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Stargate Worlds Beta Begins Oct. 15th
Kotaku reports that the closed beta for Stargate Worlds, an MMO based on the popular Stargate television shows, will begin on October 15th. Registration is open at the game's website. Gamespy has some new screenshots available, and a Youtube channel has been opened for videos about the game. We discussed the early plans for Stargate Worlds a couple years ago.
MMOs require a significant time investment, and most people don't play more than one at a time. To grow a healthy population and to attract people away from other games, you need to offer something novel. Taking yet another Sci-Fi property (that's already been done to death) and throwing it into an MMO is a sure-fire way to fail.
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"Step through the Stargate and join thousands online for a super-sized sci-fiaventure that will send you and your buddies around a galaxy dipped in liquid awesome." www.stargateworlds.com/about.html
I'm not sure I want to be dipped in liquid awesome
I realize this is beta, but this is definitely catering to a crowd that I can't identify with. I didn't expect this to be canon, but are those Ori footsoldiers with p90s? I wish whomever plays this hours of enjoyment, but it's a bit too Elder Scrolls for this die-hard SG fan. In the words of PA, it's not "for me"
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Its existence is unconvincingly denied in most videos, and in one it is confirmed but the developer insists that flamethrower gameplay is not ready to be shown to the public. He says this while a monitor behind him displays all kinds of in-game flamethrower carnage.
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It's nice to see that the self-ironic, etc humour that was in SG1 is alive and well among the staff that are developing the game. It gives me hope that this game will be a good one. Or at least go along some of the lines that the show did.
by Rich Tucholka. Pre-dates Stargate, and has more interesting effects
when ya go through a gate (like roads through space with localized
gravity and atmosphere, immediate draining of electrical batteries,
et al).
I get dibs on being MacGyver! Sorry, but I called it. Someone else can take the nerdy professor, I bet the alien guy is going to go quick, so someone should call that.
Did anyone else find it odd that the token black guy in that show was not only an alien, but he used what looked undeniably like... well... a spear? They could have been more insensitive about it, like giving him an afro, I guess.
Scary, isn't it?
Not really, since everything you just posted is sensationalist fantasy and utter rubbish.
I find their web site hard to navigate.
Any idea what their system requirements are?
Thanx,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Actually, there are quite a few of us praying for a good SF MMO. I don't even care much about franchise, personally, just give me something battery-, clip- or belt-fed already. That market segment is way under-represented. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against high fantasy setups either, but that market segment is already catered for.
Arguably, excessively catered for. I mean, if you look at the current MMO player base, about 99% is fantasy, and about 1% is SF or modern day. If you look at TV viewer estimates, the numbers are almost reversed. Unless someone can argue convincingly that the same people who like SF more on TV, somehow prefer high fantasy in a game, there must be a _lot_ of untapped potential market.
And if you think about it, it's not even that much competition they have in that segment. The problem of the SF genre so far was that it was half-arsely done. E.g., AO was launched as a festering pile of shit (read the Something Awful reviews, and know that they barely scratch the surface of how bad it was.) E.g., SWG had exactly one saving grace: its character development system. But otherwise an incompetent designer and an incompetent publisher ran it into the ground, and managed to turn the biggest franchise in history into a niche. I'd say "etc" at this point, but was there _anything_ else worth talking about in the SF MMO genre? I'm drawing blanks.
(Yes, there is COH/COV, and fun game it is, but it's IMHO not really SF. It's its own genre.)
Also about most people playing one game at a time, that is true, but that's only half the equation. The other half is that most people don't stay in a game for ever. Last I've seen a number, it was 6 months average for a MMO player. Then he leaves. (Of course, averages are averages. Some people barely play for a month, some hang around for 3 years, but the average is around 6 months.) You eventually have seen it all, eventually you get bored of doing the same thing repeatedly as endgame, and bugger off.
Before someone jumps in to defend it: I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's just that (A) nobody can afford to make near-infinite content, so you keep doing new things for ever, and (B) people eventually get bored of doing the same thing every day. You'd get bored even of chocolate cake if that was all you ate, day after day.
Basically the behemoth that is WoW is shedding bored players all the time, by the millions, and getting new players all the time. Same as any other MMO. And it also gets a big chunk of its old players back after a while, because they didn't find another game to their liking.
Someone could make a damn good living by just offering all the ex-WoW-ers a new home. Of course, then it would have to not suck. That's where most have failed so far.
The traditional model of doing a half-arsed effort and maybe patching it (to be even worse) later, is all but dead. WoW may not have been that original, but it took the time to polish the whole thing far beyond what anyone else had tried. (If they even tried at all, that is.) It set a new standard. Going back to a traditional half-arsed, launched-unfinished MMO, is like going from colour TV back to monochrome for a lot of us.
So making that net that catches those falling off WoW, might take a lot more money and talent than it sounds. And apparently more than your average publisher feels like risking.
But, still, at least theoretically it's possible. The "???" between "1. buy some license" and "3. profit!!!" is simply: "make a polished game, and don't shove it out the door a year too early." And I'd expect that eventually it will happen. Maybe it'll be Stargate or maybe something else, but eventually it will happen.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's all about the time/cost/market share thing. Until Linux has a larger market share it's not worth the cost of developing games for Linux. Mainly though because most studios have their DX toolchain and developers without masses of Linux experience.
It's not even about the DirectX API either, it's about the IDEs, the HLSL/GLSL shader ones aswell as the C++ ones, it's about Photoshop and 3DS Max and whatever audio applications they use. Until there is a better alternative on Linux (and it has to be better, no studio is gonna change for "the same") then we are pretty fucked when it comes to commercial games for the most part. I hate the idea of developing for a single platform (not just in games, but generally).
Cross-platform games aren't that much harder to write. DirectX is a small part of any decent engine, everything is abstracted away like crazy. SDL/OpenGL/OpenAL can do pretty much anything that DX can do, in some cases even more (read geometry shaders on XP).
So basically the technology is there to write a totally cross-platform game just as easily. It's down to the toolchain and the cost of changing from what they are used to. The only thing that will force that switch is a greater non-Windows market share. Unfortunately, we are stuck in the catch-22 where 90% of the people I recommend Linux to stop listening when I tell them that they can't just go into a shop and buy a game and expect it to run. My hopes lie with Wine, once Wine is 99% compatible then the Windows specific toolchain won't matter any more.
Mac os will nice with they had good video cards a good price but you need $2300 + a over priced video card update to get a good mac for gameing.
Will a pay for playing time system work better then pay per month / 30 day blocks?
So people who don't play that much pay less and the people who are on 24/7 pay more.
Most of those screenshots don't look much like Stargate at all. The look and feel of some of the city designs and terrain is all off. That's not what the forests outside Vancouver look like at all!
on a Vista laptop
There's your problem. Vista's a lot better now than when it launched but it's still bleh.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.