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Star Wars: The Old Republic Launch Date Announced
BioWare announced today that their upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, will launch on December 20 in North America, and December 22 in Europe. They've released a new trailer for the game, and reiterated that they'll be throttling logins early on to prevent server instability. Gamasutra recently spoke with SW:TOR project lead James Ohlen about finishing up the game and preparing it for launch. He said, "We're also focused on game balance for combat, for itemization, for the social systems. We've been running a lot of tests, we're getting a lot of feedback on the game. And when we get that feedback, we use it to make tweaks and changes. We're not making major changes now, we're just making changes that we can."
Would have rathered KOTR III.
I'm curious as to how big a game this will be. Is it fair to compare it with WOW or Star Trek Online?
It's real simple. You've bought the game client with the understanding that the game requires a service to play. It takes money to maintain the service...therefore a monthly fee. Why do people have such a hard time with this? Do you think Ultima Online would still be around it you just spent $20 on the game client 15 years ago and had been using the service daily ever since? No. The money to maintain the service based on the sales of the initial game client would have dried up a long long time ago. And most of that money went to paying back the initial development costs anyway.
And good luck with not paying road-tax for your newly bought car or having to keep filling it up with fuel.
As for your TV, what a rip-off, 8000 euro I payed for mine and now they expect me to pay a license fee AND the cable company AND for blu-ray movies.
You are perfectly correct in demanding for for about 40 euro a company keep a massive server farm running for years on end AND keep customer support on line every time you can't figure out a quest, all payed from the same 40 euro's.
What makes people so detached from reality that they think games like this can be run for free? Are they so in capable of doing any basic accounting that they truly can't see that a product with ongoing costs must have ongoing income?
Maybe to some its sound amazingly insightful that you are to cheap to pay 15 bucks for a piece of entertainment per month, to me it just says you are amazingly cheap. For most gamers it comes down to less then a buck an hour and quickly far far less. Only the internet is cheaper. Are you upset that when you payed for your modem the telephone company still wanted more money from you each month?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Guild wars does not have a persistent world, it has a few chat room areas that are instanced to hell and back and then when you enter the game world itself you are in your own little instance with just your own people.
(To those who do not understand this, an ordinary PC is perfectly capable of running a game world for a FPS. Even sharing that world with a few other people is not impossible, see all the self-hosted FPS games the PC was famous for). But start upping the number of people in the same game world and performance takes a nosedive. Years ago there was a FPS game that was supposed to support 256 players at once. Massive battles BUT also massive costs, because where previous FPS companies relied for online play on customer supplying the hardware and bandwidth, this company had to do it themselves. It is the reason there are virtually no massive FPS games out there, nobody can afford to run the server for free.
GW runs a large farm of cheap cheerfull servers, each time a player or small group leaves the instanced chat room area, they enter their own small area that can be handled by ordinary cheap commodity PC hardware. Think off not just the CPU but also memory. Memory has a sweet point for price, if you can outfit your servers with 4gb at 50 or 8gb at 150 then if your server can make do with 4gb you save a LOT of money. And the memory difference for a full size persistent game world is far greater. Try 32-64 GB. Now look at your PC specs. Can it handle that? No. It can't. You need to go to server grade hardware and pay the price.
Each GW instance is much cheaper to run then a persistent world for say WoW because the hardware itself is cheaper. GW can also re-use its hardware far more efficiently, each server does not care what instance it runs, if all of GW's player base wanted to play the same instance, all its servers would run the same instance for all the individual groups. Very efficient BUT not a proper persistent world as western style MMO's know it.
Their customer support is also crap and they have no such thing as moderation.
Comparing Guild Wars with say WoW is like comparing McD drive through with a full service restaurant.And before any GW fans bite my head off, I am not saying McD is bad because it is cheap, I am saying that because of the different style, its low price cannot be compared to a restaurant offering a different service level
MMO's like AoC that use instancing are always slammed for it because people want to play in a big world, not their own little corner. Guild Wars took it to extremes. You can't run into another player during a quest or even socialize and meet up in the game world. No 100 man gatherings in GW.
Your english is better then mine, your understanding of MMO's is a lot worse.
If you want a clear example of costs, I played Lotro the most. I have had a number of encounters with customer support, all good to be honest BUT they each took about 5-10 minutes to resolve. Not a lot of time you might say BUT together they amount to a bit over an hour at least. How much does it cost to have a person spend 1 hour on a customer? Saleries vary a lot BUT it will come awfully close to 40-50 euro's even at the absolute lowest rates.
So... how is the company supposed to fund the development of the game, pay for bug fixes and new content, server costs AND support when just my support needs alone cost more then the game cost? And that is even supposing that the full box price goes to the game company, which it doesn't.
Really, when you claim you can run WoW and now SWTOR of the small sum a company gets for a box sales for years on end... you got to know that you are missing something.
Play Guild Wars and play WoW, you will see they are VERY different games. Why then does GW charge a price when there are games I can play online for free by running them on my own machine! THIEFS!
Margins on software in gaming... please, grow up. The 40 euro in the shop includes money that goes to the retaile
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For the most part you are correct, but from what I played in the Beta, story plays a MUCH larger part in the game than in WoW. Every quest has voiced dialogue that is specific to your class, along with dialogue options, etc. The Dialogue wheel from Mass Effect shows up when you can select a dialogue. Sometimes you'll say things that get you Darkside or Lightside points. Will this matter hugely? No, not really, though apparently your LS / DS points will change some skills you can use.. Does the dialogue let you change the quests you'll be doing? No. Does it make accepting quests more fun? Absolutely. Skipping quest dialogue in this game isn't like skipping it in WoW, it would be like skipping it in Mass Effect. For me, this is a big enough difference to make TOR worth playing. Plus, they really took the dialogue seriously, which makes me take it seriously too. I found myself being on vent and saying "Okay, AFK, taking a quest." and muting vent, so I would be able to pay attention to what was going on. Of course, if when you play Mass Effect you just blast through the dialogue so you can get on with it, none of this will make any difference.