Further Details On the Star Wars MMO

Now that the recent announcement about Star Wars: The Old Republic has had time to sink in, specific details about the game are beginning to come to light. Massively, in particular, has a variety of interviews and in-depth looks at the classes, the combat, and the setting of the game. "When you play like a Jedi from 1 to max, and then decide to start as a Sith, you won't see any content that will be the same." They also discuss the leveling, questing and companion characters. "We want you to think of them as actual companions on your journeys throughout the game. Your actions are going to change how your companion characters develop." Eurogamer is running a preview of the game, and a wiki has sprung up to catalog all of the new information. Other tidbits: support for Star Wars Galaxies will continue; the new game will be PC only; and LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the World of Warcraft customer base.

Comments

X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter MMO

[Culture20]

Lucasarts: What were your most popular games? X-Wing? Tie Fighter? Hmm... Make what everyone's wanted for a Looooong time, a MMO Star Wars starfighter game.

Load 128 players into a 100(Tie) versus 28(xwing) battle with a little briefing ahead of time as to the goals, maybe even include capital ship piloting and hyperspace buoys for tactics. Racing the Kessel Run, Speeder races, Blasting a womp-rat in your T-16; these things are fun, even more fun against other human-level intelligences. A Star Wars RPG? I've got old West End books for that, and it's sooo much better than what a computer could ever provide.

Re:...Nothing to see here

[Aeonite]

You might want to check out Hellas. Sci-fi RPG with a Classical Greek twist. No levels, epic storyline, custom worlds. Uses the Omni System (from Talislanta).

http://www.hellasrpg.com/

Re:Story, yes...

[bm_luethke]

One of the main reasons I do not play most MMO's is that I find I am paying a company for *me* to produce content.

I also tend to note that, yes the world is huge, but it is the same 50 tile sets spread out over huge area with the same 50 creatures randomly placed in it. It may take me two full days real time to get from one of the continent to the other and you may see 2000 different enemies to fight, but after the first thirty to sixty minutes you've pretty much seen everything you are going to - the only thing that changes is now instead of level 5 wolves you are seeing level 20 dire wolves with red eyes.

Of course in any story driven game there will come a point where you have no more story. The so called "end game" has nothing, you are done with the story - for a game that depends on a monthly subscription fee that is bad. But then the people who want grind do not want the story bits at the front (after all, the only thing that counts is high end raids and such) and the people who want story do not care about raiding the same place over and over. So, most MMO's go the way of the grinder simply because that is where their revenue stream is.

I'm on the story end of the spectrum. For my self the best "MMO" I've played is Guild Wars. I put MMO in quotes because it is only loosely one - but then that is why I like it so much. It suffers badly from no end game - after all once you complete the story all you have is grind. It also doesn't depend on a subscription model - I got the content I payed for and now if the players create extra then great (sorta an odd take on Open Source - it would be the equivalent of requiring a normal fee for a piece of software - along with a mostly normal EULA - but getting the code and rights to change it along with that price).

It's not that I do not enjoy "end game grind" (I really wish GW did better on that end) and such - it's that I feel ripped off paying someone a monthly fee for me to make the game good.

Re:...Nothing to see here

[zippthorne]

I think he's trying to say that leveling is kind of a cop-out. You get some of the benefits of an improvement system, but the resource overhead (in programmer time, designer time, etc.) is pretty small. It's basically "get points for clicking something" -> points reach threshold, advance level by 1. It's like playing a several months long game of freakin' space invaders, and you're playing as the invaders...

If you're weak enough that you have to be clever to kill something in WoW, at least, you end up having to have a lot of recovery time between kills, which makes your XP/S rate go down. You're actually rewarded for NOT being clever...

Now, if you do away with levels and instead had some kind of zero-sum XP game where.. say.. if you spend all your time sitting around town "crafting" you get better at it, but your character gets fat and can't run very fast, or you learn magic, but your muscles get weak from using magic fr everything, etc...

If every gain had a trade-off, there might be some interesting effects. Do you dry your darndest to stay average at everything? Do you spend all your time in the library reading spellbooks until you're an epic caster but you have to pay someone to carry you around?

WoW is a good game, especially all the little jokes. (it's a lot like Futurama in that respect: layers of jokes that you might not even realize were there the first time around) But the great thing about WoW was that they didn't set out to steal users from Everquest. Their plan was to grow the market. And grow it they did.