Blogs

Star Wars: The Old Republic is a great game. I take that back. SWTOR is a good game, but with some deep flaws going beyond simple bugs and reaching deep into the basic design of the game.

I'll back up to the beginning. When SWTOR was announced, I knew my first, and much beloved (however gutted) MMO would be going away. Star Wars Galaxies was finally canned on SWTOR's launch day. So I did have a deep-seated resentment for SWTOR going back many years since it was first announced that a new Star Wars MMO was going into development.

Although I have yet to experience PvP in Star Wars the Old Republic first-hand, I've been watching as a friend competes in PvP matches, and am not impressed. Neither is he.

Well, two beta weekends, actually.

I had the duty of play-testing the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta for two weekends, the second of which just concluded. All-told, I played over the course of about six days, probably 30-40 hours of actual in-game playtime.

Let me just start out by saying I've been incredibly jaded about this game since it was first announced, doubly so when I learned that LucasArts was shutting down my (formerly) beloved SWG in an attempt to drive players from that MMO to their new one: SWTOR.

Had a brief opportunity to play the new Space Marine DLC last night, it's pretty awesome, the addition of co-op is perfect. Basically massacring waves of orks, they get progressively harder as you progress through the waves. My only gripes thusfar are:

1. No way to pause, you literally have to keep going or die, get the catheter ready!
2. There doesn't seem to be a way to progress through the armor challenges to unlock new armor parts in co-op.

Is EVE the game of the future? Will EVE fulfill its full potential as a sandbox sci-fi simulator? Can EVE attract more users from different genres to flesh out its legs game?

The rumor mill has been spinning since September that Sony Online Entertainment is working on another Star Wars MMO. This one is to be built on the same browser-based game engine they use for Free Realms and will be called Clone Wars.

Set in the Clone Wars era, the game will focus on a casual-social gameplay style much like Free Realms, and will therefore not be a direct competitor for the existing Star Wars licensed SOE MMO, Star Wars Galaxies, nor the upcoming Knights of the Old Republic game from Bioware.

So many names, so few mentions of a release date. How I long for this long-overdue feature of EVE Online to come to fruition. It seems that WiS has a new name, a new official name, Incarna (incarnation, I suppose). It has been reported that Incarna will come after the winter expansion Dominion and before the new EVE game Dust 514. Dominion will be coming in this fall/winter and Dust 514 will reportedly be released sometime in 2010. One would logically conclude that Incarna will become the Spring 2010 expansion, putting it around March-May. Though there is still no confirmed date.

Bioware & LucasArts say they're making another Star Wars MMO...actually the way they talk, you'd think they were making the first Star Wars MMO. They like to ignore SWG.