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LucasArts, BioWare Announce Partnership
Given the swirling rumours of a KOTOR MMOG, it should come as no surprise that BioWare and Lucasarts have announced they're teaming up for a project. They don't give any really concrete details, other than to say it is 'a ground-breaking interactive entertainment product'. They've also "launched a cobranded Web site, www.LucasArtsBioWare.com. 'Through our previous collaborations, we know that BioWare has an impressive ability to blend gripping stories with technological advancements, and we believe that our upcoming product will deliver an experience that will span the traditional boundaries of video game entertainment,' LucasArts president Jim Ward said in a statement. "
Maybe they'll actually put out a complete game this time.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Maybe with Bioware writing the code instead of Sony Online we can get a good Star Wars MMOG.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
A dead company and a company that beats dead horses for living...
What could possibly go wrong?
You know, when they made good adventure games.
Now they just make star wars games.
Yes the same happened with DAOC. They got bought out by EA :( and they made the game to easy. It was an honor to have a crafter, now they made it easy. They made it hard to be the best player, now you can solo your way to become maxed out and be the best. They gave the game away to the people who just want to play every now and then. Just so they could make a buck. Now DAOC is loosing users left and right for other games.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Seriously Lucasarts. How long do we need to wait before you put out another X-Wing title? It's been eight years sinse the last one. Where's the love?
Gotta love a group of six guys, five with laser blasters and one with a flamethrower, surrounding a dog in the wilderness and shooting it for sixty seconds to get it to die.
"But you have to have a challenge!"
Yeah, has any animal smaller than a skyscraper ever been a challenge to a guy with a gun or lightsaber in Star Wars? What? No?
Then leave the wilderness crap out of it, thanks. Elephant-sized animals should go down to one blast, like a level 1 critter in World of Warcraft. This is Star Wars, not reskinned EverQuest.
And we won't even get into the issue of a Jedi being either weak but omnipresent among players, something you have to spend months unlocking, or hard to unlock and weak. Good luck solving that issue.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I wish that all the good CRPGs weren't moving to console bastardizations and MMO models.
Some of my favorite games ever are CRPGs... Morrowind, Fallout 1 & 2, Vampire: The Masquerade and Bloodlines, Darklands (old school as hell, but one of the best games ever; we need a remake with a less-clunky interface. I'd pay new-game prices for it), Planescape: Torment, etc.
My wife's a much bigger RPGer than I am, and any trip to the PC game section of a store will draw complaints from her about how every RPG with an interesting-looking box turns out to be yet another damned MMO on closer inspection.
1. Simply don't allow anyone to be a Jedi.
2. Create a limited number of Jedi "slots" based on the population of the shard/realm. Like say for instance only
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Probable results for your solutions:
1. Nobody buys the MMO, as everybody wants to play a Jedi. Game fails
2. People buy the MMO, because they think they can become Jedi. They find out that they have to be hardcore to become Jedi
2a) Casual gamers quit, game fails b/c revenue from hardcores isn't enough to keep it open
2b) Casual gamers complain until Lucasarts forces Bioware to let everybody become Jedi
The problem is, Jedi are rare, and have power on a level way above "normals" in the Star Wars universe. Everyone's a fan of the Jedi, so everyone wants to play them. So for an MMO, you either have to nerf Jedi, make it nearly impossible to become one, or accept that everybody can be one & the universe turns into "City of Jedis". Sony tried all three w/ Galaxies, how's that working out for them?
Star Wars is a great setting for a single player game, but I'll be astounded when somebody makes a successful MMO out of it. It's like LOTR if everyone wants to play Gandalf.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Making everybody a Jedi was Sony's last gasp w/ Galaxies. At that point it feelt so non-Star Wars-ish (i.e. City of Jedis) that everybody got bored and left. I think many players (esp. casual players) wish to be a Jedi as seen in the movies-- i.e. with cool powers that very, very few people around you have. That don't fly in a MMO.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
1- don't accept a reward: +2 light side 0 credits
2- accept reward: 0 light side 1000 credits
3- Eat his children and take his credits: 1000 credits +2 dark side +3 hp
I felt they could have nuanced it a bit.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
You know, when they made good star wars games.
Now they just make bad star wars games.
Offcourse, if you are really old, you remember Lucasfilm Games as a flightsim company. Kids these days and their new fangled adventures. You want adventures, you go to Sierra.
Another company that went down the crapper.
Actually I have no idea if it was adventures or flightsim that came first.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Look at happened to poor Oblivion when it dared to charge people for a small upgrade, why they were nothing more then common fraudsters.
Meanwhile a small company called Blizzard is raking in several times what that horse armour costs EACH month PLUS they charge 5-6 times for an upgrade. Oh okay so their upgrade is a lot bigger, but people been paying them a monthly fee for years and they still want more AND get it?
Companies got to be asking themselves why they spend years on a product that if it is a big hit might make them a small fortune once while they can also spend that time making an MMO and if it is a hit make more money then they can dream off.
On the other hand, will this be an MMO? With Star Wars Galaxies still running and it still having a lousy rep and neither company having any experience (except lucasrts with destroying one) with MMO's?
We shall see. But MMO's are here to stay, because Blizzard has shown you can get some serious money from them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
DAoC was dying before the EA acquisition of Mythic (Thanks ToA!). DAoC is like an 80 year old on life support - someone needs to pull the plug.
Probably after the Warhammer release party.
I didn't want to leave this blank.
I think the chief problem is that RPGs are classically driven by the quest-issuing NPC. He's the guy who stands around in the marketplace saying 'Oh, won't somebody help me', and who gives you a quest when spoken to. Most of the sidequests revolve around helping these guys out.
What's the dark side option going to be? Kill him on the spot and just take the reward, that's one way, but makes the dark side game rather short and uninteresting. Better is an option like 'Turn him over to the bounty hunters who are the cause of his troubles and get a larger reward'. KOTOR had a fair few decent dark options - sell the medicine to the profiteering gangster rather than the doctor, say. KOTOR 2 was better - Kreia had some rather nasty teachings to impart, if you let her.
But in the end, I'm with the Korriban storekeeper. Why does everyone get the idea that 'dark side' always has to mean 'hooligan'?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. General Grevious would require a lot of work for a jedi to take down, epic battles could be fought against hordes of sith, large beasts with lightsaber resistance (as seen in the expanded universe) could create challenges. If Boba Fett can beat Darth Vader, then mid-level bounty hunters should give low-level jedis problems. It's true that a lightsaber makes a significant number of encounters one-shots, but against a master or a large animal it's not a matter of hitting them once, it's a matter of wearing them down through swordplay.
As for ripping down big buildings, that's not very star-wars either. The biggest things we see being thrown around easily are girders. You can lift an x-wing with concentration, and that's it. The force has its limits, and in a world where it's plentiful, there are other ways to balance it.
What I'd be interested to see would be if each Jedi class player would be selected by a "Force Class GM" for their role playing ability. When somebody is selected, a fuller review (by 2 additional GMs) is performed before the player is selected to be eligible. The rest could then work as mentioned in the GP post. They are placed in the queue to become a Jedi/Sith when a slot becomes available, and they are notified that they are on the waiting list to become a Jedi or Sith, and how long they should expect to wait before they'll get their shot.
This should encourage behavior that would be conducive to having a fun SW MMO experience. Players on the waiting list would try to kill Jedi to open spots for themselves to move up the queue (such activity could be analyzed to verify the character doing the killing was acting in character, and the player be knocked down or off the list if it weren't.)
Likewise, Jedi/Sith characters that play out of character could have their characters revoked. That's not to say that a player shouldn't be able to wrestle with their conscience, but they shouldn't be allowed to do things clearly out of line of their character's basic ethos. So, if a Jedi starts to advance or use dark power skills, they should be watched and observed, maybe even questioned why by a Jedi GM.
This should raise the level of role playing in the game to improve immersion.
Note: I never played SWG, but I had a couple of friends that did.
I like MMO's and I liked SWG. For a while and then something happened. Through various design choices AND player actions the game got ruined.
To explain I have to tell you how SWG worked. Like most MMO's you picked a race, sex and apperance, and a class. HOWEVER that last choice had little meaning as you could pick up all the classes with just little bit of money at the start. Unlike the rigid class structures of the Everquest clones (Ultima Online is a seperate beast) in SWG your character could advance in any skill set if he/she used it. If you wanted to advance in pistol class, you had to buy the skill class of pistoleer, and then just use pistols to kill something.
The precise arrangement was a little complex but it allowed you to combine several skill sets together to make your character. Want to be a robot building sharpshooter? A medic with a big sword? A bounty hunter with passion for cooking? A jedi... ah well we will get to that. But more or less, you could.
You had the base skill set of ranged combat (pistol, carbine, rifle (and something I forgot)), melee (unarmed, sword etc) (It has been a while cut me some slack) and support skills like medic, crafter and scout.
The idea was that you would pick those skills that most suited your style of play. For a short time in the games history it worked. A lot of players had a bit of scouting skill to help with gathering resources, some had some medic skills to help with healing even if their main intrest was combat. While others took on the role of pure fighters, secure in knowing that others in their party could heal them in exchange for taking the brunt in a fight.
It more or less worked, skills sets were varied and most were of real use.
What you have to remember was that SWG had far less of the rigid level system that other games have. If you wanted too, and could afford the modest fee you could go straight to fighting rancors, sure you would be eaten, but you could.
SWG did NOT have the quest system, instead you got generic missions of the level of your party and went out to kill spawns. While it sounds less intresting then quests, it helped with one thing. Finding a group, I never had a problem. Granted this was because EVERYBODY hunter naff's but at least you didn't spend an hour LFG. NOR because of the mixed skill sets did you have to beg for a healer to join you.
Once in a while, a group would form to hunt rancors. There were no uber elites back then, just ordinary playrs with varied skills sets seeking fame and glory. A rancor group was a time to prepare, to get your best medicine from stall, repair that armour and get all your equipment checked out.
Once ready, you left, to arrive on a dark world where EVERYTHING could kick your ass. The only way to survive was in a group and to use ALL the skills you had. The best time I had in game was doing deep into rancor valley with a small group, taking shelter among friendly animals (who if a rancor came near would attack, yes my friend MMO critters who have fights amongst themselves) and hunting. Camping out, a small lighted area under a night sky while the trader tried to find some resources so the medic could make some more stimms.
Ah yes, SWG was FUN. It was adventuring.
And then, the doc buffs. SWG had some unusual systems and one was that armour reduced your recovery rates to the point where you wouldn't heal or even were simply unable to wear the armour. To counter that, there were buffs in the forms of food, but the doc buff was introduced to allow the heaviest armour to be actually used. And sony miscalculated. Because resources were dynamic in their quality, the quality if the doc buff depended on the materials players combined. THe results were far more powerfull then intended, with a decent quality doc buff, costing 20k you could walk up to a rancor nest, tap it and just area attack away, spawning rancors until the nest was destoryed and you were surrounded by half a dozen dead beasts. Who needs a jedi now?
The doc buff
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Cool! Tycho's dream comes true!
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Well, think of it this way:
1. Blizzard also wasn't known as a MMO company, heck nor as a real RPG company either, before WoW. What people wanted Blizzard to announce at the time was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3. People were actually massively disappointed when Blizzard announced a MMO. (For an admittedly extreme reaction, see the VG Cats strip where Aeris mugs the Blizzard guy that announced they'll make a MMO. I'm sure a few people fancied doing that.) It sounded like something they'll surely botch, and a waste of manpower which could have been better used for something they were good at.
Needless to say, it currently has about 20 times more players than Everquest at its peak, and EQ2 peaked even lower.
2. Actually, WoW is very much playable as a single player RPG too. It does have about twice as many quests for either faction than is needed to get a player to level 70, it has more story and actually better texts than, say, Morrowind, and has more content than 10 Oblivions or so. It's certaily not _the_ best single-player RPG, but it's better than a lot of stuff we were perfectly content with, and even with the monthly fees still it's more content/buck than most.
In fact, that's my main problem with it: over time it's become increasingly difficult to find a real group for anything else than an endgame raid. Oh, you'll find a level 70 guildmate who'll be happy to run your latest alt through the Deadmines. Or even a perfect stranger if you ask nicely. (God knows I too have ran perfect stranger newbies through a ton of low level instances just because they were polite and well behaved and said "please".) But that kind of group does nothing to me. I want to feel like I actually contributed something to that group, and not like, say, may support-character priest was twiddling his undead thumbs while a level 70 mage was nuking the NPCs in wholesale.
Anyway, it _is_ used as, basically, a semi-single-player game by the majority of the population. They group when they really have to, then bugger off back to playing single-player as soon as it becomes possible. (Let's just say that even 90% of the people who were swearing that the massive level-60 MC raids are the meat of the game, went back to soloing 60 to 70 as soon as the portal to the Hellfire Peninsula opened.) The average WoW player _is_ playing a single player game with some multi-user chat channels built-in. Sorta the same as Unreal Tournament included an IRC client, except this time it's available right during the game.
So basically, even if you're a SP player, don't discount it yet just because it's MMO. A MMO can also be a good single-player game, and I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware gets that part even better done than Blizzard. In fact, if anyone can dethrone Blizzard in that one aspect, Bioware is probably the safest bet.
3. Well, allow some of us SW nerds our moment of hope, will you? Some of us awaited the launch of SWG like it's the second coming of Obi Wan. Some people kissed their wives, said goodbye to their friends, and expected to never be seen again in RL once a SW MMO opens.
And, frankly, it only appealed to a minority in the first place and disappointed everyone else. Yes, the (old-style) SWG fans will point out that it had its advantages over other MMOs at the time, such as allowing more customized characters. And I'll concede that. It had some damn good idea. But the rest sucked more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle. It was a SW game launched without spaceships _or_ jedi, for a start. And on the ground it was a baren sandbox that made some of us look back on even the old UO more favourably. It was a DIKU with graphics and a lot of computer-generated terrain. _Empty_ computer-generated terrain, where Raph Koster expected players to just create content by role-playing with each other... without even being given much tools or props for that. Add the constant bugs and heavy-handed dev/support team, and it wasn't much fun except for a minority of the most hardcore SW fans.
A
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Grievous is a cyborg, as in he has a human brain (and some organs) in that metal body so technically he could use the force is he was sensitive and all that crap.
The biggest things we see being thrown around easily are girders. You can lift an x-wing with concentration, and that's it. The force has its limits...
Yoda: "Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship."
Actually, that quote would be better written for Yoda as:
"Size matters not. Look, me at. By my size, judge me, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. The Force, my ally is, and a powerful ally it is. Creates it, life does, makes it grow. Surrounds us, its energy does, binds us. Not this crude matter are we, no, luminous beings. The Force around you, you must feel: here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. The land and the ship even."
Mangled, his syntax is. Begun, my impression has. Difficult times lie ahead for my wife. Talk like this, I will.
(As an aside, the best Yoda impression I ever saw was a 6'4" Scotsman with a beard like a rhododendron who said that Yoda reminded him of a randy French dwarf in a porn movie. "Take this, you will. Hee hee hmm. On you face, it will be.")