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.
Uh-huh (Score:3, Funny)
From TFA
Plus, since you're adventuring with your buddies that are playing other classes, they'll be telling you some of the exciting stuff they're doing. You're going to get tidbits that might really get you interested in playing one of those other classes. It's probably going to make you excited to try things out.
Wrong, we just want to choke underlings with the force.
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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.
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Wow, I'm in the minority then.
This sucks.
Most people seem to want a multiplayer dungeon crawler, but I want a virtual universe populated with players...
I'll never be happy in my virtual life :(
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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.
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The most popular MMORPG at the moment, by pretty much any metric you care to use, has a crafting engine that consists of the following:
That's not "well done." That's not even a fun
"LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the WoW...." (Score:2)
"LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the World of Warcraft customer base. "
Ya, good luck with that.
Re:"LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the WoW.. (Score:5, Funny)
>Ya, good luck with that.
Sniping WoW customers isnt that hard, heck I used to bullseye womp rats in my t-16 back home, and they werent much larger than most WoW players.
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Hah, wish I had mod points!
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WTF. Goes to show you don't know what you are talking about.
Their mother pays the delivery guy. Then, she slides the pizza pie under the door.
That way, she doesn't have to see her 30something naked in front of his 4 computer screens. (one with WOW, one with web browser, one with AIM / Yahoo IM / ICQ / Gtalk / insert_IM_here and one with pr0n.
Just a guess on my part, though. Not that I'd ever engage in such lamesauce.
--Toll_Free
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Questions I ask of every new-kid-on-the-block MMO:
Re:"LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the WoW.. (Score:4, Funny)
What language can I write my user-interface mods in? How much of the UI can I re-write using that language? ...
That first one is really the show-stopper for most games.
You and the 3 other people who care more about what language they write UI mods in than actually playing the game.
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That of course depends on their timing, but WoW is several years old now-- it will be older yet when The Old Republic comes out-- and has expanded the MMO market dramatically. Any game that wants to succeed [warhammeronline.com] wants to poach WoW players, and that's a very reasonable goal.
Now if they'd said, "We want to be the next World of Warcraft"-- that might be a little overambitious, especially this early. But to say tha
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It doesn't seem like it would be so difficult to get a percentage of the WOW base, if the game is good enough. A crappy game wouldn't pull anyone let alone get some WOW players. There are probably a good amount of WOW players waiting to switch to something else.
Story, yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
..but a story alone can't carry a game. Look at all the other MMOs and their quests. OK, so much of the story in MMOs is more background than anything else, but generally the quests, the actions you need to complete the quests, are rather dull and uninspiring (which is why I like that in WAR you can level up completely via PVP). Kill beavers until they drop a single beaver testicle until you have 10. Fight a spell caster that's AI amounts to casting the same spell on you over and over again. Go to some stupid place in the environment where you need to right click the object. And so on. Questing in MMOs by itself, IMO, is very, very boring. The real question is, will the gameplay be fresh and exciting enough to justify the expansiveness and the story line, and if so, how well will it interact in PVP?
Additionally, endgame: someone might not care to play the other classes, even if the story and game experience is different. They have a top-level character, they don't want to just give him up. Will there be good endgame? No good endgame can kill an MMO, just look at Age of Conan.
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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
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You could go around helping noobs
In Guild Wars players don't really create much extra content.
There are more private/3rd party WoW servers, with player created content. Of course Blizzard keeps trying to shut those down...
I'm wondering if Guild Wars PvP might take off bigger time if Guild Wars just only required the account authenticati
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It's been years since I did Guild Wars gvg, but at the time, the skill balancing was required, and good. I was happy to have someone keeping an eye on the meta to ensure things didn't get too out of balance. For instance, as much as I liked the old Orders Ranger Spike (Dual Shot, Quick/Punishing Shot, Savage Shot/Distracting Shot + Order of Pain + Order of Vampire), it was badly overpowered. Getting that toned down was a good thing. Minions were crazy when you could have 40 of them at a time, but fun. It ma
...Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
But the days of the level are coming to an end (or so I pray). More and more RPG players grow tired of levels--most now see them as other gamers see installation time. "We can't start playing the REAL game until max level." But there are alternatives!
Games like Tri-Stat use character points instead of levels. Upon completing portions of a story, and as bonus points based on how well you played a character or any other number of things, you receive Character Points with which to buy customizable skills and gear. Some say they are like "levels", but the fact you start with 350 of them and they go into your stats, gear and skill acquisition make them a clearly different beast.
A lot of games have abandoned even that and just started pooling experience points directly into stats. Games like Pokemon (yes, its a child's game, but innovative never the less) used levels, but behind the scenes gave each stat a different experience bar that rose depending on your race and the opponent's you beat.
Some games have abandoned levels and abilities altogether, instead focusing on gaming skill. A lot of people just call these "fighters" or "FPS" + MMORPG mixes, but really they can become quite fun.
But the big problem I have with Star Wars having levels based on quests is simply that too many quests just don't make sense given the setting. Jedi weren't supposed to go forth and kill. They were supposed to negotiate first and try to avoid battle. Unfortunately, there's no good way of mass-diplomacy aside from needlessly complicated (and frankly lame) sets of dialogue choices that lead to a predictable (and, if you have something like Thottbot) reliable outcome.
Now if they could make a living and breathing game with characters to interact with that are controlled by GMs and other players who can actually make a difference in the world...
Unfortunately MMORPGs are scared of idiots willing to run around blowing up random planets just for fun. Leading me to another point. Actions should have consequences, the final knife in the corpse of this game (for me, of course). This is another WoW/EQ/MUD style game where nothing you do accounts for anything other than leveling and gear mongering. They claim you can change companion's, but lets face it. In the end your not changing the world around you. Your not really talking with other characters. Your a hamster in a wheel clicking away to get to the "next stage of power" to access more content that millions of others have or will access themselves.
Some people enjoy that. I personally don't. I wish I could diplomatically barter with another player for control over a star system's spice flow that we've worked hard to get control of. And I don't want that player to just be able to kill me (or have some other random player run up and kill one or both of us) without consequence. In some zones in WoW you can kill someone who attacked you without the local guards attacking you due to high reputation with that faction. But lets face it, if you just ran around killing people, eventually even a faction your considered a hero in would start viewing you differently.
But I'm a spoiled Tabletop nerd who has been given the ultimate game system--a living breathing human being who can flesh out a world custom tailored to the needs of me and my friends. That's a real GM. Current GMs in MMORPGs are no more than tech support and referees.
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Start playing Progress Guest and leave all that annoying leveling behind. http://www.progressquest.com/
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I wish I had mod points as I'd mod that.
Post of the year, certainly on games.slashdot.org.
Your sig is awesome too:)
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]
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More and more RPG players grow tired of levels--most now see them as other gamers see installation time.
A bold claim, and I daresay quite false. I sincerely doubt that the RPG players who don't like levels are anything but a minority.
Levels, despite you apparently not liking them, work well, and more importantly, are fun. It's rewarding to gain a new level and become more powerful. You say that designers should be pushing the boundaries, I disagree. I say that designers shouldn't waste their time trying to improve an aspect of RPGs that works amazingly well.
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It's rewarding to gain a new level and become more powerful.
Really? In most videogame RPGs I don't even notice I got a level up besides a big display stating so, it takes several of them before I notice any change (well, outside of milestone levels where something is hard-limited to certain levels or stat values and you can start doing it now).
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But the days of the level are coming to an end (or so I pray). More and more RPG players grow tired of levels--most now see them as other gamers see installation time. "We can't start playing the REAL game until max level." But there are alternatives!
I flat out think you're wrong with the growing tide against leveling but putting that aside for a moment, it's blatantly obvious when you get to the "endgame" that your time leveling was the most entertaining aspect of the game. At that time, the content and the full extent of the landmass was used appropriately. Once the endgame is reached, most of the land is irrelevant and the experience is diluted.
There isn't any way to say to players to "slow down" and enjoy the experience rather than powering th
Re:...Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
By the time I got to max level, he changed servers due to a mixture of guild drama, having grown tired of his class and wanting to try a new faction.
But I tried to experience the "world of warcraft", as well as several other MMORPGs. The problem is I play games to play with people. I'd rather play a game I hate with friends I love than a game I love alone. My friends aren't horrible people--I can't expect them to share the same schedule as me or play at the same pace as me. Its just the set up and major flaw behind leveling to gamers such as myself. It may work fine for some people, but it doesn't work for me.
When you combine that with the fact your limited to a single class (amoung 8-16 options), its even worse for me. I like to stand out in a game and be more than a grunt (although I'll admit that is kinda the point of warcraft given the setting; your a soldier after all). And I don't mean "I want to be a hero and kill great evils." I mean "I want to be a character, not a role." Build points encourage characters. Levels encourage roles.
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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.
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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 bec
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For example, lets say Joe the Warrior becomes the strongest at using his long sword upon discovering that out of the thousands of abilities out there, long swords do the most damage per second. Right away I'd be concerned with the game--why does a long sword do the same to a dragon than an ooze? Yes, a
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with all those variables, IMO, rand() should be used more for determining foe behavior than for "calculating hit odds" Combat moves ought to be strictly deterministic, if possible, the chance comes in where your foe happens to do the right counter-move.
Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc. don't use the rng to calculate damage, why should games that take in billions in revenue require it?
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Thing is, there already was a level-less Star Wars MMO, with a player-oriented economy, player-built cities with actual politics, etc. And it didn't do very well.
Now, you can argue that pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies wasn't a good enough implementation . . . but it's a bit much to expect Lucas would try it again.
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You need a Second Life, I think.
No levels, but then no skill points either. You can actually acquire a skill like scripting or building and get respect and even money for it. Want to try your diplomacy skills? Well, that's what all the other users are for. You can play games but can never be really killed. Find enough similar people and you could probably organize an in-world roleplay session, with GM and all.
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Its fun to roleplay without having to worry about whose sword glows more...until it starts raining penises to the tune of a verizon commercial.
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You need to find a better place in SL, then.
There are places full of ads, but then there are plenty of those that don't have any. Also recently they're starting to make rules against placement of obnoxious ads.
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Sounds a lot like EVE Online.
Hey, Lucasarts (Score:1)
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Or Monkey Island 5.
Ugh (Score:3, Funny)
So instead of making the Jedi and other players on an equal ground by, say, making the Jedi untrained-in-combat Padawans or something, everyone gets to be their own special snowflake with tens of thousands of legendary bounty hunters running around at once. Brilliant.
It worked for City Of Heroes (Score:4, Insightful)
It worked well for City Of Heroes. Every player in COH is, at least in the design guideline, equal to three minions _and_ a lieutenant. That's what's needed for a fight against a hero to be a 50-50 chance, you know, better have a potion (ok, "inspiration") ready.
But that's ok, because the NPCs are also generated in packs of 3 for a solo mission, or pretty much in platoons for an 8 player group.
And yes, nobody seems to have a problem with being in a city with a thousand super-heroes roaming the streets at any given time.
Generally, when it comes to MMOs, probably the only sane option is to just accept what works and is proven to work, and not think much about what would be "realistic". Starting from the original idea waay back that it would be unrealistic to have quests, because it would be unrealistic if 1000 people saved the same princess or killed the same arch-villain. It turns out that people actually get used quite easily to situations along the lines of,
"Ok, did everyone get Van Cleef's head?"
"Yep, I did."
"Wait, I've got to junk something and then I'll take it too."
"I killed him yesterday, thanks"
"Crap, my buddy disconnected. Guess we'll have to come tomorrow so he can get VC's head too."
Same here. Even when logically it would make little sense to have 10,000 legendary bounty hunters, the players invariably can wrap their mind around that concept just fine anyway.
And, in the end, is it that illogical? How good do you have to be, to be a heroic version of whatever you're doing. One in a million? Being one in a million sounds pretty special to me. Well, a planet like Earth has some 6000 people who are one-in-a-million, and a planet like Coruscant could have 100,000 by itself, or more than enough for any server's population by itself. And there's a whole galaxy out there in Star Wars. There are probably trillions of trillions of sentient humanoids across the galaxy, and taking the best-of-the best, the one-in-a-million people would still mean more players than WoW has total or even than the Earth's total population.
I still think you could do it better (Score:2)
The above "works", where ALL collect the head. Raids where only ONE collects the head get annoying. But how trivial would it be to re-write the quest so that you don't collect the head but get the proof of your deed some other way.
Or even, introduce a GROUP inventory and the quest item goes in there and the GROUP turns it in?
Other solutions:
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Warhammer just prints a message across the screen that you killed the dragon, or whatever, with no quest item looting pretty much ever.
It was just an example (Score:2)
Well, I'm certainly not saying it's the only way. It's just an example of something which logically makes no sense, but the players wrap their head around anyway.
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Aren't PCs always heroic in RPGs? The problem is that usually NPCs outnumber them and not just by counting the mooks.
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.
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Make what everyone's wanted for a Looooong time, a MMO Star Wars starfighter game.
I'm pretty sure if this ever got made, I'd quit my job, school, and just play this game for the rest of my life.
Also, it isn't Star Wars, but look into Jumpgate Evolution. It seems like it might have some promise on scratching the "MMO space fighter game" itch.
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 pl
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There was Star Wars: Battlefront which allows you to play battles from both classic, and new eras of SW.
It was pretty nice, they also did have air/space battles.
Been done: X-wing vs Tie Fighter. (Score:2)
X-wing vs Tie Fighter? Not really.. (Score:2)
Hell, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter didn't even let two or three players sit together in bigger ships like the Millennium Falcon (one pilot, two gunners as seen in the movies) - a total let down of a multiplay
Updated version. (Score:2)
We want 64 players or more! MMOG style! Rankings. XvT is old.
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I remember their older work, Eidolon on Atari 800XL for example. Lucas arts was a very risk taking and adventurous company which invents things just like its founder has been once upon a time.
Check it to see what I mean
http://www.answers.com/topic/the-eidolon [answers.com]
Also look at how many platforms they supported before they became a MS DirectX puppet. Supporting that number of platforms in pure ASM (mostly) wasn't a trivial task.
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World of Warcraft? I've got old D&D books for a fantasy rpg and it's soooo much better than what a computer could ever provide.
Oh. Wait. A computer can provide better graphics. More people to play with. People to play with any time of day (or night). A computer can provide ready-built stories or just mindless killing, depending on the mood I'm in. To name just a few things. So, m
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Dude!
I just want to say ME TOO, just in case anyone from Lucas Arts is reading this thread (hey, it might happen!), and because I don't have any mod points.
If an MMO could recreate something like the battle of Yavin or Endor - with hundreds (thousands) of starfighters, all with human pilots, I would sell my soul to play.
Unfortunately I don't know if we are there yet technologically. Lets face it, hardly any other MOVIES have been able to approach those levels, let alone a networked simulation with pathing f
I know what class i'm rolling... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm rolling Bantha as soon as this comes out. Look out sand dunes! i'm so gonna be role playing all over your ass! Single file bitches!
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I'm rolling Womp Rat. At 3 meters, they'll be one of the better damage races, and Luke Skywalker is the only person who can kill one.
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Crafting ... its a loot based game. (Score:1)
Gordon: We will definitely have crafting.
Great! I'm looking forward to a new starwars game with an amazing crafting system! What kind of system will it be? Can I expect a crafter based economy, something the original SWG had but every single other MMO out there has failed at doing?
From TFA:
James Olen, Studio Creative Director: Yeah, our game is about loot.
You lying son of a bitch... it only took you to paragraphs to turn around and plant that light saber right between by shoulder blades.
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I don't see how that's lying (Score:2)
I don't see how that's lying. He said they'll _have_ crafting, not that crafting will be the only thing or the alpha and omega. There are a lot of games which have both crafting and loot. WoW is probably the most visible example, though you could take EQ2, LOTRO or WAR as equally good examples. It's the norm.
There are even games where you use the loot _for_ crafting. E.g., the seeds in WAR or the "invention" system in COH/COV.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you wanted the whole game to revolve around crafted s
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Now, I'm not bashing hack and slash, I'm simply sayi
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No, you seem to be the confused one. He didn't say anywhere that it would be crafting-centri
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And I'm saying that it's been tried, and it screwed up the game for everyone else. Suddenly those "power gamer" newbies (*) can't even buy a toothpick, much less a weapon, without paying millions for it.
Then you're making crafting too difficult, ironically enough. Or making selling too difficult. Whatever, you get huge prices because so few can construct the items compared to demand.
The solution to prices being too high would be to make construction easier - you'd get more players making stuff, eventually overwhelming the gold-buyers and second character 'anonymous gifters', clanners and so on.
Of course, in WoW you have level restrictions for items - It's not like a 1st level can even wear 9/10ths the eq
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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), w
Break the norms (Score:2)
Loot. Crafted. Healer. Tank. Nuker.
Let's actively try to move away from the stereotypes. When people play MMOs they want escapism...these days, they want to escape from the real world shackles as well as the typical MMO trappings. Sure, let us shoot people and create wonderful items. But let us TRIP someone for god's sake and make a run for it instead of standing toe-to-toe, 6-on-1, swinging our sabers into empty air while some giant creature makes "Ow!" sounds.
All this technology...I can't even tackle some
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Well you can "kind of" do stuff like that in Guild Wars.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22You_Move_Like_a_Dwarf!%22 [guildwars.com]
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Slippery_Ground [guildwars.com]
There also used to be this:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/index.php?title=Tease&oldid=935123 [guildwars.com]
But I guess it wasn't popular (or was too annoying, or both ;) ), so it got changed.
And this is funny (and useful):
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22I_Meant_to_Do_That!%22 [guildwars.com]
Hope it pans out (Score:1)
I was a huge fan of the original KOTOR (not the sequel). If this has instanced dungeons or something similar (for me, one of the only reasons the pick WoW over other MMO
Harsh, man. (Score:2)
the new game will be PC only, and LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the World of Warcraft customer base.
I already knew that corporations had almost unbridled powers, but murdering customers of a competing product? That seems rather mean-spirited, even for LucasArts.
Oh dear. The WoW customer base? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ever played WoW, you would know that its customer base is rather... well... yucky.
WoW is the 12yr olds paradise who need desperatly an E-penis. Of course there are exceptions but WoW attracts its customers because it is an extremely simple game to grind rather then master or enjoy.
Don't get me wrong. You CAN master and/or enjoy WoW, but that is not what the majority of its 10 million subscribers do. They grind. They are not intrested in story, character development, immersion. They want to grind XP, get fat loot and show of their "rares".
Age of Conan had a LOT of problems but one "new" thing it did was introduce dialog trees in its quests. Not that advanced but leading to the following complaint from a player who went back to WoW:
"Why can't the dialog trees default the best options to 1 or provide a popup to confirm if you are making an important choice because I just press 1 to skip through all of them as I want to get on with the quest without reading".
If I was a little bit lazy I would find the original post. AoC at some points gave you the choice of your quest reward be in the dialog. If I remember correctly, it was the epic quest chain.
So the developers introduced a story, a background and the WoW player base just wanted to get it over with to grind loot.
AoC also had other problems, it had no loot, no armour. The game was supposed to be skill based, not based on what loot you had on you. The forums were filled with endless complaints that the armour from lvl 10 wasn't that different from lvl 40. IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE! This way, a hardcore player and a casual player would have similar stats, very important in a PvP game that doesn't want to cater only to the most hardcore grinders.
Further problem, items weren't bind on equip, meaning you could pass them on easily once you no longer had a use for them. This meant there were no rare items to begin with, nothing special about them if there were rare and in plenty supply for low low prices. Again, no end of complaints despite the fact that this was how the game was designed. on purpose.
The complaints of course all were from the people who wanted AoC to be WoW. AoC had lots of problems but not being WoW was not one of them.
Going deliberatly after the WoW market means you HAVE TO be WoW. And not the WoW some ppl play, but the WoW 10 million people play. That is a very risky market to enter. First, Blizzard has shown they are the best at making WoW and nobody else has even come close. In fact everyone else has had to make a living by NOT being WoW and attracting customers who do NOT WANT WOW! If you introduce the perfect WoW clone, then why would people come to you? They already invested lots of money and time in WoW, so why would they switch?
if you change the smallest bit, the WoW fans will complain till you change things, but they will go back to WoW anyway and you will loose all those who hated WoW and wanted something different. If only there was an example of an MMORPG that attracted people who didn't like WoW style but the game went ahead and changed to attract WoW players, failed to attract them but repulsed its old players. Anyone? Maybe some Sci-Fi movie based MMORPG. *cough*SWG NGE*cough*
AoC showed on thing, the MMORPG market is huge. You can attract a MILLION customers at launch. You do NOT have to be a WoW clone but you have to very clear about WHAT you game is going to be like from the start (DEMO) and have it WORK.
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new game will be PC only (Score:2)
new game will be PC only (must be directx) and also "LucasArts is hoping to snipe some of the World of Warcraft customer base.". Somehow, they also need to re-assure the support of older title will continue.
I am just saying Blizzard still ships updates (even converting them to Intel) to 5-6 year old games and they use technologies like OpenGL as far as possible. They can easily ship a PS3 version for example. As they also have a CPU independent version, even iPhone version is possible.
Lucas arts should wake
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new game will be PC only (must be directx)
Not necessarily. While you're probably correct that it will be Windows only, and probably does use DirectX, at this point everything is so vague that they could simply mean that they aren't making console versions.
After all, if what they meant was, "We're using Direct3D", they could fairly easily make an Xbox 360 port.
Summary (Score:2)
Star Wars is boring (Score:3, Insightful)
Star Wars used to be cool, but after the episode I,II and III flop (except the last 20 mins of III) most of us have given up.
WTF, we just got told something different. (Score:2)
And just a couple days ago, some other gaming vidiot was telling us Lucas doesn't release games worth a shit on the PC platform.
Just goes to show you, one man's shit is another man's treasure... Or that people in power don't know what they are talking about.
Either way, good to see a new game coming out, and the AI (or programming, if you will) sounds kinda cool on this one. I always hated the fact (and it turned me off of gaming, actually, back in the late 80s / early 90s) that if you finished a game, cho
Abandoning the consoles--a huge mistake (Score:3)
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Ah, but you forget, MMOs bring in the monthly fees and are thus VERY profitable.
I'm not buying it... (Score:2)
...the hype, I mean, not the game. (BioWare pretty much automatically gets my money.)
After reading TFA's, it sounds like the same promises we hear every time a new MMO is in the works.
Why don't they solve the energy crisis and give everyone a puppy while they're at it?
I'
Re:SWG? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe current play mechanics can't do a SW game justice... or maybe... just maybe... it's the fact it's a shallow and convoluted universe that's been raped by it's creator an anyone else with enough time to pen a novel to be sold at the local supermarket... Maybe...
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I prefer Chode with 6 of 9.
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Anyway, an MMO might do the Dune books justice (or in SW, the lore because half the movies sucked) because they can put a lot more content i
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A dune MMO would be awesome. The story is practically built for an MMO. Multiple houses to choose from, a common currency (spice) and according to imdb there's even a new movie coming out in 2010. If someone started now they might get it out while the movie comes out in the cinema.
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If you put a Jedi and a simple Trooper in the SW MMO you get either a big unbalance or the Jedi and/or Trooper will be weaker/stronger than they should be.
Just to geek out here for a second: I've thought about this and I'm not sure it's true. We know that there are some people who the force is particularly strong with them, and those people would seem to have an advantage regardless of their position or training. It might be somewhat like what a lot of RPGs would give you as a "luck" stat, i.e. you'd get better results more often. So a well trained soldier, say, with whom the force was particularly strong, might be more powerful than a weak and poorly trai
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You do realize that the top 10% of America gets something on the order of 30-40%, right?
gets 40% of what now? (Score:1, Offtopic)
In 2005, The top 10% paid a little under 70% of the income tax burden. If they receive only 30-40% of the benefits, then they're getting a raw deal. If they earned only 30-40% of the income, they'd be getting an even raw-er deal, though their actual income share of 47% is not much better.
And, I find it really, really unlikely that they would be getting that much benefit. At least, directly. Sure, schools and such benefit everyone, not just the students, in some way, but it's a bit disingenuous to double
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Income tax is not a proxy for service. The rich pay way more than the poor, but the rich have a lot more control over the whole of society in return. You will never see a poor president of the USA. Obama spent close to a billion dollars in his current campain.
What the rich get as immediate benefit of their financial contribution to society is a much more peaceful society. In past centuries selfish oligarchies mostly ended up in revolutions.