Once upon a time, a western MMO was announced three years before it’s targeted release date. The developers tried to hide their more simplistic graphics engine by making use of “stylized” graphics. Some were turned off by the graphical design, but others argued the graphics would age better than realistic looking games. Besides, it promised to be a “seamless” world, which is worth something. Despite being the company’s first MMO, people trusted the developer because of their reputation for only releasing quality games. The developer had a reputation for making the some of the best games of their genre. The game of which I speak is Star Wars, The Old Republic and Bioware. But all these things could also be said of World of Warcraft and Blizzard.
Category: Star Wars: The Old Republic
The Final Countdown
A lot of times, developers get a lot more out of their advertising buck if they don’t tell us what the heck they are advertising. The Cloverfield movie trailer originally didn’t give us any clue as to the title of the movie it was advertising. All the speculation outside the movie theater actually lead to more word-of-mouth buzz than if they had just told us, “This is a trailer for a blair-witch like monster movie with a funny name”.
Bioware has once again decided to make use of the power of mystery with a countdown timer that appears on every Bioware website you can think of, except for TOR. Is the exclusion of the timer on the Old Republic’s site an indication that TOR fans shouldn’t care about the timer? Or is it an insidious plan to throw us off the trail of a big Star Wars announcement?
Well, I suppose we’re supposed to speculate until the countdown reaches zero, on Monday morning.
EDIT: Turned out it was a competition to win stuff like computers, t-shirts and other swag. My heart always yearns for a TOR announcement. /Sigh.
Early, Middle, Late
For a game that depends on a stream of income from subscribers or RMT shoppers, the first hour of play must be the top development priority. This is where you hook players. After that, the endgame is important because that is where your players will be spending time indefinitely and where your game’s chatter will come from in the long run. Next is the early game, when you build momentum. The mid-game has already fallen this far down the list, as you have certainly seen in a lot of MMOs, and frankly few care much how good the late-game is because they are already fully committed and racing for the end-game.
I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us. Continue reading Early, Middle, Late
The Explorer’s Conundrum
A big reason I fear I will never play Mass Effect 2, or similar games, is that the story is personalized. I don’t like leaving paths unexplored. What if I killed the Texas-talking lizard? What if I ignored their water supply? I hate those “what ifs.” It leaves me the feeling that I did not get the best story as if I skipped a few chapters and then tore out a few pages. The last thing I want to do with my precious time is replay the entire game just to read a few different chapters.
As a quick aside, this is largely why I don’t alt. My main has a rich history and story that would take any alt months and months of dedicated play (and player wrangling) to match. Playing an alt, in my opinion, is even worse than replaying a game like Mass Effect 2 because most often the alt experience will be a shadow of the main read. I’ll leave that thought now for another time. Continue reading The Explorer’s Conundrum
Massive Delays
Gamers love when Blizzard says that a game will be “released when it’s ready” because they believe it indicates the final product will be of high quality. However, we don’t really react well to news of a delay, do we? When Bioware announced that Star Wars – The Old Republic was being pushed back an extra year into 2011, the community on their forums went into a nerd-rage.
The Old Republic – All Classes Revealed
For months now, thousands of people have been speculating and arguing about the names of the eight classes in SWTOR. Not since the debates about the identity of the “5th Cylon” in Battlestar Galactica has it felt like this. The message boards have been bathed in flame on a semi-permanent basis as titles like “Mandalorian” “Engineer” “Noble” and “Droid” were all tossed into the ring of possible classes. The hottest debate has centered on one question. Will there be one Jedi class and one Sith class? Or will there be two for each side, making the total force-users out to be four? Would Bioware make an mmo where four out of eight classes held lightsabers?
On some podcasts, like ToroCast, they felt completely certain that they knew that there were only two force users total. On my podcast, my co-hosts and I felt so certain that there were four force-users that we often talked about them without providing a disclaimer that their existence was unconfirmed.
But now, the last of the classes are confirmed, and the two-vs-four debate can finally die.
Continue reading The Old Republic – All Classes Revealed
A difficult game to balance for PVP
Once per week, I podcast about Star Wars: The Old Republic. On the last episode, when the subject of “invisibility” style stealth for the recently revealed Imperial Agent class came up, I was adamant in my opposition to it. I hate when you are trying to PVP and thieves or burglers pop out of thin-air and do burst damage as if they had some kind of invisibility spell. I felt pretty sure they wouldn’t give invisibility stealth to Imperial Agents because, afterall, it wouldn’t be balanced for the Imperial Agent to have both cover and invisibility stealth when the counterpart, the Smuggler, does not. Well it seems I was wrong, because the folks at Darth Hater have seen video of an Imperial Agent go stealth with an non-timed toggle switch stealth.
How is this possible I wonder? One side of the fence has stealth, the other does not. It’s possible I think, because the game may not be designed around PVP balance.
Continue reading A difficult game to balance for PVP
Jedi Knight info leaks on SWTOR
It’s really hard for Bioware to keep the lid on anything once they start preparing their website for a reveal. Once someone finds a hidden link on the website, even if it only existed for 3 seconds, they post a screen capture of it and start a thread about it. By the time the thread is shut down and evidence of the restricted information deleted, most of it is copied over to Darth Hater where it can’t be touched by Bioware. This was the case with their accidental reveal of beta testing, and it has been again revealed with their accidental reveal of certain Jedi Knight concept art, icons, and even the Jedi’s animations.
Did we already know that Jedi will be in the game? Of course, but until it’s out, trying to hack screen shots out of their system is a game in-and-of-itself. Discussing why Bioware has hidden stubs like “http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/space-combat” is likely to garner more information for the reader than a “No comment about space at this time” response from a developer. And you know what? Trying to find hidden and secret information is more fun than just being given the information to begin with.
STO vs TOR
Star Trek and Star Wars are always do things differently. Star Trek space battles play out like large naval ships swapping cannon fire and Star Wars space battles play out like World War era biplanes engaged in dog-fights. On the ground, Star Wars is all sword and sorcery with a sci-fi coat of paint, while Star Trek alternates between cowboy-style fist fights and cowboy-style shoot-outs with hand phasers and phaser rifles replacing six-shooters and shotguns.
People are going to compare the upcoming Star Trek Online to the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, so I might as well throw in my two credits/latinum as well.
The Old Republic – One Micro Transaction at a Time
Star Wars the Old Republic has not announced their pricing plan officially. I think most people are expecting a monthly fee, but occasionally the topic of “micro-transactions” comes up on the message boards. Once the official boards are up and running again, I expect to see some threads dedicated to portions of the Beta tester terms of service because they indicate the existence of a micro-transaction system.
Continue reading The Old Republic – One Micro Transaction at a Time