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New SW MMO Thoughts & Hopes (long post)
Baron-al
Member Posts: 1
Don't bother reading if you're going to complain about the length of the post or flame because you have nothing better to do.
Let me preface this by saying these are wants and opinionated ones at that.
I want a sandbox environment.
I want PC specs to matter. Tell us what we need to run the game (Vanguard). Then I want the servers to be stable. I don’t want to ride a speeder bike for 1k meters suddenly to realize that I haven’t gone anywhere. In other words have people manning the ship and managing your servers with active and able customer service.
I want NPC’s interactions to have a substantive meaning. I don’t want to come back to this NPC and have him ask me the same set of questions.
I want PVP – but it to mean something in favor of hanging around a city that has been destroyed and fighting the same group of Rebels or Imps consistently. Let PVP change the game.
I want NPC cities to not be static art but be bustling with activity. Let there be player housing in the established metropolis. I don’t want to go to Mos Espa and have 2 other players there. Let there be player run shops in these cities. Let there be bazaar vendors that give you coordinates after you have found what you want to purchase. I could go on.
I do not want Player cities. Sue me. I could go on and on about this (again) – let’s just deal with the cities already developed and inhabit them (see above point).
I want a variety of races to choose from and like SWG have the ability to change my appearance over time. Or even age as the game goes on.
I want a fluid timeline. I don’t want to be caught in the pull of some black hole where nothing moves on and the story is not furthered. This is a definite appeal of being in the Old Republic or New Republic era.
I’d like to see balance – that Holy Grail that all MMO’s seem to lull their subscriber base into believing exists but never does. If this means more time to develop the game so be it. This is where Pre-CU SWG failed. The game was rushed and proven to be rushed by countless beta testers and bugs that still exist to this very day from the first day of release. How about eyeshot being uber and dumbed down weeks after release as an example? This should never have come about – Bioware and LA need to let the game breathe in the Alpha phase. Test the hell out of this game. Make your Dev Team know this game inside and out. I mean all aspects of the team. Let it be polished and stamp the bugs out to the best of all ability before you even release this thing to Beta testers. Then let the long time-consuming process of player testing and further polishing begin.
I want a game that allows me to see a galaxy. A galaxy that is like the wild frontier that the movies led us all to fall in love with the Saga over in the first place. If this is thousands of years before the Rise of Palpatine or after the destruction of the Death Star over the moon of Endor I want that feeling of being able to explore and find my niche in this amazing mythological story that Lucas created for us. I want to book passage on a player owned freighter and have the passage be fraught with danger and risk. I do not want to walk up to a ticket droid and at my discretion warp to a new planet in a matter of seconds. I understand the argument that over time you just want to get to point B but if the game is structured carefully – the journey will not be an unexciting one.
I want there to be factions – multiple factions. I think this should be a game of choices. Hard choices. I do not want the black and white of Imp vs. Reb that we were forced to choose from in SWG. I think 4 factions of differing agendas none of which has a parallel goal would enable a whole new vista of gaming ideals. Imagine if you’re in a Dark Jedi guild and you’re seeking a McGuffin of the likes of the Kaiburr Crystal. You have the guilds of the Light Jedi to contend with. You have the Mandalorian guilds to consider as they’re always coming for either. Then you have the gangland/mafia type guild like the Hutts or Black Sun that are looking to capitalize. Perhaps you could have yet another faction, a financially non-combative faction of Crafters there for purely financial gain. These Crafting Guilds could compete with each other in their own market economy balancing each other out in the process. Allegiances can be forged with combat guilds of their choosing – at the highest bidder of course. I realize there are problems inherent in the likes of Alts and the like but it’s my contention this is the best way to place Crafters in the game. Of course I could be wrong. There are thousands of different avenues to pursue and develop in this facet – but for the player’s sake – let them all be creatively implemented.
Classes. I’m not hoping for 32 classes. Although an amazing thought let’s be real. The amount of Devs working in concert with each other to realistically balance this amount of differentiation is just not feasible. Like I was saying earlier – this needs to be a game of choices. I would love to see a mix between Force Sensitivity and Non Force Sensitivity. Mix up Ranged and Melee combat. I know this is where FOTM templates come in but just like with SWG if they only spent the proper time developing the game before it was released balance issues would not have been a problem that they were – even in the Pre-CU dreamworld that many of us wish still existed. There should be something along the lines of how SWG was initially conceptualized though. I loved the idea of picking up some Teras Kasi or Fencer for when the fight got close but be able to use a pistol or carbine. The idea of having a Saber wielding bounty hunter, a specialized Jedi, a Dead-Eye Marksman, or a conglomeration of them all should be there for the choosing. Risk what you make your template out to be – there may be reward – or not. The choice is there for the player though.
I don’t want to solo my way through the game. I don’t want there to be a level based system. I don’t want to look at my opponent and think oh he’s level 90 and has a jinsu-razor I bet his crystals or pearls were gotten post NGE so my saber and template will cut him down. I want mystery and suspense and how skill and investment together will help win the day.
I could go on and on which I think I already have. I know I have not touched on many things but these were what came to mind at the moment. I want to know what the rest of you want out of the next SW MMORPG. Yes it may be years away – and this lucasartsbioware thing may not even be the MMO we’re all salivating over – but eventually someone will make it. Hopefully.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
The biggest sign of hope is that $OE will be frozen completely out...
With EA as the parent of Bioware, and EA owning Mythic, a MMO company older than SOE, there is ZERO need to partner with SOE. They are GONE.
No more Smed is the best hope for KOTOROL.
This may be great from an MBA asshat point of view, but it sucks if you're a customer.
Because the only interaction with customers Smed is interested in is picking their pockets.
This colors every decision he makes, and is not good for long term health of SOE.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Well, if it will be KOTOR online indeed, I just hope it will be completely another game, imho it's very inportant to leave all dramas and mistakes of SWG behind.
What I would love see though is SWG's level of charcater customization. The game was realesed 2003 and it has no competitors in this area still!!! (2007).
Tired af all characters look the same in all MMO games around.
what about CoH/CoV?
I'm not really sure that I want there to be classes. I think it would be better to just have skills. To be a certain profession you may need certain skills but profssion/class would offer no skill rather they would require it. It would be up to the player to decide what skills they thought would be best for their profession choice.
example: In SWG at one thime to master bounty hunter you had to be master scout and master marksman that left little room for choice or weapon specialization. From scout you got things such as camping and traps (which could only be used againts animals) which didn't really help with bounty hunting.
With what I'm talking about if you choose to be a bounty hunter you would figure out what skills you though would make you a more effective bounty hunter. If you thought that medic would be more important than tracking droids then you train medic skills. If you wanted to be a strictly melee BH than that would be fine as well.
You would get a certain amount of skill points and how you spent them would be up to you and not pre determind by a class or profession.
I don't claim to be right, I'm just posting.
The problem I see with that is that SWG (original) did a great deal right, just as it did a great deal wrong. You can't throw all of SWG out, because you'd be throwing the good out with the bad. I think it's important to look at what SWG did, then decide if you want to utilize some of the concepts on an individual basis. Don't use SWG as your starting point, use it as a mirror for comparison once you've gotten the new system's design in place.
The sandbox element of the original, player housing (if you take it piece by piece), and character customization are worth looking at and borrowing from.
I like player cities . . . but I agree that they need to add player housing to cities
Why not have districts in the citites. Like a housing district.
I actually liked player housing and player cities. I don't think they spoiled SWG. There were plenty of areas of wilderness where you couldn't build a city - but you could put up a small house or a harvester. And there were plenty of areas of SWG which were wild, where you couldn't build any structure.
The one thing wrong with SWG's player housing idea was that there was no way to clean up and demolish cities where all the players had left, cities that in effect became permanent ghost towns.
I'm still not sure why all those taverns and Tat PA halls were furnished in those cities; perhaps they were intended as RP spaces. It would have been great to 'rent" a condo in a skyscraper in Coronet or Tyrena or Bela Visal. Having players "living" in the NPC cities would have been tremendous.
The theaters..obviously created with player driven content in mind, and on Ahazi they were used for that...for staging talent shows, for example. Heck, we used the theater in Coronet for gladiatorial games! Then there were receptions, in which we'd all be attending a fashion show, and half the fun was gathering together to see the fashion show, and be seen. Summer put on tremendous fashion shows on Ahazi, that created wonderful lag as 40-50 toons would show up just to watch!
All that potentianl, tossed down the rathole because the devs could just not get past PvP duel balance as the be all and end all of the damn game.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi