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’
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.
Continue reading ‘Massive Delays’
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’
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’
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.
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.
Continue reading ‘STO vs TOR’
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’
Use The Force and you may be able to find this beta application page available to fill out when you click the link.
If not, you have failed the test young Padawan. I am sorry.
- Ethic
Sometimes, I wish I could see a nice before and after of the work being done on SWTOR behind the scenes. I mean, we get to see the Sith Warrior on IGN, and people complained about his walk being too hunched-over, or his light-saber hilt being too big. But we won’t really find out until the game ships if these things have changed. The next time they show us stuff, it’ll probably be a new planet or a new class. It’s not like they’re going to do the whole live-demo again with the same classes and do all the same things.
Oh wait, they did.
I’m sure those who want to nit-pick over tiny details will eventually go through the video and pick out every little thing which has changed. I’m not one of those detail-oriented people, but I can say that the new video of the game looks better. Forget the video quality for a moment… the PAX version of the walk-through just looks like a better game than the live-demo they did months ago.
Bioware treated hungry MMO fans by letting them see quite a lot of SWTOR’s gameplay. Well, to be honest, they just provided a link to IGN who were really the ones to provide the video. Some people on the forums were disheartened to realize that SWTOR is just an MMO, and not the second coming of Jesus. But my reactions were more positive.
It’s an MMO in Alpha, yet it looks very solid. And while the blaster bolts seem to just spray in an enemy’s general direction until it’s out of health, the melee combat looks extremely satisfying. A Sith Warrior can leap across the room, whack you with a saber and impale you. A smuggler can kick a man in the groin to stun him. I don’t need to see see someone’s health bar drop to know that hurts.
