Author Topic: BBC cover swtor  (Read 1432 times)

Offline Mangala

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BBC cover swtor
« on: December 19, 2011, 05:19:17 PM »
In an interesting twist they are actually covering another online game that isnt wow or eve... :D

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16244994

Quote
Old republic Star Wars video game prepares to launch

Budding Jedi masters and Sith lords will soon have somewhere else to hone their lightsaber skills.

Star Wars: The Old Republic launches on 20 December and lets gamers play as characters from the iconic SF series.

Reputed to have cost more than $130m (£87m) to develop, SWTOR is a bid to grab a chunk of the lucrative gaming market for publisher EA.

It faces stiff competition from established titles, such as World of Warcraft, and many free-to-play games.

The Old Republic is set 3,500 years before the events depicted in the Star Wars films but uses many familiar elements from the movies.

Many aspects of the game involve moral choices that push players towards the light and the dark sides of the force.

The Old Republic (SWTOR) is a massively multi-player online (MMO) game and resembles World of Warcraft (WoW) and many others in that it asks players to go adventuring to turn their relatively weak starting character into a powerful hero.

Players can choose to play as many different races including human, Sith pureblood, Twi'lek and cyborg. At the start of the game players must choose whether to be part of the Galactic Republic or Sith Empire.

Different species adventure as one of several different classes including Jedi knights, smugglers, troopers and bounty hunters. Players also get a starship to explore the many different planets making up the SWTOR galaxy.

The game goes on sale on 20 December in the US and Europe but people who pre-ordered the game got access from as early as 13 December.

In the UK, the basic edition costs £45 and this includes the first month of online play. Continuing to play requires payment of an £8.99 monthly fee.

Other editions, deluxe and collectors, are available and include items for use in the game as well as a security module to help prevent an account from being stolen.

John Walker, a journalist at PC games news site Rock Paper Shotgun, gave a cautious welcome to the game. He said it was an "interesting confusion" of WoW and classic PC game Knights of the Old Republic.

Mr Walker said visually the game resembled a smartened up WoW and borrowed many of the well-known mechanics from that and other online role-playing games.

"However, and crucially, there is this huge amount of story in there, with every line of dialogue recorded, and genuine moral choices to be made, with long-reaching consequences on how you experience the world," he told the BBC.

'Distinctive and alternative'
"WoW has never offered anything close to that," he said. "And playing dark side, you can do some horrible things, which is fantastic."

He said there was an obvious tension in the game between the involving, story-driven solo titles that its creator Bioware is best known for and the populist multi-player experience required to attract subscribers and recoup development costs.

"I think there is a great deal that makes SWTOR distinctive and alternative enough to be interesting," he said, though he added that it was too early to say whether the game would be a hit.

"I'm hedging my bets at this point, as anyone should in the early days of a new massively multi-player game," he said.

Joe Martin, games editor at Custom PC, was less impressed with his time testing the game.

Mr Martin said "glaring technical inconsistencies", such as the fact that lightsabers do not cut through anything, robbed the game of the attraction of its setting.

"Jedi are supposed to be rare, but a massively multi-player game is naturally going to be full of them, which robs them of their rarity and potence," he said.

While playing, Mr Martin was struck by the divide between the complex single-player content and what he dubbed the "MMO-style filler".

"All the talk about this being the first MMO to put storyline into an MMO conveniently skips the reason why single player and multi-player games operate as discrete entities," he said.

With SWTOR, publisher EA is hoping to tempt players away from well-known titles, such as WoW, which also charge a monthly fee.

But it will also have to outdo the many free-to-play online games titles that started out with monthly charges but have been forced to drop fees to survive.

The launch of SWTOR comes barely a week after the closure of the Star Wars: Galaxies - one of the pioneering online role-playing games.
"May God stand between you and harm in all the empty places you must walk."


Offline Mangala

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Re: BBC cover swtor
« Reply #1 on: December 19, 2011, 05:22:20 PM »
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10781961

Nice article on BW related to the above post.

Quote
The massive multiplayer online role-play game (MMORPG) Star Wars: The Old Republic is nearing completion. While the Canadian developer BioWare would not be drawn on an exact date, it said that spring 2011 "was not unrealistic". "It's getting closer, it's coming down the pipe," the firm's founder Greg Zeschuk told BBC News.

At present the MMORPG market is dominated by World of Warcraft, which boasts more than 10m players. Star Wars: The Old Republic is set 4,000 years before the events in the movies, which gave the developers almost a free hand in creating a unique persistent Star Wars universe. "The only requirement Lucas Arts gave us when developing the game was not to blow up any planets that appear in the movies," said Mr Zeschuk. Now a major player in the video games market, BioWare had somewhat humble beginnings. The firm was founded in 1995 by two Canadian medical students, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Both avid gamers, they set up their game development studio in a basement in Edmonton immediately after graduating from medical school at the University of Alberta.

For them, the studio name was obvious: BioWare. Within a year, they had created their first game - the first-person action shooter Shattered Steel - that had players fighting in mechanised combat vehicles. While the game sold well, it was cut from the same cloth as the likes of MechWarrior and BattleTech. The firm's next game took them - and the rest of the games industry - by complete surprise. Released in 1998, Baldur's Gate was a role-playing game (RPG) - based on modified Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules - and follows the player's exploits across a mythical land as they battle monsters, negotiate with non-player characters (NPCs) and end up battling their corrupted half-brother to save the land from damnation. The game won numerous accolades, including five "Game of the Year" awards, and spawned numerous add-on packs. Greg Zeschuk said "everyone" at the time said the role-playing game was dead, and that they should be developing a different sort of game. "We just didn't believe it - perhaps it was our naivety of being new in the games business - so we just built it anyway," he said. "After a few months, our publishers asked for another one as it turned into a huge hit and we haven't looked back since."

Arcade action
Mr Zeschuk's next game took a very different tack. MDK2 was a follow-up on Shiny Entertainment's third-person shooter, and had users playing the role of a mild-mannered janitor forced to battle alien invaders. While popular with reviewers, the game did not exactly reshape the way we play action shooters and the firm's next game, Neverwinter Nights, saw a return to form with another top-down viewpoint RPG. Then in 2003, BioWare managed to secure one of the more coveted licences in the games industry: Star Wars.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) combined the role-play elements that BioWare had developed over the previous five years with a third-person Star Wars universe. The game engine was based on the Wizards of the Coast's Star Wars Role-playing Game - which used multi-faceted dice to determine outcomes - and put the player in the role of a young Jedi battling the Dark Lord of the Sith. The game sold well and received critical acclaim.

Use the Force
BioWare's next Star Wars title - currently in the latter stages of development - promises to be its most ambitious to date. Star Wars: The Old Republic is based on KOTOR and allows the user to side with either the Galactic Republic or Sith Empire. Players' allegiance will influence character class, evolutionary route and impact on moral choices. For example, in one mission, the player captures a space vessel and has to choose whether to spare or kill the captain. BioWare said the game would have "a very deep storyline" and that a character class could change to suit the mission, rather than being locked into a single type throughout the game.

However, the firm is up against some stiff competition for the MMORPG space. World of Warcraft has captured almost 70% of the market, and attracting players to Star Wars: The Old Republic will be challenging. The situation is somewhat compounded as the last Star Wars MMORPG - Sony's Star Wars Galaxies - came in for considerable criticism from reviewers and gamers alike. A review by Keith Durocher on the gaming website Adrenaline Vault described it as a "half-finished game" and said it was "lacking due to its slow pace and the absence of vehicles and space travel".

BioWare said that its new game was something very different, and hopes that the similarities with the movies will "draw people in.
"May God stand between you and harm in all the empty places you must walk."