Only a guess, but I would say that Codemasters have pushed the game back again or something and told amazon there is no new release date. Its either that, or they are going F2P and digital download :(

Originally posted by sn0wblind00

Originally posted by Valthar

I was actually writing off Jumpgate Evolution for 2 reasons.

 

1. The direction they were taking the game

2. Black Prophecy

 

The announcement that the game will be F2P hurt my interest in the game. The fact that Jumpgate evolution has recently stated a redesign caused by player feedback basically killed my interest in Black Prophecy.

 

A pvp game based on a f2p model will fail.  I can guarantee it will not be a similar model to guild wars, or global agenda. Shame.

 

 

 

You are assuming that the item shop will be nothing but pvp advantages.  Personally I am against the mass majority of item shop games, with their bait-and-switch techniques, but not all item shop games are designed the same.  There are item shop games out there that offer almost no advantages to purchased items, other than saving up some easily obtainable points, or gives new skins or the such.  A good example of this would be League of Legends.

 I think they already announced that the shop will have ALL items available in the game, and that all items in the shop can be achieved without paying if you have the time to grind them. The thing is, the grind will surely be made huge precisely to force people to buy the stuff instead, and worse than that is in a pvp game you MUST buy the best to compete.

Damn shame.

The game looks so good, why didn't a normal p2p publisher pick it up? Maybe they know something we don't, but I can't figure what that could be. Everything about BP looks good.

the game itself looks great to me. If all I had to go on was the quality of the build (i'm not not in beta, but from reading and vids it looks great) then there is no question I would play this.

What is really concernting me is the F2p and RMT shop. BP has an emphasis on pvp which i like, but combine that with F2p and RMT I see huge trouble looming.

Thoughts?

Originally posted by Rockgod99

Originally posted by Skuz

For me, whether this game become's something I'll play a lot or not will depend upon it's item shop & whether the game design is heavily influenced & dependant upon it. (read: ruined)

I'm tired of F2P games giving you a gimped game that you need the item shop to "ungimp" it.

 

Explain gimping the game through the cash shop?

I mean they need to make money, right?

I prefer the DDO style of F2p where i have to unlock races,classes and zones through the shop. Would that be considered gimping the game to you?

If so then you only want a totally free game without supporting the dev and thats bullshit.

 

I agree they need to make money, but what worries me a little is the news that ALL items in the game are available through the shop as well as through the gameplay (read this on official forums). On the face of it, this sounds great. Those with money and no time can buy everything they want (top of the line in all ways) just as the good ol' boys do in other games using gold sellers, while those with time and no money can play in the "old" way and work their way up.

So no problem right?

Wrong in my opinion. This type of thing will either "force" people with no money to buy the stuff anyway using credit cards they can't really afford just to keep up, or you don't buy the stuff on general principles and find yourself and your clan outclassed by those who do buy the best stuff. BP seems like a great game for pvp, but it seems to me the buyers will win their clan wars and their solo fights due to gear. I know its an old argument...gear over skill, but shops like this can ruin any chance of "fair fights" (whatever a fair fight is these days is debatable though--macros, macro keyboards, ping etc etc)

I have never bothered with F2p games previously. This will be my first one. I wonder if someone could tell me if its possible the shop would have somekind of gameplay linked limitation. What I mean is that you have to do something (misions, xp related, level-linked, or other content) in the game to unlock items in the shop, so that you can't for example buy the top of the line railgun, until you have achieved the level/xp/quest line that unlock it?

What I am hoping is that a level 1 toon cannot immediately spend $200 and fly around in the best geared ship. Has anyone else played a game where the shop only unlocks after playing the correct content?

Four out of eight classes are force users, so of course there will be a lot of them running around, but I don't mind that. As long as the number of force users are roughly equel faction wise I'm ok with it. I plan on playing a Sith Inquisiter first, but will definitely have non-force alts.

I think the bounty hunter will be a very popular class and will go a long way toward reducing any imbalances. If I am right, the imperial agent also will be quite popular. Its basically a ranged rogue, correct? A sniper that can kill from very long range with a scoped rifle then stealth to get away? There will be a LOT of people who will love that.

I cannot believe any MMO would launch 3 days after christmas, so I'm staying with spring 2011.

Personally i will buy and play TOR because its new and Bioware too, but more than that i will play it because I always try new MMOs and my guildies are with me in that. We are very interested in this game, for the differances that Bioware brings to the genre, but also for the things that remain the same. We like raiding like most guilds but what we are really looking forward to is some pvp with a differance. I am no expert, but it seems to me that Bioware are abandoning the classic trinity for something else. That should at least make our pvp refreshing.

I really hope there is rvr tbh. Don't get me wrong, I like scenario type instanced pvp too, but I much prefer the idea that the fight I'm engaged in has a bigger meaning--yes I know its a game, but it just feels nicer when things like victories and defeats effect the gameworld.

Maybe there will be planets in rebellion. That would be cool. One faction is doing the rebelling, the other faction is doing the putting down thing. With zones that are planets, it would be easy to segregate the rvr/pvp from the PVE areas too. No real greifing would happen, no one getting upset, because anyone who lands on those rebellious planets knows there is pvp everywhere there.

What do you think?

I have this issue with warhammer and bt as well. It started about 2 weeks ago for me, but that was when i came back to WAR from AION so it could be a lot older problem. Btween 7pm and 9:30pm everyday, I get sever lag and packet loss leading to dc. As soon as 7pm comes around, I have to log off its as simple as that. The lag makes it impossible to play.

My solution?

Bought and O2 mobile phone for £10per month, and their home broadband package and told BT to shove it. Saving money, no connection probs, and het my mobile as well. (was t-mobile before)

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus

This is an interesting write up about Star wars MMO's and space combat. Gordon Walton is a developer at bioware now, but he used to work for SOE on SWG. 

 

[quote] Gordon Walton: So when I worked on Star Wars Galaxies, we did an expansion called Jump to Lightspeed, which added all the space elements to Star Wars Galaxies. It was a huge expansion and an awesome space experience, actually.

But what we found was that a lot of the players who were playing the game that we had were not thrilled by us having space -- because they knew it came at the expense of adding more stuff to the stuff they were already playing. So it wasn't positive for retention, because the game was a very different game. It was a 3D space game. And in fact, a whole lot of people who play RPG type games don't really do the 3D thing that well -- it isn't their strongest suit. That was part of what we found out. The control scheme had to be different; everything had to be different. It was not as advantageous to us as we had hoped.

And in fact, we had a backlash of some anti-retention from the current customers that we already had because they were enjoying the game they were playing and wanted more of that, or wanted that fixed more than they wanted to fly around space in the Star Wars universe. It wasn't that flying around space in the Star Wars universe wasn't cool: the problem was that they wanted more of what they were already doing.

So all things that you do, no matter what you do when you're changing the game, you're going to have hopefully intended (consequences), and you're also going to have some unintended consequences. The rule that we kind of violated there, for me, was that we did too big of a jump from what was available. So customers want change, and they want the game experience to change over time, but they typically react badly to huge changes to the game. You leave people behind, and they don't have the time to kind of warm up to it.

I think it is about the on-ramp. The on-ramp is a big, steep, huge set of stairs that you kind of have to climb up -- where if you walk up gradually, then you tend to bring more of the audience along with you. Because again, it isn't one audience that we have; it is a whole bunch of little micro-audiences that are motivated completely differently from what we think on the side of those of us who make the game. They are motivated differently. The ones that are just like us we understand perfectly, and unfortunately they are a minority.[/quote]

this says to me that BIO needs to have things like space flight and space combat in at launch so that they DON'T have to do a jump to lightspeed kind of expansion later and change the player experiance in a huge way. Like he said, keep the changes coming in a steady flow, not huge chunks of change all at once.

If space combat is in at launch, and I really hope it is even in a small way, then i feel players will learn the game and enjoy it. Over time they will expect more content and of course some will be space and some will be on land. Win win 

A space raid could be good if done right though. Perhaps not in open world, but it would make for a very nice scenario/battleground kind of thing.

I saw that report on the GDC as well and came to the conclusion that there would be player housing and probably guild ships. I might be reading to much between the lines, but it made me happy to think BIO might be looking into the psych of MMOs to see what ingredients make a great and long lasting one. The more MMOs i play over the years, the less they satisfy and the less time I subscribe. My latest game was STO, and I didn't last pass the 30days. That has NEVER happened to me before with MMOs, not even POTBS made me quit that quick.

Originally posted by Klastion

SWTOR will need to be much more "closed" than WoW, in result to the pivotal narrative approach, what , ultimatly, if there is , let's say a quest where you decide to line up with the Sith (A) and blow a city, or with the republic and save the city (B) or not do anything (C), then there needs to be  3 different instances of the same area, for those that followed the path and decided to do A , those that decided to do B and those have yet to decide (C).

In any case,this does not mean that the game can  not be seamless, if the designers so desire. WoW, while heavly instanced,  is very , instance apart, seamless (a good example of this is the transiction  between Goldshire, Darkshire and Westland, that can be done in any point of the of each area )  while, for example,  AOC  is not.

 

 

Yes, I also think this way.

Slightly off topic but you did bring up the story thing... I was wondering how this story approach will work with groups of live players (not your npc companions). using your example, you could have two people choose option A, and the others spread over options B and C. Will there be a sytem in place where the choices are polled and the winner of the "vote" happens?

Its very intriguing to me that a voting system might be the answer here, because it has upsides and downsides. An upside from my view is that there will be tension and uncertainty how events will unfold. Will your guildies agree to kill that city or not etc. The downside would of course be if you really really want to to B and the vote goes A. Especially as these story parts are supposed to impact your character later and cannot be undone. Devs say there is no do-over.

Originally posted by Anubisan

I am extremely happy that the release date is in 2011. It is refreshing to see a developer actually taking the time to make sure the game is released in a finished state.

Other gaming companies could learn some very valuable lessons from Bioware in this regard...

Its not refreshing that a games company pushed back a release date, its not annoying, its nothing really. Wait, that's not quite true. its business as usual. I have lost count of the times I have heard of games being pushed back for all kinds of reasons. Its nothing new at all. If I remember right, Warhammer was pushed back 6 months, and was promised there would be no more delays. What happened? Another 12 month delay and they released it so full of bugs half the population quite in the first month.

WAR is nice in a lot of ways, but it has never really recovered from all the screw ups. I don't think Bioware will make anything like the same mistakes Mythic did thank god, but pointing to a delayed release and saying "look! The game will now be awsome because they are delaying it to make it good. They are doing this for us!" is a silly argument. They are doing it for themselves. They obviously think they need the time to fix what they feel isn't right yet. Maybe they are even doing what some people think, balancing etc.

My concern isn't the release date. Mine is the lack of mention about any kind of beta start. Surely it will take at least a year of testing in beta so they can make changes? Why no word then if the game is "only" a year from release?

Edit spelling

Originally posted by Maverz290

 

Basically, originally, jedi would get bountys on them if they were seen too much in public and stuff *i think*, I only ever witnessed chases of this when i played pre CU, but recently when I played for four-five years after, it evolved to the point of when you were pvp'ing, or were killed, you could place a bounty on the person who killed you. Now if someone else put a bounty on the same person, it would add to the pot, not create a seperate contract. So some kills made you biiig bucks if they annoyed the right people. Was a nice system, just dont see how it'd work in a themepark mmo. Depends on the size of the worlds.

Ok thanks. I was a bit worried that it could get to be a pain. I mean, if the target keeps getting bounties on him, he could conceivably be run off the server! Perhaps somekind of cooldown could be used so that if i have a bounty on me and a hynter kills me, I can't get another bounty on me for a certain time.

Got notification today that Amazon.co.uk is taking preorder now for £29.73. As always with Amazon, your credit card is not billed until they ship, but on that page they have the release set at oct31 2010 which we know from the devs is incorrect.

Still, I preordered anyway. :)

EDIT: price

I got an email today from Amazon.co.uk telling me I can now preorder TOR, so I did. I did sign up for this announcement, so it was good news. When I checked the page they had put up for the game, it has an Oct31 2010 release.

wierd

Originally posted by duari91

I am really curious to see if bioware implements bounties into the game. More specifically, PvP bounties. SWG had player bounties, and in my opinion, made that class really fun. Thoughts?

How did it work in SWG? Did the game somehow post bounties on players randomly? Or did it take some kind of action from the target to make him an outlaw? The thing is, with the system of light and dark points (or whatever its called) there would be all those sith and dark freindly people with bounties on their heads, but what about the light freindly side? 

Originally posted by banthis

When the devs come out and say "we have housing" I'll be excited but also not care much since 99% of my time will be spent traveling the universe advancing my character not sitting around playing house.

I am sort of that way about housing too. Guild housing would be more exciting to me, as I really do want lots of guild content so my guildies can use it to work toward a goal. You can probably guess that I like grouping and rvr type pvp, as well as guild groups in scenarios etc. I loved the way WAR gave guilds stuff to do like levelling.

Now then, if  Bioware could see their way clear to making my "player house" a spaceship instead... I would be very happy gamer! I wouldn't want it stuck on a planet though. It would have to be mobile.

I think I read or saw a video about Jedi. The way they train in starter area, vision quests and stuff. The last thing they do is make their light saber. I know that isn't crafting as such, but I would not be at all surprised if crafting weapons like light sabers is in TOR.