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Movie Based MMO Updates
Neo writes "The handover of The Matrix Online to SOE has finally begun with users given 45 days to convert their accounts over to SOE's Station system." Star Wars Galaxies, TMO's sister game, has been having its own troubles. A recent patch had to be removed from the live game because of overwhelming, crushing player protest. Another "Star" MMOG has new help this week, with none other than Michael Okuda signing on to work on the Star Trek Online Massive game. From the article: " A technical designer and all-around Star Trek guru, Okuda has worked as a technical consultant to the writers of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine television series, as well as seven Star Trek films. He will primarily design the game's interface, along with serving as a more general Star Trek universe consultant."
If it has voice over IP, it will just degenerate into a ham contest, and endless stream of Shatnerian pauses-for-effect, "Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor", and horrible Scottish brogues
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Maybe you were thinking of The Sims Online (TSO) or you just thought you'd make up your own acronym and hoped no-one would notice. Fair enough.
BTW, the transition to SOE billing happened on the 15th of August. It's now the 22nd of August. So most people have already gone through the (mostly painless) process. We had one faction member lose his character for an hour or two, but for most people it was flawless.
The next major development event is the integration of the SOE cross game chat protocol. When that's done maybe we'll hear something from the Live Events team... and life inside MxO will continue to be interesting.
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for anyone still playing SWG. Masochists really deserve what they get. It was clear literally years ago what SOE's strategy was. Its still carrying bugs from Beta, presumably because they are understaffed or underresourced or something, but they keep pumping those (purchasable) expansion packs out somehow. People waited for over a year for the promised combat fix/rebalance/revamp or whatever it ended up being called. And even then, its rubbish and not much better than the original system. From friends who foolishly stayed on I have heard some interesting stories. In particular, their CSRs have notably become steadily ruder, more isolated from management (they seem to know nothing more than the players 9 times out 10) and somewhat less able as time has gone by. Not surprised really, on a personal level it must be a nightmare to play the role of a steward on the deck of a virtual Titanic. Nerves are well and truly frayed in that quarter.
SWG has long since transcended gaming; I hear they are up for a Tony award under the heading "Longest running farce".
This is honestly not meant to be flame bait, if you're having a fine old time thats cool for you. But don't complain, SOE know for an absolute fact at this point their player base are essentially mugs who will put up with any old nonsense. If that wasn't true you'd have cancelled your account years ago.
Really, the writing is not so much on the wall about that game as carved into your eyeballs at this point.
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Attention moderator: given I'm agreeing with the story as posted how can it be flamebait? John Smedley, if thats you, stop jerking around on Slashdot and get back to sorting some of your games out huh.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
do what? is that span of days retroactive or something?
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Okuda's got imagination. The ability to think up a bucketfull of technobullshit at the drop of a hat that not only sounds cool, but somehow plausible. With him involved, there's a very good chance Trek Online might actually have a measure of depth and challenge that would make it worth playing. Just keep the braindead regurgitators like Rick Berman the hell away from it, and all will be good.
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hehe, as long as they don't let Berman and Braga near it, Star Trek Online should be good stuff. I read some of the articles about its basic design on one of the fansites and with Okuda designing the interface, it will be much like the real thing. I just hope they take the time to make it work well, rather than rushing it out the door if it's taking longer than expected.
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Anyone have any ideas what a Star Trek MMOG could be like? The series is mostly based on story and plot lines. This contradicts what MMOGs are mostly, which is the treadmills. Sure they all have small quests, and background stories, but nothing epic like a single player RPG has to offer. I am still interested in how it turns out since the Star Trek universe is pretty expansive.
Star Wars Galaxies is dead, unfortunately. It was broken a long time ago. It's really a shame because the game has so much potential, but the developers have tinkered with the gameplay to such a degree, very little makes sense any more. There are entire classes of characters who now seem to have no usefulness due to changes within the system; there are stats on file with characters and devices in the world which either don't function any more, or keep changing their name, purpose, requirements, etc., that nothing makes sense any more. There are botched missions which are impossible to solve, and have been for months or years; Other missions end in the middle and toss you into an entirely different glass-eating class that is separate from your dicipline and makes no sense; there are NPCs that exist solely to trigger cleanup and salvage of legacy game flags that stand out like a Dairy Queen on the Death Star.
It's really sad to see this game go down the tubes, and you can tell SOE is desperately trying to keep it from sinking, but it seems everything they do just makes things worse. They should just put it out of its misery.
If you ask me, the whole station pass scheme is designed to not lose subscribers due to a crappy game that's part of their arsenal -- this way they can give you some other distraction in case their efforts fail, and they can claim X thousand subscribers even though very few may actually play a particular MMORPG.
Took vacation and bought World Of Warcraft the day it came out, and I've never looked back.
Classes are mostly balanced and varied, crafting does not gimp your combat abilities and vice-versa, and leveling fits very nicely with interesting quest lines.
Crafting was fun in SWG, at least as a Doctor. Analyzing material stats, balancing all the different variables, judging resource quality. I even did some web dev to make it easier for myself and other doctors (http://swg.dailybuzz.net/). But getting to be a top tier crafter SUCKED big time. Literally sitting there pushing a button every few seconds to make a macro repeatedly craft throw-away items to earn XP just so I could make desirable medicines? There were two parts to SWG - grinding or being a master crafter. Once you attained master, it got kind of fun. Until then, you were completely useless.
In WoW, you do sometimes have to make things repeatedly, but they're not useless. There's always someone who'll accept or buy a leather armor kit to enhance their items. Any item that's hard for you to make is valued by others at your level, so you get a worthwhile price for your wares. And any lower stuff that you do need to grind doesn't cost much or take much time and lower levels kiss your feet when you donate it to them. By the time you've made 20-30 of one item, it no longer gives experience, and by then you can train up newer and better items to craft. Compare that to making literally thousands upon thousands of the same damn Advanced Biological Effect Controller so you can get to be a better medicine crafter and healer in SWG.
Gathering materials in SWG meant buying harvesting machines, locating a good resource spot once in a blue moon, and paying to leave the machine there for a week. Gathering materials in SWG is directly linked to gameplay - appropriately leveled enemies drop materials that a player would need to craft items that would help those at around his level. Or randomly spawned herbs and minerals would appear in areas where appropriately leveled players could utilize them, and they'd be in the area questing or killing anyhow.
Just can't get over how much more *fun* WoW is compared to SWG. Blizzard really got it right.
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...do we get a playstation II or III version?
I mean, really. I love the whole idea of the Matrix Online, but I don't want to have to babysit a Windows machine just to be able to play one single game. And, anyway, playing a game about hackers on a WINDOWS BOX would be horrifying. You'd spend all your time waiting for the hammer to come down (pardon the pun). I mean, really -- hackers DO have a very well developed sense of irony.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
but would prefer someone like David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington SciFi novels. His universe is a lot more logical and contains less contradictions. Which adds greatly to the believability of the virtual world.
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