Booster pack = 10SIX?

Ahh... 10SIX. I know of only one other AO player that has ever played that game... namely, Quip - also known as Quipa, but he seems to be fading out rapidly. I played that game... it launched two and a half years ago. It was sci-fi.. set on another planet, but with no aliens, in the future. There were corporations, only 4 instead of 1, and they were all fighting to mine transium, the magical mineral that did everything. You landed on the planet with just about nothing, and built a base from scratch, and later joined an Mutual Defense Network (MDN) to help you defend it against others, who could attack it 24 hours a day. You could, of course, attack other people's bases, but unless they were real n00bs, you'd need the help of a number of other members of your MDN. You'd command Rovers into battle, giant tank-type things (there were planes and blimps and missle launchers and the whole shabang) that had incredible firepower. They were heavily customizable. There were only about 350 items in all, but you could mix and match everything, and they were all pretty good. It was the first MMOFPS, and one of the first graphical MMOGs in general.

It was terribly buggy. I would crash when I tried to select more than 5 rovers at once roughly 70% of the time. The pathing on the rovers was abysmal. The lag was itself was virtually a game-killing bug. The graphics were about as good as Quake 2, yet on a 550 Mhz machine, you'd still manage to get about 5 FPS if you were in any kind of battle.

The game never took off. It never even made it to store shelves. It was available as a download, roughly 37 megs, and ran off HEAT.net, which of course wasn't the top place to be either. At its peak, it had about 5000 subscribers. Those dwindled quickly to about 750-1000 hardcore fans. I was one of those, under the alias Iwonderif, a member of IAS2. But those continued to drop off, as we were all ub3r d00ds, and were all so strong that we couldn't be killed unless we were unlucky enough to fall asleep at the keyboard (SkorpionX pulled such a manuever and cried for half an hour). Needless to say, that wasn't very fun. I left for good at the launch of AO, with about 650 people left. 10SIX, as you can see, went down forever about two and a half months ago. I shall miss it dearly, as it was my first MMOG.

Needless to say, when I joined AO, the similarities were quite striking. In both features and "features" (like how every mission is also a hall of mirrors). The one thing I hoped for though was the big battles that we saw in 10SIX. Up to 37 people could fit into a camp... I believe I measured it to be a 742x742 square meter area. And of course, each person could bring a bucketload of rovers, for well over 300 weapons firing. Of course, the action was enhanced by the fact that if you died, you lost whatever you were carrying, and if your rovers got killed, they could be picked up by enemies. Battles would last for hours, and I thought that I would see that here. I didn't.

But now I might. And I hope I do. It seems as though with this addition, AO might come one step closer to being my perfect game - basically, 10SIX with less bugs and more people. However, that spot is now eternally reserved for Planetside.

The purpose of this thread? I dunno, I thought I'd just put forth my observation. However I don't think that will get past the almight "Delete Thread" stick of Cosmik and Cz. So, the OFFICIAL purpose of this thread is to ask if the booster pack got any influence from 10SIX. If not, I would suggest looking into that game more, it was the only game I've seen that had mastered the concept of land control, defense, and capture. I'll also leave this out to see if anyone else played 10SIX. I first heard of AO there, around the time of launch. It was going to be coming out soon (at that time it was slated for Christmas '00), and would be an escape from the bugginess that was 10SIX, but staying in an MMO sci-fi environment. Oh well :rolleyes:. If you did, just put your name and your corp, and I'll see if I remember you. And just as I finish typing this something of a rant, something of a ramble, something of the memories of an old man (well old adolescent), I've remembered that my main base was camp number 27945. Imagine that.