NephilimNexus
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Posts posted by NephilimNexus
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Some things to keep in mind...
1) There is the Empire and then there are the Sith. A good comparison would be to look at the political situation in China after it was taken over by the Manchurians (thus creating the phrase "Manchurian Candidate). There are often conflicts of interest between the Sith and those who's true loyalty is to the Empire. I suspect this is what happens when one tries to impose a system of medieval nobility (the Sith) on top of of an autocratic military junta (the Empire). The two do not really mesh well. After all, what is the actual military rank of Darth anyone? Colonel? General? How do they fit into the military hierarchy? Simply put, they don't. Their special status means that they are constantly stepping on toes within the actual Imperial military. I suspect that fear & the Force are the only things that keep them from getting shot in the back on a daily basis.
2) There are Sith and then there are the Dark Jedi. The Sith, as you all know, were originally an actual race of beings. They got so entrenched in the Dark Side, however, that they became Dark Jedi exclusively. Eventually, the terms became synonymous with each other. However, while all Sith may be Dark Jedi, not all Dark Jedi are Sith. A Dark Jedi can be of any species. That a non-Sith who is a Dark Jedi would think of themselves as Sith is simply a telling sign of how much power the Sith hold within the Empire. It's a mark of status or something.
Before that, though, the original Jedi were what is now known as Gray Jedi. That is they practiced both Light and Dark powers as needed, and held no allegiance to either. The problem was that eventually some/many of them ended up going entirely Dark Side, and thus the whole Jedi civil war thing, and afterward the remaining Jedi made a new rule forbidding using Dark Side powers, thus cementing this schizm forever.
A good analogy (that some may find flame war material, but I'm just being diverse) would be to compare the Vulcans & Romulans from Star Trek. They obviously share a common origin and both are capable of expressing great passions, even to the point of violence. And it is this point of violence where they split off, as the Vulcan's reaction to their potentially violent nature when emotional is to sever their ties to emotion entirely. The Romulans, meanwhile, embrace their emotions, claiming it gives them strength. Sound familiar, anyone?
The point being that, unlike the Sith, there is nothing forbidding a general purpose Dark Jedi from using the Light Side if they want to. They may prefer to use the Dark Side, but unlike the regular Jedi they have no rules against using the powers of the other team if it suits their purposes.
So yes, it is quite possible to have a Light Side character operating within the Empire.
Which then brings up "How does one have a Dark Side character within the Republic?" Well, not everyone in the Republic is a Jedi (or so I'm told) and for non-force users the Dark/Light issue is mostly moot, really, at least from the Jedi point of view. The Jedi have far more patience & leniency towards evil non-force users than those who even so much as dabble in the Dark Side.
Second, consider the sheer competitiveness & overbearing nature of the Sith. If one was a Dark Jedi, or even just a Gray Jedi, where would you rather be? As a Dark Jedi in the Empire, you are pretty much forced to join the ranks of the Sith, follow the Sith code, and deal with all the backstabbing political BS that goes with the whole Sith gig. But if you're a Dark Jedi, one who really understands that part about the Dark Side leading to freedom, then why would you want to become entangled with all that? Why not just head to the Republic instead? So long as you keep a low profile and avoid any Jedi sniffing you out, you can actually enjoy all that freedom the Dark Side is supposed to offer you and without having to join anyone's "special club" of sociopaths. You know, like using the Force to win at gambling & pick up chicks. Control works both ways, which is why ruling an Empire is a full time 24/7 job. Where's the freedom in that?
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To me, it's like Lawful Evil/Chaotic Good. I've heard some say there can be on such thing as "Chaotic Good".
Very well put.
As someone once said, "There are no good or bad governments, only good and bad leaders."
The problem with the Republic was corrupt, apathetic, bribe-taking senators.
The problem with the Empire was Palpatine.
Either system of government was perfectly capable of creating a perfectly decent society if not for the people in charge of them.
There is a lot of good books covering the lore of what happens after the movie trilogy, and they explore & identify these issues in great detail. Within the Republic, the Mon Calamari & Quarrens start shooting at each other again, along with numerous old rivalries against turning into open conflict - the unfortunate side effect of their new found "freedoms" being abused. Likewise, with the Sith element removed from the remnants of the Empire, they too undergo a (slow) change for the better and many people turn to their iron-fisted methods as a reasonable solution to solving things like rampant crime & civil wars.
In the end, both the Republic & the Empire could stand to learn a lot from each other. Eventually, I suspect, they would become nearly identical to each other.
See also "Hegelian Dialetic"
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Simple, Bioware weighed the Scales of Balance between:
1) Inventing an entirely new world for the fanboys to argue about whether it was canon or not.
2) Recycling a planet everyone was already familiar with & saving a lot of trouble.
Number two seems like the safer option.
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Short version: Someone at Bioware picked up a Star Wars comic and said "This Thrawn guy is cool, let's put him in the game somehow!" Meanwhile, Logic & Reason continued to drink away their shame & wallow in tears in the corner, as they had been for some time.
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Sadly, I doubt that will be the case. A long standing tradition with Bioware has been "The illusion of free will" ... meaning that your decisions may affect trivial things, but never anything major.
Though they are getting better at it. For instance, in the Mass Effect series, nothing you do will change the outcome of the game. However, in ME2 your decisions effect who will actually survive the final mission - which (we are told) affects who is still around once ME3 comes out. There are also a couple of "impossible" dialog options that only open up with maxed karma (either way), which can avoid some pointlessly difficult battles.
One problem I have here, though, is that if I'm in a group and lose the social roll to speak and the other player makes a light/dark choice, I still get hit with the points for their decision. While I'm sure a good philosophical debate could be made out of that, it's still poor gameplay mechanics IMHO.
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You know in Fallout 3 there is a perk that you can only get if you have neutral karma (it gives a bonus to speak/negotiation).
There is also a few companions who will only join you if you're neutral as well.
Something to be learned, here, Bioware.
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I remember back in the old pen & paper Star Wars RP game (West End Games) they said right there in the book (not verbatim) that though your actions may well affect the lives of millions, maybe even several worlds, the galaxy still encompasses thousands upon thousands of planets & trillions of beings. In other words, the 'Big Picture' is still bigger than you, no matter how big you may get.
And that was the point and appeal of the game. The movie canon stuff was still happening, the big players (Luke, Vader, et al) were still shaping the galaxy as a whole, but you (the players) still affected the stuff that happened in the background. Yes, you could very well save a planet... planet in question being some forgotten backwater world in the middle of nowhere. But you had fun doing it anyway because the game was about adventure, not ego gratification.
Sadly, that's a concept that's been lost over the years with game designers, and especially with the MMORPG realm - though in the latter case, players themselves are often to blame. At the dawn of gaming, the games were designed to give some sense of excitement & adventure to young-to-middle aged types with boring, tedious jobs & classes.
These days, though, it's all about the "leet" kids who were told from birth that their precious snowflakes and all destined to be president, and thus this new generation all want their games to fill the gap in that desire of self-importance that reality will never, ever deliver.
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The general direction of online gaming over the last decade has to been to phase out crafting altogether. They do this by making it worse & worse with every new game until all the people who did crafting simply give up & join the herd.
I played a Master Shipwright in the original SWG, yet I have no intentions of even touching the crafting system here, because I knew it would be exactly like what you described.
The days of crafting in MMORPGs are going to way of the dinosaur. It's all just about bigger boss fights for better loot drops, now. Instant gratification > everything else.
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The Jonestown Massacre happened exactly one day after the Star Wars Christmas special first aired.
So yeah, it really was that bad.
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They'll just raise the level cap soon enough. It's what keeps WoW afloat after all these years, and every game developer knows that there is a guy from accounting lording over his shoulder & saying "I may know nothing about online games but I know market shares, so clearly the thing to do is just copy WoW in every way possible short of getting us sued."
And thus it is done.
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Standard MMORPG practice is to start your PvP character on a PvE server, max their level, and then transfer them to a PvP server.
After all, the rule of PvP servers is that there are only two levels: "Max" and "Gank Bait," and the gank bait isn't allowed to ever reach max by those who are already there at max. Hence the above.
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An interesting idea: what if a bunch of us regulars got together in-game, even with alts, for a guild dedicated to appearance customization. We could organize and focus our crafting as a group to increase our odds with the RNG orange schematic game. (Maybe call the guild "Keeping Up Appearances" )
Back when MxO was still around, there was an entire community dedicated to nothing but fashion. Considering the mind-boggling amount of outfits available in the game, and how advanced the graphics were (at the time), these people actually poured their gametime into collecting, crafting & putting together the coolest/hotest outfits they could and then finding their way into the most impressive/exotic locations they could (for backdrops) and just do screenshot modeling shoots for hours on end.
If you think that sounds lame then you didn't see the results of those shoots. They could (and should) have used them for advertising.
Sadly, MxO was touched by the Hand of Death (read: SOE bought it out) and was promptly evacuated, abandoned & shut down not long after. Shame, really. I was nice seeing a game so far in the opposite direction of WoW.
Back on track - the original SWG had two entire skill/career paths dedicated soley to appearances - image designer & tailor. And some young folks here might be surprised to find out how lucrative those two paths were, especially considering that there were some appearances that image designers could do for you post-character-creation that were not available during your original character creation. Pay up, buddy. Ditto for tailors - because it was a totally player driven economy tailors were the only source of decent clothing. No self respecting Imperial Colonel would be seen mucking about the plebs without his dress uniform, now would he?
Ahh, immersion, how I miss thee.
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More than auto-attack for melee it needs auto-run-to for melee.
Many other games already have this; if you have a target highlighted and a melee weapon, when you hit an attack button your toon runs (follows) the target to get into melee range.
Very frustrating when fighting mobs and having to manually move myself towards foes who are camping on my blindside and one step out of blade range, especially when the camera does not automatically move to focus on your target either.
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Look up "Coca Cola" in Japanese.
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Turn off Vsynch.
There is something seriously wonky about Vsynch+ATI+64 bit OS. I had the exact same problem myself (having nearly the same rig you do) and it all came down to Vsync (major FPS killer) and Shadows (minor FPS killer).
Ditch those two and you can run everything at max & still get awesome FPS.
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I played WoW for exactly two days (free trial), decided that it was the dumbest, most boring MMORPG ever created, uninstalled it from my computer and never looked back.
Yet like a disease it keeps finding it's way into all the other MMORPGs out there, so I suppose I've been vicariously playing WoW for many years, bouncing from one new game to another, hoping in vain to find something that is truly different from that horrible, horrible experience from so long ago.
So far, no luck. Everywhere I go it just the same game wearing different costumes.
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The reason why MMOs are like that is because WoW has ruined the MMO genre. People expect everything to play like WoW but be "better".
Fact of the matter is, you can't do this because they think WoW is some kind of magical perfection of MMO-playing and you can't ever be "better" then it. Despite the fact WoW isn't really that good at all.
Nailed it right on the head, here. I, and I suspect many of you here, used to play SWG back before it got dumbed down into "WoW + lasers" and everyone quit overnight. I came here hoping to see a lot of those lost, original game elements brought back into a newer, modern form. The great elements like:
No "iconic character class" bullcrap. No classes at all, in fact. There was just skill trees. If you wanted to learn a skill then you used that skill until the skill leveled up. Over 50 skill tress to choose from ensured that no two characters were alike.
No character levels, just skills. This alone made PvP actually interesting, as you had no clue as to what the other guy was able to bring into the fight until he used it on you. And vice verse.
The most amazingly detailed crafting system ever seen in any MMORPG. So detailed that half the skill trees were crafting themed, and many players had toons that were nothing but crafters. You could honestly make a name for yourself without ever picking up a blaster, so long as you knew how to make really, really good blasters to put on the market.
Which brings me to: A real market and not just that crappy auction house routine that every game cuts & pastes from WoW. A market so detailed that players could place their own stores in the game world to showcase their wares.
Which brings me to: Player housing, and not some "magic portal" private instance generator, either. No, housing was right there on the map. You opened the door and walked inside. There was no transition from one map to another. Your house was just like every other fully realized structure in the game, and you could decorate it. And I just don't mean stupid "achievement" trophies that could only go on "hooks" - anything you found in the game could me placed anywhere you want with a simple yet versatile system for moving objects around in your home.
Which brings me to: Customization. For such an old engine they had a character creation & detail system worthy of "The Sims" - Height, weight, nose detail, eye detail, everything on adjustable sliders for precise control. None of that "Pick from our fine selection of five stock prefab heads and be happy" crap. Every character's appearance was just as distinct as their skill build, their homes, and their clothing. Oh yes, clothing was customized as well. It was the only game I ever saw besides "Matrix Online" where players RPed enough to give a crap about whether or not their outfits looked good > the stats slapped into those outfits.
It was a beautiful direction for a MMORPG to head into - one where characters weren't defined by levels & "leet build" templates. If you wanted to be a Doctor who dabbled in Music on the side, so be it. If you wanted to be a Pilot who took a minor in Bioengineering, so be it. If you wanted to throw all your skill points into Dancing, Cooking and Droid Design, hey, nothing to stop you.
It was, in other words, a true sandbox. You got to play the character you wanted to play.
Then WoW came along and scooped the brains out of the entire MMORPG industry in under a decade. By the time they were done every game out there had magically turned into a cheap WoW clone, and SWG was no exception. Their NGE was the final blow, the final caving into being nothing more than yet another pathetic WoW clone and thus everyone left. We sat waiting for years upon years hoping someone would fix it, but it never happened.
So when Bioware came along we thought, "Hey, maybe we'll finally see a MMORPG that isn't just a cheap WoW clone. If nothing else, they won't make the same mistakes that SWG did. They know better than to pigeonhole players into stupid 'iconic character classes,' tie us down to the same tired level system, or wipe out crafting in favor of loot drops, and they certainly won't stoop to WoW's mentality of hamster-wheel gameplay that revolves entirely around simply grinding to become yet another carbon copy of every other top level character whom has a virtually identical powers set at yourself & wonder why PvP got so boring so quickly."
And then the curtain was finally drawn and what did we see?
*sigh*
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When I first booted my FPS looked like a slide show, but having run into that elsewhere I guessed the culprit right away: VSynch and Shadows have always been my major FPS killers over the years (maybe it's an ATI card thing? I dunno). Once I turned shadows off my FPS doubled. When I killed VSynch it more than quadrupled. Which meant that I was able to go from minimum textures & detail to maximum and still get great FPS with just two mouse clicks.
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1) The game is barely a week old. Sheesh.
2) Personally, I've yet to encounter any major bugs. A couple tiny graphics glitches but otherwise this is game is amazingly stable - which is even more amazing for being a game so new.
3) You want to see bugs? Go play Batteground Europe for a while. That game's been around for over 10 years and it's still so full of bugs that their one server can't go six hours without completely crashing.
I swear, people don't realize just how good they've got it. Yes, I'm reverse-trolling.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but does not the Empire intro movie show a female Twilek bounty hunter with the Sith shock troops?
I saw that and said, "Hmm a Twilek bounty hunter, seems like an interesting character concept. I think I'll try that!"
Behold my disappointment once I got to the actual character creation screen and saw that this was not actually possible.
So, what gives?
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A neutral faction is desperately needed, as well. I find it rather silly that Smugglers are forced to by aligned with the Republic. Smugglers should only be loyal to large stacks of credits and work for whoever is paying the most.
Ditto for Bounty Hunters. Now some may say Bounty Hunters are very Imperial leaning, and that is true in the movies because the Emperor basically threw so much money into tracking down Jedi that there was little incentive for bounty hunters to do their original jobs - namely, hunting down dangerous criminals... which is exactly what they did up until the time of the Star Wars movies (i.e. 3000+ years away from TOR). How does that make them evil? So then why are they forced to be Imperial in TOR?
And while I'm hijacking the subject, why are all Troopers with the Republic and all Agents with the Empire? Does the Republic not have their own spies? Does the Empire not have, well, regular soldiers? Seems like these are two classes that should be available for both sides.
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Being one who played Star Wars Galaxies, I was kinda expecting the whole space thing to be a much bigger part of the game with lots of open space areas to explore and mission in.. so obviously I thought it was a joke when I figured the space stuff was just a rail shooter.
While we all here can agree that SWG has gone the way of the dinosaur & drowned in it's own tar pit of suckage, it is also important that we not forget that it wasn't always just a cheap "WoW + lasers" pseudo-console game like it is today. Once upon time SWG was the game everyone loved, and hopefully Bioware will not be ashamed to steal those things we love from the ruins of SWG's past and implement them here in TOR.
Things like real space combat, where skill & stats we fused into a single game where both mattered. Character customization options worthy of "The Sims" - quite unlike the modern industry standard of "pick one of 3-8 standard templates & be happy we even gave you that much" (height, weight, and genuine facial sculpting where all in there). Image & clothing design - because proud officers on both sides enjoyed strolling around town in full dress uniform. Sure it had no combat stats, but it wasn't meant for combat. Neither was fishing or half a dozen other skills that players enjoyed. Heck, half the game revolved around one of the most intensive crafting systems ever seen in any MMORPG to date.
And that's the point: Original SWG was loved because it was a sandbox. Players could customize their character's looks, wardrobe, equipment, and skills to such a level of precise, creative detail that players felt truly attached to those characters. RPing wasn't something the devs had to spoon feed people, either. With such dynamic, varied and personalized characters, people were quite happy to do all the RP/social interaction stuff on their own.
Most of all, remember that the NGE was the death of SWG, and in that way it was their pigeonholing every character into neat little identical compartments that did it. Loot replaced crafting, "iconic classes" replaced all customization, fixed gameplay replaced the sandbox and, eventually, TOR came along and replaced SWG.
I hope this lesson is not lost on Bioware. There's a lot of ex-SWG people playing TOR now, and the last thing any of us want to see is for TOR to make the same mistakes that Sony did when they took their great game and stripped it down to it's least entertaining denominators.
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this game is practically single player, we were promised an MMO, why does my server say "full" when there are NO PEOPLE ANYWHERE?!?!!
Game is nearly a week old, now, and everyone else has already hit max level with all their toons and are thus busy running off & doing whatever passes for raids in TOR.
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Well, I believe if a Sith Pureblood carries some form of imperfection they were deemed inferior. Some Sith purebloods not having all five fingers for example were considered lessers and inferior to those that carried all five. Just one such example.
"They're all sort of frumpy, aren't they? Because it's a bad idea when cousins marry." - Eddie Izzard
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