Star Wars Battlefront - Striving For Galactic Conquest?

Thanks to LucasArts for their press release officially announcing more information on Star Wars Battlefront, the PS2/Xbox/PC multiplayer action title featuring "the most memorable Star Wars battles set in over 15 environments across 10 diverse planets, including Hoth, Geonosis, Yavin, Tatooine and Naboo." However, a GameSpy preview adds further detail to the previously revealed information regarding this Battlefield 1942-like online-orientated title, including "the 'metagame' driving Star Wars Battlefront. Tentatively called 'Galactic Conquest,' this mode will throw players into a full-scale war. Once you capture every checkpoint on a planet and defeat the enemy's forces utterly, you'll control that planet."

Comments

Well...

[Lobo]

I liked playing this game the first time it came out, when it was called Planetside.

Re:A highlight

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

First off, who ever told you that you had a right not to be frustrated as a consumer?

Your idea of what a monopoly is also needs some work. You want the government step in and tell Nintendo that they have to port Metroid Prime to the PC? And you're not eliminating any competition by doing both hardware and software. Companies are still entitled to develop their own hardware and software combination and beat you in the free market. I don't understand how you believe competition is being driven out.

If you don't like Nintendo's way of doing things, don't buy their products. But you certainly have no constitutional right to be able to play console games on any system. A monopoly huh? Check the market. Is Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony a monopoly in the video game hardware business? Gee, since I asked about three different companies, that should make that question fairly easy to answer for you.

Er, this is technologically feasible...

[AzraelKans]

This project is not only "technologicallty feasible" it has been done before, did no one played tribes and tribes 2? I mean seriously, halo, battlefield 1942 and call of duty are based on concepts they invented. Yet everyone thinks they are revolutionary.

Actually in Halo you can only handle terrain vehicles, while in Tribes2 you are able to drive flying ships and have passengers, pilots and bombers on them. Also you were able to switch armors AND have a trird person view.

Heck , ANYONE with enough coding knowledge,a budget and some talent can give a try to code a game like this, they sell their engine for $100 at GarageGames.com

A couple points

[Lord_Dweomer]

Here are my issues with this game. If they can address these, they have a lot of potential to make an awesome game. Potentially even a BF1942 killer.

1. From everything I've read on this game, it appears its limited to 32 players per server. BF1942 had 64 when it came out. And some of the newer ones are planned to have 128. You can't take a step backward in the number of players with this kind of game and expect it to succeed.

2. Planetside was a cool concept, but they alienated many gamers by their less than stellar FPS translation. IE. "cone of fire" and no headshots. Aim is relative in Planetside. If they could make this SW game behave like a "true" FPS, AND have the massively multiplayer part of Planetside, it would draw in a HELLUVA lot of gamers.

3. Mods. Every major FPS has them. Hell, CS drove more sales for Halflife than the original game did, and currently there are more DC servers in BF1942 than BF1942 servers. If you let the fans mod it, more people will buy it. PLEASE release an SDK for it and don't force people to make their own like they did for BF1942.

4. Don't use anything like Steam. It complicates things, it breaks, its an inconvenience that ultimately will not stop anybody from pirating your game if its good and just causes issues for paying customers.

If they can address the issues I have listed, I feel they have a good shot at becoming a top game, especially since they have the backing of the Star Wars license. I know I have a blast playing the SW d20 game, sometimes even more than D&D because its the SW universe, and I'm somewhat familiar with it.

Uhhh...

[JMZero]

Companies like EA do PC ports of a lot of popular sports titles. They're usually sold cheap, and still don't sell nearly what the console versions do.

Why?

Picture you and 3 friends crowded around your PC to play Smash Brothers. Do you have 4 seats at your computer? Do you have 4 gamepads with sufficient buttons? Do you even have 4 USB ports?

Metroid's a little better, and might sell a few copies on the PC, but why would Nintendo dilute the appeal of its flagship unit (the GameCube) in order to sell a few more copies of anything? If it was going to do ports of Smash Brothers, wouldn't it start with a PS2 copy? It would sell lots more...

Until Nintendo doesn't make hardware, it isn't going to be doing a lot of ports.

Until pigs fly, you're not going to see heavy "one machine, many players" on computers. And, yes, I remember Star Control II multiplayer. It's not that multiplayer is unworkable on one computer, just that it isn't nearly as workable as the same thing on a console (or multiplayer over a network).