It’s been a while since Global Agendas european playerbase has been patched out of the game and Hi-Rez is actually doing all they can to look incompetent by rebuffing SSB because of solo pve mission whining kids and needing to “evaluate” if its a good idea to add an EU AvA map again.

Good job Hi-Rez. While you’re watching your playerbase dry out, I’ll take a closer look at what titles we can actually look forward in exchange for the time we would’ve invested in Global Agenda if it was still a good game.

All Points Bulletin.

Since I left it out in my last blog entry, I should take the opportunity now to give people an insight into the game. Talking about generic gameplay, APB is really a nice title. I had the opportunity to play it while in closed beta all the way till its release and I often found myself shooting criminals for at least 2-4 hours after the AvA with my fellow GA players in San Paro. The game mostly feels like GTA mixed in with Counter-Strike elements which guarantees for a real good core gameplay. And I’m sure that people who tend to play fps titles on a casual basis will find a title they can fool around with for the next few years with APB.

Unfortunately there are several major flaws in the game and its mechanics for people who are going to play fps games on a more ambitious and competitive level. First off, the match making is random at least - sometimes you complete missions without any opposition, sometimes you get even teams and sometimes you get like 4-5 times the amount of people in your team as an enemy. And with enough enemies, some missions aren’t even remotely doable since you can only form teams of four people and everything above is just random reinforcement.

On top of that, just before the release, people had still massive lag and stability issues with the game. It happened more than once that people one or two people out of a four man team dropped out of the game in the middle of a mission, unable to rejoin after they relogged. The random matchmaking and small team sizes combined with no need at all to work with people above that limit together totally eliminated the need for a clan except for receiving rewards from clan leaderboards.

Those worked essentially like this: Get as much people in as possible so that your clan has the most kills/objectives/missions done/etc. and everyone receives uberslotted weapons. Any need for small but strong clans working as elite units? Nope.

So APB has its positive sides, but there is essentially nothing which should make a more ambitious player play the monthly fee of around 10€ for APB, not only because of the stability issues but more of the lacking longterm goals.

Mortal 'Servercrashes' Online

Dumb enough, things wen’t not really well with Mortal Online since the game still has issues with game server crashes, inventory bugs, disabled magic system and general gameplay flaws. Its still fun to log in and farm around a bit, but after most of the five people we started with quit the game already because of technical issues with the game, the spent 50€ on the account couldn’t have been more wasted. For people who love true sandbox MMOs its still worth a shot in one or two months though, if there is still a playerbase left.

Black Prophecy

Good enough that the Black Prophecy presentation on the E3 earned nothing but positive feedback. The game even has been crowned the biggest surprise of E3 because literally nobody thought that the game would that well developed already. It still is the biggest hope for me and everyone I’ve been closely playing with the last months. It has a strong Clan vs. Clan component and seems to be already in a well polished state. As details about the gameplay get known now day by day with the closed beta still running at a small chosen playerbase, the new E3 trailer was truly one of the milestones this year for the folks following this game for a long time.

The release is slated for November 2010 and as far as it goes, Reakktor seems to be able to hold that deadline.

Until then it seems that there isn’t just any good crosshair based game with MMO aspects out there thats worth playing. Too bad. I may concentrate my blog entries more on Black Prophecy in the following days if you guys want more infos. I’d write about Jumpgate Evolution as Reakktors strongest competitor also, but since we heard literally nothing about the game till E3 2010 of them, I’d rather see how they perform regarding possible beta tests and development of the game.

Especially with the E3 being over, there is a lot of stuff I’d write about right now but I think thats it for the moment. I’ll keep all you fellow GA players updated if I discover anything thats better than token farming and .. well… waiting for AvA to get fixed.