I'm sure you will be able to play this game while ignoring the storyline also.
Unless they make every NPC voiced dialog unskippable then you just click through and when your character is supposed to choose between 3 options as such.
1.) I will help you if the price is right bud. (Evil Option)
2.) Oh let me get right on that it is the right thing to do sir. (Good Option)
I mean you don't need to know anything more then what the guy wants you to do then pick the option that fits your alignment. You sure as #$^ don't have to read into every little storyline detail and watch the cut scenes in their entirety.
I also would be really shocked if they made them all unskippable though. Mostly because once you play through both sides of the storyline even if you absolutely adore the story you won't want to have to sit through long cut scenes between each quest/mission.
I doubt this game pulls from WoW though at a heavy rate some people enjoy fantasy MMO's over sci-fi and vice versa. This game is not trying to directly compete with WoW like Rift did. Yep there are only so many players out there willing to spend 15 bucks a month playing an MMO but this game would have to resemble WoW a lot more to try to blatantly steal its players.
Designing from the storyline up is interesting, but I still don't understand the implementation of it into an MMO. How can my choices make any lasting impact on the game world, when the game world is designed to allow everyone to have those exact same experiences? To use Dragon Age: Origins as an example, how I can I choose to banish Alistar from the kingdom when someone else out there has the exact same quest and instead chooses to make Alistar king?
Are the quest/dialogue choices just going to have no impact on the game world? If so, what's the point of designing from the storyline? I act like a douche and earn evil points, I act like a saint and earn good points, but nothing actually happens differently in the world no matter the choice I make?
Confused!
(basically a re-iteration of my question from last page, heh)
I'm hoping beyond hope that they have mastered a technique that WoW started using during WOTLK, known as 'phasing', where your game state could actually be different than that of other players depending upon whether they had done certain quests etc. They just need to figure out how to implement that for...the entire game. That would be dope.
And yes, I just used 'dope' as slang. I liked the 90s.
Would it sound revolutionary if I suggested content other than raids/dungeons just might be instanced, and that would handle 95% of this branching story thing? Guess I've been playing too many heavily instanced online games of late..
I'm hoping beyond hope that they have mastered a technique that WoW started using during WOTLK, known as 'phasing', where your game state could actually be different than that of other players depending upon whether they had done certain quests etc. They just need to figure out how to implement that for...the entire game. That would be dope.
Kind of like WoW does, but they'd need to make a lot of phases if they make individual choices in quests affect phasing, taking a lot of dev time, so I kinda doubt they'll go that route except for a handful of quests arcs, if any.
I kinda doubt they'll be able to implement phasing as much as it sounds like you want. It's pretty damn time consuming, at least in the way that blizzard did it. If you want the phases to have significant differences, you have to put the dev time into both of those phases. And if you want a bunch of phases for a bunch of different options then... yea.
And I think we all know that Bioware is already feeling pressed for time.
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
The game will be successful, because it says "star wars". I'm not much of a star wars fan, but interested in MMORPGs, so I read some about the game. And I know to 100% that I will never play it. It's just "more of the same, but with star wars". No thanks. I guess for die hard star wars fans it might be fun, or for people who never played MMORPGs before. But if you played MMORPGs and are neutral about star wars, then it's, as said, just more of the same. And no thanks: got enough of that.
You could say that about most games 99% of games are just clones of other games with a slightly different take on it.
I mean once you played one FPS game you played em all.
You could say that about most games 99% of games are just clones of other games with a slightly different take on it.
I mean once you played one FPS game you played em all.
Once you played one RTS game you played them all.
etc....
To be fair, MMORPGs are pretty ****ing rooted in tradition now. It's understandable though, considering the cost to make them, the potential for commercial success if popular, and the huge potential to flop if not.
They rely on building a big community, so they kind of have to stick to what works, and it's not helping the genre.
FPS does seem to be headed in the same direction in the past few years, but there're still original games made fairly often. The (very) rare times that original MMORGPs come out, they pretty much flop really hard invariably.
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
I have to say, the $15/mo subscription fee just about completely killed my interest in this game.
Honestly what did you expect? It's an MMORPG. Even DCUO still has a monthly fee. It'd either $15/mo or F2P (or in Lego Universe's case, $10/mo). That being sad, games that aren't $15/mo or have Premium Pay content suck. And most games with PP Content suck anyways.
In an eight player game, is anything good? Don't you just sit there countering combos until someone genesis waves for 42 after all the blue players tap out fighting over a bribery?
Honestly what did you expect? It's an MMORPG. Even DCUO still has a monthly fee. It'd either $15/mo or F2P (or in Lego Universe's case, $10/mo). That being sad, games that aren't $15/mo or have Premium Pay content suck. And most games with PP Content suck anyways.
I agree. If you want a good experience, it's pretty much guaranteed that you need to pay $15/mo. I hate B2P games because they always have premium content. I don't know about anyone else but as long as you have a part-time job $15 a month is not a huge deal.
I kinda doubt they'll be able to implement phasing as much as it sounds like you want. It's pretty damn time consuming, at least in the way that blizzard did it. If you want the phases to have significant differences, you have to put the dev time into both of those phases. And if you want a bunch of phases for a bunch of different options then... yea.
And I think we all know that Bioware is already feeling pressed for time.
Yeah, obviously it's not something I'm counting on. It would just be really sweet.
As for the subscription fee causing anyone to 'lose interest'..I'm not sure what you expected from an MMO. $15/month is the going rate for any subscription-based MMO. And, as someone that has played 'free' MMOs(they're really not free, you have to spend real money to get any really premium items..and that always ends up costing more than 15/month would), I'll take subscription-based MMOs any day of the week.
Honestly what did you expect? It's an MMORPG. Even DCUO still has a monthly fee. It'd either $15/mo or F2P (or in Lego Universe's case, $10/mo). That being sad, games that aren't $15/mo or have Premium Pay content suck. And most games with PP Content suck anyways.
I expected something like guild wars or Starcraft, where once i've paid for the disc, I can play to my heart's content. As a college student with no income, 15/mo is significant.
I expected something like guild wars or Starcraft, where once i've paid for the disc, I can play to my heart's content. As a college student with no income, 15/mo is significant.
It is significant. I won't disagree with that. And it sucks - but Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 aside MMO's are either 15/mo or pay for premium content.
In an eight player game, is anything good? Don't you just sit there countering combos until someone genesis waves for 42 after all the blue players tap out fighting over a bribery?
I expected something like guild wars or Starcraft, where once i've paid for the disc, I can play to my heart's content. As a college student with no income, 15/mo is significant.
SC isn't an MMO though.
In today's market, MMORPGs can charge monthly and will make more money doing it. So that's what they do.
There are some good cash shop MMOs where you don't need to buy anything to achieve max level and have fun
But you need to pay to get the best items. I really dislike that system. If they could go the way League of Legends has done it (money makes getting every significantly faster, but it's the same stuff you get through playing) it'd be more tolerable, but noone's done that well with an mmo.
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"Virtue, Jacques, is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it..."
True, but the battlenet servers cost money, just like every other type of computer, and it is an online game that serves thousands of users, just like a MMO
True, but the battlenet servers cost money, just like every other type of computer, and it is an online game that serves thousands of users, just like a MMO
The server upkeep costs aren't the only reason why MMOs have monthly fees. As a genre, they are expected to churn out new "free" content on a regular basis, and that new content has to be paid for.
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#define ALWAYS SOMETIMES
#define NEVER RARELY
#define ALL MANY
-=GIVE US SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN=-
I'm nerd enough to link my WoW Armory Though I'll put it in a small font.
True, but the battlenet servers cost money, just like every other type of computer, and it is an online game that serves thousands of users, just like a MMO
SC2 produces patches, yes - but they don't release any NEW content. Patches only help fix problems for existing programming. The money you pay for with an MMO doesn't pay for a server - servers are actually fairly cheap even when hosting 6 million + users. It's about new content. For example, in the new WoW patch (4.3) there will be a new battle with Deathwing. That's a whole new dungeon, supposedly. So if, every month, there is new content, it's like paying for that.
In an eight player game, is anything good? Don't you just sit there countering combos until someone genesis waves for 42 after all the blue players tap out fighting over a bribery?
Bit of a necro but the NDA was lifted fairly recently and I've actually been a beta tester for a while, so if anyone has any questions or whatever feel free to ask. The spoiler tags are mostly for organization and to make the post smaller than for actual spoilers, though I do talk about how i will handle spoilers in this first part right here.
First off though, I've been beta tester for a few months or so, but at first I had graphical issues that made it unplayable. A couple weeks or so ago I updated my graphics drivers with a pretty new update that fixed it.... or maybe a new beta build did, whatever. In any case I haven't been able to play for really extended periods of time so I don't really know much about endgame. I've only played to level 20 (of 50) thus far, I haven't pvp'd either in warzones or world pvp, etc, and I generally don't know much of anything about what I haven't experienced in game.
Oh yea, on that note, I'm going to be avoiding spoilers about story and stuff, but I will lightly touch on mechanics and things like that
Alright, the game does draw a fair amount of influence from wow and other mmos, but I have to say that most of the explicit influences are from pretty superficial things. While I'm not an mmo expert the general atmosphere of the game and the combat seem reasonably unique. The most important WoW parallel I can think of is the general class/spec design - for example just the way individual skill trees are structured reminds me heavily of wow, especially for dps specs. There are also specific abilities that are near carbon copies of moves created in other mmos... for example, some tanks have a deathgrip like move. I have to say though, the specific mechanics they copied are generally good things, and it's better than just having ****ty but unique mechanics.
The worst thing I'd point out about the class design is that it generally feels fairly homogenized and there isn't a whole lot of variance or richness to the classes. First off, the jedi knight is the exact same as the sith warrior, down to the advanced classes and skill trees - and all the classes and specs have a carbon copy on the other allegiance. That's understandable, I just want to make sure people know, since BW didn't say they'd be the exact same from the start. It goes further than that, though. It's a little hard to explain without going into tremendous detail, but for example most of the dps classes work primarily off one ability that stacks up a debuff and procs effects that modify your other abilities, or rely on a rampup of debuffs and buffs, etc. No dps tree that I can think of stands out as terribly unique to that of all the other trees.
Healing is generally fairly homogenized, with all the healers having a roughly 10s fast cast heal that takes small resources and a spammable, bigger, longer cast heal with slightly more resources, some form of hot, some form of instant heal, and some form of aoe heal. They do have some unique tools though and the three healing specs across each allegiance are unique, I'm just saying that not much so.
I haven't tried tanking yet so I'm not even going to talk about it but it seems to be about on the level of healing in that the tanks are differentiated but there are similarities present.
My graphics card is **** so I'm not a good person to ask about how the game looks, but I've heard it looks a bit dated even with high settings. BW really wanted to make sure it runs on low end comps and even my laptop with an integrated graphics card runs it... passably.
For the record I'm leveling a healing commando, so pros and cons might be from that frame of reference. There's no dual spec (though you can respec) so yes, I quest as a healing spec, granted at my low level you can't get very far in the tree. Both in my experience and what I've seen in videos, healing specs are still very good at soloing content.
The biggest plus I can think of the for the game as a whole is that it's very hard to put down. The omnipresent voice acting, the focus on story driven questing, etc makes a huge impact and BW has made a game that is very hard to stop playing so you can go do work or whatever. Although I'm generally like this, I notice myself using it for quite a few hours without becoming bored or really changing my frame of mind in any way. Another smaller but important part of this is that, as far as I've gotten, the pacing in terms of how quickly you get abilities and such is very good. You won't feel overwhelmed with new things or like you need more buttons to push for longer than the story can carry you.
Another big personal plus is that healing is very involving. My commando only has a few buttons to push and a few skill tree interactions (in fact he has no procs yet) but healing is both demanding and fun. It's heavily centered on a combination of triage and resource management. The way that commando/merc and scoundrel/operative are designed, the more of your resources you eat up, the slower you regenerate them. This makes it essential that your group minimizes spike damage to themselves and that you don't unnecessarily waste resources, it is the single worst thing you can do. Smart use of mechanics and especially cooldowns allows you to bring out short term high throughput in situations where burst healing is needed and keep your resources stocked. The game in general and healing are somewhat slow paced, but the amount of thought put into the management of an exponential resource system and other things makes it feel pretty fast paced, and you will need to make some snap decisions.
My main concern is actually more about bioware than the game. I'm not even going to get into my opinion that bioware has declined over the recent past, but the single largest thing I've noticed during this beta is that there are a ton of issues and bioware has not been competent in dealing with them. It really is an inarguable point - bugs and glitches are everywhere, large amounts of characters in beta are currently stuck and unplayable and have been for long periods of time. There are several game breaking issues such as crew skills (professions) suddenly disappearing from characters, endgame chars suddenly becoming unplayable for numbers of reasons, companions becoming bugged beyond use, etc. Many of these things have gone on for a long time without even so much as acknowledgment from bioware, even though they have a supposedly kept up to date thread on known issues. This thread doesn't even contain the bug that makes all jedi knights (1/8 of all characters) unable to progress beyond a point about 16 levels into their story. That's been happening for a week and hasn't been touched or acknowledged. One month before the game launches.
With all that said, this is beta. The issues surrounding the game are excusable in a beta. It is simply important to note that it has gotten to the point where the issues and BW's handling of them have become poor enough for even beta testers to be worried and unhappy. It is of little importance if this all changes with release, but as a beta player I kind of doubt it will simply fall into place that easily.
The other big con I have is what I pointed out earlier about homogenization and general lack of depth.
The largest qualm of the community with the game itself and not the issues seems to be that it's a theme park to its core, and the only sandbox element it has are "datacrons", basically easter eggs hidden throughout the game that give you small permanent stat boosts.
It's an mmo on rails. It's a really enjoyable ride for its story, even despite the game breaking bugs and insufficient support. Hopefully those problems are gone at launch. Even so, I'll only be playing it because the story is interesting and I have some good friends who are, and I'd bet that if bugs don't cause us to stop playing, we probably will quickly at end game due to a lack of interest in repeating theme park content
Unless they make every NPC voiced dialog unskippable then you just click through and when your character is supposed to choose between 3 options as such.
1.) I will help you if the price is right bud. (Evil Option)
2.) Oh let me get right on that it is the right thing to do sir. (Good Option)
I mean you don't need to know anything more then what the guy wants you to do then pick the option that fits your alignment. You sure as #$^ don't have to read into every little storyline detail and watch the cut scenes in their entirety.
I also would be really shocked if they made them all unskippable though. Mostly because once you play through both sides of the storyline even if you absolutely adore the story you won't want to have to sit through long cut scenes between each quest/mission.
I doubt this game pulls from WoW though at a heavy rate some people enjoy fantasy MMO's over sci-fi and vice versa. This game is not trying to directly compete with WoW like Rift did. Yep there are only so many players out there willing to spend 15 bucks a month playing an MMO but this game would have to resemble WoW a lot more to try to blatantly steal its players.
Feel free to bid on my cards here!
Are the quest/dialogue choices just going to have no impact on the game world? If so, what's the point of designing from the storyline? I act like a douche and earn evil points, I act like a saint and earn good points, but nothing actually happens differently in the world no matter the choice I make?
Confused!
(basically a re-iteration of my question from last page, heh)
And yes, I just used 'dope' as slang. I liked the 90s.
And I think we all know that Bioware is already feeling pressed for time.
You could say that about most games 99% of games are just clones of other games with a slightly different take on it.
I mean once you played one FPS game you played em all.
Once you played one RTS game you played them all.
etc....
Feel free to bid on my cards here!
They rely on building a big community, so they kind of have to stick to what works, and it's not helping the genre.
FPS does seem to be headed in the same direction in the past few years, but there're still original games made fairly often. The (very) rare times that original MMORGPs come out, they pretty much flop really hard invariably.
Honestly what did you expect? It's an MMORPG. Even DCUO still has a monthly fee. It'd either $15/mo or F2P (or in Lego Universe's case, $10/mo). That being sad, games that aren't $15/mo or have Premium Pay content suck. And most games with PP Content suck anyways.
Thanks to DarkNightCavalier
I agree. If you want a good experience, it's pretty much guaranteed that you need to pay $15/mo. I hate B2P games because they always have premium content. I don't know about anyone else but as long as you have a part-time job $15 a month is not a huge deal.
My Mafia Stats - My Helpdesk
G Omnath, Locus of Mana U Arcum Dagsson BUG The Mimeoplasm GW Gaddock Teeg X Karn, Silver Golem
Yeah, obviously it's not something I'm counting on. It would just be really sweet.
As for the subscription fee causing anyone to 'lose interest'..I'm not sure what you expected from an MMO. $15/month is the going rate for any subscription-based MMO. And, as someone that has played 'free' MMOs(they're really not free, you have to spend real money to get any really premium items..and that always ends up costing more than 15/month would), I'll take subscription-based MMOs any day of the week.
I expected something like guild wars or Starcraft, where once i've paid for the disc, I can play to my heart's content. As a college student with no income, 15/mo is significant.
It is significant. I won't disagree with that. And it sucks - but Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 aside MMO's are either 15/mo or pay for premium content.
Thanks to DarkNightCavalier
In today's market, MMORPGs can charge monthly and will make more money doing it. So that's what they do. But you need to pay to get the best items. I really dislike that system. If they could go the way League of Legends has done it (money makes getting every significantly faster, but it's the same stuff you get through playing) it'd be more tolerable, but noone's done that well with an mmo.
True, but the battlenet servers cost money, just like every other type of computer, and it is an online game that serves thousands of users, just like a MMO
Though I'll put it in a small font.
Please stop hijacking my reply box.
SC2 produces patches, yes - but they don't release any NEW content. Patches only help fix problems for existing programming. The money you pay for with an MMO doesn't pay for a server - servers are actually fairly cheap even when hosting 6 million + users. It's about new content. For example, in the new WoW patch (4.3) there will be a new battle with Deathwing. That's a whole new dungeon, supposedly. So if, every month, there is new content, it's like paying for that.
Thanks to DarkNightCavalier
Oh yea, on that note, I'm going to be avoiding spoilers about story and stuff, but I will lightly touch on mechanics and things like that
Healing is generally fairly homogenized, with all the healers having a roughly 10s fast cast heal that takes small resources and a spammable, bigger, longer cast heal with slightly more resources, some form of hot, some form of instant heal, and some form of aoe heal. They do have some unique tools though and the three healing specs across each allegiance are unique, I'm just saying that not much so.
I haven't tried tanking yet so I'm not even going to talk about it but it seems to be about on the level of healing in that the tanks are differentiated but there are similarities present.
The biggest plus I can think of the for the game as a whole is that it's very hard to put down. The omnipresent voice acting, the focus on story driven questing, etc makes a huge impact and BW has made a game that is very hard to stop playing so you can go do work or whatever. Although I'm generally like this, I notice myself using it for quite a few hours without becoming bored or really changing my frame of mind in any way. Another smaller but important part of this is that, as far as I've gotten, the pacing in terms of how quickly you get abilities and such is very good. You won't feel overwhelmed with new things or like you need more buttons to push for longer than the story can carry you.
Another big personal plus is that healing is very involving. My commando only has a few buttons to push and a few skill tree interactions (in fact he has no procs yet) but healing is both demanding and fun. It's heavily centered on a combination of triage and resource management. The way that commando/merc and scoundrel/operative are designed, the more of your resources you eat up, the slower you regenerate them. This makes it essential that your group minimizes spike damage to themselves and that you don't unnecessarily waste resources, it is the single worst thing you can do. Smart use of mechanics and especially cooldowns allows you to bring out short term high throughput in situations where burst healing is needed and keep your resources stocked. The game in general and healing are somewhat slow paced, but the amount of thought put into the management of an exponential resource system and other things makes it feel pretty fast paced, and you will need to make some snap decisions.
With all that said, this is beta. The issues surrounding the game are excusable in a beta. It is simply important to note that it has gotten to the point where the issues and BW's handling of them have become poor enough for even beta testers to be worried and unhappy. It is of little importance if this all changes with release, but as a beta player I kind of doubt it will simply fall into place that easily.
The other big con I have is what I pointed out earlier about homogenization and general lack of depth.
The largest qualm of the community with the game itself and not the issues seems to be that it's a theme park to its core, and the only sandbox element it has are "datacrons", basically easter eggs hidden throughout the game that give you small permanent stat boosts.
I will get it when it's released.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kffacxfA7G4&ob=av3n
:love::love::love:I love all my fans :love::love::love:
Its common now sadly, hence why I'm more interested in GW2 and others.
Also guess its the fact I'm a hardline PvPer