I played in the Star Wars Galaxies beta from the second phase on. It was a very innovative game. That was it’s first big problem–it was too innovative for a mass-market, mass-appeal MMO. The second big problem was that the publisher Sony pushed it out the door at least 12-18 months before it was ready.
I really like what Raph Koster was trying to do, but it was too much and not complete. When the game went live, I did not subscribe. I was not willing to pay to beta test. In retrospect, I think I made the right decision.
Final Fantasy XIV seems to be following a similar trajectory. Some innovative ideas, poorly and incompletely executed. Players say they want new and better MMOs, but that’s difficult for developers and risky for publishers. Which is why we see games that are iterative improvements over previous games.
I can’t comment on Star Wars: The Old Republic other than to say I’ve been in the beta since June and I have preordered.
Yeah, I want to like Koster. Ultima Online was the first great MMO, and the only game that’s come close to being its spiritual successor is EVE Online. I wanted SWG to follow in its footsteps, and for a while in beta it sounded like it would, but various bad decisions hamstrung it.
I don’t think I can even acknowledge the existence of an NDA. :rolleyes: So, yeah, I can’t say anything more than what I already did. I’m not comfortable saying as much as Teufelblitz has.
What somebody needs to figure out how to do is create an MMO that isn’t based around the “gear grind”. It seems to me that the “gear grind” is especially out of place in a science fiction setting in general, and the SW setting in particular. The whole “find the powerful magic weapon/artifact/armor” is a meme that was rooted in “medieval fantasy” for centuries before Gary Gygax and … that other guy … put it into game form with D&D. It hasn’t been a characteristic of SF, at least in my experience. When the heroes in Star Wars blew up the Death Star, they got medals and promotions, not better blasters and lightsabers. Okay, Luke got his own X-Wing, but it’s pretty well-established that the Rebels were using mostly off-the-shelf, commercially-available gear.
And as a Mac user, I’m sadly pretty much stuck with WoW. The only other Mac-compatible MMOs I’ve found have been pretty crappy (Java-based, terrible, unintuitive movement) and/or aimed at children. I thought I’d heard from a few sources that EverQuest was Mac-compatible, but I haven’t found any confirmation of that on the EQ web site. No indication on the SW:TOR site that it will have a Mac version. You’d think that with the massive amount of money going into developing SW:TOR, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to spend a bit more to add a Mac version.
It’ll be fascinating if that ever happens, but right now gear and level grinding (and by extension epeen measurement) are what keep people playing MMOs for months and years. Sad but true.
For SW, maybe, but I’ve been playing Borderlands lately, and the gear grind works pretty well there. Nothing like finding a sniper rifle with twice the power of the one I’ve been carrying around.
Ooo, sweet! I may have to check that out. Looks like my machine meets the requirements, though I’m uncertain about the video card recommendation - the brand/model number “or higher”. Guess I’d need to study ATI’s product list to determine if my card is “or higher” than what’s listed.
There’s also A Tale in the Desert, which is interesting, albeit odd. Pure crafting, no combat whatsoever (though some of the crafting minigames are much more skill-intensive than the normal WoW click click click).
I ended up giving up on it after a while because you need a block of two hours or more uninterrupted to have an enjoyable period of gameplay in the game.
I know a lot of people who play games like this, but I don’t do that anymore. It’s just too expensive. That’s why I don’t do console gaming, either. The next great game (only $59.95!) might take a month at most to beat. Then you have to buy another game, and the next console when it comes out. blah! One MMO is all I have the mental resources to invest in.
You’re better off just using Passmark. You can sort by rank (lower is better) or score (higher is better) by pressing the little arrows to the right of each column title.
I ended up doing it the easy way: install the game and try it out. Can’t go wrong fo $9.99. I’ll see how it works today. I spent entirely too long last night on character creation and ended up in the “must … sleep … now” zone.
The thing is, how do you keep people around without including grinds? If Blizzard can’t put in a new top-tier raid every month to satisfy the raiders, what are they going to do for the non-raiders? That’s a big problem with WoW, the balance between the hardcore players and the casuals. What can they do quickly to feed non-grindy content to satisfy everyone? The grind is there because otherwise everyone would blow through new content for a week and then have nothing new. Kinda of like a parent, ha ha. No you can’t eat all of your Halloween candy at once, then you’ll have nothing!
Well, aside from the philosophical “no gear grind”, they could at least have been creative with it, instead of new “gear” you can get “promotions” to a certain “office”, of course, within each “agency” you can only be in one “office” at a time. This translates to “you get gear which goes in a certain slot, you can only have one piece of gear in a slot at a time.” It’d be silly, but it’d fit the setting better, probably (though it would take rather a lot of handwaving to explain exactly how being the War Chairman makes you better at shooting things).
Um… did anybody else just get an odd email asking you to give feedback for being a tester? Because I never received any word that I was accepted to test the game, and I got an odd survey. Of course, the site is experiencing too high of traffic so I can’t check my account either.
Just making sure it’s a rogue email and I didn’t miss and email somewhere.