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SWTOR Crew Skills unleashed
What are these two Star Wars: The Old Republic companions working on? If you've been following the game for any extended period of time, you know they are working on Crew Skills. This is BioWare's answer to crafting in SWTOR. But Crew Skills reach well beyond crafting; players can gather resources and accumulate faction, as well. When BioWare introduced us to the system a long while back, only eight crew skills were revealed. However, on Friday, the Community Team gave us a stealth update to the Crew Skills page, revealing all the categories. For example, Archaeology is now listed under gathering skills. Crafting skills will apparently grant players Armstech, Cybertech, and Synthweaving. And finally, we will be able to send our companions on Investigation and Underworld Trading missions. The Star Wars: The Old Republic Crew Skills page has all the latest information; check that out, then watch Massively next weekend for all the TOR PAX information.
SWTOR lifts the sound curtain in Friday update
In video games as in film, sound design is usually something a designer hopes goes unnoticed, but if it weren't there, viewers might think part of the game was missing. Star Wars: The Old Republic is obviously no different, but there is an extra challenge that comes with working on a widely recognized intellectual property. "Establishment of style has to be done a bit more carefully in The Old Republic than in other games; after all, there is a long legacy of signature sounds associated with the Star Wars universe that came out of the films, television series, and even previous games," declares Audio Designer Scott Morton in this week's Studio Insider. Iconic sounds such as lightsabers igniting, blasters firing, droids buzzing, and ship taking off have to encapsulate the Star Wars feel. Those of you who like to dive behind the scenes of your favorite game should check out the rest of the Studio Insider all about combat sound. In the same article, Senior Concept Artist Clint Young answers fan questions about the visual concepts of Star Wars: The Old Republic. TOR is really appealing to the senses in this week's Friday update.
Age of Conan Friday Update with new screenshots
Funcom has issued another Friday update. It mostly covers the announcement from earlier this week about Age of Conan's packed to the gills Collector's Edition. But they did sneak in three more new screenshots in today's update as well.The first is above and shows off PvP mounted combat. When I was talking to the Funcom folks earlier this week at CES during my Dark Templar hands-on, they mentioned there were two pre-order combat mounts: the Woolly Mammoth and the Rhino. I wasn't able to see the gameplay of mounted combat, but I did see Woolly Mammoths that you could kill. If the mounted version is any where near as big, you will definitely have your enemies trembling before you as you bear down on them on one of those bad boys.The second and third screenshots are in the gallery below and show an Ice Demon as well as a battle over an expansion bridge. Hopefully the next Friday Update from Funcom will have more new information.%Gallery-9836% %Gallery-13299%
Conan chats up the ladies
Age of Conan spent today's Friday update dealing with the women of Hyboria. Honestly, the first time I saw the proposed cover art for the game, I was a little surprised it didn't include, well Conan. Placing a female on their game is just one step toward proving that there is a place for women in this society (and not just a lusty tramps either, although they are in there as well.)Female characters will have the same amount of strength as male ones. Although this deviates from the original concept of women in the works of Robert E. Howard, but I think you'll agree that the portrayal of women as weak, fainting pansies wouldn't nearly be as fun to play as say, my hero Red Sonja. But the developers have gone to great lengths to make sure that women have their own identity in AoC, and to that end have created over 2500 unique female animations. Each piece of armor is specifically designed for the female form rather than being a copy of the male armor, as you can see in the screenshot above. It looks to be that the trend these days is to create women with equal strengths and abilities to men. While I am all for that, I also would like to point out the obvious: that a woman is not a man. In the original D&D female characters had a modifier -1 strength +1 charisma. Yes, I agree that women are as strong as men, but their strengths lie in different areas. Of course, the strengths of a woman are definitely harder to quantify, so I can see leveling the playing field for simplicity's sake. I suppose I am simply left with the question does a woman fight and/or deal with conflict differently than a man? Will there ever be a game that can capture this?Whatever the answer may be to those questions, I am suddenly very jazzed to play this game.
