Well, as a former SWG player, I am really glad to hear that they took this one away from Sony.

Seriously, Sony fucked Galaxies almost from the beginning, releasing the game for commercial distribution before it should have been let out of beta. I remember when you had no choice but to walk everywhere (they had not even released mountable animals when I got in the game, let alone actual vehicles).

Then there was the constant “re balancing” of the game. You could spend weeks building a character only to have all of your skills nerfed because the devs thought it sounded like a nice idea at the time.

Also, there was the secret to becoming a Jedi that nobody was supposed to know about. The reality was that there was no path to becoming a Jedi because it was never implemented until over a year after the game was out. Eventually, they did put it into a patch. It turned out that you had to master like ¾ of the possible professions and then you could train the Jedi skill set. Because of all the people who had chased the re balancing around, we had a dozen Jedi in every city overnight.

Then they Nerfed the Jedi class and we ended up with Jedi on every street corner. Heck but some of the comedians in game built macros that made Jedi characters stand on street corners and beg.

After that, they did the “Combat Upgrade” which essentially was a downgrade to all characters.

My last pre-CU character was a Bounty Hunter/Droid Engineer with heavy weapons and droid management maxed out. I could get close enough to my target to see him, run around and deploy three heavily armed R2 units and then draw fire just before sending the attack order to the droids.

Post-CU, even that tactic was so lame that I could not hunt without having a local clone ready for when I died.

Sadly, they have given the game to BioWare, who can also fuck up any game only worse. Most BioWare games can only run on $3,000++ machines and they have DRM up the ass. Why you even need DRM for an MMO, I have no clue but I am sure that they will do it, simply because the corporate culture says that such simply must exist.

 When, if ever, will Star Wars have to play by the same rules as everyone else?  I swear, it's like a fucking religion.   Movies, video games, RPGs... anything with Star Wars on it.  It all gets a free pass because it's Star Wars.

While I agree that I've never had a satisfying lightsaber battle in a SW game, I have high hopes for Old Republic. The games that Bioware has made in the past have all been great IMO; Mass Effect, especially.

Is Old Republic going to be exclusively PC? Some companies have begun putting MMO's out on the 360, I think.

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

-- Isaac Asimov

I don't necessarily disagree. I was just wondering because my PC can barely run Elder Scrolls, let alone some flashy Star Wars MMO.

I just hope that the combat isn't turn-based-point-and-click crap, like the OP was saying. That would ruin it for me. Mass Effect had a pretty good idea for combat, although it was executed fairly poorly. Maybe if they revamp that system.

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

-- Isaac Asimov

I thought it was okay, but the lightsabre combat was a joke. You just mashed the attack button and hoped for the best most of the time (I used to demonstrate how random the damage and animations were to a friend who constantly tried to pretend that there really was 'skill' involved). They still need a dedicated lightsabre action game that is of similar caliber to Assassin's Creed or God of War, though.

Ex-fucking-actly.

This is why LucasArts games are typically sub par; they know they can get away with making a mediocre title and it will still sell like a blockbuster because it has 'Star Wars' stamped on it. If it weren't a game from an established franchise, nobody would pay attention to it, and they'd have to try harder.

It's a real shame, too. I want to play a really awesome Star Wars game that is just fun on it's own merit.

The other shame is that I know LucasArts can do some fantastic stuff when they put some effort into a project. Grim Fandango isn't just the greatest game LucasArts ever published; it's one of the greatest games of all time.

I wish that they would make an Assassin's Creed-esque Star Wars MMO, but it is unlikely. From the couple of gameplay shots I've seen, it looks like generic point-and-click crap, which will drive me insane. Granted, Bioware's games are generally about story, and I don't really doubt that the story will be awesome in this game (if you've played KOTOR or Mass Effect, you'll see what I mean).

"Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night."

-- Isaac Asimov

in my opinion, and this shows how long i've been out of touch, the last decent star wars game was TIE fighter.

that was before the trilogy special edition bullshit, before jar jar binks, and LOOOONG before hayden fucking christensen got edited into return of the jedi.  in those days, star wars was in danger of becoming halfway forgotten, like ET or close encounters, and only a relatively small coven of loyal nerds still kept the faith alive, of which my 11 year-old ass was happy to be a part.  in those days, lucasarts had to make an effort.

then i grew up, and realized george lucas is in fact not a genius.  i realized that george lucas is a fucking money-grubbing retarded hack, who claims he loves his films so much that he can't bear to leave them as-is (which is funny, he left them as-is for more than a decade; now he can't leave them alone for 2 goddamn years at a time), but everytime george lucas messes with his films they get WORSE (and, i also found as i grew up, they were never that great to begin with).  lucas, however, knows that anytime he can make the picture resolution a tiny bit better (or at least say he did) and add 2 or 3 minutes of CGI bullshit, he can repackage his films, yet again, as THE DEFINITIVE VERSION and fucktard fat teenagers and 40 year-old virgins alike will DEMAND to lay down 40 bucks for it, or maybe 150 bucks for a "collectors' edition" with a shitty taiwanese t-shirt and a fucking ridiculous-looking lucite sculpture of (SURPRISE!) luke and vader locked in a lightsabre duel that i wouldn't pay 2 bucks for at a garage sale.

THEN, when that starts to get stale, he can grudgingly re-release the OLD versions for ANOTHER 40 bucks a pop!

so of course, lucas can be even more cavalier with the games.  i got smart a long time ago.  i was so fucking let down by the first dark forces that i never went back.  except occasionally to TIE fighter.

oh, and the second best star wars game of all time, super star wars for the SNES.  fuckin' right you heard me.  good solid game, no bullshit, promised only what it delivered and delivered only what it promised.

well, except the landspeeder stages.  they sucked ass.

I too want to see some really good combat game play.

This thread got me to thinking, will there be more cinematics than gameplay? So I decided to create it as a new thread here:

http://swmmorpg.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=23

You know what? This thread, just now, officially became about Grim Fandango. Why? Because the opportunity is here, and nobody ever talks about Grim Fandango. Hell, most people don't even know what Grim Fandango is; it's just something they've heard about before and vaguely understand that, somehow, it's a good game.

...But it wasn't a good game. It was an amazing game. I didn't leave my computer until I finished it... and then I wished it hadn't finished, so I did it all over again. 

This is an adventure game. You never play those more than one time through.

Well, not unless it's Grim Fandango.

The voice acting was amazing (the best ever put into a game, hands down). The music selection was aamazing. The plot was amazing. The characters were amazing. The art direction was amazing. The tightness of the controls was amazing. 

Without hesitation, though, the most amazing thing about Grim Fandango was it's sales volume:

About 500,000 copies. Worldwide. 

Ever.

This is perhaps the greatest game ever made, and it sold - at best - half a million units. Commercially, that is a colossal failure. How could this happen? LucasArts released it around the same time that they released the 2nd game in the ultra-shitty, ultra-hyped 'Dark Forces' series, and devoted all of their advertising efforts to the Star Wars game. Marketing for Grim Fandango basically amounted to including a trial version CD with Dark Forces II (most of which just became coasters, never seeing the inside of a CD ROM drive). 

The aftermath of Fandango's commercial performance (or lack thereof) effectively killed the adventure game genre. Sierra essentially ditched their ongoing franchises (or tried to warp them into unrecognizable parodies of their former selves to disastrous effect). 

...I know you'll probably be asking, "Well, what makes it so good?" 

I don't know how to answer that (certainly it's far more than just the sum of it's amazing parts), and I don't know of anyone else who does either. There isn't really a stand-out gimmick that it tries to milk. You're a travel agent for the afterlife... and you just get swept-up into an adventure. It doesn't try too hard to be epic (like a Squaresoft title), it doesn't throw in the stereotypical character tropes (the badass, the cute girl, the smart guy, the chaste hero, etc), it doesn't give you rare items to collect or intense firefights... it just tells a story, tells it well, and makes you laugh until you cry.

Maybe that's what makes it so good. It doesn't 'try' to do anything. It just does it. 

 No, Doomy, I'm afraid you're wrong on this one. 

Dark Forces II was a stinking heap of poo. The textures were awful, none of the guns were fun to shoot, the lightsabre was glitchy at best, the character hitboxes were messed and the dedicated LucasArts servers were awful; they didn't respond to cheaters, so they were flooded with griefing script kiddies in no time, they lagged, they didn't have a half-decent auto-match feature to pit players against opponents of roughly equivalent skill level...

Ick. 

Uh. I thought it was after (and I'm sure it was after Quake), but just a sec...

Nope, you're right. Jedi Knight was in '97, Half-Life was in '98. 

I was right about Quake, though. '96 for that one. 

Quake had much better textures.

I want to make sure we're talking about the same game; maybe I'm connecting the wrong experience with Jedi Knight:

Dark Forces II had the missile launcher that could shoot, as a secondary, sticky explosives, right? And the bowcaster that bounced it's shots off of walls, right? 

And in multiplayer, people would just whip them (the guns) out of your hands with Force Pull and then blast you with the cannon that shot the big, blue exploding plasma bolts, right?

If I'm connecting the right experience to the game, those guns were not at all fun for me to shoot. They had no kick, the sound effects were mediocre (though not necessarily bad), they didn't send the other guy reeling... I just never felt like I was packing a powerful distant-future weapon.

Quake's guns were fun, and I know it was a year later, but so were Half Life's (I don't think it's unreasonable to compare a game that was only a year ahead of Jedi Knight).

Hm. Well, somebody had a dedicated server up. I don't think it was the Zone... 

Maybe it was the service I used for Tribes at the time. I don't remember what that was called... 'hot' something, I think? 

And I'm pretty sure it was server lag, but I guess I can't blame LucasArts if they weren't their servers.

Cheaters. More specficially, people who jumped-in using the character model for the small green goober of a boss, leapt around the whole level and Force Lightning'd everyone while spamming 'GG KK THX!!!' in the public chat.

That got pretty old pretty fast. 

I'll come out and say that Lucas is one of the only developers doing things right. Their games are solid, finished, beautiful, and being canon for the series helps ensure good story. They are also one of the few who can still make a game hard. I can't comment on their MMO's, which is perhaps what the comment about them not getting things right was directed at, but it was vague enough that it might have been meant to go beyond that genre, which is the opposite of the truth.

2 Letters

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... well, maybe 1 letter and 1 number, but you get the point...