E3 2011: Star Wars: The Old Republic
We get a fresh new look at Bioware's upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Beautiful vistas are numerous and plentiful in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
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Shacknews
replyJeff Mattas posted a new article, E3 2011: Star Wars: The Old Republic.
We get a fresh new look at Bioware's upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic.-
The curious should also watch this: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2011-star-wars/715515
It shows that they're listening to the feedback and fixing issues (they made a complete overhaul of the UI after Pax) -
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I can't wait for this game!
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"Furthermore, the player's chosen faction (Rebel or Imperial), character class, and in-game choices will cause noticeable shifts in the narrative,"
Rebel? Imperial?-
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There's no excuse in this day and age for confusing the factions like that! Rabble rabble rabble!
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Horde or Alliance
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Freeport or Qeynos?
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My brother, if I can convince him to pick up a new MMO, would play a Marauder and I'd go Sorc.
PEACE IS A LIE, THERE IS ONLY PASSION
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11 Minute Dev walkthrough on Tatooine.
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http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/tatooine-developer-walkthrough
Helps to include the link.....-
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Yeah I realized that after I watched the link in the OP. This one has an HD download link though!!!
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short behind the scenes video of good/bad choice difference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv_7wex6a-k -
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They don't know. Redoing the UI delayed them a good deal.
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It's actually a good thing. It was a major complaint from the testers and PAX. So they went through and redid it and so far everyone's been very impressed.
The problem was it was too derivative and WoW-like. People wanted something much more star-wars related.
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Open Beta please.
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If this thing releases around/after Diablo 3, they're flat out fucked. I know Diablo 3 isn't an MMO, but there is so much overlap between the Diablo/WOW/MMO audience, and everyone's going to be riding Diablo 3's schlong when it comes out.
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all of my pent up pavlovian urges from star wars galaxies kick in once i hear the music
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kotor style story
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It's not worth your time. Just give it to me and I will save you the trouble.
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People say this a lot. "What does it have that any other MMO doesn't have?" I think that puts devs and producers in a tight spot: what would YOU put in that hasn't been done before? It's a serious question and it's hard to give good answers while staying in an MMO format.
That said, I'm looking forward to this game myself. Maybe it will suck, maybe it will turn out OK.-
I tell you what I'd do.
First, I'd abolish this Side A vs. Side B (and sometimes Side C) nonsense. There are several warring factions in the game, but I'd leave the choice of who to join up to the player. Instead of abstract separation between what 'side' you're on, I'd put into effect a more realistic option: racial alliances, racial tension, and racial war.
Elves and Half-Elves hold a shaky alliance as the Half-Elves are treated like second-class citizens by Humans. Dwarves and Gnomes are at war for control of mines, land, and treasures. The Barbarians are hated and feared by all. Humans are neutral for everyone except Half-Elves; racial enmity between the two is at an all-time high. The Beastmen (Wolfmen, Ogres, Cyclops', and a few other creatures) have a shaky alliance with the Barbarians and an ancient truce with the Elves. Let that be the thing that separates players. If you want to group with your friends, you better choose a race to complement them.
Then in the game itself, you have all sorts of organizations that are based on what kind of role you lean towards and what race you chose. The Humans have their sect of Templars, Holy Knights dedicated towards purging the land of evil influences (namely, the Beastmen, Barbarians, and the uncivilized Elves), as well as their Royal Army made up of knights, crossbowmen, and scouts.
The Elves have their Arcane Order, their Guardians (archers and sworddancers), and the Wild Elves have their disparate sect of shapeshifters that meet in secret and are allied with Barbarians and Beastmen. Half-Elves have become a kind of sub-race under the Elves, but they possess some peculiar abilities, and are master Illusionists, Bards, and deadly with small blades.
The Barbarians only have one group, their horde, which consists of Berserkers, Warriors, Shaman, Oracles. The Beastmen have some divisions between the races – Wolfmen are mostly warriors, Cyclops are mostly mages, Ogres are mostly Knights that can tap into the dark energies of the land.
Dwarves are craftsmen first and foremost, and players can become Builders who are primarily crafters (each race has its own craftsmen but Dwarves are world-renowned for their ability). Their Stone Legion consists of Dwarven Defenders, the Dwarven Gunnery team, and the Monks of the Earth which serve as oracles and spiritual leaders. The Gnomes on the other hand have become very adept at the use of chemicals. They are loosely organized, most are solely in pursuit of riches and glory, but they do have a few large orders: The Alchemists Guild, The Tinkerers Guild, and the League of Adventurers.
Players can choose to join these orders and gain specialized skills and more abilities, further paths. Or they can go ronin and become more generalized and all-around useful, but they're not top dog. These paths are also not set in stone; players can move between their racial orders and, with a ton of hard work, could even join a foreign order.
There's no classes. Just skills. Players improve by doing what they want to do. There's also little in the ways of rabid monsters and beasts; the majority of the enemies you encounter is based on your race, as well as the myriad of brigands, mercenaries, and thieves in the world. There are also dungeons to explore for treasure, artifacts to find, ruins to unearth, and so forth. But the real prize is territory. Command of territory means a simple thing - unallied races will have a hell of a time getting through the lands. There's no bonus points or anything like that, just domination of land, which leads to natural increases in dungeons that can be accessed safely, mines that can be explored and exploited, and more land for fishing and farming, more trees for wood to create items, etc.
Looming over everything are rumors of the resurrection of old demons and long-dead gods that nearly destroyed the world. The Beastmen have heard rumblings and the Barbarians feel a shift in the winds, but they have kept their information to themselves.
And then boom, you have yourself an MMO world that is unique in today's landscape with goals that are unique in today's landscape and gameplay that's unique in today's landscape. Some of it's been done before but none of it is being done right now and that's what matters.-
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I have some hopes for Guild Wars 2. The first game was a very interesting and well-executed game and ran successful for quite some time. GW2 is the only interesting MMO on the horizon, including the ones that are in development and haven't been properly announced. We'll see. I would like it if they made the game into more than loot and enemies, give it some overarching goal like land control. that'd be pretty sweet.
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I did enjoy UO, it was a trailblazer. But eventually having no classes, only skills, made for some hard to balance combinations (mage tank) and eventually everyone who wanted to compete pretty much needed to train a cookie cutter set of skills. That's a problem for classed games too of course, but one thing I did enjoy about EQ1: class restrictions based on race, and race restrictions had a high degree of impact on the game as a whole.
I know lots of people wanted their troll wizards. But really, it doesn't fit... trolls are, as a race, unintelligent and spurn books! They compensate for this by being brutes and double HP regen. Maybe I'm in it more for story and roleplaying, but things like fae warriors and ogre rogues seem backwards and too lenient.-
Yeah! Race is now such a cosmetic thing and I think that's terrible.
The issue of skill imbalance is a problem, yeah. But I think some of that can be softened by skill specializations and caps. Like, five skills that can be raised to 75 and the rest to 50. And quests can be done later on to have access to higher skill levels and more skill specializations, like a quest to get 6 to 75 instead of 5. Or a quest to get 5 to 80 instead of 75.
And if you follow one of those orders, select skills to 100 (3 to 100 and the rest to 50) so on and so forth. I think you'll have a more difficult time running into boredom with that system than with a class based system.
One of the problems of a lot of skill based games is that the Restoration skill or whatever tends to become a necessity for all players. But that could be avoided by introducing viable methods for damage reduction outside of that skill, like Crowd Control vs. Healing spells vs. Force fields/shiels vs. Life leeching
Different styles could open up other skill paths and dissuade players from following one specific line.
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get away from the idea that mmo = 1-9 rpg
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I'll actually pay attention to the story, since I don't have to read a wall of text. The only time i ever payed any attention to WOW stories, was when they did cut scenes. Usually just clicked through them so i could get to the next part of my quest. TOR is going to allow us to make decisions that affect the direction that the quest takes, which should be fun. I think i'm going to be killing a lot of folks as a Sith Bounty Hunter.
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Ok, I'm back on board.
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So does it look like they're listening to the criticisms and tweaking the game just so?
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The problem with this game is that they're using WOW as a model. You can't make an MMO that interests me when WOW is your aspiration.
Don't they get it? Anyone who's interested in this kind of game just wants to play WOW. You can't beat it at its own game.
Do something different. How about gameplay that isn't dick in a box? How about some real time combat mechanics instead of this shitty global cooldown based shitstorm?
They just went into this game with the wrong attitude. If you have a bad goal it's really hard to come up with anything good.
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Not their aspiration, but their foundation. The core of the game is still very much based on the foundational mechanics and gameplay design that WoW is and that is why it most likely going to fail.
They should have taken a more unique approach, such as using a skill based game, and making Force users something to strive for rather than a base class. Or they could have done something really cool by allowing Force users that aren't Jedi or Sith, and adding all sorts of Force powers.-
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Galaxies was quite successful, mind you. I think Galaxies also had a much better idea behind it than this MMO and suffered from, mostly, SOE being a bunch of idiots.
But no, that's not exactly what I would like to see. I understand the old galaxy had a lot more Force-sensitives and Force-users. But I think that's something that really should be explored. There should be Bounty Hunters, Commandos, Force Sensitives that are able to do certain things, Force users independent of the Jedi and the Sith that have other powers than a standard Jedi.
That's another thing. The Sith and the Jedi seem to have pretty similar powers, which is just blech. But the game should be placing more emphasis on the Force not as a power or a set of powers, but as a raw force (pun intended) in the universe. That would be an interesting, new take for Bioware to explore.
Instead, TOR looks like absolutely nothing new. You've got your classes in the game that have a wealth of abilities just like Blizzard's classes. You've got two rival factions for no real reason out of an entire UNIVERSE of choices. You could have had Jawas as something playable that wield the Force through technology or something, Wookies, playable Droids, Twileks that use lightsabers without the Force at all...instead, we have the same ol' Side A vs Side B nonsense that hardly makes sense, instead of a more natural, realistic series of factions and races with particular perspectives. -
Galaxies was an incredible game. I blacked out for 3 months while playing it. I was there. And then when I started watching my friends play WoW, it was amazing how, well... stupid the game was. It wasn't complex at all. Galaxies was probably the most complex game I've ever played, or at least right up there.
It was so weird. There were dancers in a bar that just hung out there all day and socialized. Our war party would come in from a hunt and see all the familiar faces, talk about Imperials in the area, trade, socialize, and plan missions. Jesus, it was another world.
I made a bunch of friends, and we kept in contact for a couple years after that, but it was never the same. When I look back on it, probably the best thing that came out of it was my ability to type 80 words per minute faster. Considering how much time and energy I spent on that game, I should be typing about 3,000 wpm. :(
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Bare in mind that what your seeing isn't the finished product. Also, they're trying to create a game that all can play. Make an MMO heavy on the graphics requirements and you cut a big portion of your potential customers out. Not to mention that just having an outstanding graphics card doesn't cut it anymore. More than ever, it's about having a system that functions well together and doesn't bottleneck on any particular piece of hardware. A lot of people don't want to admit it, but a big reason they still play WoW is that their rigs just don't handle other MMO's with heavy requirements well. Was one of the things that helped kill Warhammer, and a big reason Rift didn't draw more of the WoW base away. The success of this game won't be because it's got the best most spectacular graphics, but on the gameplay and lore.
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