Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars Galaxies - Fact-Checking, Fan Style
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to this interesting LA Times article regarding Star Wars Galaxies. As well as plenty of background information, the piece talks about how detail-orientated beta testers of the forthcoming Sony-published PC MMORPG are, and includes this choice quotation: "..a German fan was outraged that the cockpit dimensions of an X-wing star fighter varied from those in the movies. Blackman looked into it and found that the game's version was indeed off -- by 6 centimeters."
What would you do in a Star Trek MMORPG? Instead of powerleveling it would be power ranking.
Step 1. create new character with L337 name.
Step 2. power-promote yourself from cadet to admiral.
Step 3. become an inter-galactic warlord poising your fleet of L337 ships against your friends.
:)
The problem is, in a Star Trek MMORPG you'd have to be some kind of an outlaw or wildcard character like Quark in DS9. You could never be a starfleet officer or any kind of galactic government officer because everything you'd do would theoretically be dictated by an order from a higher commanding officer... how's that fun?
SWG's concept works because you can create a character in a vast star wars like world. You're not bound by orders or uniform oath.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
It seems absurd to create a universe in which the players have absolutely no control about the future of it. There's no heroism when something just "has" to happen. For example, if no one joins the rebel alliance, the rebels will still win. If no one joins the imperial army, the rebels will still have a tough fight. Why not just say, this is the star wars universe but things could happen differently than in the movies? Wouldn't it be more fun if you could try to kill Darth Vader even if you had only a small chance of succeeding?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
SWG's concept works because you can create a character in a vast star wars like world. You're not bound by orders or uniform oath. :)
Actually, your perception of what things will be like in SWG is just like what could be done in a Star Trek MMORPG. After all, the Empire has buckets of Imperial Star Destroyers but you'r not going to play a crewer on one of them becaue, as you said, that would be boring. It would be the same as being an ensign on a Starfleet ship.
BUT, you could still be a Federation citizen just as you can be an Imperial citizen in SWG. Furthermore, you could be in Starfleet just as you can be in the Imperial military. You're looking at it as everything being done at the behest of a commanding officer, while in the MMORPG tradition you could look at it as being assigned a quest.
For example, let's say you're an Imperial trooper. You receive a mission from a superior officer telling you to go and secure blaster batteries. You're told that a particular merchant has these batteries, so you go to see him. The merchant resists your Imperial authority (or is an agent of the Rebellion) and therefore you must kill him (and presumably his cronies), locate the batteries and either bring them back or call in for a pickup once the area is secure. Boom, you've just followed orders from a superior officer and it could very well have been fun to do so. It's little different from going to a guild leader in Everquest and receiving a mission to go out and kill giant possums for their fur so that coats can be made.
As I noted above, similar things could be done if you were a Starfleet officer in a Star Trek MMORPG. An example might be that a settlement of sentient lifeforms was found on a planet but the ship that detected it didn't have time to investigate further. Your mission might be to go to this planet, locate the settlement and make contact with them if permitted by The Prime Directive (or take close-in tricorder readings for later analysis). Along the way, you might run into hostile wild animals, Breen who are active for some reason on the planet, etc. Again, the "orders" can simply be equated to being given a quest.
Making things to do in an MMORPG isn't tough, regardless of the setting. The tough part is making sure there's enough to do and injecting enough variety into the tasks to keep people interested.
There aren't any player usable spacecraft until the Space Expansion pack... also in the beta I haven't seen any X-Wings up that close, so my guess is that this article is BS.
What I find amusing about topics like this is that fanatics will get into nitpicks like that, but won't get into conversations that make the universe seem weaker.
A huge huge discrepency in all three of the original movies involves the speed of light and how fast ships travel in relation to it. Most of the rebuttals are like "It's space jargon" or "if you read this book, then it rationalizes it completely." or "Uh he really didn't mean that." etc. Well there's a much simpler explanation that doesn't require reading a dull book. The Star Wars galaxy is very small. Small, as in "The Galaxy is on Orion's Belt" small. Scale everything down like that, and suddenly the speed of light is better than warp-drive. You can travel inter-stellar with a disabled hyperdrive to go visit your back-stabbing buddy. You can even survive a fall out of a moving vehicle or a 30-foot drop to the ground while tied together with a group of people without breaking bones!
I've had a difficult time getting people who'd be interested (aka fanatics) in this idea, mainly because they don't like the idea that the Empire couldn't possibly take on the Federation from Star Trek. I shit you not, they are overly sensitive to situations like that. Suddenly, making sense is no longer important if Captain Picard wouldn't even be able to see Darth Vader!
I have to admit, though, that the most amusing thing about this idea is that people will actually call me names over it.
"Derp de derp."
That is nice considering space travel isn't in the game so would be kind of hard to measure the cockpit. Also how did he measure it? Just eyeballed it in comparison to his character hight?
Opened up the model in a different program and measured the pixels?
As someone who is in the SWG beta, I must say over all, it's pretty damn boring and unstable. I think in the end there are going to be a lot of disillusioned and disabppointed SW fan freaks. Like all the MMOs today, it will have a long way to go at release, and hey there's already an expansion in the pipes to add the star part of the "Star Wars"