Further Details On the Star Wars MMO 129
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.
X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter MMO (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] for that, and it's sooo much better than what a computer could ever provide.
Re:...Nothing to see here (Score:4, Interesting)
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/ [hellasrpg.com]
Re:Story, yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Lots of games do use skill trees (for example the talents in WoW) - I think levels exist for a couple reasons:
1. They allow people to raise base stats as they level without thinking "I'll need more health" and allocating points to it. This makes it easier for developers to scale content.
2. A generalized skill systems makes it much harder to balance the game. Inevitably people figure out the "ultimate" builds for given game play styles (PVP, ranged damage, tank etc.). This tends to result in some players becoming overbalanced at which point in comes the nerf bat, players get annoyed at being nerfed etc.
I'm not against skill point systems if done well. I think that developers shy away from them because of the difficulty in getting them right.
Re:Uh-huh (Score:3, Interesting)
Story is very, very secondary in an MMO
I think the scary lesson that most new MMOs learn too late is that everything is secondary in an MMO. Large chunks of your audience won't care about or will be annoyed by trade skills, but you really have to have them and do them well in order to keep certain segments of your user-base interested.
Same goes for PvP, raiding, grouping, the economy, etc.
In the end, there are dozens of aspects of the game that the average gamer simply expects to be there. If it's not, then they'll walk away from your game.
Lock S-Foils in attack position! (Score:3, Interesting)
We could test different strategies attacking the first and second Death star - of course in both cases in the movies the rebels were just extremely lucky and in a real simulation the coordinators of the imperial forces will not be as "over-confident". Still it would be interesting to have the rebels figure out what kind of weaknesses could be exploited. There are definitely strategic design flaws at least in the first Death star and the imperial battle plan.
The films give us many scenarios to replay, such as the imperial attack on Hoth with the AT-ATs, maybe even mix in a little infantry action... Though I'm not sure if I wanted to play an Ewok in the Battle of Endor.
There is such a host of details in the movies that the game could use - this is what so many Star Wars fans are longing for! Not the ability to play Wookie's third removed step-brother's cousin..
Re:Crafting ... its a loot based game. (Score:2, Interesting)
That was the thing that made SWG(original) the best MMO made IMHO.
The crafting system was just amazing. Everything you used, was made by someone else. The way they did loot was a great idea as well, EPIC's were actually rare. Maybe one or two per big guild. Legendarys were just that, Legendary. These items were WAY better than anything that could be made, but they were extremely rare. I remember PVPing and when the opposing guy pulled out his Legendary T-21, and it was game over. Your normal loot (tapes), was items that you placed into player crafted items to make them much better. But again, required PLAYER made items.
Everything was about what players could make. People played that game just to craft, and had a lot of fun doing it. You had to choose between crafting and fighting (most of us had crafter alts). The BEST part about it, was better crafters with better resources created better items. A cheaply thrown together weapon, would have less than half the power of a top quality player made. People became famous for what they could produce. I still remember Chik's armor, and Fengo's buff packs on Bloodfin. That was years ago.
The other aspect that really helped this, was decay. Everything would eventually break. So that guy with the Legendary rifle, can't just run around using it all day long. He had to pick and choose when to pull it out, because each time he did it lost a little "life"
The economy drove content. Doctors would pay multiple groups of 10+ people to go hunt some meat for them. Being a doctor/crafter, they couldn't go kill things themselves. So they hire hunters to grab some. Instead of getting said meat for an NPC, and then it just dissapears, it would find its way into the economy.
Re:...Nothing to see here (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:...Nothing to see here (Score:3, Interesting)
But each of these examples did as you said: they expanded the market, not stole users. A minority of Counter-Strike players were hardcore Doom or Unreal Tournament players. Same goes for Starcraft players being ex Dune II players or Yu-Gi-Oh! players being ex-Magic players. Try logging into WoW and talking about Dungeons and Dragons in general chat. I've been outright flamed for it, despite the impact of my hobby on their own. When I try to defend myself, I get remarks like "someone would have thought of it eventually". Yeah sure, someone probably would have thought of levels, potions, oozes, dungeon crawling, playing as a single character instead of an army in a fantasy setting, roleplaying under a set of rules for combat, armor classes, seperate stats, experience points and a good number of mythological monsters that we only see in modern fantasy games because they were in the 1st edition monster manual...but they didn't. Someone else did. And we aren't using build points and fighting Quezcoatls, recovering our hit points with magic tablets as we brandish our
Anyways, while I was trying to say levelling is a bit of a cop-out (that is, its easy to do and you should use it in tabletop RPGs as calculating separate stats based on previous encounters is too much for a human in a short amount of time), I was also trying to say that people in the modern tabletop RPG design world are dropping the level concept. And what happens in tabletop games usually finds its way into video games given a few years.
Re:Uh-huh (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats actually not true - there's at least 4 types of mmo players out there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test [wikipedia.org]
I've seen all 4 types in my guild - I think the progression guilds for instance cater to "Achievers".
Personally I like learning about the story through quests and npc's. If a game is just hack and slash it gets boring too quickly.