Fresh Star Wars: The Old Republic Screenshots Introduce the Jedi Consular
The Consular is a "ranged-style Jedi," going by LucasArts producer Jake Neri.
As before, we have no official word as to when BioWare's anticipated PC MMO will arrive or what sort of business model it will use, though all of its classes have now been revealed and closed beta applications are still being accepted.
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SeraphielX
replyAnyone else kinda concerned that this game just won't feel right?
I'm not sure Star Wars really works as MMO material. The Jedi people in the movies were fairly well established as nearly-unstoppable death machines, but that sort of thing just doesn't fit in an MMO where you have the standard auto-attack/special attack/etc kind of fight. So far, from the videos and such, it's looking like a generic MMO with a Star Wars skin on it.
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I'm pretty sure the only Star Wars MMO that would work would be one without Jedi, and the issue with that is the only reason anyone wants to play a star wars game is to be a Jedi.
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Actually I wouldn't. Jedis are kinda boring to me, I would rather play some alien dude hitting people with a wrench or something.
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I think it's safe to say you are an extreme minority. Most people play Star Wars games to get some hot jedi lightsaber action, not hot alien wrench action.
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Did you not play Knights of the Old Republic? The jedi in those games are far from unstoppable death machines. They had some kind of armor that would stop lightsabers, can't remember the name of the stuff.
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I did play KOTOR.
I really enjoyed it.
But yeah, they had this... cortosis(?) armor and swords (just so it could make some kind of sense to parry a lightsaber with something not-a-lightsaber). It was a sloppy handwave to cram Star Wars into a different sort of context and make the story work. The rest of the game was fantastic enough that I could let it slide.
From the videos I've been watching of this, just in the starting area, they've got these big animals you're supposed to kill for whatever reason. Is every animal made of cortosis? Is this material so prevalent that every soldier is covered with it? This is the only way it's even vaguely reasonable for it to take more than one hit to kill anything. Ever.
These glowing superweapons are just an inherent aspect of the Jedi that either: a) makes them so overpowered as to be senseless as a playable MMO class or b) requires watering them down so much to balance with everyone else that they just aren't correct anymore.
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To its credit, Star Wars Galaxies made jedi the rare, ultra-powerful individuals that you speak of. It was a real wonder to see one in action. The problem was it was such an exclusionary class that most people never saw the content and as such were angry about it.
I don't mind the SWTOR compromise of making the jedi a part of a balanced class roster, and I doubt most people who are going to play this game do either. The bottom line is that if the underlying gameplay mechanics are fun and are supported by various community/social features, this game ought to be successful, independent of setting, adherence to the lore, etc.
With that said, I haven't seen any evidence so far that the mechanics are, in fact, any fun at all.-
SWG was, in that respect at least, faithful to the setting they had chosen to work with. Star Wars, the post-movie situation, just isn't readily adaptable to an MMO. The one class that almost everyone would want to play is absurdly rare, so everyone's stuck with doing cantina dancer, bartender, nerf-herder, whatever. The alternative obviously didn't work either: throw out the established setting and let everyone be a Jedi.
TOR might work better on this front since the force-using types are supposed to be more numerous, but they're still having to fudge the setting pretty severely to cram it into the MMO-style combat mold.
I hope it's good. Maybe the story will be awesome enough to ignore whatever problems end up in the released version of the game. At this point I'm still not sold on the idea.
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Cortosis weave stops the blade, the pure metal actually shorts it out. Yes, my Star Wars nerd credentials are still valid!
Also, did you play the same games I did? I think 'unstoppable death machine' was the perfect description of my KOTOR characters - in KOTOR 1 I could kill anything in the galaxy besides Malak in 1 hit by the end of the game, and I could take out about 3/4 of his life, so it only took two hits to kill him. Rarely have I seen games in which the player is more broken.
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