| ||
Wed 2024-11-20
Tue 2024-11-19
Mon 2024-11-18
Sun 2024-11-17
Love, Acceptance, and Screeching Modems Sat 2024-11-16
Fri 2024-11-15
Search
Archives
2023
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
One good site
MDN
Nelson Minar
Blog licensed under a Creative Commons License
|
I'm failing to enjoy Lord of the Rings Online. It has amazing graphics, the best fantasy
backstory material available, and a strong fan community.
The instance-based epic quests make LotRO
the first MMOG with a strong storyline and
the deeds
system is a clever innovation to give some purpose to grinding.
But the gameplay experience is failing.
The graphics engine is broken. The combat
seems simplistic. And it's terribly, terribly
laggy. Monsters jump around as network packets arrive, crowded areas
take forever to load, and the whole game is played under the miasma of
a 200ms delay.
For example, as a Hunter what I do is run up to a monster and then shoot an arrow at it. So I take my finger off of W, the run key, and use that finger to press 1, the shoot key. Every single time, I'm told "you cannot do that while moving". It seems the the client is waiting for the server to acknowledge I stopped moving before letting me shoot, forcing me to wait 200+ms for the round trip before my input is accepted. It's not network congestion or ping time (those are fine), it's just the software isn't designed to feel like realtime. All this makes me appreciate the brilliant gameplay experience of World of Warcraft. I pretty much never feel lag in WoW, the game plays like an action RPG. In combat it feels like my ability to execute move combinations swiftly makes a real difference. Thanks to an addon I know that there's actually a 200-300ms delay between actions, but the client and server must be working together doing speculative execution to make it feel like realtime. It's not easy to do that and make it work, but it's very important to gameplay. |
|
