Vindictus Available Today!

[Brutal]

I rarely play video games anymore, I find it much more satisfying to just code. However, I have been anticipating this game for quite a while after seeing trailers and gameplay demos. Later today it is leaving closed beta and open beta will be starting. Make sure to check it out if you like MMOs. It is free and it uses the source engine (Im curious to see how the source engine handles an MMO)

http://vindictus.nexon.net

[BTolputt]

I am interested to hear about the game-play. From the videos it appears arcade-like; some form of cross between God of War & an MMO.

Having paid close attention to MMO developers (via blogs, mailing lists, and the like) - they tend to avoid anything too reliant on "real-time" combat due to the nature of their solutions to latency & cheating. An interesting case in point is the cheating that was so prevalent in All Points Bulletin before it shut-down (for, I believe, unrelated reasons).

WoW, for example, has minimal requirements on the real-time nature of the display. I play it often with my wife sitting together on the lounge, MacBooks in our lap, and we frequently notice the differences in the scene shown. Due, however, to the point & click, "attack with buttons/hot-keys" style combat this is not really an issue. So long as the server has decent tolerances, we're all good.

A game like Vindictus appears to be is more reliant on "twitch skills". I'd feel alot more cheated by losing a combat that looks to rely on my real-time skills than by something that splits the skills of my character from how/when I invoke them (through the button/shortcut-key interface). EVE Online has similar gameplay design points, sharply splitting player & character skills (and often exacerbating it with lag bugs in game).

[Jabberwocky]

With some clever MMO programming, you can incorporate some twitch elements in PvE combat. Mostly because you only need to maintain the "illusion" on one client computer, and you can run verification code on the server that lags a little behind. It's not a huge deal if 2 clients are slightly out of synch with one another, like you've seen playing WoW.

Player vs. Player twitch combat introduces a whole lot of extra complications. Now 2 clients have to be in synch or things feel very loose and sloppy, and you're much more at the mercy of latency, with fewer potential tricks up your sleeve to deal with it.

[BTolputt]

Hence the reason I am interested in this. On closer look though, the way this game would solve the issue is the same as every multiplayer FPS does - by having each area allowing combat as it's own instance so that the server need only manage the interactions of a party of players (rather than the possible flash-mobs one sees in WoW, EverQuest, DAoC, etc).

[Brutal]

I have been playing this game quite a bit since release. To stay free (minus the cash shop) they actually use the party leader as the Server when you go into a dungeon. Since dungeons are on max of 4 players (6 if it is a raid) the host does not really require much to provide a fairly reliable gaming environment. The first few days were terrible as people with very low upload speeds were trying to host dungeon parties, but once people started realizing you can't host unless you have a decent ISP, it has been fine.

So from what I can tell, all they really host is the main world which is very basic, it is just a single town. To combat the issues of having to load hundreds of players in the one town (which would obviously cause some performance issues for players), they implemented a channel system. Basically a group of people are on each channel, and you can't see anyone else from other channels. You can switch channels if need be, but this seems to be their work around for that.