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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."
Noooooooooooo!!!!
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.
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.
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Isn't star wars galaxies still around? How does it compare?
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?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galaxies
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The first Star Wars MMO came out 5 years ago. Star Wars Galaxies couldn't live up to the hype but it had some good ideas in it such as its crafting system. SOE essentially killed it by entirely revamping the combat system, not even the space expansion could save it. It also didn't help that the game really had no plot to speak of to begin with. This new MMO will undoubtedly be the final nail in the coffin for Star Wars Galaxies.
I take it that you don't like Star Wars or proper grammar.
...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
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Failing? Didn't the game sell almost 2 million copies?
"LucasArts has already shipped 4.3 million copies of the game, but it's proved so popular they've told the factory to make some extra copies. Looks like The Force Unleashed could be the most popular Star Wars game to date - unsurprising when you consider it's one of the least rubbish"
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=243312
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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!
No, there was but sony got stupid and screwed it up like everything else they touch. They thought they could make a turned based game system made for adults into a fps system, sorta, for 12-15 year olds. They thought wrong.
I thought that in the end, there can be only one?
Have you seen the arrow?
Where do we sign up for your program?
Sifting through pig turds looking for grains wheat to eat, is not fun.
...
Yeah, like there is a Highlander 2.
"There can be only one."
There should have been only one!
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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.
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.
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?
I actually look at it from the other direction. Maybe they're putting this game 300 years afterward for the express reason that all the previous characters are dead. That way, when/if this MMO fails (and even if it doesn't--there are a lot of people with no interest in these online games), they can go ahead and release another standalone KotOR game or two and finish up the KotOR story proper.
Or maybe that's just hope talking :(
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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.
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.