My question to you today is:
Based on your normal play style how do you see yourself acquiring the materials you need to craft in SWTOR?
Will you use the auction house mechanic relying on other players to provide the auctions for you to buy, or will you rely on yourself and your companions to gather what you need via the gathering mechanics and the missions?
Read on!
It played out just like always, I play Darth Vader or I don’t play. Yeah I know sometimes I can bring the drama, but really, I play Vader.
My trusty sidekick my son, pronounced that he was going to be the bounty hunter, specifically Jango Fett, because he wanted to be aligned with me from the sith side. (I can always count on him to be at my side)
At the sound of this declaration the two girls sitting across from me made their intentions known (rebel scum, I should have known). My oldest daughter decided upon Luke Skywalker, (she would have rather had a Anakin figure cause she thinks he is cute). My middle eldest daughter chose to be Han Solo cause she said him and Luke were best friends.
So there we have it, a sith warrior and bounty hunter combo vrs smuggler and jedi knight, this ought to be interesting. Based on what I think I know about SWTOR game mechanics, even though it seems balanced with some dps/dps-heal combo I am still betting heavily on the dark side at the start of this one, the force is strong with me after all.
We started the game and immediately my oldest daughter within 4 turns had all of the light blue properties. This is not going well. Vader and Jango were having a run of bad luck and between the docking tax, and letting the wookie win we were slowly loosing our chance at available property.
Of course on her next turn she immeditley put up 3 Millenium Falcons, rebel scum! We proceeded for the next few turns where me and Jango began a viscious cycle of having to stay in them every time we went by, we are almost out of credits and we now own barely more than a few utilities and some random property that we cant make work between us. Things are getting dire for my command of this unit.
All the while on the other side of the universe my youngest daughter now has control of all the yellow and is starting on the reds as well! Who knew that Han Solo could keep his dealings so discreet and fly under the radar like that?
I am not even sure if they will be able to see the master plot unfold in front of them like I had planned.
They may have thwarted me before I even got started. What started out as a secret plot between Lord Vader and Jango, to destroy Luke Skywalker once and for all and end *her reign of terror (she has won three games in a row) has turned into a what looks like a complete wipe for the forces of the Dark side.
As we start the game for the second night I now have 300 credits and my partner has about the same. I am not sure that the forces of the darkside will prevail because as it stands now we can barely roll the dice on the board because of all the credits stuck under the rebel side.
I am starting to think about making my way to the escape pods, I will hold on for just a little bit longer…..
Read the continuation of this story in the second part entitled “Confessions of a Star Wars Dad, Vader’s last stand at Endor“.
With Pax now behind us, how did BioWare deliver ?
Well, they gave us exactly what they said they would (not everything we wanted as fans). What they told us before Pax, they had the goods there. They had the early levels on the Sith classes, and what seemed to be a very respectable mid lvl instance. A great deal of interviews have come in, and I’m sure many more are on the way.
In respect to the game play, most every comment is positive, and from the footage we have seen, the instance does look like a highly engaging, and a somewhat challenging, fun packed run.
The only downside I would call out, is that of queues, that none could of foreseen. A 7 hour wait after 10 minutesof Pax opening, I’m sure you could have had four times the amount of games running, and demand would still outweigh the supply.
You need months of different flavors of beta testing before making a product generally available
Several major gaming news outlets have reported that EA’s CFO Eric Brown hinted during today’s Lazard Capital Markets Technology and Media Conference that Star Wars the Old Republic will not be releasing before July 1. Here’s the transcription of what he said that made people conclude this:
So we said it’s going to launch sometime in calendar, but not within Fiscal 11 … So that basically pens down between, you know, April 1st and December 31st of this calendar year.
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It’s also reasonable to infer that it’s not in our Q1 guidance. We gave Q1 Fiscal 11, Fiscal 12 non-gap revenue guidance, minus 39 minus 44 cents and I think it’s not unreasonable to infer that it’s not included in that 90 day period.
Darth Hater has a full transcript of all the things said at the conference pertaining to the Old Republic and you can read it here.
The more important things to note are:
News was also reported by Massively and vg247 and it seems that TOR Legends were the first to report the story.
Although this should not come as a surprise to anyone we can’t think of a better comment to this than point you to this website here. Feel free to push the button several times.
Yeah, yeah I know, nice pun on words for the title, but that’s sort of how I see tanking in Swtor going, and that makes me excited. Now, it really isn’t taking from behind the group, it’s what Bioware is calling Ranged Tanking. This isn’t your standard fantasy MMO where the tank is wielding swords and shields and charging that massive dragon because, well you know, swords have a reach issue. Not blasters folks and once you go blasters, you never go back.
So let’s get this out of the way first. This is the Star Wars Universe. At no time in any movie do you see anyone beyond Jedi popping out any type of sword and going at it. Even when Luke whips out the Lightsaber and goes full tilt on some Stormtroopers, you don’t seem those Troopers pack up the blasters and whip out a vibroblade so they can melee like a Jedi.
Blasters are a part of the Universe in the game. so to have this type of game play in the Swtor MMO, it makes me excited, especially after seeing the videos from PAX weekend.
Now, not all melee is gone as you can see that the mobs can get up close, especially the Captains pet, and there is still that old school feel for the melee fights. The thing is, the tanks aren’t sword carriers unless they are Jedi.
The other aspect of the game that goes hand in hand with the Ranged Tanking is the aggro swap off I saw. I noticed a couple of instances where the Trooper would end up in melee range and pop aggro over to the Jedi, who since he carries a Lightsaber, would start the melee fight and let the Trooper get some range again. once this happened, the Trooper then took over as ranged tank again and the Jedi went back to DPS.
There are so many aspects of this game that are starting to come out that once everything becomes known to the players of the game, there may be more that excites us beyond what we know so far.
Thread on the official forums dedicated to Daniel Erickson MeMe we started a while back has had some new hilarious entries and I just wanted to show them to our visitors as well. In honoring this epic thread I also wanted to make another contribution and also add to the forever growing debate of Star Trek vs Star Wars. I bring you an animated gif: Mr. Spock vs Mr. Erickson. It is rather big, but I think it is worth waiting for it to load.
Here’s a couple of user created MeMes:
posted by notinvited
posteb by EtharionTurambar
posted by Droolmouth
In their latest interview from the PAX East convention of 2011, Darth Hater sat down with Bioware’s creative director, James Ohlen.
Darth Hater: “We also heard that in your dialogue system, you are tracking metrics on when people are pausing to see how long they’re taking to make decisions and things like that to really work on the dialogue. So you are getting ton of information from the testers?”
James Ohlen: “We keep on getting more and more information as the testing groups get larger. We had two groups of a thousand players on a shard and that got us a lot of information because it was a lot more people playing together. We were able to see a population that was not indicative of the final game, but it was closer to it because the populations were so much bigger than just a couple hundred. We’re able to use that to make a lot of adjustments; it also validated a lot design decisions we made months earlier. The game really gets a lot better every single month. It is pretty impressive. The developer teams are getting faster at making changes and making adjustments to feedback. Two years ago it would take so long to see a change in the game, but now you see changes every month.”
From what I remember in the past, we have never really gotten a definitive number from a developer about just how many people are involved in “game testing”. If I remember correctly the only estimations of a number came from the statement of “more than I could fit in my office” or something to that effect. (the actual quote escapes me at the moment but it was very similar to that statement)
When they tell me that they have two groups of a thousand players on a shard that gives me a better idea as to how far they are along in the numbers of people that they have allowed in at this point. I figure it is more than two thousand at this point, but at least I now have a baseline reference.
The comment that they were “on a shard” also makes me wonder if they also have the ability of running more than one shard at this time with their current server structure. I am thinking they do and that they may be currently operating several shards at this point in time. Maybe a private in house version for the developers only that showcases the latest builds, maybe a couple for outside the office testers, and etc. I may be way off base, as this is just speculation on my part.
In the end though, with this developer interaction I feel better about the testing process going on at Bioware. One of my fears from the past was that they didn’t have the amount of people testing their game that they needed to find out all that was necessary. That a small minority of people testing would sway the design decisions in directions I as a MMO veteran did not approve of for my gaming time.
With a number of at the very least two thousand testing the game, I feel much better that a wider view of MMO mechanic and game play design is being addressed.
Now if I could just get my hands on it and test out the “Crew skills system” I could die a happy man. 🙂
Hello everyone, I’m MrWarlock
I am happy to announce I’ll be joining Swtor-Life, in a partnership that we hope will serve the followers or SWTOR, in bringing you news, thoughts and concerns of the up and coming game.
Like Swtorcrafter before me, we see this as a great opportunity in bringing you a better service.
A little about me – Well I’m what you would call an aging gamer of 39. Since the days of Ultima Online, I have been hooked on mmo’s. There after have played many more, and those who do not know me, I’m on the side of the fence that hates WOW, just to get that out of the way 🙂
I will bring you my hope’s, dreams and concerns on TOR. Hopefully they will continue to bring you some humor, and most importantly give you a thought provoking prospective on TOR.
As we all continue to ride the roller coaster ride till launch, lets keep are fingers crossed that the game is all we are hoping for.
For anyone wishing to follow me on Twitter add MrWarlock_
We all hope here at Swtor-Life, will continue to grow and giving you, the TOR faithful a better service in the future.
Until we meet again MrWarlock signing off.
Welcome to our second day of covering the Penny Arcade Expo and all the Star Wars The Old Republic news that will be pouring out of Boston. Yesterday was a satisfying day for TOR fans because of the officially released trailer and a number of great gameplay videos from both Taral V instance/flashpoint and starting worlds. There was an announcement that we’ll get some more official news today as well so keep refreshing this post for the latest updates.
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 CRR Crew + Erickson = awesome |
 Torocast, DartHater, MER |
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You can check out our Day One coverage in the posts bellow:
Comments Off on Pax East SWTOR Minute by Minute coverage – Day 2
Visitors of Penny Arcade Expo have been busy recording various gameplay sessions all throughout day 1 of the convention and we have gathered all the relevant videos in this one post. There is some more footage of Taral V flashpoint as well as some starting planets gameplay. We also have Daniel Erickson giving a few more presentation of various planets and I suspect we will be seeing all of these videos as downloadable content from the official site. Until then enjoy.
Video shows full in-game cinematic for the instance telling us the background story of why are we fighting this hard fight. Flashpoint footage is from the first third of the instance and the person playing is a clicker (you have been warned). Quality is Full HD and the video is worth your bandwidth.
Video shows the last third of Taral V instance including the fight (and wipe) with the last boss. *spoiler alert* Last boss seems to have an add so it requires some coordination and unfortunately the Trooper died and Jedi Knight was not able to take aggro from the healers quickly enough (not his fault). The person playing seems to be a veteran MMO player and you can see just how smooth the gameplay is when played by a knowledgeable player. The video is HD and gets 5 stars from me.
Jungle part of Taral V from the Jedi Sage perspective. Video is HD with detailed shot of the UI in the end
We see the starting zone for Bounty Hunter with some great cutscenes and a chubby BH as our protagonist. HD quality is available and I recommend watching it this way because it brings out the best out of the game footage.
We see some areas of Hoth with surprising volcanic activity and future questing grounds set inside ice caves and ship graveyards. Available in HD quality as well. Thanks to Engrey for the footage.
Official trailer showing in-game footage of Tatooine vistas.
The video shows all cutscenes and footage from questing inside a cave on Korriban. This is footage similar to the one we’ve see at Gamescom last year, but nice to see it again.
