SW:TOR announced. Looks like crap

[Samuel]

So it will be a WoW clone? Do we need another of those?

Seriously, those it look like this has any distinguishing features to set it apart?

[charlemagne]

Yeah, they say it'll focus on story a lot (so maybe more of a LOTRO clone).

[Seydlitz_k]

ugh, I'm really disliking the artistic style of this game. Check out hip-cool-emo teenage super-sith boy here: http://www.swtor.com/info/story/sith-lords This is looking to much like city of heroes, especially with the spandex costumes, and the annoying comic-book hero proportions. Strangely, the character concept art dosn't look half bad though. I wonder why they didn't make the models similar to the concepts? I know games aren't all about graphics, yada yada, but a convincing visual style is important.

Some of the gameplay mechanics seem interesting (NPC companion, storyline and quests relating to your class and your faction and your light/dark alignment). It'll improve the soloing aspect of MMO's a lot if they do it right. I'm interested to see where that goes.

The story sounds very generic and minimalist as well. Hundreds of Republic planets?

The only way I see it working, is if the Republic was retconned to have shrunken drastically in size until it's only a few hundred planets. This could be due to the huge amount of massive wars that happened just prior to the MMO (Great Hyperspace War, Jedi Civil War, Manadlorian Wars, etc.), and most systems might have lost support for the Republic and gone off to do their own thing. What then happened is the Sith retreated to some backwater outer rim confederation of systems (Possibly a few thousand systems which grouped together for economic and safety reasons, after leaving the republic) and pulled a Darth Sidious, secretly instating themselves into power and slowly building a Sith support base in their population until the confederacy declares itself the new Sith Empire due to massive popular support and attacks the weakened husk of a Republic just for revenge. With the rest of the galaxy being fractured into small groups of single or only a few thousand systems, this would make the Sith a credible threat to galactic stability.

To be fair though, even that is a bit ridiculous. I would have much preferred Bean's idea, or if they had set the game during the Great Hyperspace war, or just before the Jedi Civil War or something. It would have been much better if Bioware took their own advice, and started a new story far away from established canon.

[Big Phil]

For those of you who played Galaxies; what was that game like compared with KOTOR or KOTOR II? I played Galaxies for all of a week, and then got bored.

[Mr Bean]

For those of you who played Galaxies; what was that game like compared with KOTOR or KOTOR II? I played Galaxies for all of a week, and then got bored.

Galaxies was a game that had gems of good in a giant sea of crap.

Combat? Crap
Exploration? Good to crap. The best places were stocked chock full with ultra strong monsters or bandits

Skills(Per "fix") great to crap, it was quick and easy to train skills, you could have a max of two and a half classes fully trained. Wanted to be a part time dancer, full time bountry hunter? Can do. Want to be a Ter-kasi(whatever) hand to hand fighter instead and a part time stylist? Takes you about a week to untrain all your skills and get fully trained on the new class and that's a causal, hour a day style playing. Switching classes took about two days if you did it in two four hour sessions. There were also a ton of classes which play totally differently from each other, and when combined togther made crazy hybrid classes.

Then they revamped everything and the one good SWG point(Free-form classes) got tossed out the window. Congradulations Bounty number number 119823 and Jedi 1999DZ

Housing and Towns:Awesome but no serious point. You could with enough credits place down a small to mansion sized house anywhere not within city limits(Note on shanty-towns in a moment) and change that house to your hearts content. It was kinda awkward to move things around but with an hour or so of practice you could get anything you wanted where you wanted (SWG had the "Galatic Showcase to show off the best ones, and I saw some rather impressive stuff folks had done Like this Guild hall)

90% of the decorative stuff was cheap and easy to make yourself or buy off someone else.

Jump to Lightspeed was what killed the game for me. It was a point and click FPS. Piloting skill matter less than nothing and crafting for space equipment was 25X more expensive than anything ground side.

Craft:Crafting was hit or miss. Crafting things easy (Bioengineering was fucking crazy in it's complexity and randomness, lets put Rancor in Bunnies and add in a dash of Death snake! Some days you get a giant fully rancor which drools poison, some days you get a Rabbit with light pointy sharp poison teeth. Some days you get a fluffy snake),

It went like this, quality of parts+your skill+your tools=final product for 95% of crafting(Minus bio-engineering) crafting was great fun in SWG.

Lets get to the rest of the MMO


Bugs? Lots!
PVP? Broken! But team PVP was the name of the day and see how easy it was to change to the current flavor of the week class.
Servers? Ghost towns to so overloaded they crash every other night.

[Big Phil]

Was it possible to play Galaxies without a team or dealing with the mouth-breathers that typically play MMORPGs?

That's why I liked KOTOR; it was my game, and I didn't have to deal with real people being creepy, idiotic douchebags. And that's precisely why I hated Galaxies.

[Seydlitz_k]

Was it possible to play Galaxies without a team or dealing with the mouth-breathers that typically play MMORPGs?

That's why I liked KOTOR; it was my game, and I didn't have to deal with real people being creepy, idiotic douchebags. And that's precisely why I hated Galaxies.

I think you'd best stay away from this game then. While it might be a fun solo experience, it's only been out for a few days and the community seems to already be a steaming pile of shit. Check out the boards if you have the stomach to...It's already populated by retards. Quite a lot of them the kind that worship Traviss and want to be Mandalorian Bounty Hunters... (Anyone want to bet that the professions will be 40% Jedi/Sith, 40% Bounty Hunter, 15% Smuggler and 5% everything else? )

And SWG was broken even before it was launched and handed over to an inept Live team, with no idea about the core principals of the game. Those claims that it was good pre-CU? Don't believe 'em. It was only good during beta, and that was because of constant resets, the freshness of it all, and because that was the closest to what the devs had envisioned. As well as the beta tester community being close knit, and lacking the brain dead morons that flocked to SWG post-launch.

[Oskuro]

I just wonder why don't they set an SW MMO during the Clone Wars. You have two clearly defined factions, the Jedi are somewhat more plausible as a class, lots of "Battlegrounds" potential, and the prequels are fresh enough in the minds of the fans to ensure a solid player base. Also, the prequels are what the younger SW fans know best, and GL seems to get a hard-on out of spewing prequel-related products.

Oh, and killing gungans.

[ThePorkchopExpress]

So it will be a WoW clone? Do we need another of those?

Seriously, those it look like this has any distinguishing features to set it apart?

Actually they turned Staw Wars Galaxies into a WoW clone with their class and expertize template system. Except when the NGE (new game experience) came out, it was incomplete and the templates werent included for every class. Actually i think only 2 had them at the start, and they added 2 at a time with patches that were months in coming. Terrible.

Any time in the future when a company totally wrecks a game.. i have a feeling it will be referred to as SWG'ing it.

[Ashka Boda]

I just wonder why don't they set an SW MMO during the Clone Wars. You have two clearly defined factions, the Jedi are somewhat more plausible as a class, lots of "Battlegrounds" potential, and the prequels are fresh enough in the minds of the fans to ensure a solid player base. Also, the prequels are what the younger SW fans know best, and GL seems to get a hard-on out of spewing prequel-related products.

Oh, and killing gungans.

That's an incredibly good point in every way, especially since everything about TOR (the factions, the politics, the adversaries - even the armor) are very similar to The Clone Wars. I am incredibly skeptical of everything to do with this game, especially seeing as Star Wars' previous foray into MMORPG was the sorry shitwad that was Galaxies.

And why don't they use new eras? The Republic had existed for twenty thousand years when the Golden Age of the Sith comic is set. That's plenty of time to set interesting ruckus, and you wouldn't be nearly as confined to continuity as you would after 5,000 BBY. The New Essential Chronology outlined at least a dozen interesting-sounding conflicts that have not been explored in any other way.

I never really liked how KOTOR is set, what, fifty years after Tales of the Jedi?, and the techonlogy is basically the same, if not better, than that of the movie era, whereas in TOTJ, they're using beam tubes, paper books, lightsabers that have to be attatched to power packs and spaceships that look like flying gothic cathedrals. They could basically have set KOTOR in any era, and they picked one that had already been extensively explored in comics, novels and both tabletop RPGs. Morons.

[Ohma]

I never really liked how KOTOR is set, what, fifty years after Tales of the Jedi?, and the techonlogy is basically the same, if not better, than that of the movie era, whereas in TOTJ, they're using beam tubes, paper books, lightsabers that have to be attatched to power packs and spaceships that look like flying gothic cathedrals. They could basically have set KOTOR in any era, and they picked one that had already been extensively explored in comics, novels and both tabletop RPGs. Morons.

Actually, the tech seen in the first TotJ comics (oddly enough, they were also subtitled Knights of the Old Republic) was only a bit more anachronistic from what is seen in the KotOR games. The only major difference was that the majority of the ships seen were more like giant flying scrapheaps than the chunky-but-spaceship-looking things in the games. The only reason you saw stuff like paper books and lasers with external power packs was because the locales visited were generally backwards parts of the galaxy where people either hadn't advanced as far as the rest of the galaxy, or just made do with older tech because it was cheaper.

For some reason the Dark Lords of the Sith and Sith War comics went for a much more anachronistic feel than the originals, switching to people in variously ancient egyptian and greek esque outfits instead of clothing similar to what you'd find in Firefly, mostly replacing junky looking computers with wacky magic crystal hologram things, and very rarely showing any vehicles (other than spaceships) that weren't creature drawn.

[Ashka Boda]

he locales visited were generally backwards parts of the galaxy where people either hadn't advanced as far as the rest of the galaxy, or just made do with older tech because it was cheaper.

I guess it could also be reasoned that the Sith War introduced many new fantastic technologies, rather like our own world wars, but to me, that still doesn't explain why they had to set KOTOR so shortly after TOTJ. And now TOR is supposed to happen just after KOTOR... it's like they're trying to fill in everything between 4,000 BBY and 0 BBY before they explore anything else.