Info-Thread zum Game

[Ecid]

It is confirmed - in the latest build of the game, we freed up some of the combinations of classes and species. I'll tell you that I have a Zabrak Bounty Hunter on my screen right now.

That being said, absolutely nothing in this regard should be considered 'officially announced' (ie 'This is how it will be in the game at launch'), as we're still gathering feedback and looking for potential issues with combinations we didn't expect.

Choices that might be in a build today might not be there when we ship.

Thread bezieht sich auf das (in)offizielle "Playable Species Compendium"

[Ecid]

Neue Screenshots aus dem "PC Gamer" Magazin:
http://img19.imageshack.us/i/cathar.jpg/
http://img39.imageshack.us/i/troopera.jpg/

werden in folgendem Thread diskutiert:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=287351

Dort finden sich dann auch folgende Antworten auf entsprechende Spekulationen, die mitunter interessant sind:

The Imperial Agent does have an ability at a high level that uses two blades as a visual effect, but that doesn't mean the class gets to dual wield.

Sorry if that shot confused.

Hey guys,

The Agent can specialize in the use of his energy blades, but that doesn't really make him a 'melee' class per se in the same way that a Knight or Warrior is.

Operatives continue using their rifle as their primary weapon, and continue getting abilities that utilize that weapon, but they can – as part of one of the Operative skill trees – add some special abilities. If you specialize far enough into the right skills, you unlock an ability that has a dual blade appearance, though the class does not actually dual-wield blade items in the same way that melee classes do.

In summary, you equip only one blade item as an Operative, but not in your primary weapon slot. What you see in the screenshot is the use of a single special ability that has an activation animation that shows two blades.

Hope that clears things up!

This is how rumors start

Actually, the Agent's second weapon slot is for a specialized Energy Knife, not for vibro blades.

[Ecid]

First an Foremost: Am 5 April findet auf der Insel (London auf dem Gelände von HMV) ein Community Event statt. Ausgewählte Mitglieder der SW:Tor Community werden dort für 1h SW:Tor auf der "Origin World" spielen können. Jede Klasse kann gewählt werden, sowohl Republic als auch Empire. Das Event findet am Rande eines Presse Events statt. Zusammen mit den HMV-Tickets werden rund 200 Fans (je 100 pro Session) das Game testen können. Video- und Photofootage des Events sind erlaubt, allerdings nur solange sie nicht die Bildschirme filmen. Das event unterliegt ansonsten keiner weiteren NDA, ihr könnt also mit Berichten der Commuity rechnen.



Dann gab es da noch die News zum Thema "Shyriiwook Localization"

http://www.swtor.com/news/news-article/20110401 (EN)
http://www.swtor.com/de/nachrichten/artikel/20110401 (DE)
Mit 3 Videos und einem besonders interessantem Screenshot, der aufzeigt wie Chat's aussehen wenn man kein Shyriiwook versteht.


In den Kommentaren lässt sich dann auch folgendes finden:

So far we have:
-Facial Expressions (and blinking!)
-Emotes (Face Palm, Shocked/Scared face, Sad Face...)
-Companion UI
-Possible Love Scenes?

Yes, kind of, to all four.

First - and what I was mostly thinking of - you got a glimpse of the improved facial animation system that our animators have been working on for quite a while. This is going to help make conversation scenes in The Old Republic even more involving! With or without Wookiees.

Second, yes, that's companion UI... however, our UI has entirely changed. We now use Ewok fur instead of Wookiee fur. Also, it looks different. Let's just call it a work in progress!

Three and four - yes, we have lots of emotes and yes, we have love scenes (perhaps lacking in sound effects).

Also just FYI - Bowdaar's appearance in the second video was purely as a silent punchline to the action. The usage of companions in Flashpoints and other parts of the game is still in testing.

[Ecid]

Könnt ihr euch noch an diesen Screenshot erinnern ?
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/6227/lolojedi.png

Okay, for starters, fake screenshot is fake.

Moving on: it's very important to some on the team that the look and feel of characters tend to gravitate to match their classes - this concept of gravity is the important thing. While we do want to allow a certain amount of freedom in letting people choose a visual look for themselves, we also want to be sure that the easy path, the path of least resistance, ends up with people looking like Star Wars. This was, and remains, an important goal for those of us doing itemization.

Along the way, we've tried a few things. Incidentally, 'tried a few things' is one of the reasons we tend not to tell you guys about features until we've tried them out a bit - many ideas that sound good on paper fail in practice, and we prefer to weed those out before, say, people get attached to said failed idea and get angry because we took them out.

One of the things that we tried was gear that morphed when you put it on, so if a Trooper puts on armor statted for a Jedi, the armor would suddenly look like Trooper armor. This ended up being disconcerting to a lot of people playing the game: icons didn't match, for example, and gear that looked lame on you would look awesome on your companion character, which felt pretty sucky when you put it back on you. ('Felt sucky', incidentally, is code for, 'bad designer, no cookie').

Our gear now is settling in a pretty good state, in my opinion. We've taken the coolest and most emblematic armor, first off, and made it class only.

For the rest of the armor, we are following a reasonably standard RPG model of heavy, medium and light. Knights and Troopers both chase heavy, for example, but care about different stats. Armor with Knight-favored stats looks a closer to the Jedi ideal, whereas armor with Trooper stats looks more like the Troopers we know and love.

Yes, you can put on some vaguely 'Trooper-esque' armor as a Knight, but your stats will be terrible, thus the gravity of, you know, being good at your class is going to mean that it's rare.

And let's not forget that there is social value in seeing a Knight in vaguely 'Trooper-esque' armor - you know he's probably terrible at his class, and you probably shouldn't let him tank.

I've been playing our test server a lot lately, and I can tell you right now, people who are concerned about this are worrying too much. Our Knights look like Knights, our Troopers look like Troopers, and our players by and large are ending up with appearances that are appropriate for the class.

I also appreciate that you're not afraid to call out the lowest common denominator.

It's really not that, although I do appreciate the opportunity to bring the snark.

Success in MMOs (any MMO) requires the player have a certain level of skill, as well as a certain amount of knowledge about how the game works. It's important for designers to acknowledge that there are skill disparities between players, and (a) ensure the more advanced players have challenges that meet their acquired skill levels and (b) help get the lesser players enough skill and/or knowledge that they can take part in the good stuff.

Failure is tough in any game, but in MMOs its worse due to the social stigma of failing around other people. One of the key problems learning to tank, for example, is that failure is fairly binary (you suceed, or you fail) and usually while you're doing so, your whole party is paying the price. Pretending that everyone will be awesome-sauce in your game systems is ultimately myopic, and frequently addressing the issue that they won't be is often core to game design decisions we make.

[Ecid]

Könnt ihr euch noch an diesen Screenshot erinnern ?
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/6227/lolojedi.png

Okay, for starters, fake screenshot is fake.

Moving on: it's very important to some on the team that the look and feel of characters tend to gravitate to match their classes - this concept of gravity is the important thing. While we do want to allow a certain amount of freedom in letting people choose a visual look for themselves, we also want to be sure that the easy path, the path of least resistance, ends up with people looking like Star Wars. This was, and remains, an important goal for those of us doing itemization.

Along the way, we've tried a few things. Incidentally, 'tried a few things' is one of the reasons we tend not to tell you guys about features until we've tried them out a bit - many ideas that sound good on paper fail in practice, and we prefer to weed those out before, say, people get attached to said failed idea and get angry because we took them out.

One of the things that we tried was gear that morphed when you put it on, so if a Trooper puts on armor statted for a Jedi, the armor would suddenly look like Trooper armor. This ended up being disconcerting to a lot of people playing the game: icons didn't match, for example, and gear that looked lame on you would look awesome on your companion character, which felt pretty sucky when you put it back on you. ('Felt sucky', incidentally, is code for, 'bad designer, no cookie').

Our gear now is settling in a pretty good state, in my opinion. We've taken the coolest and most emblematic armor, first off, and made it class only.

For the rest of the armor, we are following a reasonably standard RPG model of heavy, medium and light. Knights and Troopers both chase heavy, for example, but care about different stats. Armor with Knight-favored stats looks a closer to the Jedi ideal, whereas armor with Trooper stats looks more like the Troopers we know and love.

Yes, you can put on some vaguely 'Trooper-esque' armor as a Knight, but your stats will be terrible, thus the gravity of, you know, being good at your class is going to mean that it's rare.

And let's not forget that there is social value in seeing a Knight in vaguely 'Trooper-esque' armor - you know he's probably terrible at his class, and you probably shouldn't let him tank.

I've been playing our test server a lot lately, and I can tell you right now, people who are concerned about this are worrying too much. Our Knights look like Knights, our Troopers look like Troopers, and our players by and large are ending up with appearances that are appropriate for the class.

I also appreciate that you're not afraid to call out the lowest common denominator.

It's really not that, although I do appreciate the opportunity to bring the snark.

Success in MMOs (any MMO) requires the player have a certain level of skill, as well as a certain amount of knowledge about how the game works. It's important for designers to acknowledge that there are skill disparities between players, and (a) ensure the more advanced players have challenges that meet their acquired skill levels and (b) help get the lesser players enough skill and/or knowledge that they can take part in the good stuff.

Failure is tough in any game, but in MMOs its worse due to the social stigma of failing around other people. One of the key problems learning to tank, for example, is that failure is fairly binary (you suceed, or you fail) and usually while you're doing so, your whole party is paying the price. Pretending that everyone will be awesome-sauce in your game systems is ultimately myopic, and frequently addressing the issue that they won't be is often core to game design decisions we make.

[Parth]

Update off-site heute, Video mit Highlights der PAX East:

http://www.swtor.com/de/medien/trailer/ ... -east-2011

[Ecid]

"I got to be a frickin Jedi man!"


Neues aus der Welt der Devs:

Believe it or not, the issue of throwing too much story at the customer is something that we talk a lot about at Design Central. Throwing too much talk at the customers all at once tends to be confusing, and can dilute the power of the strong quests. We've become pretty adept at understanding quest flow, and how it's unique in our game. VO quest givers tend to be a little more spread out from each other than in other games, for example, and we lean on systems like Bonus Quests (quests that are unlocked on the field) to deliver goals and objectives without VO and story.

There were originally concerns that these systems would weaken the sense of story in the game, but its done the opposite -- our VO'd quests now really shine, largely I personally believe because they have more oxygen to breathe.

I think a "Previously, in SWTOR..." feature could be very nice but it might be pretty hard to implement.
Actually, we sort of have exactly that.

Every time you log into the game, the loading screen gives a summary of your Class Quest so far - a short and succinct few paragraphs, but it's very effective nonetheless. For the world quests and other quests of less import, though, you will have to resort to your quest log.

Für alle die Interesse an den Spielerfahrungen vom UK Community Event haben: 29 Spieler berichten in ausführlicher Form ala "Ecid plays Kotor I" über ihre Erfahrung beim 1 Stunden Anspiel-Event der Homeworlds (german sux btw)
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthre ... dit5974896

[Parth]

FF: adv classes update: http://www.swtor.com/de/nachrichten/blog/20110408

[Parth]

DE mit Klärungen nach dem UK Event

Hey Folks,

First of all, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who came out for the event. I was running on four hours sleep, jet-lagged and we had just finished an all-day press event. The energy and enthusiasm you folks brought woke me up and kept me energized throughout. Like PAX, any time we get a chance to share the game with our fans it turns into an amazing time. Now, let me see if I can clear some stuff up that there seemed to be questions on:

- Party size in the game right now is four, which includes CCs. This is also true in Flashpoints. This does not mean having two people and their CCs is the same as having four people. CCs are powerful but they are not the same as having smart humans nor are they equal in power. So on a less difficult Flashpoint with amazing players or players that had a couple extra levels it’s likely possible to two man or three man them but I will say that when Alex and I tried to two-man the Heroics on Dromund Kaas with our CCs we got stomped flat. And, you know, I’ve been playing this game a while. Most important to remember: All of these rules can and likely will change in the future. And yes sometimes they’ll change week to week if there’s a new build during that time. This is what testing is about.

- I referred to “ten plus hour worlds”. It’s my short hand in the office for “big worlds.” It's not a concrete number for play time. Some of them are bigger than that. Some are much bigger. And obviously, your time spent on them may vary, especially if you like looking at our gorgeous landscapes.

-There are light side and dark side icons on the dialogue wheel if you are using the mouse. If you are using number keys to pick dialogue options, you’ll never see them. So if you hate the idea of choosing wrong, you’re going to be a mouse user for dialogue. If you hate the idea of hand holding you’ll be a number key player. Best of both worlds.

-Swimming will not be in TOR for ship. It is not a 'free feature' we turned off and is actually a huge amount of animation, pathfinding and AI work. Either every creature in the game needs to have water moving/fighting animations and AI to handle 3D movement or combat has to stop in the water with all the AI craziness that having safe zones you can jump in and out of entails. We have nothing against swimming but it’s never going to outrank improving combat, Companion AI or any of our other core features.

-Dark Side / Light Side is working even though most people didn’t see a difference in their bar on the terribly ugly placeholder Character Screen. The bar doesn’t move much per decision because it’s a long game. Highlighting the bar shows the point value which makes it easier to tell quest by quest progress.

- Class quest answers are not arranged by DS/LS but by class appropriateness. So the most “Boba Fett” response (curt, professional, all business) goes on the top of the Bounty Hunter. The most “Vader” on top of the Sith Warrior etc. So if you’re playing purely to your class fantasy you can just keep moving along easily. So in similar situations a Sith Warrior might have a “[Kill Him]” option as a first response but an Inquisitor might have it second and the first response might be trying to look deeper at the situation and discover what’s really going on.

-Darths do outrank Lords in our time period and both are official titles in this Sith Empire. The honorific, however, is always “my lord” when speaking to a Sith who outranks you whether they are officially a lord or not. So all soldiers in the Imperial military of normal rank (not moffs and generals, etc) will call you “my lord” as soon as you achieve Sith status. This doesn’t mean you’re actually a Lord by title yet. The Sith themselves have a complex sense of rank and will often try to test others with their forms of address.

-There was an odd bug that was causing cover points to appear for Troopers and Bounty Hunters. These have not become cover classes.

-Training abilities does cost credits.

-Datacrons are, in fact, spread all over TOR in hard to reach places, do appear on your map if you’re close enough, have some awesome history pieces for your codex, are very hard to get (I’ve only gotten a couple ever in playing) and do permanently increase your stats. Kudos to Kandycane for being the first person I’ve ever seen to get one at an event. Explorer badge!

Hope that helps,
Daniel Erickson

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthre ... dit5987118

[Parth]

ich nehme das diese woche mit: die erweiterten klassen wurden zum zweiten mal weiterentwickelt und hybriden sind competetive, cap bei 17 plannis, companions fuellen gruppen bei fp's auf und machen beim open world pvp mit (alle mit bowdaar ), min/maxplayers werden weniger spass (stooryy) haben, und DE soll im sammelpost zum uk event (siehe auch weiter oben) zitiert worden sein: "saying there will be a heavy focus on World PvP."

ach ja, geschwommen wird nicht