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Which November release are you looking forward to most?


matt--

Which upcoming release are you looking forward to most?  

208 members have voted

  1. 1. Which upcoming release are you looking forward to most?

    • Galaxies: Trials of Obi-Wan
    • Empire at War (Feb. '06)
    • Battlefront II


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Previously I wasn't too excited about any of these titles, though I wanted to see if Pandemic could make up for the disappointment that was SWBF. However in the last day or so I've really started to be interested in Empire at War. This game looks like it has a ton of potential, if they can avoid repeating the mistakes of Force Commander... hopefully they've learned their lesson this time!

 

And, best of all, they're NOT rushing to release it with the ROTS DVD, and in fact the pc demo will come out before the actual game (a rare occurence these days with LA!), so I'm really thinking it could be good.

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Well, they said they were releasing a Battle Front Demo too... remember. It was on the site "Demo Coming Soon!" and then like 3 weeks later that spot mysteriously disapeared. :-\ So yeah, no demo = no buy. Sorry... but thats almost a rule for me and PC games.

You're not wrong... Only the demo of a certain game can provide you a true idea of its potential... Screen-shots or trailers do not suffice... (Remember SWBF's first pictures and movies : They were awesome, but the final version of the game wasn't so good... :mad: )

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SWBF had a lot of potential. I remember being won over by all the hype and testimonials from people who'd played the Xbox demo. They were trumping it as living the movies, the first good non-Jedi game, etc. After playing the monotonous single player, then trying the horribley executed MP, I just gave up. The community was small, and obsessed with whining about TKing (people didn't work together as a team, and all servers had the same exact settings, preventing you from improving things).

 

A group of friends had our "last" LAN party for a friend who was moving across the country to a new job, and we gave Battlefront one last shot (I suggested it). We discovered that apparently (at least in 1.2, didn't test the beta) you can't have a team of humans vs. a team of bots. It's literally impossible. The game forces at least one human to be on a team. Since I was really the only one familiar with the game people lost interest rather quickly (though people played the single player version for awhile since it didn't have the framerate cap and no teamwork requirement, etc).

 

There are still major bugs in the game, the admin/hosting setup is still cumbersome and there is still little variety in the online gameplay options.

 

The server administration and tools were rather cumbersome compared to what we're used to. The game suffered a lot because it was an obviously rushed console port (rushed to coincide with the similarly rushed Star Wars DVD boxed set). Then it was haphazardly patched and abandoned in light of SWBF2.

 

The Jedi Heroes, while a cool idea, were flawed in execution and nobody used them online anyway (there was a sizable "anti-jedi" faction on our forums, though apparently Pandemic ignored them and is expanding the role of Jedi in the sequel). The "space combat" was non-existent and flying ships was more of a liability than a benefit. Vehicle combat was actually the most fun part of the game, making the maps without vehicles rather annoying and tedius by comparison. Yet many people complained about the "skillessness" of camping a spawn point by yourself inside a massive tank or walker (though, isn't that a strategic move in a game like this?). The game was advertised as "play any star wars battle, any way you want to." But you were limited in so many ways, and only a few battles were from the movies, and even then they weren't very "accurate" (though when you think about it, before ROTS there weren't that many large scale land battles to re-create). SWBF just failed to deliver, and the things it got right still had problems.

 

It's possible that Pandemic/LucasArts will right the wrongs and release the game they meant to give us this time around (that is actually the selling point now of SWBF2, according to previews in magazines). I'm hoping they're right. I also hope they'll give a final patch to SWBF1 so the fans won't feel quite so ripped off. Some people love the game no matter what, but then some people loved Jedi Power Battles. There's no accounting for taste. ;P

 

But then I see what SWBF could have been and it's a great idea. Too bad the execution was sabotaged by various factors.

 

Republic Commando they took their sweet time with and it shows in the polished feel of single player, but the Multiplayer feels very tacked on. They seemingly just decided to leave it unfinished, so it's very buggy and minimalist. The small community is due to the mismanagement of servers, the lack of info on running one, and the lack of anything but a windows dedicated server model that requires two computers if you want to play on your own server.

 

RC also feels like a console port in many ways, though I think this hurt the title less than SWBF. It's hard to explain but that's the feeling I get. It also seems to have been abandoned, but with no sequel or expansion on the horizon I think the fans don't have much to hope for.

 

The fact that EaW is supposed to be "totally fresh" leaves me hopeful. It's not tied to any other release (though being as the only other 3-D star wars RTS it will inevitably be compared to Force Commander, hopefully with the words "and it totally blows away that piece of crap Force Commander".. but it should be a good game in its own right, not just marginally better than that failure!). Likewise the fact that it's set in an indefinate period between movies (the 20 year span between trilogies) they have more freedom to do what they want, while retaining familiar Star Wars conventions. The Episode III hype is over (or at least any final reverberations of it will be by the time the game is released), so they can branch out, and they need not worry about stepping on any "established history."

 

PS: I'm probably looking like an idiot and lazy for saying this, but I wonder just how "trials of Obi-Wan" will play out? I mean, what do you get to do, be Obi-Wan and run on some training courses that we assume he went through between prequel movies? Is it a Jedi training course? (so is this for the people to buy who weren't lucky enough to be a Jedi before?) I thought SWG was set in the time of the Empire's rule, when Jedi are rare and "hunted" (and people complain that there are too many Jedi already)... but Obi-Wan becomes a Jedi during the Republic... so are we talking time travel here? Just how does this module "work" with the rest of SWG? I can understand how the Jump to Lightspeed would work, they just put the spaces between planets as areas you can travel in real time in vehicles. Rage of the Wookiees I assume just expanded the Wookiee race and missions related to that, say on Kashyyyk... I guess not being a SWG player I miss out on this stuff. But I'm just curious how the Trials of Obi-Wan thing would work. It shoulds like something rather short and individual oriented (rather than community oriented).

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Technicalities, i see myself as a laid back gamer, i see a star wars game, i pick it up, i play it, if i get to kill stuff by shooting it in the head with a sniper rifle, pumping it full of blaster shots with a rifle, slicing it to pieces with a saber, or blowing it up with a vehicle i like it :p

 

And i thought the multiplayer was fantastic.

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