I don't want the multiplayer to just be "large groups of random people standing around in a village". That's pretty much all that HGL was. Open areas are what make MMOs feel like MMOs. Fighting fields worth of diseased badgers and seeing 6 other players doing the same thing because some NPC has some bizarre badger fetish. Town interaction is great, but if town is the main area where I get player interaction then the illusion of Massive Multiplayer is quickly lost. MMOs will only feel massive when you see other players questing where you're questing, other players fighting while you fly by overhead. You have to see players in action for it to feel like a persistent world.
I'm not suggesting that this game won't have it just by one video not showing any. My concern is just that the style of play they are emphasizing, individual interactive story-lines, lots of cut-scenes, combat within the scope of a story-line, that doesn't really lend itself to the persistent-world-feel that I described above.
See this is actually what makes this a draw for me. I don't get a kick out of people talking in region chat or going to a field filled with badgers that other people are also there killing. I get a kick out of playing with a group of cool people and if we never come across any random people while we're having fun, that's not only fine but in many cases preferable.
You uh... you don't want a MMORPG then. I don't really know how else to say it. Massive Multiplayer games revolve around uh.. massive multitudes of people in one world. You just want an RPG with multiplayer components.
Neverwinter Nights sounds exactly down your alley. Play Multiplayer official campaigns or player-made campaigns. Never have to worry about nubs ruining your fun with region chat. Plus, non-MMO games have the added advantage of getting to do nothing but the awesome story-line driven experience that MMORPGs desperately try to mimic.
If this game goes down that alley, I'll be pretty disappointed. There are plenty of RPGs I can play without paying monthly fees. If I'm paying monthly, I'm doing so because the game offers a unique massive world brimming with life.
No, I don't. And no, they don't. I've had lots of good times in WAR with Candymancers and The Six Mouths by ignoring the rest of the players and doing our own thing.
I don't think it's entirely uncommon for classes to be merged together or significantly changed at this stage of development.
Merging? TOR is going a fairly different direction with the MMO format. With each class tied to a specific storyline that would mean destroying - completely - a whole fuckload of work, which has likely been planned, written, and rewritten for a very long time. They're also recording voice acting right now. That's pretty expensive. To eliminate entire sections of the game would be enormously wasteful at this juncture.
Once again, I'm not saying it could never happen - just that BioWare know what they're doing, and that they're unlikely to be going into this stage of development without having each class planned out and discussed - concept-wise - to a mind-numbing degree.
They might drastically change how each class plays a dozen times from now until release, they might revise and completely throw out the current ability tree or whatever; but to do anything that removes an entire class would be an enormous setback.
After watching the 20 minute videos, I hope the Flashpoints are like instances in WoW. You get a group of people together, accept the mission and go about it. You can then repeat it afterwards too, for different results/loot/exp/etc.
That probably won't happen, as they've said you can't repeat/undo choices you've made (which the flashpoints are all about) and they're a progression of 'your storyline'. You can invite friends though so I guess you will be able to repeat one from a friend.
Possibly, if you run through again with someone who's never done it, it lets them pick what choice to make (which would make sense, since the conversation did ping back and forth a bit between the Bounty Hunter and the Sith Warrior). If you go back through and everyone's played it, what you do may be determined randomly, or according to which path the majority chose, or you may be able to decide again but without the long-term repercussions (no Dark Side/Light Side points, et cetera).
The decision to kill the Captain was the Sith's to make. The Bounty Hunter just got the oppourtunity to chime in sarcastically after the major choice was made.
That's the impression I got anyway. Why the hell would a Bounty Hunter be killing an Imperial Captain? That makes no sense.
Yeah, why would a BOUNTY HUNTER kill someone? :winky:
So I watched the developer walkthrough videos today with my friends.
Up until this point, I wasn't really following along with anything cause this game is far off and to early to get excited for in my case. But those videos piqued my interest. This just looks fun, a fun game to play.
While watching the videos my friends and I were talking.. have they talked more about how group play would work yet? Is there going to be any type of healing class per se? or is this just going to be like the video showed, and bunch of offensive people (with a smattering of support-style skills) working together to bash some mans? Have they talked about what happens when the story stuff is over (the main storyline I mean) like... end game "raiding"?
I looked through the stuff in the O.P. but didn't necessarily find those answers, and they may not be answered, but figured the active people in this thread would have their finger on the pulse a bit
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We know basically nothing about healing other than "it's special and we think you'll like it". There are buffs and debuffs, for sure, so there's likely a class that's very good at it - we know the Trooper has some leadership skills, for example. It does seem like the characters are more rounded than some other MMOs, however.
Yes, it seems in general like a lot of ganging up to chat in dramatic situations and then slaughter lots of mans. But that's just what they've shown - what they call a "flashpoint" - and to be honest we don't know how open or instanced the rest of the game is.
No word on what happens with endgame stuff; they've said they do want to cater to raid people, but it doesn't sound like the be-all end-all of the endgame. They have stated they'd really like to create an ongoing story with "acts" continuing the storyline past the first release. They were pretty vague so it's likely just an idea in the air right now.
So maybe a bit like LOTRO and the books they keep releasing with more group content. I mean everything they say, and have shown does look cool and shows promise. And it is bioware. Just worried about the whole MMO aspect of this game Personally I'd like it if they didn't try to shoe-horn a healing "class" in and went a different route, just hope that the game will have plenty of group content to do and keep doing even after you get to the "end".
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There was mention of some special high-tech gadgets inside the Trooper's armor as being one of the things he relies on to match up to the Sith etcetera. No idea what they mean by that, but hopefully it's some neat tricks on par with the Bounty Hunter's flamethrower. It may also be combat stimulants or bacta. Who knows?
We know that every class has access to an out of combat heal, whether it is an ability or an item is unknown. It is on a 60 second timer.
Also, someday I really need to create the "bet my cock" website I specced out a year or so ago, where you can lay down on things like whether there will be two Force-sensitive classes per side or one, and you can be publicly shamed for proclaiming your allegiance to the wrong side of the debate.
There was mention of some special high-tech gadgets inside the Trooper's armor as being one of the things he relies on to match up to the Sith etcetera. No idea what they mean by that, but hopefully it's some neat tricks on par with the Bounty Hunter's flamethrower. It may also be combat stimulants or bacta. Who knows?
I think we went over this at some point in an earlier thread but in the Star Wars universe technology doesn't always get better as time goes on. A lot of the stuff that is commonplace in the Old Republic (like stealth field generators and melee weapons capable of parrying lightsabers for example) can be extremely rare if they even exists at all in the later timelines.
Now you can argue that this was just a way to get certain game mechanics in but that's kind of beside the point. It's all cannon as far as this game will be concerned so saying "Oh, yeah? Old Republic troopers? Armor that kicked all sorts of ass" wouldn't be totally out of place.
Happy, you got to cut him some credit. He "is" using a loser Clan emblem as his icon, so his judgment is obviously flawed dramatically.
In regards to TOR, even though they're only releasing small bits of information at a time, each time they do it does start to give us a good idea of how the game is shaping up. If they keep this up, I don't know many people who won't want to give this a try because it looks damn fun.
I find it a little bizarre that they still haven't linked or uploaded the videos to the main SW:TOR page.
they probably don't want their servers to be completely destroyed... yet.
Delta, in the current economy no one's going to give you any credit, and they're only going to cut the important stuff off, not the slack parts. All in fun of course. I played as a Word of Blake way back when and we didn't get along with Clanners very well.
Some new speculation: do you think they'll have the rogue-like combo/action point build up system for the Jedi as well, or do you think they'll use a different system altogether? Perhaps make the Sith more offensively oriented (as they've shown quite well in the videos) and the Jedi more defensive and waiting for the right time to strike (just a theory)? Personally I wouldn't mind either method as long as they can justify/balance/make it work right. I'm just curious as to the opinions of the masses.
I find it a little bizarre that they still haven't linked or uploaded the videos to the main SW:TOR page.
they probably don't want their servers to be completely destroyed... yet.
Well, that's kinda why I figured you'd link it from the SW:TOR page to the IGN site, which can more than handle the load given that it was happily doling out video from TOR, Blizzcon and Gamescom at the same time.
Some new speculation: do you think they'll have the rogue-like combo/action point build up system for the Jedi as well, or do you think they'll use a different system altogether? Perhaps make the Sith more offensively oriented (as they've shown quite well in the videos) and the Jedi more defensive and waiting for the right time to strike (just a theory)? Personally I wouldn't mind either method as long as they can justify/balance/make it work right. I'm just curious as to the opinions of the masses.
I imagine that the mechanics will be similar, although the powers will be different and as you said perhaps more defensively orientated. Considering the considerable crossover in lightsaber fighting capabilities between a Jedi and a Sith, it'd be rather bizarre if the mechanics were drastically different to the point of causing one to pause when switching between.
I'm vaguely thinking of the difference between a Fury warrior and an Arms warrior (with a dash of Protection) pre-BC.
I don't want the multiplayer to just be "large groups of random people standing around in a village". That's pretty much all that HGL was. Open areas are what make MMOs feel like MMOs. Fighting fields worth of diseased badgers and seeing 6 other players doing the same thing because some NPC has some bizarre badger fetish. Town interaction is great, but if town is the main area where I get player interaction then the illusion of Massive Multiplayer is quickly lost. MMOs will only feel massive when you see other players questing where you're questing, other players fighting while you fly by overhead. You have to see players in action for it to feel like a persistent world.
I'm not suggesting that this game won't have it just by one video not showing any. My concern is just that the style of play they are emphasizing, individual interactive story-lines, lots of cut-scenes, combat within the scope of a story-line, that doesn't really lend itself to the persistent-world-feel that I described above.
See this is actually what makes this a draw for me. I don't get a kick out of people talking in region chat or going to a field filled with badgers that other people are also there killing. I get a kick out of playing with a group of cool people and if we never come across any random people while we're having fun, that's not only fine but in many cases preferable.
You uh... you don't want a MMORPG then. I don't really know how else to say it. Massive Multiplayer games revolve around uh.. massive multitudes of people in one world. You just want an RPG with multiplayer components.
Neverwinter Nights sounds exactly down your alley. Play Multiplayer official campaigns or player-made campaigns. Never have to worry about nubs ruining your fun with region chat. Plus, non-MMO games have the added advantage of getting to do nothing but the awesome story-line driven experience that MMORPGs desperately try to mimic.
If this game goes down that alley, I'll be pretty disappointed. There are plenty of RPGs I can play without paying monthly fees. If I'm paying monthly, I'm doing so because the game offers a unique massive world brimming with life.
There is a lot wrong with this line of thinking. So by your logic what makes an MMO an MMO are things like competing for mobs? getting corpse camped? etc?
Not you know -- playing a game with a clan of good friends?
i'm curious as to how different the playstyles will be, and hope they will be fairly different, regardless of their various propensities toward either offensive of defensive skill sets. i'm thinking of something along the lines of (no balance whining, i'm talking pure button pushing mechanics) the difference between the black orc and the ironbreaker tanks in WAR. the basic idea of each class (tank) is the same, but they play quite differently.
since replay value seems to be a design goal, i hope they make some choices in that direction, so it's not just pushing the same buttons with a different icon tile set for the two classes.
i'm curious as to how different the playstyles will be, and hope they will be fairly different, regardless of their various propensities toward either offensive of defensive skill sets. i'm thinking of something along the lines of (no balance whining, i'm talking pure button pushing mechanics) the difference between the black orc and the ironbreaker tanks in WAR. the basic idea of each class (tank) is the same, but they play quite differently.
since replay value seems to be a design goal, i hope they make some choices in that direction, so it's not just pushing the same buttons with a different icon tile set for the two classes.
I could see Sith working on something like a Rage point system. While a Jedi works on something more akin to a mana pool.
If you look at the 20 minute video, the Sith has a bunch of yellow dashes underneath his health bar where the BH and Smuggler have a much more traditional looking mana pool. Though their mana works like a Rogue's energy bar in WoW. The dashes for the Sith, I'm not sure how those work. They didn't seem to go down or up when he was in combat.
If you look at the 20 minute video, the Sith has a bunch of yellow dashes underneath his health bar where the BH and Smuggler have a much more traditional looking mana pool. Though their mana works like a Rogue's energy bar in WoW. The dashes for the Sith, I'm not sure how those work. They didn't seem to go down or up when he was in combat.
The dashes are his rage meter. He chains them with lots of smaller attacks, and spends them on finishers like the impale move. You can see how it works in the video.
So I just did a bunch of reading on this and that 4 page interview is very informing. The fact that each class has it's own storyline/questline all the way to the level cap, can be done solo or teamed, sounds incredible. I also like the fact that you get your own private room for interacting with major NPCs.
So it appears that inside any cutscene or choice both people throw an option in to the pot -- then roll to see who's option is actually used in the scene.
So on the Imperial Officer scene, the Sith chose to kill him. We don't see what the bounty hunter chose.
They roll, the Sith won the roll. So his choice was the one that was acted upon.
They've said several times now that they're still not sure how it's going to work. They're playing with several options, including the roll one you suggested, a "leader" option, or a more democratic vote system.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited August 2009
I have a lot of questions about how teaming is going to work. They showed how you could have people in your party and you could both interact with a cinematic sequence, but this leads to a lot of questions.
Iif every class has a fully contained unique story, what is the incentive to group with your Smuggler buddy if you're a Jedi? Your stories don't cross, so you wouldn't be advancing your stories at all. I would imagine there has to be some sort of group based story content specifically to give you and your buddies something to do. The per-class content seems to really lend itself to being done solo, or at the very least, in a party with other members of your class. Maybe at various points in the epic story lines, the stories do cross, requiring you to group up with other classes? I would imagine a combination of the two will end up the reality, some group content separated from the story lines, and some crossing of story lines.
On the Jedi vs. Sith front, I think the Jedi will end up being a tank with buffs and possibly light heals, while the Sith will end up a DPSer with debuffs. This is complete and total speculation, and has no basis in anything but my own head, but it seems logical.
So I just did a bunch of reading on this and that 4 page interview is very informing. The fact that each class has it's own storyline/questline all the way to the level cap, can be done solo or teamed, sounds incredible. I also like the fact that you get your own private room for interacting with major NPCs.
I have a lot of questions about how teaming is going to work. They showed how you could have people in your party and you could both interact with a cinematic sequence, but this leads to a lot of questions.
If Your stories don't cross, so you wouldn't be advancing your stories at all. I would imagine there has to be some sort of group based story content specifically to give you and your buddies something to do. The per-class content seems to really lend itself to being done solo, or at the very least, in a party with other members of your class. Maybe at various points in the epic story lines, the stories do cross, requiring you to group up with other classes? I would imagine a combination of the two will end up the reality, some group content separated from the story lines, and some crossing of story lines.
On the Jedi vs. Sith front, I think the Jedi will end up being a tank with buffs and possibly light heals, while the Sith will end up a DPSer with debuffs. This is complete and total speculation, and has no basis in anything but my own head, but it seems logical.
From the video, the Sith Warrior seemed like more of a CCer then a debuffer. Outside of DPSing, his two prominent abilities were Force Choke and the AOE force lightning.
I feel that this game would be best played with a group of people that schedule to play together on the main story quests/missions.
If there is an ample supply of side missions along with the main story missions this would be perfect. During the "off" hours you can just fuck around doing missions for a little xp or cash but when your friends all get on its time to party up and progress the story some more.
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No, I don't. And no, they don't. I've had lots of good times in WAR with Candymancers and The Six Mouths by ignoring the rest of the players and doing our own thing.
Merging? TOR is going a fairly different direction with the MMO format. With each class tied to a specific storyline that would mean destroying - completely - a whole fuckload of work, which has likely been planned, written, and rewritten for a very long time. They're also recording voice acting right now. That's pretty expensive. To eliminate entire sections of the game would be enormously wasteful at this juncture.
Once again, I'm not saying it could never happen - just that BioWare know what they're doing, and that they're unlikely to be going into this stage of development without having each class planned out and discussed - concept-wise - to a mind-numbing degree.
They might drastically change how each class plays a dozen times from now until release, they might revise and completely throw out the current ability tree or whatever; but to do anything that removes an entire class would be an enormous setback.
Yes. Yes I will. Your point being? :P
Margaret Thatcher
Yeah, why would a BOUNTY HUNTER kill someone? :winky:
Margaret Thatcher
Up until this point, I wasn't really following along with anything cause this game is far off and to early to get excited for in my case. But those videos piqued my interest. This just looks fun, a fun game to play.
While watching the videos my friends and I were talking.. have they talked more about how group play would work yet? Is there going to be any type of healing class per se? or is this just going to be like the video showed, and bunch of offensive people (with a smattering of support-style skills) working together to bash some mans? Have they talked about what happens when the story stuff is over (the main storyline I mean) like... end game "raiding"?
I looked through the stuff in the O.P. but didn't necessarily find those answers, and they may not be answered, but figured the active people in this thread would have their finger on the pulse a bit
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Yes, it seems in general like a lot of ganging up to chat in dramatic situations and then slaughter lots of mans. But that's just what they've shown - what they call a "flashpoint" - and to be honest we don't know how open or instanced the rest of the game is.
No word on what happens with endgame stuff; they've said they do want to cater to raid people, but it doesn't sound like the be-all end-all of the endgame. They have stated they'd really like to create an ongoing story with "acts" continuing the storyline past the first release. They were pretty vague so it's likely just an idea in the air right now.
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Cause stormtroopers wore armor but they didn't provide any protection at all. And that's a few thousand years after the KOTOR era.
Why spend the money on a generic soldier when you can replace him with a generic someone else?
The idea behind the Republic Trooper is an elite trooper who is worth that 300 grand in armor.
Also, someday I really need to create the "bet my cock" website I specced out a year or so ago, where you can lay down on things like whether there will be two Force-sensitive classes per side or one, and you can be publicly shamed for proclaiming your allegiance to the wrong side of the debate.
I think we went over this at some point in an earlier thread but in the Star Wars universe technology doesn't always get better as time goes on. A lot of the stuff that is commonplace in the Old Republic (like stealth field generators and melee weapons capable of parrying lightsabers for example) can be extremely rare if they even exists at all in the later timelines.
Now you can argue that this was just a way to get certain game mechanics in but that's kind of beside the point. It's all cannon as far as this game will be concerned so saying "Oh, yeah? Old Republic troopers? Armor that kicked all sorts of ass" wouldn't be totally out of place.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
It's not a typo.
It's the bane of the internet.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
You're face is the bane of the internet.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Happy, you got to cut him some credit. He "is" using a loser Clan emblem as his icon, so his judgment is obviously flawed dramatically.
In regards to TOR, even though they're only releasing small bits of information at a time, each time they do it does start to give us a good idea of how the game is shaping up. If they keep this up, I don't know many people who won't want to give this a try because it looks damn fun.
I'm pretty sure you mean either "cut him some slack" or "give him some credit." Either of those works. :P
they probably don't want their servers to be completely destroyed... yet.
Delta, in the current economy no one's going to give you any credit, and they're only going to cut the important stuff off, not the slack parts.
Some new speculation: do you think they'll have the rogue-like combo/action point build up system for the Jedi as well, or do you think they'll use a different system altogether? Perhaps make the Sith more offensively oriented (as they've shown quite well in the videos) and the Jedi more defensive and waiting for the right time to strike (just a theory)? Personally I wouldn't mind either method as long as they can justify/balance/make it work right. I'm just curious as to the opinions of the masses.
Well, that's kinda why I figured you'd link it from the SW:TOR page to the IGN site, which can more than handle the load given that it was happily doling out video from TOR, Blizzcon and Gamescom at the same time.
I imagine that the mechanics will be similar, although the powers will be different and as you said perhaps more defensively orientated. Considering the considerable crossover in lightsaber fighting capabilities between a Jedi and a Sith, it'd be rather bizarre if the mechanics were drastically different to the point of causing one to pause when switching between.
I'm vaguely thinking of the difference between a Fury warrior and an Arms warrior (with a dash of Protection) pre-BC.
There is a lot wrong with this line of thinking. So by your logic what makes an MMO an MMO are things like competing for mobs? getting corpse camped? etc?
Not you know -- playing a game with a clan of good friends?
Also -- Star Wars Cannon!
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
i'm curious as to how different the playstyles will be, and hope they will be fairly different, regardless of their various propensities toward either offensive of defensive skill sets. i'm thinking of something along the lines of (no balance whining, i'm talking pure button pushing mechanics) the difference between the black orc and the ironbreaker tanks in WAR. the basic idea of each class (tank) is the same, but they play quite differently.
since replay value seems to be a design goal, i hope they make some choices in that direction, so it's not just pushing the same buttons with a different icon tile set for the two classes.
I could see Sith working on something like a Rage point system. While a Jedi works on something more akin to a mana pool.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
The dashes are his rage meter. He chains them with lots of smaller attacks, and spends them on finishers like the impale move. You can see how it works in the video.
So on the Imperial Officer scene, the Sith chose to kill him. We don't see what the bounty hunter chose.
They roll, the Sith won the roll. So his choice was the one that was acted upon.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Iif every class has a fully contained unique story, what is the incentive to group with your Smuggler buddy if you're a Jedi? Your stories don't cross, so you wouldn't be advancing your stories at all. I would imagine there has to be some sort of group based story content specifically to give you and your buddies something to do. The per-class content seems to really lend itself to being done solo, or at the very least, in a party with other members of your class. Maybe at various points in the epic story lines, the stories do cross, requiring you to group up with other classes? I would imagine a combination of the two will end up the reality, some group content separated from the story lines, and some crossing of story lines.
On the Jedi vs. Sith front, I think the Jedi will end up being a tank with buffs and possibly light heals, while the Sith will end up a DPSer with debuffs. This is complete and total speculation, and has no basis in anything but my own head, but it seems logical.
Ahh link!
Would you be the Han Solo to my Luke Skywalker?
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
If there is an ample supply of side missions along with the main story missions this would be perfect. During the "off" hours you can just fuck around doing missions for a little xp or cash but when your friends all get on its time to party up and progress the story some more.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)