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LucasArts, Bioware Announce Star Wars MMO
LucasArts and Bioware held a press conference today to confirm what has been suspected for a long time: they're working on a Star Wars MMO. It will be called Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Further coverage is available at Gamespot, and IGN has some of the concept art. An official website for the game was launched as well.
"According to the game's official announcement, Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader, with the galaxy divided by war between the Empire and the Sith. That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR, a time frame that, according to Zeschuk, 'is completely unexplored in the lore.' Players can take the role of either a Jedi, a Sith or other classic Star Wars characters -- and, as perhaps can be expected from BioWare, Muzyka says story will be a major component, underlying and driving all of the player's actions."
After a few years of relative peace in the galaxies, Darth Arts will turn to the dark side and fsck up everyone's game to make it more "appealing" to new players....
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to keep watching reruns of Episode 1....
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Noooooooooooo!!!!
Isn't there already a Star Wars MMO?...
First there were dolls, shirts, light sabers and manner of spin-off merchandise. I'm surprised that it took so long to get a MMO going. I expect to see people at scifi conventions dressed like a sith and wearing a belt with digital readout declaring their score/health/karma from the game. It's bound to boost cosplay in North America. The FSM knows we need more of that!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It's like a million screams all at once, and then silence.
I really wish they didn't make this an MMORPG, However, given the nature of the beast they will probably make a lot of money off of it.
Anyone ever see those anonymous death threats directed at random people online? Well, I'm going to do the opposite. I vow to track down the parent poster, where ever he is, drag him kicking and screaming out of his parents' basement, bathe him, put him in the sun until he gets a tan, teach him to speak English (as opposed to Trollish), set him up with a real job and girlfriend, and give him a life.
I wonder if there would be a class whose sole purpose is to spam laser blaster fire all over the battleground during the entire fight.
After failing with force unleashed Lucas Arts decide to hand ball yet another Star Wars game off to a competent company.
Maybe they need to compare themselves to Bioware and try to figure out where they're dropping the ball.
Message to George:
Yes we know you made the original Star Wars trillogy, yes it was good, yes I enjoyed it. Maybe it's time to move on and come up with something else that's original and just as good....
I hope this doesn't put off another Knight of the Old Republic game. I have no desire to pay a monthly fee to play in the Star Wars universe but on the other hand I loved the two KOTOR games that were made. ...and seriously, do we really need another MMO out there? I hope they at least do something original with this.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Isn't star wars galaxies still around? How does it compare?
Yeah, have you checked out that users journal history?
I'm not saying anything mean, but I am really scratching my head after browsing his journal and comment history.
I wonder if an elder geek couldn't save this one. BTW, Luke727, have you been bitch slapped or do you just get modded down quickly? Just kinda curious.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I really have a hard time seeing how story can meaningfully be integrated into an MMO. There's just too many people participating in the world in completely different ways. There's just practical matters, like what time zone do you put big events in? How do you evolve the story in a way that entertains the hardcore players on a day to day basis but also maintain consistency and meaningful interaction for more casual players who only put in a couple hours per week? What happens to your story when the players react in a way completely unexpected?
An real world example is EvE Online. Along side a mostly player driven universe, the devs have tried to run "storyline" events, and they hardly ever worked out. The players just didn't react as was hoped/expected (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully.) I remember one event where the devs tried to get a big bunch of casual players together to go fight a big scary ship that they'd never expect to be in combat with otherwise. But players of a large and powerful corporation accidently stumbled upon the target ship before the casual group could get there, and destroyed it first. When the casual group arrived and the ship was already dead, they turned against the dev characters' ships. And that's not even getting into the many cases where groups have purposely thwarted the devs' plans. Fortunately for EVE, these sorts of "story" events aren't a big part of the game, and not particularly important to its success.
If you're going to focus your game design on the story driven part, then you'd better find a way to let every single player be a part of it in a meaningful way. Otherwise a small group of hardcore players will dominate the storyline, and leave nothing for the rest
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Here's to hoping that they don't let Raph Koster anywhere near this game. In fact, can we get a restraining order against him for the entire dev team?
I dunno, I think killing him or her would be a better use of your time and would ultimately be what's best for society.
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Its WoW with blasters.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I take it that you don't like Star Wars or proper grammar.
This info was leaked months and months ago. No surprise, but very excited to see what's in store for us!
...make it Binary only for all I care... compiled for 32 and 64 bit.
Lots of sad and cynical posts so far, but I have to say I'm looking forward to. I loved KotOR, and I've been hanging out for this one for ages. I just hope they do it right. I played SWG for a while, if for no other reason than being an MMO in the Star Wars universe. Bioware did KotOR right, hope they can translate it to an MMO format successfully.
So on behalf of the Star Wars geeks, YAY!!!
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
You mean like Lewt Warz
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
How many times is LucasArts going to fit that line in?
it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise.
That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR
Uh, you're going to make a continuation of the KotOR franchise... 300 years after the events of that franchise?? LucasArts forced Obsidian to rush out KotOR II before Christmas and so they didn't have time to give the game the ending it deserved - no conflicts were resolved in a satisfactory manner, leaving it up to a future sequel. And now they're just going to jump 300 years into the future, a time when most of the characters from the last two games are dead, and expect it to make sense?
Yeah, good luck with that.
(Or more likely, they're going to start a new storyline entirely and they just slapped on the KotOR label for name recognition.)
Star Wars? Oh, yeah, my parents used to be into that.
"Bioware did KotOR right, hope they can translate it to an MMO format successfully."
And yet they messed up their own property. Gives me hope.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Oh no. I disappeared into KOTOR. I did not want to return to the real world. I was a Jedi. I believed it.
If this comes out, there is no going back. I will effectively disappear from meatspace. I will live off peanut butter, chocolate milk, and Mountain Dew. I will be a Jedi again. My powers will be greater than yours. I will be strong, courageous, and, when provoked, unleash a wrath so furious that you will stare in awe.
This forsaken material world I shall leave behind. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
I really hope that they allow me to "grandfather in" my Level 93 wookie cantina bacta-splooge collector. I almost made Jedi.
will they bolt SecuROM onto it? If so, I'm not buyin.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Neo-Nazi or Elder Geek? These are tough choices you offer.
My head just exploded into candy!
The Old Republic is so last millennium... didn't anyone see this game coming back then?
Most people don't get why the integral of "e to the x" is so funny. Most math majors don't have a sense of humor.
I hope it brings back the fantastic Dancer class.
I can't wait to do me some dirty dancing, Wookie style!
BLARRRHHAHHDHDDDDDDDDD!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
ANH +3: Empire - Arguably the high point
ANH +0: A New Hope - Pretty good
ANH -19: Revenge Of The Sith - Bad
ANH -22: Clone Wars - Very bad.
ANH -32: Phantom Menace - Terrible
ANH -1000...?
If we extrapolate the level of suck achieved as the canon goes back in time, there is the potential for a vortex of such terrible suck to be created that it sucks us all in long before the LHC ever comes close.
Our only hope is that the existing KOTOR games weren't just flukes and estabished the timeline vs. suck rule only applies to Lucas penned movies. We can but hope.
While they're at it, LucasArts should come out with a game called: "How To Beat A Horse To Death Like Nobody Else In History".
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Where do we sign up for your program?
I loved Galaxies when it first came out. Looking back with my rose-colored glasses what I remember loving the most was the roleplaying it brought out in me. I'm not normally a strong roleplayer, but I will roleplay back at other people. I tend to blend in with the crowd in that regard.
Galaxies compared to most MMO's I've played enabled some of the best roleplaying I've ever seen (I realize my limited experience of course, I'm sure a lot of hardcore roleplayers would laugh at me). A lot of what the game entailed was interacting with other players which, naturally, enabled a lot more roleplaying. Some examples are you would go out and grind like most MMO's but after a while you'd have wounds that you can't heal in the field. You'd need to head to town and visit the hospital where medic classes will grind their skills on you and heal you back up. Your mind would also get wounds (fatigued basically) that would need to be fixed up by entertainment, namely dancers and musicians. These two simple features allowed for a lot of fun roleplaying. Yes you could walk in and just sit there, but you could also really get into the roles... I actually made a very low IQ medic for my roleplaying. I made macros for healing people's wounds where my character would do random things such as tasting the medicine before giving it to patients. It was quite enjoyable. One of my favorite roleplayers stood at the shuttle bay and stood behind the otherwise empty ticket counter saying random airline things that made me crack up. Most were just classic airline jokes with star wars twist but it was very well done.
Games like WoW on the other hand are fun in their own right, but I find it a real challenge to roleplay and can't remember ever truly doing so in that game. Everything is setup for playing the game instead of ROLEplaying the game. I'm not asking for SWG back, but if they can make it easily roleplayable like SWG enabled, I'll be happy. Star Wars is still one of the best backdrops for a geek like me to get lost in.
of trumpeting up the story element when in a few years the servers are shut down and no one will be able to experience those stories again. Once the fan patch for kotor 2 is released, I intend on playing the first two kotor games again. I couldn't do that if they were MMO's.
I actually preferred pre cu SWG to WOW - flame away.
I am squeeing in fanboyish delight. Hopefully I can stop before I have to catch the train; this is probably a disturbing thing for a 30 year old software developer to be doing on public transport.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
In all fairness, though, I don't think it was a general Sony problem. The SWG team was something different and let to play by its own rules. Stuff like repeatedly lying to customers, the Sith Lord approach to dealing with players and board posts, etc, were something I haven't experienced in other Sony games.
And while the NGE and its bad interface were bad, let's not kid ourselves: pre-NGE SWG was a one-trick pony. It had exactly _one_ saving grace that everyone remembers fondly: the flexible character development system. That's it.
It was launched as a largely-empty DIKU MUD with graphics, without Jedi _or_ vehicles _or_ spaceships. If that's what SW is about, I rest my case. It's been a scramble since then to figure out how to shoehorn Jedi in. And even the excuse "but SW doesn't have thousands of Jedi"... well, they made it even worse lore-wise.
I mean, basically the story of a typical Jedi in SWG was: You're a grizzled old veteran, you've seen wars and have been on the wrong side as often as on the right side. You learned that winning and getting out in one piece beat being right. You setted in somewhere and took a job as an entertainer in a cantina. You learned pretty quickly that the pretty semi-naked girl or the bishounen in gay outfits get all the tips, and nobody even notices the master musician. You got your pretty haircut and (if apropriate) your implants and strutted your anatomy for cash. You didn't end up a misanthrope, you ended up despising every sentient species in the galaxy. Then you decided to try your hand at crafting. You prospected every corner of every known planet, you've made backroom backstabbing and deals, and generally made Hutts look like Mother Theresa by comparison. And you rose to the top like the biggest shit floats to the top of the septic tank. Then for reasons you'd rather not talk about, you went into smuggling instead. The less talked about that period the better. Then you tried your hand as a bounty hunter, and it's been largely an exercise in being a paid assassin, and elliminating gamblers who didn't pay their debts and opponents of some of the biggest scum in the galaxy. You learned again that being paid beats being morally right.
And only after that, when you're a jaded, cynical, burnt-out shell of a former human, _of_ _course_ you're ready to be trained as a Jedi.
I mean, hello? Wasn't that why they took them as kids? So they _haven't_ learned all those bad reflexes and views yet?
But even that's reading too much into it, because it was basically one big empty sandbox, where players were supposed to create their own content... but without the tools or rights to do so. Smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle, quests were generally a late addition and mostly an exercise in merchandising the SW key characters, etc. Even the holocron grind wasn't as much thought to be the little story I wrote above, it was just an unimaginative exercise in taking the old "remort" system of MUDs ten steps too far and turning it into an _unholy_ grind.
I'm sorry, but that's not a _Sony_ problem, that's a Raph Koster problem. That's his ideas you have at work there. I don't think, say, Sony's old Everquest was like that. It only became a Sony problem in as much as they let him tell them what to do in other games too, and for example in EQ2 they've been struggling to fix that bad touch ever since.
And even after that bad era, SWG still is a... weird exception even among Sony games. They didn't turn EQ2 into a FPS, for example. Or I don't remember such SWG-typical idiocies as for example having classes which don't even have a combat level and can't do the quests, in any other Sony game. Talk about a fundamentally broken balance. On the contrary, most of the rest evolved to have better balance, get more story, etc. Nor, again, lying to the customers instead of fixing the damned bug reports. Etc.
SWG also had their own rules on Sony's website. It's the only Sony game where unsubscribing took me to a page which basically said, "go away, we don't wa
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
SOE somehow botched up a goldmine in Star Wars Galaxies. If BioWare can assemble a good team of developers in the "MMO-know", I'm sure it will be a hit.
Players can take the role of [...] classic Star Wars characters.
Translation; the game will be filled with players named Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader.
Chronologically late.
killing him... would ultimately be what's best for society.
And the gene pool.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20760
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20757
Because it sound a lot like story is going to individualized as opposed to generalized. Every one is going to have a party of NPC's like the other two games. They have a lot of good things that makes me confident that this MMO might actually be worth paying a monthly fee for, and I have never done that before.
Your ideas fascinate me and I'd like to sign up for your jewsletter.
MMO chat until you get someone started about how green they are, then laugh when you ask them why they are hypocritically wasting lots of electricity playing a MMO game.
What is an MMO? There are clearly levels of nerd in this sector I cannot comprehend.
This game could become the first MMO that I will play, but only if there is a roleplaying server that I can join. The KOTOR games were immensely enjoyable, but to me at least, that was because of the atmosphere, the great characters, the backstory, the moral dilemma's and other roleplaying related things. The combat honestly wasn't particularly great.
If I can play a KOTOR MMO full of Kreia's and HK-47's, I'll be a very happy guy, but if it's going to be a world full of LrdKillMeister123's, then I don't even want to get anywhere near it.
If you remember the old SWG website then you remember how long the load times where for simple things like âmenusâ(TM). Ironically this was directly reflected in the load times that where constant in the game.
When I first played WoW I wondered how it was that I didnâ(TM)t have to wait to see what was in my bag... But, then, if you go to the WoW page it loads instantly and has reasonable navigation.
Fast forward to SWtOR and look at the front page. It takes a while to load, it is un-intuitive, thereâ(TM)s a ridiculous splash screen, pointless graphics and obnoxious sounds every time you hit the front page.
This does not portend well for the KotOR MMO my young padawan.
Revan at beyond the Outer-Rim and if the Outcast has contacted him/her ? Well, that freakin' blows...WTF!!! Damn it George... Finish what yer started...
Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader, with the galaxy divided by war between the Empire and the Sith.
Shouldn't that be "between the Republic and the Sith"? Or was there an Empire before the Republic before the Empire we came to know and love? Thanks.
Just went to http://www.swtor.com/ with FF 2.0.0.16 from Ubuntu 7.04, which sent me to a nice "Welcome old browsers" page. What gives ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
I can't believe how many people are bashing this without even seeing more about it. Personally I think Bioware did a great job with KOTOR and might actually do this MMO pretty well.
Leeroy Jenkins jokes
8/2005-10/22/2008
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
"I've got a bad feeling about this"
This only lucasarts as the factor that can f@ck up this game. i wonder if bioware will be able to prevent it.
perchance, if any execs or liaison from lucasarts reading this, i have one advice : "shut the f@ck up during and after game development and let bioware do this thing". else i go on paying blizzard each month.
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They should make a Monkey Island MMO. I miss the good old days of Lucasarts.
Never heard about The Force within Blood Elfs?
Am I eval()? - http://www.monst3r.com.br
why the execs in sony are being paid for anyway ? to run, govern things right ? if they let some fucktards ruin one of the biggest merchandises in the world, that means that they didnt do their job well.
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seriously when george lucas finally frickin dies, will this shit finally go away after 30some years. and where the @#$! will all his money go?! hes gotta have almost as much as B.Gates by now. QUIT FEEDING THE BEAST, maybe it'll stop producing shit. man i hate star wars, long live the Trek!
Blizzard says they're doing this because they're still working on the Zerg and Protoss campaigns but the Terran campaign and multiplayer (for all three races) is done so they're going to release that instead of waiting another year or more. So for the other races they have to build the maps, polish the story, do the cinematics, do whatever special stuff it is they say they're doing, and so on.
Kotor was considered rubbish?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I did the same look/double-take. He has some fairly intelligent (if not fully-developed posts - that is, reactionary musings rather than really trying to do justice to a subject) posts and then some really stupid ones, as well as a link to goatse on his profile.
Currently, me = ???
(clearly, I am the second step)
"Little is much when little you need."
What pisses me off is that Bioware has essentially abandoned the console gamers that made KOTOR such a bestseller. KOTOR sold something like three times the number of games on the Xbox than than it did on the PC. And Bioware is repaying us by making a PC-only MMO? WTF?!?!? Are they TRYING to piss off fans and lose money?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I think that's called ERP.
"Little is much when little you need."
The problem is, not everyone CAN be a hero. In any game (or RL for that matter), the heros are far outnumbered by the "grunts". And some of those grunts might work as hard as the heros, but never quite get into the limelight. Maybe they don't have the social skills or the gaming skills. Maybe they don't live in the mom's basement and game for 24/7. But for whatever reason they remain in the background.
That's always going to be the case in any game with large numbers of players.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Well, I guess we'll never know exactly what went on in there, but I just have to wonder.
Did Lucas actually tell them how to code it? Get into the tiniest details of the interface? Surely nobody (sane or half-competent) drags the client into that kind of talks.
I don't doubt that _some_ details got vetoed by Lucas, but I doubt that the whole NGE fiasco can be blamed on them. How much of it is really to blame on Lucas, and how much just on incompetent design and implementation?
The reason I wonder is that Bioware seemed to have had a lot more free hand with their KOTOR. I don't doubt that they had a bunch of details vetoed by Lucas or forced upon them, but the result was still a thoroughly enjoyable game.
For example, on one hand Bioware was free to move their game completely out of the trilogy time and invent their own story and planets and characters... on the other hand, the NGE turned the whole f-ing storyline into nothing more than a merchandising exercise for key SW characters. (You know, same as printing Vader's head on a t-shirt.) Did Lucas demand that? Is Lucas as schizophrenic as to behave that fundamentally differently to the two teams? Or is the unimaginative story in the NGE really just to blame on the SWG team?
Did Lucas force them to make the NGE first person... and not even update the enemy AI or interface to actually be fit for FPS play? Well, they didn't demand that KOTOR be first person or anything. How much of it is really due to Lucas's demands, and how much of that fucked-up interface is just... design out of spite, for lack of a better word? The whole thing almost feels like something designed out of spite.
And if SWG ended up practically micro-managed by Lucasarts, how did it come to that? Not many end up managed that way, even by Lucas, so it's a valid question. Just to play the devil's advocate: Can it be that Sony and RK just couldn't manage that team and that franchise, and Lucasarts ended up having to do that job too, whether they actually want it or not?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Lucasarts fanboy or anything, and I'm sure they have their share of the blame. I'm just wondering how much of it, and how _did_ it come to that.
Ah well, as I was saying, we'll probably never know.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
AFAIK diversity is best for the gene pool. Yes, that seems to include stupid-ass /. troll genes.
hopefully the people in charge of the new bioware star wars mmo will incorporate a crafting/merchant system as advanced and detailed as the one found in SWG, preNGE. for a few years my main character was a chef. it sounds weird in retrospect, especially when most of the mmorpgs out today are combat oriented, but i actually had a lot of fun. i was also part merchant and bioengineer. my days were spent decorating my restaurant and obtaining food resources and ingredients from players who would harvest the stuff. i would also spent a large amount of time exploring the planets, looking around for a good water spawn or a field of high quality space corn to place my harvesters. then, at the end of the day, i would do a lot of experimenting and i'd try to make the best recipe for bivoli or bespin port or mind brandy. then, i'd input the recipe to a food factory and a few hours later i'd have several crates of profitable food. the food system, after the chef revamp, i was pretty detailed, and different foods would buff different stats or abilities, and there was usually a decent demand for foods of various types. my character was a meek and mild mon calamari... if i ran into trouble trying to milk space herbivores or if bunch of spiders made a nest near my food harvesters, i had a scout blaster and a few pistol skills that i could use to try and defend myself. everything in SWG is horrible now, and the population issues are such that getting a new restaurant off the ground is impossible, and even leveling up a merchant is essentially impossible because of the complete lack of grind-quality ingredients, as well as a market for mid-level foods and stuff... ...but it would be great to see a crafting system like this in a new mmorpg. it would be such a refreshing change from the bland crafting found in warhammer online, or world of warcraft, for example.
But, how can it be a war between the Empire and the Sith if the Empire doesn't rise until Episode 3 and this is set "thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader" at the height of the Old Republic? Sounds like its a war between the REPUBLIC and the Sith as seen in KoTOR.
My Babylon
Wasn't Bioware swallowed up by EA? Although, to be fair, I think EA might have been smart enough to buy the company, and leave it autonomous enough to not ruin it, but we'll see.
Anyone ever see those anonymous death threats directed at random people online? Well, I'm going to do the opposite. I vow to track down the parent poster, where ever he is, drag him kicking and screaming out of his parents' basement, bathe him, put him in the sun until he gets a tan, teach him to speak English (as opposed to Trollish), set him up with a real job and girlfriend, and give him a life.
Your goal, while noble, seems a little cost-and-labor intensive...
-
Although, on the other hand, a threat to change this guy's life is just as cheap as a threat to kill him
No sig for the moment.
I was pretty content to read my fellow gamer's replies and see how much excitement there was for this title, not to mention reading some posts on just how bad SOE and LucasArts fucked over SWG but then I kept running into bashes and trolls. The game is not out and people are already on the warpath? I decided to post my ruminations about SWG, hope for SWTOR, and a pondering on why the bashing so bear with me if you will.
Ruminations (I'll bitch later): I played SWG for 2+ years, almost from day one. I was there for what can only be called an extended beta phase since Galaxies live was NOT complete. Bases were missing levels or working elevators, quests did not always have a completion, and a lot of the planets seemed empty. Except for Corellia :-p. On a positive note, the freedom to develop your character was highly original and one of the best things about SWG. Even if you met, say, another Teras Kasi/Dancer* in the game they more than likely had alloted their skill points differently than you did. They surely had different weapons, different armor (well, maybe different armor since we all had 90% kinetic resist - lol), and a slightly different play style. The "sandbox" game that SWG was on initial release took more thought and intelligence to get into that simply picking "warrior", but that made it fun.
Also, the great crafting system and mostly player run economy. I ran three accounts (and then dropped to two) so that I could have a combat player and a crafter - and enough lots to put down harvesters, houses, and crafting stations ;-). Weren't lot swaps fun? Anyway, the detailed crafting system pricked the geek number cruncher in a lot of us and it was fun to hunt down resources. Specially if you were tired of combat or running around in space. There was a thrill at finding some 900oq (overall quality, if I'm remembering correctly) copper or high rating power or some uber grains. I was one of the top contributers on my server to the SWGCraft.com website back when it was active and made almost daily updates so that I, and my fellow crafters, had access to good intel. Ahh, the good ole days of running for my life on Endor because I had no combat skills on my crafter and I was tracking down some hot resource :-p. It was all fun while it lasted...
Hope for SWTOR: Well, the concept art looks fantastic and Bioware - IF frackin' EA and LucasArts will leave them alone - makes pretty damn good games so there is hope they can pull this off. I like the idea of a story driven MMO but I hope that it does not DEFINE you completely. Sometimes hunting down and killing shit is very satisfying :-D. I do not want to be forced into following a storyline so that I can progress in the game. I would also like to go off the reservation, as it were, and start hunting down Jedi (I played Imperial in SWG, like I'm going to switch sides now *eg*) or maybe some Alliance/whatever Diplomat needs to be reminded of their place in the universe? I also would like to see a crafting system like what SWG had put in place. Something that I can crunch some numbers on, something that will make me think, a system that will be a challenge other than "Oh shit, I need to go kill 400 banthas and skin them for hide again." Now, I don't mind skinning banthas but I would like some hides to be high quality during one week (or two week) period and then the next one mediocre and so on. Not just the same hide every time. Crafting should be a process with some thinking behind it (Should I add in this semi-rare copper to get higher stats or make a batch of decent gear with the more common form?) and not just "I need 20 light leather, 2 copper bars, and 4 pieces of string." Challenge the players! Yes, you might not reach World of Warcraft numbers in terms of subscribers but you will get a large, dedicated, usually intelligent player-base.
Please do not give us a twitch based FPS combat system either. Something like the old SWG or even WOW's combat system would be good. Click o
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
unfortunately it was.
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I see that rule 34 is alive and kicking. That's almost shameful, dude. Wait. Wookies? Where do I sign up?
I'm an idiot, I just re-read the article. I give it no chance of succeeding now.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
The original game had massive potential, it was a wide open sandbox environment where you could feel free to be part of a huge civilization. It felt natural and realistic in some ways that every other MMO has failed to achieve. The character creation system was nothing short of brilliant. The crafting system was also far in advance of anything else before or since. Yes, it had massive faults. The whole Jedi fiasco and holocron unlocking etc was an absolutely pathetic way to implement Jedi. The combat system was and remains horrible. The quests lacked for something as well and were always rather lifeless - but then I *hate* quests in any MMO so I am naturally biased. However, no game since has let me play a character who was just an Entertainer - in a highly flexible manner that allowed for some real creativity. No MMO has let me just be a crafter and participate in "economic pvp" with other crafters in a completely player driven economy. Nothing has even come close. Now, those 2 styles of gameplay are not for everyone, nor are they all I did (I mastered 19 professions of the 32 on my main character, none of it done for Hologrinding for Jedi (I had no interest in being a Jedi), but just for the hell of it and to try new things). The game just kept slipping downhill with each major revision. The development team that replaced the original developers just didn't get the original design at all, and tried to warp it into a poorman's WOW clone/standard MMO. The NGE (Negative Game Enhancement) has to be the singlemost botched attempt of how to develop an MMO in gaming history and should be the industry standard textbook case on what NOT to do. That was foisted on the SWG developers by Lucasarts from what we can deduce and they were told it was going live with (pretty much) zero testing no matter what. I don't think the SWG developers saw it coming, since they had been developing new content and changes right up until the hammer fell - why bother announcing a whole new Creature Handler class system when you know that it will never go live? I hope Bioware is intelligent enough to take a few good things from SWG and ignore the rest (including the entire combat system), and doesn't just produce another fucking WOW clone in the hopes of getting a huge playerbase. The IP has the most massive potential of any intellectual property out there and it would be a shame to see another pathetic game that emulates WOW's crappy "easy-mode" design again, and instead I would rather see something that lives up to the potential. I am worried about their "entirely story driven" promises since picking any one single approach to MMO design is a major mistake IMHO. I hate quests and hate being ramrodded into someone else's idea of my character's "story" (ie exactly like everyone else's story). I want a sandbox system where the story is what I do with my character and I am free to lose myself in an alien environment I can immerse myself in. Sadly I don't think that most people get the attraction of that sort of environment because no one is coding them these days.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Ooh, ooh! Do me next!
I haven't played either of them, but how is this different from what you can do in Second Life? From reading about it, it seems to have a "player driven economy", and the fact that you can transfer in and out to physical currency seems good. If someone is good at the in-game economy, they can make real money.
Possibility would be, that you begin as a small worker, townsman, Farmer what ever, and you don't know who is a NPC and who a normal player, at the beginning you get a random name, and you only can change it whit the time. You also have to behave your self or you get Punished by the other townsfolk, so you have to do the normal stuff, until you got enough money to charter a space-carrier to travel to different planets and places, But in all this time you have to keep in mind to maintain a low profile to don't get known, because evil Bounty hunters will hunt you down. So you become a member of a space-freighter or you can join the army, you know, you live in this world, with the people, in the KOTOR world, that would be awesome, not riding from quest to quest and gaining Xp but actually living there and seeking Adventures.
And this is a surprise? They essentially did the same thing to the PC community when they made KOTOR X-Box only to begin with. Many from the PC community said the exact same thing. The primary difference is there was a multiple game history with the PC community prior to KOTOR.
Well, that's kinda _why_ I wonder. The way I remember that article, they had free reign to choose the era too.
But even the era isn't really everything. Bioware ended up writing the history of the Sand People, for example, in the process, plus invented new planets, some bits of galactic history, etc, all which do influence the "present". They pretty much wrote new pieces of SW canon. And Lucas apparently had no problem with that.
I kind of have trouble reconciling a Lucas which is more like "do whatever you want" to Bioware, with the image of him being the iron-fisted despot of WoW. _If_ he ended up ruling SWG with an iron fist, I dunno, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit more than "I don't like your turrets" involved. Like maybe that they were really shitting on his franchise.
As I was saying, it's just idle musings and I don't actually _know_ what happened there. So it's all wild guesses and trying to put two and two together. Something doesn't quite add up there. Of course, I'm probably wrong about what's really missing in that equation. I just can't help wondering anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, that ought to scare him away! OMG, a GIRLfriend!
http://www.marines.com/
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on