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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.
From TFA
Plus, since you're adventuring with your buddies that are playing other classes, they'll be telling you some of the exciting stuff they're doing. You're going to get tidbits that might really get you interested in playing one of those other classes. It's probably going to make you excited to try things out.
Wrong, we just want to choke underlings with the force.
Yeah, just as some of us still log into EverQuest from time to time. The key thing to remember about a Star Wars MMO is a large chunk of the market cares not for anything SW related. I would assume something like a Dune MMO would garner far more interest from fans and the unacquainted alike.
Maybe current play mechanics can't do a SW game justice... or maybe... just maybe... it's the fact it's a shallow and convoluted universe that's been raped by it's creator an anyone else with enough time to pen a novel to be sold at the local supermarket... Maybe...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
..but a story alone can't carry a game. Look at all the other MMOs and their quests. OK, so much of the story in MMOs is more background than anything else, but generally the quests, the actions you need to complete the quests, are rather dull and uninspiring (which is why I like that in WAR you can level up completely via PVP). Kill beavers until they drop a single beaver testicle until you have 10. Fight a spell caster that's AI amounts to casting the same spell on you over and over again. Go to some stupid place in the environment where you need to right click the object. And so on. Questing in MMOs by itself, IMO, is very, very boring. The real question is, will the gameplay be fresh and exciting enough to justify the expansiveness and the story line, and if so, how well will it interact in PVP?
Additionally, endgame: someone might not care to play the other classes, even if the story and game experience is different. They have a top-level character, they don't want to just give him up. Will there be good endgame? No good endgame can kill an MMO, just look at Age of Conan.
The moment I saw there were kill quests, levels and caps I decided this wasn't the game for me. People continually say "levels are the only way". You know what, the reason Gygax and Arneson are seen as development genius' isn't because they gave up and went "but this is how it always is". They developed levels. It was a unique and innovative system for creating characters that can advance beyond their initial stats (or beyond a single enormous transformation, like a pawn into a queen).
But the days of the level are coming to an end (or so I pray). More and more RPG players grow tired of levels--most now see them as other gamers see installation time. "We can't start playing the REAL game until max level." But there are alternatives!
Games like Tri-Stat use character points instead of levels. Upon completing portions of a story, and as bonus points based on how well you played a character or any other number of things, you receive Character Points with which to buy customizable skills and gear. Some say they are like "levels", but the fact you start with 350 of them and they go into your stats, gear and skill acquisition make them a clearly different beast.
A lot of games have abandoned even that and just started pooling experience points directly into stats. Games like Pokemon (yes, its a child's game, but innovative never the less) used levels, but behind the scenes gave each stat a different experience bar that rose depending on your race and the opponent's you beat.
Some games have abandoned levels and abilities altogether, instead focusing on gaming skill. A lot of people just call these "fighters" or "FPS" + MMORPG mixes, but really they can become quite fun.
But the big problem I have with Star Wars having levels based on quests is simply that too many quests just don't make sense given the setting. Jedi weren't supposed to go forth and kill. They were supposed to negotiate first and try to avoid battle. Unfortunately, there's no good way of mass-diplomacy aside from needlessly complicated (and frankly lame) sets of dialogue choices that lead to a predictable (and, if you have something like Thottbot) reliable outcome.
Now if they could make a living and breathing game with characters to interact with that are controlled by GMs and other players who can actually make a difference in the world...
Unfortunately MMORPGs are scared of idiots willing to run around blowing up random planets just for fun. Leading me to another point. Actions should have consequences, the final knife in the corpse of this game (for me, of course). This is another WoW/EQ/MUD style game where nothing you do accounts for anything other than leveling and gear mongering. They claim you can change companion's, but lets face it. In the end your not changing the world around you. Your not really talking with other characters. Your a hamster in a wheel clicking away to get to the "next stage of power" to access more content that millions of others have or will access themselves.
Some people enjoy that. I personally don't. I wish I could diplomatically barter with another player for control over a star system's spice flow that we've worked hard to get control of. And I don't want that player to just be able to kill me (or have some other random player run up and kill one or both of us) without consequence. In some zones in WoW you can kill someone who attacked you without the local guards attacking you due to high reputation with that faction. But lets face it, if you just ran around killing people, eventually even a faction your considered a hero in would start viewing you differently.
But I'm a spoiled Tabletop nerd who has been given the ultimate game system--a living breathing human being who can flesh out a world custom tailored to the needs of me and my friends. That's a real GM. Current GMs in MMORPGs are no more than tech support and referees.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
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.
>Ya, good luck with that.
Sniping WoW customers isnt that hard, heck I used to bullseye womp rats in my t-16 back home, and they werent much larger than most WoW players.
It worked well for City Of Heroes. Every player in COH is, at least in the design guideline, equal to three minions _and_ a lieutenant. That's what's needed for a fight against a hero to be a 50-50 chance, you know, better have a potion (ok, "inspiration") ready.
But that's ok, because the NPCs are also generated in packs of 3 for a solo mission, or pretty much in platoons for an 8 player group.
And yes, nobody seems to have a problem with being in a city with a thousand super-heroes roaming the streets at any given time.
Generally, when it comes to MMOs, probably the only sane option is to just accept what works and is proven to work, and not think much about what would be "realistic". Starting from the original idea waay back that it would be unrealistic to have quests, because it would be unrealistic if 1000 people saved the same princess or killed the same arch-villain. It turns out that people actually get used quite easily to situations along the lines of,
"Ok, did everyone get Van Cleef's head?"
"Yep, I did."
"Wait, I've got to junk something and then I'll take it too."
"I killed him yesterday, thanks"
"Crap, my buddy disconnected. Guess we'll have to come tomorrow so he can get VC's head too."
Same here. Even when logically it would make little sense to have 10,000 legendary bounty hunters, the players invariably can wrap their mind around that concept just fine anyway.
And, in the end, is it that illogical? How good do you have to be, to be a heroic version of whatever you're doing. One in a million? Being one in a million sounds pretty special to me. Well, a planet like Earth has some 6000 people who are one-in-a-million, and a planet like Coruscant could have 100,000 by itself, or more than enough for any server's population by itself. And there's a whole galaxy out there in Star Wars. There are probably trillions of trillions of sentient humanoids across the galaxy, and taking the best-of-the best, the one-in-a-million people would still mean more players than WoW has total or even than the Earth's total population.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What language can I write my user-interface mods in? How much of the UI can I re-write using that language? ...
That first one is really the show-stopper for most games.
You and the 3 other people who care more about what language they write UI mods in than actually playing the game.