I agree with you Nighthawk, on all you wrote, and hence, if there is something that all my numerous gamer friends never contest, is that the graph engine is beautiful, and so the first impression, lights, sky, distance of view, are just great. There is no need to redesign anything to retain people with design. The point will allways be the same: economix make them fly away, not appearence.
to point something concrete imo about this area with a living example that i remember : One of my ex-girlfriends wanted to have a try at entropia, 6-9 monthes ago (ava is now of course dead..). I saw that area where she started. If I remember well there are mission in each 3 branches (mining craft hunt).She was on 3rd hunt mission, craft and mining already done, and she told me she had to drop nova or frags for another mission. as she had the 3rd finished she shot mobs to drop her thing and did'nt succeed. her weap was dead so she resigned and came back to camp and validated the hunt mission back, but oh bad suprise there was another 4th mission! her weap was dead, and i remember because i helped her to look for a tt and buy a newcomer gun, but we did not find any tt machine.
So she was with not way to finish the missions and went through tp to calypso.
Fact is simple:
-or there is no tt machine and maybe it would ne a nice idea to "design" one^^
- there was a tt machine and we did not see it although we looked to it for a good moment. In this case a redesign is just needed ;-) maybe it was kind of integrated into a wall or with another skin? I never saw that area again as i did'nt had the chance to have another gamer gf since that one ;-)
anyway, that makes my point: her first impression, graphics of the outside of buildings, was great. the good human investment (= what could kim do to make his own company attract more depositers) would be at my sense to "design" free activities, loads of them, that could be done outside or even inside, and make the people "stick" to the game, fall in love maybe even with it. Inside the buildings is not the good side of cry engine for sure, we wont turn a cat into a dog. You better set a tent and make tissues move with wind, would rend 10x what these pics are. But implement a few mini-games bugless and fluid, could be bowling, kiting, tennis, any sport, origami, painting ;-)) that would be so nice.
This area was done a year ago and they took their time as usual to do it. It was bad work? live with it, because we have to face it, the only thing to retain people is to delay the moment they realise the actuals costs and unreliability of the game. This can be delayed by offering people something else that sweating or walking in the middle of monsters and pray to find dung to be part of game. In other words, game has to take its distances with RCE so that we don't see only that when talking about it, it is obvious.
Take Lotr : they had an expensive $/month game with a good reputation. They announced they were going f2p with item shop, "like the others". I went to try, thinking it would be terrible: areas has to be bought, most of instances too, even travels from city to another are not included when you start. And you know result? type "lotr highest income" or something like that, you will see that they met neverseen success. Why? because when you start to play the game, you don't think about it, and then you can collect "golds" by playing, exploring. You never feel traped by itemshop like in the other games, you get attracted to it. You can do loads of quests in f2p, and so when you see that this instance is "only" 4$, know what? you buy it. I ended up buying a premium one year account to unlock many functions. When my year will end, many things will stay, and i will have enough golds to buy all the future areas i want. This is what i call clever work from design/artwork team. I sometimes connect just to do 1 thing: play music, cause they implemented a midi interface ig.
There are some ugly regions with monotons textures on calypso, it's true. I would change these, starting with amaethera by solfais (never seen a nice screen of this region, did you?) until the low-end of island! lol
tx if you read it all ,)
filibert
