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Star Wars: The Old Republic [Releasing Date: Dec 20 NA/EU - NDA Lifted]

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CzarTim

Member
GLopez12 said:
Isn't the companion system just a pet system? It also sounds a bit like the hero system in Guild Wars. That's not really innovative, and it's not the kind of innovation that keeps people actively picking the game over World of Warcraft.
Typically pets are just tanks, here they can take any role you want.
 

GLopez12

Neo Member
CzarTim said:
Typically pets are just tanks, here they can take any role you want.
Pets haven't been just tanks for a long, long time. Guild Wars and WOW both have pets and companions that can fill a variety of roles.
 

Yasae

Banned
The game doesn't cost half a billion dollars.

It doesn't cost $400M.

It doesn't cost $300M.

It doesn't cost $200M.

It's in the ballpark of $100M. Very expensive for your average game, even pretty costly for an MMO, but not for a game trying to do what it's doing.

And if you're going to believe that several hundred million dollars was spent on this game, how about itemizing the costs? People on GAF would have you believe that voice actors are paid a king's ransom for their work - that must be what's so insanely expensive!
 

Izayoi

Banned
CzarTim said:
Typically pets are just tanks, here they can take any role you want.
What? Even LoTRO has a wide variety of pets/companions that fulfill various roles. From healing, to CC, to DoTs, to Fellowships... you name it.

TERA has pets that do all kinds of different stuff as well, and as was mentioned earlier, so does WoW and Guild Wars. Pets doing things other than tanking is nothing new.
 

GLopez12

Neo Member
Yasae said:
The game doesn't cost half a billion dollars.

It doesn't cost $400M.

It doesn't cost $300M.

It doesn't cost $200M.

It's in the ballpark of $100M. Very expensive for your average game, even pretty costly for an MMO, but not for a game trying to do what it's doing.

And if you're going to believe that several hundred million dollars was spent on this game, how about itemizing the costs? People on GAF would have you believe that voice actors are paid a king's ransom for their work - that must be what's so insanely expensive!
If you say so. The fact some people inside EA and Bioware are apparently throwing around numbers that high should make you a little more modest about your prediction, though.

Izayoi said:
What? Even LoTRO has a wide variety of pets/companions that fulfill various roles. From healing, to CC, to DoTs, to Fellowships... you name it.

TERA has pets that do all kinds of different stuff as well, and as was mentioned earlier, so does WoW and Guild Wars. Pets doing things other than tanking is nothing new.
Yeah, I don't know where anyone got the idea that pets are just tanks. That hasn't been true for so long.

Either way, it sounds like the companion system is just a pet system, which is neat but not innovative, and it's definitely not the kind of feature that will help The Old Republic trump World of Warcraft.
 
I'm fine with it playing the same as World of Warcraft and other MMOs but it's not the reason why I'm excited for TOR. I'm excited because it's Star Wars, it's Knights of the Old Republic, and it's BioWare.

Yasae said:
And if you're going to believe that several hundred million dollars was spent on this game, how about itemizing the costs? People on GAF would have you believe that voice actors are paid a king's ransom for their work - that must be what's so insanely expensive!

Are you telling me that David Hayter and Nolan North don't have 35 cars, a mansion, a private jet, and a luxury yacht?
 

GLopez12

Neo Member
HarryDemeanor said:
I'm fine with it playing the same as World of Warcraft and other MMOs but it's not the reason why I'm excited for TOR. I'm excited because it's Star Wars, it's Knights of the Old Republic, and it's BioWare.
That's the thing, though. The people who have played the game are saying it doesn't feel like Bioware or Knights of the Old Republic. They are saying it feels like Word of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift or any other theme-park MMORPG except with a Star Wars reskin. That's disappointing, to say the least.
 

antonz

Member
feedback from testers have been quite positive. Im not surprised the media hates it. They hate MMOs in general. Just like the vast majority of gaf do.
 

Allard

Member
Proxy said:
Don't know where people are getting $500 million from. The only thing even remotely close that I know of states $300 million but that was mentioned by a supposed ex-EA employee with a chip on his/her shoulder.

http://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

Yeah that's the one I was talking about. Also the link I posted was an analyst that based all his information on a public financial document given to investors last month, and that document made it sound like the 'worst' they would need to make up for development and marketing costs was 140 mil. EA will be in deep shit if that documents ends up a horrendous lie and the cost is actually double or triple like some of you people seem to be speculating (I repeat... speculating, I still haven't seen these so called sources, give me a link to the podcast it was said in, give me a link to employee that recently said differently).
 
GLopez12 said:
That's the thing, though. The people who have played the game are saying it doesn't feel like Bioware or Knights of the Old Republic. They are saying it feels like Word of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift or any other theme-park MMORPG except with a Star Wars reskin. That's disappointing, to say the least.

I've been hearing positive feedback about the game. The only place I've heard any negative feedback was from Giant Bomb and Jeff Cannata which I've expected at this point.
 

GLopez12

Neo Member
antonz said:
feedback from testers have been quite positive. Im not surprised the media hates it. They hate MMOs in general. Just like the vast majority of gaf do.
I love MMORPGs.

People who have played the game are not saying they hate MMORPGs. They are saying this plays like one.

Allard said:
EA will be in deep shit if that documents ends up a horrendous lie and the cost is actually double or triple like some of you people seem to be speculating (I repeat... speculating, I still haven't seen these so called sources, give me a link to the podcast it was said in, give me a link to employee that recently said differently).
I think it was in the Bombcast or Weekend Confirmed podcast. I don't remember because I've listened to a blur of podcasts in the last few hours.
 

CzarTim

Member
GLopez12 said:
Pets haven't been just tanks for a long, long time. Guild Wars and WOW both have pets and companions that can fill a variety of roles.
Izayoi said:
What? Even LoTRO has a wide variety of pets/companions that fulfill various roles. From healing, to CC, to DoTs, to Fellowships... you name it.
TERA has pets that do all kinds of different stuff as well, and as was mentioned earlier, so does WoW and Guild Wars. Pets doing things other than tanking is nothing new.
I don't play near as many MMOs as I use to, my bad.
 
Man, after all the news out of E3 and gameplay demonstrations recently I have become super pumped about this game. Although it does borrow from WoW that's to be expected, but you can tell Bioware has done what it can to stray the path a bit. Combat looks great, cutscenes, storyline, worlds. Good stuff.

Will it get me to quit FFXI though? I think there's a fair chance.
 

Allard

Member
GLopez12 said:
I love MMORPGs.

People who have played the game are not saying they hate MMORPGs. They are saying this plays like one.


I think it was in the Bombcast or Weekend Confirmed podcast. I don't remember because I've listened to a blur of podcasts in the last few hours.

Guess I'll go look around then.

And yeah I too have heard lots of positive impression from people that got to play it on the show floor, (although most of those impressions are quick to admit, it 'plays' a lot like WoW too).

And to tell you the truth that's fine to me. There are two things that can/will grab me in an MMORPG. The best is of course innovation, and the second is Presentation. If old ideas are presented in new ways or make you feel like you are getting a new experience then that is all I need. The Star Wars Universe alone is reason enough for me to play the game, and this is coming from someone that is absolutely sick of WoW. And I'm not sick of WoW's gameplay, I'm sick of how Blizzard is handling the game by streamlining the experience so much that they remove any nuance or complexity in a players experience.
 

SteveO409

Did you know Halo invented the FPS?
Added this to another long list of never get accepted into beta ever lol . If anybody from Bioware reads this, I swear I signed up a long time ago! I still take good care of my Jade Empire limited edition that I received from yall years ago
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=28209188&postcount=137

Signed up for beta with this email
tranman409@yahoo.com Would spend countless hours testing your game this summer.






yeah I'm really desperate :p
 

Yasae

Banned
GLopez12 said:
If you say so. The fact some people inside EA and Bioware are apparently throwing around numbers that high should make you a little more modest about your prediction, though.
But they don't. Nobody inside EA would approve budgets that high. Have we seen hundreds of millions' worth of marketing and promo? They don't even have a release date on the game and yet still say it will make 2011. Couldn't they just hire more staff with a nearly unlimited budget like that?

There's nothing about the game which indicates such an enormous cost. Nothing. It's way up there for sure, but I think $100M is appropriately budgeted for what they're trying to do.
 

Cipherr

Member
GLopez12 said:
I know that sounds pessimistic for the genre, because it means we're stuck in a stagnant state with WOW, but I just don't see why these companies are throwing so much money when they can't even do something new.


Its really simple IMO. Its the reason why there are so many FPS on consoles. The more money a business is going to spend, especially in this industry, the more they assess the risk. The closer to the status quo, a system that has been done before, and successfully, the less the risk. What we would like is something completely out of the box, innovative, massive and brand new. To do that in the MMO genre would be more expensive than doing the same in ANNNNNNNYYYYY other gaming genre on the planet. And with it being completely different, the risk is much higher.

Highly Risky, and Extremely Expensive. These businessmen spend years in college learning to avoid combinations like that if at all possible. Again, Im agreeing with you, I would love it. But for it to happen at the scale your describing? I can really easily understand why it hasnt. Our best bet for now is the devs doing some things new, but on a smaller scale to contract a bit of the risk that comes from the game not finding a massive audience, like EvE online did.
 

bjaelke

Member
People still think it costs +$300m to develop
KuGsj.gif


Where should those all that money go towards? Blur? It's not like they're doing something that revolutionary. They're "just" developing a game.

I know EA have said, that they don't want to cut corners with this game (hence the delay), but that number is just ludicrous.
 

Knox

Member
Cipherr said:
Its really simple IMO. Its the reason why there are so many FPS on consoles. The more money a business is going to spend, especially in this industry, the more they assess the risk. The closer to the status quo, a system that has been done before, and successfully, the less the risk. What we would like is something completely out of the box, innovative, massive and brand new. To do that in the MMO genre would be more expensive than doing the same in ANNNNNNNYYYYY other gaming genre on the planet. And with it being completely different, the risk is much higher.

Highly Risky, and Extremely Expensive. These businessmen spend years in college learning to avoid combinations like that if at all possible. Again, Im agreeing with you, I would love it. But for it to happen at the scale your describing? I can really easily understand why it hasnt. Our best bet for now is the devs doing some things new, but on a smaller scale to contract a bit of the risk that comes from the game not finding a massive audience, like EvE online did.
This.

We're not gonna see a AAA game like TOR deviate too far from what is known to work, not until the MMOFPSs start rolling out, and even then they'll borrow mechanics from other MMOs.
 

Retrofluxed

Member
Knox said:
This.

We're not gonna see a AAA game like TOR deviate too far from what is known to work, not until the MMOFPSs start rolling out, and even then they'll borrow mechanics from other MMOs.

Ugh... I know they're coming, but I still weep for humanity.
 

bjaelke

Member
It seems they're still sending out invites to people in the North America. They said it was only 1000 extra invites, but if people are still getting invited, then it has to be more than that.
 

CzarTim

Member
bjaelke said:
It seems they're still sending out invites to people in the North America. They said it was only 1000 extra invites, but if people are still getting invited, then it has to be more than that.
As in already sent out or about to?
 

Fonds

Member
So are there any Neogaf Guilds created for Europe yet? I've finally decided this is going to be my MMO to play in the near future.

TERA seems too Korean for me.
I could never get in the Guild Wars fluff
I won't even start on the rest.

Been following SWTOR for a long time now and after this E3 I was convinced it's where my digital self needs to be :p
 

Jira

Member
Fonds said:
So are there any Neogaf Guilds created for Europe yet? I've finally decided this is going to be my MMO to play in the near future.

TERA seems too Korean for me.
I could never get in the Guild Wars fluff
I won't even start on the rest.

Been following SWTOR for a long time now and after this E3 I was convinced it's where my digital self needs to be :p

What is that supposed to mean? If you haven't looked at GW2 yet and are just assuming it's identical to GW1, look again.
 

bjaelke

Member
Fonds said:
So are there any Neogaf Guilds created for Europe yet? I've finally decided this is going to be my MMO to play in the near future.

TERA seems too Korean for me.
I could never get in the Guild Wars fluff
I won't even start on the rest.

Been following SWTOR for a long time now and after this E3 I was convinced it's where my digital self needs to be :p
There's no European guild. I asked about it a few months ago when phase 1 of the guild hq launches, but the activity in thread was very low compared to now. Maybe it's time to try again.
 
How can you people say this game is WoW reskinned? TOR is so complete. It has a huge story for every class, cinematics, fucking LIGHTSABERS. Of course it'll have some WoW elements. It's a MMORPG for fucks sake.
 

Fonds

Member
Jira said:
What is that supposed to mean? If you haven't looked at GW2 yet and are just assuming it's identical to GW1, look again.

I've been looking at GW2 for a long while as well. I played Guild Wars 1 for quite a bit as well.
I just can't get into the feel of that world. I really like the graphics I'm seeing and the gameplay seems a massive improvement from Guild Wars 1. It's just the setting that doesn't seem interesting to me at all.
 
HarryDemeanor said:
I'm still waiting for the Planetside 2 reveal. God I miss that game.

Me too... awesome game.

What we need now is a game capable of blendig the WOW formula (revisited of course) and the RPG aspect of the old MMORPG released before WOW. That's what i need.
 

Raide

Member
eravulgaris said:
How can you people say this game is WoW reskinned? TOR is so complete. It has a huge story for every class, cinematics, fucking LIGHTSABERS. Of course it'll have some WoW elements. It's a MMORPG for fucks sake.

Its an MMO, nobody will care about story. They are putting all this dev time into stories and cinematic trailers and what they are forgetting is that vast majority of players that will stick with the game will be skipping all that crap. They just want to get levels, find loot and kill stuff.

All of the recent in-game footage I have seen shows people just mashing keys and the combat looks pretty much like WoW. Looks and feels like turn-based but its not. It sounds like they are putting way too much time into making the game massive and it could be DOA before it even comes out. Fans of SW are bound to get dragged into the world but for everyone else, it just looks like WoW.
 

bjaelke

Member
Raide said:
Its an MMO, nobody will care about story. They are putting all this dev time into stories and cinematic trailers and what they are forgetting is that vast majority of players that will stick with the game will be skipping all that crap. They just want to get levels, find loot and kill stuff.

All of the recent in-game footage I have seen shows people just mashing keys and the combat looks pretty much like WoW. Looks and feels like turn-based but its not. It sounds like they are putting way too much time into making the game massive and it could be DOA before it even comes out. Fans of SW are bound to get dragged into the world but for everyone else, it just looks like WoW.
That's not what the game testers are saying.
 

Vlodril

Member
Its an MMO, nobody will care about story. They are putting all this dev time into stories and cinematic trailers and what they are forgetting is that vast majority of players that will stick with the game will be skipping all that crap. They just want to get levels, find loot and kill stuff.

All of the recent in-game footage I have seen shows people just mashing keys and the combat looks pretty much like WoW. Looks and feels like turn-based but its not. It sounds like they are putting way too much time into making the game massive and it could be DOA before it even comes out. Fans of SW are bound to get dragged into the world but for everyone else, it just looks like WoW.

Hate statements like these. Your opinion is not a fact man.

As far as TOR goes so far it looks good. It could be more (and maybe it will with expansions) but i am excited about the whole cinematic factor. The lack of it is the thing that turns me off STO so far.
 

Raide

Member
Vlodril said:
Hate statements like these. Your opinion is not a fact man.

As far as TOR goes so far it looks good. It could be more (and maybe it will with expansions) but i am excited about the whole cinematic factor. The lack of it is the thing that turns me off STO so far.

Yes, its only my opinion but also based upon playing various MMO's since UO and Everquest (Not really much I know). In the end, the story is pointless. No matter how well a developer crafts a story, it will get ignored by the majority once they have gone through it the first time. I love seeing people craft amazing worlds and fantastical stories but many games give gamers the easy option to skip things, which renders all that works pretty pointless in the long-run.

This applies to other types of games too but MMO's especially. I enjoy some of the storyline stuff in WoW but in the end, people are just grinding levels to get to end-game.
 

Vlodril

Member
I like how you say "yea its only my opinion" then going on to do the exact same thing. We ''ll agree to disagree then. Soon enough the game will launch and we will see if people can be interested in story in MMO's or not.
 

Raide

Member
Vlodril said:
I like how you say "yea its only my opinion" then going on to do the exact same thing. We ''ll agree to disagree then. Soon enough the game will launch and we will see if people can be interested in story in MMO's or not.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some MMO's and I am looking forward to seeing if the wait has been worth it. I got so hyped for Warhammer Online and got brutally disappointed. :(
 
Raide said:
Its an MMO, nobody will care about story.

I care, and it's a large reason I get sick of many MMO's, I have no story investment in the world or characters. If others don't care about it and just want to power level to end game, then that's their problem when they whine about the game not offering them anything new, as they knew before they jumped in what they were getting.

GLopez12 said:
If you say so. The fact some people inside EA and Bioware are apparently throwing around numbers that high should make you a little more modest about your prediction, though.

This isn't true. Only person to give out the ridiculous number was a single jilted employee who was not even working on the game, and was being fired at the time. There are no "some people" tossing around those numbers. They also came out and told investors that the rumored numbers given out by the angry "informant" were way off base.
 

Lumine

Member
What the hell is the deal with that system scan thing? I've been trying to sign up for the beta for who knows how long and every bloody time I get an error on the system scan. I tried some of the supposed solutions posted on their forums as well as using IE instead of firefox, but nothing works. Is there something else I can try? This is starting to piss me off. Though I bet I'm too late now anyway. :(

Edit: Oh what the fuck it suddenly worked now haha. For some reason installing the plugin again through IE and then retrying in Firefox did the trick. Awkward.
 

Fonds

Member
I'm actually quite hyped for a bit of story in MMO's. As far as i'm concerned I get more involved with my character and the world it's in if there is more story.

Most MMO's out there just have cookie cutter fluff, boring me with the world very soon. WoW tries to act like there is a story, but the story has no impact at all (on me at least). I hope SWTOR will make the story matter, and from what I can see thus far it does.
 

Ainaurdur

Member
The Story in MMO dialogue has been going on for a while now. Even with some games that didn't offer that much immersion into the story, the story was still there to take in if you chose to enjoy it. However largely ignored it may have been by the community.

I have played some games for the pure grind and loot rewards, and then have chosen to stay in others just for the story.
All the while being dragged along and whined at by a friend or two who thought I was taking too long because I bothered to read the quest dialogue or even talk to random town NPCs.
Some games seem to punish you for wanting to follow the story because your party wants to get as much exp as quickly as possible.

I am really looking forward to TOR. I just hope they are able to find some balance between these issues, allowing players of all types to truly enjoy the game together. Minimizing the push and pull.
 

Yasae

Banned
eravulgaris said:
How can you people say this game is WoW reskinned? TOR is so complete. It has a huge story for every class, cinematics, fucking LIGHTSABERS. Of course it'll have some WoW elements. It's a MMORPG for fucks sake.
I think too many have been tapdancing over the fact that this will easily replace KOTOR 3 in terms of content. The bones are there - story, cinematics, characters, quests etc. If it was just a bunch of text then maybe I'd complain, but you're at least going to get the feel of the prior games.

That said, they should still make KOTOR 3 with the money generated from this (however unlikely that may be.)
 

Fonds

Member
Ainaurdur said:
I am really looking forward to TOR. I just hope they are able to find some balance between these issues, allowing players of all types to truly enjoy the game together. Minimizing the push and pull.

Good point. During party play there will certainly be friction between players that want to hear out everything the questgiver has to say and players that wanna skip the dialogue and just randomly pick dialogue as soon as possible.
Since there is a die rolled on who gets to pick the dialogue option, I think you will always need to hear the NPC out. I'm guessing people that wanna boost their chars might be annoyed by this.
 

syoaran

Member
Fonds said:
Good point. During party play there will certainly be friction between players that want to hear out everything the questgiver has to say and players that wanna skip the dialogue and just randomly pick dialogue as soon as possible.
Since there is a die rolled on who gets to pick the dialogue option, I think you will always need to hear the NPC out. I'm guessing people that wanna boost their chars might be annoyed by this.

This WAS a major issue for me, but it looks like they've fixed this because if you look at the E3 builds, the dev commentary states that players are rewarded for the intention of the outcome (so if your going light side on the sith side, but the roll winner picks a dark side path, you still get rewarded light side points).
 

Yasae

Banned
syoaran said:
This WAS a major issue for me, but it looks like they've fixed this because if you look at the E3 builds, the dev commentary states that players are rewarded for the intention of the outcome (so if your going light side on the sith side, but the roll winner picks a dark side path, you still get rewarded light side points).
Hmm, interesting.

I still have concerns about the game becoming stale after seeing a quest cinematic one too many times. You can't really employ a vote to skip option (like GW) because it's not passive and choices might come up. There are class storylines and those will help break up the monotony, but there's also going to be plenty of quest overlap and repetition which is made more tiresome by having to sit through the same dialogue over and over. Different choices and outcomes are only going to help so much.
 

Speculator

BioWare Austin
Yasae said:
Hmm, interesting.

I still have concerns about the game becoming stale after seeing a quest cinematic one too many times. You can't really employ a vote to skip option (like GW) because it's not passive and choices might come up. There are class storylines and those will help break up the monotony, but there's also going to be plenty of quest overlap and repetition which is made more tiresome by having to sit through the same dialogue over and over. Different choices and outcomes are only going to help so much.

At the moment you can in fact skip through lines of dialogue like ME using the spacebar for both class and multiplayer conversations : ).
 
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