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You know what pisses me off? Good looking games with faction differences.

I absolutely HATE that if I wanted to play a Sith and my RL best friend wanted to play a Jedi, that we would not be able to do missions together, etc due to a faction difference.

If you want to play together, then you both have to decide on the same faction... which eliminates half of your race/class combinations.

This is why I loved EQ and Vangaurd.... no matter what class/race you choose, you can play with your friends.

You're not the only person who feels like that, but I can't imagine a game set in the Star Wars universe where there isn't a faction difference, dark against light.

I still wonder if eventually there won't be cross-faction content, both sides fighting a third party. Although I think it's pretty unlikely.

I played SWG when it first dropped and it was ok because I played the game by myself. (I later quit when PvP was so unbalanced that it sucked) Like Commandos being able to 1 shot kill people with the flamethrower.

Anyway... Yes Star Wars based game is going to be Rebelion vs Imperial Army I imagine so you have to choose a side.

I was really into WoW during the design period until they announced the faction wars between human/horde. It cut your choice of race from 8 down to 4.
There are thousands of characters running around the WoW realm with the exact same graphic as yours. (When the game first came out anyway)


Verant/Sigil/SOE just got it right when it came to class/race combo's and having an extreme amount of options.... they did however miss the boat on other things.

While the gameplay on ToR looks pretty good and reminds me of the good things in SWG... I'll still prolly just wait for EQNext to drop before I involve myself heavily in another MMO. I recently just broke my addiction to the Project99 EQ server and am finding myself with a ton more freetime.

molitoth is like me in the mmo front. Faction games are basically 2 of the same game on the same server.

I just cant get into games like that. Games have really been dumbed down with so many options. Paths to level up are so linear, its like why do you even have to level now days. Just start out at max level. Everything pre max level, is just snoozefest.


Leveling is fast now days, but its just pointless. Everyone has played mmo's now, they know how to play a character. Back in the EQ days, i agree'd with the leveling it was new, and you had to learn what to do, but that part is gone. There is never any sense of danger in any game anymore. Its like your going to die, its like so what. Means nothing. I remember my friend was doing a planes run in everquest and got his corpse stuck in the plane of fear. lol Took the group i was with 4 hours to get his corpse back. It was one of the most fun ****ing days i ever had in mmo's and it was because of a **** up.

That's the WoW influence. Every major MMO on the market is about getting to the cap as quickly as you can so you can start playing the 'real' game. We've talked about that on this thread before. TOR is a different beast, they're designing it to be a game with BioWare style gameplay and leveling, which means long, cinematic storylines, slow leveling curves, companions (which are *not* pets, entirely different concept), basically everything they've done in their single player games but in a multiplayer environment. Getting to the cap is not the focus of the game. Advancing through storylines that are hundreds and hundreds of hours long are what they're placing the highest priority on. Whether that means it will take hundreds and hundreds of hours to reach the level cap, or whether that means you'll be continuing to do hundreds of hours of story content after the cap, I don't know, because the beta is currently under an NDA. What I do know is that each class' story is built up of 3 acts, and the average playtime for just the first act for beta players currently (according to BioWare) runs over 100 hours. I don't know if you're familiar with KotOR, but they've said that the initial act of each class in TOR is longer than an entire play through KotOR. What level folks are at that point, I don't know, but that's a pretty substantial amount of time, and it doesn't include ancillary game activities like exploring, crafting, PvP, heroic quests, or whatever else it is people can do right now. That's just the time involved with the class stories.

As far as making death "meaningful", you're probably never going to see harsh death penalties in an MMO again. Developers are not targetting a niche audience, they're trying to draw in as many players as possible, which means casual choices will generally win over hardcore ones.

Even in the MUD community, which is a subset of a subset, the death issue is a controversial one. Lots of games have started to move to permadeath, but it's still a small fringe that prefer that style of play. It tends to appeal to people who are more interested in realism and roleplay than leveling, though there is another group of hardcore player-killers and such who like it because of the added risk/thrill. I really enjoy permadeath, but that's just me.

And for those not familiar: permadeath means that there is some mechanism in place to where your character can truly die and not be recoverable, so that you have to start a whole new character.

Ooh i know, the way MMo's are going and they will never revert back. Its EZ mode from here on out. Thats why i just dont play anymore. Ive moved on. It just sux that i have too is all.

Yeah, I don't think I'd ever play a game with permadeath. I don't particularly enjoy doing things over. So that would mean I could never do anything even remotely dangerous. I'd literally quit if I, say, through an accident or lagspike or some other unforseen event lost a character I'd spent any significant time on. That would be game killing frustration to me. And I don't play games to be frustrated. That's what real life is for. In my opinion, of course.

I don't think they're easy mode. I think they're just finding the sweet spot. A lot of early MMO play was basically just pointless grinding. And speaking just for me I'd say I don't miss most of that in the least.

Although I do like some grinding - that's the OCD sociopath in me.

Umm EQ was the ****ing mother of all grindfests. Let's get something clear, just because you have to grind for weeks to level, doesn't mean it's 'hard' or interesting. I don't find grinding fun, like not AT ALL. I, for one, am happy with how the MMOs have evolved.

never said it was hard, but we didnt have quests that held your hand. I didnt mind some of the grind fests, the only grind fest that was pure bullshit for me was the Key to Vex Thal. That was what i found that was bullshit. Though i did it like multiple times with people. Aten Ha Ra had to die.

There is no camping in games, but for me, thats when i had the most fun was camping zones for items. Some people can say it was boring and thats ok, but i had fun with that. Watching other groups fight through to get deeper then wiping. Had some great laughs. I wouldnt settle for the old school EQ leveling up system anymore, its outdated. like MOli said VG had alot right but what they had wrong was REALLY ****ing wrong and that was performance. That game had it almost perfectly if it wasnt for a terrible game engine.

I havent played a mmo seriously in 2 years, i am ok with it. I check them out every now and again and see whats out there, but most of the shit they pass out now days, ill take a ****ing pass.

Sports games and Street Fighter Keep me entertained.

Camping dungeons was one of the worst parts of EQ, in my experience and opinion. And that doesn't have anything to do with how boring it was. I never liked the idea of other people benefiting from my work, or of people jumping my camp or stealing mobs and loot. Instancing for me has been a welcome improvement for recent MMOs.

'course I'm the kind of person who has as little contact with people that I don't know as possible in MMOs (just like in real life). I don't pug, I don't pvp (although I will in TOR, since it's team-based and not burst-damage based), I don't generally roleplay. I'll help random people when I come across them, but that's about the limit of my social interaction outside of my tight circle of friends. Actually a surprisingly large number of MMOers these days are like me. It's estimated that something like 40+% of the current MMO market (across games) is primarily solo-oriented players. Which is what I am. Although I think I'll probably group a good bit more in TOR since the group size is smaller (4, and currently you can use companions to fill 1 or more of those spots) and I (hopefully) have an established group of players coming over with me.

'course, being able to do things alone or in smaller groups does not in any way mean it's easy. And MMOs have always been soloable, in any case. I primarily soloed EQ lo those years ago, on my wacky bard named (I think, this was sooo long ago) Dantae Goldenlyre.

'course you're always going to have a difference in opinion on these things, whether you're talking about camping, leveling, traveling (why I was a bard originally in EQ - drum made me run fast!), grouping, griefing, dying, or anything else. Like any other opinion-based discussion there really aren't 'right' or 'wrong' answers, just differences in taste.

Well, these are MMORPGs (admittedly text based) with persistent, every-changing worlds. So one character may be a wealth, pampered noble magic user experiencing that life. You get assassinated by a rival, and you could play a low-life street urchin with your next PC that never leaves the ghetto and makes his living picking pockets. There's not really any doing things over because it's a different type of "game."

Even if you play the same class, the experiences that you have in "leveling" the class will be vastly different because your background will be different, the world will have changed since your last time to play a character, and you'll likely find yourself attached to a different organization or employer.

Vangaurd was a combination of the perfect grind+quests to level at a sensable rate.

EQ was pure grind. All quests were strickly for loot reward, not xp; which led a lot of quests to be worthless.

The problem with Vangaurd was by the time everyone hit level 50, there was no raid content for another 6 months when they brought out APW. But by that time, a lot of people had already quit and not willing to come back.

I'm just hoping EQnext is Vanguard with end game content.

I may have to give this one a try. I finally kicked the little 5 year WoW habit a couple months ago, but I am itching to play something in the free time.

there was more then just the nothing to do at 50, that was a big part, but folks with the 8800 graphics cards at the time couldnt zone without CTD. lol I think that killed everythign more then the nothing to do at 50. Raiders are the minority in mmo's sadly. lol

Interesting bit:Steam, D2D and others can't like that...

They've released info on what they're presenting at E3:Sounds like we'll be getting some wicked gameplay video next week.

(plus a new blur trailer....)

No Steam release at all?

Nope. Origin exclusive.

Pretty good interview on Advanced Classes here. Gives (a few) details on skills for each class.

Oooh, they've just put up a pretty cool new Advanced Class page on swtor.com.

Thank God. The last thing we need is millions of fellow nerds crashing the servers trying to download the game on launch day. The servers should only crash during account creation on launch day, just like any other decent MMO. :p

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JIMP......

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Latest cinematic is here: http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/return

I'll embed it as soon as an embeddable copy's available. This is not the video that aired during the EA press conference, although parts of it were in the Choose video. It's the Intro Cinematic which I'd assume means this is what we see the first time we (finally) play.

Do you think they'll announce a launch date at E3?

Here's a youtube version of Return. It will likely get pulled, but here it is for as long as it lasts...

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SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTAHHHHH.....

Regarding the release date, my expectation is still september/october with the official announcement coming at PAX Prime in August (26th-28th IIRC).

They always save the best stuff for PAX...

So what's the status of the beta? I had always assumed that they would do about 3-6 months of open-ish beta testing before launch. I haven't heard anything about people being accepted into a beta program.

Of course, I could be way off and either the beta has been going on for a while, or they're just doing one.

Closed beta has been going on for a long time. I don't have any idea how wide it is, the NDA is still in place, but I get the impression there are a lot of testers. I just don't happen to be one myself or know anybody who is. If I had to guess I'd say they likely have thousands of testers going right now, if not tens of thousands. They're not just in 'friends and family' testing at this point, i.e. internal testing. That's what I think at least...

Open beta I would be surprised to see run more than 3 weeks to a month. They're primarily there to serve as server stress tests, at least in my experience, and to give potential customers a bit of a preview.

They're pretty far along in testing I think. I know they've had players advance hundreds of hours into their story quests, and things like that. I don't think, however, raiding (which is being unveiled at E3 this week...) has been on the external test server yet. Although I'm sure it's already been heavily tested in-house.

Ah, cool. I was afraid that any official announcement would be followed by another 3 to 6 months of testing. Glad to hear that beta testing is well under way (even if it is closed beta).

With no news on EQ:Next in forever, I'm guessing that ToR will be my game of choice when it drops. This looks pretty cool, and as long as they have PvP balanced correctly from the start, I will be able to deal with the faction war.

SWG was great until they ****ed up PvP balance hardcore (I played a Polearm class) and couldn't kill anyone with a gun. And Commando's with flamethrowers could 1-2 shot anyone dead.

There's a live demo from E3 today at 4. http://live-event.ea.com/e3/chat/star-wars

Trailer for The Eternity Vault, the first raid they've unveiled:

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Longer interview about it and other things.
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These 6 minutes were better than all 3 of the Prequels combined.

Gamespot's stage demo.

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Here's just the gameplay, minus the interview:

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Is it possible tha this game is going to be TOO huge and TOO expansive, or is there any such thing for a SW game?

No such thing for an MMO.

MMOs are supposed to be that huge and that expansive.

I've never been a MMO guy, but this game looks like it will dwarf anything that came before it. And frankly, I'm kinda glad I'm not a MMO guy, because I'm pretty sure I would lose my life to this game if I were.

From some players' perspective it may be. We've been programmed to look at MMOs as something you race through to reach the level cap and raid. And this is a game with 200+ hour class stories, without even exploring, doing world arcs or heroic quests or pvping or anything else. And I think that may be daunting to some.

Just speaking for myself, I'm a player who enjoys trying different classes out. Assuming my account ever gets fixed (I was hacked and had all 9 of my toons deleted...) I have 6 level-capped characters in LotRO. I'll do the same thing in TOR. However, it will take me (literally) a year to do it. Minimum. Because we're talking about 1600 hours of just class story. 66 days real time.

(good grief)

I didn't see it myself, but apparently Daniel Erickson said a few minutes ago on Gamespot's live feed that there will not be an open beta, essentially because the audience for the game is too large.

Better eternity vault vid:

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Of all the classes, what overall percentage of players will choose to be jedi/sith?

Half?

Half or more would be my guess (and primarily sith).

Although I'm seeing a lot of interest in agent, bounty hunter, smuggler and trooper, much more than I expected.

I've been planning on playing a Consular since the game was announced, but I think every class looks like it could be both unique and fun. Which is not something I've really encountered in an MMO before. I know in EQ I basically wanted to be a bard and nothing else, and in WoW I was a warrior 99% of the time and a mage 1%. I can't even decide which class I want my first alt to be. All the non jedi/sith classes look really cool to me (agent/bounty hunter in particular).

That's been my problem with WoW in the past. I guess I love the grind, because I'll play a class up to about level 30-40, then I'll want to try another class, so I'll roll a new toon (even if I already have one of that class created) and play on that one for a while. But now I've got a 79 paladin that I'm hell bent on getting to 85 (the current level cap).

I have no idea what class I'm going to play in SWToR.

The thing that's going to be cool about TOR is that it's a different game every time you level a toon. So not only is your Smuggler going to play completely differently from your Jedi Knight, he's going to have a 200 hour story arc that you haven't seen.

That's been my biggest hurdle in the past. In LotRO I have (had) 6 capped toons. And unfortunately every single one of them had to do the exact same quests and areas to reach that level. It gets so tedious... So TOR is kind of a godsend in that regard.

Guys..... WTF is a toon?

Thanks.

A toon is a character.

Hmm.. Why is it necessary to call a character something other than a character?

I think it's just short for "cartoon". Quicker than saying "character" or "avatar" or something else.

Fascinating... thanks.

More vids. For whatever reason gametrailers is blowing everybody else away this year.

Interesting note, it looks like they haven't done as wide external testing as I thought: twice today I've heard they only have 1000 external testers. On the flip side, in these vids, Ohlen says the current testing build is playable all the way to level 50 (which I wasn't sure about).

[edit: looks like the videos were removed for some reason]

Dear Keg,

Gametrailers is asking me for authentication when I click on this thread....

That should take care of it. Not sure what happened there. The last trio of videos seem to be gone this morning.

Did they announce any timeframe for release?

2011. Since we're in the 6th month of 2011, you can probably guess what the time frame is. :)

whoa

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I love KOTOR.

I love DX1.

This game might just eclipse them both.

No shit, whoa.

Those trailer vids are better than the freaking prequels all rolled into one.

Seriously. If only they would do a full movie using that animation. Would be epic.

Couldn't you sell your character once you reach the level cap to some n00b?

Might as well when this game comes out, right?

No doubt, man. I was lost to WoW for about a year, these things are like crack.

Hey now... you owe me royalties for intellectual property or something....

Beta impressions from Penny Arcade:(more at the link)

Sounds cool. I'm a habitual quest text skipper when I play WoW. As a result, I know next to nothing about the lore of the game. I always tell myself that I should start taking the time read through the quests. But after about 7 quests of "There's a big bad guy over that we need to kill! But first we need some new thatching for our roofs. Go and collect 12 twine from those smaller bad guys over there." I go back to just skipping over the text.

At first I wasn't that impressed with the amount of dialog that will be in SWTOR. But the more I think about it, I hope it will help to provide a more immersing experience.

I'm a text-skipper as well. Even if it's a game where I'm interested in the lore (which I was in lotro at one point), I've never had much of a desire to read walls of text, so I end up tuning out what's going on so I can get back to combat or grinding or whatever other mind-numbing MMO activity I'm doing that day.

Wasn't much lore in WoW quest's unless the quests were for an instance or a huge world event. I read all that. The more local quests had some interesting themes (like when you first travel to Theramore). WoW's lore did have some really awesome heroes and that's what I think made the game so special. My WoW universe nerdiness had me so ****ing excited when I first heard rumors that we would find Tyralion in Burning Crusade. /shame

I freaking loved the WoW lore and I loved visiting all the unique little places in the world.

I also never really understood why the Undercity was alive with little stories and subplots and constant little events taking place in the city while Ogrimmar, Darnassus, Iron Forge and Stormwind were just so meh. It's like they started to design the game with the Undercity, got done with that and were like "**** working so hard on the cities, just throw some shit together for the rest of them and let's start on the rest of the world."

I was big into WoW lore when the game first launched lo those years ago, and they had the book trilogy leading into the game.

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Something that might add fuel to the fire of when they are releasing TOR to the public.

I was big into Star Wars Galaxies before the dreaded NGE took place. I have been off that and addicted to WoW waiting for a new Star Wars type game. Anyway for those of you that played SWG or know about the game, Sony just released a statement to everyone stating they are stopping the SWG servers as of December 15th. Here is the email I got.

Dear Star Wars Galaxies™ Community Member,
We write to you today to inform you that on December 15, 2011, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and LucasArts will end all services (MMO and Trading Card Game) for Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). The shutdown of SWG is a very difficult decision, but SOE and LucasArts have mutually agreed that the end of 2011 is the appropriate time to end the game.
We are extremely grateful to all of the SWG fans. We have had the rare opportunity to host one of the most dedicated and passionate online gaming communities and we truly appreciate the support we've received from each and every one of you over the course of the past eight years.
In recognition of your incredible loyalty, we are extending special Fan Appreciation offers to the current SWG community. We also plan to go out with a bang with a galaxy-ending in-game event in December and hope to see you all there. The details relating to these offers and events as well as the timeline and specifics regarding the discontinuation of the service, are provided below.
Again, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to our player community for making SWG one of the best online communities in gaming history.
Sincerely,
Sony Online Entertainment & LucasArts

Now there is more detail in the email but I didn't want a text wall to assault your eyes. Needless to say I guess Lucas Arts is putting all their eggs in 1 basket instead of trying to keep both Star Wars games up and going.

Bioware and EA have been very quiet on when a release of TOR will happen. I am wandering if they were waiting for this shoe to fall before they could actually say anything.

Has there ever been a game hyped as much as this one?

SWG, WoW, EQ2, Vanguard, AoC were all hyped out the yin-yang pre-release. Those are just a few off the top of my head.

I think the difference with TOR is that the game was announced extremely early (Feb '09 IIRC), and they've been giving weekly updates for nearly that entire time, so it's been constantly in the public eye. And they've seemed far more willing to let people play the game at conventions than any other game I can remember. People were I think playing early builds as far back as Gamescom in late 2009, and it was extremely well-received even that far back. I can't think of any real negative reactions to gameplay from anybody in the media whether it was 2009, 10 or 11.

And they've also been, since day it, solidly behind the idea of "it'll be done when it's done", so it's the rare MMO that (so far...) hasn't been rushed to market. As I recall the original estimated release date was Holiday 2010. So if that's an actual delay (no way to know because they've never even hinted at a release date...), then the game's been in development for nearly an extra year, which is a lot more time for hype to build. Although with a lot of us (including me) we're to the point where we're tired of hearing about it and want to play it. Hell, I'd probably be thrilled with playing a buggy TOR at this point.