Spacetime Studios announces: Blackstar

[SnakeCharmer]

Yeah, there's definitely a possibility of this going wrong, especially with 'established' devs. You start jamming diku classes into Wing Commander and things will get ugly.

Some roles make sense. Tank, your big heavy fighter. DPS, your agile missile ship. Thief, your stealth fighter. Of course, why even address them in the traditional terms when the groundwork was laid ten years ago anyway?

Now I want to go play a good space flight sim, dammit.

Imo, ground game would ruin it. Too difficult to do both, you're basically making two entire games on one budget. Dunno how they managed it with JtL, but even that needed more fleshing out. Now...if you made it so this new space flight mmo dovetailed into the tabula rasa ground game...maybe. But I still think it's a bad idea to try anything beyond space stations.

I'm with you:  If it involves actual planetary stuff; running around whacking foozles and space aliens, then bleh.  But if your 'ground combat' is actually fighting on giant space stations / capitol ships (boarding raids, etc), it's perfectly doable.  Fully realizing that your whacking 'Crewman TK421 foozle' on a big ship instead of '6 legged 4 eyed foozle' on a big planet, which is the same thing just a different skin, it'd still be 'more fun'.  The perception is what's important, I suppose.

But anyhoot, raiding ships would be a good time:  Commando / Soldier types for general combat, hackers/spies for breaking into stuff, that sort of thing, medics for keeping everyone alive.  Good times.

[HaemishM]

Are you saying it might be cool to drop bombs from orbit on Tabula Rasa?

ON the game or IN the game?

[Yegolev]

You read that correctly.

[Sky]

Are you saying it might be cool to drop bombs from orbit on Tabula Rasa?

I didn't think it was /that/ bad.

But a good suggestion for the f13/meatplace game. Turd bombers!

Snakecharmer: I'd rather avoid the non-ship fighting aspect alltogether, I think. Too difficult to do correctly. And fuck medics if you do. Let's just drop that whole 'need healer' thing entirely, for crissakes. Give me a medpac or let me just respawn on my ship again. This is not the thread for a forced grouping rant, however.

[SnakeCharmer]

Snakecharmer: I'd rather avoid the non-ship fighting aspect alltogether, I think. Too difficult to do correctly.

You have to admit that it would be awesome splendid to have the option of commandeering it rather than just destroying it.  A dice roll to decide if your boarding team successfully subdues/kills the opposing crew after you disable the ship would pretty much suck.

[Driakos]

Would be fun to be one of the troops on the Homeworld 2 Marine Frigate.  Actually be able to fight through the enemy ship, and take it over, under a time constraint.  If you fail, or they blow up the Marine Frigate you disembarked off, good luck hiding on the enemy ship.  Maybe a cyanide tooth, or a personal use satchel charge.

Trying to do both ground combat, and space combat well, that's a huge challenge.  Better off making your space game superb, then adding the ground game at your leisure.

[Sky]

Well, that's a big part of it, too. We can be pretty sure these guys know their spaceflightsim stuff. However...SWG. So...yeah. Space flight.

[Typhon]

They've stated that they were doing an original IP,

Thank the lord.  I love the memory of WC.  It would be very cool if an MMO could capture some of the feel, some of that fun.  But if this game has any chance at all to be good, and I hope it does, it's not by being World of WC.  The minute the mmo ran up against some single-player WC canon that could not be resolved they end up doing some crappy compromise that was good for no one.

Edit: for great grammar!

[Hoax]

If this game is supposed to have space and ground its pure, utter vaportrash until I hear of an actual beta client.

[Trippy]

Would be fun to be one of the troops on the Homeworld 2 Marine Frigate.  Actually be able to fight through the enemy ship, and take it over, under a time constraint.  If you fail, or they blow up the Marine Frigate you disembarked off, good luck hiding on the enemy ship.  Maybe a cyanide tooth, or a personal use satchel charge.

I think Serek Dmart has a game like that.

[Kaa]

I think Serek Dmart has a game like that.

Oh God.  :-D I've never actually played his game, but watching him come onto the Usenet and rant was priceless...

Kaa

[Trippy]

I really wish it was Larry Holland and Totally Games that was making a game like this.

[UnSub]

Yeah, there's definitely a possibility of this going wrong, especially with 'established' devs. You start jamming diku classes into Wing Commander and things will get ugly.

Some roles make sense. Tank, your big heavy fighter. DPS, your agile missile ship. Thief, your stealth fighter. Of course, why even address them in the traditional terms when the groundwork was laid ten years ago anyway?

Now I want to go play a good space flight sim, dammit.

Imo, ground game would ruin it. Too difficult to do both, you're basically making two entire games on one budget. Dunno how they managed it with JtL, but even that needed more fleshing out. Now...if you made it so this new space flight mmo dovetailed into the tabula rasa ground game...maybe. But I still think it's a bad idea to try anything beyond space stations.

IMO, make it an FPS / space dogfight cross, fully respecable classes at any time on respawn, experience levels on all classes that are pretty easy to work through and provide moderate bonuses / ability upgrades. Have space stations / key structures so well armoured and defended that it's too hard to blow them up from the outside, making boarding parties the best way of controlling them. Light trade and crafting skills could also find a place in such a game.

The MMO genre has Planetside and a couple of space sims to look at and work out what went right and what went wrong.

[5150]

Would be fun to be one of the troops on the Homeworld 2 Marine Frigate.  Actually be able to fight through the enemy ship, and take it over, under a time constraint.  If you fail, or they blow up the Marine Frigate you disembarked off, good luck hiding on the enemy ship.  Maybe a cyanide tooth, or a personal use satchel charge.

I think Serek Dmart has a game like that.

Which of the unfinished ones are you referring to?

[Trippy]

The publishers released the games before they were done. It wasn't his fault!

[HaemishM]

Would be fun to be one of the troops on the Homeworld 2 Marine Frigate.  Actually be able to fight through the enemy ship, and take it over, under a time constraint.  If you fail, or they blow up the Marine Frigate you disembarked off, good luck hiding on the enemy ship.  Maybe a cyanide tooth, or a personal use satchel charge.

I think Serek Dmart has a game like that.

Which of the unfinished ones are you referring to?

Were there any finished ones?

I tried playing one version of his game and my mind ran screaming from my body at the sheer insanity of it. To say it sucked would be insulting to things which suck.

[Sky]

I tried playing one version of his game and my mind ran screaming from my body at the sheer insanity of it. To say it sucked would be insulting to things which suck.

Just because your mind can't comprehend a complex galactic simulator doesn't mean the game sucks. It means you're stupid and shouldn't waste your time trying to play things meant for more intelligent people, you total fucking moron. Get off my internet!

[HaemishM]

Derek?



I miss you.

[d4rkj3di]

The publishers released the games before they were done. It wasn't his fault!

Serek Dmart made MMO's?

Serek Dmart. Serek Dmart. I summon thee!

[Stephen Zepp]

Derek?



I miss you.

Heh...I don't. He's been "participating" over in my forums lately 

[atricks]

   This is my bad memory kicking in, but I could have sworn I briefly talked to either Raph or Rich Vogel at one E3 a while back about Wing Commander or was it Privateer Online, and how much effort they put into a terrain/fractal type generating system and other things, only to have it killed in favor of Earth and Beyond by EA.   I think it was after that they split to start on SWG.

    I have to wonder if this new one is based off of any of those old ideas?   Earth and Beyond was too diku ish and non twitchy (and I think could have been a lot better game with about another year of work before release), EVE is too much on the other end, and there is nothing in the middle.   Ie, take the best elements of all the damn cool space games and somehow combine them.  WC/X-Wing/Starflight/Freelancer/Star Control/Freespace/Privateer etc.   
 
   This is one of the very few mmorpg ideas I still have a lot of hope for that I think just hasn't been fully exploited yet.   

[Lucas]

...In the last few weeks various developers posted articles on different topics, as you can see by looking at the company homepage.

With today's "blog" they went just a little (a little) further, introducing one of their l33t and (no more) seekret tools, the AUTOSKEL (*echoing fade out*).

So, if you are interested in skeletal women with skeletal boobies, with skeletal ass and with arrows desperately trying to avoid intimate parts while pointing at something, just check it out.

[eldaec]

I can't see a release date anywhere on that site.

They're no fun.

[Daeven]

Could someone please just make Star Fleet Command as the space bits (with a strategy / resource component) and Alien v Predator in the ship corridors / ground game for the ground pounders to deal with?

Please?

[Stormwaltz]

Could someone please just make Star Fleet Command as the space bits (with a strategy / resource component) and Alien v Predator in the ship corridors / ground game for the ground pounders to deal with?

That's half of my "if I had the money" MMG right there.

EVE + FreeSpace 2 + Armored Core / AvP = will never get funded

[eldaec]

At this point I'd just settle for any space combat game as good as what was being released SIX YEARS AND TWO MONTHS AGO. Yes. It's 6 years since FS2, and nothing since.

At a stretch I could be persuaded to accept Starlancer, but that only brings it down to 5 years 8 months. ffs.

[Draegan]

I'd try any MMO-game that deals with spaceflight that's not called EVE. 

Twitch too.

[Venkman]

JTL is all we've got unfortunately. And you need to hack through a bit of nuisance to get to it.

Freespace 2 MMO. Go!

It really can't be that hard. I'm not asking for thousands of ships in realtime twitch battles. Just limit it to the same amount any modern encounter zone supports, just a few dozen, with dynamic zone lines and shit. Jumpgate Evolutions done yet (maybe)?

Is it really so hard to justify a space sci-fi game without the hook/crutch of either of the major IPs?

[tmp]

Freespace 2 MMO. Go!

I-War Online could be pretty neat.

Just sayin'

[Stormwaltz]

I'm not asking for thousands of ships in realtime twitch battles. Just limit it to the same amount any modern encounter zone supports, just a few dozen, with dynamic zone lines and shit.

Pretty much what I'd like to see. Two forces meet at some point in space and decide to fight, they're given a locked, dynamically-instanced battle space with a population cap akin to a modern team FPS. You die, you're kicked out, but other members of your guild could "tag in."

[TripleDES]

EVE - ePeening - Grind + Twitch + Ground = <3

[Nerf]

Imho, the problem with Eve isn't the grind -- it's that your character doesn't really get any benefit from actually playing the game for the first 6+months.

I'd be all over Eve like flies on shit if they would just add some incentive for me to go blow shit up, like xp for kills that made my training go exponentially faster.

Oh, and twitch, /target+f1+f2+f3+f4+f5+f6+f7+f8 != fun combat.

But ground? Meh, privateer didn't have ground, any nobody gave a shit, no need to force a dev house to do two things poorly, just give us one thing half-assed, please.

[Teleku]

That's pretty much how I felt about it.  While the skill system is nice in that you don't have to be playing to be advacing, it annoyed the hell out of me that I couldn't do anything to make it go faster.  I really wanted to go kill shit or do SOMETHING that advanced it faster.  With combat being very shallow, PvE/Mining in general also be shallow, it just made things yawntastic.  Maybe a hybrid of the two systems?

On a side note, my other big gripe is that they followed the same route as shadowbane in that system/stations controlled by corporations could only be visited by members, on pain of death.  I want somebody to make one of these empire building MMO's were there is a free flow of people between empires.  IE, I'm not a member, but my small corp (or just you for that matter) can set up shop in that empire to do my own thing (maybe have an open citizenship that means you also pay annual taxes).  The ruling corp sets all the tax rates and laws, manages the economy, and fights against the other ruling corps with there standing army (heh, and maybe you could force draft citizens of the empire in times of war (like, turn the pvp flag on between them and the opponent) as a side price for citizenship).  It gives it a multilevel approach to governing and economy like the real world.  Actually making your empire a friendly place for small corps to do business, resulting in higher tax revenue and potential talent recruitment.  I always felt really restricted not being able to go see other peoples cities in Shadowbane, so it would also help for explorers.

[Venkman]

Eve's got so many levels of alliances at this point, players effectively already provides what you describe.

Doesn't do much for the time-based advancement problems of course. I'd rather have a way to blow through that noise too, something beyond just super-expensive Implants too risky to put in unless you stick to 1.0 space all the time, and aren't at war.

[Nerf]

Theres implants for skills?  I've been letting a friend use my account for the last 6 months or so, and really tried to get back into it for about 2 days, but it all boiled down to having to wait another fucking six months before I could fly the cool t2 ships, or even enjoy the new content that's going with the next big update.

All I want is to be able to powerlevel my skills by destroying lots of boa...errr...pirates.