The Old Republic

[Dr. kitteny berk]

It's not that big really, a wow install is about 30gb these days, and aside from a few characters, a lot of the voices are generic.

[spoodie]

Rift is below 9GB on my machine. Obviously it doesn't have as much content as WoW, it's a recent game. But 40GB?!

[Baliame]

I think Bioware aren't aware of the term "compression".

Voice works aren't really that compressible - certain formats very much aren't, and those which are have a compressed sample stream, therefore you'd gain very little by compressing it. The performance loss wouldn't be worth the effort.

[Dog Pants]

This is worth noting. £40 for the game at pre-order, which I will always refuse to pay personally. Of course it's early days yet so that could just be a few over-ambitious sales type people, but popular opinion on RTS is that EA are trying to make as much money as possible in the first few months off the back of the hype before the game bombs. Not that this is necessarily a critique of the game - many other perfectly playable MMONGs have suffered a similar fate before it - but accurate or not a £40 shell out before a £10/month subscription for a game that looks pretty flimsy to me is not doing anything to raise my opinion.

[Roman Totale]

£40? Fuck that for a game of Storm Troopers.

[FatherJack]

Most of the big new releases are £40 crossed out £30, the big MMOs are around a tenner a month. Doesn't seem that unusual to me, they're just pricing it similarly to WoW so it doesn't look like a cheap game.

I don't think it will be any good though.

[Joose]

Im not sure why people think that this high price means they think it will bomb. It looks more to me like a "this game will be successful whatever, lets charge more so we make more money!" decision. I'm not sure they are right, mind. I'm not going to be spending £40 on it, that's for damn sure.

[Sheriff Fatman]

£93 for the CE?! Christ on a bike.

[buzzmong]

£93 for the CE?! Christ on a gold plated motorbike.

Fix'd!

[spoodie]

Game are selling the Collector's Edition for £130! Before they added the detail of what was included I'd assumed a lifetime subscription would be part of it, but no, there's no mention if it. Just a load of tat.

[Dog Pants]

They've put up a map of the playable systems along with a few ships and things;

http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/galaxy-map

It's pretty, and it looks like it will launch with 17 planets to play on, which isn't bad for a game at launch. There are some ships to look at too.

The overarching thought I had while browsing all this, though, is that the setting still feels like it has identity issues for me. Republic vs Empire, okay it's Sith Empire, but they still have ships that look like TIE fighters. Yet the game is supposed to be set hundreds or thousands of years before A New Hope. I dunno, I'm keeping an open mind but I'm still not excited about the game.

[Dog Pants]

Well, looks like it's ramping down to become free to play, bombing so hard it's taking EA's shares with it.

http://blogs.bettor.com/Anonymous-Biowa ... te-a173317

Seems like an odd step, blaming fans for giving them the game they wanted. This quote in particular stood out:

gamers actually wanted SWTOR to be more like Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), a single player role playing game by Bioware before it was acquired by EA, rather than World of Warcraft (WoW).

And they're blaming the KOTOR parts? They were the only good bit. I think they've got this all arse about face.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

3 ways to make an MMO work, or not work.

1) Charge console prices for the base game.
2) Make trials not particularly easy to get hold of.
3) Release the game within a month of a major wow patch/expansion.

tl;dr: EA are twats.

[Anery]

I'm a bit different in that I did enjoy playing the story missions and the dungeons when I got the chance. The problem was the padding inbetween the story and the inablitly to get a dungeon after the second week of the game -LFG tools, do not launch without them.

*EDIT* I did some writing a few weeks back about certain things that an MMO should/should not do. here

[Dog Pants]

I'm a bit different in that I did enjoy playing the story missions and the dungeons when I got the chance. The problem was the padding inbetween the story and the inablitly to get a dungeon after the second week of the game -LFG tools, do not launch without them.

*EDIT* I did some writing a few weeks back about certain things that an MMO should/should not do. here

Pretty much agree from what I played. The low-level two player mini-dungeons were pretty good, and the story aspects were good for a normal RPG, let alone an MMO. Just a shame they dumped it all into generimmo.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

this.

[Joose]

Just a shame they dumped it all into generimmo.

This. Like I've said before though, for me the highlight of the game was the non horse characters stories (the Agent especially). For a single player game, they wouldn't have been able to justify doing a completely different plot for each class, and making a SW game where you don't have the option of being a dressing gown clad glow-stick wizard is essentially making the decision that you don't want to make as many sales. It definitely would have been better as a single player game, but if it was made single-player it would have been made differently, and less good. Which is a shame.

[buzzmong]

I dunno if you actually need horse users to be in the game as player characters though.

Galaxies did perfectly fine (pre-NGE) when the vast majority of the populace were not Jedi/Sith and were just "normal" classes like Gunslingers, Soldiers, Engineers or whatever the classes were.

Saying that, Galaxies had the system in place that if you stumbled across the right combination of mastered career paths (you could master 3 at a time), said combination being randomly selected when you made the character, you'd unlock horse Sensitivity and could train as a Jedi/Sith.

I suppose you could say it was the ultimate carrot, but quite a large number of people had fun with the roleplay aspects, especially the people who formed Stormtrooper regiments and then staged organised battles with the equivalent rebel counterparts (very EVE-like if I must say, players creating PVP content), and never actually spent time trying to be a Jedi/Sith.

[Joose]

uuh..

Galaxies

a single player game

[buzzmong]

uuh..

Galaxies

a single player game

Well, I was on a tangent from Pants saying not having a Jedi/Sith would lead to lesser sales. Which I think is possibly wrong.

If you really want me to go down the singleplayer games route of games that did well without lightsabers: Rebel Assault(s), Dark horses I, the entire X-Wing/Tie fighter series of games, Shadows of the Empire etc....

I think it can be done, but those were good games, and I've no doubt the promise of a lightsaber could easily carry a mediocre or even bad game sales wise.