Star Wars: Galaxies

[NewBJedi]

Originally posted by Ae0N

That is a completely different RPG Jedi...

 

 

 

 

 

Yah, I know, I was just showing alternatives.

[Kanubis]

Remeber this well, galaxies is in development by VERANT. VERANT

Two words, cash cow.

As a veteran of EQ (from week one) I know all of Verant and Sonys tricks of the trade...

 

Urm.. using all my human empathy I'm sensing some vague waves of intense bitterness !

 

Seriously, I see your point but:

 

a) You were with EQ from the beginning, found it intensely buggy and yet stayed on to become a 'veteran'. The bugs can't have pissed you off all that much....

 

b) Hopefully Lucasarts will conduct in-house play testing. Even their 'less accomplished' games are genreally bug-free.

[Ae0N]

Originally posted by Prince Legolas

I wonder how much it will cost per month for Australians? Also if the only servers will be over in the land of Yanks (USA) will Aussies be able to join it (considering we would need to pay money to do so) If so how would we pay for it? Besides credit card that is.

 

 

I read somehwere that they are asking ISP's all over the globe to help with the bandwidth, so I don't think it would be a problem.

 

 

 

[NewBJedi]

Too bad Raven isn't involved in SWG. The combat would rock.

[OOO]

I actually shut my account down and restarted it numerous times. The shutting down was me getting fed up with the game, the restarting was my real life friends nagging me and talking about it when we hung out.

 

When EQ first came out it was new and fresh and uncharted territory. True, ultima online, meridian95, gemstone, and before them MUDs where available; EQ was the first one to grab a main stream audience.

 

EQ was in fairly decent shape before the release of the Kunark expansion. Before Kunark it had its fair share of bugs, broken quests, class nerfs and so on, but the main game was OK.

 

With the release of Kunark, EQ added on 10 more levels for characters to gain (going from 50-60). They also added in newer and harder dungeons and monsters, and more powerful weapons and armor. This begins a long string of serious problems. I'll go into detail on only a few.

 

First off, the more powerful weapons and armor. Now everyone wants to find new magical items that no one has seen before, so adding items is a good thing. However EQ has no type of item decay, meaning that once an item is aquired by a player, it does not leave play unless destroyed by a player, is dropped for 15 odd minutes, or is lost on a decayed corpse. Needless to say these things where VERY rare. As the powerful Kunark items where found, the previously 'most powerful items' where trickled down through the player economy. What this did was allow still very powerful weapons and armor into the hands of low level characters, totally unbalancing gameplay in favor of melee characters. Warriors began to rule, plain and simple. If you where a INT caster (and by int I mean intellegence caster which means you did damage with your spells) you had no place in most groups, as all that was needed was a healer and three or four tanks. Even Monks, once the MOST powerful melee class with its fists, where soon overshadowed by 'twinked' melee classes.

 

Another problem was that many classes did not have their skill caps raised high enough (if at all) in the level 50-60 range. The PRIME example of this is the ranger. Rangers got almost no raise in their DEFENSE skill cap when the expansion first came out. This ment the newer and tougher monsters had an easy time tearing a renger apart if the ranger happened to 'aggro' the monster onto him. With the more powerful weapons being droped, this was an easy thing to do. "Ranger Down" was the "Hey You There" of EQ when on large scale raids.

 

Verant had no inkling of an idea of what people would do with their game. An example would be from my own class, the Bard. A new Kunark song had the effect of slowing a monsters attack speed and movement speed. When this song was used with a pre Kunark song (that did much the same thing) it had the effect of stoping a monsters movement rate 100%. Two bards working together, twisting these songs with the fear song (which made monsters run away), could take out insansly tough monsters without being hurt and without any downtime.

 

Another example of Verants inablity to think straight, a high level Kunark bard charm song was able to charm the pre kunark GOD OF FEAR!!! The god of fear Cazic-Thule, took dozens of people to take down. He could strike people dead form across the map and had a death touch in melee combat. And yet a SINGLE bard was able to charm him and have him for a PET!

 

D'oh!

 

I won't even BEGIN to talk about customer service. Or Ubber Guilds. God I hate ubber guilds

 

There are so many other things I could go on about. EQ has so many problems that it is broken, down to the core. It became far more popular then Verant thought it would be, and grew bigger then they had any way of controling.

 

Now this is not to say that they will make the same mistakes with galaxies. They have a new canvas to work with, their starting from the ground up and making something new. Verant has allot of bought knowledge on their side when it comes to MMORPGs. But that still doesn't change their track record as far as I'm concerned. Me, I'm going to ignore the hype of galaxies. I'll take anything they say to me about it with a grain of salt. And when it comes out I'll wait for reviews and read messge boards before I even think about starting up an acount. They just screwed EQ up that bad and in so many ways.

 

BTW, since they raised their normal EQ servcie up to $12.95 us a month I would guess they will charge anywhere from $12.95 to $14.95 a month for it. As for how you pay without a credit card, you can buy EQ cards at electronics boutique. It costs $12.95 and has a registration code that you put in and it gives you another month. Or so I read

 

 

OOO

[Breakin2']

Well, if I wrote that much, I'd want to triple-post too.

 

[

I took care of the excess posts.

 

--Matt-windu

]

[PolarWind]

I'd need to get some more info on the Jedi class if I were to get this game. Frankly, if Force sensitivity is random, I'll make and destroy a character until I get one that's Force sensitive. I want to play a Jedi, period.

[Prince Legolas]

I am sure you will find it is pure random. And you wont be able to become force sensitive straight away anyway so you may need to play for weeks before finding out if your sensitive. And if you scrap the character you may scrap it too soon to realise it was going to eventually be force sensitive.

 

But if everyone does this and everyone becomes Jedi's and Dark Jedi's... This will be a very stupid game to play. Because really it is ment to be the Starwars universe inhabited by us, but if everyone is a Jedi or Dark Jedi then it is NOT the starwars universe we all know. As there is hardly any Jedi or Dark Jedi in the real SW universe.

 

Anything done in excess would be boring. Same goes for the majority of the population being Jedis and Dark Jedi.

 

You : "Im a Jedi"

Other guy : "Who cares, everyone is a Jedi. Your not so special cos your just like everyone else."

[OOO]

With Jedi, Verant is walking into troubled territory...

 

If they in ANY way make it random to become a jedi, all they will do is make a HUGE market for jedi accounts on Ebay. Huge.

 

Finding a way to balance jedi, which is going to be THE class of galaxies to most people, is going to be very hard. They have to balance them to fit into the game as well as balance them in difficulty to keep the Jedi population down.

 

I just don't think they can pull it off

 

And personally, I'd love to see the dark jedi even harder to play then the light jedi.

 

OOO

[Ae0N]

The dev team for that game is also taking alot of flak for not putting in Stormtroopers as a playable character, perhaps just their lack of creative thinking. I myself am all for the ST being in SWG.

 

 

[Breakin2']

That's a good point about selling Jedi characters on Ebay. I hadn't thought of that. However, I doubt Verant (or Lucasarts) would mind that much since it would only add to the game's hype. You know they'd love to have some stories published about some wacko paying $1000 for a level-whatever Jedi.

[PolarWind]

*sigh* I guess I won't be getting it then. I'm playing DAOC anyway, besides, 56k isn't great to use.

 

Call me stubborn, but I don't want to be a spy or bounty hunter or trader or anything else. I want to be a Jedi, and I don't want to wait weeks to find out if my character is Force sensitive.

[Darth Abbadon]

This got me thinking a little bit about a game I am eagerly awaiting: NeverWinter Nights. Since NWN uses 3rd edition rules, it could probably be modified to run the Star Wars RPG, which is another d20 system. Just thought you might be interested in that thought.