I never watched Stargate: SG-1 while it was on (is it still on?), so when everyone was getting all excited about the prospect of Cheyenne Mountain’s Stargate Worlds MMO, it meant nothing to me. Now, thanks to Hulu, I’m catching up. A couple of episodes in to the second season and it’s clear the show is already chafing against its episodic “planet of the week” formula. Could Stargate Worlds make it work for them? Will it work for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, or will people yearn for a less story-based, more personal play experience?
IGN has some SWTOR gameplay videos hosted by Bioware peeps and I have to admit, it looks really great, a lot better than I thought it would. So much like Knights of the Old Republic that I mostly am just hoping Bioware decides to release SWTOR as a single player game. I do like how party members swap out who gets to choose the canned responses. I just hope party members agree beforehand on how things are going to play out.
Player 1: The Emperor has commanded your death!
Hapless NPC: Then he can have my death! AND YOURS! draws blaster
Player 2: Hi, would you be my friend?
Hapless NPC: puts blaster away Yes, I think we can come to an understanding.
Player 1: Then DIE!
Hapless NPC: Huh? confusedly draws blaster again
Yesterday, Cryptic announced that it had reached the limit on the number of lifetime and six-month subscriptions it offered. This shocked a lot of people who weren’t aware that there wasn’t a limitless supply, especially after all the angst concerning the offer just a couple weeks back.
Syp sums up the controversy nicely. Cryptic had announced the offers would end September 1st, so people expected to hold off on the go/no go decision until August 31st, 11:59:59PM, California time. Now that the decision has been made for them, some potential players who were very much looking forward to the game have decided not to play. Did the game become less fun because of the ending of their pre-launch offer? Beau argues that you should have known ahead of time if it mattered that much. Warhammermer was just disappointed that the end of beta event was so geared toward North American players.
I love Tobold’s theory posts, and maybe I’m just too sensitive to perceived slights against my favorite MMO, but when a respected blogger, talking about Blizzard’s announcement of guild levels in the forthcoming Cataclysm expansion, says about guild level implementation in other games, “the suboptimal guild advancement systems that other games already have” and “Blizzard is famous for is stealing the badly executed ideas of others and unleashing their potential, thereby making their version much better than the original.”
So which are those other MMOs with badly executed, suboptimal guild advancement systems? EverQuest 2, which more or less defined and refined the system in modern MMOs? Warhammer Online’s, whose guild levels are widely touted as one of its best features? Lord of the Rings Online? And both EQ2 and LotRO even have guild halls, based on guild advancement. Will WoW take these badly executed ideas and make them good? Or were they bad ideas simply because WoW hadn’t done them yet?
Speaking of WoW, Dusty Monk at “Of Course I’ll Play It” has embarked on a new exploration of World of Warcraft’s mysterious world of Azeroth. Let Delsenora guide you through the numberless mysteries of Elwynn and Goldshire. Before Blizzard destroys them forever, next year.
Lars of MMOment of Zen reports that the EQ2 devs are trying to bring down the size of EQ2’s initial download and have it stream the rest, a la Guild Wars and Free Realms. Fantastic idea – get people playing the game within minutes. Why doesn’t EVERY game offer this?
Well, off to work, but you might be asking, why is the title in German? Well, I know a little German…