While I'll still defend anyone wanting to use the CC, I honestly think that on the client side progress has been held up by supporting 2 clients. Not because there are 2 clients, but because in supported 2 drastically different one's the EC has been held back in order to keep the CC players competitive with the EC users. Maybe it would be better phrased as, the EC has so much more potential than the CC that it's possible it has been intentionally ******** in development to keep the playing field from being disproportionate in it's favor.
Oh, there's absolutely no question that working on multiple clients at the same time has caused some issue with developing a "replacement" client. But the other side of that coin is that even when Mythic devoted HUGE CHUNKS of UO development time to a new client (ie: KR), they did a **** poor job of it. I mean, it's no real coincidence that after spending multiple years on KR and then releasing it that they then backtracked and headed in the direction of the EC.
The problem there is that they still haven't really learned the fundamental mistakes that they made in KR's development, and instead, they yanked out features that were actually what made KR an improvement (ie: the LUA links to things like the plant system menu, and so forth).
The other problem is that now they're attempting to develop the game as a whole with a skeleton crew and so any little thing going wrong becomes an emergency and causes serious delays to every other part of the game. Remember that UO:HS was touted as being a booster that they could develop without taking development away from the rest of the game. And yet exactly the opposite happened. They froze development on the rest of the game to develop HS, and STILL released it bug-ridden.
Clearly the CC is old and dated and needs to go. However, it needs to go in a fashion that does not completely alienate the playerbase that still uses it. There are ways to handle graphics on games that allow you to basically substitute and control how these things are done so that low-end players could still play with a base system while high-end systems could turn on the effects and have a great old time.
Which, of course, leads to the final mystery... why in the world is the EC such a piece of trash on high end systems? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I play WoW with high textures, high ground effects, high particle effects, my water reflects and ripples... and I walk through crowded areas FILLED with people and experience only the slightest slowdown. I go to Luna in the EC, and I might as well put myself on auto-pilot and grab a cup of coffee.
In short... there's something wrong with HOW they're developing the EC, and until they can make it stable, provide options for their existing customers, there's no way for them to cancel the CC. I'd go to the EC in a heartbeat... if it weren't such an utter piece of rubbish.
This one I can't really explain myself. I feel that yes the EC should have gotten a total overhaul in graphics, it didn't. It feels like the CC graphics outside mobs, were ported over to a new format for speed. Hopefully some of the "Improvements" they discussed in the HoC will help cover these things.
The problem with the EC's graphics (and KR's as well... here comes the banana tree... *sigh*) is that they hired an outside firm (rumored to have been Chinese) to redraw all the graphics. Instead of updating the existing graphics and having the same look and feel to UO -- which IS possible, the banana tree being the proof positive of this -- they chose to give UO a completely different, super-thick, smudgy, hideous look that was nothing like the UO that people knew. SOME people liked that look... of course, there's no accounting for taste there, but still...
What really happened is that for whatever reason someone at Mythic signed off not only on these horrible graphics but clearly didn't provide appropriate guidance in the update of the game. And it didn't go well.
Surely they had a chance to do it right... and instead, the KR graphics are a moneysink that provided next to nothing useful.
I can kinda feel you there, though I've seen games that use a semi-transparent background for gumps. Yes the EC could have been better by default, it's a steep learning curve, but not a unsurmountable one. I also think the confusion involved with some of it is simply how much they tried to carry over from the CC, or related to how the server interfaces with the Client since that interface is supposedly compatible between both clients.
Well, there's no doubt that they've really done a strange mishmash of KR and CC menus to arrive at the EC, but what I'm talking about really is that they should have gone with a theme that still felt UO-like and stuck with it. They could have improved menus and had the opportunity to make the UI consistent. They designed most of KR's menus very poorly, and the EC is just a bad hashup.
I don't agree so much with it's just them trying to slap WoW onto UO. A good modern client is something that UO needs, it's like I was saying us old time vets aren't UO's future, we're it's present and past, but to get subs back up UO has to make itself somewhat marketable again, and that means filling the game full of teens and 20 somethings, as much as some of us dread that, it's what UO needs. Graphics a SNES could match aren't going to cut it, what should be our target audience grew up with games that were already graphically superior to UO, most of them have never seen a MUD much less played one, heck most have never played a tabletop RPG. For them UO is just this backwards little MMO trying to hang on in it's twilight years. UO needs to re-invent itself in a major way, if it is to ever rise to popularity again.
What I mean by slapping WoW's interface on top of UO is that they removed a great many of the things that made UO's interface immersive, and went for a grid-style that just doesn't carry over well. I mean, consider that your main backpack holds up to 125 items... that's either a huge bit of screen if you move it to show it all or a bunch of scrolling. Additionally, the game doesn't store these dimensions for you, your client does, and so if someone opens up a pack you've arranged, they just see a mess of whatever the default view is. Now, I will say the current macro system is better than WoW's in theory, but on the other hand it's clunky and expects you to know how to use it without any in-game tutorial on it. Easy stuff isn't so bad, but the rest becomes trial and error.
Then again, the playguide for the game is severely out of date too, soooo...
Laying the framework for a modern client is a good step along that path, now we just need to work with the developers to clean it up, we're it's BETA testers, we often complain about what we don't like but rarely do I see solutions to how to fix it. If they were to incorporate half of what Pinco did into the EC it would be a good start, then we'd need some decent graphics. While they are improved over the CC, they still fall far short.
The problem with the EC and BETA testing it is, well, we've been beta testing for what two years now on the EC, and for about 4 years on a new client altogether. That's far too long to be dragging this process out.
But, again, they don't have the development resources to do it any quicker. UO's running on a skeleton crew. At this point, working on a new client is almost silly.
no enhanced UO for me
