As long as they don't implement that retarded minigame of shooting down small ships with the board cannon every time you travel from planet to planet. :x
I'd like space flight to eventually be a significant part of the game. But to be honest, I kind of hope they leave it out initially, and just focus on making the rest of the game good.
The thing about Star wars is it's a fairly complicated universe when you consider how vast it is. So there's a lot of targets they could be throwing darts at, but I think it would be better for everything if they focused on one aspect of the game at first. Maybe space flight could be the focus of a major expansion pack. I know I'd personally hate to see space flight get a half-assed treatment just to get it in there. Space flight could be (And is) a whole game in itself, so I hope it gets its own resources down the road or that its implementation doesn't effect the rest of the game in a negative way.
I'd like space flight to eventually be a significant part of the game. But to be honest, I kind of hope they leave it out initially, and just focus on making the rest of the game good.
The thing about Star wars is it's a fairly complicated universe when you consider how vast it is. So there's a lot of targets they could be throwing darts at, but I think it would be better for everything if they focused on one aspect of the game at first. Maybe space flight could be the focus of a major expansion pack. I know I'd personally hate to see space flight get a half-assed treatment just to get it in there. Space flight could be (And is) a whole game in itself, so I hope it gets its own resources down the road or that its implementation doesn't effect the rest of the game in a negative way.
Agreed. Any Star Wars MMO will remain incomplete if space travel/combat is not made a significant part of the game. But, half-assing it is worse than not including it at the start of the game.
I'm hoping this MMO makes playing a non-Jedi just as viable as a Jedi character. Given that the Star Wars movies and novels are full of non-Jedi major characters, any game that forces everyone to be a Jedi would not be attractive to me (and probably a lot of other potential players)
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Well, they have said that people will be able to own a ship, but the degree of customization of said ship is what hasn't been answered.
As far as space flight/combat/travel, like jdarksun said, nothing has been addressed, and judging by its level of involvement in the previous 2 games, I doubt it will be anything other than minor mini games, if that.
Jdarksun: I'm fine with travel not being instant, as long as combat situations are not Final Fantasy ZOMG RANDOM!!!
Even something along the lines of the "Mount and Blade/Pirates of the Burning Sea" type top down/unproportioned map for space travel would be better than a "listing of planets you can instantly go to". Granted this type of thing generally means the game is heavily instanced.
Exit at planet at the spaceport <loading space>
Fly around, get attacked <loading battlefield>
A fully-realized space expansion would be perfectly reasonable. And awesome.
I've always wanted to see an optional sort of travel system, in some ways, like SWG. Provide pay instant travel at a cost, or allow players to fly themselves with certain limitations at risk but with possible discoveries and gains to be found. Well beyond the scope of an initial release.
Honestly, I just want them to have more than 1 ship. If everyone gets the Ebon Hawk, I'm gonna be *so* angry. If they have to have public shuttles, so be it. But if people own their own ships, there needs to be at least 1 ship for the Republic, 1 for the Sith.
I think they could safely take notes from Jump to Lightspeed for a space implementation.
JTL got it about as right as you can make it in an MMO, and the only reason it didn't get popular is because they decided to stop developing for it and/or improving the AI.
I would be satisfied with a clone of that system.
Jasconius on
0
Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
edited February 2009
If they do some space thing, they need to make much more use of instances. The space available in JTL was pretty small.
Just_Bri_Thanks on
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Let's say I'm an on/off Star Wars fan that, in a huge travesty, missed out on the Kotor games. Let's say I'm starting to find this MMO interesting. What, if these were true, would I do to get up to speed on this time period? Track down old game copies? Books, comics?
If you can't find the games, you can always look up things on Wookiepedia. There's a nerd's paradise of information there. It's like having 20 of the virgins you get when you die for Allah.
I'd prefer they do away with instancing altogether.
You say that without really realizing just what that entails.
Depending on the type of MMO it is, instancing is far and away preferable to the alternative, which is EQ-style open dungeons that get crowded, camped, and stupid in a hurry.
Or, in the case of actual space gameplay that was talked about, would be nigh-unworkable due to the realities of bandwidth capabilities.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
You're going to have to include some sort of constraints or context for this statement, because I have no idea what you're talking about. My download speeds top out at 2.2-2.3 MB/s, I think I can handle a few bytes of information per character in my general vicitinity. I mean, it's worked for virtually every real-time online game ever.
There's a rather significant difference between what YOUR computer can handle, and what the game's servers can handle. Especially when you consider the costs incurred by the company hosting the game servers. This is a profit motivated business after all.
There's a rather significant difference between what YOUR computer can handle, and what the game's servers can handle. Especially when you consider the costs incurred by the company hosting the game servers. This is a profit motivated business after all.
True, but you know what's even easier on their servers than instancing?
Bolded for emphasis. I would say that a heavily instanced online game cannot be called an MMO. After all, what is "massively multiplayer" about having 16 people in the same "zone"?
Semantics. Simply having the people connected to a more-or-less persistent world fulfills the "massively multiplayer" part; there is no ballpark numerical figure involved. And when I say "instancing", I'm not talking Guild Wars-style instancing where you leave a town and every single area you may go into is created just for you or your group.
You see crowding and camping as negative aspects of gameplay. I see potential for great interaction and socialization. I also see that perhaps there is a content imbalance if people are hunkering down in one location instead of out participating in the world.
Rose-tinted glasses. The ideal solution is a combination of instancing and open areas where they're appropriate. As an example, large Sith temple for players to explore and battle through is probably fine as an open, un-instanced area where players can move freely and interact with each other. The innermost sanctum housing the approach to and battle with the Big Bad of the place? You may want to consider instancing that part to at least a single group or so, if only to avoid the "wait in line to bop the named Foozle" scenario.
Or, in the case of actual space gameplay that was talked about, would be nigh-unworkable due to the realities of bandwidth capabilities.
You're going to have to include some sort of constraints or context for this statement, because I have no idea what you're talking about. My download speeds top out at 2.2-2.3 MB/s, I think I can handle a few bytes of information per character in my general vicitinity. I mean, it's worked for virtually every real-time online game ever.
I'm not talking about your bandwidth, I'm talking about server bandwidth. If a space-based game like EVE or even some older ones like Jumpgate simply removed any form of zoning or instancing, their servers would melt, and it's taken millions of dollars worth of server infrastructure just to get EVE's servers to the stability they are now. Constantly monitoring and updating x, y, and z axis data for every single player, enemy, object, and asteroid along with projectile paths and velocities (not to mention hit prediction to account for lag and all the other things you may want to do server-side to maintain at least a modestly secure client), and then sending that information to every player in the region is incredibly taxing on servers, even with small player counts in segregated space zones. Having everything in one big uninstanced space area is lunacy and will lead to massive lag at best and constant server failure at worst.
Edit: But apparently there is no room for compromise to you; open world or bust it seems.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
0
Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
I'd prefer they do away with instancing altogether.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean instancing in the way that Guild Wars or WoW does it, with only those in your party in the instance. I mean instancing in that you can get "less" people in the same space, not "none".
I think more what I had in mind was the city areas in guild Wars. You can go to a different instance by selecting it from a list so as to meet up with people, and perhaps you can get some opposing factions together WoW battleground style.
To make it more transparent, Changing instances involves a hyperspace calculation and a mini jump.
In game considerations, the only difference between Tatoeen 4 and Tatoeen 7 would be where in orbit you are flying. There should definitely never be more than 1 POI in any instance, and there should definitely never be space stations belonging to warring factions in orbit around the same planet.
Just_Bri_Thanks on
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
We'll very likely see the 'WoW' type of instance. The simple reason for open dungeons going the way of the dodo for most big MMO's is because it really makes it simple for people to be a dick. Hell I recall hearing a story about in EQ where this lower level guy watched and was able to tag this raid boss just before the raid did, they killed him... but couldn't loot the fucker! You obviously know what happened. Not to say I find the idea of dungeon-like places a bad thing, maybe for a quest-line or something that requires some outside help, but nothing that really has 'phat lootz'.
I love instancing, I think CoX did it right. I really, really hate competing with other players for spawns and mission objectives. It seemed like every night for the ~6 weeks I played WoW I was waiting in line for my turn to get to do something. I mean, I despise hunting/street sweeping tasks to start with, but that just makes it worse.
Now, I wouldn't have minded if CoH didn't have city zones and was a merged space, but they didn't do that for technical reasons rather than design ones.
I don't personally see a problem with instancing the 'dungeons'. Games like WoW, LotrO and Warhammer are massive. Each zone isn't separated by a loading screen aside from traveling to places such as Outland/Northrend. This is more for keeping those without the expansions for these zones to even be able to try and access them. As someone else said, I am pretty sure you've got a thick pair of rose colored glasses on over the whole completely non-instanced thing. There are some minor benefits as you described but these things are quite easily done outside of the dungeon entrance, which is a rather big world itself, huge in some cases. Now... you act as if just because server technology has advanced, that we can suddenly do better than they did with EQ. I'm certain this isn't the case because not only has the servers gotten better but so did everything to do with the games themselves. I may not be an expert but the idea of comparing the strain of running the EQ servers to, for instance, WoW or LotrO/Warhammer seems silly.
Let's say everyone was using a full 10 K/s. A server of 3000 players would utilize about 30 M/s. P
You're assuming that each person uses up the same amount of bandwidth regardless of what's going on around them.
This is why servers get laggy when there are too many people in one place, instead of just getting basic server information, you're getting all the input information from every player around you. So if there's 2 people around you, you're sending your info to 2 people and getting it from 2 people. If there's 3000 people around you, you're sending your info to 3000 people and you're getting info from 3000 people. Meaning your bandwidth is going up the more people that are around you.
Not to mention the actual processing strain put on the server sending out and getting in all that information at once.
It's not impossible to account for that, and make hardware capable of handling that. The question is, can they still keep subscription rates competitive, and turn a profit.
Bioware already confirmed at some point that you have a 'stable' of companions, and you only use one at a time.
Do we know if they're going to actually do something (earn money, fix things, assassinate rival Jedi), or are they just going to hang out on the ship, waiting around and praying you'll take them out to play every now and again.
That's one thing about the KOTOR series (and Mass Effect and Jade Empire) that bugged me... except for a few plot points, your companions were just watching porno in the ship/courtyard while you were out fighting for (in)justice.
When/if they get a public board, I'd suggest that.
"Hey Boss...um...while you were on Hutta, I got bored and wandered into a Pazzak den...and, um, well, to make a long story short, between the booze and Twi'lek strippers I'm sorta in the hole to the tune of about 450,000 credits and there's a bounty on my head....can you help me out?"
A. Get off my ship, deadbeat and forget my name.
B. OK, lets go talk to this syndicate
C. OK, lets go talk to this syndicate (and secretly turn in your friend for the bounty)
"Where's that protocol droid that was annoying me? Oh, I tossed him out of the airlock about 3 parsects back, why?"
A. Either find it or you're going out the airlock next
B. *pull gun; shoot*
C. He was an annoying prat anyways...
*walk in on female romantic interest entwined with that Twi'lek you picked up 2 planets back*
"Wait....I...I...can explain!"
A. Get off my ship, whore.
B. *pull gun, shoot*
C. Can I join in?
I'd love to walk back on my ship and, say, if I stupidly made a party of people who hated each other's guts find them literally trying to kill each other and I'd have to take sides or something.
I hope they dont put the *pull gun,shoot* thing in the game. Ill prob choose it everytime =x
Wellllllllll, I won't say for a fact that they won't put this in, but I'll say that they were frowning upon that kind of writing for this. Kind of the opposite of "show, don't tell" they wanted it to be "tell, don't show."
For instance, in that scenario it would be like:
"Wait....I...I...can explain!"
A) Get off my ship, whore. Explaining will be hard to do without a face.
C) Can I join in?
Instead of specifically writing an action as a dialogue choice, they want to convey stuff like that through dialogue. It's gonna be an interesting trick to pull off, since you can't easily do it 100% like that all the time. In those cases, it would be like "Explaining will be hard to do without a face. <Shoot the bitch.>" But yah, they want to get away from that stuff.
I think they could safely take notes from Jump to Lightspeed for a space implementation.
JTL got it about as right as you can make it in an MMO, and the only reason it didn't get popular is because they decided to stop developing for it and/or improving the AI.
I would be satisfied with a clone of that system.
Or they could just edit-copy-paste the old X-wing and/or TIE fighter game and just update the graphics and ship types.
Bioware already confirmed at some point that you have a 'stable' of companions, and you only use one at a time.
Do we know if they're going to actually do something (earn money, fix things, assassinate rival Jedi), or are they just going to hang out on the ship, waiting around and praying you'll take them out to play every now and again.
That's one thing about the KOTOR series (and Mass Effect and Jade Empire) that bugged me... except for a few plot points, your companions were just watching porno in the ship/courtyard while you were out fighting for (in)justice.
When/if they get a public board, I'd suggest that.
"Hey Boss...um...while you were on Hutta, I got bored and wandered into a Pazzak den...and, um, well, to make a long story short, between the booze and Twi'lek strippers I'm sorta in the hole to the tune of about 450,000 credits and there's a bounty on my head....can you help me out?"
A. Get off my ship, deadbeat and forget my name.
B. OK, lets go talk to this syndicate
C. OK, lets go talk to this syndicate (and secretly turn in your friend for the bounty)
"Where's that protocol droid that was annoying me? Oh, I tossed him out of the airlock about 3 parsects back, why?"
A. Either find it or you're going out the airlock next
B. *pull gun; shoot*
C. He was an annoying prat anyways...
*walk in on female romantic interest entwined with that Twi'lek you picked up 2 planets back*
"Wait....I...I...can explain!"
A. Get off my ship, whore.
B. *pull gun, shoot*
C. Can I join in?
I'd love to walk back on my ship and, say, if I stupidly made a party of people who hated each other's guts find them literally trying to kill each other and I'd have to take sides or something.
I hope they dont put the *pull gun,shoot* thing in the game. Ill prob choose it everytime =x
Wellllllllll, I won't say for a fact that they won't put this in, but I'll say that they were frowning upon that kind of writing for this. Kind of the opposite of "show, don't tell" they wanted it to be "tell, don't show."
For instance, in that scenario it would be like:
"Wait....I...I...can explain!"
A) Get off my ship, whore. Explaining will be hard to do without a face.
C) Can I join in?
Instead of specifically writing an action as a dialogue choice, they want to convey stuff like that through dialogue. It's gonna be an interesting trick to pull off, since you can't easily do it 100% like that all the time. In those cases, it would be like "Explaining will be hard to do without a face. <Shoot the bitch.>" But yah, they want to get away from that stuff.
Oh, ok.
So after choosing "B" *then* I can.
A. I forgive you.
B. Pull gun;shoot
C. Can I still join in?
If you really want to make the game immersive as a Sith or Dark Jedi, you need to have summary executions as part of the deal.
Some of your party members might be scared shitless into obedience. Others may try to take you down or hire a bounty hunter to watse you.
On the instance verse open world thing I think a mix is best. EQ is one extreme with no instances, you have to camp spawns, camp camps for leveling and just well camp everything. The bonus is that it feels more like the real world and you to explore everything. The down side is server load, camping/griefing are easier to do and travel can be pain with out some sort quick transport system. The other extreme is all instances, this is Guild Wars and to an extent AoConnan. This limits interaction and reduces the idea of massive multiplayer down to multiplayer. Making it feel more like an fps.
In the middle you have the majority of MMO's that are doing well now. WoW has instanced raids and dungeons so people can do it at the same time, reduce the camping and lighten the load on the world servers where most of the population will be at one time. Outside of these you have the open world. This includes major gathering areas such as the Org and IF in the past, Shatt in TBC and Dalaran now. These places its hard to state you are in anything but an MMO. And thats not just the people but the lag. These places can get very very laggy very quickly, even on high end machines. But with the mix of instancing and open you get the mmo interaction and still get the nice non-camped dungeon runs with friends.
I think the real future is more in the phasing idea. You do something, changes the world you enter a new phase. But this kind of makes it feel like an instance even if its not. So it is hard to balance the sets.
In general its hard to balance, but I think so of todays mmo's like LotR and WoW have a pretty decent balance where you have the multiplayer game dungeon runs and the MMO world to also play in.
For the space thing, I would kill for them just to make another space flight sim like XvT or Wing Commander. When was the last time you saw one of these games made for the pc using a joy stick? If they put it into an mmo, I would be hooked so fast.
Semantics. Simply having the people connected to a more-or-less persistent world fulfills the "massively multiplayer" part; there is no ballpark numerical figure involved.
I disagree, and would argue that a heavily instanced game - like Guild Wars - is not an MMO at all. Connecting to a shared world isn't what makes a game MMO, a significant numbers of players participating in the same world area does.
And we can put a number on it. We have FPSes that do 64. EQ was able to handle ~100 reasonably, and raids upwards of 150+ were possible. It's been almost ten years since EQ was released, so let's assume that some technology improvements have taken place.
So let's give it a minimum of 128, with a goal of 256 not being unreasonable. The exact defined area isn't as important in this juncture, nor is what happens if that number is exceeded. Let them be baselines for what is considered "massively."
The ideal solution is a combination of instancing and open areas where they're appropriate.
My good sir, your ideal solution may incorporate a combination of instancing and cake for all I care. It does not make it the ideal, but it is a potential solution to a problem of contested spawns.
However, I would argue that you're instancing around poor desgin decisions.
I'm not talking about your bandwidth, I'm talking about server bandwidth.
And my bandwidth is a part of that. How much I'm eating up from the server is going to matter.
Let's say everyone was using a full 10 K/s. A server of 3000 players would utilize about 30 M/s. Part of my monthly payment is for using that bandwidth, and will go to leasing the T1s (or OC3s, or multiple ZOMG45s or whatever).
And that's if the full 10 K/s was being utilized. Even in your example, updating the position and orientation of an entity is cheap - maybe a few bytes. In something like EVE, it's even cheaper, because you have position and velocity. You don't constantly have to send updates if someone's traveling in a straight line at a fixed speed. And collision detection is cheap (er) when you're not dumb firing projectiles.
The real issues are making sure that your servers have the bandwidth and processing power to handle whatever areas they're responsible for - be it static zones, dynamically allocated areas, or however you want to handle the situation.
Having everything in one big uninstanced space area is lunacy and will lead to massive lag at best and constant server failure at worst.
Multiplayer FPSes exist in one big uninstanced space, and they work pretty well.
Just because you have one area, doesn't mean you only have one server (or cluster, or whatever) assigned to it. It doesn't even mean you have a single area of interest. Dynamically allocate servers to handle different sized areas dependant on population. Or make it fixed and do handoffs. If your servers can't handle more than X players in a single location, spread out the content (and thus players) to discourage them from sitting in one place.
This is all work they aren't spending on making the content interesting.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
This is all work they aren't spending on making the content interesting.
Eye of the beholder, my good man. One might argue that a MMO's content cannot be interesting in a heavily instanced environment. Indeed, my argument is that it ceases to be an MMO at all.
Which is fine. There are many wonderful, interesting small-scale multiplayer games out there. If SW:TOR is another, so be it.
Your definition of an mmo is myopic.
An mmo is a game with a massive amount of people.
No where in massively multiplayer does it say "must have a fully non instanced cohesive world".
That's just you.
You can call all these mmos by names other than mmos if you like, but all you are going to accomplish is communication difficulties and having to reexplain your world view every time. Just seems like a complete waste of time to me mate.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Is there any actual information in this thread or are you all swinging light-tubes at each other and making "BWOOOOOOSH" noises and arguing about what this game might be?
Posts
I'm so fucked if this turns out to be good. Two-plus MMOs at the same time?
Also, in my initial searching, I haven't seen reference to vehicles or spaceflight. Any word on those?
I can't be the only person who would love to just play a navigator/pilot.
The thing about Star wars is it's a fairly complicated universe when you consider how vast it is. So there's a lot of targets they could be throwing darts at, but I think it would be better for everything if they focused on one aspect of the game at first. Maybe space flight could be the focus of a major expansion pack. I know I'd personally hate to see space flight get a half-assed treatment just to get it in there. Space flight could be (And is) a whole game in itself, so I hope it gets its own resources down the road or that its implementation doesn't effect the rest of the game in a negative way.
I'm hoping this MMO makes playing a non-Jedi just as viable as a Jedi character. Given that the Star Wars movies and novels are full of non-Jedi major characters, any game that forces everyone to be a Jedi would not be attractive to me (and probably a lot of other potential players)
Rigorous Scholarship
As far as space flight/combat/travel, like jdarksun said, nothing has been addressed, and judging by its level of involvement in the previous 2 games, I doubt it will be anything other than minor mini games, if that.
Jdarksun: I'm fine with travel not being instant, as long as combat situations are not Final Fantasy ZOMG RANDOM!!!
Even something along the lines of the "Mount and Blade/Pirates of the Burning Sea" type top down/unproportioned map for space travel would be better than a "listing of planets you can instantly go to". Granted this type of thing generally means the game is heavily instanced.
Exit at planet at the spaceport <loading space>
Fly around, get attacked <loading battlefield>
That kinda thing get very trying after awhile.
I've always wanted to see an optional sort of travel system, in some ways, like SWG. Provide pay instant travel at a cost, or allow players to fly themselves with certain limitations at risk but with possible discoveries and gains to be found. Well beyond the scope of an initial release.
JTL got it about as right as you can make it in an MMO, and the only reason it didn't get popular is because they decided to stop developing for it and/or improving the AI.
I would be satisfied with a clone of that system.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
You say that without really realizing just what that entails.
Depending on the type of MMO it is, instancing is far and away preferable to the alternative, which is EQ-style open dungeons that get crowded, camped, and stupid in a hurry.
Or, in the case of actual space gameplay that was talked about, would be nigh-unworkable due to the realities of bandwidth capabilities.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
There's a rather significant difference between what YOUR computer can handle, and what the game's servers can handle. Especially when you consider the costs incurred by the company hosting the game servers. This is a profit motivated business after all.
Not much profit there.
Rose-tinted glasses. The ideal solution is a combination of instancing and open areas where they're appropriate. As an example, large Sith temple for players to explore and battle through is probably fine as an open, un-instanced area where players can move freely and interact with each other. The innermost sanctum housing the approach to and battle with the Big Bad of the place? You may want to consider instancing that part to at least a single group or so, if only to avoid the "wait in line to bop the named Foozle" scenario.
I'm not talking about your bandwidth, I'm talking about server bandwidth. If a space-based game like EVE or even some older ones like Jumpgate simply removed any form of zoning or instancing, their servers would melt, and it's taken millions of dollars worth of server infrastructure just to get EVE's servers to the stability they are now. Constantly monitoring and updating x, y, and z axis data for every single player, enemy, object, and asteroid along with projectile paths and velocities (not to mention hit prediction to account for lag and all the other things you may want to do server-side to maintain at least a modestly secure client), and then sending that information to every player in the region is incredibly taxing on servers, even with small player counts in segregated space zones. Having everything in one big uninstanced space area is lunacy and will lead to massive lag at best and constant server failure at worst.
Edit: But apparently there is no room for compromise to you; open world or bust it seems.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean instancing in the way that Guild Wars or WoW does it, with only those in your party in the instance. I mean instancing in that you can get "less" people in the same space, not "none".
I think more what I had in mind was the city areas in guild Wars. You can go to a different instance by selecting it from a list so as to meet up with people, and perhaps you can get some opposing factions together WoW battleground style.
To make it more transparent, Changing instances involves a hyperspace calculation and a mini jump.
In game considerations, the only difference between Tatoeen 4 and Tatoeen 7 would be where in orbit you are flying. There should definitely never be more than 1 POI in any instance, and there should definitely never be space stations belonging to warring factions in orbit around the same planet.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Now, I wouldn't have minded if CoH didn't have city zones and was a merged space, but they didn't do that for technical reasons rather than design ones.
You're assuming that each person uses up the same amount of bandwidth regardless of what's going on around them.
This is why servers get laggy when there are too many people in one place, instead of just getting basic server information, you're getting all the input information from every player around you. So if there's 2 people around you, you're sending your info to 2 people and getting it from 2 people. If there's 3000 people around you, you're sending your info to 3000 people and you're getting info from 3000 people. Meaning your bandwidth is going up the more people that are around you.
Not to mention the actual processing strain put on the server sending out and getting in all that information at once.
It's not impossible to account for that, and make hardware capable of handling that. The question is, can they still keep subscription rates competitive, and turn a profit.
Wellllllllll, I won't say for a fact that they won't put this in, but I'll say that they were frowning upon that kind of writing for this. Kind of the opposite of "show, don't tell" they wanted it to be "tell, don't show."
For instance, in that scenario it would be like:
"Wait....I...I...can explain!"
A) Get off my ship, whore.
C) Can I join in?
Instead of specifically writing an action as a dialogue choice, they want to convey stuff like that through dialogue. It's gonna be an interesting trick to pull off, since you can't easily do it 100% like that all the time. In those cases, it would be like "Explaining will be hard to do without a face. <Shoot the bitch.>" But yah, they want to get away from that stuff.
Or they could just edit-copy-paste the old X-wing and/or TIE fighter game and just update the graphics and ship types.
Margaret Thatcher
Oh, ok.
So after choosing "B" *then* I can.
A. I forgive you.
B. Pull gun;shoot
C. Can I still join in?
If you really want to make the game immersive as a Sith or Dark Jedi, you need to have summary executions as part of the deal.
Some of your party members might be scared shitless into obedience. Others may try to take you down or hire a bounty hunter to watse you.
Margaret Thatcher
In the middle you have the majority of MMO's that are doing well now. WoW has instanced raids and dungeons so people can do it at the same time, reduce the camping and lighten the load on the world servers where most of the population will be at one time. Outside of these you have the open world. This includes major gathering areas such as the Org and IF in the past, Shatt in TBC and Dalaran now. These places its hard to state you are in anything but an MMO. And thats not just the people but the lag. These places can get very very laggy very quickly, even on high end machines. But with the mix of instancing and open you get the mmo interaction and still get the nice non-camped dungeon runs with friends.
I think the real future is more in the phasing idea. You do something, changes the world you enter a new phase. But this kind of makes it feel like an instance even if its not. So it is hard to balance the sets.
In general its hard to balance, but I think so of todays mmo's like LotR and WoW have a pretty decent balance where you have the multiplayer game dungeon runs and the MMO world to also play in.
For the space thing, I would kill for them just to make another space flight sim like XvT or Wing Commander. When was the last time you saw one of these games made for the pc using a joy stick? If they put it into an mmo, I would be hooked so fast.
http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/video-documentary-2
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Tell me about it ... everything I have seen so far of this game makes me giddy like a school girl ... in a good way that is ... kinda.
Yar! I am a mighty pirate!
This is all work they aren't spending on making the content interesting.
Your definition of an mmo is myopic.
An mmo is a game with a massive amount of people.
No where in massively multiplayer does it say "must have a fully non instanced cohesive world".
That's just you.
You can call all these mmos by names other than mmos if you like, but all you are going to accomplish is communication difficulties and having to reexplain your world view every time. Just seems like a complete waste of time to me mate.
Do you wanna go.
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edit: Ahaha Zulu
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