f13.net

I haven't really been following this too closely, but I also havent' seen the announcment posted here:


http://www.swtor.com/ (http://www.swtor.com/)


Edit: damn, it was buried in the other thread.  Den me!
edit: ok don't den me.  Also link fixed thanks to EWSpider

Needs a new thread anyway.

I kind of thought the same.

agreed.

wish I could go to the link, but alas, I am at work    :tantrum:

That link didn't work for me, try this one:

http://www.swtor.com/

The game looks really bland and uninteresting from what I've seen so far, but I'm more interested in whether or not they used the Hero Engine and how that's working out for them.

Here's what we know so far (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8738.945):

1) No combat details
2) No class progression details beyond it being personal story arcs at first/for awhile (implication is AoC Tortage)
3) NPC henchmen are in. You can socialize with them in various forms including furry stuff romance.
4) Graphics are way early but not inspiring. Example 1 (http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/922/922115/bioware-mmo-project-untitled-20081021113627678.jpg). Example 2 (http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/922/922115/bioware-mmo-project-untitled-20081021113635115.jpg).
5) No idea on schedule.
6) No idea on beta.

I don't know what a "story-based MMO" entails, but that doesn't sound very fun.

from Darn's good list and the opinions in the other thread it sounds very very GW-like.  Which is very surprising and disappointing.

This is EA and they are not big on risk.  But they could've given WoW a run for its money if was a full MMO, not just a hub&spoke online story board.

But wait and see. 

Unless its voiced over, it means more text to skip and hit "Accept".

You know those unskippable cutscenes whenever you make a new character in WAR?

It'll be like that after every quest.

Options/Sound/Disable Voice Overs

I learned that after one trip through town in eq2.

That's a cool way of saying it. I may need to steal it :-)

Not even worth speculating or talking about at this stage. Really. Think of all the shit that other MMOs promise at that initial press release to be part of the game at launch. Hero classes? (WoW) Dogs of War to balance RvR? (WAR) etfuckingcetera.

Expect one part KOTOR and two parts WoW with less polish than the latter and a minimum 6-month-release pushback. Wake me this time next year. Or in 2010.

Yeah that one really had me sold on WAR something I was interested in I was suckered.

They should have called it SWOTR instead: Secret Weapons Of The Republic! SWotR is a much more snappy acronym.

So, we get ANOTHER Star Wars game, that has no starship combat.

I wouldn't bet on that.  They know it was idiotic of SWG to ship without space, and I rember a job posting in the other thread about them looking for people who have worked on space sims.  It was one of the earliest clues this was going to be Star Wars.

There better be some F13 exclusive beta invites...

Ugh.  Again with two factions . . .

Well, it *is* Star Wars. You're either with Yoda or against the wall when the furry wookie revolution comes.

I want to be excited, but I'll be damned if I can summon any interest.  Maybe when they have something playable, and it doesn't turn out to be another boring grindfest full of amateur hour cock-ups at every turn.

Bioware saved Star Wars for me once already, so it will take a lot of disappointing news and schedule slips and feature cuts and the like to burn through their buffer of  :heart: :heart: :heart:.

Given that this is an early MMO announcement though, I won't rule it out.

One of the factions is the Sith, whom there was only ever supposed to be two of.

After I post this, I am forgetting this game exists.

I thought they started this pre-EA?

Oh no you din't.  Anyone want to take this one? 

I'll do it. I suppose it's only right.

The Sith Order only instituted the "Rule of Two" in the aftermath of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, when Darth Bane betrayed and annhilated the existing Brotherhood of Darkness, about 3000 years after the KOTOR era and 1000 before the movie era. Prior to this, the Sith had numbers roughly equal to the Jedi. While the Jedi have always basically been the same, the Sith have gone through a number of die-offs and resurgences, with the title "Darth" dropping in and out of use and the structure changing drastically more than once.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. This message brought to you by the f13 resident Star Wars dork.

Have they even reached that stage in development where they overreach and overpromise ground breaking features yet?  Cause I don't see it based on the announcements so far.  While it's fun to snicker when OMG GREAT STUFF gets scaled back or cut entirely until the game is eventually released as a dessicated clone of a 10 year old game this announcement seems kind of conservative and meh-worthy.

Wrong IP!  :grin:

Those lightsaber hilts are freaking huge.  It's like they're holding champagne bottles with beams coming out of them.

Star Wars Battlefront.

Republic Commando. (? Did they have space pew pew in that? I only played like the first few levels.)

By the 2 screenshots posted, it looks like there going for subscriptions rather then graphics.

It looks like the WoW engine, but with starwars models.

Crap graphics + simple gameplay seems to be the way forward in the MMO gaming market.

How dare they chase those pesky subscriptions. :awesome_for_real:

Battlefront didn't. Battlefront II did but it was pretty arcadey and not so much on the X-W:A sim side.

Republic Commando didn't. On the other hand, it did have big explosions.

Flash site. For the sake of humanity, just stop. I can't browse it even if I wanted to.

Mah point is that while I like Star Wars space (when it's done good) it's not necessary for a good SW game.

We appreciate you geeking out so we don't have to.

I'll help you by pointing out that this is Bioware Austin, not Bioware Proper.

(http://images.mmorpg.com/images/latestgucomic_t.jpg?cb=10/23/08)

Are those potatoes? 

More like fly's, the two in the back are part of a series. Most times, eating popcorn on the side of the bug zapper, watching games...well... yeah.

(http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2008/gu_20080924.jpg)

I don't get it.

The flies are MMOs, the Bug Zapper represents the ultimate end of all MMOs.  Shadowbande and Horizons have been hovering on that brink of death for so long, they have become bitter and sarcastic residents of that purgatorial zone. 

If you're looking for funny, probably best to look elsewhere.  Funny is his acorn, but at least he's not wearing lipstick.

Re: two faction discussion.  I need to dust of my SW Geek badge, but aren't the Mandolorians a viable possible third faction during this point in the timeline? 

Only other comment I'll make at this point is that, despite all the early hate, this is essentially KOTORO.  It's pure money hats.  It may end up sucking, but I hope nobody here is suggesting it won't sell at least a million boxes.

I can't believe I didn't see that they were flies.  For some bizarre reason, I thought the wings were just some sort of background.  D'oh!

I thought the wings were background or perhaps bubbles, and the potatoes were well-formed cartoon turds.

They are turds, of a sort.

The Zapper:

(http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2007/gu_20070703.jpg)

Good point! It will be the same assholes who brought us other shit-in-a-box titles like:

Star Wars Galaxies
Shadowbane
Tabula Rasa
Numerous Canceled Projects

He used to be mildly amusing before he turned /gu from "Comics I make for my EQ guild " into "Comics I make to pay the rent"

Don't be a hater.

His earlier stuff was alright, I read it regularly.  But he seems to have been struggling for a while.  It's almost like he's just going through the motions.  A large part of the break, I think, is he went from EQ comics where he had a more personal connection to the absurdity we all faced, whereas today's comics are largely a few tidbits he gleans from gaming news sites and he slaps a little something together.

Agreed. Back in the classic EQ - Planes of Power time period, Woody was really dialed in to the pulse of that game and it's community in a way that only another player could be. Obviously he stopped playing and moved on to other things that did not consume him quite as much, and the comic has become unreadable for it. (At least for me anyways.)

This is going to sound pathetic, but it kind of encapsulates the sadness you have when you realize that there will never be another one like 'your first.' (MMO that is.)

Damn that's cold.  You make it sound like a halfway house for battered mmo developers.

Oh god, someone check on McQuaid :ye_gods:.

Don't worry. He's on the nod in a pool of his own filth at this point.

... but I'm sure they've got his resume.

Seriously though

I know it's off topic but is he attached or related to any know project at the moment?

Back on topic sort-of.

if SWTOR is a success, it will be in spite of rather than because of the the Star Wars IP. Like someone said earlier in this thread, NGE was all Lucas' peoples doing.

Add this picture because it made me LOL -
(http://www.geocities.com/eqdoktor1/humor/darth-vader-lord-vader-demands-an-explanation.jpg)

Err... (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ea-and-lucas-arts-star-wars-mmo-to-be-bigger-than-wow)

(http://driph.com/words/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/awesome.gif)

Good old clueless suits. It doesn't matter what industry you look at, they all have 'em.

I'll confess. KOTORO-meter aside, I'm not really that excited about this project. If it doesn't sound too disastrous in beta I might shell out for a box a bit after launch and play the free month just to see what's up, but that's as far as my enthusiasm goes. That whole bit about the Seventh Battle of Ruusan? I had to look that up on some nerd website.

I'm a huge nerd myself, for the Star Wars movies, but I've basically avoided most of the games/books/comics/whatever. I didn't even play the original KOTOR until last year when I made that thread about it.

Sky high expectations married to low competence. Should be a good time.

Worked for Spore.   :uhrr:

And Walton was the father of the Sims Online.

Yeah, we'll see.

Made a few corrections, in teal for great justice.

What do you guys expect them to say at this point (or any point)?

"Yeah, we don't really think our product will succeed, and we think our investors are idiots, but hey we'll take their money and go through some motions.  Oh yeah, and our employees and programmers completely lack any sort of talent, and we have a complete lack of faith in their abilities."

What do you expect a company to say about its product and about its hopes for the future?  Hmm?

EDIT:  In my opinion, if they truly believe that storytelling has the potential to attract so many players, they will have hired a lot of writers.  There are quite a few (popular, contemporary) sci-fi writers who have written Star Wars paperbacks etc., and I'd expect them to tap that talent.  If the game is to succeed or fail based on the quality of storytelling, they have to.

They should advertise the writers.

They ought to say nothing at this point.  Hyping your product this far in advance can only serve to create unrealistic expectations.

My post was only to poke fun at the interview or press release or whatever.  I never pay attention to these things until they're at least in beta, preferably release.  Until then, in spite of whatever information people claim to have, it's all (probably wrong) speculation.

It's bullshit and it seems harmless enough and most people will ignore *now*.  But a month after launch a horde of trolls with shit-eating grins will be plastering these statements all over the forums to show why the game is an abject failure.  You'd just think that one day they'd learn.

I said this in the other thread, but I'll say it here for those who missed: a lot of people from "BioWare Proper" transferred to Austin to work on Old Republic. I don't know how many overall, but there were six from the writer / tech designer circles I run in. The most important was James Ohlen. He's been with the company since Shattered Steel, was the guiding hand on the Baldur's Gates, and served as head of design for many years.

The game could still be crap, but it would be BioWare crap, made by many of the same people who brought you BG, NWN, KotOR, and Jade.

Lucas got this one right while he was writing The Phantom Menace: "I'm not interested in breaking any records."

It's like dropping your rolex into the dirtiest public toilet imaginable.

Just a quick note:

SWG did not fail because of the IP. It had huge numbers when it launched remember? It failed because of the execution. Honestly, if I was at Bioware Austin I'd have a board devoted to things to learn from SWG.

Don't:

Launch without vehicles or space.
Make a grind that kills.
Ignore itemization so crafters can rule the game.
Forget the content.
Use HAM or something equally retarded to force players to go see other players who are just running macros anyway.

This is good to know. I'll be keeping my eye out on this one with very cautious enthusiasm. I've been hurt before.

Have a plethora of bugs.

Don't try to fleece us, Stormwaltz. Please :(

Edit: In fact, until it's a success, it's probably smart to remove yourself from the direct line of fire. I have a feeling, from everything said - particularly that bigger than WoW shit, that there will be LOTS of collateral damage.

Back to the subject of graphics, those images linked are good enough to keep me interested. There is no need for games to go all-hyper detailed. It didn't help AoC.

Will pistol damage stack with rifle damage?

Or would that conflict with Star Wars canon now?




Anyhow, 'story-based MMOG' sounds too much like Guild Wars PvE to get excited. (I'm guessing the pvp element will also be Guild Wars style sport-PvP)

I never really understand how anyone expects story-based to work in an environment where you are interacting with thousands of people who all have the same role in the same story.

Maybe they're thinking of making it like WoW's "story":  players get involved in the many subplots (dragons infiltrating Stormwind, king kidnapped, the Thrall subplots, the many subplots going on with pretty much each zone and/or dungeon and its boss) and they get lore bits and plot info as they grind the NPCs.  But as far as the main story:  the re-opening of the portal, the resurgence of the BEs, trolls, and (soon) the Scourge, that's handled via periodic expansions.

I mean, expansions are a given, right?

Anyway, judging by how Episodes 1 - 3 were, "a zillion subplots" seems to resonate with George Lucas (and he just couldn't cram everything he wanted into 3 2-hr movies, but it's possible to cram into a MMO without skimping on the narrative of each subplot).  So, I mean, the Death Star will be frozen in space after having just destroyed Alderaan, grave threat, no hope, and all that, and until the expansion hits we'll just be the thousands of Bothans that die to acquire its schematic.

FIFY.

I have nothing else to add  :grin:

"Story-based" says to me that they are going to use that as an excuse to not make a good games system that will be fun once you run out of story content.

See: Mass Effect.

Story-based mmo sounds to me like DDO.  Just with a very slightly less :uhrr: IP and a mostly single player based game with an excuse for micropayments to avoid software piracy.  But I'm probably really far off-base.

DnD is probably the closest you'll ever come to an IP that you don't have to shoehorn into a DIKU based mmo.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is just a couple bantha tracks behind Startrek and it's teleporters and make-stuff-ators.

launch the game if it lacks the 'stars' and 'wars' of the IP.

I know some people loved SWG, but it was one of the worst adaptions of the IP that it possibly could have been.

Oh, and 'story-based'? No-one cares if the controls suck and the classes are completely unbalanced.

I don't want to. I only want to correct this rumor that the team doesn't include anyone from what's traditionally considered "BioWare."

I honestly have no idea what the game will look like in the end. I only know what it looks like now. I can't comment on that, and it obviously still requires a great deal of polish.

Alpha invites how soon?

That is the best thing you can do to appease this crowd.

If there's one for me, then you will have 700 word bug reports to look through too.

PS: Get some more community people and forum moderators ASAP.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=265389&page=2

I can't help but point out this gem: 


 :awesome_for_real:  I almost feel like I should pay the devs a subscription fee just to watch their goals get cut from release, one by one.

EDIT:  Article also says that when you have a group encounter, you don't even have to get a full group- AI can fill in missing slots.  This is sounding less and less like an MMO all the time and more like GW or Diablo. 

From the same article:


SWOR, the hottest MMO of 2011!  :why_so_serious:

Here is the rule of MMO marketing: show, don't tell. Until you can put it up on the screen and we can see how it plays, it is all hype that is just going to end up strangling your product under the weight of expectations.

That was the reporter's musing, not the dev's (at least the way I read that article).  I continue to maintain this is much farther along than anyone here thinks.  Didn't Stormwaltz, before the announcement, confirm that whatever MMO they were developing was currently playable, at least in some alpha fashion?

Am I the only one that hates the acronym SWTOR? You can't pronounce it, and it's too long to spell out. We should all start using SWOR.

KOTORO, however, was the best mmo name yet.

We should just keep calling it KOTORO, maybe it'll stick.

God no. They can't avoid veterans getting in to the game. But no way should a company expedite entry for a group that has a long track record of turning on those games either by not buying the box or not lasting the first month. Then add to that the perfect storm of it-needs-to-be-better-than-SWG, MMO, and EA.

Nah. They need to run the other way  :grin:

I am already having fun on the boards.  When I explained to an old SWG pre-beta board vet that I was a college "sophomore" at that time, the boards changed it to "sop****ore."  Its good to see that the Galaxy-spanning war won't be marred by naughty language. 

I can accept that Bioware might have a playable engine, or at least one that works well enough in some areas to show off.

However, look at what they are promising:

 - a completely unique, distinctive story for each class (although if the classes are "Jedi" and "Sith", maybe that won't be an issue)

 - massive worlds and numerous races that fit with the SW mythos

 - a companion system that interacts with the player and reacts to what they do

 - irreversible choices for characters, so that when a player goes down a certain path, they'll have to make some decisions; this means that multiple paths per class will need to be developed, so that players can actually experience the different alternatives

 - plus all the usual game systems that Bioware didn't want to discuss

In their own words, SWOR is the biggest game they've ever done. Working engine is great, but there is a lot of stuff to add to it to create the MMO they are talking about.

Irreversible choices, that's worked ever so well in previous mmogs....



tbh, those examples just sound like the usual fluff statements to me.

My guess; Bioware haven't even decided how any of this is really going to work.


The fact that they say it is 'currently playable' just means they've bought an engine and installed it.

Exactly.  I'm not worried about a late release date because of those features, since they are crack fantasies and will be cut (probably sooner than later). 

What features? There's none detailed to any sufficiency to have an expectation about, good or bad.

The feature of every class having a completely separate content experience, and (according to a couple interviews) the fact that this game won't have any MMO quests in the traditional sense (the exact quote was "you'll never walk into a cantina and have a stranger ask you to rescue his cat"). 

Unless Jedi and Sith are the ONLY classes, there is simply no way that the first will happen.  You can NEVER create enough static content to satisfy everyone and keep everyone occupied (at least, when you expect said people to come back month after month and pay you money).  For SWTOR to base an MMO around doing this is very troubling, given most people just want to click through quest text anyway.

Most single player RPGs give us (at most) a few dozen hours of content, and they are going to create 10 or 12 separate single-player games and keep patching in new content in a manner that nobody finishes their content?  Maybe the Defense Department could do that if it threw its budget at it, but even EA will fail.   

Swuh-tor, philistines.

Even EA?

You speak as if EA's involvement is a plus.

That's not a feature. It's a system. Its success will rest mostly on content. As a system, what they've said so far barely qualifies as the title of the initial email that talks about the eventual need for a basic scoping document. There's so little that we know at this point the only expectation is whatever each of us imagine it could maybe someday turn out to be.

That of course is the problem itself and the reason saying nothing at all is better than the bits they've said so far.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but this is Star Wars, so they have to give us plenty of time to reach page 100.

I've said before that I don't really want a world, I want a game pretending to be a world. This super-instanced Guild Wars shit doesn't even do an adequate job of pretending.

New art interview (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/47423).  One thing stands out:


So basically, it will be crap graphics at 140 fps.  Awesome.

Or maybe they're just not even trying to hide the fact that you'll get 5 fps in cities.

In honor of this game's development, I'm dressing as SPOCK for Halloween.   :grin:

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,46413/

    Star Wars: Galaxies - Episode III Rage of the Wookiees (2005), LucasArts Entertainment Company LLC
    Star Wars: Galaxies - The Total Experience (2005), LucasArts
    NHL 2005 (2004), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Star Wars: Galaxies - Jump to Light Speed (2004), LucasArts
    Star Wars: Galaxies - An Empire Divided (2003), LucasArts
    CyberStrike 2 (1998), 989 Studios

Heh. It's like I don't even have to try. Still doesn't explain how screenshots were ever released with lightsabers the size of a bantha.

I still don't get what the fuss is.  Stylized TF2-style graphics don't really age in the way we normally think of graphics aging.  This is one thing that WoW nailed.  Photorealistic stuff ages badly because there is always better photorealistic stuff the next year. 

But oversized weapons make you feel powerful.

Agreed, any game you want people to play for years to come should go this route in the first place, for an MMORPG it should be a no-brainer.


I remember having a conversation about the personal story-based MMORPG a long time ago, I believe on this site.  It seems to just be a tragic concept.  Either you make the storyline meaningless to the character development and no one will give a shit about it, or you make the storyline matter in development and end up with a bunch of characters who are pissed about how their character turned out and have to re-roll to make the 'correct' choices.  You can't let people switch at will, because again, the story doesn't matter at that point.

Honestly, the only way I could sort of see getting around this is a faction based end game where the choices you made during the story-line aren't permanent, but just push you to certain directions of gameplay.  Even there it's likely that in the end game people would view this as a inconvenience instead of a benefit, unless you push some seriously incredible evolving RP/story angle really well and make people feel involved in whatever faction they find themselves.  God, even that sounds idealistic as hell.

Agreed. If players want storyline that means they want a unqiue place in the world. But for that place to matter there has to be some consequence to the choice. Otherwise you're just waiting for WoW to steal back your players.

Faction/Reputation is a good way to do that, something that's been devolved even before EQ1's shallow implementation of the "Air of..." from Ultima IV.

But considering how much whining there was on the most recent Scourge Invasion in WoW, I highly suspect any amount of game-changing consequence woudl only be met by derision. And /angryquits.

Stylized photorealism is where we should be going with gaming.  The two arent mutually exclusive.  Why is it that people seem to think they can only have one or the other?  Art and Tech CAN be used simultaneously.  Matter of fact, Bioware made a good example of this with Bioshock.

So please can we stop it with the photorealism vs. style argument.  Photorealism will ALWAYS be a better pallette to work from (unless your game demands anime), and original style makes the best brush strokes.

What's ironic in all of this is that SWOR will ultimately have LESS of a story than sandbox-SWG.  When you dont give the players control over the story, the gameplay eventually fizzles out.  Regardless of the choices Biolucas gives you with storyline, it's still just one bloated choose-your-own-adventure game.  REAL story-based game theory is more based on Mad Libs than anything else.  Make an infinitely flexible framework and let the players evolve it themselves.

For Star Wars, just add the pew pew, ships, and the "hhoe-pers" and you're good to go.

Lastly, any story-based Loot-oriented SW done during KOTOR (while being a Jedi) will ultimately fail because lets face it... Jedis arent too keen on LOOT.  So using the WoW motto of phat lootz till you die isnt going to work here.  I'd be willing to say Bioware should be "mindful" of adding enough flexibility into their title, because it's not like Jedi run around space collecting things... or even really improving/adding to their skillset much.  Hell, what is it?  They swing a sword, move things, and shoot lightning...  and run fast sometimes.  That's it.

What they need here is a story-based sandbox action space shooter.

FIFY. And I humbly disagree, Bioshock looked like low-resolution turd. The art concept was great, but the execution was weak.

Video of the PR presentation btw.:
http://www.videogaming247.com/2008/10/27/star-wars-the-old-republic-the-entire-reveal-presentation-in-video/

And here's a small guess on what features they're probably still considering:
http://www.ahazi.org/forums/showpost.php?p=165362&postcount=1

A storybased MMO might actually work if they don't overdo it and dip&throw a few story-elements and cutscenes here and there instead of instancing half the game...

Better for what? Considering it increases hardware requirements, demands more processing power, much more detailed coontent *and* makes immersion much harder to achieve (the uncanny valley effect) ... there actually seems to be very little incentive to go that route, when you think of it.

And speaking of pallette, photorealism is typically brown with some green thrown in the mix. Is why even movies nowadays stylize the hell out of that photorealism whenever they can.

... and aren't compensating for anything at all.

What is going on, this is like the 5th time this month I've read a WUA post and thought... "Right on."     Bizarro world? :)

telling a great story through a persistent world, hmm the fail is coming.

Depends on how much of the 'world' is persistent.  Main trading and social hubs where the world never really (and doesn't have to) changes?  Sure. 

But when the main story line locations and times are wholly dependent on how far each person has progressed on their story / level are completely instanced?  Maybe not SO much.

This ain't your normal MMO inbound, folks.  Unless you count global chat.

HAHAHA. Can we bronze this?

I hope the implication wasn't there that I thought it would be a good one, friendo.

If so, I sincerely apologize.

Edit: Clarity.

We'll see. I'd like to believe they don't make the same mistake LoTRO did where so many more-than-WoW quests had such wierd quest-step disparity issues.

I dunno.  I don't think it's a number of quests thing.  I only played the trial for a couple days for LOTRO so I'm not all that familiar with it. 

The feeling I get for SW:TOR is that as your character progresses, your world changes, but doesn't change for anyone else.  They only see the changes if they group with you and (temporarily) become part of YOUR timeline.  And you don't necessarily need them (other players) because of your companions (a la Mass Effect) that you chose between missions (or at any given time that you return to the Normandy, if memory serves).  The parts that don't change are social centers.  In a round about way, that's fine with me since I prefer solo PvE, but love some group PvP.

The whole consequences matter meme is something that bothers me as well.  If it's a single player game, I can replay from the beginning to that point of proverbial no return in fair record time - or save right before hand.  An MMO?  Not so much.  I don't want to think I've wasted 100 hours because I took the wrong path; whether real or perceived (which, honestly, is there any difference?).

I'm not keen on the art direction, I'm not keen on the graphics approach (better computer only gets better fps, otherwise the game will look the same on a garden variety budget rig as it does a tricked out quad core SLI power rig), and other stuff.  It's really a game not for me, in that I'm just too damn old.

We need a good Trammel thread to dredge up the old animosity, but anymore I don't even have it in me. I blame WoW. Everyone plays it, everyone does as much PVP as they do or don't feel like, and even the biggest carebear does a little sport PVP on the side.

But seriously, if KOTORO (fuck it, I'm calling it that) instances all or most of it's zones, that's a total deal-breaker. If I want something like that, Diablo 3 will be out by then, with no subscription fee and gameplay/loot that's virtually guaranteed to be 1000% more fun.

I've always thought that the solution to the whole 'global consequences of your actions' thing is radically small server sizes.  I.e. 100-200 people max, with hundreds of servers.  Gives people much more of an opportunity to shape their environment.

WoW is already doing this with their new 'phasing' setup in Lich King, except (rather shortsightedly) they have not (to my knowledge) included any way to bring others into 'your' timeline.  So if I want to help a guildie on a phased quest because we just feel like playing together (the quests are supposedly designed to be soloable if necessary, but whether they NEED the help or not is irrelevant) I can't.  I'm forbidden from playing with them because I'm not on the same step of the phased quest.

Either way, it is an interesting implementation and if they are indeed planning something like this for the Old Republic, I'll be at least interested to see how well it handles and whether it's extremely jarring or not.  It's not as though we don't already have a complete lack of immersion as far as mobs respawning, dungeons respawning, etc, goes in all current games.

That sounds basically like NWN, just with professionally managed small servers all run by one company. Some of the better and longer lasting NWN servers have had exactly this.  The DM and world builders react to the actions of the players in the world, changing the zones as necessary.  Thing is I'm not sure such a thing would work on a large scale because every single one of those hundreds of servers would require a dedicated and personal staff of at least a few people to react to and implement the changes the players make.

All of the "world changing" in SWTOR (horrible, horrible name btw, I pronounce it sweater in my head) will be of 2 varieties:

1)  Offline Tortage stuff, and
2)  In-game (i.e., multiplayer) limitations on powers/loot based on your choices.

I disagree with #1 making up a large part of an MMO, but #2 has its problems as well.  Here are the possible scenarios (for the Jedi class, just to pick one):

(1)  Your (irreversible) in-game choices mean that at endgame your Jedi has Force Heal, but can never get Force Lightning.  Response:  "Wtf, I have to reroll to get out of this gimp power to get the awesome IWin Lightning??  I quit!"

(2)  Your (completely reversible) in-game choices mean that at endgame, you can "respec" to Dark Jedi by grinding Jedi Master NPCs for a few hours to get the powers you want.  All story becomes totally meaningless, because all your choices can be wiped out easily in the end.

(3)  Your storyline/choices has no effect on your powers or equipment.   The story stuff is thus completely meaningless.


The game will start out as 1, move to 2 within two months (because the first people hit high level) (except with a horrible horrible grind to change) and a few months after that changes to total insta-respeccing.   Hell, even the ability to permanently lose a certain companion ("wtf, I clicked on the wrong dialogue option BECAUSE OF LAG!1!! and lost my Dashade forever, I'm permagimped against Jedi now /ragequit!") will monumentally piss people off.

People like to think that their characters (even if, by definition, limited to their own class skills) can always theoretically have any option open to them- i.e., no way to permanently ruin a faction, switching from gnomish to goblin engineering, etc.  SWTOR will launch with permanent choices, but very quickly dispose of them.

This looks hauntingly familiar to what Bioware's SWOTOR team has said so far about story driven classes;

 http://www.gamebanshee.com/previews/dragonage1.php (http://www.gamebanshee.com/previews/dragonage1.php)

and

http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/dragonageorigins1.php (http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/dragonageorigins1.php)

Quotes of note, Dan in this case is Dan Tudge Project Director/Executive Producer Dragon Age: Origins






Looks like DA:O will give a lot of insight in what SWOTOR has in store.

It wasn't so much a quantity thing as a style thing. Do you remember that Darkshire quest in WoW where it was like 14 steps or something through a fairly interesting story line? There's a few quest series like that in WoW but the game is largely one to three quest steps and that's about it.

LoTRO, at least from what I remember into the late-20s, had many many more quest-series. It made perfect sense for the world and the lore, but it made it harder for people to help each other in a situation that was concurrently mutually beneficial. It usually was a lot more one person helping another and then vice versa, thus doubling the time and repeating the content over and over. It drove a wedge between those who quested together anyway and those who soloed but needed the occasional help that, at least at launch, was a bit harder to find because nothing lined up.

Ideally, the Origin Stories stuff in Swatter is more like AC1 monthly quest/content/world updates after a single-player Tortage type front end. I can't see them completely relying on the personal stories for all players all the time because while one branching story-arc and side missions works well in a single-player game, it becomes really unwieldy and crazy expensive in a game with multiple classes. Unless you dumb down the quests such that the "choice" is merely between the red or the white sauce.

The reason this single player -> multiplayer shit about SWTOR is the discussion of the week is due to two reasons, well OK, three.

1. Bioware excels at making single player games, so Edmonton is probably forcing that part. It's largely a terrible design, whether or not they succeed. If I want to have an amazing storyline where I'm the hero, I'll play a single player game designed as a single player game. Nothing is worst than a single player game dropped into an MMOG design paradigm (Oblivion, I'm looking at you, /snore).

2. Bioware Austin simply doesn't know better, which is inexcusable. Someone needs to be in the goddamn room and say "This is stupid" - of course, no one has been at Mythic telling Mark that his latest roundup of ideas is dumb as bricks so I can't understand why I would think someone might be at another EA studio. Once again, even if they succeed on this single player stuff, it's still stupid. If you want to make a single player game, just f'ing make one.

3. Nobody at Bioware Austin knows how to make an MMOG.

See what I did there? /chortle.

Edit: Also, game is still so unbelievably ugly that they're already fighting an uphill battle. They really should not have shown anything yet and just shown a logo or something.

At the same time, none of that matters. The box is going to say BiowareEA. Not "The Team That Brought you Games You've Already been Pissed off about" or "From the guys who wanted WoW's sloppy seconds."

I suddenly realized why they didn't call this KOTORO.  If it goes the way of the NGE, it least it doesn't poison the name of the franchise.

Yeah, its obvious, but I'm naive in some ways. 

Although I disagree with the graphics hate, this is the single most correct thing you've ever said in the MMO forum.  At some point, this game will either become full Diablo co-op, or someone at EA will sit down with them and say "Look, MMO-wise, this is retarded."  I'm betting the latter happens, probably late enough to delay the game 18-24 months. 

Nobody wants to make single player games. They're too easy to pirate and don't bring in monthly bucks.  Business-wise it's smarter to just create one, add in network support to be "of those MMO-thingys", lop off all the support staff and limp along collecting $15-$20 from idiots who don't realize they're now paying $100 for a game they used to pay $50 for.

Well, duh. I was speaking purely from a design standpoint in relation to the company involved and the people making the game.

I would totally play Star Wars Guild Wars.

Ahh, gotcha.

I wouldn't pay a monthly fee for one though.

I don't think enough people chortle on the internet.

The story stuff might be nice if all of it was voiced. I guess they could keep all that stuff server side and stream it down as needed. Like this they could set up new in-world missions with voice, but without all the silly big-ass patching (unless world content needs to be updated).

Interview with SWTOR writer Daniel Erickson at Gamasutra.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3835/a_new_galaxy_daniel_erickson_on_.php?page=1 (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3835/a_new_galaxy_daniel_erickson_on_.php?page=1)

So basically, I'm gonna have to play a million alts to gain enjoyment from this title?  pass...

My take away from this is that the writers are happy with the writing aspect of it. Which is great, but I really need to see how it is implemented in the normal play experience.

I think thats a bit of an overreaction to that article.  But what that guy doesn't seem to get is that other devs, historically, haven't sat around in berets and red smoking jackets saying "We could implement a meaningful story, but we will not, ha-ha!" 

What this guy is describing sounds like a mighty fine singleplayer game with co-op.  But he doesn't seem to understand that that type of game is NOT AN MMO.  MMOs have some sort of shared world, which is mostly incompatible with handcrafted super-instancedx10 singleplayer advancement.  Other MMOs have realized that the shared (not with 3 friends, but in the sense that hundreds of other people are doing things around you) world experience is important.  These guys don't seem to get it. 

I wonder if the group training BioWare writers get, based on BioWare's single player experience, won't leave a lot of the writing as though it is 10 different single player plots that everyone just works through.

If you look at storylines in MMOs, MxO had (imo) a really interesting one that progressed things quite a bit (http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/posts/list.m?start=0&topic_id=36300024703&#36300485319). Each chapter gave each of the three sides something to do, then the resolution was announced and the storyline moved on. It did little to save the game and stop players from leaving because the basic gameplay mechanics weren't what people wanted to play.

2 gold stars for Unsub.  This is what I'm talking about (I mentioned MxO previously), if Bioware wanted TRUE story-driven gameplay then they should focus on utilizing their staff and the players DURING gametime... not before.  There are loads of net volumes on progressive Storytelling game theory, none of them involve a few dozen writers simply writing stories.  All of them involve systems similar to MxO's or some sort of uber-code that takes input from the user and translates it into meaningful theme and plot.  It offers endless replayability, which is what MMOs are really about.

What should be happening is a system developed to ADVANCE the storyline, not just live it to its end depending on which class you are.  Rinse, wash, repeat.   In a genre where the main actors are pretty vanilla, this is even more important.  All Jedis really HAVE is storyline... and blasters and starships.  Throw in persistent RvR (also a developing storyline) and you're set.

btw, how is there still no mention of ANY kind of factional warfare?  this is a joke right?

You're overanalyzing. They didn't call this KOTRO because Jedi and Sith are 2 out of 8(?) classes and not the total focus of the story as they were in single player.

Or did I miss the implied green?

SOE responds to the announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic (http://www.massively.com/2008/10/27/soe-responds-to-the-announcement-of-star-wars-the-old-republic/)


And some SOE forum goodness about the subject. (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?&topic_id=772505)

Translation:

If SWTOR sucks: Galaxies stays in business.
If SWTOR is midly successful: Galaxies stays in business but bleeds some players.
If SWTOR is a hit: Galaxies dies.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

What the fuck is that a Justim Timberlake Stormtrooper sig in the first post? SWG players truly are faggots.

Always two there are, a master and an apprentice.

 :awesome_for_real:

But which one was destroyed, the master or the apprentice?

 :awesome_for_real:

http://kotaku.com/5075263/biowares-halloweeners-mock-their-own-giant-lightsabers

PC Gamer had an ok writeup of SWTOR. Nothing more than we didn't already know. Images look better in print than they did in this thread though.

I can't remember where I first head this anecdote of the quest design process there, but they carried it in PCG too. Basically, a bunch of writers sit around coming up with ideas. As each is presented, the lead guy provides as suffix something about "and then Darth Vader...". If anyone snickers, the whole idea is tossed. Darth Vader does not save 10 kittens. :awesome_for_real:

I'm still recovering from my creepy experience with AoC, the overhyped bastard of MMO and FPS...  :ye_gods:

FU(n)Com's effort a la Tortage made AoC rather surreal. On the one hand, singleplayer "kill X foozles" quests at night and on the other hand a daylight chat room with a few FPS PvP options but absolutely no "RPG" to be had (not supported, seemingly). I found it all rather queer, a bit like watching Eraserhead for the first time.

Now I've recovered and stopped taking the Quells^tm, I'd rather not go through that again with SW:TOR, thank you. Too early to say anything else -simply not enough information. Fun, albeit of the unkind kind, to be had hypothesizing on the innumerable way they can feck this up.

The old "shit-in-a-box" moniker cannot in all fairness be applied to SWG, however. As someone else pointed out, that was a case of monumental mismanagement on a truly biblical scale and the stench of that corpse will cling to SOE and John Smee-Hee for years to come.

My fondest hope it that SW:TOR will be a sandbox peppered liberally with meaningful quests and choices that suggest ways for the players to go and provide mechanisms of support for those choices without railroading. This would of course mean a return to mmoRPG, those latter three letters are you'll have noticed are frequently neglected by "enthusiastic" (read: spinning) suits.

My only thoughts are the screenshots scream "CARTOONISH" - and I mean in the Warner Bros. way...  :? What happened to the grimy "Used Future" which was the whole basis of the Star Wars look?

Just say "no!" to cartoony graphics - they are demeaning to the subject material, and lead to Hentai.




 

To be fair, the vast majority of players ignore the RPG too.


Having seen the size of the lightsabers in SWOR, I'm sure Rule 34 will kick in soon anyway.

Curses! Foiled again! And I'd have got away with it too, if it wasnt for the damned majority of paying subscribers!

 Oh, wait a minute...  :headscratch:

KotOR (and to lesser extent the 'new trilogy') happened -- i'd figure the reasoning behind it was, stuff that appears grimy, broken and used in the last few movies might've looked bit fresher few decades or few thousand years before.

The graphics style seems quite consistent with the style of single player KotOR games, so it's a few years late to complain about it.

Err, you have seen the which-came-first Ultima or Dragonstomper argument in the other thread right?  :awesome_for_real:

It's never too late to complain about something, even if you complained about it years ago too!  :grin:

In light of the evidence i have no choice but concede the point :grin:

Remember, it doesn't remember where in the universe you are or what decade/century it is, everything must look consistent! I went to Montreal and it all looked pretty clean and nice. Then I traveled back in time to Delhi, India in 1934 and everything was dirty as hell. What the fuck, real life? Try some consistency!

Well, I, for one, am looking forward to the game.  Naturally, I have reservations.  I wasn't exactly happy about the whole project, but now?  I'm looking at it as a chance to dive into a new Star Wars game, plain and simple, so I'm excited.

Welcome.

Kill the sig pic.

I let this guy in because I didn't think he was a spammer. I suppose that's ironic. Peace out bro.

New screens up yesterday...

http://www.swtor.com/media/screens

Decidedly less cartoony, although lightsaber hilts are still made of Pringles cans. 

Damn. Stormwaltz - shove a sock in this guy's fucking mouth. Don't let him talk to the press again until release is imminent. We know EA will push it out the door before it's ready (see WAR) and all this"bigger than WOW" and other huge promises like the above will make you look like as big a bunch of fuckwits as Paul Burnett.

Those screenies look pretty good. Lightsabers have been toned down, and are merely long instead of gigantic cylinders.

As for the thing about the quest text, I ask you who cares? That's not a crazy thing to offer, nor is it something to be excited about. If I told you that Alliance and Horde get completely unique quests without repeated dialog, would you give a shit? I definitely wouldn't.

Goes back to whether reading the story matters. In WoW it does not, as in that game the only choice you have is whether to advance or to not advance. But in an RPG like Fallout 3 or Fable, paying attention to the quest means making a choice that matters. SWTOR is saying they're trying for the latter.

I'm wondering if they did the same thing for the hilts that was done to Chris Tucker for The Fifth Element.  They showed him some waaaay outlandishly fairy outfits, anticipating his rejection, then showed him some that were less outlandish, but still out there, which were in fact the ones they wanted him to wear.

Those screens are definitely much better than the first ones, and not just because of the improved hilts.

SWOR is going micro-trans, no sub fees.  (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56292)

I can see this working very well. Or blowing up horribly. It all depends on how well Bioware can design the game.

This is probably good.. for me, since there'll only be a few months of content and I won't pay subscription for a glorified single player game. How Bioware intends to benefit is a more interesting question. There is a strong Guild Wars vibe that I find increasingly discouraging.

I don't see why anyone is getting bent out of shape about it on the official forums.

Who cares how you pay for it as long as the game is good.

I'm going to withhold judgment until I can get a sense of how it's implemented. It could be the Next Great Thing or just a credit card hungry monster. I know Bioware from their great games, not their industry innovations (in the way of Steam or Battle.net, for instance)- so who knows how it'll play out.

EA has told Shacknews that no statements have been made about the business model, and Mr. Riccitello's comments were misunderstood.

Sounds like another instance of that guy opening his mouth months before he was supposed to  :awesome_for_real:

As a SW geek.. a one-time SWG fanatic, and someone who's bought alot of Bioware games.  I'm seriously unenthusiastic about this game.  It's not helping that the more I hear and see about the game, the more it becomes even less likely that I'll play it.

Since EA is involved, I bet there's a need for vital items against $$$.

EA can deny making any descision on business model but Riccitiello clearly knows whats going on with it, even if he isnt meant to talk about it yet.

I really dont see them going with a traditional Asian style microtransaction model. If they are not doing subscriptions then I think they will do things a bit differently, perhaps paying for content. new areas, new storylines, etc. This way, they can still sell a box. Requiring customers to buy a box and then doing korean item sales is not a good idea.

Personally, I think this really should be a traditional box and subscription game. The audience is clearly big enough, SWG did not lack for initial box sales.. Assuming the game is decent, the revenue from subscriptions will more than pay for all the additional ongoing content development.

Oh, and by the way, just in case you aren't up to date, sometime today (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=9647) we'll get to see the first, public "video documentary" of the game, including in-game footage.

Should be fun  :ye_gods:

You were reading the official forums of a game that has barely been announced and for which no details are readily available.  Those posting are the hardest of the hardcore in terms of fanbois and players.  As such there are two problems that develop.

1) They all have their own little vision about the gameplay, exact mechanics and EXACTLY how things should work based on nothing but their own screenshot-fueled dreams and wishes.  Anything that veers from that will be met with howls and anguish.

2) Being the hardcore uberfans, they are the MOST likely to be fucked-over by a microtrans model.  They'll dump $30 or more per game account a month on features and upgrades instead of $15 a month for the same 'full service.'     You'd see similar whining and gnashing of teeth from the WOW-lifers if it moved to a Chineese model of pay-per-hour that had you paying $15 a month if you played 20 hours a week and a shrug from folks who would a) budget time appropriately or b) give a cheer because they would be saving money per month.

Oh yeah, I get that.  Probably should have clarified, but then again I didn't think anyone would care what I thought.

It was more of a "I don't get the angst anymore" kind of a remark, as in it won't affect me one way or another because I'm beyond giving a shit anymore and can't believe I ever did.  My  :awesome_for_real: ZOMGSTARWARSMMOGAME  :awesome_for_real: is broken.  Well, all MMOs fall into that category these days.  If it's good, I'll play it.  If it sucks, I won't.

Welcome to jaded country.

(I need a .jpg for that riffing the old Marlboro ads.)

And...Here is the video documentary:

http://www.swtor.com/media/vidcasts/viddoc001 (http://www.swtor.com/media/vidcasts/viddoc001)

Huh. The combat looks really fast and frenetic (which may or may not be a good thing) but really doesn't give me a good indication of anything.

Typical MMO faire: Lots of promises and flash. 

I am interested in seeing more... that's a start.

I really kinda dig it.  It does look fast, but wow...

Hrm.

They did say at one point that the control scheme / UI was going to be like using a controller in a fighting game.

Very cool.

I wonder if they will still be touting how meaningful "choices" are after a few documents are out that completely diagram every choice and what it means for your character.  Until choices affect more than just my character they will be little more than what we have now, a way to accomplish certain goals.  The choice is only dramatic if I don't know what will happen when I make it.  I can easily see a couple weeks into the game that people will be following guides for "how to choose your way to X".  They talk about this new system (much like TR did)... and perhaps it will at least cause some people to read quest chat... but I am not sure it is going to be the dramatic story-telling mechanism that they envision.

Someone mention "scope of the game" and "more content than all other games combined".   :oh_i_see:

We'll see, game looks cool though.  It'll all come down to how it plays and feels of course.

"...these are real choices that are going to make a real impact on the story and where the narrative goes that you have to live with forever..."

WTB Choice Respec, PST! :uhrr:

I'd bet they end up scrapping the Storytelling aspect mid-development in favor of a more polished, solid traditional MMO (and after they realize they cant meet their deadlines).  Honestly though, does anyone here even look at the storytelling thing as a really "cant wait to try it" game feature?  I dont.  It's linear.  It's a thicker CYOA novel.  booooring.  I hope they just leave it out unless they get educated and develop a truly dynamic story system, then I'd say go for it.  But for now, I'm pretty sure they're gonna scrap it (just like Tabula Rasa did).

Story = great for a single player RPG, not so much for an MMO

Give players tools to compete and have conflict with eachother.  That's what this universe is about.

If the combat system they are working on is fast and fun and less mechanical than in most MMO's, I'll be real interested in this

I'd agree with that wholeheartedly.

I really am tired of looking at 5 different toolbars and watching timers, cooldowns, and an action/mana pool rather than watching the action. 

Check out the video documentary that just went up on the main site.  Very encouraging for lightsaber combat, at least (although not much foot movement from the combatants, which isn't necessarily bad- if you can gain a slight advantage from doing triple backflips every two seconds during every fight, the whole game would be ADHD spaz monkey circle-strafing). 

Are you all kidding me? Those characters didn't move from the place they were fixed on the floor at all. I was getting MxO flashbacks.

So, all of those special attacks could have come from hitting the right button between auto attacks. Not saying they did, but I expected a more jaded reaction here to that video.

What Unsub said.

This has been already said but every decision making an impact is going to suck initially with people clamouring for wowhead/thottbot.

That said it still looks enticing...  :why_so_serious:

It being in the StarWars universe means nothing.

It's gonna be shit.

Well, at the very least, the lightsabers were hitting each other, not just waving in the air in the general direction of the enemy as big white numbers popped up.  That alone is an advancement from any MMO with swordfighting that we've seen.

EDIT:  Overall, I haven't seen anything yet that would take this game off my long-term fanboi list.  I am still concerned that its going to be more like Diablo (single-player with co-op) then a true MMO- they still haven't explained to my satisfaction how you can have such an individual story, AND share a common world with thousands of others.   So, I'm still pro-SWTOR until we hear its a superinstanced Guild Wars. 

I'm gonna call just the opposite on this. Simply because Bioware has done it before..

Great story, lukewarm combat on a good day, inventory system that causes migraines.

Only because nobody has ever done a good job of it before.

Expect a Beta Q4 2009 -- or sometime in 2009.  Yup.  EA needs this. 

I don't think I agree with all the EA hate - people say EA rushed WAR out the door, but the way it looks to me, WAR was never going to be a decent game the way it was (and is) being handled, and better to throw it to the wolves sooner than later.

Note that Microsoft did the same thing, as I recall. I don't think people give publishers enough credit these days...

Meaningful story choices aren't bad. I mean you either minmax it or not, but that's the case with anything. Minmaxers can look at big charts of what stuff to do, other people can just do whatever grabs them.

...except that people /ragequited over making the "wrong" choice between goblin and gnome engineering (in the first couple years, before you could respec).  Either people can respec anything important at the end anyway (in which case the "meaningful" choices aren't that meaningful) or someone is going to put in 200 hours and find out they can't have their favorite (uber for pvp) companion because of picking an incorrect dialogue choice 50 hours back.   People don't WANT permanent choices in an MMO.  The potential cost of a do-over is too high.

And some people quit out of boredom because nothing they do has any meaning...

It is going to come down to a lot of different factors.  If the stories are solid and the game enjoyable, then I think most people can get past a couple of disappointing choices.

It is all about the opportunity cost.  And, I suppose if the gameplay is interesting enough you might actually get some good replayability with all of the different "choice lines".  It sucks for people like me who hate alts.  Still, "choices" seem to be a nicer way of saying "factions".  You make a choice and certain people like you better, opening up new content while other people like you less, closing off certain content.  None of it has any effect on the world you live in... so it is very much like a single-player game inside a multi-player world... ala WoW.  Can't really argue with its success, but it is not some new awesome system.

As others have said, we have the whole "make the wrong choice and suffer the unchangeable consequences" thing going on in real life, most people don't want that to be the case in their games too.

It's Star Wars. You only ever get two choices there -- be evil, cackling asshole and get dark side points, or don't be evil asshole and get light side points. So you always have pretty good idea what will happen when you make your choice, but that doesn't remove the drama from the choice itself, imo.

You can't respec the horde troll into alliance gnome. I don't think there's really many people ragequitting over that.

THat's hardcoded from the moment of character creation.  People, from the first MMO onward, really don't expect to be able to change race (and if the KNOW general faction is hardcoded going in, they aren't angry).  But people have gotten used to thinking that any options theoretically available to a created character will never be permanently off-limits to that character.  Changing that balance will upset a lot of people.  Hell, if it takes 200 hours to max a character and I took paths that left me grossly underpowered (with no way to rectify that) I would be angry.

One thing they can certainly make use of is factions.  This way what you do will certainly effect how you play at the end game, but not irrevocably.

However, permanent character choices are in some sense just another balance issue.  It's actually fairly similar to starting as a class as a noob to the game.  You don't know how the class is going to play out at higher levels, what options will be available to you, and what will be restricted to you.  And in balancing some things may change out of your control as well.

There is one difference though, in that these choices will be pervasive over the course of your gameplay experience, rather than just at character creation.  And there will be more choices to balance, and more things to piss the players off if choices are really a big deal.

Yus, but nevertheless it is a handful of permanent choices made about the character. And if KNOWING the choice is permanent is enough to remove the anger then can't that work as well for the same kind of choice made at some point down the road? If i recall right, it is a route already taken by quite a few of Korean MMOs -- they have the player start as generic 'noob' class and then give them progressively specialized choice of what they want to become in the end. Now granted, these MMOs aren't usually pinnacle of user-friendly and casual design, but this particular aspect of them doesn't seem to be brought up as example of what makes them more annoying than the average western MMO...

You can currently make the choice at character creation that after 200 hours leaves you with realization you picked a class that (relatively) sucks ass. (since many abilities are introduced at late part of character advancement, it can be impossible to immediately realize the mistake) So really not sure if having this choice over the course of these 200 hours rather than in the very beginning... is somehow making it worse or for that matter any different.

edit: also, if the argument is 'permanent choices are bad because i can screw myself up making them' then i don't think it's argument against permanent choices per se, but rather against shoddy balancing and bad design. After all ideally you shouldn't be able to screw yourself up no matter what path you take, each should lead to viable (but different) end result.

*COUGHS*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfjxSkYDR4g

Forget about MMOs. I played a strategy/rpg hybrid where goals were defined by achieving objectives in a set period of time. People forced the dev to change the game's direction because people were pissed when they realized being inconsistently good or evil left you with combat units that were too difficult to synergize with each other.

The problem that they are going to battle is perception; whether real or not.  As long as some players feel like they *possibly* made the wrong choice in their storyline, the angst will flow.  It won't matter if it's a quest reward or storyline or whatever. 

But give it 3 months, and there will be quest/storyline trees with every conceivable path posted somewhere on the net.

I'm not exactly sure why that would be a bad thing.

This is why my feeling that meaningful choice really comes from a player driven game.  You never REALLY know how a person is going to react.  I had exactly the same response as you, which was basically that all the stuff is going to get sorted out, made into guides, and then the only "choice" in which goal you want to do. I suppose its possible to design PvE content around the concept of "unknown" consequences , but it would have to be incredibly dynamic to the point that I don't think we have the technology to do it yet.

For all the bitching about knowing how things are going to turn out, you could just not read a damn guide.

It's really that simple.

Impossible. We metagame because it's in our genes.


One could cheat this by having a pool of very different rewards randomly chosen at the end...

It is that simple for a single player game, in a game where you are interacting with other people who might be using said guides, its not so simple.

I suppose... but "you chose the dark side answer and got a new light saber" and "you chose the dark side answer and got a new <randomly generated reward that is not a lightsaber>" aren't actually really different choices. 

Perhaps I can explain better.  What I mean by consequences isn't whether or not you get shiny thing 1 or shiny thing 2, but that your choice could actually have a very NEGATIVE impact on your character.   I know that people only like happy fun times in a game, but having the ability to mess things up makes everything a lot more interesting in my opinion. 

Ok I see where you are going with this. That is a more involved dynamic but my cheat can be applied. I'm not saying it's a good way of implementing it. It's just a cheap quick way since the cost and time factor gave you pause on how this could work.


From my experience long lasting negative impacts are possible iff the rule makers make it explicitly clear what the player gains and loses for making their choice. Without that knowledge many feel lots of regret because they didn't make an informed decision.

It would be the equivalent of scam if KOTR MMO didn't give you a heads up of what will happen and then the offer you the option to undo your choice for $5....




....  :nda:

I eagerly await accidentally killing someones pet cat and forever incurring the wrath of the sand people, or something.  :awesome_for_real:


I want this game to be awesome, I really do, but so far...

Who's bitching?

But anyway, there's that.  Some people don't like to be surprised; then there's people that catass race through the content not paying attention to any of it, then complain there's no content at 'end game'.  They don't care what the content is, just so long as they can get it done and claim they did it.

Hell, i'd WISH for that over the model it will end up having, which is: "Hey, here is your big moment do you choose 1) save everyone and earn light side points or 2) massacre everyone pointlessly for dark side points"

It exists, here's an example:  http://www.storytron.com/ (http://www.storytron.com/)
Problem is, it's fairly new just as you've said.  Most games on the radar today have already been in dev. for a least a few years, so they miss out.  I actually speculated Bioware might be developing some sort of Storytron type system for SWTOR, but the more I heard interviews from them the more I saw it was nothing like a dynamic/interactive storytelling system.  And the fact is, Storytron is extremely basic in its current form, however if it had Bioware/EA's millions I'm sure it would do well.  

How is the choice of the goal any less "meaningful" than choice of point in the story, though? One is for the min-maxing metagamer, the other is for the roleplayer. But both influence and shape existing game character, in a way that appeals to the player.

Having to pick between door 1 and 2 without knowing what's behind either isn't imo any more meaningful than making that choice with full knowledge what you're going to get. It's just different strokes for different folks, but both can fit in the same game where the knowledge of reward is entirely optional.

I guess I do come across a little strong on topics like this.  I do tend to get defensive because the MMOs I tend to like SWG (pre "upgrade") and EVE Online tend to get the short end of the stick (though admittedly EVE is doing quite well for itself).  I think CCP has things under control, but there is always a bit of doubt that creeps in that they will change fundamental game mechanics to make their game more accessible and blow it for me.  I don't have a problem with games that I don't like existing, or hell, evening being the most popular ones, it just makes me recoil a bit when those players start trying to change the games I enjoy :).

Put succinctly, and I suppose more on topic for this thread: TOR doesn't look to me like it is going to live up to my ideal of what a star wars game should be, or even has been.

We can thank Lucas for that. I actually find it jarring watching the differences between TOT and the Prequels. The acting, usage of music and the set pieces are just so different from each other. Let's not even go into writing, editting and direction.

This is not the website for you.

"Rescue kittens from trees and get a blue lightsaber" versus "kick puppies and get a red one" is still way more story choice than you'd get anywhere else. /shrug

I look forward to seeing how they intertwine overarching stories and RMT. I'm not saying it'll be hard, I just don't expect them to do it even remotely right. This whole thing is going to be a mess. Also, your two examples are poop.

Everyone knows Sith love puppies and hate kittens. (http://www.millan.net/minimations/smileys/vader.gif)

Even if Bioware DID do the story-system "right" the fact still remains that if there's no inherent truly interactive Gameplay underneath, that most players will just scroll through the mountains of text to get at the end.  It'll be quicker to reroll another character and travel down a different arch, rather than read a book for one toon; and sadly they'll all count as "successes."  Just slightly different outcomes.  That to me doesnt make a game, it just makes fluff... and I'd rather have a singularly epic and well-written story with great voice-acting rather than a few linear walls-of-text.  Gotta be gameyness in the story.

That's a cool strawman but they haven't exactly done their RPGs so far (previous KotOR included) as 'wall of text to skip', why would they start now?

To take it back to the level of retard: stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Single player games allow that process to be stage managed somewhat. MMOs are desirable because (in theory) your character / the player doesn't run out of things to do, even when they've reached the end of the planned content because there are other systems there to take up the slack (which are generally either repeatable PvE that is very story light or PvP content).

The challenge SWOR faces is that regardless of how good the story is, the second you start throwing other players in the mix the devs lose that ability to control the content experience somewhat. There are a couple of ways around this - force certain play experiences to be single player, for instance - but the unofficial announcement of microtrans in this title makes me think Bioware is looking to make content release in a more episodic format, so that even if you get to max lvl your character can't finish their storyline until Bioware wants it finished. Then the next update comes along that you choose to pay for or not. In the meanwhile, you can do some meaningless PvE or meaningless PvP or meaningless crafting or whatever.

I think it's more likely that they'll have a bunch of episodic narratives rather than one overarching one that you can't finish.  This is easier to charge people for (pay $10 to participate in the Battle of Fooburger!) and repeats the satisfaction of concluded narrative.  I'm thinking something like the LOTRO Intro series done many times over, with multiplayer, and somehow protected against idiots and griefers.

So, in other words, it won't possibly work. 

P.S. I like how nobody on the Internet has bought the EA "he was misunderstood" line for even a second.  Maybe we are maturing as a community. 

Not likely,It's just noone believes anything EA says anymore.

Thought the video looked ok. Pretty standard stuff. I think it was UnSub that mentioned the MxO feel and I agree. The videos show too much choreography for it to be twitch, but more so than the usual variety of EQ1-like combat where swings and reactions rendered have nothing to do with the buttons being pressed. It certainly looks fast, but I'm thinking queued moves and "cinematic" battles, when what I'd really would have much rather gotten was Force Unleashed.

Everything else is the same talk we've already heard. Probably AoC-style single-player front end with persistent opt-in public space PvP ala outdoor WoW PvP or WAR, though likely with MUCH more single-player than not.

I'll have to disagree here because of two things:
1)  Force Unleashed was garbage.  Quite literally no strategic swordplay in the game whatsoever.  Just mindless swinging with the occasional force push... especially the Wii version
2)  Jedi see everything slower, therefore trying to effectively transcribe that into a world of mere earthlings (that's us) means making it a more deliberate, tactical MxO style combat interface (an interface which was pretty cool IMO) with maybe some AoC positioning involved.  If you've ever stood and watched two really good brawlers in MxO it's a pretty beautiful thing; a neophyte would wonder "how the fuck are they doing that," while inside the battle they're simply making quick tactical decisions that manifest themselves in flashy martial arts displays.  The higher lvled the player, the flashier he/she is and the more likely to win they are (although inherent player skill does play a role).

I once scribbled a game design (for a pretty phreaky sci-fi game) that actually involved altering the internal game timer (latency) of a player relative to the gameworld as a whole.  This wouldve been dependant on his character's precognitive skill.  Strong with the force?  Your latency is less.  In THIS way you could physically simulate what it would be like to be Neo or Skywalker (people around you would see a rubber-banding effect, but to you everything would be fine).  But, for a "normal" game... the only way is making it turn-based to an extent.  And when you think of it, that's all a Jedi really is doing: "taking a turn."  The physical aspect of swinging a lightsaber doesnt exist, only the INTENT exists and it just happens... those who see their oppenent faster and intend quicker are better Jedi.

So, I really think an MxO/AoC interface could work if they do it right, but it's a fine line on how much real twitch you really need for a Jedi game IMO.  I think most people here would agree though that a normal hack 'n slash Force Unleashed style game wont last very long in the entertainment column.  It'd just devolve into random bytch-swings that wont reflect the overall theme Bioware is getting at (grandiose storytelling and action sequences).  A highly choreographed, "story in a battle" fight sequence is what Bioware is after... so their combat interface will probably reflect that. 

I should have provided details for my Forced Unleashed comment.

On the X360, it was fun. Lightning, pick up guys, pick up objects, throw crap around, acrobatics, that sorta thing. I never got far into the game itself, but regardless, that's not the model for an MMO anyway, so irrelevant. The sword play I didn't care so much about because it wasn't the premise of the game. There's better sword games out there for reference.

From a geek standpoint, I never got the point of the sword fighting. I can hurl objects at you from all points around you so instead I'm going to see how strong/quick my l33t forc3 fighting skills are against yours'? Yea, I know it's a part of the IP, but even back in 1977 I was wondering why Han didn't just jump into the Falcon and start quadblasting Darth Vader while he was fighting Obi-Wan.

In any case, I hear ya on how this should work to feel right. I sorta think along the lines of early-DAoC Combat Styles. Mists of memory here, but they seemed to work from what I can remember about playing a Friar for a bit. If it can be that fast, but still reactive and cool looking, that could be a win.

At the very least, and just going by the videos, it looks like it could be a unique combat alternative to WoW. Which would be nice because that's where a good chunk of their early players are likely to come from (by sheer numbers alone).

Maybe you don't force hurl shit at each other because the other Jedi Master will negate it.  Like when Luke wasn't even a jedi yet going against vader in empire.  He just got fucked up.

Yea I know, the whole Dooku/Yoda thing, and they expanded on this in EU stuff too. But I don't a crap. It was fun :-)

I don't know who mentioned LOTRO but that is the best approach I see. Alot of generic quests, and a few "epic" storyline quests to advance the story of the game.

Was it the first or second Dark Forces that had the good saber action? It was a bit cumbersome at first, but once you got it down, you never needed a gun again. Anyway, one of my favorite tactics was to bounce laser shots back at the enemy. It would have provided about as much distraction as Luke yelling did for Ben.

It's a geek thing imo. I spent a lot of time as a kid pretending to fight with a lightsaber. Actually being able to chop up stormtroopers with one was  :drill: Who cares about reality?

Star Wars MMO? Eh, why bother? It's an mmo. Just put your balls in a vice and throw in the New Hope DVD.

Good. Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.

I think I've seen you (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPj6viIBmU)

I think if there was a guy with super-reflexes, super-speed, and super-strength waving a lightsaber rather angrily at me, I'm pretty sure 99% of my concentration would be on "Not letting that thing hit me in the face". I don't think I'd have much to spare for anything fancy with the force.

Maybe if you got into a bind or something, where you had a split second to focus without worrying about a saber through the head, you could grab something and throw it, or shove him or shoot lighting out your ass or whatever.

If I wanted to make sense of the whole thing, I'd say lightsabers were there to even the playing field between two Jedi (as well as being useful at all sorts of other things, including reflecting blaster bolts), mitigating the whole "whose stronger in the Force" thing. Unless, of course, you were some Dark Jedi Master facing off against an untrained farm boy who'd only had his glow stick a few months. THEN you could probably kick his ass one-handed while tossing random garbage at him.

Probably while laughing.

Dark Forces didn't even have light sabers iirc.

I think it is Dark Forces II you are talking about.

By Jedi Knight II, you were tiresomely overpowered against anything not-Jedi.

Jedi Outcast : Jedi Knight 2 has supremely better lightsaber combat than Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 but it wasn't until Jedi Academy: Jedi Outcast 2 : Jedi Knight 3 : Dark Forces 4 that you got the dual weilding or double bladed sabres.  :grin:

Jedi Outcast introduced the different stances and the slow motion camera action whenever you got a killing blow in which was tediously annoying after a while but had it's moments.  I think I have a stack of screenshots from somewhere showing aliens getting decapitated, stormtroopers on their knees clutching the stumps of their severed arms and general lightsaber mutilation goodness. There was also that whole wall running thing and acrobatics which did seem a little random but every now and then was quite sweet.

I was never bothered by being so much more powerful than non-jedi/sith characters. I felt that was exactly how you were meant to feel as a jedi.  A room full of stormtroopers didn't become a "can I survive this encounter?" challenge but a "how quickly can I clear the room and can I do it without getting my shields touched?" challenge.

I still think Jedi Knight was the best of the series though, dodgy graphics or not.

Also, Dark Forces 2 had much cooler Sith to fight than Jedi Knight 2 or Jedi Outcast 2. Plus JK2 and JO2 made you suffer through godawful jumping puzzles.


The Mara Jade expansion for DF2 was also neat. I think the difference was that DF2 was back when lucasarts was good at game design. By the time of JK2 and JO2 they had caught teh gay off of the George Lucas prequels and everything they have been involved in since has turned to shit.

The O forums suck ass.  S l o w, teeny tiny hotlinks, and everytime I want to log in, I have to clear my cookies/cache. 

Penny Arcade sums up the small combat clips we've seen perfectly: " It looks patently ridiculous to strike a monster more than twice with an infinitely sharp laser beam, and the whirling idiots in these clips look like they're auditioning for Thriller."

To be fair, it's be patently boring to walk up to that slug looking thing, casually swipe it once (or even twice) and kill it.  Or shoot it once with a blaster.

I wonder what part of 'it's a game' is lost on them...

Oh well.

I think the typical MMO-style combat of "let's just stand here and trade blows a while" looks especially ridiculous when you add lightsabers to the mix.

Which is why you make 30 slug looking things, and make combat about jedi awesomeness vs npc overwhelming numbers. A bit like Star Wars.

Which would be very, very cool if they could it and not have players who have less than up to date gaming rigs start chugging.

Working up an entirely new combat system that doesn't rely on standards such as armor and HP would be an interesting way to work a Star Wars game, but technically not particularly necessary.  They could simply do some renaming, and then make appropriately styled animations.

HP becomes Fatigue or Stamina or whatever you want to call it - the guy's ability to continue dodging and evading blows.  When he runs out of 'Stamina', he becomes too tired to fully avoid the next hit, and it scores a fatal/incapacitating strike against him.  Animations would therefore revolve around attack and dodge, with only the occasional animation actually showing contact between weapon and defender.

The main issue is one of animations showing people being hit by lightsabers/blaster bolts, rather than showing them dodging said attacks.

Because as we all know, games involving more than 3 enemies onscreen at once have only been possible for the last two years.

Been in KotOR games since the beginning. Whining about it now (and with brand new Force Unleashed that's arcade'y game but does the same thing) ... that's kinda like crying fool there's talking aliens in episodes 1-3. Srsly.

Bit of a difference between 3 and 30.

CoX has done fine for years, with 3, 15, 30 guys on screen. It's how you scale the tech.

CoH/V draws the first 50 characters on screen, iirc.

What's the statute of limitations on complaining about continuing sucky aspects of things?

Midichlorians? Time doesn't heal all stupid.

I remember posting when Anarchy Online came out about this same issue.

   How is it that 30,000 years in the future with hi-tech laser pistols I have to hit a guy in shirt sleeves 10 times to kill him?

All response were:  that's the only way it can work.

Any people wonder why non-fantasy MMO's fail?  They all make 0 sense, even if they invent their own 'physics'.

I'm not a Star Wars geek, but even in the current cartoons, the only time a Jedi has a problem is when they are overwhelmed, fight shielded bots, or an enemy also with a light-saber.

Can a game say its based on Star Wars, have Jedi's and Light Sabers yet be nothing like the combat depicted and still be Star Wars?

So what we're looking for is Bushido Blade Online.  Screw up and get slashed once, dead.  I'm not even being sarcastic here, no.  I'd REALLY like a game like that.  Reliant on reflex, positioning, and tactics to gain victory.  It can be done... but they aint gonna do it.  Not because they can't, but because many folks dont want to rely on their own gaming (and fencing) skillz to advance in an MMO they're paying monthly on.

Our talk prior about the MxO system brought up a memory of mine in playing it that combat was actually pretty deadly (at certain iterations).  If you got hit, you got hit pretty hard (all things being equal).  It just gave ample opportunity to prepare and counter.  If you were a high level, things happened slower and you had more time to react.  Low level, things moved impossibly fast... etc.  It's whack-a-mole in its most literal sense, only in reverse... as you level the moles slow down instead of speed up.

I'd still say Bioware's only real compromise between an arcadey fencing game and a traditional RPG is to employ an MxO system with collision physics ala Unleashed.  It really is the perfect marriage IMO.  Is there any other existing system that'd work?

I'd guess if there's indeed a sucky aspect to complain of, it's reasonable to expect the complaints to start when the element is introduced. The basic feedback loop if you will. Otherwise with all other factors remaining the same it's hard to blame developer when they don't address something they never got complaints about.

Using your midichlorians example, this particular complaint about the lightsabers is like starting to whine about stupidity of midichlorians 2 movies *after* ep.1. Is the complaint valid? Maybe, but shit, what took you so long?

Force Unleashed has lightsaber wielding dude whack repeatedly on regular startroopers and stuff until they fall (still in one piece) And it's made part of the official, Lucas-sanctioned canon. :grin:

As far as KotOR goes, they had some special whatever-the-name melee weapons which were said to be able to block the beam of lighsaber, allowing for prolonged duels with targets that weren't Jedi.

Vibro-blade.?

Does it make any less sense than stabbing a crocodile 20 times in the head with a sword and it still doesn't die?

"It's magic!" "It's technology!" (nanotech armor can't stop a bullet? Kevlar can do that today...)

Oh, and BTW, I can't wait for SWTOR because I have a totally original idea for a character. He's a Sith who repents and goes over to the light side. So he's a Jedi with a dark emo past. And a purple two bladed lightsaber. And he's an orphan because orcs slaughtered his home village.

CoH draws enough people on screen that I remember walking into many warehouses with eight man f13 hero teams, and exchanging comments along the lines of 'holy fuck that is a lot of clockwork bitches'.

In 2004.

Putting vibro in front of everything is the bullshit excuse for why swords can now cut hardened steel armour like a piece of cheese.

The bullshit excuse for lightsabres not chopping swords in half is that they are reinforced with some bullshit EU alloy that repels the force. Or something equally stupid.


Not even George Lucas went down this road in the prequels. You would think that even retarded EU fans would have realised by now just how shitty this Star Wars pikeman crap really is.

Jedi : Glowy Swords
Everyone else : Pew Pew laser guns

What is so fucking difficult about that? Do mmogs in space really have to have medieval style combat? Really?

(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/thumb/5/5d/MagnaGuard.jpg/632px-MagnaGuard.jpg)

Granted, that was briefly retarded, but it is nowhere near the scale of retarded vibro-bullshit in the EU.

Doesn't matter, it's canon.  :awesome_for_real:

Oh and as to your crusade against EU shit, what about the novelizations of the movies?  :grin:

(Granted, what pissed me off there in the Ep 3 book is the implied fight Mace Windu had with Greivous in which he realized Obi Wan would probably do better against him. That's the fight I want to see!)

Yup, looked it up and that's apparently it -- http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vibroblade

Says it used material which could also be utilized to make lightsaber-resistant armour, and having this stuff around makes some mild sense in era where every second guy was running with a glowing stick... as much sense as having the glowing sticks in the first place, anyway.

Isn't much of fight when everyone else has to do with pew-pew and the guy with the stick is staid to just reflect the pew pew back as he pleases. That limits potential fights to just between the guys with sticks, and the lack of variation like that gets boring sooner rather than later.

Bottom line is all the Star Wars EU is severely retarted. And yea, that includes the Timothy Zhan crapfest.

KOTOR era stuff I have enjoyed.  All the books written for the post ROTJ period can suck me.  Kevin J. Anderson in particular should be jailed.

EDIT:  And also David Wolverton, even more so.  The Courtship of Princess Leia just might be the worst book I have ever read.

It's implied because it was shown in the second Clone Wars cartoon series that aired right before the movie released.  Mace really sucked ass considering that fight lasted longer than the Grievous vs Obi Wan fight from the movie and how Grievous was "disarmed" in less than 20s by Ben.

EXACTLY!  Which is why its ALWAYS TOTALLY LAME to make MMORPG-style combat in future settings, which in turn makes future-setting MMORPG lame - which is why they fail!   QED.

Logic 101 is just down the hall.  You might want to pop in.

Some of the EU stuff is ok. I thought the two Zahn books that kicked off the New Jedi Order were actually pretty good. But we're talking "fine for an airport" pretty good here. You don't go to movie-based fiction novels for award-winning high prose.


It's implied because it was shown in the second Clone Wars cartoon series that aired right before the movie released.  Mace really sucked ass considering that fight lasted longer than the Grievous vs Obi Wan fight from the movie and how Grievous was "disarmed" in less than 20s by Ben.
[/quote]

Hrm? It's been a few years, but from what I recall of that episode, Mace was fighting things trying to rescue Palpatine but the only interaction he had with Greivous was when he Force-crushed his exoskeleton from far range (hence why Greivous is coughing when he gets off the elevator at the beginning of Ep 3). It was that which I thought was a huge let down, because I saw that episode after the movie and only because I had read the book (I want to see a fight dammit!)

Going by your logic, most successful modern and scifi games are total failures, too, because no one goes down in these in one shot, either. Apart from headshotting, where appropriate.

Scifi MMOs fail because there's a) a generic dislike anything far-future scifi and b) no one really tries doing proper scifi. Those who do, don't have the funding nor skills. Those who have the funding and skills rather continue to churn out what's tried and proven (i.e. fantasy MMO #745101). And if they do, you get silly shit like Tabula Rasa, which is stylistically fantasy with guns, because I sure don't see scifi in there.

I feel obliged to throw in EVE in response to that, but it's a kinda niche outlier ofc.

A Sci-Fi MMOG hasn't done gangbusters because we get crap or niche (or both  :uhrr:) games set in the Sci-Fi genre.

There is no earthly reason that mmog style d20 variant combat can't be translated to a ranged weapon setting.

There is also no reason that positioning and movement can't be made more important. And absolutely no reason it has to encourage you-swing-I-swing slugfests.


As others have said. EVE.

Exception to the rule. And it did take the game quite a while to get somewhere.

Also, in EVE you shoot spaceships with shields and ablative armor. The laser-vs-human-no-instant-death argument from Sunbury goes kind of moot in this case. Assuming you equal spaceships with humans... Since there are no human PCs... yet... What the fuck did I want to say?

Just make the actual visual combat blocks and parries and dodges, your health goes down when your 'hit', but visually you still parry/dodge or whatever until the killing blow.


The Health Bar represents your 'focus' or 'endurance' or whatever, and when its out, the fatal attack slips in and your suddenly in two pieces or have a blaster hole in your chest.

...which is really what hitpoints are supposed to represent, anyway.

... except the hitpoint bar should not be replenished with healing abilities if it was really what it represented.

Then you stop calling it healing and call it "restore strenght" or whatever, really its not hard.

You mean like calling it 'Morale' and having it be restored by music and reduced by taunting and insults, and the result of losing it be 'retreating' instead of dying?

If only some game (http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Morale) could do something like that. . .

The semantics! They do nothing!

People have enjoyed, are enjoying, and will always enjoy star wars games in which a blaster shot or lightsaber swipe doesn't instantly kill them. Changing it visually to a series of dodges/parries while your fatigue builds or stamina drops doesn't seem to add any value to the product. I don't expect that stuff to be fatal to my character in a Star Wars game because it just makes sense any more than I expect headshots to be instant kills in Fallout 3 because it just makes sense. Just seem to be nitpicking at little peripheral systems that matter very little, in comparison to the whole, because we don't have much info yet.

Yes, we get it.  LOTRO justifies its system that way.  It does not however, have animations for parry dodging, etc.  You actually get whacked, which reduces your morale.    *shrugs*

I always started out pen and paper games that have new players with the "Hit points aren't your ability to take a hit. They're your ability to take a hit, your ability to dodge, your luck, your karma, your fate, your ability to roll with blows --- everything that comes together in keeping you alive in a fight." talk.

I then go on to explain that it's not that a level 20 character can take a ballista bolt and still live -- they can't. Their high HP pools merely represent that they're experienced enough to get the hell out of the way, whereas said level 5 guy wouldn't be fast enough.

Doesn't really matter in MMORPGs, I think, but for P&P games it adds some realism for players.

Yeah. I never really liked that explanation though. Because your AC was your chance to deflect and/or avoid damage. Saying that somebody with more HP could take glancing blows better just kinda ignored the fact that my fighter had a ton of hit points and could take the best hit from a broadsword (critical, max damage) and survive.
Or that it wasn't such a concern for big monsters like giants and dragons.

It just isnt' a consistent rationale.

Visual dodges and parries add quite a bit of value to a game, for me.  The parrying and lightsaber-shoving that the NPC's in the KOTOR games did looked way better than the 'swing at empty air' moves of other games.  Of course, as far as realism goes, you can't really parry with a sword without ruining it very fast, so meh.

Supposed "inside source" gives some information on SWTOR.  :awesome_for_real:

I don't know how legit it is (probably not much), but if it is, then its pretty much death to the game as far as I can tell.

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/221089/Here-it-is-an-inside-look-at-TOR-in-its-current-state.html

You bumped this thread for that?

Someone might care *shrugs* it was only on the second page.

Sounds great.  Would love to see a game that doesn't make me go grab 4 other people to complete a quest line that I solo'd to that point.

Not that I believe that information is real.

Yeah, I fail to see the problem, other than tacking on a sub fee for a single player game. The game is supposed to be KOTOR: Online, and that's what it sounds like.   The folks bitching about "Whah, fuck hybrid classes" and "wtf you can solo the whole game?" make me giggle in sadistic glee.  Its like people WANT to sit around unable to do anything for hours like the old EQ days.  No thanks!  Raid content/ small group content is nice, but even I have a problem with it being the only avenue of gearing up toons and It'll be nice to see a game going a different direction.

The TOR forums are awful.  Just awful.  Painful to read.  I try not to read them until Friday nights when the weekly updates are posted.  Otherwise it's the same drivel posted again and again.  Suppose in that manner it's no different than any other MMO pre-launch forums.

Sounds great to me. I would definitely pay $15 a month for a KOTOR with massive content that me and a couple of friends could play together. A KOTOR where I have to group with 24 other people with names like "xxxDARTHBOBOxxx" to do stuff, no thanks.

Oh yeah, I'd love a constantly updated single player type game with some co-op stuff.  MMOs are generally a blast until you start having to converse with the general population.  Then it comes crashing to a halt.

I guess my problem then is why call it an MMO?  This might as well be Neverwinter Nights with frequent content updates.

MMO = Monthly payments.

 :awesome_for_real:

(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/GrimDysart/hahasubfee.jpg)

I'm not paying a sub fee for a single-player game, and companies can go right on eating shit until they learn that.

I'll pay a sub for a single-player game with a huge world and constant updates that also had co-op... but I guess the co-op means it's not single-player.  I want to game with my friends, not random shitcocks, which isn't a problem until I have to find four shitcocks to fill out a group when I really just want to play with my wife and/or another friend.  LotRO comes pretty close but it has more than one place where you need a full group to progress the story, and that is what has kept my wife and I from finishing even Book 1.  I keep telling her that it's not a big deal, we can just jump into a group and knock it out (Epic 1.11) but it is, in fact, a big deal.

Add in a stout co-op/matchmaking component.  Would that really be a bad thing?

I'd rather just be able to play solo or with the companions or a couple friends.  I'm not in a large guild - hell, it's not even a guild, just a close circle of friends spread out over the country that like the same games.  Every 'real' guild I've ever been apart of is nothing more than a bunch of players playing solo playing together: each person was off doing their own thing, and people would help each other when need be.  Otherwise, guild chat or vent was just a bunch people talking.  I've never been apart of a raiding guild in any game, and likely never will.

Uh, yes it does. My hunter dodges fucking arrows with matrix like grace.

Blizzard didn't charge for Diablo 2 and that whole thing turned out kinda successful. It's not just the Blizzard magic either, since I haven't heard about Guild Wars driving ArenaNet out of business yet. This is just a moneygrab by a bunch of EA fucks who think you'll pay $15 a month for anything with multiplayer and levels. You want to sell me additional content? It's called an expansion pack. But hey, why crank out a traditional expansion in six months and charge forty bucks for it, when you can produce content at the same rate and make ninety bucks in sub fees in the same period of time? Shit I'll bet you can collect sub fees AND sell expansion packs, as long as you keep buying the notion that it's an MMO!

Money. Grab.

Whatever. It's going to blunder around in development generating little-to-no buzz, EA is going to shove it out the door early and unfinished because they just can't fucking help themselves, and it's going to sell mediocre and then shuffle off into obscurity.

While I generally agree with WUA's assessment of KotORO/EA, I submit that I would have paid a monthly fee for Diablo II if it meant Blizz would have put more effort into preventing battle.net from being as shitty as it was.

Yeah, responding to an old post, sue me.  But you don't parry with the edge of the blade, you parry with the flat and allow the striking blade to slide along the length, either directing it outwards to throw the guy off guard or inwards, turning your blade slightly and catching it with your cross-guard.  At which point it is possible to use the greater contact area between the blades and your more centered balance to twist the blade out of the other guy's hand.

Anyways, I tried going to that link.  The only possible conclusion: fuck mmorpg.com.


Like by ethnically cleansing half the population that played it?

You want any chance of ever competing with WoW, pay heed to this dude.

Or go ahead and try to make the same game BUT BETTAR. The reason I play EQ2 is basically, everything else is the same and I have high level characters there. But even that game gets me down when I'm in a great quest line and cockblocked by some epic dungeon crap. Because you shouldn't be able to get to the fun stuff without putting up with mmogtards. Oh, and you picked the wrong class, you suck, we don't want you, blah blah fucking why are these game forms still dominant? Because for some reason, the masochistic geek assholes like grunk are driving the market, and companies think that by having some tepid solo component, they've covered all the bases.

My old idea is to have multiple instances of a dungeon: public, group, and solo. Public is like old-school EQ dungeons, open for the poaching, have fun kids.  Group scales to your group. Solo scales to your character, maybe even some class-specific options. Anyone in any form of the dungeon can turn on the dungeon chat channel, for LFG or just socialization. But then you'd get the grunks bitching that people like me could hang out and casually solo something and not /earn/ my gear for bragging rights or whatthefuckever. Meanwhile, these are the same assholes who will be first to tell you that if you don't force grouping, nobody will ever group. So it's good game design to force people to play the way they don't want to?

MMO != mandatory grouping. Please fucking stop. It will lead to better grouping (srsly, UO).

Exactly, Sky.

Which is why, in my own humble opinion, if any MMO developer could implement Valve's AI Director into raid encounters in MMOs it would be moneyhats.

I think the big problem with the WoW and post-WoW MMORPGs is their incongruous nature.  You'll be going along, playing your bland but mildly entertaining never-ending single-player RPG (that's all these games are without the MMOGtard element), and then they fuck with the skinner box and tell you to do go be social for seemingly no reason whatsoever.  Current MMORPGs start off with solitary activity, and then randomly expect you to change after letting you settle into this mode of play.  This is why public questing in WAR was such a great idea (with horrible execution of course).  We'll be seeing more reiterations of that in the future I'd expect.

But I don't think mainly catering to solo players is a necessity in every MMORPG.  Personally, I actually find that this hurts retention for me.  I find these games last about 24 to 48 hours without any sort of social necessitation.  CoH, AoC, and LoTRO all certainly fit this bill for me.  They aren't terrible for the genre...I don't see why the fuck I'd play any of these games for longer than a month if I just played them as a singleplayer game.  And since 90% of the early content is solo, that's really the only option you have.  Then when they eventually thrust grouping on to you, it's unnatural and no one wants to do it.  Which to me is simply ludicrious and utter fail in a MMORPG.

So SWTOR.  Link is gone, but if it's a single-player game with a monthly payment, that, of course, is fucking insane. Why not just make a single-player RPG that's actually good?  Instead of a what's likely to be a mediocre single-player RPG with time sinks and bullshit that I have to pay a monthly for?

Oh yeah, skinner boxes and money hats. 

Shit, I would have paid a monthly fee just so my characters didn't get deleted from inactivity. If GW had a monthly fee... I'd probably pay it. I wouldn't expect either to be in the 'full MMO' price range, but if ArenaNet slapped a $5/month fee on GW, I would pay it.

I wouldn't, and our magical duo would be broken up.  :ye_gods:

I guess my idea of a MASSIVELY multiplayer game implies some sort of massively multiplayer aspect.  I actually don't have a huge problem with the idea of paying a monthly fee and getting a co-op game with frequent content updates.  In fact it doesn't sound like a terrible idea.  What I have a problem is when they say "We are making a Star Wars MMO" and give me a star wars co-op game.'

Perhaps its merely marketing.  People are probably willing to pay monthly if you use the term "MMO" and might be resistant to the idea of that concept seeping into other genres. 

Want me to pay a monthly fee for a single-player/co-op game?  Please to be fucking yourself and die.  I guess I go into full DCUO fanboy mode now, because this game (if this stuff is true, and my instinct is that it is, at least mostly) is dead to me. 

If it is RMT + pseudo massively multiplayer, I suspect it might be copying the GW model of purchase a box and then purchase extra content updates as they become available. No monthly fee makes sense in this case.

It makes sense that Bioware would develop it this way since this is what they are used to - storytelling in set amounts. They aren't used to fully open worlds where players can explore, or even hack-and-slash action gameplay.

But who knows? Wait for all the info to be released before judging.

What reason would this site have to exist if we did that?   :oh_i_see:

I'm here for cocktail hour, the armchair game design and to laugh at millions of dollars being mis-spent on entertainment products.  :grin:

I'm not going to call any title "dead to me" without a lot more information being released. Even Darkfall.

I look at it in that MMOs are going to evolve from what we know it now to a really glamorized version of Xbox Live.  Social areas are going to be designed in (capitol cities, auction houses, etc) to where players can congregate and, well, be social.  I suppose it would be Guild Wars-esque, but with better and bigger implementation.  It will be Massively Multiplayer in that respect, I suppose, and at that point you're just playing semantics with obsolete terms and wording.  I tend to think that most players play solo together with friends - whether existing or new friends they've made.  What I mean by play solo together is that they're off adventuring on their own, but chatting away in guild chat or vent/teamspeak with their friends.  Raids will become smaller, more manageable by 4-6 players.  Content gets pushed faster as I would imagine it's easier to balance and create for 1-6 rather than 25, 30, or 40 players.  Plus, I think it's more personal to the player than having 40 people play the game like a stopwatch and watching threat/hate/dps meters rather than enjoying the action.

But that's just my opinion, however wrong it is.  Feel free to blow holes all in it.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Let's not get crazy here. ;D

This is what I don't understand, though. You won't play these games more than a day or two without being forced to group. Why play them at all? Why are they more fun when forced to dick around LFG and dealing with strangers, or the time issues and obligations of dealing with a guild?

Also, I don't think mainly catering to solo players is a necessity in every mmo. You'd never hear me say that. No reason not to focus on everyone's style. Like what? You want to open the semantics box? Ok. Here are the MMOs I know of: Eve, PS, Shadowbane. Where the massive numbers actually come into play and make a difference and improve the game. Isn't a game where you have six players in a dungeon group simply a co-op game with a matchmaking lobby in-game? Isn't a 48 person raid just a larger co-op, I mean we had 64 player servers in BF1942 years ago?

DOOMCASTED!


I do see the appeal of a good group working together, I've done it and I've enjoyed it. However, it's not really a realistic gaming style for a lot of adults, and it sucks that the coolest content in dungeons, mobs, loots, is all set behind a cockblock that means guys like me, who don't have the time nor structure to sit around wasting time on a video game (and face it, most raid time is wasted time, the fights are pretty fucking boring and the organizational skills of most guilds is pathetic or fascist), are second-class citizens in the game. S'why I'm mostly done with mmo entirely, and just hop into EQ2 for a few months a year (except this year, entirely mmo-free for a year).

The only reason I still gripe about this shit after all these years is that I enjoy the game worlds, the occasional interaction with others, the persistance. There have been some pretty cool online worlds, and most single-player games just can't build with the scope of an mmo. Strip out the heroic tags in EQ2 and I'd pay to play it single-player/co-op with people who aren't random intertards. And just to head off the comment, thinking that something like Oblivion is a solution could mean you have severe head trauma and need assistance.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.  You can get things done solo in games and still have the ability to have large amounts of players interacting at once.  I doubt have a problem with people soloing or playing in small groups.  My problem with SWTOR is that it (seems to based on the information we have), lack at least 1 of those things you like, persistence.  It looks more like it is going to be heavily instanced, so that you aren't going out into  he game world where you can occasionally meet some people, but rather than you just decide beforehand if you are going to play with someone, then group up and go do your thing. 

It isn't purely about the number of players, i don't think its the semantic issue you are making it out to be.  It should POSSIBLE that while I'm out doing my thing I run into a large number of players, that we are all sharing a world together even if we aren't interacting at a given moment.   To me, the feeling of people in a large seamless world with lots of other people is probably as important as actually playing directly WITH those people.  I don't care about small group content v. raids, quite frankly that dichotomy doesn't interest me at all.   

I guess my problem then, is heavily instanced games.

Oh, you misread what I meant by persistence. I LOVE instancing. Read back a couple posts where I said every non-hub zone should have at least three instances AT ALL TIMES. The problem with my system is that it allows everyone to play the way they enjoy and achieve the goals of the game. This isn't the problem so much as the current crop of mmo achievers see it as a threat to their way of "earning" their achievements.

And that, I think, is the core problem with mmo design. Any raid player can solo better than a soloer, and also can access far more content due to their "dedication" to a /game/. Thus, if you don't enjoy raiding, don't play mmo. Thus, mmo=raiding. And that's retarded, because most raiding gameplay is pretty stupid...but I won't digress into my dislike of console rpg boss battle style of design...

How does instancing affect persistance in a negative way?  Most games you can't affect the world at all.  Guild Wars is one of the most heavily instanced games I can think of, and things actually change because they do instance the world.

I actually like Sky's suggestion though.  Give players the instance options ranging from Open to Solo.  I would use both.

I'd pay an extra dollar per month if they could be choked with SoJs, for the irony.

Its the ability to effect an huge world that compels me to play an MMO in the first place.  If I can build a castle in my own instance, but if another player goes to the same area of the game but in a different instance and my castle is obviously not there, then it feels cheap.    I guess it comes down to feeling like what I do matters.  In an instanced game, your actions only effect yourself (or those in the same instance), if an open game, everyone's actions effect everyone else.  That makes everything far more interesting as far as I am concerned.  

I'd rather get screwed over by a guy who makes better decisions than me than have no threat of anything negative happen at all.  In most MMOs these days you are only advancing, you can never take a step back if you make mistakes.   Its only a matter of how quickly you are advancing.  That just doesn't appeal to me all that much.

But you don't change the world in an MMOG.  It's why they're called persistent worlds.  It doesn't matter if it's the Ogre of Death that you just killed (and will kill 100 more times until he drops the shiny) or the group of guys that's about to kill the Ogre of Death after you just killed him.

Depends on the MMO.  There are differing degrees of it in different games. WoW has almost none (this silly "phased" stuff aside).  Some have more, some have less.  In UO or SWG you could setup houses, that has a pretty obvious effect on the world.

In EVE the 0.0 space has changing borders, people fight, take control of areas, setup player owned star bases, etc.  These things have a tangible effect on the world, it changes where it is safe to travel, it changes where you have a place to resupply, etc.  EVE also has static missions that don't really have much effect on the actual game world, its not totally player run by any stretch. 

Its the ability for what you do to affect other players, and the ability for other players' actions to effect what me that is compelling.  Heck, in EVE the market is so complex it is arguably a PvP environment in itself, even though there is no fighting (though sometimes economic disputes do lead to fighting).

A game that is highly dependent on PvE content does lack this a lot of times, simply because if you kill an orge, and he just is gone forever, you've got a problem on your hands, the game DOES need to become repopulated somehow.

All you're talking about is a shiny version of an auction house.  Nothing more, really.

The EvE market system really is a rather engrossing game in and of itself and shows that even a shiny version of an auction house can make a good game if you bother putting some love into it.

I don't care for instanced housing either, but neither do I have a better solution.  OK, that's not true, but my solution to it is my solution to most everything wrong with MMOs: limit server/world population to 150 players.

The MMOs I play don't allow people to affect the world populace except via griefing and/or PVP.  I'd like a game I could play where I don't have to worry about being assploded... in fact I find myself far less interested in any sort of worry when playing a game than ever before.  I suppose I am saying that I would be all for affecting the game world as long as it wasn't simply causing other players to lose large sums of game-wealth.


I'm curious, then, how you might feel about a game where there was a toggle in your options like: "Lose XP on death?"  Would you use it?  Would anyone set it to "Yes"?  Would it be cheap if you knew some other players chose to avoid that penalty?  Personally, I like the current trend toward noticeable penalties for screwing up that do not actually gimp you somehow and let you get back into action relatively quickly, while I'm still angry about the asspounding I just got.  That is, in a nutshell, why I quit EVE.  Of course, there's a lot of subjectiveness in there.  Also I forget where we are on the Death Penalty topic, but I thought we had put that one on "simmer" since WoW.

IMO, what makes these games interesting is either cooperation or competition with other players.  I find them mediocre at best as single-player games.  I've never played mainly co-op with another person, so that's a perspective I'm missing however.

It's said around these parts that these games are as fun as the people you play them with.  There's some truth to that and I'll agree to an extent.  But how about PvP?  That's fun because other playing against other people is more interesting than playing against the AI.  If it's sport PvP it doesn't matter if they are MMOGtards or not.  In world PvP...it matters in a good way, because slaughtering assholes is damn fun.  Auction House?  Similar thing.  The player element makes it fun.  So, as an example, what I liked about WoW was grouping, PvP and the auction house.  The solo questing was nice to pass the time if I had a hard time finding a group or couldn't commit whatever hours necessary, but it was generally mediocre filler to the good parts of the game.  I'd prefer it if the world PvP had more ramifications, but sport PvP is still better than killing bland retarded mobs by myself all day.

I do like to be able to do things by myself.  But if I'm going to be doing something by myself, I'd prefer it to be PvP-related in some form.  I mean, occasionally I don't mind doing some quest grinding, but that shit gets old quick as the main means of progression.  These days, I'd honestly rather camp a room in EQ for a few hours with a group than go from quest hub to quest hub and kill 10 boars over and over again.  At least there's some possibility for an interesting human element to arise there.  The basic WoW quest-grind skinner box has left me horribly bored, and it's the main reason why AoC sucked so bad, LoTRO gets boring fast despite it's excellent ambience and design, and WAR's PvE is incredibly bad.

Why all of this?  I'm more interested in the world than the game, and more interested in player interaction than progression.  Vanguard interested me.  I liked playing EQ despite never getting past level 30 simply due to the economy and the social element.  I hated the fact that no one ever took chances due to the brutal death penalty, however, but I didn't hate the brutal death penalty for it's own sake, because progress isn't necessarily that big of a deal.  Also, I'm fairly young with few obligations. Usually, if I feel like commiting some time to a game, there will be nothing that comes up to bother that arrangement.  And if I only have 30 minutes to play...I'll just play a single player game or browse the web.   Anyways, I'm clearly weird, but there might be a few of me out there, so can someone do Vanguard right please?  ; )

This is already too long, but this is only half of the equation...I also really like the nerdy stuff about these games as well:  Eve fittings, DPS calculations, and figuring out how various abilities or equipment interact with each other.  Talent calculators have destroyed way too much of my time.

Why thanks! I would use all three options depending on the situation. I would use the Open dungeon because I do like interactions with strangers every now and again (shock!). But if a troop of buttholes rolls in to rape the place, I'd happily zone out and quietly play in the solo instance for a while until I see they've left (a /w showing a modified list based on which flavor of instance someone is in, I guess). Then if I happen to meet a few like-minded individuals, we could stay in the open dungeon or head to the group instance. I also forgot to mention the raid instance, which would probably add more linked heroics to encounters or something.

The biggest problem is as I mentioned, I expect that the solo boss mobs (hard but not wicked hard like a named heroic linked to other heroics!) would drop the same loot in all instances. Because I don't believe that good loot should equal putting up with strangers or having to be so anal about gaming that one has to have set times to meet up with others. The main reason I got into CRPGs was because it was so hard putting together a gaming group that could meet regularly!

The one thing I might alter is having items with base stats drop, but then have some extended stats or effects that are based on the instance. So if you're in the raid instance, you'd get the base piece with some extra goodies for raiding, whereas I would get something biased toward solo builds.

Malakili, two things. One: the word you are looking for is "affect". If you can effect changes in the world, you affect that world. Second, if you don't like what I'm proposing, that's cool. Play something else.
First off, there is always the threat of something negative happening. If you want to break down all the exploration and questing into how quickly you can advance, well...you're the guy I'm talking about who probably won't like the kind of game I would. In EQ2 there's an option to shut off combat experience. I have this enabled, because I find levelling way too fast, and when you get to the end, all there is to do is raiding, which I do not like.

Death penalty: I'm ok with EQ2's system of xp debt. Though CoH's similar system seemed more brutal. Srsly, fuck death penalty, though. Why stack something on top of "You got killed, now run back and start over"? This sits right alongside the dungeon issue, because it's usually the same folks who need masochistic gear-gaining that decry the lack of ball-crushing death penalties. Death doesn't "mean" anything without penalty. Loot doesn't "mean" anything unless it's a total pain in the ass to acquire. I cite grunk again, because it's an easy one.

Let me lay it out as best as I can figure: If you need "meaningful" achievement or consequence from a video game, you will never enjoy the kind of game I would. I'm ok with that; you be, too.

First topic: I wouldn't have a big problem with small sever pops.  Some of my fondest gaming memories are from NWN persistant world servers with good admins.  They would add player housing (for large in game costs), by literally altering the game world and inserting the house.  Generally you could only have 50 or so people logged on at any given time to those, if I recall correctly.  

As for that option, i would probably be more inclined to use it in a single player game than a multiplayer one.  Part of MMOs are the competition, and if other players were just ignoring the death penalty while I thought it was interesting, I'd basically never be able to compete.  I don't think it would be "cheap" since it would be a game mechanic, but I wouldn't like it either.

As for death penalties, I think they make a game interesting or not.  If I can run in guns blazing or spells blazing or whateverweaponthegamehas blazing, with no regard for my life aside from the fact that I gain experience points a little slower for 10 minutes or have to run a little ways, it just doesn't seem like any of my decisions regarding combat are all that important.  if I want that style of game, I'll just play a first person shooter.

EDITED TO ADD: Re: Sky's post right above me.

Yeah, I think we like different kinds of experience in online games, at least in RPGs.  Like I just mentioned, i don't mind the kind of game you are supporting, I just tend to like them as single player games.

Didn't AOC do the solo and group instances? I think they even did it for their over world zones.

That doesn't make any sense. Actually, you yourself just admitted the stuff you want would work better in a small-scale game, not mmo. Have you ever seen the housing blight in UO? Have you ever lost levels from stupid shit in EQ? Hell, even losing levels from trying new tactics or exploring new areas?

I'd much rather have it loose and friendly. Go in guns blazing, see if it works. If it doesn't try something else. If it does...hell, try something else for fun. Not only does a death penalty stifle the heroic nature of rpgs, but it also leads to the kind of conservative thinking that excludes classes from raids and groups.

I think this is the crux of it.  I don't like the idea of everyone being an hero in an RPG.  Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying I want to be the hero and noone else, I actually enjoying playing a much more mundane role, crafter, shop keeper, resource gatherer, etc more than I like being the one who slays the dragon most of the time.  If everyone is a hero, than it is no longer heroic, its just average.  I think there is a much more interesting dynamic when there are different kinds of players.

As for death penalty  leading to conservative thinking, I don't mind that too much.  For me, planning what I am going to do in a game is often at least as fun (and sometimes more fun!) than actually playing the game itself. 

I have lost stuff, yes.  I play eve, losing things is part of the game, and I like that.  You can prevent yourself from losing skill poiints with clones, and you can help to mitigate your loss with insurance (although its often a pittance compared to what the ship was worth with fittings, but in the end, you shouldn't fly something in that game that you can't afford to lose.

There are ways to control housing and other such things such that they don't get out of control (although obviously it has in some games).  Its about making it work in any given setting.


Since this is in the SWTOR thread, I'll actually try talking a bit about SWTOR now.   I guess the biggest problem I have, is that they are essentially (or seem to be), creating a playable Star Wars movie (or book), rather than creating a star wars universe where people can write the own book (or movie) that intertwines with the other players as they do the same.   Instancing is only one problem that is leading to this, along with the minimization of crafting and non-combat stuff.  It just seems like a very shallow game to me.  It might be fun to play, but I can't see it keeping me playing month after month.

sounds like Tabula Rasa meets guildwars... FAIL

They tried this and most people hated it.  I still think the incredibly buggy code and complete loss of direction once live ensured this view, but we're not getting a Star Wars game with that kind of freedom again.

I don't think we're getting a game with that kind of freedom again, at least not with "MMO" tagged on it. It's always great on paper, but the ideas never really seem to survive through development. Maybe it's a skill or talent thing. But the people thinking dynamic huge microeconomies are not making subs-based games. They're off developing casinos, where they get to work with real money :awesome_for_real:

Forget that the only MMOs that would even have a shot at bringing in the right resources are either IP-based or for kids (and usually both).

The idea isn't wrong. But because it's never been done wholly right, it may actually be dead.

It's not a skill or a talent thing, it's a time managementthing.

Yeah, it sounds great to have a whole slew of systems in your game. Anyone can promise systems for:  Building your own furniture, harvesting crops, harvesting wood, dynamic spawn of resources, raising/ breeding animals with DNA/ bloodline systems, houses with build-your-own-floorplan systems like The Sims, metalworking, smelting, scribing and a billion other "crafty" bits.  They can also promise to include some deep, meaningful combat WITH dynamic mob behaviors and intelligent respawns and NPC towns with their own day/ night cycles.

It doesn't mean they'll be able to design, refine and build all those systems in 3, 5 or even 15 years.  Hell, The Sims has taken how long just to get to a system with more than one Architectural style and that's one of the main focuses of the game!

"Worlds" always try to bite off too much, promising the stars and disappointing everyone in the end because nothing has gotten the bulk of the development time.  Nothing will have gotten any real attention to detail because, hell, everyone's focus (or at the very least the lead designer's) will have been so split that you can only give things a once-over, before saying "shit, we've got to get to the other 20 features we promised."

It's the same reason I said Spore wasn't going to turn out to be what everyone was envisioning in the early days.  There was never enough time to deliver on all those huge promises.  If it takes 3 years to deliver ONE good, well-focused game, why do MMO devs (and fans) believe that you can do four of five games combined into a jumble in only two additional years?

This is why I don't mind playing WoW despite being a world sim fan. Directed content means you actually get to play the game, instead of puttering around with a few unfinished simulation features.

Still, a few sandbox and sim aspects can go a long way towards making a MMOG seem more deep and interactive. Devs just need to stop falling into the kitchen sink trap and implement them realistically.

Project management is a skill and a talent. That was my point. I used this when we talked somewhere around here about what the Blizzard staff prioritized for launch-day WoW. The stuff you mentioned about furniture and crops and whatnot are the exact things I used as examples. You need to know who your game is for and be able to plan against delivering it. That's not intuitive game design theory. That's on the ground execution throughout the entire process from design turnover to late beta (because you'll be designing throughout but need to hatchet quickly feature creep).

Absolute Launch Needs: You need good combat, some semblance of balance, enough content to prevent the absolute need for mob grinding, and a good workable and customizable UI (business stuff like a good CSR, trusting management, solid tech, and a working ecomm system are all givens). And you need to focus your race and class (or template) selection around what you know you can balance and deliver complete.

Nice-to-haves: (or, anything that should take a back seat to the Absolutes): Engaging crafting (the best system in the world is only going to matter to a small percentage of players), weather effects, cosmetic player outfits, housing, voiceovers. All of these are cool, but all of these have dragged resources away from other things. If your combat sucks, or half your races have no content, high resolution raindrops ain't going to save your game.

Yeah, while it is nice to have many systems, a few can really make a difference.  If you try to do everything, you simply won't before you run out of money, but it is realistic to implement enough deep/robust "sandbox" elements to make the world engaging. 

We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Just because it isn't realistic to make a 100% realistic recreation of any given world, doesn't mean that a number of really solid systems can't be put into place that will go a long way to giving the appear of a realistic recreation of a world.  Hell noone is asking for 100% recreation, I don't want my character to have to take a crap in the middle of doing something.

There are players who do. I remember reading plenty of suggestions about making characters potentially starve to death if they can't find enough food, or locational damage that realistically impacts on character ability (but with a magic heal button somewhere so that a doctor can grow you a new leg and stick it on). Some of the discussions on the Exanimus forums - a zombie genre MMO - would have killed the game dead in their leaning towards the sandbox (although the title appears to have been killed dead in pre-production, so there we go).

Ultimately I steer away from sandbox because I want a game to play. I know I'll never have enough time to keep up in a sandbox - by the time I get there the Wild West will already be won - or have enough time to contribute in any PvP that sees permanent-through-force resource transfer (like happened in Shadowbane), so sandboxes are generally out for me. I want a co-op game experience from my MMO and some fun, which thus far CoH/V has been best at delivering to me. Wizard 101 comes in at #2.

Dev digest video thing (http://www.swtor.com/media/vidcasts/devdispatch001) was released today.  Absolutely gorgeous looking game...

It does look pretty, I'll give them that.  I don't know how much I liked how the humans looked, kinda of a Team Fortress 2 look almost, which ALMOST fits in with the rest of the aesthetics but looks slightly out of place. 

The animations looked very nice as well.

Still don't intend to play this game, but i'll enjoy looking at the screenshots they release.

Is there really anyone here sufficiently lacking in cynicism that they can sit there and watch an MMO developer "Hello fans here is the magic behind how some fat software nerds render terrain that may or may not be in a game that might come out like four years from now and will likely total shit anyway!" diary video and not just yawn no matter WHAT they see?

Get back to me when the NDA on the beta drops, otherwise STFU, developers. I didn't get past the "Star Warsy music over pictures of generic office cubicles" intro before choking on my own vomit.

Yeah, I don't get it. "The making of Tython"? Why do I care? I don't even know what the hell Tython is or whether it's any good, why do I care how it was made?

I don't get the trend towards boring videos where devs talk about their games. It's one thing if they have some charisma and something really cool to show off but an everyday dude futzing around in a level editor?

I hate this fucking bullshit years-premature MMO (or whatever) hype in general. Out of curiosity, since everything anyone does in any aspect of this industry is going to be compared to them, when did Blizzard start the PR on WoW anyway? I don't really remember there being shit to hear until there was a beta to play, but then I wasn't paying attention at the time.

If this Wallpaper is to be believed, 2001.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/wallpapers/wallpaper1.html

It's the same bullshit they threw on early DVDs because a) they had the space; and, 2) they needed to find a way to get people to care (and history is repeating itself with blu-ray). This is the sort of low-impact investment that doesn't really require anyone care, but which makes the studio feel good that it's able to saying something, anything.

But yea, I couldn't care any less. Not until I'm in the beta.

Yep. http://www.games-fusion.net/press/content/blizzard_entertainment_announc.php

Though at the time the planned release date was believed to be 2003, not 2004.  They announced SC2 in 2007 and D3 last year, so it might just be that Blizzard announces things way early, too.  Do other single player companies announce things 2-3 years in advance (for new projects, not sequels)  I don't follow game companies or release dates obsessively enough to know.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/8/31/

Oh man, that is rich.

And a psychohistory decision point  :awesome_for_real:

To make the obvious joke: Duke Nukem Forever.

From an outsider's perspective, it seems like small studios and owners of franchises tend to kick things off too early. Perhaps they really think they'll deliver what they promise. Perhaps they need to hype to get a publisher interested. Perhaps they do it because everyone else does it and they love free booze at trade shows.

For MMOs, the tendency has been to announce them just as the project kicks off, when the reality should be the major announcement should be made along with beta so there is a 70% chance that was is in the first PR statement might actually appear in the game. If MMOs take 5 or so years to get to launch, that's a long time for pointless and vague announcements that the marketing team have to get to work on.

If the BioWare head pieces are to be believed, development started back in '05 (http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155486).  Whether that's blue sky spitballing or actual development; no idea.  And the Hero Engine was licensed back in '06.  So, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 years has already gone into it.

No real reason it couldn't be out sometime this year or within the first six months of '10.

The game itself looks like you could replace the lightsabers with normal swords and call it the next LOTRO expansion.

AFAIK, the Hero Engine is yet to be associated with anything successful. Or even launched. I can get pre-production starting back in 05, Hero Engine came on board late 06, but actual work probably didn't kick in to 07, so actual time spent in development is closer to two years.

Will it come out in 2009? I don't think so. This is BioWare's first MMO and they'll need some learning time, especially if they go down the "everyone gets a storyline" and RMT add-ons. Then during the beta testing they'll run into balance issues and SW fanbois / fangrrls who think that it isn't SW enough. Also BioWare will want to get Dragon Age out and away first so that SWOR doesn't eat into those sales. Having a look, DA is meant to be out "early 2009" according to the wiki with console versions out at the end of 2009, but I can't see any hard dates so have to assume DA probably isn't out until at least Q2 2009. BioWare will probably want some time in-between launching DA and SWOR, so again I can't see SWOR launching in 2009.

More likely Q4 2010 for SWOR.

I think its interesting to see what the Devs think is so awsome about their game that they're willing to put it out there. It gives me a chance to see what flavor a game it'll be. I can tell right now that the super fast anime-style sword combat animation isn't going to win me over.

NO

IT

ISN'T

Goddamnit. Not you too.

This is by no stretch Bioware Austin's first MMOG. They've already looked in the horrible face of minimal success a number of times. :awesome_for_real:

For some of them, it's their 2nd go 'round with a SW MMO  :grin:

Dev videos are for fanboi fluffing.  You are not the target audience.

Seriously? We are not the target audience for a Star Wars-themed MMO set in a timeperiod only relevant to gamers from a development studio only gamers know about and which is part of larger company whose name only matters to forum warriors?

Who the hell is the target then?

Edit: reworded a bit for flow.

The people who didn't like Sim Beru.  :grin:

Not all of us have an encyclopaedic knowledge of which dev works at which studio. :grin: Why, just the other day I realised that DCUO's Chris Cao was intimately involved with both EQ2 at launch and SWG. That news made me smile.

I tend to view the entire brand as behind a title, not just one studio. So while BioWare Austin might have some great MMO experience, it doesn't necessarily filter out to other areas that are going to be needed or for what SWOR is allegedly going to be like (e.g. building for RMT content). Although perhaps having WAR as a practise MMO will help EA get SWOR out smoothly.

Also, with all the talk of story, I wonder if the experience of a lot of the BW Austin guys fits that design goal well. Unless story comes down more to window dressing or SWOR comes out as a pseudo-single player MMO, since either seems feasible.

It's safe to assume that a US made, major MMO that doesn't come from Blizzard is being made by MMO "veterans" with proven track records of mediocrity.

Yep. Same old innovative gameplay and immersive storylines and dynamic combat (paraphrased from the offical FAQ  :awesome_for_real:) which means it's probably going to be SWG 2, the Warcraftening.  :oh_i_see:

I made a  :oh_i_see: face when I saw those people in a meeting room discussing quests.   I immediately thought of those quests you do that are incredibly dumb and boring like "Walk over here and read this awesome thing!  Then fly all the way over here for X and theeeeeen......"

Meh.

Looks good though I have to admit.  Still waiting on what the UI looks like and how the game plays.

All this about making every single quest epic and heroic is just blowing smoke.   It won't happen.   It sounds nice, and they are all in a tizzy about their "4th pillar of story," but at the end of the day, they are going to realize they are creating all this content for a group of players that is just going to be figuring out the way to get through to the end most efficiently without really caring how they got there.

Yep, because Sky and I are already having fun playing other games.

I can't be bothered to read up too much until the beta leaks phase.

I'll risk falling into your subtle sarchasm and actually answer your question as if it were genuine.

This is the target audience (http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=8).  Jaded and abused people who mostly believe that "MMO Development" is an alchemical process designed to transform tears into gold and who have picked over the corpses of hundreds of still twitching Next Great Things will not be excited by a dev diary.

You mean the place with the 18-page two-day-old thread entitled "Gross overreaction to Tython by SWGers"  :awesome_for_real:

Seriously, I wasn't being sarcastic. It's not veteran MMOers that I was referring too earlier. It was the magic cross-section of adult geeks with a passion for games who as impressionable youths watched Epiode 4 out of the back of their parents' station wagon at the drive-in. We survived the The Star Wars Holiday Special, Episode 1, and SWG. And we still want a Star Wars game. And will put WoW on hiatus to play it almost no matter what launches.

That we also have played MMOs is more testament to the fewer sites we used to rant in the wild west days than anything else.

So when I thumb through the oboards and see the types of debates happening, I don't see a huge difference between that audience and the "jaded and abused" folks who already spent all their energy feeling all hyped for DAoC. The conversations are almost the same, only differing in the amount of IP to be talked about.

It's that audience which they think a guided tour through a string of non-statements is going to entice. And that's where I think they're wrong.

I see a lot of the same discussions about MMOs in my forum travels, but it is WoW in place of EQ and Darkfall in place of Shadowbane. The big difference now is the sheer number of MMOs you have available.

After a little while, those dev diaries are going to drop off as things drag in production. The forums will complain about the lack of info being released. Beta will take longer than expected. Although it sounds like a good idea - "Let's shoot some videos of our dev guys talking about how awesome our game is!" - it really isn't unless you are about to launch. No set beta date and no set launch date? Forget about it.

I've reached a point where I don't care what the devs say about the game while they are building it, I don't want to see the concept art and the last thing I want to do is watch a video of them tweaking sliders or whatever.  Tell me the release date give me some decent shots of the release client interface and make an interesting trailer from in game footage, with subtitles cause I don't want to hear the lame psuedo British accented voice overs that I will never listen to because I turn the audio off as soon as I can get to an options screen.  I'm pretty sure that means I'm not in the target market for this game, of course if the SWTOR version of Batcountry survives for more than 60 days post launch I might give it a try.

60 days will be too long.  Everyone in it will likely have quit and begun waxing poetically about the failures here.

Didn't Bioware before being bought by EA, buy Perpetual's backend interfacing/billing whatever not sure what it was. Did perpetual finish it? Did Bioware get it? How much did they spend? Has Bioware junked it already? Or did Bioware back out. Not really seeking answers just wondering type of thing.

Assuming it was to be used on this I am.

afaik, Perpetual was only connected to Star Trek Online. Had nothing to do with SW:TOR they did.

Ah come on.  It was better with the Yoda reference.

If the game is good enough to keep Batcountry going for 2 months then I will probably find it worth playing for at least the first month or so.

BioWare licenses Perpetual Third Party Tech (http://au.gamespot.com/news/6175380.html)

Perpetual was going to be building MMOs, licensing its tools to other companies and several other noble schemes. BioWare could have bought it; I'm not sure what happened to the assets when P2 went under.

Slight correction.

Bet there will be a closed beta before 2010. 

Do not underestimate the crunch EA as a whole will be under this year.  "Things will get worse."

Assuming there is a beta, I'm betting beta is somewhere in the middle of this year.

Since this is EA, beta will start on launch day.

Y'all are assuming EA won't just flush the project down the drain like they have every other MMO to date. Times are tough, EA is flushing jobs and companies and I'd bet against Bioware: Austin, myself.  "They want how much money and how much longer? Fuck it *fa-woosh*"

cf.    EA Q3 figures not good (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15643.msg587582#msg587582)

Ah, corrected I am.

It is interesting that SWOR appears to be developed using a huge number of third party applications. Hero Engine, Perpetual's thing, Unreal 3 Engine (I think), plus probably stuff like SpeedTree and so on. This could mean they get on the shelf quicker, but there really hasn't been a good track record of MMOs using third party engines and succeeding.

I think it is the way of the future, so someone will get it right some day, but it hasn't happened yet.

This could be the game to get it right.  They have enough vets that they know what tools they need and figured they can either try and reinvent the wheel again, or carefully select what the need and get to work.  At least in theory.

While I want this to be a good game, there's enough cynic in me to believe it will crash and burn like all the rest.

Except that in the MMO market a team of vets just seems to increase the magnitude of Fail.

A good chunk of MMOs use Unreal tech and non-proprietary billing and account systems. From a gameplay standpoint, yea, I don't see Perpetual's Engine, Big World, Multiverse or any of the few dozen other engines-awaiting-games actually being attached to big productions that were successful. But it really depends on what parts of what engine you use... and of course the talent of the designers to be right and the skill of the producers to be real  :grin:

Thus my cynicism.

I have a fair bit of faith in Unreal.  It's largest issue is that the subtractive editing and manual delineation of LOD zones that it's editor uses is more suited for tightly designing small spaces rather than large worlds.  On the flip-side, you can do all sorts of wonderful optimization which would make shit like Dalaran and Shattrath in WoW less likely to be a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

Just out of curiosity, where did Blizzard get most of their team for WoW from?

Were they already the staff that they had making their previous games, or did they employ vets from other MMOs?

They employed a few former EQ poopsockers, I know that much. Otherwise, no idea.

As a rendering engine, it's also extraordinarily bad at rendering hair. Epic has no out-of-the-box solution for it. Ever noticed that all the UE3-powered games of the last few years feature characters with shaved heads? That's why.

That probably wouldn't fly in an MMG, where people love their customization.

So far though hair in MMO (heck, most games for that matter) are typically nothing but regular textured polygons with some alpha channel thrown in. Seems to be good enough for people, and nothing even a basic rendering engine cannot handle.

God forbid having to write a few lines of code and perhaps a shader.

Wait, are you saying it's not that hard (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13129.msg584709#msg584709)?  :grin:

(I kid I kid!)

BSP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning) is not really only in unreal. Tons of games, and MMO's use it. They just happen to have a sweet integrated editor. Shit, even torque does now (http://www.garagegames.com/products/constructor) (always had the use, just not the editor, for that, you used unreal, QuArK, or other)...However, contrary to your observation, its not relegated to only indoor spaces. So, like i said, its a technique, not a limitation, as each engine uses it differently. Its quite possibly one of the oldest techniques. Source Engine uses it too.

I do however recall one is subtractive, as in the entire "space" is already "filled" and the other is additive, as in you make volume in a void. I think it was the diffrance between quake, and unreal IIRCC.

And Speedtree is used in just about every dam thing. Cuse its  :drill:

BSP for dummies (http://qxx.planetquake.gamespy.com/bsp/), just in case. And a fantastic presentations written by Carl Shimer. (http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/bsp/bsp.html)

*bonk*

This is what I was getting at to an extent.  They both use BSP, but the subtractive scheme tends to be better suited for interior stuff, and the additive for exterior stuff, because when you are building an outside area it's easier to fill a void with stuff, rather than carefully delineating the void and then populating it.  Conversely, subtracting rather than adding tunnels is intuitive and subtractive schemes makes it harder to create a hall of mirrors or missing geometry that players can fall through.

Also, Unreal makes really fucking nice usage of 2D planes and actors to create zones which dynamically alter their LOD properties based on player position.

I didn't mean to pick on Stormwaltz, I've also heard that Unreal is really really bad at hair. I just find it funny that people expect so much of a game in a box that they can't put in some effort and make hair look good on their own.

Then again Unreal is likely very complicated and changing it significantly is quite painful from what I understand. I guess that's why all Unreal Engine games look kind of the same.

I can't imagine anyone wanting to... say... form a guild in "KOTOR3 with co-op fights and a graphical lobby" or what the fuck ever. People are going to play through all the story in the free month and we're going to see another "sold a million boxes, woops 20% retention rate" post-WoW flop.

This is pretty much what I expect. 

If they try to do WoW, it's already a flop.  Trying to pull off a 10-man raid scenario in Star Wars just results in stupidity.  A ten-minute-long fight of a 'boss' being tanked by a jedi while soldiers pump a few thousand blaster shots into it is ridiculous.  Just about any modern or future setting game (or long long ago setting with super high tech) isn't going to follow WoW's lead very well, because you reach a point in fairly short order where anything should probably fall down after taking more than three bullets to the face and having a laser sword slice through its entire body four times.

Yeah, in my opinion games with more modern (or futuristic) weaponry would do well to organize "raid" content much more like survival type scenarios, or long assaults on a dug in position.   The tactics would involved dealing with large numbers of different enemies, rather than one big "boss," which as you described doesn't lend itself to these kind of weapons.

These would probably make for more dynamic and interesting combats anyway, rather than the only Tank + Spank (plus some gimmick mechanic), which dominates WoW even now.

As opposed to setting a gnoll on fire and then slicing through it's body with a magic sword a half dozen times... and it's not dead yeat?

Yeah.  Grab a broadsword and go out and try to kill a bear with it, see how fast that goes.  Well, it's liable to go pretty quick, just not in your favor, but still.  Hacking on a tough critter with a piece of metal can at least sort of believably take a while.  But not a lot of things can take full-auto blasts from modern firearms and be a threat for more than a second or two.  A Star Wars 'raid' would have to be a full-scale battle, with a cast of hundreds and whatnot, with more focus on numbers than on having 'bosses'.  Quests can have tough opponents where the game designers can force a 1-on-1 duel, or a 1-on-a-few-people fight in the case of super uber force users who could realistically fend off three or four players.  But even a great jedi isn't gonna be able to block the shots coming from twenty people gunning them down at once, and having them be able to soak up that much damage would wind up being ridiculous.  Ditto for the inevitable Starcraft MMORPG, in order to not be silly it would need to be more akin to Planetside than WoW.

While the bear is on fire and yours is a magic sword?  :awesome_for_real:

So obvious, but will probably be forgotten in the implementation of this game.  :|

We're trained by Bosses, but we need to drop that noise for raids. 40 people show up there should be 80 enemies that need to be cut through. I'd rather see raids borrow from some of the larger PvP encounter conventions, except of course with AI that be mowed down for the bling.

That doesn't work when you have aggro mechanics and AOE damage that can have 3 guys take out all the 80 mobs.

A game without AOE would be interesting.

Yea, that's sort of a requirement.

How about we not have raids?  Is there anything that can retain people endgame other than raids and/or random PvP gankery?  Maybe not, I guess...

Well, 'raid' is being used solely in the sense of 'large scale event' when I use the word, not 'EQ-style trash/boss setup'.  Grabbing 30 of your closest friends and assaulting some Sith base is a big, involved proposition, rather raid-ish in scope, and should be a great deal more fun than what we're getting today.

Which is why the AI Director from Left 4 Dead would be spectacular for 'raid' encounters for MMOs.  No more quest walkthroughs, enemies that vary/scale according to skill.

Le awesome.  And it will probably never happen

I mean, it COULD happen, but I actually don't think the majority of the playerbase would want it to happen.  The raiding/end gaming people enjoy the meta game of theorycrafting fights.  While it would certainly be appealing to just have encounters where you show up, go and are surprised,  I don't think it would actually go over all that well with the community.  Think of all the bitching that happens already when an encounter comes around with too many "random" elements.  People get pissed off that they died to random element X that they could NOT POSSIBLY HAVE AVOIDED OMFG!!!, and it eventually gets toned way down or nerfed into oblivion.

As for where Blizzard got their people, I know Kalgan used to be Evocare from the UO team. He bolted when EA fully borged OSI, after having been lead developer on the Age of Shadows expansion. If you've ever played both a UO necromancer and a WoW death knight, you can definitely see the same guy's fingerprints on both in terms of gameplay concepts.

Raids are a catchall term, of which Kidsune's analogy is a part.

What we're really looking for is a repetitive event-base activity that retains accounts with deep ongoing new content being added at the unrealistic rate at which it is consumed. That's raids, battlegrounds, arenas, etc. Repetitive gameplay with a different advancement arc.

If you want to get away from that, you're in the proven land of UO and Eve. And it's proven in two ways:

• Social commerce and player driven economies can retain interest in a virtual world.
• Somewhere south of 1% of all current MMO players give a rats ass about it.

It's also a lot harder to make something like that work than it is to get players conditioned to periodic new content and personal advancement paths.

So yea, we could not have raids, but...   :grin:

Funnily enough Star Wars is perhaps a setting where this works -- could definitely see some emperor-level guy to focus all attention on the one (few) jedi attempting to slice him, while some retards with lasers pointlessly take pot shots at him from around the room, only to get two-shotted wih lighting if they draw too much attention to themselves.

I've had too many low-level WoW mobs throw spears through my paladin until he looks like a pincushion while he stood there laughing, landed too many giant leap-into-the-air hammerblows on dudes without them even staggering, to think that typical medieval fantasy MMO combat is any more believable than guys shrugging off laser beams.

It's okay, because they're blasters.

Powered by blaster gas. Which means guns in the Star Wars universe are fart guns.

Is that why the prequels stunk?

Someone please excuse my stupidity, but are this this  and this  actual screenshots or concept art? The art style would give me the feeling of playing an interactive painting   :uhrr:

Edit: oh, and this is what huts look like: http://cdn-www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/ss/SS_20090213_004_1600x900.jpg (http://cdn-www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/ss/SS_20090213_004_1600x900.jpg) (all released 13th feb 2009)

This is the SWTOR thread, so insert random "they're both star wars" segue. I'm not posting it in Gutboyland.

SWG wants to be your furry valentine: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/3328/swgclientr2009021203552au4.jpg

That's. just. WRONG.

Yup, saw that and immediately logged right the fuck out and played TR instead.

Yep, thats the art direction the game is taking.  Screenshots.

Thank you. :)
A bit...uninspiring...to be honest. I realise MMORPGs should be designed to run well on the widest possible selection of systems as well as handle 100+ characters on the screen at the same time, but still... *sigh*

Ok, I sorta agree on the interior shot. It reminds me of levels in the first Unreal, and all the spawn that have descended from it since.

But the outdoor shots on (presumably) Tatooine are fantastic. If there's any limitation at all it's from the source material. And given what they're trying with the engine, I think even the Hutt (two Ts ;-) ) even looks good.

Yea, I'm starting to have hopes for this title. I feel like 2010 is going to be the first full year where we'll have games that were reactions to WoW rather that oh-shit-too-late-to-change games that were in the queue prior to 2004.

That stuff looks bad to you? Since when is being given the feeling of playing an interactive painting even close to being a negative comment?

It looks pretty decent so far. And probably looks pretty good to a whole legion of non-gaming star wars fans

I've really come around to the art style as well.  Looks fantastic.  There's very little difference in concept art to screenshot.

The only thing I'm not keen on is the spandex suits.

eeek! Time for some frantic backpedalling... ;D

Well, Darniaq already pointed out its mostly on the interior shots. I still stand by my first impression though, which was somewhat underwhelmed.
Maybe these shots illustrate it better:

Exhibit 1: http://cdn-www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/ss/SS_20081021_TombLightsaberDuel_full.jpg
Exhibit 2: http://cdn-www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/ss/SS_20081021_PlatformLightsaberDuel_full.jpg

It looks a little cartoony to me, but if, like WoW, it plays smoothly on my 4 year old PC I'd give it a shot.

Yeah, the style is not photorealism but rather something with slight cel-shaded quality to it. This is pretty consistent with the style from their previous KotOR games and not really wrong, imo -- avoids the uncanny valley effect and helps the immersion.

The interior shot doesn't really show anything wrong with the engine or the graphics style, it's rather issue with uninspired design.

It's all taste, sure.  But I'm not seeing the issue. 

The character models need a bit of work, and a little anisotropic filtering wouldn't hurt those shots.  But the environments look wonderful. 

Yeah, I used to be one of those people that was all "Ooooh, i love realism!! :drill:"  But then I realized, there are lots of styles that are plain nice to look at regardless of how real they look.  So now I'm pretty much willing to let any graphical style have a chance as long as its nice to look at.

If I want to bash on this game, there are plenty of reasons, but the graphics aren't one of them :why_so_serious:

It's starting to remind me a lot of the clone wars cartoon and I really dislike the look of that.

Considerate of them to highlight the area to aim at.

Those are from their first released screenshots.  They've been tweaking the people from what I've seen of later ones.  I rather like the look of the environments themselves though.

It's Hutta apparently. The original homeworld of - erm, someone - I forget who but sure I'll remember eventually. Before it got destroyed and they took to the moons.

The comments on this page (http://www.swtor.com/media/screens/chemilizard) are gold.

Ah, Nal Hutta? Yea, the Hutts strip-mined everything including the atmosphere, but the moon (Nal Shardda) became a huge smuggler depot. I remember some early Solo visits there from some novels.

So I looked it up and saw that the shot on this entry (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nal_Hutta) looks fairly close to the ones above.

I refuse to nerdrage every time a new set of photos is released and plan to save it for when the actual gameplay is available for testing.

What I'm mainly worried about is all the screenshots of people fighting animals.  We've been down that road before. 

EDIT:  I mean, fuck, what was it about the six movies that makes developers think Star Wars is a farm animal killing scenario?  The collective two minutes spent in the wampa cave and rancor pit? 

And fighting cat monsters in a gladiator pit, and fighting a space worm thing, and fighting mynocks, and fighting garbage snakes...

I blame the Womp Rats line. Exterminating vermin since ANH!  :awesome_for_real:

It's because they're all a bunch of dickbags lacking in even the basic creativity required to divorce themselves from the medieval fantasy MMO "kill monsters" meme. Christ, this shit looks stupid.

Oh!  I hope there are swordsmen, people with pikes and medics that can throw damage over time poisons!

Nah, more like because people otherwise bitch about not enough variety in shapes of their xp bags. So it's not all robots and badly trained storm troopers/rainbow aliens with differently shaped foreheads, BFD. Limiting the types of targets isn't exactly creative, either; nor any less stupid in the settings dating back few thousand years from 'long, long time ago' and located in brain of some fart who thought knights with laser swords would be cool, to begin with.

Seriously, Luke spent his first couple levels grinding wamp rats.

Pikeman was fun, and lore correct.

(http://members.tripod.com/~switz/RoyalGuard16.jpg)

(http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/thumb/3/32/WeequayLuke_ST.jpg/180px-WeequayLuke_ST.jpg)

Yeah but not enough. He got owned by sand people and nearly got owned in the Cantina. And the Dia Noga. Fortunately he was carried through the Death Star instance by the rest of his group and vehicle based combat didn't seem to have level based restrictions. Bet he got a stack of XP and a couple of levels for taking part in the "Death Star" raid. Mind you, rerolling into jedi class when the first expansion came out was a bit lame - and he still got owned by a low level wampa.

It was his own fault for not bringing frost resist gear.

What do you expect from a twink? His only bit of good gear was his father's tier 5 lightsaber.

Really not the guy's fault, stunlock out of stealth is way OP.

Dude was totally sploiting the mentoring system in the dagobah zone. Also, don't forget Ben twinked him after he got wtfpwned in the tatooine newbie zone.

editoops, didn't see there was another page where the twinkage was mentioned.

Joined Channel: [1. General - Dagobah]
[Luke_S] yells: Need hlp wit teh Raise X-Wing q plzzzz
[1. General] [MasterYoda]: It's a solo quest
[Luke_S] says: I need help plzzz
[1. General] [MasterYoda]: You can solo it. It's not hard.
[Luke_S] whispers: hlp plz. I tired but cant doit
To [Luke_S]: It's a low-level quest - you can do it without trying
[ObiwansGhost] has come online
[Luke_S] whispers: i dunno how. I pay u 1g to hlep me.
To [Luke_S]: Alright. Just this once.
You invite [Luke_S] to join your party
[Luke_S] whispers: thx. Can u gief me weps for Dark Side Cave q too plz?
[Luke_S] has joined your party
[Party] [MasterYoda]: You don't need weapons for that quest. Just need to talk to mob
[Luke_S] says: I heard u ned to kill mob in Dark Side cav
[Party] [MasterYoda]: No - just need to talk to it.
Luke_S has joined the guild
[Guild] [ObiwansGhost]: Welcome to the guild. Please read all the guild rules at http://www.lastofthejediguild.guildhosting.com
To [ObiwansGhost]: WTF? Dude, did you just invite him to the guild?
[ObiwansGhost] whispers: y
To [ObiwansGhost]: He's a total noob. Doesn't even know how to raise the X-Wing
[Guild] [Luke_S]: How do i get 2 Bespin?
To [ObiwansGhost]: ./facepalm
[Guild] [ObiwansGhost]: Bespin is a 40-50 zone. You need to level first.
[Guild] [Luke_S]: i ned 2 get 2 Bespin. My mates r there.
To [ObiwansGhost]: Can't we kick him?

Webcomic released (http://swtor.com/media/webcomic).

Suprised to see this sort of promotion at this point unless the development is much further along than people suspect.

And there's only six slots for comics.
And five of them are gray.

But I doubt we're talking a mid-May launch here :-)

Where did you see the 6 slots thing?

MMOs never start pre-promoting themselves years ahead of time. Never.  :why_so_serious:

Halfway down is the section starting with "Act 1: Treaty of Coruscant". There's six holders for comic-book Issue title images. Only the first is filled.

I have no idea how much I'm overthinking this  :grin:

Ah.  OK.  Wasnt showing up on my old IE6 or whatever it is at work.  Guess we'll have a better idea when we see how fast the issue slots fill up.

SWTOR - a new hype (http://newenthusiast.com/bounty-hunters-incoming-20090316452)

There are promising 10x what SWG promised yet they rushed the release of SWG because it costed too much  :uhrr:

At the end of the video, a guy goes : hundreds hours of cinematic experience.
Can't wait for a release with 300 hours of God of War like gameplay - different for each class. hahaha.

Still unimpressed. I don't see why this is an MMO.  Even if they deliver all they say, why is MMO the best format for this kind of game?  You can't have a story where every player is the center of the game, and at the same time have a persistent world.   

Players can be the center of their own story until the story ends. At level 60, when the raids begin  :awesome_for_real:

Am I the only near-geriatric dyslexic who reads SWTOR as "Secret Weapons Of The Republic" ?

yep

Its not an MMO.  At all.  The devs just want to get a lot of hype built up before the "Yup, its pretty much like Diablo with two or three friends at most, except there is common bank where everyone can show their l33t gear" reveal. 

1) Sub/ Microtrans
2) MMO players are more forgiving of crap releases and frequent patches than single player gamers
3) Sub/ Microtrans
4) You can't pirate a MMO

It all strikes me as a very cynical way to raise profit and lower expectations -- put some effort into creating an SRPG in a superficial multiplayer environment; slap on a "MASSIVE" tagline. Now you've got a standard Bioware SRPG and some sort of 2004 pseudo-MMO in a single package.. is this particularly exciting in any way, shape, or form? No, but legions of fans will gladly pay for the privilege of going through a rote KOTOR-esque experience and perhaps engaging in some small group pvp.

There is nothing ambitious, intriguing, or imaginative about this design; nothing that moves either genre forward or that hasn't been seen before. It leaves me absolutely cold.

Desire to play this game is suddenly waning....waning....

'scuse me.

Everyone here was going apeshit when Blizzard announced Diablo-with-a-WoW-colour-palette.

If this is Diablo with Star Wars skins, why would that be a bad thing?

If they deliver on good stories and let me have co-op play, I'll be quite happy with it.

Patching yes.  Accepting of crap releases not so much anymore.  The studios are a few years behind on this, however, I would like to think we've had enough major flops for this concept to scare a few suits.

Desire to play this game dead.  Oh well, on to Champions Online then.

Please. It'll launch and you'll all buy it. And hate yourself while doing so  :awesome_for_real:

Want to put cash on that?   :drill:

This hasn't interested me since I figured the angle out when the whole pseudo-mmo w/ microtrans thing was revealed.

If it's only going to be a MMFaux, I really won't be interested in it. It strikes me as Guildwars-with-Starwars much more than Diablo-with-starwars. Which I don't think is rather important, since I'd be more inclined to just play Diablo instead- a game that I believe won't have a subscription fee attached to its internet lobby.

MMFaux is fine if I don't have to pay a monthly fee.  If it's a monthly fee you better Massive that shit up.

I'm stamping my name on this. You heard it here people! Ashrik made it up!

If you are going to play the game for months on end, why does it matter?

If you aren't going to play the game for months on end, you don't stay subscribed.

See also, Hellgate.

I don't understand the question. If I'm going to play the game for months on end, it matters because there's a substantial price difference.  Suppose 'on end' = 6 months.  A $15 fee means I'm paying an additional $90 for the game on top of the box price.  The going rate for non-persistent world games is substantially less than $150.  But this is all  :dead_horse:

IF they can deliver a game experience that replaces loot and xp with story, I'll take off my hat to them.

I severely doubt it, though. I think this is the kind of pie in the sky game design that gets pruned down just before release. And maybe they'll throw in an XP nerf and a few reputation grinds for good measure. (http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/jar_jar.jpg)

Since they claim it's an MMO, you should know that this kind of pie in the sky game design is instead served to players on a shit platter just after release.

Non-subscription games are designed to last around 12-24 hours, then you buy another one. That's $50 per month.

If you are happy paying a subscription for an eq clone because it lasts longer (and therefore costs $15 per month), what is the enormous objection to paying for anything else that runs on and on.

Basically I don't understand why it has to be an eq clone to justify the subscription, if it is something else, but you are still willing to play it for the same length of time, why doesn't that justify the same fees?

Yes, that's almost exactly what I said  :uhrr:

Conceptualizing it as paying for a certain number of hours is dumb.  You think since Far Cry 2 was billed as a 50 hour game, Ubisoft would let me play for just 10 hours for $10?  I think they would say no.  You don't pay monthly for MMOs because you're getting a lot of hours out of them.  I know people that have put enough hours into Starcraft and DiabloII to rival any faction grinding catass, but Blizzard doesn't come back to them for more money.

You pay more because all the time you're spending playing is being spent on their servers eating up their hardware and bandwidth, and because they're trying to maintain a world with a ton of shared data storage that has to be kept consistent.  That shit is hard and expensive and you pay for it.  And people are willing to pay for it because lots of people think it adds a lot of value.  And then Guild Wars decided they could do most of it without even charging you. 

So if SWTOR comes to me and says I'm basically getting an offline or LAN game with a graphical chatroom patched onto it, and then they say they want to charge me monthly because I'm getting so many sweet, sweet hours, I'll say fuck off, they're charging way over market rate for that software.

I hope BioWare realizes there making Guild Wars with a starwar IP. If they don't....I sense a great failure in the force.

I would be quite happy if they did that.

Same.  Despite what often gets thrown around here, Bioware has a pretty good track record.  While I won't believe all claims, they know their storytelling, too.

I am very curious where people are getting the idea that SWTOR is going to be a bunch of people playing single player games with a chatroom/auction house. Because I haven't seen anything yet that implies anything different from AoC. And AoC didn't fail because it had a single-player front end wtih eventual dropping into a semi-MMO ("semi" because you could level up well in night missions alone) and then a full-on MMO.

I also don't get the rage about MMO monthly fees. Nobody cares about the accumulated financial investment they made into an MMO until they're about ready to quit and are trying to emotionally divorce themselves from their character and friends. It's not really because they "wasted" $150. Conversely, nobody cares about the potential $150 they may invest in an MMO over 10 months, unless they're so strapped for money they shouldn't be buying games in the first place.

Welcome to my friend, the recession.  Perhaps you've heard of it?  I'm seeing people drop from WoW because of it, the question is how many overall. 

I certainly would't pay for WoW if it didn't have the large-group endgame, but that's my own bias.  I don't need to pay per month to wave my e-peen and/ or have people around me for he illusion of a world interaction. (Which I still don't understand from the crowd here, who turns off all channels and doesn't group.)  If it's a single player game, with only single player or 2-3 person missions, why the fuck would I pay for it at all?  Because it's 'the model' and 'just how things are done these days?'

Screw that. I'll go full console first.   While SP games may be designed with only 12-24 hours of gameplay, I can also find them for less than $50 if I wait a short while.  I'm willing to, and do that already.   The games I pay full-price for are ones I know I'll get more than 12-24 hours of. Things like Civs, Mount and Blade or other sim-likes and soem FPS.  You know, things where the game differs each time you play it.  I'm sure as hell not paying $50 for Final Fantasy ## since it's a once-then-done experience.

the hype is just isn't there, I foresee many many many many jedis in there on day one hunting down sand people for moisture vaporator parts to hand in at Tatooine right after they finish the tutorial in Dantooine cause it's the 'fastest way to exp'

$15 is still a good deal if you are enjoying the game.  You won't get multiple games to give you the same number of hours played for $15, even if you buy them from the bargin bin.

As long as I get my money's worth for the month, I can afford to stop and start a single MMO, including during the lean periods.

Quit throwing things in my face that I forgot. :grin:

Still, I'm not convinced that the corporate culture of Bioware won't have it's influence.  It should.

You are clearly not aware that once you put the Bioware logo above your front door, thick drops of sweet genius drip onto the heads of your employees.

I'm far too aware of this, hence my reminding of that one little fact - constantly.

Isn't the Bioware office in charge of this also being run by Kelly Flock? If so, you people are really getting your hopes too far up.

schild has informed me it is not, in fact, Kelly Flock, but a bunch of ex-SWG, ex-Shadowbane devs. Ummm, yeah, fail.

You're raging against the second paragraph in my post but about stuff I asked about in the first paragraph? I'm all for generic rage, but wtf do we really know about SWTOR to get all sandy about it this early?

Gordon Walton - Studio head (SWG, The Sims Online, UO)
Rich Vogel - Vice President (SWG, UO, M59)
Damion Schubert - Lead Combat Designer (M95, Shadowbane, The Sims Online)
Dallas Dickinson - Lead Content Designer (SWG, EQ)


Dude.  MMO discussion.  F13.  Sand comes with the territory.

(http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs21/i/2007/232/f/f/Darth_Vader_Playing_Pool_by_Star_Maiden.jpg)

I'd never have thought to see my hometown in such big bright words!

I swear half of f13 is doing this on purpose now.

new vid

mostly interviews, with some sporadic ingame footage

http://www.swtor.com/media

I'm lazy. I demand to be told if the video contains any information.

I wouldn't call it information.  It's almost as if Mark Jacobs was at the helm of that video. 

That said, if they pull off what they're saying, I might quite like it. 

Different story quests based on what class you are (Sith, Jedi and BH mentioned). 
Lots of popular environs. 
Set 200 years after KOTOR, yet thousands before ANH. 

It does have a bit of a clone wars/cartoony look to it.  If anything, it reminded me a little of WoW's art direction because they're likely doing it to keep poly counts down but textures rich. 

Dunno, I liked what I saw overall.  Diablo with a coat of SW paint sounds awesome to me.  I like the story-based part of the game, but if they're focusing on that, they better put a ton of story in and keep updates flowing. 

Summary
This takes place 100 years after KOTOR 2.
Apparently the forces of destruction are winning over order...and you get to choose sides. Each character class has their own starter quests that spans their own racial pairing (in this case,class). I'm guessing there'd be RVR in there.

Personally this sounds all too familiar but knowing Bioware (edmonton or not), they should retain their 'movie production' into the story presentation which we often see in their games (Mass Effect, etc). What's the ETA on this thing anyway?

Before it's finished.

no mmorpgs arrives finished i guess.  :awesome_for_real:

Come on man, what even prompts you to say such a thing? It's a bunch of EQ/UO/SWG developers shitting out something that we can guarantee EA is going to shove out the door half-finished. You know it, I know it, we all fucking know it.

As I've said before, a big swack of Edmonton moved down to Austin to work on SWTOR. But you knew that when you posted this. ;) Hell, the lead writer of ME1/2 is moving down there (http://www.drewkarpyshyn.com/news.htm) in a few weeks.

Anyway. I talked to one of the writers in the Edmonton office who's telecommuting to work on SWTOR. Single-player? No. Diablo/Guild Wars? No. Friendly towards single players and small groups? Yes, very. Less oriented towards those who like their fun to rely on the contributions of 40-60 strangers? Yes.

I walked away with a positive impression. It sounds like they're making a game that suits the way I and my friends tend to play rather than the way catasses and raider guilds tend to play. Only my impression, not official, contents may have settled during shipping, disclaim, disclaim.

Reducing group sizes also tends to quicken the rate of content consumption.. unless there's a whole Diablo thing going on, which apparently isn't the case? Not to mention the unusual pains being taken to craft a careful single player narrative that many MMO players are predisposed to skipping through.

This sort of stuff is cynically received because it all sounds far too good to be true. No dev studio has ever produced static content at a rate deemed satisfactory by their playerbase; there needs to be some sort of emergent social gameplay to fall back on. Instead, the Bioware PR campaign seems entranced thus far with this idea of providing parallel, rich, impactful, singleplayer storylines -- but this will all be exhausted in a matter of months. Then what? Guild Wars PvP would be a good cop-out; the alternative would be.. nothing? What?

I disagree (http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/vol2-book7). But of course I'm biased (http://ac.turbine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=443-march-2009-who-watches-the-virindi&catid=60-2009-events&Itemid=68).

I can't say much more than I have. It sounds like they're taking the route LotRO has following the last year or so. Epic story quests + 3-12 man raids + single-player instances. That's a combination that works very well for me and the people I tend to game with. Obviously it can't work for every style of player. With apologies to Sun Tzu, he who tries to appeal to every audience will appeal to no audience.

Speaking of AC, I was reminded of AC2 during this move by all the story talk.  I remember from AC2 they had monthly updates and (from my spotty memory) you could look at the quests that were offered on a monthly basis in the UI, like it sorted it by month.  I'd really like to see that enter back into a MMO.  It keeps players logging in every month to both pay and have something new to do.  On paper, WoW is one of the best games I've ever played... but lack of consistent new content for all player types means I play for 2 months, then I'm out till the next xpac. 

I hope that a focus on solo/small group content will open up staff that would have done raid material to do content.  I hope. 

I understand of course the limitations of your position in this capacity, but I do appreciate your thoughts.

If SWTOR is ultimately taking cues from LOTRO -- fine, this is sensible in a few ways. If we compare Turbine's own DDO to LOTRO and conclude that 10-man raids are an ideal compromise between emergent social activity and static content consumption, the line that begins to justify a subscription fee, then I would agree; and it would be sensible for Bioware to adopt this model.

What I still take exception to, however, is the angle the good doctors appear to be taking -- this idea of a vast single player narrative. Yeah, maybe that'll be the 'hook' for the first few months of release and that of any subsequent expansion pack; but the vast majority of time afterwards, presuming a LOTRO model, will be spent in mini-raids with more than a few of your friends (or idiotic strangers), and I very much doubt that we'll be seeing individual agency, or player choice, or a sweeping storyline, or saving the world by your lonesome in these situations.

LoTRo online did a great job of giving you quests which "changed the world" in the sense that they changed the world as seen by that particular character, but you still knew that lower level characters were seeing things as they had been for you a week earlier.

I'm not knocking LoTRO because the quests and storyline were fun. It does sound as if SWTOR will do something similar, except perhaps giving the payer more choices to make. What they seem to be suggesting, however, is that players' actions will actually, really change the world, which is something I'll believe when I see it.

As long as it has exciting combat, shiny graphics and some of the classic Star Wars music to bring back the memories, I'll probably spend my money on it. Too much hype makes me cynical.

Just to be clear, I was drawing a parallel based on my own experiences playing LotRO (which are extensive, since it strongly appeals to my play style). I couldn't tell you what the SWTOR team is drawing their inspirations from. The guys I talk to on the design team seem to chew through MMGs very quickly. They were "done" with LotRO before I even started playing, and in the last year they got through to the endgames of AoC and WAR (and maybe some others we haven't talked about).


I'm of two minds about it myself. The conventional wisdom is that you can't make any one player the focus/hero of an an MMG, since all quests are shared and repeatable. But I can see ways to have single player/small group focus in epic/class quests without losing the community spirit of an MMORPG in the workday public quests and dungeons, in crafting and loot-selling, and in moving through the world between quest areas and dungeons.

Like everyone else who's worked on (or played) an MMG, I have a "dream design" on my hard drive at home. One of the concepts I want to explore is use of instances to allow players to change the world -- as they see it on their own client in most cases, and as everyone sees it in the case of Sagas (my name for uber-Epic, world-story advancing quests).

Shit, I'm off-topic now. Anyway. All I wanted to say in the first place is that "SWTOR is a single-player game" is an exaggeration. Back to work now.

Sure it will change the world, just only for the player that does it.  If you want a game where players change the world, it can't be done through quests, because that means once the quest has been completed, the world has been changed, and that is that.   EVE is a pretty good example, so is UO, SWG, etc..  Players have a huge impact on the game world.  The problem is, how do you make a game with the depth of a game like EVE, that is actually playable by a million people?  The answer is: I don't know, but SWTOR isn't going to be the ones who do it, and they aren't even going to try.  They are simply going to give us a lot of KOTOR content with a chat box,  call it an MMO, release content patches every so often, and charge 15 bucks a month.

Basically the Hellgate:London strategy.

Which is another game everyone was all OMGWTFBBQ about and didn't mind paying a subscription for until the quality of execution turned out to be about the level of Horizons.

I just don't really see the appeal in adding a new pillar of gaming to a place that was structurally sound without it and, according to most who lived there, looked better when they could pretend their own structure was in its place. When most products of this nature are being hyped to me, they claim to provide more and more interesting systems of things that I'd like to see. This is going in the entirely opposite direction of having a superior version of something that I've never cared about to begin with.

Even if we are you believe the statement claiming to have more content that 4 to 6 other RPGs (I can't help but assume this is purely a mathematical assessment), it just seems like a whole lot of what I don't want. While I'm sure ease-of-use and soloability certainly contributed to WoW's success, I'm not quite ready to believe the straw-man line that following it to its logical conclusion (the massively multiplayer singleplayer RPG) could be a greater, or even equal, draw.

In conclusion: HARRUMPH

It's structurally sound for an aging audience that one game completely dominates. Anyone who wants to compete for our* attention has to go up against WoW. And the only way to do that is to offer a good alternative to the style of play that WoW offers wrapped in a relevant theme to draw us in (this isn't SW, it's KOTOR, which has a much narrower awareness). Because unless you have a very specific set of conditions, you're not going to offer a better version of WoW. You need to instead exploit its weaknesses. Which btw were the same ones EQ1 had.

• PvP unto itself is not a good alternative. It's either been done in a huge way and failed or been done right and been comparatively very niche. Or said another way, it's too risky for a major IP or too small a market for one.
• Open world has been done too. And it was only big back when the entire genre was small. Risk and market size again. But then add that open was already tried with this IP, and in fact a transmorgriphied version of that still exists. So yea, no SW open world game.
  
• FPS/RTS both remain largely unproven in this platform, as it's never been huge when it's been done at all, even if it was done right.

So that leaves an even more direct translation of the traditional RPG trapping of Hero's Journey, one that's different from the EQWoW character optimization system. Yes, that's the most popular mechanic, but it can only ever have a single dominating game at a time because of its model.

No idea how well they'll pull it off. I long for a return of some of Mythica's thinking about instantiated personal/small-group spaces with world-changing events that were permanent. Because if it's not instantiated, it becomes open world :-)

* Being the 18-40 crowd... because I'm older than the usual 18-34 bloc ;-)

Did you have to qualify your qualifier?  Now I feel old. :-P

Bioware job isn't really hard, they probably picked the best design model that fits their ability to make a good game. Even if its a not a true blood mmo, a good game with extensive multiplayer may hit just short of a million boxes sold (not just available for retail), and probably end up keeping 50% of the player base in a 6 month period. Pretty good business. If they really want to design an mmo true and true but with a "twist" (aka every mmo for the past 5 years) they have to have budget that covers its cost with 250k player base or pray to the snake god of game design that they keep over 400k paying subs for a year. Otherwise your running deficit once the free trials are up and half your playerbase goes back to WoW (looking at you WAR and AoC).

I'm fairly certain that Funcom and Mythic would be extremely glad if only half their playerbase had returned to wow.

True, I should have said, when 90% of your playerbase goes back to WoW.

What this tells me is that in 2 years I have to take up shuffleboard and drop my Cable for AOL dial-up.

Die.

Give me a few years and apparently I'll be on death's door.  You don't have to wait long.

With the outstanding EA track record regarding MMO development, I'm sure it will come out feature-complete and polished, too. Oh man, let's form a guild right now.

i'll bite. Sith or Jedi? Or we gonna be bounty hunters?  :awesome_for_real:

BH. Obviously.

Sith.  Dark Space Ninjas with LAZERSWORDS always win.

Ewok Faction guilds or GTFO, "Bioware."

I'll play the droid technician  :uhrr:

I'm holding out to see if there will be smugglers. Fuck mages Jedi.

Smugglers who don't smuggle but do in the design doc, confirmed.

CH

Pokemon > Jedi

 :heart:

BURN THE UNBELIEVER!!  HE IS A HERETIC!

I'll be whatever faction you old assholes aren't playing. It'll be like farming dark side points from.... old assholes  :why_so_serious:

"you may be younger and faster. But I have better insurance."

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

 :ye_gods:

I feel worse for actually knowing the reference too.

that's funny.

Oh they left a lot out of the KOTOR game. Just giving a mention of Darth Malak from KOTOR1.
Looking at the 'landslide' victory in war, I'm amazed that the narration concluded with the Galaxy divided somewhat 'equally' among the two when the graphic presentation slide comes up. Way to be impartial guys!

Sith is the new Horde/Destruction, right?  I don't want to accidentally pick Jedi if they aren't cool!!!!

You have to wait and see which faction gets the half finished quests and scenery and the spraggon model used in 23 different colours as your NPC mobs.

Whichever faction is granted the power of persecution complex is automatically the cool one.

So...  Are we doing another F13 guild (or space guilde, or whatever the fuck they call it in this game?

If so sign me up for 2 months of frenetic play followed by angry ragequit.  I'll bring my wife too so she can berate me for my poor PvP play.

You know the great thing about this game? We probably won't need to. It's "storyline driven" rite? If they do an open beta, we can all finish it in a few weeks.

The whole thing is ill-planned from the beginning.

So what the fucks endgame?  PvP?  Poetry slams?  Writing intricate genealogies for your characters and pets?  Pokemon breeding?

This is why I keep asking why this game is an MMO.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

No, you just go ahead and think inside the box.

End game.

Looser.

One with wookies and ewoks, then?

Bioware is new to the MMO scene, but I have the utmost faith in that company. They have never developed a shitty product, and on the small scale they learned how to meld a storyline and small party adventures together like no one else. We'll see if they can do that with TOR while scaling it up for the masses, and right now everything I see looks good.

Right now Bioware is one of the few rays of hope, and TOR is probably the best setting to do a star wars MMO because you're not married to a certain plot or timeline like SOE was with SWG.

Statements like this have an awesome track record when it comes to MMOs.  :awesome_for_real:

I wouldn't make that statement if this was their first gaming product. Like Blizzard, they developed several major games prior to taking on an MMO. So they go into this with a lot more experience than many others.

Yeah I'm a Bioware fanb0i, where's my fucking lightsaber?!

KOTOR - Very good game
KOTOR 2- Sucked, especially the rushed/unfinished ending.
Mass Effect - Hey lets have a hundred side quests that involve running around the same goddamn ugly ass terrain to assault bases with the exact same maps!

Aren't they also responsible for the abortion that is/was Neverwinter Nights 2?  I love D&D and I can't bring myslef to play that game because the controls/interface are so terrible.

Now Bioware+Black Isle... thts some classic stuff.  But since the Torment/BG game era they have been pretty meh.

KotOR2 and NWN2 were made by Obsidian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_Entertainment).

I assume you've never played Neverwinter Nights?

You sonofa. You're gonna make me repeat myself again, aren't you? Just because you don't want to read the thread.

As retired gaming press, you should really be more informed.

Edit: Look, this is how it is, unfortunately. Right now, Bioware Austin is like a bunch of griefers who got their names changed in an MMOG to avoid being noticed on sight as griefers. Now, they may or may not have changed and they may or may not have gotten themselves together, but until they PROVE otherwise, they are not "new to the MMO scene" or deserving of any amount of "faith." Remember, people don't really change, companies even less so.

Bioware Austin as a company name is new to the MMO scene, sure.  The people that make up Bioware Austin and are tasked with lead positions, however, are not.  Look at the names I posted a page or so ago:

Gordon Walton - Studio head (SWG (tanked), The Sims Online (tanked), UO (successful because of lack of competition and being a forefather of MMOs?))
Rich Vogel - Vice President (SWG (see above), UO (see above), M59 (tanked))
Damion Schubert - Lead Combat Designer (M95 (see above), Shadowbane (to quote Haemish - sb.exe, pigfuckers), The Sims Online (see above))
Dallas Dickinson - Lead Content Designer (SWG (see above), EQ (see UO))

I'd argue that EQ and UO were successful in spite of themselves because they were new and no one knew what to expect and didn't know any better.

But nevertheless, zebras don't change their stripes.  You can't honestly say that they've all had some eureka moment in that 'Hey!  Now I get how to make non sucky MMGs!!!.   The only person that gets somewhat of a pass is Walton, who came into SWG and tried to rescue it after the fact - then bolted in '04 after *possibly* seeing how lost of a cause it was.  Looking back on it, SWG was doomed from the beginning and no amount of patching was going to slow the sinking ship.

The one name that I really kinda laugh at is Dallas Dickinson as the Lead Content Designer.  Just how much content did SWG have while he was there?  Pretty much none.

I heard MDK2 was pretty good - so this should be too.

I had a good laugh. I was about ready to invoke EDMONTON for ya, but realized I was a page behind  :awesome_for_real:

No new infoz at all. Anyone expect anything at E3? Anyone care?

I'm almost tempted to take a picture of this and turn it into a giant emote called :austinware: or :zebras:

This thread is 17 pages long, and I've read it and seen the arguments. I'm not saying your point of view is wrong, but in this case I think its one of those "in the eye of the beholder" perspectives.  I've played most Bioware games, and they were all great. Bioware has never produced a massive MMO where thousands of people are on the same server playing together, but neither had Blizzard when they made WoW.  But both companies had a good track record of making good games prior to jumping into MMO's.

They could very well release their MMO and its plagued with all sorts of problems. But since I'm 99% jaded towards all other dev studios, I like to hold out that 1% ray of hope for Bioware. 

Now I've seen the arguments about whether this game is going to be GW/Diablo, LotRo, etc but it doesn't really sound like anyone truly knows. All we know is that the game will have individual story arcs, there's going to be some multi-play component, and no one really knows much about the community component. The more details I get the more happy or skeptical I will get as well, but thus far I haven't seen anything that would make me lose faith in this company.

The point is look who's in charge of making the game.   :oh_i_see:

But it's not. What the hell are you talking about?

I think waylander has lost his mind. 99% jaded by other devs? Bioware Austin /ARE/ those other devs! It's more like if Blizzard had hired McQuaid to make WoW. You can't QA your way out of a shitsack.

Now, if Bioware had made an in-house mmo (I don't consider austinware in-house, really, they're mercs), using the team that made BG2, I'd love it. It would be heavily story-based, fully instanced and awesome. And mmogtards would hate it for not being enough of an mmo (as if that ever really makes a game better).

So SWTOR will probably be just enough of a compromise between what Austinware wants to do and what Bioware advises them to do, that it will suck for both folks like me and also the mmogtards. You've got to embrace the niche from the design doc and funding stages or you fail.

Mmmm throwing the argument of faction imbalance to a friend of mine about the usual 'too many sith, too little jedi players'. He mused 'maybe that problem wouldn't crop up if the Sith are allowed to backstab each other just like how it turned out in KOTOR1'

Perhaps it's worth considering, but I'm still doubtful.

Well, regarding the quoted paragraph, lead designer is James Olhen, who was Director of Writing and Design of Baldur's Gate I, II and Knights of the Old Republic I; dunno if it was mentioned in here, but supposedly Karpyshyn, lead writer of Mass Effect, has temporarily joined the project as well.

So, at least on the story/lore/writing side of the project (which should be a prominent aspect, in their words), we should expect something of decent value; now, regarding the overall design/fun value...heh :headscratch:

Heh, so Sith are FFApvp but Jedi are Between-Realm only PVP? That'd be interesting.

Story in MMOG...

The truth points to itself. Even LotRO with its vast amount of stories has to rely on a decent game (which it wasn't at release).

Permanently; his last day here is Friday.

He was also the lead writer of ME2, and was the guy who let you Force-persuade Zalbaar to kill Mission.

Then buy that man a beer from me. 

So...not only will the mmo feature crappy mmo gameplay from "experienced" mmo vets, but it'll clear out the talent from the good arm of Bioware, too? Fuck.

Hate to sound so negative, because I srsly love Bioware, but I have a baaad feeling about this...
(http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/3421/blogstarwars.jpg)

So they sub-licensed their valuable and successful IP to a developer who turned out shit-on-a-stick.  This does not fill me with confidence.

After which they proceeded to make other successful games using their own IP rather than licensed IP.  Seems like a solid decision.

Also, it's reasonably likely that Obsidian would have done a good job with KOTOR2 had Lucasarts not pushed them to release a title that was in development for less than a year, if I remember correctly.  Not that I'll defend KOTOR2, it's a half-finished game at best, but the blame definitely lies with LA, because it's clear that the parts of the game that got reasonably well done rather shine.  These are, after all, many of the old Black Isle people.

hey, does anyone know who exactly is in charge of NWN1's online component?  I seem to remember Blizzard getting some practice for WoW on the technical front by running battle.net.  It still went nuclear at launch for popular servers, but it was technically sound, as I remember it.

Not that that will save a game from poor design and worse execution, but it may shade the level of failure it one direction or another.

KOTOR 2 is both an unfinished piece of shit and the best thing to come out of the Star Wars property since JK2.

What's up with all the bashing?  Relax, it's made by Bioware.  If any company can pull this off, it's them!

edit : bah. no one bite  :oh_i_see: