Posted by Lethality | 24 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: What Month Will TOR Release?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Heading into PAX this week, we thought it would be a great time to take the pulse of the communuty and do a release date check! The Penny Arcade Expo is the last major gaming convention in the US remaining in the release window for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which as of right now is still “Holiday 2011”. There are still other events on the schedule, but arguably none of them have the hutzbah of PAX!

Obviously, as of this writing we don’t know what announcements will come out of PAX, but assuming one of them isn’t a release date, that will leave 4 full months left in 2011 in which BioWare can meet its stated launch goal. September is unlikely, as that’s been stated when Beta Weekends will be taking place. Realistically, that leaves 3 months.

So today’s question is simple… what month do you think TOR will finally launch? I’m not sure there’s an 0ffical Vegas line on the odds, but we knew the TOR community will have lots to say on the topic! Let’s hear it!

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Posted by ReDDoT | 16 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Would You Purchase A Life-time Subscription To TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

If it wasn’t “officially” confirmed before, we learned when Star Wars: The Old Republic became available for pre-order that there will be a monthly subscription fee associated with playing the game.  We don’t yet know what this fee will be, but we’re hoping to learn very soon. We also expect there will be a slight “discount” for longer term commitments such as 3-month or 6-month terms, but this is just speculation based on industry precedence.

Beyond that, some MMO games even go as far as offering a lifetime subscription, eliminating monthly dues, usually for a healthy chunk of cash. When Lord Of The Rings Online was launched, it offered players a lifetime subscription for $199, for example.

Some players are completely confident that they’ll play the game for at least a few years, turning such one-time purchases into smart economics over the long term. But there are also some risks to such an investment. Sometimes developers decide to shift the course of the game or introduce some dramatic changes, causing a fairly big portion of players to quit. As a lifetime subscriber, you can certainly stop playing the game too – but would likely feel that your purchase was under-serviced.

Here in the TOR community, it seems quite a few people would be completely fine with paying $300 for a lifetime subscription. In fact, there is also a group of people that will be fine with paying more than $300 for the subscription. Personally, I plan on taking monthly subscription originally and perhaps upgrading to a 3-month subscription later on (assuming TOR will follow the traditional model).

What about you? Would you buy a life-time subscription for TOR? What’s the “price ceiling” for you? Let us know below!

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Posted by ReDDoT | 10 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Would You Like Guild Vs. Guild Encounters In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Imagine this – a cutscene of your personal starship, complete with a custom paint job, docking with your guild’s capital ship. Just then, an attack by a rival guild! Desperate to defend your ship, you and 10 of your guild mates take out your companions and split up in two groups of 5 players. One defending the bridge, the other covering the generator room. The enemy guild ship engages in a firefight, while the opposing guild’s players invade your ship via special pods and the real battle begins. From here on, only strategy, teamwork and communication will secure victory!

If reading the paragraph above didn’t trigger a sudden urge to participate in a guild versus guild encounter, then perhaps this whole PvP thing is just not for you. But for those who do enjoy a good challenge and a worthy opponent, as well as to have a nability to directly challenge rival guilds (going beyond the generic PvP Warzones) – these encounters would be ideal.

Some folks have already compiled a very interesting list and a description of a speculated guild capital ship system, with some lists growing to be a lot more sophisticated and organized. Clearly, a very large chunk of a community wants this to be in-game.

In our interview with James Ohlen at PAX East, he confirmed that guild capital ships are high on the priority list will eventually be implemented in-game:

Ask A Jedi: At gamescom last year, you dropped a little hint about the possibility of guild capital ships. Is there any update you can give us on that?

James Ohlen: That’s definitely on the wish list! Every single one of my senior designers loves that idea. All the way back in 2006 that was brought up in design. I was the mean design manager who was like “we have to finish a game here, we can’t have ridiculous features like guild capital ships for launch!” and they would say “we can get it in!”

The community can know that almost every one of my senior designers is on the side of doing it. I’m pretty sure its eventually going to get in the game, because they’ll beat me up until I promote it to the next feature. If it’s not in for ship, it will definitely be a patch down the road.

Personally, I really hope that this idea will make it into TOR in some way… it would be innovative, as well as make the PvP experience more personal.

What about you? Would you like to see these and other guild vs. guild encounters in TOR? Do you think it would help the longevity of the game? Let us know below!

 

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Posted by ReDDoT | 7 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: How Many Warzones Should TOR Have At Launch?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

For a massively multiplayer online game, diversity and variety are what can differentiate just another MMO from a great MMO. When talking about the Player vs Player system, the variety of game modes, maps, sizes – all of these can contribute to the fun factor, and keep players coming back for more.

With regards to Star Wars: The Old Republic, we have instanced battleground maps called Warzones. Up until gamescom, we knew of two Warzones in TOR: Alderaan Civil War  and The Voidstar. Now, we know of a third: Hutball. Each are extremely different in their goals and approaches to how the two teams interact and compete for victory.

The question that comes next is this -how many Warzones (not including the open-world PvP) will there be in TOR? On the upside, more variety would always be a good thing. But having more Warzone maps could also potentially spread out the player-based, making it take longer to get into a PvP match. In my personal opinion – BioWare should launch TOR with at least 3-5 Warzones that will bring  just enough diversity and fun gameplay for PvP fans.

What about you? How many Warzones do you think TOR should have at launch? Does it matter to you? As usual, let us know below!

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Posted by Lethality | 21 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: What Do You Think Of The Huttball Warzone?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

One of the news items coming out of gamescom this week was word of a new, third Warzone called Huttball. Yes, you read that right – Huttball.

In this Warzone, opposing teams are pitted against each other on Nar Shaddaa in an arena run by a Hutt crime lord. From the videos we’ve seen, it appears to be a capture-the-flag style match, except where the flag is a “ball” and you can pass the ball to other team mates.

In concept, this actually sounds pretty fun! But the idea breaks down a little bit when you consider the canon, and setting for the game. Why would Sith play a game with Jedi that they otherwise would kill on sight anywhere else?

Writing Director Daniel Erickson responded in a thread to just this question:

Totally fair question. I wrote Huttball personally and gave it my big stamp of approval. Huttball came from a request by the pvp team to have a mode that could mix sides in the event of unbalanced factions. So it’s not Empire vs Republic playing insane death sports, it’s anyone who wants to win some prizes and flex their muscles going to Nar Shaddaa, gambling center of the galaxy, and blowing off some steam. Story is important but so are alternate, setting-appropriate activities that give some depth and variety to the world and the gameplay experience. There is a crazy Hutt that likes running huge arena events for his amusement. Your choice if that’s the way your Bounty Hunter enjoys spending his downtime.

So, as we can see Huttball was designed to address a potential game population balance problem, with Daniel doing his best to wrap some context around it.

But not everyone thinks that this explanation fits within the story setting of the game, or jives with statements made by BioWare in the past about other non-heroic types of content such as holidays or mini-games like Pazaak.

So what do you guys think? Does Huttball sound fun? Do you have any problem with Sith/Jedi mingling in this manner, given the narrative construct of the game as a whole? Will you play Huttball?

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