Not interested in pleasing fans clamoring for a regular RPG-game continuation of the wonderful but mismanaged "Knights of the Old Republic" franchise, Lucasarts has paid off Bioware to instead pump out a MMO, to try and get a piece of the big online pie/tug-of-war.
Here's from their official game page, a wonderful, beautiful, awesome concept sketch showing two Jedi working with a lightsaber (displaying the game team's insight and familiarity with the 'meat and potatoes' of the franchise);
More to come soon! Or more correctly, "I ain't through with you by a damn sight."
[ October 23, 2008, 06:13 AM: Message edited by: Nim ]
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Face-off in nondescript power station environment; Hey you, what did your baseball coach tell you about crossing your arms in a swing?
EDIT: Also, show me one, I repeat, ONE detail in these boys' stances that isn't the same. Seems like the clone wars happened 2000 years earlier than we thought.
[ October 23, 2008, 09:24 AM: Message edited by: Nim ]
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Don Juan here using the old police-approved choke hold. Don't "Force" the issue!
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
And here I believe is concept art of SW:TOR's attempt at a good old classic Sith lord;
That's some amazing gear on this Sith. Hmm, where do I remember that from?
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
I liked the first KOTOR, the second KOTOR not so much (too buggy and rushed). I'm also not one for MMOs.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I've never tried an MMO, sounds like too much work (and I'm only NOW making a concerted effort to finish Fallout 2.) Anyway, how do they work exactly?
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Mars needs Women: Check out www.team-gizka.org, they've worked their asses off to fix all bugs in Kotor 2, and have made some great strides. Their stuff made the game very enjoyable to me at least.
Reverend: Well, every massive multiplayer online game works differently (in the details), but most titles parrot the bigger, more successful ones (comparing World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan). The basic premise is that you level your character from 0 to a high number (like in an ordinary RPG), getting gear upgrades, reputation with factions and usually develop some profession at the same time, which can yield goods, other upgrades or just money.
The big, noticeable leap in MMO-popularity of course happened because games came which had a ready-made "guild"-system, which let people organize in groups of their own making, with their own flag/logo/tabard, giving them purpose, support and friendship, as well as putting them on the map if they perform well. Being in a good guild can be very addictive and intoxicating, when you work together to kill harder and harder bosses, splitting the loot and cheering eachother. Bubbly and cloying and happy...it's insidious.
Star Wars: Galaxies is of course already the resident MMO for Star Wars since 2003, having been in existence for some time, and it is very strange for Lucasarts to do this maneuver, and kind of bite its own ass due to essentially trying to steal customers from another game they already own. (I've never spent time on SW:G, its graphic engine isn't even advanced enough to show lightsaber glow-trails, which SW:KotOR did and was released that same quarter, and "Jedi Outcast" had trails too, a whole year prior.
As the recent "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed" console-only action game by most accounts was a big miss (wading indestructibly through legions of easily-killed Storm Troopers, using a retconned vanilla "Brown-haired Silent Hero" is as boring as running through Quake with God-Mode on).
Looking at the concept art and screenshots available so far about this new SW:ToR, it looks terribly uninspired and desperate to catch up with the times. Oh, and the coffee-thermos lightsabers don't help.
Posted by Da_bang80 (Member # 528) on :
I've played through SW:TFU and while the stormtroopers were laughably weak some of the other enemies were insidiously difficult to kill.
The game's only saving grace was the force grab, it was a lot of fun just grabbing a stormtrooper and ramming him into his buddies and watching them grab hold of each other as they were all floating in the air over a giant ravine.
The game felt like they tried to pass off a tech demo for Euphoria and DMM as a real game. Which by themselves represent a very nice step foreward in video games. It would have been nice though if the stormtroopers wouldn't trip over a crack in the floor and die when they hit the ground.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Chronic clone-osteogenesis, gotta hate when that happens. :.)
I would've bought it if it had been released for PC, but I can see why they'd focus on the console. The whole SW:STFU seems to feel more like "Devil May Cry" or "Gungrave" in its game dynamics and levels.
While I enjoyed dabbling with "Heavenly Sword" at a friend's house, I hope the game houses don't stop manufacturing Kotor-like games, I've missed them. The first time I replayed Kotor 1, it was like "Ooh, I'm gonna do this before that this time, and not waste time on those, and get that power early...*crack knuckles*". One of the most replayable games ever, until "Sith Lords" came out.
Looking at the screens and stuff from this new "SW: the Old Republic", I'm kind of confused. I've never seen models that look like that, all big-limbed and awkward, and yet flimsy like "Star Blazers" characters. Or Claymation, that's what they look like. Especially the s-sabers.
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
About the only thing that looks interesting to me is the concept for an "old" astromech in that first pic.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
After reading a bit more, it seems this game will establish an entirely new and retconned period of SW-history for the plot of the game.
After the Jedi Purge that happens in "Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords", where Darth Nihilus, Traya and Sion decimate the Jedi and are later defeated by the player, it now turns out the REAL sith empire finally decides to show its face and come out of hiding from the Unknown Regions, having prepared for two millennia in exile, ever since "The Great Hyperspace War" 5000 years before SW 4:ANH.
After this new "Great War" that followed the events of KotOR2, the Galactic Republic gets its ass handed to it and this TruSith Empire takes over half the galaxy until they settle on Coruscant, kicking out the Jedi and the republicans. After a new proclamation called the "Treaty of Coruscant", the Jedi relocate to planet Tython, a new planet invented last year in the SW novel "Darth Bane: Rule of Two", according to Wookieepedia.
So after this new Great War that goes bad for the Republic, an era of Cold War is established, giving the perfect breeding ground for lots of small-scale events and action that a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game could take place in. So they have about 1600 years to play with until anything else "canon" comes up (The New Sith Wars at 2000 years before ANH).
I can't judge this whole thing yet (only the un-starwarsy latex/"TRON"-like game graphics released so far), and despite my dislike for some of EA Games' marketing and takeover maneuvers in the past, if the game is respectful, innovative and contributing to Star Wars, that could be nice.
Making a good MMO is so much more difficult than just a single player game, though, there are so many factors and facets that need to work in perfect synch, kind of like trying to start a successful night club.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Those lightsabres look a lot like the container I deposit my money into at the pneumatic drive-through teller. The older Jedi in the first linked image is sending his Padawan on an urgent mission to get rolls of quarters for the Courscant laundrymat.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Well, half a year has passed and new material has been released, a lot of videos and screens from the GamesCom convention circulate the net about next year's Star Wars game, set in the Old Republic, 3000 years before Luke Skywalker.
IGN has a 20-minute demo at their site, divided into four parts. The third part has the content most relevant to the Kotor-franchise, in my opinion. It deals with the classic RPG-element of moral conversational choices, while the first two video-parts deal with combat and exploration, and the fourth part is just a long segment of a quest being finished.
Here's a new screen of the recently revealed Sith class in action, showing that the lightsabers in the game are still absent, in favor of airport-technician glowsticks.
Point of interest: The third video shows the Sith player carrying out orders given from a "Grand Moff Killren" of the sith empire (parting from the Sith empire of the Kotor-games, this new rendition is mostly modeled on the galactic empire of Palpatine, to the point of forsaking the official Imperial Sith logo)
Gender: All the female bridge-crew of the ship, actually all women in the game -period-, are outfitted with regulation F-cups. Everyone's hair still looks like rubber hats, but it seems they had to prioritize.
Music/voicing: To be fair, the voice acting and music are solid and well done (since many of the original "KotOR" voice actors have been hired for this project), sadly most of the music is only good because it's directly lifted from the earlier two games, easily heard when the Sith player in the demo kills the captain, leading to the typical "dramatic death" tune of Kotor 1&2. Granted there's a long time until second quarter 2010, question is will they bother?
Combat: The force-user combat seen in the demo is very jarring and noisy, partly because the traditional saber-clash sparks have been upgraded into saber-clash thermonuclear explosions. I'm not kidding, the first jedi/sith battle shown from the game flashes and sparkles comparably to the highest endgame boss fights of Warcraft.
Interface: The controller interface seen in the demo is of the Arcade hack-n-slash style, foregoing the classic format of automatic attack like in previous SW:Kotor-games, Neverwinter Nights and World of Warcraft.
While this more agile hands-on control of fighting can perhaps offer a more customizable and personal fighting style for gamers (until the 133t player-crowd has learned to "min-max" the lightsaber techniques and just spam the most powerful attacks all the time), there is a great risk of alienating the large part of the RPG-gamer community that aren't used to split-second button-mash fighting.
Put simply, it may lead to a very big gap in the game's lightsaber community, between the players who can beat the final level of Tetris with one hand while opening another Jolt-can with the other, and the gamers who...can't. (Or won't, ed.note)
This alone will lead to the first SW:ToR game-patch, which will "nerf" combat more than combat has ever been nerfed anywhere before. There will be wringing of hands, faces smeared in ash and scalps shaven. Songs of lament will be written in elvish.
Of course you will be able to choose other classes, such as Soldier class (a perky Stormtrooper-ish model), the Smuggler class (two weapons in arsenal - blaster and dry wit) and the Bounty Hunter class, who is the game's "heavy weapons" guy and engineer/door hacker. But lets not fool ourselves. The kids will make one decision, sith or jedi.
[ September 02, 2009, 03:25 PM: Message edited by: Nim ]
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
It's not looking any less like shit, is it?
Posted by shikaru808 (Member # 2080) on :
I'm still putting my money on ST:O. Just me though...
Posted by Josh (Member # 1884) on :
The voice over work is interesting, but by the very nature of an MMO with so many players, the choice of having player characters having voiced dialogue seems strange. There might be a dozen voices available to you, so everyone will sound the same.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Maybe you can tweak the pitch of a given voice- that way you could have a customized voice -within certain limits, obviously.
Would you even need a seperate voice file for that?
Posted by Josh (Member # 1884) on :
If it's just messing with a pitch slider it would probably be using the same voice sample, but it wouldn't offer that much differentiation between people with the same voice base. There's a lot of subtlety to how a person speaks that is in the rhythm and pronunciation.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Actually, you can do pretty cool things with simple audio-filters, nevermind simple pitch (ootini).
I'm not saying Ben Burtt will ride by their office on his white droidicorn and do his magic for this game, but it should be possible to sufficiently alienate and distort stock lines with modern studio software, if that's how they want to do it.
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
You know I'm kinda disappointed by the art. Ships, droids, and other tech look too close to the style of the movies. Even the faux Imperial symbol is too much. The KOTOR games were able to develop their own style while still have that "Star Wars" feel to it. This game looks like it takes only a couple of decades before the films, a century at most; not the many thousands of years that they claim.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
you will be able to choose other classes, such as Soldier class (a perky Stormtrooper-ish model), the Smuggler class (two weapons in arsenal - blaster and dry wit) and the Bounty Hunter class, who is the game's "heavy weapons" guy and engineer/door hacker.