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Mankind is doomed!
April 26th 2000, 17:11 CEST by morn Imagine this: a massive multiplayer game gets released and is available in the stores and isn't even playable. Imagine the same game remains in the same state for a couple of months, with barely any of the customers who paid for the game even being able to connect to the game's servers. Imagine the game still barely resembles anything that has been advertised by the developer and the publisher almost one and a half years after its release. A gamer's worst nightmare? No. It's happened, and the game's title is Mankind. Space. The final frontier. These are voyages of French developer Vibes, on its continuing mission to discover new ideas and develop new games, to explore strange new genres, and to boldly go where no man, no one, has ever gone before: creating a massive multiplayer space conquest game in a persistant universe spanning over nine million planets. Thus was born the premise of Mankind. "What a great idea!" thought little Morn and ordered a copy of his game in early 1999. Big tears did he cry when he installed the game only to realize that the account creation section on the Mankind's webpage was unavailable, with only a message from the Vibes (the developer), telling him to wait a couple of days while they were fixing the game. At least they promised that his 12 month license that came with the boxed game wouldn't start until they had fixed all the bugs -- so all was good. Or wasn't it? A couple of months later little Morn received word from Vibes that the highly anticipated patch had been released on Mankind's website, that the game was now in full operation and that the 12 month license would now commence. So he quickly reinstalled the game, fired up his browser, and downloaded the patch, giddy like a schoolboy in anticipation. And yes, his heart started bumping a little faster when the game actually -- for the first time ever since Morn had bought it -- connected to its server! It greeted him with a wonderful intro screen and some powerful welcome fanfares, making him get all excited about his nearing career as the ruthless leader of a mighty space empire, leaving a trail of death and destruction behind him on the planets of his enemies. Until he saw the graphics. Tried to use the interface. Heard the sound (the little of it that was there). Realized that most of the screen text was still in French (a language as unknown to him as Lisp or Swaheli). Was suddenly, and with no warning, returned to Windows. Went back to the web site to read that the game was still not completely done, and for now all players would have unlimited money, and all units equal power. "What a crock", thought Morn, and played some more SiN. As it seems, almost anything that can go wrong with a computer game did go wrong with Mankind. So many weirdnesses have happened that I find it difficult to write a funny and entertaining text around them, so I'll just present them as a simple list. Here goes:
Now, there is a Mankind community out there, and a pretty strong one at that. But from what I've been told, most Mankind players have simply decided to accept their fate and see Mankind as a huge "role playing game", with clan wars taking place rather on their webpages than within the game. When asked for the things Vibes did right with Mankind, one of the players I talked to simply stated (after thinking about the answer for a moment): "The communication system. It's like a mini ICQ, and you can give money and units to someone." Mankind is so broken, PC Gamer UK recently gave the game their first (and only) "N/A" rating, saying it was so utterly terrible and incomplete that it wasn't really a game. I want my DM 70 back. |
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How about this: You can't get to the EULA without first opening the game package, but if you don't agree with the EULA you're stuck with a game that is essentially a coaster. I don't know about where you guys live, but where I live <b>you can't return opened video games</b> you can only exchange them for the same title. Thank you. |
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morn: I see the relevance of your post, but you're too much of a shady character to play that "innocent hurt consumer" type. I mean, your run planetcrap. :) Then again, I don't think many here bore witness of that battle that went down between shadows.co.uk and Unreal.org. seh always had the news, but the ORG had the black guy of the Unreal community, and Unreal Audio. Not to mention a randomly generated title image made by all the site's fans. Andy: Nice to hear Jashon Hall hasn't succeded in his attempts of assasinating you. :) I agree with your point, but - and it's a big BIG but (Jennifer Lopez big), they are the ones selling you something, they are taking our money (they we all work very hard for). If something doesn't work as they *sold it* and advertised it, shouldn't the consumer have the right to at least get their money back, and decide whether even more legal compensation be made, for them selling something that didn't work as advertised? As if, because of their inadequcies the responsibility falls back on you instead of staying on the one who took your money. This is all very extreme, but wouldn't this make the problem go away? Somewhere between it's current state and this new one. Certainly only in extended cases would this happen, say in the case of Ultima 9, or BC3K. That is a thousand people getting something that didn't work as advertised. A thousand people feeling like they were just stolen from. I really wonder who came up with the term 'Cavaet Emptor' anyway, the buyers or the sellers? |
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Geh, I really shouldn't try and type when I'm this tired. |
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Well Morn I`m REALLY not surprised of what you`ve just said. By the way I'd like to say one simple thing to all of those who put Mankind's mediocrity on France and frenchmen-- Your memory is very short, some of the best and most innovative games came from France. Want titles? Alone in the Dark, Moto Racer, Flashback, Heart of Darkness, etc. Now to my main point. France is a very proud country or something. They finance their high profile enterprises. Cryo and Kalisto (of Dark Earth and Nightmare Creatures fame) are now simply like xeroxs. They make games just to make games. They rely on the spectacular visuals of their games for them to sell but they don't really care since their financed by the state. We get a truckload of french software here and I've been caught only ONCE by Cryo: they made a Ubik (by Blade Runner's Philip K. Dick...) pc game and, god, they used prerendered on the back of the box. The game sucked ass as a matter of fact. Highly bugged, badly programmed, etc. With Mankind I'm guessing they did the same. The only problem is that as hard as you may try, you CANNOT make a persistent world game with bad programming and no persistent tweaking. Cryo is there to cash in, period. I doubt there will ever be a second Mankind. If it happens it'll be because some high profile publisher saw something good in Mankind and decided to take Vibes under their wing. Cryo won't do the same mistake again. Anyhoo.. people please just stop blaming "frenchness" ok? I don't know where it started but it's becoming annoying Ben |
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When I first heard about this Mankind game in another thread in the 'Crapper, I thought it was a sarcastic comment. Now that I see that this is a real happening, allegedly I guess haha, I'm simply flabbergasted. Wouldja stop the world?? |
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Andy: <i>'Morn quite rightly doesn't like the situation with Mankind, but by persisting with the game he's effectively encouraging another company to do the same thing. Being annoyed with a company doesn't actually do much good - you have to be pro-active. You have to take your money back from them and not give them any more. Otherwise you're just standing out in the wilderness, shouting, and nobody can hear you.'</i> You're exactly right, that's why I'm going to write to Cryo about it and demand my money back. Unfortunately, I have this feeling that they're going to tell me that it's a bit too late, as I bought my copy over a year ago (how big are my chances, you think? I seriously don't know...). I was stupid enough to believe Cryo and Vibes when they claimed that "it'd work really soon". :( (On a sidenote... what I'd really like to see is a time where a thread on PlanetCrap is worse than a million lawsuits. Hmmm...) - Morn |
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Regarding slashdot, anyone noticed the number of (what the moderators class as) rubbish posts has gone up to about 30 - 40% of the total number of posts nowadays ? Shame really, it was a good site til about a year ago. Dev |
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Morn - well, if you don't mind investing the necessary time and money, I'd say you should sue them if they won't give you a refund. On principle, if for no other reason. |
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Bob McBob, I agree with you totally on this. I've often found that games made on the continent generally expand genres outwards of what you would normally find in any UK or USA based game. If anything, their 'frenchness' or to be more accurate, their "Europeanesss" is a virtue not to be scoffed at or overlooked, but to be studied and integrated into our own tried and tested themes. Examples more recently than the games you stated would be Omikron (French) and Outcast (Belgian). For another French example of gaming finesse, cast your mind back to 1992 and the blockbuster hit Another World. Being Foreign (French or otherwise) is not the issue in this thread, simply shitty-arsed programming and penny-pinching, miserly publishers. -Chango |
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This tread is not really helping my mood. I'm getting tired of games that don't work and people trying to be positive about them. I feel that the more understanding we are the more it encourages the industry to see how much more they can get away with. It's become epidemic. Game always have patches. They are sometimes shipped KNOWING they have to patch stuff and saying so. I'm very tired of people acting like if you buy a game that does not work you should be positive about it, soon a patch will come that will fix everything. Bull crap. Negativity rules. Embrace the bitterness. rail against bastards taking your money and give you a shiney plastic dick.... er,disk-o-crap. You know, playing violent computer games has never given me the desire to kill anybody. But when I hear people being Positive about getting screwed over for hard earned cash I just slip a cog. When I hear the puerile legal sludge that oozes out of game publishers legal department I just want to take a rusty linoleum hook and........... well, I'll spare you the details. Let's just say I'm not a happy person today. I'm kind of sick of the double standard that say's " If the game does not work, it's only a game" on the other hand "If you warze a game you stealing money from hard working programmer". Sheesh, I almost wish I was ambitious enough to warze but I'm too damm lazy. Hell I find waiting for a game to load from a CD taxing on my patience, then when it boots up the game and crashes back to windows..... well that is about all the excitement handle. I guess I can boil this all down in one concise little statement. If I pay for a game I want to play a game, if I can't play the game I paid for I'm don't feel, obligated to be positive about it. Things are not going to get better unless we bitch, and maybe eat a few of the weaker looking publishers alive. I'm done talking now. Please feel free to chat among yourselves.... |
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GreenMarine: "Have turrets and equipment become less effective over time requiring them to be replaced. " - I don't know whay anyone hasn't thought of it so far, but I think just making ammo a finite resource, instead of it being infinite as long as you have the gold / wood / credits. Say it costs so much wood / gold / credits to buy 500 rounds of ammo for a turret gun, then the player can't simply set it to guard and forget about it. This method directs the player's attention more across his / her total kingdom or base, instead of what is happening at the moment, whereby the player will set up one area more than another because turrets will guard and shoot for ever if unopposed. I find the prospect of a gun or tank running out of ammo more believable than the tank simply decomposing in mid battle. -Chango |
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It's Thursday afternoon, and, what a surprise, the Mankind account creation system, which has been offline for a while, is now back online. - Morn |
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CRYO, eh? Wow. That explains it. They are a disastrous bunch of misfits. I can't believe they're not broke or sued to death yet. Didn't know they did an UBIK game, but... anyone else remember their "Aliens: Dark Horse Comic Book Adventure" game? Oh, it was all the hype when it was being developed. Supposed to have this-and-that X-Com type action/strategy combat system. Supposed to have an extensive story... supposed to make bloody sense. When it was released, it was a not-even-half-arsed mishmash of a few different idiotic things. 1) A 'talk to people and choose the right things to say' adventure game. Dialogue to get the right things made no sense. Had no apparent point to it. 2) A 'take item use item' Myst point-and-click rail-walker game. 3) A pointless and nonsensical "transfer items between members of your party" isometric overhead RPG. Combined with a ridiculous faux-Diablo point-and-click-here-to-attack. More notes about Cryo's fine, fine job on this steamer: There were constant crashes and bugs in the first release. GAME STOPPER bugs. So bad, in fact, that the publisher sent replacement CDs with the updated version of the game to all game owners who requested them. No patch, just replacement CDROMs. The entire first chunk of the game was changed so that a 10-minute conversation part of the game between main character and part of crew was removed. It was considered sexist, offensive, and NONSENSICAl. There was obviously the intention for more actual combat in the game. There were slots/notes for multiple lazer gun levels - but only ONE in the game. Some of the items/storyline bits made NO sense. NONE. A major, tedious "puzzle" in the first part of the game (feeding your crew after waking up after cryo sleep) was removed. It was obnoxious as hell. The game was changed to remove the need to carry food around in inventory, but it's still pointless. DUMB DUMB DUMB: Play the game, get to a milestone section with a bit of FMV. Game autosaves at that point. After 20-25 'moves' or actions in any direction, aliens overrun complex and you die. No way to stop it, even with the right moves. This is a signal to restart from that last milestone, and you continue with everything you had, just back at a previous location, and the time resets.... DUMB! Just poorly done. As for KRONOS, they're French? Oh, wait, sorry, that was KALISTO. They weren't that bad. Not great, creative at least, but Nightmare Creatures had some DUMB issues with it... |
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Well that's bizarre... I justv saw a quote of the nanosecond quoting me quoting GreenMarine. *Mondo Bizarro* |
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"It's Thursday afternoon, and, what a surprise, the Mankind account creation system, which has been offline for a while, is now back online. " Mr0n, you been sending Cryo emails along the lines of...."http://www.planetcrap.com - ph3ar /\/\3!!" or something? Word must have got to them one way or another - it can't be that much of a coincidence can it? Can it? OR can it...?? -Chango |
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Chango [106]: "<i>. . . but I think just making ammo a finite resource, instead of it being infinite as long as you have the gold / wood / credits. </i> Anytime a resource is limited, the people with the most power (the established players) will conrol it. If you limit the amount of ammo, the price will rise, and only the grandpas will be able to afford it, giving them an even greater advantage. |
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Not to sound profane, but this sounds like the f*ckest game yet. Didn't Cryo close down a few years ago? *Digs through magazines* Online only...unlimited number of players..900 million planets.. economic and social desicions must be made...control military forces on sea, land and in space..and behold, the screenshot looks cool too! Release date: 2nd quarter of 1999. How many of these features actually appeared in the game? |
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#110: I would imagine something much more epic from good old mr0n. "DEAR DUMB FRENCHY FAGOTS MAEK YORU STUPID GAEM WORK OR I WILL SHEWT AND KILL YOU WITH LASER GUNN BEEMS FROM MY EYELIDS!!! HAHA M0RN" Or maybe something along the lines of: "A biblical plague of locusts will swarm upon your house of evil! They will destroy your tools of sin and leave you with nothing! <B>Praise the Lord!</B>" Hm... the most pointless post yet on PC 3.0? Probably. |
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Right, I see your point there, but as far as the grandaddy contingent goes, the same could be said for decaying turrets and tanks etc. I was simply saying that instead of a tank crumbling to peices in the battlefield, it should instead run out of ammo or power - that would be better suited to real-time strat. Either way, repair / more ammo will still cost money or resource units, whcih of course returns to your point that the more experienced players will be able to control these things more easily and once again will dominate them play. -Chango. |
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It's a shame that such a great licence as Ubik was given to Cryo. Come to think of it, it's a shame it was given to <i>anyone</i> - I'm not entirely convinced it could be translated to another media and still retain any semblance of the original. (I would go so far as to say this applies to all Philip K. Dick books - <b>Bladerunner</b>, while a good movie, was a horrible bastardization of <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<i>; <b>Total Recall<b> disregarded the crux of the short story it was based on, and then failed even as a movie.) |
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UBIK, I disagree that Blade Runner was a horrible bastardization of DADOES? ... although I agree with you on Total Recall... and Screamers... BR may not follow DADOES? exactly, and it does indeed change the tone of the novel from Dick's more paranoid "lousy commie skin jobs" bit to the more sensitive "are they human?" version in the movie. But remember what PKD said when, months before he died, he saw the dailies of what they were filming and read the script... he said that what they filmed was much more what he wanted to write. In fact, look at the anger (psychosis) in DADOES and go back to the more introspective view of "We Can Build You" and you'll see that, kipple aside, BR is what DADOES should have been, even according to the author himself. Oh, and CRYO SUXS DOOD JEFF K WILL ROOL THEMM! |
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Yeah, any penalty applied arbitrarily will always be felt more by newbies than the established players. Perhaps including some kind of logistics cost to your fleet that increases exponentailly as your fleet size increases. I work for a USAF contractor, and I know that for a large force, the cost to keep a plane in the air far exceeds the direct cost of pilot, fuel, etc . . . |
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Hey, can we add KRONOS to the list of DungBeetles along with CRYO? I would like to take this time to rant about MEAT PUPPET. Anyone (sorry, NE1) remember that one? |
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Morn <a href="http://www.planetcrap.com/stories/7/#956843671">[107]</a>... Heh... I'll bet the registration was turned back on because Cryo figured because of this thread they'd get a few more suckers. Negativity aside, nothing sells more games than awareness of a title. I'm sure somebody on this board will have the morbid curiosity to try Mankind now. |
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Oh, and I really enjoyed Total Recall. Whether it's like the book or not, it was a pretty good film. Who can forget, "See you at the party, Richter!" |
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Morbid curiousity's the only way Daikatana will come off the shelves anywhere but Wal-Mart. There are alot of us, you know who you are, who'd pick it up for a few bucks to see just how bad it was. After all, how many 100+MB downloads of the demo were those of us slavering to see how bad the trainwreck is? |
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Mankind made you it's bitch. |
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Crash: I play Asherons Call on Frostfell |
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Taniwha, #121: <I>"There are alot of us, you know who you are, who'd pick it up for a few bucks to see just how bad it was."</I> Heh. I don't doubt that for a second. Unfortunately for John "No Split Ends" Romero, I'm not one of those people. I purchase more than enough unremarkable software without anybody's help. :) |
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SMS 0wnz PlanetCrap. Heh. -db |
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Oh <I>don't even go there.</I> :) |
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I think slashdot is lame. I'm not too much of a fan of the free software movement though and I much prefer working with Windows over Linux. Slashdot has some cool articles though and I like Jon Katz. |
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I think Slashdot would work if moderators were not permitted to moderate a post down. |
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Slashdot is extremely lame, but it wasn't always like that. There was a time they posted sci-tech news faster than the major news organizations, but that's given way to endless Microsoft bashing and Gnazi propoganda. Most of the Slashbots seem to despise Jon Katz, I don't understand it myself... he's the best writer they have. |
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Sure, maybe slashdot is lame, but I wonder if Morn would be willing to sell planetcrap for 9 billion dollars, or whatever VAL paid for slashdot and freshmeat. |
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Taniwha - Ok, points taken. :) Though, I for one find Dick's paranoia fascinating. Also, I loved moment in DADOES when Decker finds the toad and for a moment believes that it's real. Hmm... it's been so long since I've read a PKD book.. |
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Bad_CRC: YES! I WOULD! Okay, j/k. :) Who would want a site like this anyway? - Morn |
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My favorite scene is the alternate police station, and the confusion that ensues. If you've read it, you know what I mean. |
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Personally, I'm not a fan of Slashdot either. I would like to create a game, a persistant world type online game, let's just call it "Shootin Shit".. It would be a game for either disgruntled hunters, or as a bonus, you could hunt down the last male of an endangered species and kill it. Six packs of beer would be powerups (Extra aiming capability), and packs of cigarettes would be used as health. Yeah, this sounds like it could be fun! |
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ugh, Morn I looked out for Mankind for ages, I even had some of those high quality jpgs as my wallpaper. The game was in my head for ages...and then I realized that it sucked. My friend Simon got a hold of the copy, and didn't leave his house for 3 weeks. Not because He was addicted, but because he went into a coma after reading the license agreement. I really don't think this was a big scheme to get our money, but rather a game that went terribly rank, and coupled a license Agreement to cover their asses. My two cents. - Trin |
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I'm a huge fan of Philip K Dick in general, and I'm always amused that his work has been (poorly) translated into films. "Blade Runner" is a wonderful piece of work, really. But for those who liked "Total Recall", wasn't that the film, where at the ending, they melted ice and produced air? What the hell sort of chemistry was that? I'm wondering if I should apologize for wandering way off the Mankind topic, but given the nature of these threads, probably not. |
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Does anyone remember a BBS game called "Hack 'n Slash"? In that game, you couldn't fight anyone more than 3 levels below you. (It was an RPG/AD&D/dungeon-style game). That seemed to stop the "grandfather effect". |
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<B>Zaccix:</B> I never played the game...but there's a problem with that sort of limitation. What if you, a 4th-level something-or-other, get jumped by five 1st-level players? Are you still prohibited from attacking any of them? |
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Paradroid, baby. That's what the world needs converted to an MMORPG ;) |
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While we are on the subject of book to game conversions, how about a game based on "Ender's Game"? That is one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read. |
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Hm. What sounds better, SlashCrap or CrapDot? <B>MODERATE THIS UP!</B> |
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Hi everyone ! I'm new to this site and I'm playing Mankind since the begining in December 98. Yes, the game still need developpement, half of the keys functions are not working and so on. But the game in its current version (1.6) is quite more playable than in december 98, when it was nothing more than a graphical IRC buggy program... Mankind would be nothing if there was not this strong communauty of players. Days after days, we're still mankind players. I've made *many* friends and I have already seen some in real life, even if they lived 500km away. But my post have another purpose. I've read (quite a long way upper) a post from Brandon "green marines" Reinhart, stating that "There is a clan on there called "the Collinades Superior" or ColSup. They are a bunch of pricks and they force everyone to pay them duty or they destroy your planets. They are so huge, you can't possibly stop them. They'll steamroll your planet in less than five minutes. That's a big problem with persistent MMPGS. You get the grandfather effect where the early adopters can kick the shit out of any newbie on the block. Mankind is really imbalanced in that way. " As a member of Colsup, I have to precise this statement is quite.. false. We haven't forced anyone to pay us duty, and we search peace before anything else. We also try to help newbie by telling them how to use the game. As a major clan in the game, we have to help them, not to destroy them. Brandon, if you encounter any problem with us during your play, please send a mail to diplomatie@colsup.net and explain what happened. Please visit our website on www.colsup.net to see by yourself we're not player killers. Any suggestions are welcomed. |
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Hummm ... I've not read all text above but have see that a lot of guys speak about a game they don't know ... and made of course a lot of errors. The 1st post was very correct I think, except one point : since the release of the game (dec 98) to june 99, the servers was online and we played. But the space was empty : no interface for buidings, all units with the same characteristics, all ressources everywhere, only 1 weapons, no cities, unlimited money, all ships to be sold in imperial bases, etc. So Mankind was online but it was only a fight area (no need to build ships, we bought them to imperial bases ...) Right now, the features missing (and promised) are : - 2 Empires -- on of the principal feature, they normaly motivate players ... - guild -- their no implemanted in the game :-( - modules -- to customize your units Vibes alway said the 2 empires come "in 2 or 3 weeks" (since 1 1/2 year ...) They have said modules will be impossible since Mankind2 ... so I think their allready know that when they make the box ... At the top of who didn't know what their speaking about, Brandon 'GreenMarine' Reinhart take the 1st place !! I've create the clan ColSup in sept 98 (yes, 98 ! before the release of the game). The only points was : democraty, fun and peacefull. Now we're nombreus and we've never paid s.o. to make our job. GreenMarine : don't try to give to ColSup another name, it's stupid. ColSup = Colonies Suprêmes. Yes, we was a frenchspoken clan at the start (I'm belgian) and this explain my very bad English :o))). But since about 1 year we've translate all comm in English and open registration to all players so from now we've russian, portugeis, all europe and some american players. And we're not the powerest clan in the game (this isn't our goal) I hope I've clarify some points :o) Visit www.colsup.net for more info if you want. |
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This guy is clearly a Col Sup spy. Or maybe his guild is just so big he doesn't know what the other half is doing. Col Sup need your Iridium? Col Sup take your Iridium. :) Anyway, I'm not going to play Mankind any more, its poorly implemented and its not much fun after a few days. |
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GreenMarine: Don't tell me Iridium is an actual resource used in the game... otherwise that is some awfully enticing bad-joke fodder. My brother had an Iridium pager, he said it pulled his pants down because it was so heavy. $3000 for a phone, c'mon! |
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