SWTOR

[Stormwaltz]

Every SW novel writer should be shot into the sun.

Just Kevin J. Anderson. Most SW writers are mediocre. He's actively bad. Everything he's ever written, licensing tie-in or otherwise, has been bad.

[Sky]

Ok, if you sign up under some odd name for Bat Country without first pm'ing me said name here, I'm just going to decline your app.

I mean, I can figure out who 'CmdrSlack' is, but 'steak'? C'mon. I want to reject that one just on general principles.

[squirrel]

But an account is at steak!!

Ok. My bad.

[Evildrider]

Ok, if you sign up under some odd name for Bat Country without first pm'ing me said name here, I'm just going to decline your app.

I mean, I can figure out who 'CmdrSlack' is, but 'steak'? C'mon. I want to reject that one just on general principles.

There is a guy with the named steak on the boards.  I've seen him post here and there.

[Sky]

Didn't see him in the Member List.

[Samprimary]

Every SW novel writer should be shot into the sun.

Just Kevin J. Anderson. Most SW writers are mediocre. He's actively bad. Everything he's ever written, licensing tie-in or otherwise, has been bad.

Also, as a general rule, no franchise should ever dare involve themselves with comics. Ever. It is the absolute best fucking way to make any franchise mind-gratingly (as in, like rubbing a cheese grater literally against your brain until you can't think about it anymore as a defense mechanism) bad.

Star Wars comics are a delightful example of that!

So's World of Warcraft, as it gave them Med'an the Super Everything Goku Marysue Fanfic Thing.

oh hell, you could point to practically anything.

[Ingmar]

To be fair in WoW's case, it was thoroughly Mary Sue-d before the comic.

[Samprimary]

yeah but it's just that extra special plateau when marysue cannot restrain herself from designing characters that make Goku seem well-rounded and full of plausible weaknesses in comparison, then pegging your canon with it long and hard.

[Velorath]

Every SW novel writer should be shot into the sun.

Just Kevin J. Anderson. Most SW writers are mediocre. He's actively bad. Everything he's ever written, licensing tie-in or otherwise, has been bad.

Also, as a general rule, no franchise should ever dare involve themselves with comics. Ever. It is the absolute best fucking way to make any franchise mind-gratingly (as in, like rubbing a cheese grater literally against your brain until you can't think about it anymore as a defense mechanism) bad.

Star Wars comics are a delightful example of that!

So's World of Warcraft, as it gave them Med'an the Super Everything Goku Marysue Fanfic Thing.

oh hell, you could point to practically anything.

Huh?  There are some pretty good Star Wars comics out there, and as I've mentioned, I'm not even particularly a fan of Star Wars.  The Tales of the Jedi comics essentially created the setting that KotoR takes place in.  Besides that, the comics market is so small, I doubt most fans of any given franchise ever read any sort of comics tie-ins.  Certainly not enough to where it would damage the franchise.

[Riggswolfe]

For some reason you can't just have a thing in Star Wars without changing it's name to be different. It's not hacking, it's slicing. It's not coffee, it's caf. I'm frankly shocked that hot chocolate got to be hot chocolate and not... hot spacechoc or something.

I'm not sure this is just Star Wars though. If the sci-fi is more or less Earth in the future this doesn't happen. But if it is primarily "someplace else" you see alot of this. Think of Farscape or BSG for example. Money is cubits? Cuss words are changed. "Frak" "Dren" etc...

[Ingmar]

I think the 'frak' stuff is just so they can swear during prime time. If it had been an HBO show it would have just been 'fuck' I'm sure.

[Evildrider]

Didn't see him in the Member List.

He might have been erased then, but I know I've seen him post here before.

[Draegan]

I applied to Bat Country, let me in! 

[Sky]

Only if you start a fansite.

 

[SnakeCharmer]

If BC in TOR had any sort of traction, I'd foot the bill for one of the cooler "guild websites in a box" packages.

Anyway, according to the SA forums, Erikson said in one of the interviews at the UK thing that companions counted against your total group number, so two players could use two companions to run the group content.  Or three players and 1 companion.  So that's really good news.

[Typhon]

It's good news if that bot can be the healer.  If the bot only gets to be the dps, not so much.

[Zetor]

Yep. In Guild Wars, healer heroes [aka TOR companions] made things go a lot smoother in general, and let the human players focus on 'the important stuff'*. Interrupter heroes worked great too due to their obviously-inhuman reflexes. I wonder if it'll be the same in TOR? Also, what is the extent of control you have over your companions?

* that said, I ran a healing-specced character with an army of heroes to kill stuff for me. It actually made the game play like a RTS, kinda. 

[Draegan]

Only if you start a fansite.

 

You think I'm crazy enough to make a fansite for anything Star Wars?  Pfft.

[Sky]

Dunno about the companion thing. Looks like murky waters, companions for this but not that. And you know this will be blues and that will be purples. Because inclusive games should be about exclusivity!

[kaid]

It's good news if that bot can be the healer.  If the bot only gets to be the dps, not so much.

Seems like a healer companion would be one of the easier AI to make. Most people would much rather play the game than watching mini health bars and in most games the healer game play is wack a mole tunnel vision on the health bars with limited situational awareness of whats going on around them.

[Typhon]

Given some of the posts in this thread, it sounded like BioWare was considering removing or limiting the healing companions because they were too good - which would seem to support your theory that healing bots are easy to make.  So easy, in fact, that they render human healers obsolete.

So my thinking was, "if healer-bots are out, and I'm still waiting in the queue for a healer, then companions haven't really improved the game in any way".

[Sheepherder]

Pretty much.

[Velorath]

Today's update is a fairly lengthy article on advanced classes.  There's an interesting section on some of the ways they've changed each class due to testing, as well as what some of their testing metrics are.

[Merusk]

Those skill trees are entirely too full and bloated.  They should trim them down and streamline them now to remove choices and "bloat" before they do it in a huge, game-crushing expansion. 

[Velorath]

Those skill trees are entirely too full and bloated.  They should trim them down and streamline them now to remove choices and "bloat" before they do it in a huge, game-crushing expansion. 

Well it looks like they're going for a lot of flexibility within each class.  Half the classes (Trooper, Bounty Hunter, Consular, and Inquisitor) look like they can spec Healing, Tanking, Ranged DPS, or close combat DPS, depending on advanced class and spec.  Imperial Agent and Smuggler seem to lack tanking abilities, while Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior seem to lack healing, but other than that things seem fairly open.

[DayDream]

Looks like they're giving each four base classes access to three roles, or two roles and duplication of one of them in some form or another.  So that's four classes times three roles, for at least twelve individually balanced classes, per side.  So twenty four classes assuming that the classes aren't carbon copies across sides.  Presumably most of them will have different optimal stat ratios and equipment.

Hope they've got room for all that in their budget.

[Hawkbit]

Not that I wasn't expecting WoW in space, but... it's WoW in space. 

[UnSub]

at least twelve individually balanced classes, per side.

BioWare don't balance.

[Margalis]

There will probably be 2 healing-specced Bounty Hunters in the entire player population so they can skimp on balancing that one.

[Samprimary]

What they're doing is certainly ambitious, but hell on earth to properly balance.

And they would have had to have been much more ironed out and down to the tiny, tiny details by now if they really seriously wanted me to think they were going to be pulling that feat off in time. Instead, we get a bunch of "ooh, and this! we liked this, so we made it this! and OMG how about that! it is popular with our testers!"

...

mmh

[Reg]

I don't think even WoW was balanced when it was first released was it?  Balance seems more of an ongoing process than an achievable state from what I can see.  They've got respecs available right off the bat so it's not like people are going to be permanently gimping themselves - though this will inevitably lead to a plague of flavour of the month builds every time they change something.

[caladein]

The biggest thing they're at risk of is multiple instances of the Paladin/Shaman problem.  Ignoring that, it's a reasonably simple set-up: eight Advanced Classes per side each with a shared tree with their classmate, a damage tree, and either a tanking/healing/(second) damage tree.

They're not going to get loads more healers and tanks because they opened the roles up to people who don't also want to be Jedi/Sith, but locking people into one role at character select in a holy trinity-based game at this stage is pretty dumb.

[Arrrgh]

Did they answer the dual spec or not question yet? They were dodging it when last I read their forums.

WoW in space with no dual spec means fewer tanks and healers.

[Sky]

If they would just put in Rift's ability to switch between several (four!) roles (specs) at a time, it would be a really nice step forward. However, each class would also have to be able to fulfill the role decently, unlike Rift. Get that right and they are a long way to longevity. Get it wrong and they'll get a few bored WoW vets waiting for something better to come along (like Rift did imo).

[Velorath]

Did they answer the dual spec or not question yet? They were dodging it when last I read their forums.

WoW in space with no dual spec means fewer tanks and healers.

They mentioned in that article that you could respec for an unspecified amount of in-game money, but that's about it.  I wouldn't really expect anything like dual spec in at launch although I would think that it would be a fairly easy thing and worthwhile thing to copy.