SWTOR

[Rasix]

I have some beach front property in Arizona you may be interested in.

[kildorn]

I don't know that limiting launch copies is ideal, but some form of zone wide instancing and a cloud based capacity solution would be ideal for any MMO launch. Launch day always sucks because you're slamming auth servers that are specced to take maybe half that load at peak.

That or stagger the preorder phase to let people register well before your sneak peak start, so your registration servers can at least stay up (they expect less peak traffic than the auth servers, even)

The issues I see at every launch are, in order, reg servers overloaded, auth servers overloaded, and newbie zones devoid of life/impossible to use. It would be nice if we'd try and solve those with some of the tech we already have. But saying 'you.. you can't start at the same time as everyone else' seems like a poor solution.

[sam, an eggplant]

Lots of beta invites going out today, check your mail kids.

[kildorn]

Somewhere I lost my charmed life and stopped getting beta invites for everything under the sun :(

[Ingmar]

Same. 

[Paelos]

Lots of beta invites going out today, check your mail kids.

Thanks for getting my hopes up.


Ass.

[sam, an eggplant]

I actually got back into the beta myself, and a bunch of others got in on another forum I visit.

[Crumbs]

You still never answered my question about why SWTOR needs to innovate. 

They quite obviously don't need to!  I thought the question was how could they innovate.  The short answer to your question is, if it's in the gaming graveyard by next spring, then that's why SWTOR needs to innovate.

[Threash]

I don't get why this is such a terrible thing. Doesn't anyone remember how annoying WoW was in its early days with all of the server queues and lag?

Not as annoying as sitting at home holding my dick and reading about how awesome WoW is would have been.

[Sjofn]

Graphics looked like shit to me.

I'm going with "its a low texture beta build".

keep telling yourself that,  honestly the characters themselves just look off. If they are going for realism just look to mass effect 3 and how much better that game looks(yes its single player but that's hardly an excuse) and if they wanted something more cartoony, than a clone wars style would work too. As it is, the graphics seem somewhere between the two and don't quite work for me.

Ugh, I much prefer the SWTOR look to Mass Effect. Mass Effect, the people are universally ugly as hell. I don't care if it's more "realistic," they look ugly. The lip-sync animation in SWTOR isn't right and I hope they improve it before release, but I will be eternally glad they didn't go the Mass Effect route for character design. <shudder>

The style sort of reminds me of DA2's style, and I liked that style fine, so uh. Hooray for me, I guess!

[Kirth]

Lots of beta invites going out today, check your mail kids.

 

[Furiously]

/vader "Noooooooooooooooo!"

[Kirth]

You still never answered my question about why SWTOR needs to innovate. 

They quite obviously don't need to!  I thought the question was how could they innovate.  The short answer to your question is, if it's in the gaming graveyard by next spring, then that's why SWTOR needs to innovate.

What's considered "innovative"? and btw just browsing thru the graveyard I see a few games that I consider attempted innovative things. I'm not trying to wind you up I just don't think there is much room for innovation is what's consider a modern mmog.  

[Evildrider]

Graphics look fine to me, they made the game so that older computers won't melt when you try to play the game. 

[Nevermore]

That's one of the things that makes me nervous about GW2.  I highly doubt my computer can run that game and look nearly as good as the trailers.  SWTOR looks like I shouldn't have too much trouble.

[UnSub]

I have some beach front property in Arizona you may be interested in.

I hear there are a limit of them available. Sign me up!

[Fordel]

That's one of the things that makes me nervous about GW2.  I highly doubt my computer can run that game and look nearly as good as the trailers.  SWTOR looks like I shouldn't have too much trouble.

The GW people are very good at making stuff look great on a 'budget' as it were. I wouldn't worry too much about that.


The original GW looks fantastic and was very forgiving on what kind of PC could run it.

[Nevermore]

Except I almost never crash in WoW and I crash a lot in GW.

[Fordel]

I had the opposite experience between GW and Vanilla WoW /shrug.

[Zetor]

Somewhere I lost my charmed life and stopped getting beta invites for everything under the sun :(

Yep. Actually, come to think of it, the only two betas I got into were WAR and FFXIV.

[Shrike]

Graphics look fine to me, they made the game so that older computers won't melt when you try to play the game. 

This is probably a good thing overall and I can certainly understand the desire of developers to get stuff out to as many people as possible...but...

Sometime you're going to have to raise the bar. We've been stuck in a particular graphics flatspot for a number of years now. Most blame the current consoles and to some degree that's deserved. Still, PC gaming has always been expensive and it was upgrade or die for a very long time. It's time to starting moving this shit forward again, especially with the next generation of consoles only a couple of years out. It's not THAT expensive to build pixel-ripping rigs that run at 1080p (blah, but that's another rant).

I"m already committed to playing ToR, but the graphics just leave me a bit cold. I know it can be a lot better than this--and it should. I've seen the Steam surveys and the shockingly low-end rigs many play on. Wasn't like this back in '99, nosiree. I've been ragging the hell out of my 1650xwhatever friends to upgrade that junk and see the light! Engines that scale well are certainly out there. I'm hoping Rage and id's tech5 are the spark that drives us to some serious hardware upgrades across the gaming community. It needs it.

[Merusk]

It's a bad time to be a graphics whore like yourself, as it's quite possible we've reached a very long plateau on them.  Getting more detail & polys seems to require dual cards (like multi-core processors) but your average consumer isn't going to buy anything with more than one card.   Additionally, that extra flash costs a lot of art time and money for diminishing returns. 

As you said, not a lot of users are using superior rigs.  That's not going to happen until the economy levels out and if things go the way I think they're going to it won't level out for another 3-5 years minimum.  People also aren't going to be spending big-bucks on computers like they used to.  Non-tech people are content with consoles or tablets for the bulk of their use, meaning they're not buying junior a $2000 PC either.   No, the $500-$600 rig is where the bulk of computing is going to be for a long time if it ever moves past it. That means devs have to cater to those older machines or start charging more per box because they're aiming for a greatly diminished user base.

We're also not going to break the  uncanny valley problem any time soon and game companies seem to have realized this and are ok with going more stylized than not.  It's also quicker, cheaper & easier to produce WoW / LOTR/ Clone Wars art with less expressive faces and barbie hair than to even attempt to build an engine that would do movie or cut scene-quality graphics given enough processing power on the user's computer.

[Outlawedprod]

I sense a disturbance in the force.  http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=439175

[Paelos]

I sense a disturbance in the force.  http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=439175

Much ado about nothing.

[Lantyssa]

Interest declining further.

[koro]

I got into the beta yesterday.

My girlfriend was not pleased.

She didn't get an invite.

[Cadaverine]

Interest declining further.

Between Bioware's decision, and the sentiments expressed by some people across the various related threads, I said the hell with it.  They don't need my money.

Edit: quotes are hard.

[Paelos]

I'm trying to think of an MMOG that had homosexual references.

Someone help me out.

[01101010]

I'm trying to think of an MMOG that had homosexual references.

Someone help me out.

WoW...  

edit: link to the hee hee's... bleh

[Furiously]

I think it's more so that Bioware has always included same sex relationships, so for them to take a step back says something about their risk taking on this project.

[koro]

I think it's more so that Bioware has always included same sex relationships, so for them to take a step back says something about their risk taking on this project.

How many Bioware games have included same-sex relationships? The only ones I can think of are Dragon Age 1 and 2, Mass Effect 1 and a little bit of 2 (female only in both, and no same-sex stuff between primary party members in 2), and... maybe Jade Empire? I guess there's also the buggy and incomplete Juhani romance you can go through as a girl in KOTOR 1, but I don't really count that.

That's less than half of Bioware's releases, and one of their series is one-sided about it. I'd be hesitant to call it something Bioware's "always" done, and I believe someone at Bioware (David Gaider maybe?) has admitted that they rarely, if ever, do it out of a conscious effort to include it.

[Reg]

Bioware games with same sex relationships are rated Mature.  With SWOR they're going for a Teen rating.  I seriously doubt there's any more to it than that.

[Amaron]

Jade Empire let you romance the princess if you were female.  I thought BG2 did as well but I guess that was only in mods.

Also you forgot same sex Carth in KoTOR. 

[koro]

I am fairly certain you cannot romance Carth as a guy in KOTOR.

Unless you're making fun of Carth and I'm missing it, because making fun of Carth is the normal, natural order of things.

[Amaron]

Exactly.