How do you play with your friends then? Maybe you could join them for their story, but then you’d miss huge chunks of your own. Or huge chunks of theirs if you don’t always play at the same time.
From the FAQ:
Why would you miss chunks of your story?
They’ve said it’s still going to continue though I find that hard to believe.
I believe Hanacker assumes if you joined your friends and killed a bunch of their 20 foot tall quest mobs for an evening, you’d outlevel your own personal 20 foot tall quest mobs.
Of course, if indeed the questline is “personalized” to the extent that those mobs aren’t something anyone else wants, then I guess the game could bump them up to make them challenging.
And someone thinks the game will launch in 2010? That sounds optimistic to me. Knowing nothing except that software projects ALWAYS slip and that announcements like this are usually way in advance, I would say more like 2011.
Yeah, I guess I’m stuck on a WoW mindset. Something heavily instanced with scaling levels (sort of like DDO or CoX) or essentially level-less (like Guild Wars) could work. It sounds a lot like what DDO promised, but maybe the problem with that game was more the execution than the model.
very funny description
Those lightsaber fight screenshots are horrible. The others don’t look so bad, I guess, but it’s so early and really the animations will tell the tale.
Way too early to get excited about this, to be sure.
I’m always puzzled when people classify Star Wars as a sci-fi IP. Jedi seem like the epitome of swords and sorcery to me. They carry magic swords that cut through anything. They levitate, pick up massive objects, deflect energy and shoot lighting from their fingers by channelling an invisible force.
Would that be out of place in Warcraft? Warhammer? D&D?
Just because they fly around in space ships doesn’t mean a Star Wars MMO can’t follow fantasy MMO patterns and remain faithful to the IP.
There are also robots and spaceships. That’s probably why.
Can LOTRO just wait on the other side for them?
I don’t think the screens are terrible from a technical standpoint. It does the art direction couldn’t decide between erring on cartoon-ish side or going for more realism. That’s a bit of a problem, but we’ll see how it is in motion.
Given you can be Sith, let’s hope the pvp is well designed.
As a disgruntled SWG ‘Uncle Owen Simulator’ player:
“I’ll give them heroics. I’ll give them the most spectacular heroics they’ve ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions so everyone can be superheroes! Everyone can be super! And when everyone’s super, [laughs maniacally] no one will be.”
Syndrome from the movie “The Incredibles”.
I wish them good luck though in developing their game and that it will be awesome.
I ll have a look at it when it’s out but even then I highly doubt it will get my interest.
As someone said, The Star Wars IP is getting really tired.
I would buy this if it was a single persistent world in which everyone played on the same server which would allow me to buy a space ship and explore the galaxy, finding new habitable planets and creating new settlements then defending them from attack in a galactic civil war with air/ground/sea.
I want the story to be created in a giant Star Wars sandpit by 1,000,000 plus players each one deciding whether they want to be a starship pilot, a hunter, a farmer, a turret gunner on a space station, an AT-AT driver, a smuggler, a mayor of their own settlement, an infantryman, an explorer or just a good for nothing layabout.
From a design standpoint, Star Wars is fantastic. It has an aesthetic that stands head and shoulders above most space operas, and it’s rightly celebrated for that. In terms of “look and feel” it’s one of the most remarkable sci-fi properties ever created.
It’s difficult to assess “the story” when Star Wars comprises six movies and umpteen comic books, novels, and videogames. In my opinion “the story” of The Empire Strikes back is very good indeed, and in other entries is ranges from bad to serviceable to good, depending.
I don’t know particularly why a Star Wars setting shouldn’t work for a sci fi MMO as well as, or better than, any other. Particularly when you set the action in a timeline where you aren’t bumping into canon stuff all the time.
Star Wars is classified by lots of people as sci-fi because it has spaceships and laser guns. You may object to those criteria, and if you want to use a finer set of genre names you can call it sci-fantasy or space opera or whatever. But I don’t see anything remotely puzzling about this naming convention borne out of convenience and certain superficial (but extremely salient) characteristics.
You can limit the term “sci-fi” only to hard sci-fi, if you like, but I think, at least in the context of videogame IPs, that amounts to contrarianism for its own sake. Heck, I suppose Star Trek isn’t sci fi either. Warp travel is impossible based on what we currently know of physics, and there is no evidence that telepathy exists, and Q is basically a very powerful wizard, so…
Or just fantasy, since that’s what it is. Science has zero to do with Star Wars. Contrary to what StGabe said earlier, it actually is wide open, since nothing in Star Wars actually needs to make sense, it just needs to do what the writer wants it to do. This is, of course, both a strength and a weakness.
If you’re just referring to the original trilogy, then sure. However, when Lucas moved away from the worn industrial style of the original trilogy for the shiny cgi aesthetic of the prequels, the series took a huge step back visually.
I dont mind the shiny cgi asthetics as much (though I dont like them) as the need to be pseudo scientifical trying to explain stuff with mediclorians.
Star Wars was the most open up setting being fantasy in space, grabbing both genres with magic (the force) and tech (space ships) but not with the burdens (using orcs and elfs) or needing to explain stuff with science (like Star Trek).
Apart from that as Tom wrote in his TFU review:
“the things that made Star Wars good back when it was good: shame, betrayal, redemption, family, love, destiny and the storytelling insight to realize that Galactic politics, droids, spaceships and aliens were just a backdrop.”
If Bioware can keep telling stories like that in an MMO environment (which I sadly dont see with the look at griefing potential), they might get me but till then:
“this is not the game you are looking for” waves hand