Stargate Worlds Beta Begins Oct. 15th 84
Kotaku reports that the closed beta for Stargate Worlds, an MMO based on the popular Stargate television shows, will begin on October 15th. Registration is open at the game's website. Gamespy has some new screenshots available, and a Youtube channel has been opened for videos about the game. We discussed the early plans for Stargate Worlds a couple years ago.
Re:You should be more worried about CHRIST than OR (Score:2, Informative)
Scary, isn't it?
Not really, since everything you just posted is sensationalist fantasy and utter rubbish.
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there are quite a few of us praying for a good SF MMO. I don't even care much about franchise, personally, just give me something battery-, clip- or belt-fed already. That market segment is way under-represented. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against high fantasy setups either, but that market segment is already catered for.
Arguably, excessively catered for. I mean, if you look at the current MMO player base, about 99% is fantasy, and about 1% is SF or modern day. If you look at TV viewer estimates, the numbers are almost reversed. Unless someone can argue convincingly that the same people who like SF more on TV, somehow prefer high fantasy in a game, there must be a _lot_ of untapped potential market.
And if you think about it, it's not even that much competition they have in that segment. The problem of the SF genre so far was that it was half-arsely done. E.g., AO was launched as a festering pile of shit (read the Something Awful reviews, and know that they barely scratch the surface of how bad it was.) E.g., SWG had exactly one saving grace: its character development system. But otherwise an incompetent designer and an incompetent publisher ran it into the ground, and managed to turn the biggest franchise in history into a niche. I'd say "etc" at this point, but was there _anything_ else worth talking about in the SF MMO genre? I'm drawing blanks.
(Yes, there is COH/COV, and fun game it is, but it's IMHO not really SF. It's its own genre.)
Also about most people playing one game at a time, that is true, but that's only half the equation. The other half is that most people don't stay in a game for ever. Last I've seen a number, it was 6 months average for a MMO player. Then he leaves. (Of course, averages are averages. Some people barely play for a month, some hang around for 3 years, but the average is around 6 months.) You eventually have seen it all, eventually you get bored of doing the same thing repeatedly as endgame, and bugger off.
Before someone jumps in to defend it: I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's just that (A) nobody can afford to make near-infinite content, so you keep doing new things for ever, and (B) people eventually get bored of doing the same thing every day. You'd get bored even of chocolate cake if that was all you ate, day after day.
Basically the behemoth that is WoW is shedding bored players all the time, by the millions, and getting new players all the time. Same as any other MMO. And it also gets a big chunk of its old players back after a while, because they didn't find another game to their liking.
Someone could make a damn good living by just offering all the ex-WoW-ers a new home. Of course, then it would have to not suck. That's where most have failed so far.
The traditional model of doing a half-arsed effort and maybe patching it (to be even worse) later, is all but dead. WoW may not have been that original, but it took the time to polish the whole thing far beyond what anyone else had tried. (If they even tried at all, that is.) It set a new standard. Going back to a traditional half-arsed, launched-unfinished MMO, is like going from colour TV back to monochrome for a lot of us.
So making that net that catches those falling off WoW, might take a lot more money and talent than it sounds. And apparently more than your average publisher feels like risking.
But, still, at least theoretically it's possible. The "???" between "1. buy some license" and "3. profit!!!" is simply: "make a polished game, and don't shove it out the door a year too early." And I'd expect that eventually it will happen. Maybe it'll be Stargate or maybe something else, but eventually it will happen.
Re:System Requirements (Score:3, Informative)
It appears that they don't have officially released specs as of yet. Their FAQ still isn't even 100% sure what platforms will be used. -_- PC is sure of course, but other than that...
Currently the plan for Stargate Worlds is to release on the PC. However, we realize that there are MMO and Stargate fans on many platforms, and we would like to explore as many of these options as we can. Once we have confirmed which platforms will be supported we will make an announcement on this website.
There's some speculative posts on the forum about what plausible system requirements there will be. The best info I can find is on the Stargate-Worlds wiki [stargateworldswiki.com]
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Re:Actually... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Looks like ass (Score:3, Informative)
They did have deserts and such, but there were used sparingly. The explanation given - that the Ancients settled on planets that were nice (or were terraformed to be nice), and put the stargates and villages in hospitable locales - does make a lot of sense. The exceptions are mostly where the Goa'uld moved the stargates to places for mining.
"Every planet looks like Canada" was done for cost reasons, but they did fit it in the storyline fairly well.