Illuminator

If you read all that shit, you missed the point. The point is that games are supposed to be a cinematic medium and immersion here is dead on arrival because nobody wants to read all that monologue and for the most part nobody does. There's no plot line that affects your mood, no visible expression of emotion from any of the actors, and EQ2 ends up hiring a writer who writes exceptionally long-winded ways of saying "kill 10 skeletons".

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Oh shit I just had a memwipe, why is retarded uncle Roger still designing raids for this game again?
Some players might bot against encounters but it seems like he bots the encounter design!

Diknak

lol, and so true. I would like more cinematic experiences and not just the long winded crap like that. I would also like voice overs outside of the starter areas, but I don't see that ever happening.

Talonis

Besides scripts playing while you wait and cut-screen aerial flights in certain zones, are there any real cinematics in game at all?

I remember the first time I saw the final Diablo cinematic like it was yesterday.

Another example of EQ2's unrealized potential.

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Bring it on!

Zykdous

Cenime takes you out of the picture, I always felt. When you suddenly become a disembodied floating viewpoint, you are observing events happening to a third party, not experiencing events happening to you. There is no greater immersion than to feel as if you are a part of things.

All these tools people claim add immersion: cenimatics, voice overs, cut scenes involving gameplay; they are not required, and are rather a cheap way for developers to go around having to create an immersive game. Case and point, The Elder Scroll series. Morrowind was the most immersive game I played. Why? You talk to an NPC and you spend the next 20 minutes reading. Just like the real world, everyone had a story. It made the game feel more alive. Then here comes Oblivion, with its new immersive full voice over npcs. Suddenly, everyone only has 1 sentence to say to you.

Afterthought, isn't lore supposed to be a story, anyway? Ever read a book, then watched a movie, and thought, "man.. the book was so much better"? It's happened for nearly every book I've read taht a movie exists for. You just can't get as immersive as the bounds of your own imagination.

Summary: I disagree.

Hoss

FUCK CINEMATICS

It was one of my biggest problem with AoC and is my biggest problem with console games. They fucking suck, I hate them all and you need to die in a fire for suggesting they be added to this game.

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Orochan

They should add more in game cinematics like what you get in NHT and WoE iirc. I liked those a lot, and it felt more immersive imo.

Also the one you get when you start in gorowyn is pretty cool too. Leave it to SOE though to completely forget all the other cities.

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Crabbok

Illuminator is upset because he can't read!

And btw EQ2 does have cinematic events both in Movie Format (Which suck because they take time to load), and in scripts. The Scripts are much better if your a lore person, but I suppose they still would piss Illum off because there is typically SOME reading involved... like the named in Deep Forge who attempts to summon an elder elemental... or when Farroth Mal finally arrives in Acts of War.

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the_mo

fixd

Namai

I'd hate to see cinematics such as the one in WoE used too frequiently. They do give you a feeling of being removed from the game, and I hate that.

If they actually took the time to script NPCs and create animations for them though, that would be all good. In order to retain the sense of being a part of the world, I need to see things from my characters point of view (well, a few feet above and behind my characters point of view, but wtfever).

Scripted events, when done right, are what makes a game feel alive. It has worked in the last two Elder Scrolls games, it works in a few other MMOs, but outside of a comparitvly small number of heroic/epic mobs, scripts just do not exist in this game (and the few that do usually cause excessive lag).

Voice overs can add to a script, but they are expensive to do. Recording every line of NPC text in the game isn't really possible with what EQ2 would have for a budget, but they could invest in a voice synthesizer to do it.

Genji

Since when? I'm not saying I actually read all of the lore crap, but MMOs are the least cinematic types of games usually. If I wanted a cinematic fantasy experience I'd go watch the LotR trilogy or something.