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.
Yah, I get this same vibe from it. Having a regular, steady group, is going to be a big deal in this game, because you're going to need to be in about the same place story wise as your friends if you want to group with them a lot.
(And yes, I'll be Han Solo to your Luke Skywalker )
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.
Force Choke looked like a DoT + CC to me. It locked the guy down, but he was taking DoT damage as well. I'd class that as a "debuff" of sorts. He's definitely a DPS class, the question I guess is what his utility is. CC may be it, it's hard to tell from just that video.
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.
Force Choke looked like a DoT + CC to me. It locked the guy down, but he was taking DoT damage as well. I'd class that as a "debuff" of sorts. He's definitely a DPS class, the question I guess is what his utility is. CC may be it, it's hard to tell from just that video.
Well, he probably doesn't buff other guys, seeing as how he's a sith and they're supposed to be more self-focused.
If I hadn't seen the video, I'd say the Sith class is a DPS specialist, with some limited CC ability (Force Choke, Force Push, Force Lightning, etc). Something along the lines of a rogue, yet with far more survivability and less stealth.
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.
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.
Force Choke looked like a DoT + CC to me. It locked the guy down, but he was taking DoT damage as well. I'd class that as a "debuff" of sorts. He's definitely a DPS class, the question I guess is what his utility is. CC may be it, it's hard to tell from just that video.
Well, he probably doesn't buff other guys, seeing as how he's a sith and they're supposed to be more self-focused.
If I hadn't seen the video, I'd say the Sith class is a DPS specialist, with some limited CC ability (Force Choke, Force Push, Force Lightning, etc). Something along the lines of a rogue, yet with far more survivability and less stealth.
If we take KoToR as a template for what a Sith would be (by looking at the dark side powers), he will have some debuff abilities. See the Slow/Affliction/Plague and Fear/Horror/Insanity lines from those games. It's not a sure bet they will base the Sith and Jedi classes off the KoToR templates, but I would venture a wager that they'll be close.
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.
Reading further: Can I just throw money at them already? I love these guys. Their words are like sweet nectar.
Ah, it feels good to be an excited fanboy. If only for a little while before my inner child is brutalized and left to gnaw on a dead cat in the corner again.
Basil on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Those debuffs may well be mostly shifted over to another Sith class, leaving the Sith Warrior as a pretty meaty, physical attacker/tank.
Ah, good point. I didn't know that the Sith being broken in to multiple classes (and I would assume Jedi as well) had been confirmed.
Oh, it's not - but people around here seem to agree that it does seem very likely.
Zetetic Elench on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited August 2009
See, I thought the class list would be pretty short, with a lot of hybrid classes (kind of like WoW), because each class has a completely unique story line, start to finish. So every class they add, adds a whole new swath of content. I could be wrong, but that was my reasoning for thinking the class list would end up pretty compact.
Those debuffs may well be mostly shifted over to another Sith class, leaving the Sith Warrior as a pretty meaty, physical attacker/tank.
Ah, good point. I didn't know that the Sith being broken in to multiple classes (and I would assume Jedi as well) had been confirmed.
It hasn't been confirmed, Zetetic is making assumptions.
There are a couple competing theories. One is that Force users might have different specialization trees that further refine a class' role.
That would make more sense to me than an entirely new class, given the fact that new class = ton of new content, which is sort of a unique thing for this game. I can't think of any other MMO where adding a new class means you have to add level 1 to max content for it as well.
Those debuffs may well be mostly shifted over to another Sith class, leaving the Sith Warrior as a pretty meaty, physical attacker/tank.
Ah, good point. I didn't know that the Sith being broken in to multiple classes (and I would assume Jedi as well) had been confirmed.
It hasn't been confirmed, Zetetic is making assumptions.
There are a couple competing theories. One is that Force users might have different specialization trees that further refine a class' role.
That would make more sense to me than an entirely new class, given the fact that new class = ton of new content, which is sort of a unique thing for this game. I can't think of any other MMO where adding a new class means you have to add level 1 to max content for it as well.
That's the basic line of thinking that's gone on previously.
(Let's not get started with it again, lol.)
Melkster on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited August 2009
I agree. We were talking about that earlier. There has to be quite a bit of cross-class content, otherwise why would anyone ever group up?
I don't know if this has been addressed in the past 66 pages but I figured I'd ask anyway...
I watched all 4 parts of the video. Combat, story-line, and cinematics all seemed impressive... for a single-player game.
I didn't get any MMO feel from the video, at all. Instanced story-lines are good; they make the game feel individualized and allow for more interesting battles. However, they can't be over-done or you end up with HellGate: London. Hundreds of quests, all of which had to be done in a specific order, so that at the end of the day I may have seen a bunch of players at the various towns but I had barely any opportunity to play with them. I really don't want that to happen here. If I'm constantly doing instanced battles, and there are too many of them, it means I'll have difficulty finding people to join me on them.
From what you guys have seen/read about, is this a valid concern? Will the game actually feel MMO? Or will it be HGL-like in it's multiplayer experience?
Um, it's a demo walkthrough. I'm sure the game is gonna provide for large groups of random people standing around in a village doing /dance and yelling about how episode 1 was actually not that bad or whether anyone has bacta elixirs to sell. Or people on vent flirting with underage girls who've just joined their guild. It's just that that's not the sorta thing you're gonna want to showcase in a preview video like this.
See, that's precisely my concern.
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.
Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
Why do we all assume that characters will have specializations and talent trees? If we look at KOTOR and then ME we see that you get skills or feats from a preset list and you can make the same classes unique by using the skill points differently. Whether it's the D&D style and everyone will get the same skills, feats and force powers to choose from with certain class only abilities that you may or may not need to take or it's like ME where you have set of skills already and you level them as you go. The lader is much more like DaoC.
In regards to healing class; I don't think there will be a designated healing class. In KotOR the closest you got was a casting jedi using the healing power when needed or your character with the highest firstaid skill using a medpack. In ME you have the one heal you could use on a timer and the effect was multiplied by group member's first aid skill. Healing would most likely some altered version of this. Remember we're supposed to feel like heroes. We won't need anyone spamming heals to keep us alive. It will be much more strategic.
I love the idea of the flashpoints. It seems that quests hubs and certain rooms will be your own personal adventure ontop of some instances for missions. You invite someone into your party and they become part of your world and story. You advance the plot figure out what you need to do next and leave the room and bump into everyone else doing the same. Now you're all in the world together helping eachother get certain things done that maybe you don't need to do but are helping for the experiance, adventure and hope that they will come help you track down that bounty or sith lord.
It just seems to have that feeling of walking out your front door in the morning.
I don't know if this has been addressed in the past 66 pages but I figured I'd ask anyway...
I watched all 4 parts of the video. Combat, story-line, and cinematics all seemed impressive... for a single-player game.
I didn't get any MMO feel from the video, at all. Instanced story-lines are good; they make the game feel individualized and allow for more interesting battles. However, they can't be over-done or you end up with HellGate: London. Hundreds of quests, all of which had to be done in a specific order, so that at the end of the day I may have seen a bunch of players at the various towns but I had barely any opportunity to play with them. I really don't want that to happen here. If I'm constantly doing instanced battles, and there are too many of them, it means I'll have difficulty finding people to join me on them.
From what you guys have seen/read about, is this a valid concern? Will the game actually feel MMO? Or will it be HGL-like in it's multiplayer experience?
Um, it's a demo walkthrough. I'm sure the game is gonna provide for large groups of random people standing around in a village doing /dance and yelling about how episode 1 was actually not that bad or whether anyone has bacta elixirs to sell. Or people on vent flirting with underage girls who've just joined their guild. It's just that that's not the sorta thing you're gonna want to showcase in a preview video like this.
See, that's precisely my concern.
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.
Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
That is the absolute worst fucking thing about MMORPGs....fields of people killing snakes. I am generally in favor of WoW style worlds but with actual interesting and meanful quests.
I agree that if this was like EverQuest and each class had no variance across players it would be very uniteresting to play. And keep in mind, I just came off of WoW where each class had their trees but all it really did was just multiply the number of classes but homogonize them into 3 groups. And which ever class/spec you chose was going to have 90% of the same build as anyone else choosing to be that class/spec.
I'm hoping for a less tree oriented way to build a character. Don't make me choose to be a mdps vs tank jedi with a path I need to follow point by point as I level. It's just too linear.
While i did describe two instances of someone being dramatically better at healing than others, the second isn't actually a class it was a skill everyone could get. And even a jedi guardian could do a decent job healing if using the FP conservatively.
So, knowing this game will likely not come out for another year at least, I'm trying to just push it out of my mind because I don't want to get involved in this game developers play in trying to just leak out the info little by little to get fans of the series to salivate.
That being said, these guys are making it really, really hard. Those videos were ridiculously good. I can't wait for any news whatsoever. I think this is the first time I've ever followed a game this closely that has been so far from being released.
I don't know if this has been addressed in the past 66 pages but I figured I'd ask anyway...
I watched all 4 parts of the video. Combat, story-line, and cinematics all seemed impressive... for a single-player game.
I didn't get any MMO feel from the video, at all. Instanced story-lines are good; they make the game feel individualized and allow for more interesting battles. However, they can't be over-done or you end up with HellGate: London. Hundreds of quests, all of which had to be done in a specific order, so that at the end of the day I may have seen a bunch of players at the various towns but I had barely any opportunity to play with them. I really don't want that to happen here. If I'm constantly doing instanced battles, and there are too many of them, it means I'll have difficulty finding people to join me on them.
From what you guys have seen/read about, is this a valid concern? Will the game actually feel MMO? Or will it be HGL-like in it's multiplayer experience?
Um, it's a demo walkthrough. I'm sure the game is gonna provide for large groups of random people standing around in a village doing /dance and yelling about how episode 1 was actually not that bad or whether anyone has bacta elixirs to sell. Or people on vent flirting with underage girls who've just joined their guild. It's just that that's not the sorta thing you're gonna want to showcase in a preview video like this.
See, that's precisely my concern.
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.
Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
That is the absolute worst fucking thing about MMORPGs....fields of people killing snakes. I am generally in favor of WoW style worlds but with actual interesting and meanful quests.
wow is basically nothing but people in fields killing snakes and then instances
I watched the 20 minute IGN video and read that article. I still do not see a justification for calling the game an MMO. It appears that the game is heavily instanced with very little openness and persistence, and even in the public areas, there is pseudo-instancing. On top of that, the storylines are supposed to be soloable.
Don't get me wrong. It looks fun, and I look forward to playing it. I just don't see why the game is an MMO rather than a single-player or Guild Wars-style co-op RPG. It still looks like they do not think they can justify some sort of business model without calling it an MMO.
I watched the 20 minute IGN video and read that article. I still do not see a justification for calling the game an MMO. It appears that the game is heavily instanced with very little openness and persistence, and even in the public areas, there is pseudo-instancing. On top of that, the storylines are supposed to be soloable.
Don't get me wrong. It looks fun, and I look forward to playing it. I just don't see why the game is an MMO rather than a single-player or Guild Wars-style co-op RPG. It still looks like they do not think they can justify some sort of business model without calling it an MMO.
What's in a name?
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is absolutely massive, that's for sure. It's definitely multiplayer. It's also conducted entirely online. It's an RPG, of course.
It fits the basic definition of the word, that's for sure. But I do agree with you - there is a tradeoff being made here. You get a better story, yes - but you lose a bit of the persistent world feeling that most MMOs try and capture, with a couple exceptions. Has it lost so much of it's persistence that we can no longer call it a "persistent" online world?
Considering they have already said it isn't going to be instanced like Guild Wars, and they've already said there are going to be small and large group instances to do, I think it's quite silly to keep acting like OMG it's a single player MMO!!~!~
WoW might as well be a single player game until max level. The only thing anybody does in groups in WoW below the max level is do 5 mans, or if they play with RL friends, you group with them. They've already stated you can group with your friends to quest in TOR, so at this point it just seems like a whole lot of complaining just to complain.
Edit: Also, if more instancing in the story quests means I don't have to stand in a pack of 47 level 3 Jedi collecting crates of blasters for a guy, then give me more instancing. This game is going to be insanely popular, and I guarantee you it will be as social as any other MMO, if not more so.
I watched the 20 minute IGN video and read that article. I still do not see a justification for calling the game an MMO. It appears that the game is heavily instanced with very little openness and persistence, and even in the public areas, there is pseudo-instancing. On top of that, the storylines are supposed to be soloable.
Don't get me wrong. It looks fun, and I look forward to playing it. I just don't see why the game is an MMO rather than a single-player or Guild Wars-style co-op RPG. It still looks like they do not think they can justify some sort of business model without calling it an MMO.
A 20 minute developer walkthrough is not an MMO. It's a demo.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is absolutely massive, that's for sure. It's definitely multiplayer. It's also conducted entirely online. It's an RPG, of course.
It fits the basic definition of the word, that's for sure. But I do agree with you - there is a tradeoff being made here. You get a better story, yes - but you lose a bit of the persistent world feeling that most MMOs try and capture, with a couple exceptions. Has it lost so much of it's persistence that we can no longer call it a "persistent" online world?
LOTRO had an interesting way of telling a story and changing the world. Most important quest givers (like gandalf) were always in an indoor (instanced, but shared with anyone else on the same progression line) location, like a room in The Prancing Pony or a guest house in Rivendell, and they appear or disappear depending on your progression in the book quests. Starts off at prancing pony, moves on while you continue the book series.
My sense of it is that it's more like LOTRO. Flashpoints are like the story-heavy instanced elements of that game.
Some people are seeing the flashpoint gameplay, assuming it applies across the entire game through ignorance (it's not exactly made clear what a flashpoint is in the video, although they've explained it in interviews) and writing the game off as a co-op RPG.
I watched the 20 minute IGN video and read that article. I still do not see a justification for calling the game an MMO. It appears that the game is heavily instanced with very little openness and persistence, and even in the public areas, there is pseudo-instancing. On top of that, the storylines are supposed to be soloable.
Don't get me wrong. It looks fun, and I look forward to playing it. I just don't see why the game is an MMO rather than a single-player or Guild Wars-style co-op RPG. It still looks like they do not think they can justify some sort of business model without calling it an MMO.
A 20 minute developer walkthrough is not an MMO. It's a demo.
And in that demo and the many interviews they've done, I still don't think they've explained how the game is massively multiplayer. Other than vague promises of end-game raids, everything they have shown or talked about could be done in a co-op game with hubs/lobbies like Guild Wars or Diablo.
Are there non-instanced places players can meet outside of hubs? If there are, I don't think they've shown any yet. They could just be emphasizing the storyline stuff because that is what sets them apart. That's fine. I'm just going to be skeptical of the MMO-ness of the game until they show some open world content.
My sense of it is that it's more like LOTRO. Flashpoints are like the story-heavy instanced elements of that game.
Some people are seeing the flashpoint gameplay, assuming it applies across the entire game through ignorance (it's not exactly made clear what a flashpoint is in the video, although they've explained it in interviews) and writing the game off as a co-op RPG.
Hell even if it was just a Co-op RPG, what I have seen of it so far would suggest it to be an awesome co-op so I would still be paying them mad moneys for it.
I watched the 20 minute IGN video and read that article. I still do not see a justification for calling the game an MMO. It appears that the game is heavily instanced with very little openness and persistence, and even in the public areas, there is pseudo-instancing. On top of that, the storylines are supposed to be soloable.
Don't get me wrong. It looks fun, and I look forward to playing it. I just don't see why the game is an MMO rather than a single-player or Guild Wars-style co-op RPG. It still looks like they do not think they can justify some sort of business model without calling it an MMO.
A 20 minute developer walkthrough is not an MMO. It's a demo.
And in that demo and the many interviews they've done, I still don't think they've explained how the game is massively multiplayer. Other than vague promises of end-game raids, everything they have shown or talked about could be done in a co-op game with hubs/lobbies like Guild Wars or Diablo.
Are there non-instanced places players can meet outside of hubs? If there are, I don't think they've shown any yet. They could just be emphasizing the storyline stuff because that is what sets them apart. That's fine. I'm just going to be skeptical of the MMO-ness of the game until they show some open world content.
The MMO Gamer: From a design standpoint, how do you handle heroic storytelling in an MMO?
In your standard online game you might walk up to a quest NPC, see a guy right behind you, and know that he’s getting the exact same quest you are to do whatever the heroic thing you’re doing is.
Do you have to segregate players, emulate the single player experience within an online world to make them feel as if they’re the protagonist, as opposed to just one player out of hundreds of thousands?
Daniel Erickson: Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
James Ohlen: Plus, you don’t have to put up with when you’re talking to your Sith lord somebody coming up and doing the /grind dance right beside you. [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: That happen a lot in internal alpha?
Daniel Erickson: Oh yeah! [laughing]
James Ohlen: [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: I imagine that would be slightly immersion breaking.
James Ohlen: Yes, it is.
But, what you saw right in there had the working system. It’s basically a staged system. When you start up a conversation, everyone is on their stages and they’re able to play all of their animations, say all their lines, it’s very cinematic.
But, it still works within the confines of the public zone. What you saw in there was in a flashpoint, which is instanced, but that could also have taken place, and looked just as good, had it taken place in a public area.
I'm pretty sure they meant Guild Wars when they were talking about "those primarily instanced games."
My sense of it is that it's more like LOTRO. Flashpoints are like the story-heavy instanced elements of that game.
Some people are seeing the flashpoint gameplay, assuming it applies across the entire game through ignorance (it's not exactly made clear what a flashpoint is in the video, although they've explained it in interviews) and writing the game off as a co-op RPG.
Hell even if it was just a Co-op RPG, what I have seen of it so far would suggest it to be an awesome co-op so I would still be paying them mad moneys for it.
So would I. It looks like they are trying to do something really new and innovative, but they call it an MMO when that label doesn't really match what they are doing.
My sense of it is that it's more like LOTRO. Flashpoints are like the story-heavy instanced elements of that game.
Some people are seeing the flashpoint gameplay, assuming it applies across the entire game through ignorance (it's not exactly made clear what a flashpoint is in the video, although they've explained it in interviews) and writing the game off as a co-op RPG.
Hell even if it was just a Co-op RPG, what I have seen of it so far would suggest it to be an awesome co-op so I would still be paying them mad moneys for it.
So would I. It looks like they are trying to do something really new and innovative, but they call it an MMO when that label doesn't really match what they are doing.
You couldn't be more wrong. Have you read anything about the game yet? They have been showcasing the storyline stuff because it's the main thing that's going to separate it from the crowd. It's hard to show off tons of players in a zone when you're the only person playing the demonstration demo.
This is just my take on what the game will be like.
You're on Dantooine in a spaceport or city. All around you other players running in the streets, using vendors and auction houses etc. You take a walk down a street and walk into a building. Now you're in a flash where the NPCs interact with you like we've seen in the vids. When you're done you walk out and you're back in the MMO city. Like my comment earlier of leaving your door firt thing in the morning.
When you leave the city you're not creating a new flash. I get the impression it's just like any other MMO world where the only thing you've done is walked through gates and there are people running around out there too. Now, in wow there were quests of kill x ogres, retrieve y. These usually took place in common areas and there was no reason for your character to do it, motive wise. But now those common areas, maybe the crystal caves on dantooine aren't common and when you walk in, it's an instance/flashpoint. Just not a repeatable one that requires 5 people to run over and over.
I'm sure there will be a lot of open areas with monsters and bad guys to fight, places to explore or grind some experiance. I think they've already said that they want to minimize the amount of time in flashpoints.
And have we thought of characters needing to go to the same area for different reasons? Sith needs to go to the crystal caves to access crystal and the bounty hunter needs to go to collect on a jedi known to mediate there? If you were the sith you'd have to fight the jedi, just as a boss type quest experiance, if you were alone. As a the bounty hunter your job just got easier.
You will be able to play other species, we just have not announced those other species yet.
Woowoo. As I suspected, other races are playable. Assets are likely not anywhere near complete yet.
Wookie Sith.
Melkster on
0
Just_Bri_ThanksSeething with ragefrom a handbasket.Registered User, ClubPAregular
edited August 2009
I think it would suck to be a wookie. Every time some political body gets hopped up on some delusions of grandeur, the first thing they do is enslave the wookies.
Just_Bri_Thanks on
...and when you are done with that; take a folding
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Posts
Yah, I get this same vibe from it. Having a regular, steady group, is going to be a big deal in this game, because you're going to need to be in about the same place story wise as your friends if you want to group with them a lot.
(And yes, I'll be Han Solo to your Luke Skywalker
Force Choke looked like a DoT + CC to me. It locked the guy down, but he was taking DoT damage as well. I'd class that as a "debuff" of sorts. He's definitely a DPS class, the question I guess is what his utility is. CC may be it, it's hard to tell from just that video.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Well, he probably doesn't buff other guys, seeing as how he's a sith and they're supposed to be more self-focused.
If I hadn't seen the video, I'd say the Sith class is a DPS specialist, with some limited CC ability (Force Choke, Force Push, Force Lightning, etc). Something along the lines of a rogue, yet with far more survivability and less stealth.
http://www.mmogamer.com/06/11/2009/a-new-hope-for-mmos
If we take KoToR as a template for what a Sith would be (by looking at the dark side powers), he will have some debuff abilities. See the Slow/Affliction/Plague and Fear/Horror/Insanity lines from those games. It's not a sure bet they will base the Sith and Jedi classes off the KoToR templates, but I would venture a wager that they'll be close.
Awesome interview!
Reading further: Can I just throw money at them already? I love these guys. Their words are like sweet nectar.
Ah, it feels good to be an excited fanboy. If only for a little while before my inner child is brutalized and left to gnaw on a dead cat in the corner again.
Ah, good point. I didn't know that the Sith being broken in to multiple classes (and I would assume Jedi as well) had been confirmed.
Oh, it's not - but people around here seem to agree that it does seem very likely.
That would make more sense to me than an entirely new class, given the fact that new class = ton of new content, which is sort of a unique thing for this game. I can't think of any other MMO where adding a new class means you have to add level 1 to max content for it as well.
That's the basic line of thinking that's gone on previously.
(Let's not get started with it again, lol.)
Answer.
Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
In regards to healing class; I don't think there will be a designated healing class. In KotOR the closest you got was a casting jedi using the healing power when needed or your character with the highest firstaid skill using a medpack. In ME you have the one heal you could use on a timer and the effect was multiplied by group member's first aid skill. Healing would most likely some altered version of this. Remember we're supposed to feel like heroes. We won't need anyone spamming heals to keep us alive. It will be much more strategic.
I love the idea of the flashpoints. It seems that quests hubs and certain rooms will be your own personal adventure ontop of some instances for missions. You invite someone into your party and they become part of your world and story. You advance the plot figure out what you need to do next and leave the room and bump into everyone else doing the same. Now you're all in the world together helping eachother get certain things done that maybe you don't need to do but are helping for the experiance, adventure and hope that they will come help you track down that bounty or sith lord.
It just seems to have that feeling of walking out your front door in the morning.
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
That is the absolute worst fucking thing about MMORPGs....fields of people killing snakes. I am generally in favor of WoW style worlds but with actual interesting and meanful quests.
I'm hoping for a less tree oriented way to build a character. Don't make me choose to be a mdps vs tank jedi with a path I need to follow point by point as I level. It's just too linear.
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
At Jdarksun:
While i did describe two instances of someone being dramatically better at healing than others, the second isn't actually a class it was a skill everyone could get. And even a jedi guardian could do a decent job healing if using the FP conservatively.
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
That being said, these guys are making it really, really hard. Those videos were ridiculously good. I can't wait for any news whatsoever. I think this is the first time I've ever followed a game this closely that has been so far from being released.
SteamID: devCharles
twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesewise
wow is basically nothing but people in fields killing snakes and then instances
Don't get me wrong. It looks fun, and I look forward to playing it. I just don't see why the game is an MMO rather than a single-player or Guild Wars-style co-op RPG. It still looks like they do not think they can justify some sort of business model without calling it an MMO.
What's in a name?
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is absolutely massive, that's for sure. It's definitely multiplayer. It's also conducted entirely online. It's an RPG, of course.
It fits the basic definition of the word, that's for sure. But I do agree with you - there is a tradeoff being made here. You get a better story, yes - but you lose a bit of the persistent world feeling that most MMOs try and capture, with a couple exceptions. Has it lost so much of it's persistence that we can no longer call it a "persistent" online world?
I'm not sure. That's an interesting debate.
WoW might as well be a single player game until max level. The only thing anybody does in groups in WoW below the max level is do 5 mans, or if they play with RL friends, you group with them. They've already stated you can group with your friends to quest in TOR, so at this point it just seems like a whole lot of complaining just to complain.
Edit: Also, if more instancing in the story quests means I don't have to stand in a pack of 47 level 3 Jedi collecting crates of blasters for a guy, then give me more instancing. This game is going to be insanely popular, and I guarantee you it will be as social as any other MMO, if not more so.
A 20 minute developer walkthrough is not an MMO. It's a demo.
The Raid
Massively and Multiplayer go together.
The Raid
Some people are seeing the flashpoint gameplay, assuming it applies across the entire game through ignorance (it's not exactly made clear what a flashpoint is in the video, although they've explained it in interviews) and writing the game off as a co-op RPG.
And in that demo and the many interviews they've done, I still don't think they've explained how the game is massively multiplayer. Other than vague promises of end-game raids, everything they have shown or talked about could be done in a co-op game with hubs/lobbies like Guild Wars or Diablo.
Are there non-instanced places players can meet outside of hubs? If there are, I don't think they've shown any yet. They could just be emphasizing the storyline stuff because that is what sets them apart. That's fine. I'm just going to be skeptical of the MMO-ness of the game until they show some open world content.
Hell even if it was just a Co-op RPG, what I have seen of it so far would suggest it to be an awesome co-op so I would still be paying them mad moneys for it.
I thought you said you read the article?
http://www.mmogamer.com/06/11/2009/a-new-hope-for-mmos
In your standard online game you might walk up to a quest NPC, see a guy right behind you, and know that he’s getting the exact same quest you are to do whatever the heroic thing you’re doing is.
Do you have to segregate players, emulate the single player experience within an online world to make them feel as if they’re the protagonist, as opposed to just one player out of hundreds of thousands?
Daniel Erickson: Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
James Ohlen: Plus, you don’t have to put up with when you’re talking to your Sith lord somebody coming up and doing the /grind dance right beside you. [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: That happen a lot in internal alpha?
Daniel Erickson: Oh yeah! [laughing]
James Ohlen: [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: I imagine that would be slightly immersion breaking.
James Ohlen: Yes, it is.
But, what you saw right in there had the working system. It’s basically a staged system. When you start up a conversation, everyone is on their stages and they’re able to play all of their animations, say all their lines, it’s very cinematic.
But, it still works within the confines of the public zone. What you saw in there was in a flashpoint, which is instanced, but that could also have taken place, and looked just as good, had it taken place in a public area.
I'm pretty sure they meant Guild Wars when they were talking about "those primarily instanced games."
So would I. It looks like they are trying to do something really new and innovative, but they call it an MMO when that label doesn't really match what they are doing.
You couldn't be more wrong. Have you read anything about the game yet? They have been showcasing the storyline stuff because it's the main thing that's going to separate it from the crowd. It's hard to show off tons of players in a zone when you're the only person playing the demonstration demo.
You're on Dantooine in a spaceport or city. All around you other players running in the streets, using vendors and auction houses etc. You take a walk down a street and walk into a building. Now you're in a flash where the NPCs interact with you like we've seen in the vids. When you're done you walk out and you're back in the MMO city. Like my comment earlier of leaving your door firt thing in the morning.
When you leave the city you're not creating a new flash. I get the impression it's just like any other MMO world where the only thing you've done is walked through gates and there are people running around out there too. Now, in wow there were quests of kill x ogres, retrieve y. These usually took place in common areas and there was no reason for your character to do it, motive wise. But now those common areas, maybe the crystal caves on dantooine aren't common and when you walk in, it's an instance/flashpoint. Just not a repeatable one that requires 5 people to run over and over.
I'm sure there will be a lot of open areas with monsters and bad guys to fight, places to explore or grind some experiance. I think they've already said that they want to minimize the amount of time in flashpoints.
And have we thought of characters needing to go to the same area for different reasons? Sith needs to go to the crystal caves to access crystal and the bounty hunter needs to go to collect on a jedi known to mediate there? If you were the sith you'd have to fight the jedi, just as a boss type quest experiance, if you were alone. As a the bounty hunter your job just got easier.
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
Woowoo. As I suspected, other races are playable. Assets are likely not anywhere near complete yet.
Wookie Sith.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
And dye him pink.
He would terrify everyone he meets.
didn't Lucas Himself ban wookiee force users from ever happening again?
Waaagaawwgghhwhrrwaah?