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Star Wars: the Old Republic Launches
Today marks the official launch of Star Wars: the Old Republic, a new MMOG from BioWare, EA, and LucasArts. The game's population has been building throughout the week as players who pre-ordered were granted early access, but now the gates have been thrown open to everyone. By using the Star Wars universe and a 'story-driven' approach to MMO gameplay, BioWare hopes to draw in a new group of players who don't typically consider themselves MMO gamers. Since the game is still largely unexplored, comprehensive reviews have yet to be written, but Shack News has a write-up about the early game. An article at Eurogamer discusses whether this sort of game launch marks the end of an era for the MMOG industry — the game's budget is estimated to be as high as $100 million, and it relies on a traditional subscription model when many games are making the switch to free-to-play.
Subscriptions or other revenue generating methods have been traditional since games went multi-player past the point where a server in some guys basement was sufficient. Costs money to run these games, so they cost money to play.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Played the beta. WoW Improved with lightsabers. Same old borefest. Yes, I know there are companions and mass effect style conversations. Things are slightly different and improved. Yay. Stop pretending it's this awesome new MMO experience. It's not.
You see, I'd love to be playing this, but at 60 for the game and 15 a month, that's just too rich for my tastes.
I think the game itself should be free and downloadable, then charge a monthly fee for the online access. I'm going to wait for the cost of the game to come down :(
But damn, it's so tempting to buy ...
The title doesn't really fit....
My suggestions:
- Return of the Grind
- A new quest
- The sleep deprivation strikes back
Yours, Martin
And fully voiced quest interactions with very good writing.
I personally burned out on WoW a good while back. Several months before Cataclysm came out I quit playing. When it came out I resubed and leveled one character from 80 to 85, but then quit again shortly thereafter. I've tried many of the free-to-play games, Rift, EVE Online, and many others in the meantime. Nothing grabbed my attention.
I got early access to SWTOR 5 days ago and have already played at least 15 hours and can't wait to knock off work so I can play again.
I can honestly say that I see myself leveling at least 1 character of every class to max just to see the quest chains. Its that good.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Wow, the rare guy who wasn't completely pleased with his Star Wars Galaxies experience.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've had access since last Tuesday. I'm currently at level 24 (out of 50) and so far the story has been enjoyable. It does not feel like a grind, in fact most missions to kill x # of creatures are just bonus quests that you can easily skip.
The game is not revolutionary and they did take most of the best features from WoW. I really enjoy it.
Right now the only thing negative I have to say about the game is the artifcial cap they put on every server. Almost every server had a 20+ minute queue to log in during peak hours last week. My brother said he had to wait 10 minutes at 10am this morning to log in. If I have to wait more than a couple minutes I will be raising hell.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Napkin math:
200 employees (random guess, but my gut says that's a low number)
x $75k per year (another random guess, but I don't think it's absurd)
x 5 years in development
= 75 million. Add in marketing, management, and server costs, and you might be there.
Oh, and don't forget license fees. I won't speculate on what Lucas is charging them, but I bet it's mindboggling.
My other sig is clever.
Dont forget the quest chains are always different depending on your choices and lightside vs darkside points. Infact there are lightside and darkside quests too and then they change again if you group a lot with your guild.
You can have 4 sith inquisitors and will have a completely different story line for each one with dark/light and solo and group alts. Cool stuff
http://saveie6.com/
What a load of crap, as someone that played in 2 of the betas for SWTOR and is in the game now as an imperial agent, "Wow with light sabers and laser guns" is actually a perfect description. The game is much richer in story with a lot more effort put into the quest dialogue and story but apart from that it is a skinned version of wow. It is a nice change but even as a star wars fan I don't think this game will last as the "just another wow clone" syndrome will hit this game hard within a few months.
Believe me, it wasn't the fans that ruined Galaxies, it was Sony. They drove that property into the fucking ground. The "New Game Enhancements" killed it permanently back in '05, it just took them 6 years to put that final nail in the coffin.
Sony should never be allowed to touch a fucking MMO again.
I agree %100. I was in the last beta weekend and logged 10 hours playing to level 15. WoW with lightsabers and blasters and speeders instead of flying horses. Want to know why this game is an epic fail? There is no free space flight. It's all scripted combat on rails. DUMB. The name of the game is called STAR WARS... yet your ability to have a war amidst the stars on your own terms does not exist. I canceled my pre-order shortly after the beta weekend. Will wait for the first expansion that adds free space flight.
"Free to play" is a misnomer. It should accurately be "Pay to win" or "Pay to play well regardless of your skill level".
I hate it. It's a crappy way to do a game, and represents one of the more reprehensible expectations of sociopaths on this planet.
GW1 sold around 7million copies and is now a major franchise. A few things it didn't bring to the table was a persistent, instanced world and large (20+) player 'raiding'. Both of these have been addressed in the sequel that just entered beta testing... and still with no monthly fee.
SW:TOR bring the RPG back to MMORPG. But I think GW2 has the chance to be truly revolutionary -- it destroys the 'holy trinity' model, no monthly fee, and the graphics and gameplay look to be a substantial improvement over the current generation of 'hotkey' MMOs.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I think one of the long term players from beta who is a friend of mine put it best.
"I played the entire early part with my friend. We share start point for our characters, so we can "watch" each other's plot lines. So I walk with the quest giver NPC, and he says "Now that we're finally alone..." and my friend's character is right next to me. Jarring".
The best question was "so if this truly is MY story, why are there twenty guys who look just like me talking to the same NPCs and doing the same quests?"
Fact is, you just can't make a good, immersive story about a "hero that stands above the crowd" in an MMO. You have to be one of the masses, and by extension, not really a hero that stands above others. When MMO's pretend it's not so, like TOR and some of the new/remade zones in WoW, it looks silly and breaks immersion in a very bad way.
Difference is, WoW doesn't hype it up as a major selling point. TOR does, and while it works for people who are experiences with MMOs and don't really expect anything truly new, just an improvement, those who actually do expect something new end up sorely disappointed. Which is what happens to people who believe that TOR is not WoW with lightsabers. Because in the end, under all the extra fluff, there's still going to be twenty guys who have a story largely identical to yours right next to you reminding you that you're not the "hero that stands above the crowd" that game tries to make you believe you are.
MUDs preceded MMOs. They were also by and large F2P.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD
Also as someone who actually plays it, I think it's inexact. It's like calling Skyrim "Fallout 3 with swords."
The only similarity to WOW is that both are games in the same genre. So, yes, certain mechanics are going to be shared between the two, by necessity. Some because frankly, they're part of the whole MMO premise, and some because we have a decade and a half of figuring out what players like and what players don't like. In a new game you want more of the former and less of the latter.
And it's not even a bad thing. We had an attempt at ignoring everything that other MMOs showed that works or doesn't work. It was called Tabula Rasa. Yeah, Lord British thought he's so great that he can simply wipe the slate of everything that had been learned in a decade of MMOs and reinvent everything his way. It wasn't much fun to play for most people who've tried it and it bombed badly.
And really, most of that stuff isn't even particularly specific to WoW. As someone who's played half a dozen MMOs before, I don't see why I should reduce a whole genre to one game. It's called MMO, not "WoW clone". You could just as accurately say it's Everquest 2 with lightsabers, or City Of Heroes with lightsabers, or, really, whatever.
The classes for example are not really clones of WoW, suprisingly enough. The companions mechanic is also not very WoW. Actually branching available quests based on what you did before (e.g., alignment) is also not very closely mirroring any WoW mechanic I can think of. Having a choice of how you want to end a quest is also not very WoW-like. Etc. The point is that it's different enough to feel different and interesting, and in the end that's all that matters.
As for what happens in a few months, meh, nothing is for ever. I bought a game, not entered a marriage and made a kid, you know? If it stops being fun to play in a few months, for whatever reason, I'll move on then. And hey, at that point I will have got a couple of months of fun. Am I right?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Okay, I brace yourself not to laugh, but I've gone back to the MUD FAQ...
"Because of their size and their constant computational activities, servers can be extremely CPU-intensive and can even be crippling to any other work done on that computer. Even if they're not CPU-intensive, most MUDs can take up a fair amount of disk space - anywhere from 10 to 90 megs, which could impact the other users on the machine. Do not ever run a MUD server on a machine illicitly or without express permission from the person responsible for the machine. Many universities and companies have strict policies about that sort of behavior which you don't want to cross. "
- http://www.mudconnect.com/mudfaq/mudfaq-p2.html#q9
The point being, when MUDs were the main form of multiplayer online gaming, they were not trivial in hardware requirements.
And yes, I'm sure your mouse does have more storage than that these days...