New Horizon's Expansion!

[HratLi]

Hehe... a mini preview of a sorts.

http://bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.p...threadid=67150

Horizons to Expand [May 08, 2006, 11:36 am ET]

Tulga Games announces plans for Horizons: The Settlements, an upcoming expansion for Horizons: Empire of Istaria, their MMORPG:

MESA, Arizona - May 8, 2006 - Tulga Games, LLC, developers of the award-winning Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), Horizons: Empire of Istaria, today announced the development of a new Horizons expansion, tentatively titled Horizons: The Settlements. The new expansion will contain all of the content from the original game, as well as environmental, creature and gameplay updates.

Horizons: The Settlements will feature both player-crafted and developer-designed content including new furniture, racially-themed structures, gardens, monsters, treasures and quests. Players will now have the option of building new racial structures, such as Dryad trees and Dwarven tunnels, making for a more customized player environment, while new companion animals can function as beasts-of-burden, familiars and guardians. Vicious new monsters, including Harpies, will now inhabit Istaria, providing new battle opportunities and new types of treasure to capture. Horizons: The Settlements will be free to current subscribers, while being priced at a suggested U.S. retail of $19.99 for new players (available in stores and via digital download).

[Kelsaka]

Is it silly to ask for an eta at this point? Although I'd be happy if the answer was "before 2007"

[Weston]

Odd that we'd hear about this first here, eh? It's sure not in the NEWS dead folder at the top of this forum. It's also not officially posted here by the Devs, but rather second-hand from the BluesNews page.

Another thread here says Tulga has lost its Design Lead, Rawdge, and that Amon is implementing that. Changes are afoot, again, and the current members seem to always be in the dark....

Funny to read the idiots who replied on the BluesNews page. For my part, Horizons is still the best MMORPG out there. Funny it's not a view shared by the masses, whoever they are.

Weston

Bring on the expansion, and soon, I say!!

[Deth]

Odd that we'd hear about this first here, eh? It's sure not in the NEWS dead folder at the top of this forum. It's also not officially posted here by the Devs, but rather second-hand from the BluesNews page.

It is on the news page I just checked. As well down in Discussions.

Edit: and in Off-topics they have word of a new game they are putting out also.

[tramsan]

And here's the release on the www.istaria.com page:

http://www.istaria.com/news.php?nws_id=9

[HratLi]

Hehe... BluesNews had the scoop on it before our pages updated I guess.

I'm excited, though it would be interesting to know at least an anticipated ball park date. Maybe it's just for some media attention? Who knows.

-HratLi

[Peaches]

I am thrilled to hear that a new boxed version is coming out. Next time I have to do a reinstall, *I plan on purchasing this even though its free to us current subscribers) to avoid the horrid reinstall and long downloading session for patching. Can't wait for this to be released!

Very cool work Tulga!

[Weston]

It is on the news page I just checked. As well down in Discussions.

Edit: and in Off-topics they have word of a new game they are putting out also.

Note that I said in the News FOLDER above. I always forget to check the LINK at the top of the forum page. Why do you suppose there's a NEWS FOLDER -AND- a NEWS LINK?!?

And it was NOT in the discussion folder at the time I posted my comment, unless I completely overlooked it, which is possible. At times, likely even. LOL, oh well.

Weston

[Deth]

Note that I said in the News FOLDER above. I always forget to check the LINK at the top of the forum page. Why do you suppose there's a NEWS FOLDER -AND- a NEWS LINK?!?

And it was NOT in the discussion folder at the time I posted my comment, unless I completely overlooked it, which is possible. At times, likely even. LOL, oh well.

Weston

O never use the News Folder. they never used that anymore. I wonder why they ported it over anyway.

You may have just had a old cache or I got lucky and got in just after you looked and they posted.

[Justa Mirage]

Oh great! More work for me.... Can't wait to get home and find the board I am head moderator of, filled with more "We hate Horizons" and "Don't be fooled" messages and "Beware"

Hopefully they follow the TOS so I don't have to wear my ban stick out.

Honestly, what is the funniest thing and this is the god honest truth:

Before I went to sleep, my wife asks me... "Should I keep playing my dragon or play a non-dragon character? Should I train Armorsmithing to make my own armor? When can I make cool armor that I can wear"

I said to her.... Remember when we started playing Asheron's call back in 2001? We started right before their first Expansion pack was sold and even then it was still a new game (1 1/2 years out the gate)

Horizons is 2 1/2 years old with no expansion, most of the characters are multi 100 level bipeds or 100/100/100 dragons. If you need armor, there is probably a dozen "Expert Armorcraft or blacksmiths or weaponsmiths" that can make a noob character most anything, as techs are easy to get for higher level characters if you want a low level suit of armor or weapon with techs. You would be better off training construction, or confection, or alchemy schools because they can make cool stuff that is always going to be in demand.

Then I said.... I wish Horizons would launch a new client and make it an expansion pack ... like Asheron's call did years ago...

Then I read today's front page news.

too freaky.

[Roberto]

Then I said.... I wish Horizons would launch a new client and make it an expansion pack ... like Asheron's call did years ago...

psst. AC had an expansion in July of 2005...

[Justa Mirage]

That was expansion pack number 2

the first one was Dark Majestry and it came out in 2001

Expansion pack #2 ruined it for me... I have since quit AC

[Guaran]

I think the point he was making is that in about september 2005, AC closed for good.

I think this expansion will actually just be new content added for all subscribers, with the game turning into a $19.99 client cost/retail box price. It would be a good way to market it, and they could include some sort of promo code in the box (for a shoulder dragon and underwear, etc.) to help justify the cost. Game would also still be a free download (likely scenario).

A box on the shelf would get some new customers. People might see it and think it is a whole new game. And if they haven't played in several years, thats essentially true.

[Justa Mirage]

Actually AC2 closed for good in December... AC still exists, I still have active accounts but just don't play that much.

Just about the entire server population is like HZ... 90% vetrans at max level and 10% newbies that either are still newbies playing casually, or being PL'ed by a guild to get them past the "boring newbie hump"

[HratLi]

Hahaha... Man, I played AC for like 2 years and was still only around level 38.
Best/worst times of my life were running through dungeons littered with my corpses trying to pick up all my stuff.

-HratLi

[Carsia Wolfsong]

Okay... THis is what I don't get right now... Is having an expantion coming out while another team working on the new game Tulga is making called Dark World. On top of that... Where is the end game.. Sure you reach level 100 or higher if not a dragon.. But there is still no end game. On top of that the story for HZ still continues with the WA and still no new news about what is happening of that storyline when having a new expantion.. Is there no ending on it? That is what I mean for end game is final boss and story for quests.. I'm just cersous of how this is going to work out with people switching over towards the New project and working on HZ at the same time.. Not too sure how that is going to work but.. if it does.. What the hell. Might aswell give it a try and if it works.. I"m game!.

[Theolaerynn]

Where is the end game..

I think if you leave out the word 'end' it would be a much more interesting question.

I mean, shouldn't they fix the original game before releasing an expansion? I know I and many I knew got very tired of playing a paid Beta and have since cancelled our accounts. Unfinished classes, inconsistent design decisions across classes that have any content at all, abysmal client performance to the point of being unplayable by some... The list goes on and on from there.

We have known since the very first set of layoffs that there just weren't enough developers and customer support staff to handle the current bugs, so how is it they have enough to build an expansion, let alone a whole other product?

The lead designers we do have seem to be schizophrenic, and seem to lack direction when figuring out which bugs to work on and how to address them. When you don't have enough customers to keep the game profitable, and some of the ones you do have cannot connect or suffer unplayable client performance, making useless and needless cosmetic changes is just a waste of resources they keep telling us they don't have. Add in that some folks like myself left the game over these types of decision making (and I use that term very loosely), and you gotta wonder if the desingers are eating too much lead based paint.

Top reasons I left:
Client perfomance - Hitching whenever another character came within rendering distance that was so bad I could not group. I would litterally freeze for 5 to 10 seconds for each group member that would come into view, and by the time I had control again the group had often wiped. This forced me into a solo game that had a monthly charge. After 6 months of beta and two and a half more years of paid beta I just had enough.

Client performance - With reasonable hardware I lagged often even at minimal settings. Reasonable hardware: Athlon 2800+ with 1GB DDR400 running in dual channel, a SATA drive dedicated to Horizons, BFG Nvidia 6600 GT (factory OC), running minimal settings at 1024 x 768 (!!!) with all the latest drivers. Cable connection, SB Live soundcard. Even EQ2 runs smooth at much higher settings, and we all know what a pig that client is!

Developers and Designers who seem to be on crack - They can't seem to make a consistent desing decision to save their souls, and add to that decisions they know will hack players off but have no real purpose. I have to assume that, because they wont friggen talk to us most of the time, so in the absence of information I must assume the changes are just something made on a drug induced whim. Especially when some of the changes are only graphical, and when we over-ride their change with the original stuff there are no adverse effects.

I could go on forever, and that in and of itself pisses me off. I *love* the idea of Horizons, I think it has incredible potential. My wife and I love our characters. I thought the Ancient Rite of Passage was pretty cool too. The character models are spot-on for Dragons and Dryads. How a company can take all of that potential and all the things Horizons has absolutely nailed, and still manage to eviscerate it is beyond me. It just continues to support my lead based paint and crack theory.

You gotta suck to drive me back to EQ2, and yet that is what AE has done. Not because EQ2 is all that good, it is just the only viable game in town for me. WoW doesn't appeal to me for a number of reasons, and Guild Wars still feels too much like a solo game. I can play Oblivion if I want a single player RPG.

[HAG]

Mydnite, either you are doing something wrong with game-setup of HZ or you have much higher expectations than me.

I'm running HZ on a computer one step under yours (Athlon 2600+, 1GB DDR-333, ATI 9800) and i get average 30-40 fps on medium settings.

[Ishar Xhaan]

mydnite by "lag" what you mean ? if you talk about graphical rendering, with my PC ( sempron 3100 768 meg ram ati 9600 and crappy HD ) i can play smoothly @1024 so what you are saying , if you re lagging that bad it would rather be because you have a very bad net connection to ISP or bad wifi @ home or maybe you re playing with 300 irc chats opened emule kazaa or whatever other crappy P2P program, I dont have lag even when i play 10 ppl group on epic mobs with a connection 65kB/s and my PC so your story sounds strange.

[Theolaerynn]

As an example of lag I mean where I kill a critter and it doesn't fall down, or when I hit a spell and it takes a few moments after the cast timer has finished for the effect to actually go off. Another good one is running through Lagzoon or any well developed player town or large guild area.

But the lag I could deal with, honestly. It is the hitching every time a character comes within rendering distance. Locking up for 5 to 10 seconds everytime someone comes within view is just unacceptible. Again, if I wanted a single player RPG I would play Oblivion and save myself a monthly fee.

Not everyone experiences the same issues. There was a time when many players would crash on porting, but I never did. Knee jerk reaction would be that this was a set up problem for the affected individuals, but anyone with any kind of experience would know it is much deeper than that. Different graphic engines and client / servers have different weaknesses regarding any PC's software and hardware.

For instance, all the various games that had trouble initially with ATI cards. New cards, new drivers, clean OS, and it didn't make a bit of difference because the games themselves had the weakness. It wasn't always something ATI could fix on their end, not that they have the best driver authors in the world. Sometimes it had to be the game developer that fixed their software to be more compatible with mainstream hardware, which can be exceedingly difficult to do.

Things worked fine for me until the patch last August (I think it was), and briefly again when a later patch fixed an issue, but was promptly broken again by the next patch and never re-fixed.

And yea, if I am out hunting alone or with just a couple other people, somewhere away from player housing and blighted areas, and if there aren't a mass of spell effects then sure I get great frame rates. And if I never move out of view of any of them, and no other players wander by then I don't get the hitching effect either. But it doesn't work that way for myself and those I hunted with, there was always someone running in and out of render distance to pull critters. The only way to avoid it was to solo, and once again we are back to playing Oblivion and saving a monthly fee. Or EQ2, which is not nearly as fun as Horizons was when it was actually playable, but a hell of a lot more fun than Horizons is now.

My UT2004 pings are < 100 (great for that game) and I have no hitching or lag, so my network connetion is just fine. If it wasn't it would be impossible to snipe people or go head to head with them. The only time I lag in EQ2 is when I am in a raid with 12 or more people and there are a ton of spell effects going off. The spell effects are massively more intense than anything Horizons uses (although like most graphics I much prefere Horizons versions), so there is no way it should be smoother with more people than Horizons is.

So while I am glad it works fine for those of you who have no issues, because Horizons definitely needs paying support if there is even the slimmest chance they might one day fix it, that doesn't really help me or any of the other people affected by them.

And ask yourself this: If the population of Horizons is so drasticly reduced from even when they consolidated servers, much less from go-live, isn't that an indicator that something is wrong? And given how many people that have left did so very disgruntled by the bugs and lack of communication from the developers, wouldn't that in turn make one wonder just how it is the developers feel their efforts are best spent on an expansion rather than fixing all the stuff that has caused so many to leave? And if Tulga is so interested in Horizons, why are they not puting more resources into it instead of working on other products? Horizons is a veeeery empty place, compared to WoW and EQ2, which are much newer products.

In a perfect world I would by far rather spend my game time in Horizons. It isn't a perfect world, though, and Horizons is still barely more than paid beta.