Note the general universality of the answer - it's fairly likely that bot is configured to post that very same, non-committal answer to the reply after a certain interval. They just adjust the single word used in reply according to topic and voila - perfect answer.
While most likely true, the problem is that "warranty going back up" is going to be an issue in current dupoly.
Also the fact that hard drives being actually unreliable will likely impact economy, as many people now rely on their work computer and laptop for some very important data while being very lax with backups. It was sorta workable before provided you switched to a new computer quickly enough, but if your statement about quality is true, it may not be enough any more. And the issue may actually be big enough to impact economy beyond hard drives and computer manufacturing.
Worth noting that WoW's world has been dynamic since 3.0. It helps the problem a bit by making it appear that your actions in fact influence the world. In WoW, you can for example do a few quests in a small allied base as a part of effort to build up, and after a while, base will enter a next phase and grow. Essentially it means that there are different versions of the base in the same place, and your questing progress determines which one you get to access.
It still doesn't remove the "there's ten other guys doing the same thing" issue though, but in most cases that doesn't matter because quests themselves are often structured as either "adventurer, you're doing a small part in large scheme", or quests lead to hot-join events where you are asked to "go join an event" and the event happens in intervals, and your joining of said event doesn't really impact it. You can make it faster by helping, or you can just stand next to characters and watch. The event will occur in spite of your participation, which on other hand is quite immersive in terms of "this is a functional, living world with or without you", but also removes the possibility of being a central hero. You get to interact with central heroes, and often help them, but you never are one.
You do realize you're talking to an advertisement bot that has this very same litany going on in every topic? It just changes some words according to the subject line, the rest of the ad is exactly the same word for word.
Problem is, the "participation in story to save the world" is done in WoW 2.0 style. Unchanging world. WoW's world started to change as you progressed in 3.0, and this was further improved in 4.0. WoW is now on 4.3. TOR leveling feels like a mix of Burning Crusade (2.0) leveling with voice acting with class quests.
A great example of difference was WoW 3.0's Icecrown map. At the beginning, it's fully under scourge control. There's only 1 allied base, everything else was hostile. You enter it to find it under heavy scourge siege (phase 1). You reinforce the base, only to find that it comes under massive scourge assault just as you finish setting defenses. You jump onto one of the wall cannons you helped set up (phase 2) and defend against heavy onslaught. If you succeed, you're asked to send the word to the forward outpost that gets set up after enemy has been beaten back (phase 3). After this, you reinforce the defenses to prevent next assault, then you are asked to set a beachhead deeper in Icecrown to prevent further assaults. You push to the next hill with the elite friendly NPC company and hold the hill as it comes under counter-attack to set up the forward scouting base (phase 4). After being successful, you're asked to deliver report of victory while tents are is set up. When you fly back, scout base is up and functional and NPCs with next quests await...(phase 5).
That's just five initial phases of many (there were tens of them in icecrown). Each one directly influences the world - new bases are erected, new NPCs spawn and others vanish and so on. Friendly death knight faction conquers one of the scourge strongholds for themselves and sets themselves there. Scourge abomination manufacturing factory goes from pushing out abominations to being under siege by your allies. Even the very entrance of Icecrown Citadel goes from peaceful zone far behind many gates defending it to fully breached warzone.
And this is unique for each character - two different characters can be in the same place on the same map in the different phases, viewing a different landscape from different parts of the story, according to their own personal progress. It's an excellent story vehicle, and it being absent in TOR is far more damning then any other feature currently missing in it in comparison to WoW. TOR world is STATIC. WoW 3.0 and 4.0 world is DYNAMIC. TOR is basically two whole versions behind WoW in this regard, and that's pretty damn bad thing for a game that claims to be story-driven to be missing such a crucial story-driving element.
The other issue, "different stories for different characters" is a choice. WoW made a choice to make two stories - alliance and horde, and blizzard presented a very good reason why they gave up on class quests completely - they want you to be able to experience as much as possible on a single character if you want to play it that way. It's not a flaw - it's a design choice. It means you only need to create two characters, one for each side to fully experience the questing and lore. In TOR, you'll have to make eight, which can be both a blessing and a curse (altoholics will love it, and people like myself who like to focus on one character will hate it). For the longest time, they even tried to fuse alliance and horde quests into essentially one quest line, including making a single sanctuary hub for both factions, but that concept wasn't taken too well by player base and WoW went back to two completely separate quest lines in 4.0.
If "fixing it in one place doesn't fix it everywhere", you're either doing something wrong on design level or are forced to do something wrong because of other reasons like limits of the tools you're using, or interaction with other modules of the program/game. Again, look at WoW. It's translated into many languages and keeps getting translated into more. It's very modular, in fact there are many add-ons that literally wipe out old interface and create a totally new one. Everything you see on UI is fully customizable, either through blizzard's own UI customization window which allows resizing among other things, and an add-on called "move anything" (which does exactly what name suggests). Or you can take add-ons and add-on libraries that will let you change everything from font and font size to location or each and every piece of text on the screen, regardless of language used.
Hence, I stand by my previous statement. "Copy from WoW". The total amount of text and such outside chat windows should be manageable to QC through and make sure it doesn't overflow. You can also implement safeguards against overflows, like hiding unimportant parts of the text when overflow is detected (i.e. "random mob x casts skill y on target z" can become "x... y... z" using ellipses to hide things like direction of casting, or shortening long names and words). Aligning text to images like icons can be done through anchoring icon to certain part of the text by default and doing a pseudo-window treatment where anything that doesn't fit into certain length is shortened or word-wrapped to the second line where applicable.
The ways to do this are there, and if there's one thing that massively large WoW's UI mod community has done is leg work for ways you can manage tremendous amounts of information on your screen in ridiculous amounts of various layouts, fonts, languages and so on while keeping it clean and manageable. If you're actually doing this commercially for a living, I strongly recommend you take a look at their work. There's a lot to be learned there.
Because both of their attempts to port their RTS games to consoles ended up as complete failures. They were borderline unplayable (I had a "pleasure" of trying out starcraft for n64). You simply cannot properly control RTS without a mouse. You can fumble around, but that's pretty much it. With blizzard going even further toward "speed and accuracy of your actions matters" road with starcraft 2, the bridge to any kind of console version was burned.
Mouse controls on console are non-functional in most cases, and games generally don't even bother supporting those.
(FYI the initial post left out "2" after starcraft).
You're still not seeing the forest for the trees. All above with a couple of exceptions is TRIVIAL to check for potential overflows because there's not much text options in there (and in many cases you can use a pseudo-window).
Chat on the other hand is and should be in the chat window. Not as a fixed part of UI. And that should be word wrapped. Same for quest text, dialogues and other text content that comes in large amounts. This stuff gets its own, preferably resizable window with full customization options for both font and font size.
Just copy WoW (and its very popular chat add-on prat) in this regard. It really does this part very well.
I think you're missing the point a bit. In WoW, you are playing out the main story. It's not over, like it is with Star Wars, where the third movie essentially ends the main story. In WoW, the main story is ongoing, progressing along with the game.
You can apparently buy it from Origin, through price is hilarious (2/3 more expensive then in local retail). I suspect you would be forced to use origin if you bought through it, but I'm not 100% certain, so if someone has indeed bought the game through origin, it would be nice if you elaborated here on the issue.
And retail version doesn't require you to use origin.
You don't need to "check the stunning amount of text". You just need a window for dialogue with word wrap. That's it. Windows notepad does it fairly well for any text, with both adjustable text window and adjustable text font size and font itself. Same thing for WoW and its various add-ons that customize the chat window.
UI text is a different issue, but there's several orders of magnitude less text there.
You do actually, if all those customers see the huge queue and leave. That's why businesses hire more employees and buy more infrastructure as they grow and why not growing with demand is often lethal for a business.
The model you're talking about is "pay to win". A far more interesting (and financially successful) model is "pay for content" that Guild Wars (2) uses.
Not to be offensive but "in your dreams". LA will most definitely milk any such project that is trying to gain most of its initial subscriber base on the brand name, and will most certainly charge a significant fee before taking a "cut off the top".
You have to remember that they have set out to match WoW's profits. They want to make money, they see that market can bear a decent monthly, and they're milking it.
And of course, they have to pay licensing fees to Lucasarts. That is never cheap.
Personally I'm mostly vexed about lack of phasing. After going through post-cataclysm Tirisfal Glades and other similar zones, the static zones of TOR just don't impress me as much. There is no feeling of achievement where I personally see how entire bases get erected or destroyed based on my actions.
Worth noting that quite a few of us skip much of voice acting in other bioware games as well. I usually read through subtitles by the time voice actor reaches about 1/3 of the dialogue and just skip to the next line.
Honestly, you should try the WoW post-Cataclysm. In many areas, it's better then TOR questing because of functional phasing. You actually feel that you're building up fortresses, and your actions are changing entire landscapes, because, well, they do. The landscape enters a different phase as you progress. One great example is the new Tirisfal Glades, where you literally conquer the warzone down to going into enemy capital for quick surgical strikes. You even get to watch one of the biggest pro/antagonists in the game die... and get resurrected. You get to watch very real conflict inside the horde, angry voice acting, and melting people with green goo.
Honestly, I agree with the statement as far as original WoW goes, but new zones, especially ones that have been fully revamped offer a very compelling leveling experience. I was planning to zerg them for loremaster achievement on my max level main character, and ended up watching every cut scene and reading every quest because they were enjoyable.
While TOR "will sure have their leaders", they will not have the big names. Because they don't have the permission to change the canon story.
That's the beauty of owning your own IP. You can do whatever you want with it.You want to have your heroes directly interact with the most important characters of the universe, and actually help them? No problem! You want to feel that your very actions are actually changing the course of the main story? No problem! You want to have your players relive the epic end battle of warcraft 3, where you mounted a desperate defense against endless waves of demons? No problem!
Now try to do the same with the Star Wars. Lucasarts will shoot your suggestions down as fast as you can make them, no matter how good they would be for the game. Because the real story of Star Wars will always be that of the six movies. And you'll never get to mess with those. Lucasarts will simply not let you. And that is a very real problem.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
That's going to be one hell of a locked down OS. Will it be able to run anything at all?
Note the general universality of the answer - it's fairly likely that bot is configured to post that very same, non-committal answer to the reply after a certain interval. They just adjust the single word used in reply according to topic and voila - perfect answer.
While most likely true, the problem is that "warranty going back up" is going to be an issue in current dupoly.
Also the fact that hard drives being actually unreliable will likely impact economy, as many people now rely on their work computer and laptop for some very important data while being very lax with backups. It was sorta workable before provided you switched to a new computer quickly enough, but if your statement about quality is true, it may not be enough any more. And the issue may actually be big enough to impact economy beyond hard drives and computer manufacturing.
Worth noting that WoW's world has been dynamic since 3.0. It helps the problem a bit by making it appear that your actions in fact influence the world. In WoW, you can for example do a few quests in a small allied base as a part of effort to build up, and after a while, base will enter a next phase and grow. Essentially it means that there are different versions of the base in the same place, and your questing progress determines which one you get to access.
It still doesn't remove the "there's ten other guys doing the same thing" issue though, but in most cases that doesn't matter because quests themselves are often structured as either "adventurer, you're doing a small part in large scheme", or quests lead to hot-join events where you are asked to "go join an event" and the event happens in intervals, and your joining of said event doesn't really impact it. You can make it faster by helping, or you can just stand next to characters and watch. The event will occur in spite of your participation, which on other hand is quite immersive in terms of "this is a functional, living world with or without you", but also removes the possibility of being a central hero. You get to interact with central heroes, and often help them, but you never are one.
You do realize you're talking to an advertisement bot that has this very same litany going on in every topic? It just changes some words according to the subject line, the rest of the ad is exactly the same word for word.
Problem is, the "participation in story to save the world" is done in WoW 2.0 style. Unchanging world. WoW's world started to change as you progressed in 3.0, and this was further improved in 4.0. WoW is now on 4.3. TOR leveling feels like a mix of Burning Crusade (2.0) leveling with voice acting with class quests.
A great example of difference was WoW 3.0's Icecrown map. At the beginning, it's fully under scourge control. There's only 1 allied base, everything else was hostile. You enter it to find it under heavy scourge siege (phase 1). You reinforce the base, only to find that it comes under massive scourge assault just as you finish setting defenses. You jump onto one of the wall cannons you helped set up (phase 2) and defend against heavy onslaught. If you succeed, you're asked to send the word to the forward outpost that gets set up after enemy has been beaten back (phase 3). After this, you reinforce the defenses to prevent next assault, then you are asked to set a beachhead deeper in Icecrown to prevent further assaults. You push to the next hill with the elite friendly NPC company and hold the hill as it comes under counter-attack to set up the forward scouting base (phase 4). After being successful, you're asked to deliver report of victory while tents are is set up. When you fly back, scout base is up and functional and NPCs with next quests await...(phase 5).
That's just five initial phases of many (there were tens of them in icecrown). Each one directly influences the world - new bases are erected, new NPCs spawn and others vanish and so on. Friendly death knight faction conquers one of the scourge strongholds for themselves and sets themselves there. Scourge abomination manufacturing factory goes from pushing out abominations to being under siege by your allies. Even the very entrance of Icecrown Citadel goes from peaceful zone far behind many gates defending it to fully breached warzone.
And this is unique for each character - two different characters can be in the same place on the same map in the different phases, viewing a different landscape from different parts of the story, according to their own personal progress. It's an excellent story vehicle, and it being absent in TOR is far more damning then any other feature currently missing in it in comparison to WoW. TOR world is STATIC. WoW 3.0 and 4.0 world is DYNAMIC. TOR is basically two whole versions behind WoW in this regard, and that's pretty damn bad thing for a game that claims to be story-driven to be missing such a crucial story-driving element.
The other issue, "different stories for different characters" is a choice. WoW made a choice to make two stories - alliance and horde, and blizzard presented a very good reason why they gave up on class quests completely - they want you to be able to experience as much as possible on a single character if you want to play it that way. It's not a flaw - it's a design choice. It means you only need to create two characters, one for each side to fully experience the questing and lore. In TOR, you'll have to make eight, which can be both a blessing and a curse (altoholics will love it, and people like myself who like to focus on one character will hate it). For the longest time, they even tried to fuse alliance and horde quests into essentially one quest line, including making a single sanctuary hub for both factions, but that concept wasn't taken too well by player base and WoW went back to two completely separate quest lines in 4.0.
If "fixing it in one place doesn't fix it everywhere", you're either doing something wrong on design level or are forced to do something wrong because of other reasons like limits of the tools you're using, or interaction with other modules of the program/game. Again, look at WoW. It's translated into many languages and keeps getting translated into more. It's very modular, in fact there are many add-ons that literally wipe out old interface and create a totally new one. Everything you see on UI is fully customizable, either through blizzard's own UI customization window which allows resizing among other things, and an add-on called "move anything" (which does exactly what name suggests). Or you can take add-ons and add-on libraries that will let you change everything from font and font size to location or each and every piece of text on the screen, regardless of language used.
Hence, I stand by my previous statement. "Copy from WoW". The total amount of text and such outside chat windows should be manageable to QC through and make sure it doesn't overflow. You can also implement safeguards against overflows, like hiding unimportant parts of the text when overflow is detected (i.e. "random mob x casts skill y on target z" can become "x ... y ... z" using ellipses to hide things like direction of casting, or shortening long names and words). Aligning text to images like icons can be done through anchoring icon to certain part of the text by default and doing a pseudo-window treatment where anything that doesn't fit into certain length is shortened or word-wrapped to the second line where applicable.
The ways to do this are there, and if there's one thing that massively large WoW's UI mod community has done is leg work for ways you can manage tremendous amounts of information on your screen in ridiculous amounts of various layouts, fonts, languages and so on while keeping it clean and manageable. If you're actually doing this commercially for a living, I strongly recommend you take a look at their work. There's a lot to be learned there.
Because both of their attempts to port their RTS games to consoles ended up as complete failures. They were borderline unplayable (I had a "pleasure" of trying out starcraft for n64). You simply cannot properly control RTS without a mouse. You can fumble around, but that's pretty much it. With blizzard going even further toward "speed and accuracy of your actions matters" road with starcraft 2, the bridge to any kind of console version was burned.
Mouse controls on console are non-functional in most cases, and games generally don't even bother supporting those.
(FYI the initial post left out "2" after starcraft).
You're still not seeing the forest for the trees. All above with a couple of exceptions is TRIVIAL to check for potential overflows because there's not much text options in there (and in many cases you can use a pseudo-window).
Chat on the other hand is and should be in the chat window. Not as a fixed part of UI. And that should be word wrapped. Same for quest text, dialogues and other text content that comes in large amounts. This stuff gets its own, preferably resizable window with full customization options for both font and font size.
Just copy WoW (and its very popular chat add-on prat) in this regard. It really does this part very well.
I think you're missing the point a bit. In WoW, you are playing out the main story. It's not over, like it is with Star Wars, where the third movie essentially ends the main story. In WoW, the main story is ongoing, progressing along with the game.
You can download it and try for yourself. Like steam, the storefront itself is free.
But frankly, it's terrible. Something among the lines of steam on release of counter strike 1.6. Very basic, very buggy, very annoying.
You can apparently buy it from Origin, through price is hilarious (2/3 more expensive then in local retail). I suspect you would be forced to use origin if you bought through it, but I'm not 100% certain, so if someone has indeed bought the game through origin, it would be nice if you elaborated here on the issue.
And retail version doesn't require you to use origin.
You don't need to "check the stunning amount of text". You just need a window for dialogue with word wrap. That's it. Windows notepad does it fairly well for any text, with both adjustable text window and adjustable text font size and font itself. Same thing for WoW and its various add-ons that customize the chat window.
UI text is a different issue, but there's several orders of magnitude less text there.
You do actually, if all those customers see the huge queue and leave. That's why businesses hire more employees and buy more infrastructure as they grow and why not growing with demand is often lethal for a business.
The model you're talking about is "pay to win". A far more interesting (and financially successful) model is "pay for content" that Guild Wars (2) uses.
Not to be offensive but "in your dreams". LA will most definitely milk any such project that is trying to gain most of its initial subscriber base on the brand name, and will most certainly charge a significant fee before taking a "cut off the top".
Playing and RTS without a mouse is even more so. There's a reason why blizzard simply will not do starcraft on a console.
You have to remember that they have set out to match WoW's profits. They want to make money, they see that market can bear a decent monthly, and they're milking it.
And of course, they have to pay licensing fees to Lucasarts. That is never cheap.
Personally I'm mostly vexed about lack of phasing. After going through post-cataclysm Tirisfal Glades and other similar zones, the static zones of TOR just don't impress me as much. There is no feeling of achievement where I personally see how entire bases get erected or destroyed based on my actions.
Worth noting that quite a few of us skip much of voice acting in other bioware games as well. I usually read through subtitles by the time voice actor reaches about 1/3 of the dialogue and just skip to the next line.
Honestly, you should try the WoW post-Cataclysm. In many areas, it's better then TOR questing because of functional phasing. You actually feel that you're building up fortresses, and your actions are changing entire landscapes, because, well, they do. The landscape enters a different phase as you progress. One great example is the new Tirisfal Glades, where you literally conquer the warzone down to going into enemy capital for quick surgical strikes. You even get to watch one of the biggest pro/antagonists in the game die... and get resurrected. You get to watch very real conflict inside the horde, angry voice acting, and melting people with green goo.
Honestly, I agree with the statement as far as original WoW goes, but new zones, especially ones that have been fully revamped offer a very compelling leveling experience. I was planning to zerg them for loremaster achievement on my max level main character, and ended up watching every cut scene and reading every quest because they were enjoyable.
I honestly can't decide if post above is funny, insightful or informative.
While TOR "will sure have their leaders", they will not have the big names. Because they don't have the permission to change the canon story.
That's the beauty of owning your own IP. You can do whatever you want with it.You want to have your heroes directly interact with the most important characters of the universe, and actually help them? No problem! You want to feel that your very actions are actually changing the course of the main story? No problem! You want to have your players relive the epic end battle of warcraft 3, where you mounted a desperate defense against endless waves of demons? No problem!
Now try to do the same with the Star Wars. Lucasarts will shoot your suggestions down as fast as you can make them, no matter how good they would be for the game. Because the real story of Star Wars will always be that of the six movies. And you'll never get to mess with those. Lucasarts will simply not let you. And that is a very real problem.
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.
Guild wars is anything but "recent", undermining your argument severely.