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Stargate Worlds Beta Begins Oct. 15th

Posted by Soulskill on from the work-in-progress dept.

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.

17 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Licensees and licensers: stop being stupid by bconway · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
    1. Re:Licensees and licensers: stop being stupid by Ostracus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "MMOs require a significant time investment, and most people don't play more than one at a time. "

      Take one failing economy and add a dash of living with one's parents and suddenly people have plenty of time.

      --
      Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
    2. Re:Licensees and licensers: stop being stupid by Arngautr · · Score: 5, Funny

      Indeed

    3. Re:Licensees and licensers: stop being stupid by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But he may have a point about being able to play only one MMOG at a time, and how carefully us users are going to analyze it before we even pay a single dollar.

    4. Re:Licensees and licensers: stop being stupid by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think the key word here is *novel*. You're seeing a new flood of MMOs, because publishers and developers are salivating all over themselves, seeing how WoW is raking in more cash yearly than some third-world countries. Obviously, they want a piece of the action too. Unfortunately, the MMO is a bit of a different beast than most games.

      1) The development costs are more significant. By definition, MMOs have to be very content-rich game. Moreover, you have the added technical complication of developing a server infrastructure along with your game.

      2) It's much harder to innovate in terms of gameplay. Fast action in an MMO is still damn near technically impossible with today's internet. Too many users simply don't have the low latency needed to compete in a twitch game. As such, most MMOs end up doing statistical combat. Point and click on a monster, and the server rolls the dice. The other problem is world persistence - you can't dramatically alter the state of the world without impacting every other player. As such, most MMO games simply punt on this. The player can't truly alter the state of the world, and so any actions ultimately feel futile.

      3) A pay-to-play model is a limiting factor. People play a fewer number of MMOs than traditional games because of the monthly fee. As such, the market space is more fiercely competitive in an already competitive industry. Gamers already playing with one game are highly unlikely to subscribe to another game. Additionally, many gamers are simply uncomfortable with the notion of paying for a game, and then *also* paying a monthly fee, and so won't be a part of the market regardless.

      4) MMOs require a minimum amount of user participation in order to remain commercially viable. Unless the game develops a certain amount of traction, the servers are likely to shut down. After that, the game becomes unplayable forever. Gamers are aware of this, and so are often wary of MMOs that seem questionable.

      We've already seen EA try and fail in this space. Earth and Beyond, The Sims Online, etc... Others have also had their share of failure: Asheron's Call 2, Auto Assault... These are not piddling startup companies or unknown properties here.

      I think we're heading for a large number of MMOs released in the near future, and an almost equally large number of MMO failures and closures about a year or two from now. After that, only the largest competitors will be left, along with a small number of innovators. And by then, most publishers will be scared to death of the MMO market.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. Right... by Misanthrope · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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

    1. Re:Right... by elrous0 · · Score: 2, Funny

      I'd much rather be dipped in chocolate.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. Looks like ass by DirtySouthAfrican · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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"

    1. Re:Looks like ass by johannesg · · Score: 3, Interesting

      SG1 managed a fairly consistent look (it looked a lot like Canada, except with medieval villages ;-) ), so I'm a little surprised that none of the screenshots seem to reflect this. Maybe trees are just too boring?

    2. Re:Looks like ass by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      SG1 managed a fairly consistent look (it looked a lot like Canada, except with medieval villages ;-) ), so I'm a little surprised that none of the screenshots seem to reflect this. Maybe trees are just too boring?

      That's a bug, not a feature. Even earth isn't anywhere near that consistent, and yet all planets in this galaxy and beyond look like Canada? There should be deserts and rain forests, great plains and high mountains, islands and reefs at the very least, if not even more exotic. So while not exactly canon I consider that a practical limitation just like convienently humans, goa'uld, jaffa, wraiths and so on all look humanoid, while the story is better than most you know it's so humans can play all the roles without CG or puppets.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:Looks like ass by hab136 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Even earth isn't anywhere near that consistent, and yet all planets in this galaxy and beyond look like Canada? There should be deserts and rain forests, great plains and high mountains, islands and reefs at the very least, if not even more exotic.

      They did have deserts and such, but there were used sparingly. The explanation given - that the Ancients settled on planets that were nice (or were terraformed to be nice), and put the stargates and villages in hospitable locales - does make a lot of sense. The exceptions are mostly where the Goa'uld moved the stargates to places for mining.

      "Every planet looks like Canada" was done for cost reasons, but they did fit it in the storyline fairly well.

  4. SG1 humour by Secret+Rabbit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    """
    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.
    """

    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.

  5. Re:You should be more worried about CHRIST than OR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Scary, isn't it?

    Not really, since everything you just posted is sensationalist fantasy and utter rubbish.

  6. Re:DIBS! by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Funny

    Better then $200 plastic sneakers, baggy pants, droopy t-shirt, and some cheap gold chains. (At least that is how the black guys I see at Taco Bell look like mostly.) At least when black guys were shown as wild African men they were warriors - now what the hell are they supposed to be?

    I may be to white to understand but from my point of view I'll take some rippling muscles and a spear as my stereotype any day. Give whitey his light saber but Mr African Warrior man will kick his ass with nothing but a bit of stick and a dazzling smile. All black men should talk like James Earl Jones too. That guy is awesome. I don't think white guys could get away with sounding like that though. Even Darth Vader is black - if Anakin talked that way we'd all be like wtf.

    Why complain if your stereotype makes you look like a stud? Or anyway that is my theory on stereotypes.

    --
    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
  7. Actually... by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Actually... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      EVE online is not really a scifi game. Its a set of scifi spreadsheets with a pretty interface.

  8. Re:System Requirements by Kandenshi · · Score: 2, Informative

    It appears that they don't have officially released specs as of yet. Their FAQ still isn't even 100% sure what platforms will be used. -_- PC is sure of course, but other than that...

    Currently the plan for Stargate Worlds is to release on the PC. However, we realize that there are MMO and Stargate fans on many platforms, and we would like to explore as many of these options as we can. Once we have confirmed which platforms will be supported we will make an announcement on this website.

    There's some speculative posts on the forum about what plausible system requirements there will be. The best info I can find is on the Stargate-Worlds wiki

    :

    Currently the public plan is to release Stargate Worlds only on the PC. However CME have indicated that they would like to release the game for other operating systems and consoles, most likely the XBox360.[5][6][7] There are no definitive set of system requirements at this stage, and they are unlikely to be available till much closer till the release of the game. It is expected that any current middle to high end PC will be able to run the game. [8] Better hardware will result in a better graphics experience. The team is using dual 3GHz Xenon CPUs with dual cores with 4 gigs of RAM 512 Meg Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT as their development platform.[9] And while the game is currently being built for Windows XP, it will support Vista as well.[10]

    At this stage, whilst the devs would like to support it, no decision has yet been made regarding dial-up.