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Hands-on with SWTOR's Jedi Knight on Tython
Last month, Massively was invited to LucasArts for a whole day's experience with BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic. One of the perks of living on the West Coast is that I get to attend all these awesome in-depth Silicon Valley events and really expand on Massively's sessions at various conventions! For all my enthusiasm, I have to admit I approached this hands-on with no small amount of trepidation. I'm a huge Star Wars fan (I still play Star Wars Galaxies!), but I fell out of "expert" range on the saga a decade ago. Like many of you readers, I've been wary of the hype and even warier of delusions of grandeur on the part of game companies trying to do justice to the IP. I was really afraid that it wouldn't be as good as I'd hoped and that I'd walk away disappointed. And given the parts I saw, SWTOR's not as good as I'd hoped. It's better. %Gallery-108535%
Massively's in-depth interview with SWTOR Community Manager Stephen Reid
Last Friday, Star Wars: The Old Republic finally revealed the Crew Skills crafting system. In a slightly less important announcement, BioWare also announced its new Community Manager, Stephen Reid. OK, I'm teasing. It is very important announcement. Since Sean Dahlberg stepped down, the community team has been without a face and voice to the community. Those left behind had to put in extra effort into providing the fans with the latest releases from the SWTOR news room, and for a while, the community was unsure who, if anyone, would be able to fill the shoes. Now, Stephen Reid has taken the helm of the massive community starship. Now since we have a new voice of the SWTOR community team, Massively thought it would be interesting to get his thoughts on the game, on the community, and on how we, the fans, could best make Star Wars: The Old Republic the game it should be. Massively Senior Editor Brianna Royce sat down with Stephen at a recent LucasArts event for an in-depth interview -- join us past the break to see what he had to say!
Hyperspace Beacon: Testing the SWTOR waters
If you didn't know already, just over a week ago three writers from Massively, including me, traveled to Seattle, Washington for PAX Prime. During that time, besides catching the flu, we were able to catch a glimpse of some of the games that have yet to be released. We were able to play games like TERA, The Force Unleashed II, Guild Wars 2, RIFT, End of Nations, and many, many others. Some were pretty good; others, not-so-much -- but most seemed very polished and perfect for presentation. Of course, you all know I was there to see Star Wars: The Old Republic. I caught a lot of it. There were six of the eight classes available for demo at the gorgeous LucasArts booth. (BioWare did have a booth there, too, but the team was displaying some small game it was trying to get off the ground called Dragon Age 2.) Visitors had a chance to try out the smuggler, trooper, agent, bounty hunter, and both Sith classes. Because of the enormous lines that constantly encircled the booth, I was only able to play three of the classes: smuggler, trooper, and Sith inquisitor. For this edition of the Hyperspace Beacon, I will give you my impressions of the gameplay for those classes. However, I want to take a slightly different look at them. At E3, Massively's editor Seraphina Brennan was able to give her impressions of the smuggler class -- she covered the mechanics and so on. Although I will touch on the combat mechanics, I have decided to focus on some of the features BioWare is famous for: cinematics, character development, and overall storytelling. Follow after the break, and I will give you an honest breakdown of how SWTOR measures up to its predecessors.
New ArenaNet blog post details dialogue in Guild Wars 2
Just yesterday, we talked a bit about the fact that Guild Wars 2 fans love the small details just as much as the large ones. As we learn more and more about Guild Wars 2, so much of what is exceptional about the game is found in those little details. Attention to the little things, right down to the stitching on a ranger's armor piece, adds up to create an overall sense of immersion and depth that helps make a good game a great one. That attention to detail comes heavily into play when the GW2 team looks at how the story is presented. Way back in May, Lead Designer Colin Johanson spoke at length about the traditional system of quests and quest text. We know that ArenaNet is actively rejecting the traditional -- and immersion breaking -- system, but what will take its place? We got some exciting news on that very thing last night, and as always, it's all in the details. Follow along after the jump to see for yourself.
Erickson dishes dialog choices for Star Wars: The Old Republic
Bioware has touted the fourth missing pillar from MMOs since the the first video introduction of Star Wars: The Old Republic: Story. This concept of great character development and plot on top of an intense combat experience has been Bioware's staple since, well, forever. Player choice propels every Bioware story in a very dynamic way, so we have no doubt Bioware will deliver. In fact, earlier this week we reported that SWTOR will boast the equivalent of 50 novels worth of dialog -- an insane amount of possible storytelling, to say the least. Yesterday, Daniel Erickson gave us a bit more to chew on in the SWTOR official forum. In the developer walk-through, we witnessed the dialog system in action. Not only will one player lead the conversation, but others in his group will be able to chime in as well, thus intensifying the story. How this system works has not been defined, yet players have high hopes for it. What Erickson did touch on in his post is the idea of choice. He tells us that dialog choice will differ in each class. A Sith will naturally want to choose the darker choice in the dialog tree, whereas the smuggler will naturally want the funny or flirty choice. Those choices will usually be the top option, but, Erickson says, "Want to be a hardcase Smuggler? A wry action hero Bounty Hunter? A charming Inquisitor? Choices are much broader than just good and evil." Multiple options will be available for those players who want to explore different paths for their character.
Alpha Protocol's protagonist can be a real jerk sometimes
The latest trailer for Obsidian's "Espionage RPG," Alpha Protocol, exposes one of the most useful tools a spy has at his disposal: His ability to converse. The video above explains the delicate balance you must maintain while questioning a source. And by "delicate balance," we mean, "be nice to him until he lets his guard down, then repeatedly strike him about the head with a half-full bottle of Ketel One." Hey, this "spy" stuff is easier than we thought! Fine, there's a little bit more to it than that. Check out the video above to see how your words are just as effective as your bullets, except in instances where you need to shoot someone.
The Tattered Notebook: Roleplaying advice for veterans and newbies alike
Hello there adventurers! Seccia has taken the week off to go visit the remainder of her family in Neriak so I'm stepping in to help out with her column! This week in The Tattered Notebook, I thought it would be a good time to talk about roleplaying a character. Roleplaying isn't just jumping into a game world and talking in a funny accent. It's also not just making up a character and spamming a scene with emotes. Good roleplaying skills take both time and practice to learn. And while I can't teach you everything in the space of a single column, I can give roleplayers, both veterans of the craft and newbies, a few tips to polish up your roleplaying skills and enhance the power of a scene.
Prince of Persia dialogue writer wins UK Writer's Guild award
The 2008 reboot of the Prince of Persia franchise (which, apparently, is getting shut down) featured some of the most enjoyable snark and pith we've ever heard in a video game. Fortunately, Andy Walsh, the man responsible for the Prince and Elika's sharp-tongued exchanges, was recently recognized for his witty dialogue when he won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Games Award last night in London. Normally, this is where we'd drop in a quote from Walsh about how excited he was to receive the award, but it doesn't seem that anyone initiated the optional dialogue with him following the Writers' Guild awards ceremony. Too bad, something tells us we've missed out on the best part.
Dialogue font in Clover PC no longer 'a hideous affront to humans with eyes'
Sometimes, all it takes to sully a good gaming experience is the implementation of an unattractive font. The merit of your game's well-written dialogue is lost when delivered in italicized, all-caps, 16-point Tahoma Impact -- a lesson recently learned by Binary Tweed, developer of the Xbox Live Indie Game darling Clover. Though the title was chock-full of charm, its dialogue was gruesome enough to sear the eyes right out of your head. Fortunately, Tweed has learned its lesson, and plans on adding a touch of polish to the dialogue in the game's upcoming PC iteration, Clover: A Curious Tale. Not only will the script be fully voice acted, and the dialogue paired with animated character portraits, but the font used in the game has been significantly gussied up. According to the developer's blog, it's no longer "a hideous affront to humans with eyes." We're guessing that means your cats will still find it fairly repugnant.
Breakfast Topic: Your favorite lines of spoken dialogue
While video game voice acting never really seems to draw the amazing big names, it's definitely steadily improving from the old day when it was spare members of the coding team and a couple people pulled off from the street or something. WoW seems to combine the best of both worlds here, in that Warcraft's Voice acting seems to run the gamut from awesome to pretty decent to painfully over-hammy. Still, to its credit, it's produced a whole lot of iconic lines, from the first "zug zug" to "You are not prepared" and beyond. With so many iconic phrases, both breath taking and amusing, I'm interested to know what lines of dialogue stick with you and why. Is it the turn of phrase? The delivery? The context in which the line is spoken that adds to the drama or humor?For me, it's all about Eadric the Pure. Pretty much every line of dialogue he gets in the Trial of the Crusader 5-man is amazing. Well acted, well scripted, with just the right balance between pomposity, noble righteousness and a sort of bemused sense of humor and enjoyment about the whole concept of the Argent Tournament. If I had to pick one line, it would be his final one: "I yield! I submit! Excellent work! May I run away now?"Yes, you may Eadric. But please, come back again soon. You're awesome.
Gary Whitta worked on a Warcraft screenplay
You'll notice that I surreptitiously left the question of "screenwriter" out of the other day's Breakfast Topic. That's because, quite frankly, I have no idea who I want writing the Warcraft movie. The folks I really like in Hollywood are probably too quirky to write an epic movie like this, and the folks who usually write these epic movies are too lame to handle a world like Warcraft. In my mind, only someone like Metzen should wield the pen for this one, and even then, his strengths lie in creating universes, not dialog. So I have no idea.But apparently there's already a screenplay being worked on: with the news that Sam Raimi is taking the helm, screenwriter Gary Whitta (who's written both for games and movies) says he'd been working with both Legendary and Blizzard on crafting a screenplay that included both the sprawling world and a story that would resonate with non-players. But he says that since Raimi took over, it's likely the whole thing will go in another direction, as "his own pretty specific vision of what he wanted to do story-wise." Whitta does say, however, that, from what he's heard, "Raimi is the best possible director for this." Sounds good to us.It'll be quite a tightrope to walk: depending on what Legendary actually wants out of the film, they've got to make the story interesting and pressing enough that even non-WoW players will get into it without ruining and/or ignoring the reason why there are so many players in the first place: the lush and intriguing universe we've all enjoyed playing in. Anyone tasked with putting together a script that uses all of those blocks to build something great will have quite a job ahead of them.[via Blue's News]
Wolverine movie borrowed lines from Wolverine game
Remember how when you saw the Wolverine movie yesterday, and it was at the part where Wolverine was all like "Rawrrgh! I'm going to cut on you!" and you thought that dialogue seemed pretty familiar? You may have heard that exact same line in X-Men Origins: Wolverine: The Game -- in a recent interview with Yahoo, Aussie hunk extraordinaire Hugh Jackman admitted he "was able to bring some of the lines of dialogue from the game script into the movie." Thief! Vagabond! Scoundrel!However, since the general consensus we've heard says the game is better than the flick, perhaps this scurrilous Outbacker's shameless line thievery isn't such a bad thing.[Via GoNintendo]
SWTOR has dialogue trees, irreversible choices, love interests
In the midst of all the frenzy over the announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic, we learned that players will have NPC companions like they do in single-player BioWare games. But there's more: BioWare has said that players will be able to engage in dialogue trees with their companions, and the decisions made in those trees will have irreversible implications.Anger your companion, and he or she might leave your party forever, or become your enemy. BioWare also hinted that romances with NPCs will be possible -- again, as in the single-player games. This all fits nicely into SWTOR's commitment to storytelling as an addition to traditional MMO gameplay. Things just gets better and better, don't they?Some questions are raised by this: how will players socialize with one anotherwhen they're constantly tied up in dialogue trees? Will it use the old BioWare dialogue method found in the KotOR games, or will it use the new, cropped Mass Effect one? Stay tuned, ya'll!%Gallery-35034% Bioware has finally unveiled Star Wars: The Old Republic, their new MMO! Massively's got you covered on all the details -- from liveblogging the announcement to screenshot galleries and more. Join us in the Galaxy far, far away!
CD Projekt going seriously overboard on The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
Judging from this screenshot, you can see where some of the *ahem* enhancements are going. CD Projekt is pouring a lot of time and effort into The Witcher, which came out almost a year ago. They're adding new animations, new NPC models, fixing all of the dialogue translation problems, squashing bugs, and "increasing load times by 80%." The question is, will people pay attention to a game that came out last year? GameCyte has a full interview with project lead Maciej Szczesnik who talks about the changes they've made. They caught a lot of flak over the poor translation of the game from the original Polish into English, and now they've re-recorded over 5,000 lines of dialogue along with all of the other upgrades and fixes. You can hear the difference between the old audio and the new audio pretty clearly by clicking on those links, but frankly... they just sound like different readings/voices to us. How does the plot change by hearing someone shout "Quick! To the laboratory!" any differently? The new edition, which comes out September 16th, includes two audio CDs, a making-of DVD, an official game guide, a short story from the author of the book that the game is based on, and a map, and it retails for $49.99. However, if you're previously purchased the game, it's a free download. Hey, we're all for free stuff.
Player vs. Everything: Age of Conan closed beta impressions
Everyone and their brother seems to be writing about Age of Conan over the last few days, but hopefully you're hungry for a little more. I've spent the last day and a half trying out different classes and playing through the various starting missions, and I'm ready to serve up some impressions. If you want the quick and dirty version, I'm really impressed with what Funcom has done. This game is worth your money. I'll try to talk about the aspects of the game that I haven't seen discussed much yet, as well as the stuff that everyone is talking about. It's also important to note that I've been playing with the closed beta client -- not the open beta one. There is a serious difference. I should mention that when I wrote Friday's article, I hadn't yet played the game and I was basing my arguments largely on the claims of people who had had bad experiences with the open beta client. I still stand by my arguments about making games with outlandish system requirements, but I think Age of Conan will run just fine on many systems. Keeping all of that in mind, here's what I think of the game.
All the World's a Stage: WTF is IC - OOC? WTB RP! OK THX, CU L8R
All the World's a Stage is brought to you by David Bowers every Sunday evening, investigating the mysterious art of roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.While many online gamers are famous for using "leetspeak," there's a certain portion of the community that places a great deal of importance on complete sentences and good spelling. Roleplayers, as a whole, are friendly and communicative, but nonetheless have special ways of interacting that other gamers may not understand. As a new roleplayer, I remember having to figure a lot of these things out, although I was blessed to befriend many people who kindly explained things to me as well. The first and most important concept I had to get a grasp of was the idea of "in-character" versus "out-of-character" communication (usually abbreviated to IC and OOC), and in what situations the use of either sort would be appropriate.It's fair to say that on an RP server where roleplaying is still the rule rather than the exception, anything in the /say or /yell channels should be "in character." That's to say, it should be phrased with good spelling and proper punctuation, and should only refer to happenings within the WoW universe. In situations where one must say something out-of-character in these channels, it is polite to at least couch your OOC words in double parentheses to clarify your meaning.
Wii Warm Up: It's dangerous to go alone
Gaming history is rife with humor, mistranslations, and moments of hilarity both purposeful and accidental. What we want to know is: which are your favorites? Why are those moments so memorable to you? Do you look forward to the chance to relive some of these times, thanks to the Virtual Console ... and some of the remakes for the DS?
DS Daily: Please win (no, really)
Details on the new minigames in Brain Age 2 have surfaced, and we finally know the origin of this hilarious screenshot. Dr. Kawashima isn't simply encouraging you (like he would ever do that!); instead, it turns out that part of the game is that sometimes you need to win at Rock, Paper, Scissors ... and sometimes, you need to lose. We can't wait to see that screen. "Please lose!" Gee, thanks. Next you're probably going to tell me that I fail at life.So what's the point? Well, we do love to talk about that wacky Dr. Kawashima around here (we like it a lot), but we figure that within a matter of months, "Please win" is a phrase that will work its way into our everyday lexicon of silly game phrases ... which of course leads us to ask you in turn about some of your other favorite wacky moments and unforgettable dialogue in gaming.%Gallery-3436%
Dialogue's FlyBook VM and V33i with HSDPA launching in Japan
We've had a lust affair with the Flybook line of ultra-portables ever since we spotted the V33i model last year. Today, Dialogue announced that they'll be offering the Flybook V33i (pictured) to Japan with the option for built-in WWAN for HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS/GPS connectivity. Oh never mind that Japan hasn't even launched their HSDPA service yet, this chicken has hatched and set to roll on July 4th for ¥268,800 (about $2,336). Just enough time for local carriers to meet their most aggressive launch targets. Oh, and remember that "airline friendly" Flybook VM we saw at Computex? Well, the little Core Duo, swing-arm pup will be turned out in Japan on June 20th for ¥216,000, or about $1,877 hard cash. VM action pics after the break.[Via Impress]Read -- Flybook VMRead -- Flybook V33i
Dialogue's Flybook VM laptop with airline friendly telescoping screen
Ahhh, so that's what you get when you cross a Clio NXT and swing-arm styled iMac... the Flybook VM from Taiwan's Dialogue. That swingin' 12.1-inch, 1280 x 768 widescreen panel folds down and around tablet-style which is sweet enough. But the inclusion of a telescoping arm means the panel can be projected safely away from that reclining econo-class fatso seated in front of you. The VM is Dialogue's first Core Duo (1.66GHz) and sports Intel's 945GM integrated graphics, up to 2GB of RAM, a 1.8-inch 30GB disk, integrated webcam, stereo speakers, fingerprint reader, ExpressCard slot, 802.11a/b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, a dual-layer DVD writer, and up to 7 hours off optional six-cell battery. Wait, there's more. According to the press release, the VM will also feature a built-in GSM/GPRS/EDGE radio. Oh please daddy, give us a pinch and tell us that's true 'cause that little tidbit is conspicuously abscent from their website's specs. No word on pricing or availability but at 3.6-pounds and about an inch thick, we'll be keeping an eye out sho'nuff.[Via RegHardware]
