The Continuation Of The Matrix Storyline

[wakobi]

The game itself looks pretty good to me at the moment simply because I love the city, the way you can make your character look, the wire-fu etc.... BUT the one thing that has really piqued my interest is how they have already begun to advance the storyline since Revolutions.

I just can't wait to be involved in this:

Matrix Online - The Continuation Of The Story

Whaddya you guys think?

Well in any event i'll be tossing back a coloured candy soon and will probably see a bunch of fellow MW'ers on there!

[Wes]

It seems interesting(Matrix - Keanu = GOOD ) but I just do not have the time now, nor will I likely have the time to after I start working to play a MMORPG. Any idea about how much time a week one needs to keep in the story?

Also, it gives min system requirements, what about recommended?

[Keith]

I too have absolutely no time for an MMORPG, but I'd gladly take another Animatrix to cover things.

[wakobi]

Any idea about how much time a week one needs to keep in the story?

Well the cool thing is, Matrix Online isn't as deep as games like World Of Warcraft and Everquest in many ways since the main focus of it is playing through the story based missions that are written. However, if you miss any of these, you get a history backlog of all the story cinematics to date, so if you go without playing for weeks at a time, you can still get an idea of whats going on.

Also, it gives min system requirements, what about recommended?

Well as with most games these days, the detail settings are very tweakable so there's a lot of room for optimisation. To get it running decently (high/max detail) you'd need this kind of PC:

Athlon/P4 @ 2.4Ghz

1 GB of RAM

7GB HDD Space

128 Mb GFX Card (Preferably a Radeon 9700/9800, or a Geforce 5700)

Broadband internet connection

Hehe, I gotta mention though the Matrix Media Player, which allows you to play any kind of Windows Media Player formatted file in the actual game, hehe very cool:

Matrix Online Radio

[Lynx7725]

Hmm. Thing is, I've heard fairly poor reviews of this game from other gamers, as in the code (actual code) is not as tight and it appears to be in Beta, rather than release-worthy.

MMORPG, very important for the code to be tight enough. It's rather bad if the game keep crashing for reasons unrelated to lag...

Man, 1 GB of RAM...? Ouch.

[Sundown]

MMORPG, very important for the code to be tight enough. It's rather bad if the game keep crashing for reasons unrelated to lag...

True, but loose code can be fixed over time. What's even more vital is elegant and robust gameplay mechanics. A poor and unbalanced one is a disaster to unwind once you let it run a little while... ie. SWG. If the game design is actually pretty decent, it could be a winner. Anyone know how it actually plays?

-Al

[Lynx7725]

True, but loose code can be fixed over time.  What's even more vital is elegant and robust gameplay mechanics.  A poor and unbalanced one is a disaster to unwind once you let it run a little while... ie. SWG.  If the game design is actually pretty decent, it could be a winner.  Anyone know how it actually plays?

-Al

Code tightness gotta be reasonable too right?

I mean.. game balance, you have to be careful but you can gradually tweak. But a bad set of netcode, that's a real killer in MMO games.. or bad execution of the game mechanics.

From another forum, this is what someone said:

First of all I have a AMD XP 3200+ 1.0GB of Ram and a Nvidia Ultra Geforce 5950 Ultra with 256mb of ram with a broad band connection and the game ran like crap for me. Maybe it was due to server load or whatever.

Second the tutorial was bugged as hell, so I couldn't learn anything about the game cuase I got kiced from the tutorial half way thru. Which also kept telling me to go to a cabinet or something from then on in, even though i couldn't cuase it was in the tutorial.

Third, having no idea about the game, I couldn't figure out what to do, how the skills work, what different guys where in my level. So I said hey I've played tons of MMORPGS let me just fight a guy and see whats going on, well with all the lag and complete lack of sense, I couldn't figure out for the life of me what the hell was actually going on, when I would do some attacks as opposed to others, or even if Im winning. I actually though I was winning my first fight from the animations but then I died.

In all honesty I would give it one more year, this game should still be in beta. If they have all the bugs figured out and its still afloat then give it a try, but right now its a waste of money. I think they spent too much time on the matrix story, and setting and making the game look matrix-like(which it does, I will give it that), but not enough time on mechanics, and gameplay.

Someone else echoed:

I was in the beta as well and I can only echo most of these remarks.

One difference, I did get through the tutorial, after about four tries. I was told that, to test my combat skills, I had to fight this guy. So, ok, I walk into the room and sure enough, there's this guy that attacks me, I start pressing random buttons in my combat toolbar since I had no idea what they did. Eventually the guy just fell over and died, to this day I don't know if I actually killed him or if he just died to some pre-existing heart condition and beating me to a pulp just brought on a stroke.

A few rooms later I'm given a gun and told to shoot someone, I'm on a sort of walkway and on another parallel walkway a bit further some guy starts shooting at me. I return fire with my S&W sixshooter and from what I can tell I'm not actually hitting a whole lot, at least not the guy. So again, after several minutes of exchanging gunfire my enemy again just lies down and dies, maybe because he was bored or maybe because by now he was stuck in some crate on the walkway and death was the only escape.

The actual game was about the same, awnser a public phone, get a mission in one of the 300 empty appartments, which usually involves killing everyone there and getting something from them. All this with a lot of lag, clipping problems and about half of the missions not working.

Granted, this was all in beta and I hope they got most of the problems fixed by now, I wouldn't know because after about a week (I actually lasted a whole week) I uninstalled.

Regardless, it's released way too late anyway, they should have had this on the market during the hype, I know making MMOGs takes lots of time, but right now, with WoW and EQII out, you don't want to go public with a sub par MMOG.

Overall, it seems like the designers had the background but not quite sure where the direction of the game is going...

[Prime]

Does anyone know what the sales have been like for this game? I haven't seen it hyped very much...

[Zeta Otaku]

MMORPG, very important for the code to be tight enough. It's rather bad if the game keep crashing for reasons unrelated to lag...

True, but loose code can be fixed over time. What's even more vital is elegant and robust gameplay mechanics. A poor and unbalanced one is a disaster to unwind once you let it run a little while... ie. SWG. If the game design is actually pretty decent, it could be a winner. Anyone know how it actually plays?

-Al

I play it pretty often and I love the game. Yeah, there are a few bugs that pop up now and then, but the devs are fairly quick to fix them. Now, the current comabt system is slightly unbalanced (being fixed next month with the Combat Upgrade... pretty much making it an entirely new game...) but it's been fun to play none the less.

The space combat system is hit or miss... it isn't like ground combat and you actually need skill to do well. Think the old X-Wing/TIE Fighter games with a mix of Wing Commander... there's a ship for every play style.

Now, as long as you can ignore the continuity being raped (anyone can be a jedi after a long, tedious quest system and mindless XP grinding) and spamming of ingame stores in every starport, the game is a blast!

PS> if anyone else plays this game and is on Bria server... a warning to your guilds... there's a Wookie Jedi by the name of Tibarraji. He's a liar and a thief. he was a foudning member of the guild I've been in and we recently forced him out due to pilaging our in game museam of rare items and loot and selling them for his own gain as well as raiding our town's treasury. He's also an all-round bastard... if you see him, stick close to him while he is in combar or using force skills.. this will give him visability and put him on the bounty hunter terminals... where hopefully he will be hunted and killed....

granted there's no perma-death, but there is XP debt which would set him back a few days of progression (the death/xp debt is Jedi exclusive, so for those of us normal players need not worry )

... kinda went on a rant there... any other questions about the game, just ask. I've been playing for a year, so I should be able to answer most of your questions.

[Gumper]

been playing SWG since it came out.

Not played over the last few months though as its just SO BORING!!!!

The quests dont really have much story to them, there are a few theme parks you can go to and do a series of quests, like Jabbas palace etc, but thats about it. The normal mission terminal missions are just re used over and over.

Only so many times I can go and clear out a nest of angry animals

As for space combat, got sick and tired of all of the easy space missions being surrounded by impossibly hard enemy fighters Kinda hard to kill a tier 2 enemy fighter when there is a tier 4 droid fighter after you all the time

Matrix online looks pretty cool, but from what ive read above maybe ill wait a while for it. You get a months free subscription so may give it a go.

Kinda busy playing WoW just now, lvl 43 paladin. Quests in WoW all have good stories and a lot have multiple parts to them, so much better then SWG

[niomosy]

Monthly fee? I'll pass. Tried a monthly fee game once with City of Heroes. I might consider paying a monthly fee for a game I really like. With Guild Wars coming out at the end of the month and asking for no monthly fee, I'll probably not be bothered to try a lot of other mmorpg's for quite a while.

[Lynx7725]

Monthly fee? I'll pass. Tried a monthly fee game once with City of Heroes. I might consider paying a monthly fee for a game I really like.

That's funny; a lot of gamers I know are pretty cool with CoH, and is willing to pay -- there are worse/ harder games out there. I guess it's a matter of taste.

Anyway, back to topic. Matrix Online? Who else tried?

[combined arms]

Ok, first a disclaimer that i haven't played Matrix Online at all, and I'm not a big fan of MMPORGs in general. But after reading this thread, I spent a bit of time exploring the game's website. It seems like a very interesting continuation of the Matrix universe. I obviously can't judge the gameplay, but I like the story elements that they describe. Even thought there is a fragile peace between humans & machines, the machines are still in conflict with the renegade programs. (Not like Agent Smith, but the "benign" ones like Merovingian and other exiles from the machine world.) As a human, you can takes sides and aid either the machines or the exiles, or just go on missions for Zion. Performing a mission for the Agents is an intriguing twist. It's not enough to get me to play, but I would like to see where they take the story in the future.

[niomosy]

Monthly fee?  I'll pass.  Tried a monthly fee game once with City of Heroes.  I might consider paying a monthly fee for a game I really like.

That's funny; a lot of gamers I know are pretty cool with CoH, and is willing to pay -- there are worse/ harder games out there. I guess it's a matter of taste.

Anyway, back to topic. Matrix Online? Who else tried?

I was playing CoH at launch. At that point, it really didn't have the content that it seems to have now and I got bored after about 2 or so months of playing. I cancelled at that point and never bothered subscribing back up. FWIW, it's the only monthly-fee mmorpg I've played beyond free Beta stuff thus far. It takes a lot to get me interested in paying a monthly fee, though. Guild Wars looks to have what I need at the price I want.

On topic: I'm not sure how well a Matrix Online game will end up doing. Had things ended with the first movie (or had the subsequent two movies been as good as the first), things might be different. It seems likely to get a cult following going, though.

[Duke Togo]

The Continuation Of The Matrix Storyline, Progression in the Matrix Online

FOR ME TO POOP ON!

Jesus, didn't The Matrix's 15 minutes of fame go by about 20 years ago? Hey, while we are at it, lets make a Robocop 3 MMPORG.

[Sundown]

Code tightness gotta be reasonable too right?

I mean.. game balance, you have to be careful but you can gradually tweak. But a bad set of netcode, that's a real killer in MMO games.. or bad execution of the game mechanics.

I dunno. From my actual MMORPG experiences, I'd say game mechanics are much more important to get down right off the bat than bugfree code. Fixing unoptimized net, graphics, and gamecode is a straightforward endeavor in software engineering. So long as you have a sensible base architecture, it's doable, even if it takes time, effort, and manpower.

But a bad starting game design can't be easily or quickly fixed by gradual tweaks. Unbalanced mechanics will breed unbalanced gameplay, unbalanced character progression, exploits, a broken economy, broken class interactions, and a gigantic mess of interlinked and interdependent systems that you have to undo. The complexity just grows as time goes on, and the whole system will start to entangle upon itself. Fixing one thing without careful consideration of its repercussions will just promote another imbalance in its place.

The longer you wait to fix the system and get everything right, the more you'll have to redo and undo. And the larger the change in a system, the more vocal the outrage from the playerbase will be-- even if they're good changes. Players hate having what they've worked for taken away, and they hate having systems they've mastered be changed on them... even if the new systems are much more balanced and elegant from the perspective of game design.

That's why I consider sound game design even more paramount than tight code at launch. Fixes to code likely result in a more noticably improved product most of the time. Tweaks to gameplay very often do not. Yes, both race against time and market pressures, but imbalanced gameplay actually produces problems that grow worse in magnitude with time. Unoptimized and buggy code results in a fun game that can be played properly only some of the time. Bad gameplay mechanics results in an unfun game all of the time.

This has been my experience with MMORPG's, most notably SWG. The engineering issues were always forgivable, and the game always grew more stable over time. But its gameplay mechanics are so horribly maligned that two years of balancing has resulted in a mess in many cases worse than it was at launch. Now it requires a complete overhaul in the form of the "combat upgrade"... but I'm dubious on whether the developers can deliver or not.

I play it pretty often and I love the game. Yeah, there are a few bugs that pop up now and then, but the devs are fairly quick to fix them. Now, the current comabt system is slightly unbalanced (being fixed next month with the Combat Upgrade... pretty much making it an entirely new game...) but it's been fun to play none the less.

Err, I was asking about how Matrix Online played. I agree that the technical issues in SWG are handled fairly quickly. But the game's one giant mess in my opinion. SWG is easily the most horribly imbalanced major MMORPG I've ever played, and it's easily the one with the least developer effort on getting things right in the gameplay department. I've been around since launch, and the game is actually more unbalanced than ever, thanks to quick developer fixes and "enhancements" like doctor buffs and foods that are added without much thought. "Slightly" is a bit of an understatement.

-Al

Edited April 12, 2005 by Sundown

[Lynx7725]

I dunno.  From my actual MMORPG experiences, I'd say game mechanics are much more important to get down right off the bat than bugfree code.  Fixing unoptimized net, graphics, and gamecode is a straightforward endeavor in software engineering.  So long as you have a sensible base architecture, it's doable, even if it takes time, effort, and manpower.

[..]

That's why I consider sound game design even more paramount than tight code at launch.  Fixes to code likely result in a more noticably improved product most of the time.  Tweaks to gameplay very often do not.  Yes, both race against time and market pressures, but imbalanced gameplay actually produces problems that grow worse in magnitude with time.  Unoptimized and buggy code results in a fun game that can be played properly only some of the time.  Bad gameplay mechanics results in an unfun game all of the time.

Okay, let's talk MMO design then (and horribly mutilate this thread. )

Thing about game design is that it's like women -- not all men like the same type of women, hence the huge variety of women out there. (BTW, this is a theory a friend of mine came up with. It's something I tend to agree with though).

Same applies to game design.. for example, some people prefer the skills approach in Everquest, others the class approach in Lineage II, others the powers approach in CoH. In a sense, no matter what game mechanics you have, someone is bound to hate it.

Broadly speaking though, MMORPG are fairly well playtested and balance issues are not really that common nowadays.. Games like UO, Everquest, SWG sort of pointed out the ills of not designing properly, and it appears that the designers do spend extra effort to ensure that the game balance issues are addressed before coding begins.

At the very least, when I look at what is on the market right now, I find that in general, the design of MMO games are such that the important balance factors are often parameterized instead of hard-coded. This means it becomes hugely easy for companies to retune balance, because rather than revamping code, they just tweak a database value.

Yes, if the companies don't think through a change properly, massive unhappiness will result.. But what you describe for SWG isn't so much of a design issue, but a change management issue -- it's not what they ended up changing, it's that they never thought through the consequences of what they want to change.

In essense, I think the main problem with SWG is that they lost sight of the original design philosophy, and added/ made changes counter to the philosophy.

In IT management terms, it's a project/ change management/ product continuity issue, not so much a design issue (at least not of the original design)..

Aside: Sorry if I sound a bit confusing, I was up till 3am last night trying to trace through a labyrinth of reports to get to the truth...

Coming back to the discussion, while you are right to say the design is important, I find most of the time the game design is okay -- the quality of design in games out there nowadays aren't too bad.

Unfortunately, the execution of said design....

Truth to be told, the end users of IT are very pampered nowadays -- they expect perfection for very little. The net result of this is that gamers tend to be very critical of games that has obvious code defect or inefficiency. This leads to a high barrier of entry for MMORPGs if their code is not tight -- gamers are put off by having to wade through errors to play their games.

Yes, as you said, eventually the bugs will be fixed, but in the meantime the company loses many potential customers because they turned out a sub-par program. MMORPG is still largely a word-of-mouth genre, and a bad rep due to software bugs can just be as deadly as a poor design.

[yellowlightman]

Ok, first a disclaimer that i haven't played Matrix Online at all, and I'm not a big fan of MMPORGs in general. But after reading this thread, I spent a bit of time exploring the game's website. It seems like a very interesting continuation of the Matrix universe. I obviously can't judge the gameplay, but I like the story elements that they describe. Even thought there is a fragile peace between humans & machines, the machines are still in conflict with the renegade programs. (Not like Agent Smith, but the "benign" ones like Merovingian and other exiles from the machine world.) As a human, you can takes sides and aid either the machines or the exiles, or just go on missions for Zion. Performing a mission for the Agents is an intriguing twist. It's not enough to get me to play, but I would like to see where they take the story in the future.

To be honest, it sounds like they're dragging out the coat tails of a story that for all intents and purposes was finished (poorly, might I add). It seems like they would have been better of setting it during the movies, with the players working for Zion or the machines and fighting against each other.

[Lynx7725]

To be honest, it sounds like they're dragging out the coat tails of a story that for all intents and purposes was finished (poorly, might I add). It seems like they would have been better of setting it during the movies, with the players working for Zion or the machines and fighting against each other.

Actually I think it's not that bad a move, to set it after the movie.. if it has gone according to the movie, then the players would expect certain things to happen, etc., so the developers are tied down by the movie.

Setting it after the movie -- and especially since it would be very bad taste for there to be a Matrix IV (A New e-Hope?) -- allows the developers the flexibilty to tell the story that they want to tell, with fewer constraints. It of course remains to be seen if they actually have anything worthwhile to tell...

[Uxi]

It's interesting to see where they might be going... That said, it would have a better story if the Matrix movies were more open ended and left a war with the machines.

SWG has straightened out most of it's early issues. I don't find any great imbalances remaining (though there's plenty of room for expansion) and await the Combat Upgrade with trepidation... Hopefully it's more "twitchy."