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Regular-kind MMO combat ain't gonna cut it in Star Wars: The Old Republic, says BioWare. The developer is gunning for something a little more impressive. To hear BioWare honcho Greg Zeschuk describe it, we're all gonna be thinking "From the top now! Five, six, seven, eight!" every time you fire up the oversized lightsaber in PvP.
Darth Loser...Tatooiny...C-Creepio...fuck you, George Lucas. I know, you didn't make this game, but still. You led us down the path that led to this game. Which led to this trailer.
LucasArts and BioWare are holding a press event in San Francisco today to reveal their next massively multiplayer online game, known as Star Wars: The Old Republic. The title has already been formally announced as a PC release, a successor to the Knights of the Old Republic role-playing games and not designed as a replacement for Star Wars Galaxies. We're there, liveblogging the midichlorians out of the thing, furiously typing away as if our friends were about to be crushed to death by an Imperial trash compactor if we didn't update fast enough. Hit the jump for the thrilling, up-to-the-second liveblog of the event.
BioWare and LucasArts have officially announced Star Wars: The Old Republic, the second massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the Star Wars universe. While technically not a replacement for Sony Online Entertainment's Star Wars Galaxies, BioWare brands the ambitious MMO, set in the time period of previous Knights of the Old Republic games as a sequel of sorts to those games — events occur some three centuries after KOTOR II — calling the MMO "Knights of the Old Republic 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12-plus."
Two factions, the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire, will also incorporate two paths, light side and dark side.
"You can play as the good guy in the bad place trying to do good things or the bad guy in the good place trying to do bad things," according to BioWare.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is currently scheduled for a PC release, but a date has yet to be determined. For more details, including artwork and screen shots, read on.
Star Wars: The Old Republic revealed [GameSpot]
Like a disturbance in the force, you knew it was coming. With the official announcement popping out for the Japanese market last week, today we hear that Darth Vader and Yoda will be made available as downloadable characters for Soul Calibur IV in the US as well. Which means 360 owners can play as Vader, PS3 owners, as Yoda. Both will be available on October 23 - same day as Japan - and will cost 400 MS Points/$US5.
Remember the PC Gaming Alliance? Yeah, formed back at the Game Developers Convention, it has representation from pretty much all of the big hardware brands in PC gaming, plus publishers Activision and Epic. And its president, Intel's Randy Stude, just went off on LucasArts for not creating a PC version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
LucasArts' reasoning was that the variety of gaming PC setups out there, plus the limitations of lower-end configurations, would make it difficult to create a version of SW:TFU that everyone enjoyed. Stude, in an interview teased on Videogamer.com, called that an "uneducated" excuse and added "LucasArts hasn't made a good game in a long time."
Said Stude:
"In the last several years there have been at least 100 million PCs sold that have the capabilities or better of an Xbox 360. It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game potentially and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response."
But wait, there's more:
When I spoke to Haden Blackman, executive producer of The Force Unleashed, last month about the upcoming new level of the Star Wars game he told me that they are considering giving players new force powers down the line as part of a downloadable content pack.
But what interested me more were the cut force powers.
"We implemented more force powers than we shipped with," Blackman told me. "We removed some because of consumer feed back. There were too many in the game and (the force) started getting watered down.
"We do have other ones we could go back to look at."
While Blackman declined to list out the cut force powers, I did manage to get him to talk about one of the cut powers he particularly liked.
Jeff Freeman, whose work includes stints at Spacetime Studios and Sony Online Entertainment on Star Wars Galaxies as lead gameplay designer, has died at the age of 39, an apparent suicide, reports The Escapist. Freeman was the target of the Star Wars Galaxies community's ire following the launch of the "new game experience" that took players by surprise with its timing and sweeping changes. The Escapist detailed the targeting of the game designer by SWG devotees in this 2007 write up. Freeman left SOE in 2006 to join Spacetime.
Freeman's brother tells the Escapist that "personal issues," not the fury of SWG players were at the root cause of his decision to take his own life.
Jeff Freeman, Former SWG Lead Gameplay Designer, Dies [The Escapist]
Over 1.5 million copies of Star Wars:TFU have been shifted since the game launched last week, making it the fastest-selling Star Wars game of all time.
Actually, is that such a great record? Hard to tell without knowing the other figures for context - anyway, it has sold a lot and that is good.
LucasArts say that the initial publishing run of 4.3 million copies is unlikely to last long, and the game is going into a a second 'printing' earlier than expected.
Full details after the jump
When LucasArts first announced Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the game where continuity is tussled in order to introduce a secret apprentice to Darth Vader, gamers were excited, and hardcore Star Wars fans were a little outraged. Star Wars continuity is not something you want to screw with unless you're George Lucas himself, and even then they're not too sure about it. Now time has passed, emotions have settled somewhat, and what is essentially the next installment of the epic Star Wars story is upon us. Has LucasArts managed to appease both gamers and Star Wars junkies, or have they left both groups out in the cold? The game critics tally midi-chlorians, after the jump.
