Just wondering if there were any plans to include any form of space combat in the game. For me, it's what really defines the star wars legacy. The pilots where what took out the death stars and star destroyers. Not the Jedi. Course, where would Star Wars be without those loveable wielders of the Force? But it would be so much more exciting to pilot an xwing at points and go into dog fights with other players.

I was also wondering if there is going to be any neutral characters within towns and what not that don't take either side. It'd be fun to pick off Jawas, just to see them run away like mad. It'd add to the feel of the game. In the movies, not everyone was ready to blast your head off. And it'd also add a nice break between the action.

Originally posted by Eklin
Just wondering if there were any plans to include any form of space combat in the game. For me, it's what really defines the star wars legacy. The pilots where what took out the death stars and star destroyers. Not the Jedi. Course, where would Star Wars be without those loveable wielders of the Force? But it would be so much more exciting to pilot an xwing at points and go into dog fights with other players.

I was also wondering if there is going to be any neutral characters within towns and what not that don't take either side. It'd be fun to pick off Jawas, just to see them run away like mad. It'd add to the feel of the game. In the movies, not everyone was ready to blast your head off. And it'd also add a nice break between the action.

Well, it is Jedi Academy after all so yes, lets not forget about the Jedi... I'm not sure how well the Q3 engine would do with piloting a spacecraft with six degrees of freedom.

Neutral characters... well, that was one of my gripes about the Nar Shadda level... a city populated by Rodian snipers *nice*. JK1 had civilians, so did MotS, twas pretty cool since u had to watch what you shot.


But in the end its a FPS not an RPG, so while they can be expected to use RPG-like elements to try to boost sales, I doubt they'll go hog wild with the idea.

Yeah, I can understand about the whole space combat thing. I've still got X-Wing Alliance to tide me over until the space expantion of SWG is released.
But neutral characters aren't necessarily an RPG element. Yes, if you look at them and hit the use key they should acknowledge you (just like your allies did in JK2), but that's all they really gotta do aside from wander around a bit, pretend to interact with eachother, freak the moment a fight breaks out, and die like lowly cowards if you feel the need for some senseless slaughter. Realism is important in ALL types of games.

In Bounty Hunter (albeit it was a very poor game), there were tons of innocent bistandards to mess with. I'd just like to see something like that in this.

EDIT:
One last thing I'd like to add, one of the biggest things they should change, if anything, is the footstep sounds. In the beginning of the trailer, you hear the distinct "clump, clump, clump" as the Jedi walks away from the craft. Thing is, he's on SNOW. Shouldn't we hear some crunching or something like that?

Originally posted by Eklin
Yeah, I can understand about the whole space combat thing. I've still got X-Wing Alliance to tide me over until the space expantion of SWG is released.
But neutral characters aren't necessarily an RPG element. Yes, if you look at them and hit the use key they should acknowledge you (just like your allies did in JK2), but that's all they really gotta do aside from wander around a bit, pretend to interact with eachother, freak the moment a fight breaks out, and die like lowly cowards if you feel the need for some senseless slaughter. Realism is important in ALL types of games.

In Bounty Hunter (albeit it was a very poor game), there were tons of innocent bistandards to mess with. I'd just like to see something like that in this.

Yeah it would be nice if they did more (NO, no conversations) like react when you draw your saber close to them, or scream and run away when a fight broke out. Of course we had the prisoners in JO... and that Imperial officer that you had to lead around for a while... But they werent exactly neutral, just interactive objectives.

Personally the 'man the gun' type of thing, like they showed in the KOTOR 'shaky-cam' video, would be fine for me. I'd like a little more than was in JKII, but I'm not a fan of space combat ... I tried XWA and could never get into it.

Mike

Raven was playing with the idea of having a flyable X-wing in JKII...there's a cheat that allows you to pilot an X-wing... (sort of)

Space combat is a possibility, but a slim one. It has nothing to do with the engine. Raven has the source code for the engine, they can do anything with it. The problem is that it's a First Person Shooter, not a space sim.

I longtime dream of mine...we discussed this on the Vehicles (http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=99838) thread a few days ago.

I can't see a huge problem with flying a starship in space, because there are various ways to fake a starfield moving, and having other ships flying about.

What I don't think we'll see is any kind of vessel that can fly high over terrain...due to the restrictions on the map sizes. If you look at the helicopter level in SOF2, you were in a fixed position, and most of the terrain was hidden by a mist effect. They could do something similar with JA...but it would have to be in a proper context, and not just tagged on...

I think we've still got some way before we see the type of seamless transition from flying and running and gunning in this series that is supposed to be in Mace Griffin. As I said before, they built the engine from the ground up to enable them to make that feature an integral part of the gameplay. I'm not sure a similar thing could be done with the modified Q3 tech.

You wanna fly, get a GameCube and Rogue Leader, or get the old Rogue Shad for PC. Sorry, but flying isn't gonna be in JA. Someone would have said something, and to make quality skying they'd take longer to get the game out anyway.

Originally posted by Eklin


In Bounty Hunter (albeit it was a very poor game),


Bounty Hunter was NOT a poor game.

Yeah, It's either not going to happen, or will be in a limited capacity like StormHammer described. Maybe within 5-10 years. But I'll be waiting, LOL

Space maps are not hard. It's much easier to render for the engine than normal maps even, MUCH less polygons, I.E. there is no map, it's just a big open space. You already have all 5 axi's in the game, it's not a big addition. All you have to do is make a map, very large, and put invisible boundaries around the entire inside of the map, then put little light sprites behind those boundaries, then put a black sky behind that. This way it gives the illusion that you're moving past a real sky. This would be a very welcome addition.

Think about doing some sort of siege on hoth, with snow speeders attacking AT-STs or whatever they're called lol
They would have to be limited in number, but that would be great!

Originally posted by babywax
Space maps are not hard. It's much easier to render for the engine than normal maps even, MUCH less polygons, I.E. there is no map, it's just a big open space. You already have all 5 axi's in the game, it's not a big addition. All you have to do is make a map, very large, and put invisible boundaries around the entire inside of the map, then put little light sprites behind those boundaries, then put a black sky behind that. This way it gives the illusion that you're moving past a real sky. This would be a very welcome addition.


Actually, the map wouldn't have to be that large, and it could be done a different way. You just make the spaceship you are piloting stationery and allow it to pivot in any direction, and have a particle system to generate a moving star-field, which speeds up and slows down according to the speed of your 'ship'. Then you just introduce other ships as targets to shoot at, which could always come at you from an angle so you never physically see them spawn into the map.

That's probably the way I'd do it...if I had any programming skill...

But when you are talking about flying over a landsurface at any height...that's where the problems start to appear. Raven partially solved it in SOF on the train level by keeping the train stationery and generating a moving terrain around it - just like the way they used to film Thunderbirds. But if you want complete freedom of movement to fly in any direction over that terrain...then yes, indeed, you'd probably need a very large map, and it would have boundaries. For a flying craft, hitting those boundaries will shatter your 'suspension of disbelief' and make the experience less immersive. That's why in SOTE when you were about to reach the map boundaries with the snow speeder the game took control and turned you around.

Now...if they could take the train level from SOF as a start point and keep your craft stationery (in a horizontal plane) while giving you vertical movement, and then move the generated terrain in ANY direction...that would solve part of the problem. However, I don't know if you could then have building models generated on the fly that appear on the ground, or indeed, enemies. It's probably possible, but might need a great deal of work to make it feel natural. Anyway, I would really doubt that you could then land your craft at any point on such a generated terrain, and go exploring on foot. You'd have to ask a programmer/level designer how difficult a proposition that is.

I'm sure that kind of thing will be possible soon, but I imagine it may be beyond the current engine capabilities for JA...

Yes. Beyond the JA engine, & also beyond the memory requirements of todays computers. But it is on the way (someday). We have already seen things leaning in this direction in many games, including some pretty old ones.

Does anyone remember the game "IGI - I'm Going In" (the first one, not the sequel)? The game itself sucked due to other factors, but the really cool thing about it was that this was the first game to use the engine of a flight sim in a FPS. The maps were HUGE!!! You could hike over mountains forever.

If a game designer thought on that sort of grand scale when designing a game engine, it could be possible. The engines would have to be able to handle incredibly large land based topography like those in flight sims. But they would also have to be able to handle the memory required to make all the little objects/buildings as detailed as they would be in an FPS's with detailed maps of each floor etc. instead of a giant box with a texture slapped on the outside.

The same would be the case with the space missions: The capitol ships would not just be shapes with textures on them to look like ships, but would instead be actual floating maps of that entire ship, complete with AI characters or other MP players, that you could land on & explore.

I don't foresee this type of gaming experience anytime soon, but with the advances in computing power, memory, etc. we may get to see it before we're in nursing homes.

By then the games will come in huge game packs with a single dvd (or it's successor) for each mission, Gigs will be a term referred to RAM instead of processor chips, & we'll be using head tracking visor/headsets instead of monitors, etc.

Oh what a glorious time it will be! *prays to the gaming Gods*

Would be cool, huh?

Hi again, folkles!

Look at Shadows of the Empire, it had some missions where you man the gun while the ship flies on it's own. That would not require any huge additions to the current game. Also, look back at the drivable APC in that one version of CS, that game was never meant to support that kind of thing, but it got done anyway. Also, look back at TIE Fighter, I never once hit the edges of one of those maps, I think it was because after you got to a certain point, you stopped moving, even though your speedometer stayed constant and the particles kept going by.

I just found X-Wing Alliance in the bargain bin ($8.00, and that's in Canadian!) and I would really like it, if my joystick weren't such a sensitive peice of crap. It's cool that you can hyperspace between individual maps within a single level. I wonder what a system like that could do for the next Jedi Knight game...

Anyway, space combat has always been my favorite part of Star Wars, so anything new is welcome. *Sits in cave, waiting for new TIE Fighter game and combing cooties out of long, chinese-style mustache...*

i love space combat... but unfortunately you would almost certainly get something with terrible, FPS-like physics which actually felt more like you were FPSing in space (Freelancer anyone?) than something that felt like a proper space sim.

Very few games manage to mix genres well, usually you get 2 crummy games tacked together, rather than the one excellent game you could have had if they had concentrated on a single genre.

I would rather lucasarts actually finished XWA! It was the first X-wing game which didn't have a complete plot, and it was the first one without an expansion pack.... how does that work??!!?? :mad: :confused:

Star Wars+Descent=Loss of Faith in Lucasarts

The X-Wing/TIE Fighter series is still my favorite, after all these years (Monkey Island: a close second) because it was long, fun, and had a real story that affected gameplay. Half-Life? Pshhht! TIE Fighter was the greatest game ever, as far as I care.

I would, however like to see a blend of several game types (here I go again) in a Star Wars game. If you could fly your ship over to Tatooine, talk to Jabba, get him mad, get chased by Fett, join the alliance that would be cool. I would like to see a mixture of command and action, like in Natural Selection. You could have one guy playing a Homeworld-like RTS, while all the others flew B-Wings and carried out his orders. That would not be nearly as hard as implementing RTS/FPS, as the simple space-combat system would be much more flexible...

Originally posted by Solbe M'ko
I would, however like to see a blend of several game types (here I go again) in a Star Wars game. If you could fly your ship over to Tatooine, talk to Jabba, get him mad, get chased by Fett, join the alliance that would be cool. I would like to see a mixture of command and action, like in Natural Selection. You could have one guy playing a Homeworld-like RTS, while all the others flew B-Wings and carried out his orders. That would not be nearly as hard as implementing RTS/FPS, as the simple space-combat system would be much more flexible... The biggest reason why things like that haven't been done is that it would be a huge undertaking, probably too much for any one company to deliver. Developing a FPS or RTS game is one thing, but developing all of those together would require a lot of resources and time, especially if you are going to do each part justice.

Besides, many people who want to play a FPS do not want to have to go through RTS or simulator elements to finish the game. It would be very hard to please everyone with all the combined gametypes.

Space combat would be awesome in this game however i just don't see it happening, at least not now. Maybe somewhere down the line we'll get the true jedi treatment to be able to do whatever we want.

An idea i have is to make a jedi game that's like morrowind one of the MOST IMMERSIVE games i ever played. It's essentially a first person game as well as third person and is simply HUGE!!!!. Choose the class and race you want to be and select the force powers you think are most important or no force at all. maybe going through a trial or two to learn new ones, maybe like test your might mortal kombat style levatating heavier objects or dueling with a fellow jedi in training or master to learn how to block and parry. Learn how to do mind trick by learning speechcraft. Buy new outfits, maybe some mandalorian armor or a new jedi tunic. You could literally spend weeks looking around and doing whatever you want. Hell you don't have to even be a jedi. Be a bounty hunter or a combination of both or just a simple person trying to make his way in the universe.

Maybe as a young jedi padawan accompanying your master to a trade dispute between two worlds or raiding a pirate operation with your fellow bounty hunters. you could get a contract to go take out a person who owes another guy some money. When you meet up with him you can persuade him to hand the money over or just blast him altogether. Or as a jedi, ultimately deciding whether you want to be a sith lord or fight for the right as a true jedi master. Best of all the game supports multiple npc's and comes with tools for modifying and making your own levels.

there are at least 10-15 worlds you could visit, maybe some hidden worlds. How bout checking out the cloners' progress on Kamino or making a run to Tatooine, going to mos eisley and having a drink at the cantina, you don' like the ugly guy having a drink next to you? Taunt the bastard. on your way out make a stop to free a prisoner from the local hutt. what about a whole planet based on Coruscant with buildings and skyscrapers all over the place? You could jump up and down on the rooftops of buildings or go to a senate meeting. You'd get lost for sure. And inbetween travelling around worlds you could fly in space (hence the need for further development). Have a bunch of jedi starfighter missions to take out a ship. Or have a whole squadron go up against an armada of fighters and capital ships. When you go to the next quadrant you hit a button and jump into hyperspace. Need repairs? Dock at the local space station, your capital ship or land on the closest planet. Buy an astromech to automatically repair damage to your ship while you're off on a mission.

I think the morrowind part being able to go and do whatever on a single world is can be done for a star wars game right now. Really the only things lucasarts has to do is modify the game so that combat is like Outcast or JA or better. Ok maybe the flying is stretching a bit but maybe one day soon. Realistically speaking this game could max out at 5 gigs at the most. But who doesn't have at least a 20 gig hard drive nowadays right? Or just release the game on one dual layer DVD. Hell lucasarts should call up Bethesda software now and buy the engine rights to make this bitch. The question is, would they ever take the time to actually make a game of this caliber?

Maybe JK4 or something all new? I hope the dudes at raven and lucasarts are reading this.

When I think of this I think of SotE (Shadows of the Empire) and how it had some cool areas, and some that just s*cked. I would love to see it as a 'side game', like the 'shoot the tie fighter' bit in JKII, but expanded and a bit more control given. I think much more than that would pull too much focus from doing what is needed - which is making the best FPS they possibly can.

Mike

Originally posted by txa1265
I think much more than that would pull too much focus from doing what is needed - which is making the best FPS they possibly can. Definitely, especially considering a finite budget and resources.

Originally posted by Prime
Definitely, especially considering a finite budget and resources.

Obviously you (also) have to work in the real world ... unlike (seemingly) many here still in high school, who (as is their wont at that age) expect everything for nothing.

Mike

Tyler you really should take a look at this page:

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/)

That is/will be like 90% the game you described.. well allmost :)

didn't Alleigence allow one player to RTS and give commands to the other players who were actually flying the units... that game looked cool, though im not sure it is still going.

i still think that until lucasarts can start doing ONE genre right they shouldn't try doing cross genre games.

Its a shame there is currently NO simulation market on the PC, as i always wanted a decent land based tie-fighter-like simulation with snow speeders and walkers. and they still haven't made a decent RTS or a decent 4X game.

Personally, if they were going to put in flying then i would want it to be a sim of Tie-fighter standard, and it would most likely be of a crummy, below starfighter arcade standard.

yeah but then again, galaxies doesn't play like outcast and i don't much care for online games anyway. Besides you need DSL or broadband to play those games, let's not forget the subscription service which is totally unessessary....... it's just too expensive for me right now anyay. Whereas you just play this game at home by yourself, with one 49.99 disc, no extra fees, it's all good.

Tyler & toms got the idea...WOOHOO!!!

The gameplay Tyler describes is exactly what I'm talking about. FPS style movement & fighting control over your character as in JK when in 1st/3rd person mode, & when you climb into the seat of your fighter/shuttle/capitol ship, etc. you switch to a cockpit view with REAL space/flight sim characteristics (no cheezy arcade sims) such as full HOTAS controller support, etc. With the better aspects of RPG's thrown in, this would be an awsome style of game.

In Shadows of the Empire these things were sort of accomplished by having the missions actually be different kinds of gametypes for each mission. They were mini-games. One mission you flew a snowspeeder, & in another you walked around shooting stormies. But you were never allowed to park your speeder, get out & shoot at some droids with your blaster all in the same mission. They used different mini game engines for the different mission types.

But for the kind of true total 3D virtual gaming experience we're talking about, you would need a seamless game engine that does not see a difference between FPS & sim, but instead looks at everything as a HUGE virtual reality sim. Then you add in the good RPG aspects to complete the picture.

SWG could evolve into something like this in the years to come.

The problem is that it is Lucasarts' style to wait until someone else perfects a certain gametype/engine & then will adapt that particular type/style into one of their games. So more than likely if we are to see the realization of this style of game, it will be done by someone else first in a non-StarWars game. Total VR Battlestar Galactica anyone?

I agree. Lucasarts is something of a vulture company. Dark Forces was Star Wars Doom. Battlegrounds was almost identical to AoE. I give them immense credit for their earlier adventure games like Sam and Max, Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and the Dig. Outlaws, though...

The whole flight sim thing went down in the late 90's when, to my memory, Quake came out. As soon as that happened, the huge surplus of Flight Sims on the market created demand for a fresh kind of game, the FPS. Now the FPS has been rehashed almost as much as C&C was, so we want to go back to the older gameplay types. The only consistantly popular type of game is the RPG. The newest flight sim I have played is the new redo of Sturmovik (sp). It was okay.

I hate this "I wish they'd include this really cool feature, but alas this is an FPS and not RPG".

Who cares what genre it is as long as its fun!

I'm all for space combat as long as its done well... If it can't be done good enough then I say get rid of the idea and focus on the FPS combat entirely.

But on a similiar note, I say Raven should add as many RPG elements as possible without bogging the game down at all. I mean more bystandards would be a great addition... a Bar full of illegal, Disrupter-wielding Rodiens doesn't exactly make for interesting varied gameplay.

If they do actually include more civilians it would be nice if they added converstations between two NPCs like we hear in JKII all the time... Those were really great, and the more of them the better.

Back to the vehicles for a moment.. did Raven say that there will most certainly be more vehicles in this game than JO? Well, if they can correctly create a good ground flight simulation I would only assume that space combat would be even easier.

the quake 3 engine cant cope with big enough spaces to even match JK, so there is no way it would work with flying vehicles, let alone space.

Now the JK engine, i bet that could have done space combat ok.

The walkers in JO were, to be fair, fun for about 3 minutes. But that was more because of the "cool" factor than because they were fun. They weren't modeled in any detail though, and controled more like FPS characters than Giant walkers. They should have had 1st person views only, with guages and readouts and a fairly small viewpoint.

Almost all sim games seem to have disappeared from the maket. Space sim games arent selling (Freelancer is the only one in about the last 3 years, and that was more like an fps). Mechwarrior games arent selling. Flight sims are too expensive and time consuming to make and aren't selling. Developers would much rather spend 1/4 the money and time on dumbed down, cross-platform 3rd person games than develop proper sims. It is a shame.

Shadows of the Empire sucked. the only remotely good bit was the snowspeeders, and even that wasn't great. A classic case of a game with too many genres not doing ANY of them well.

I'd really like a decent SW sim that combined Mechwarrior style Walkers with Interstate 76/Tie fighter style speeders. Where you had to worry about power ratios, targeting, speed and armour.

Rather than one of these Starfighter type games that have been simplified to the point of A to go foreward, B to go back, C to shoot. Steer and shoot. snore....

and another thing....

WHY OH WHY don't they get the guys who did either Imperium Galactica 2 or Galactic Civilisations to re-do Supremacy(Rebellion)???? 4X games are perfect for the SW universe, I really want to command Thrawn, nogri, etc... and for a game that got terrible reviews it is still selling for about 30 quid on ebay. So there must be a market.

If they are going to be a vulture company they might as well do it properly!

Raven has said that they are using models to do some of the terrain, and assuming Raven has done a decent job of updating the Quake III engine, they ought to be able to make rather large bits of terrain. Look at the Doom 3 engine for example...would you think that it's capable of large terrain? It is actually capable of terrain the size of the Radiant grid! (If the terrain is a model)

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
let's not forget the subscription service which is totally unessessary...

It is very necessary. EverQuest has at least 80,000 people playing at all times. Can you imagine the processing power and dedicated network links that need to be up and running reliably all the time to make sure all 80,000 players can have a good time? It's very expensive to maintain that kind of stuff. If the developers and publishers could make a profit off just selling the game, there would be no online fee. If that wasn't true, you'd be subscribing to first person shooters.

That's why i say they should make a game based off the morrowind engine or a better one. That way those who do not have a dsl line or broadband (like me) can enjoy a sp game without having to worry about crap like lag, choppy framerates, and people screwing with you once you leave a town. Not everyone enjoys playing online you know. No, make a game so people without a good internet connection can play ( and i don't mean bots with non AI) and get almost the same experience as playing online. I mean really a lot of people, me included, can't afford $50 a month to connect online on top of $10-$20 for a game that you already paid $50 to get. Please.

Truthfully, they are only utilizing about %20 of the market. The internet is dead now compared to a few years ago.

Oh...dear god... I can't believe the words you just said... so horribly, horribly wrong.

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
That's why i say they should make a game based off the morrowind engine or a better one. That way those who do not have a dsl line or broadband (like me) can enjoy a sp game without having to worry about crap like lag, choppy framerates, and people screwing with you once you leave a town. Not everyone enjoys playing online you know. No, make a game so people without a good internet connection can play ( and i don't mean bots with non AI) and get almost the same experience as playing online. I mean really a lot of people, me included, can't afford $50 a month to connect online on top of $10-$20 for a game that you already paid $50 to get. Please.

I can understand what you mean. I've got a laggy 56k connection, and it's not much fun trying to play online sometimes. I wouldn't sign up to an MMORPG anyway, even if I had broadband, because I know I couldn't dedicate enough time to it to get my money's worth. I prefer a good SP game, and some fast MP action, rather than trekking around a virtual world online. I do think that MMO games are possibly over-rated as a 'growing trend' - some have seen quite low take-up figures, below their estimated target audiences. There seem to be quite a large number of MMO games currently in development, and I fully expect to see some of them fail spectacularly. I do not think the market is quite large enough to support a large number of MMO games. If you are already subscribing to one, are you likely to subscribe to another at the same time? If not, that means finding new customers, and that's always hard to achieve. Having said that, I think games like SW Galaxies will be successful, because there is already a very wide fan base. The online Matrix game may be successful for the same reason.

I still think it is going to be a while before we see a large-scale offline RPG/FPS hybrid for Star Wars, though.

Truthfully, they are only utilizing about %20 of the market. The internet is dead now compared to a few years ago.

Erm...I'd have to disagree with you there. The Internet is very much alive and thriving. And I'd like to see some statistics to back up your argument about 20% of the market. It's probably true that not as many people play the MP side of games as the SP side, but I'm not even sure there has been a study to examine that in any depth.

Originally posted by txa1265
Obviously you (also) have to work in the real world ... Indeed I do. Wouldn't life be grand of games could be made on an unlimited budget? Too bad it couldn't be farther from the truth. :)

Originally posted by txa1265
unlike (seemingly) many here still in high school, who (as is their wont at that age) expect everything for nothing. What, you mean like this?

let's not forget the subscription service which is totally unessessary....... I guess those huge servers all just run for free. :rolleyes:

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
That's why i say they should make a game based off the morrowind engine or a better one. That way those who do not have a dsl line or broadband (like me) can enjoy a sp game without having to worry about crap like lag, choppy framerates, and people screwing with you once you leave a town. Not everyone enjoys playing online you know If you don't want to play online, then avoid the MMORPG genre altogether. There are hundreds of great SP games out there. Trying to turn something like Galaxies into an SP game as well is probably beyond the scope and resources of the game company. Besides, can you imagine having to run Galaxies entirely from your desktop? Now that is some computing power. :)

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
No, make a game so people without a good internet connection can play ( and i don't mean bots with non AI) and get almost the same experience as playing online. I mean really a lot of people, me included, can't afford $50 a month to connect online on top of $10-$20 for a game that you already paid $50 to get. Please. Truthfully, they are only utilizing about %20 of the market. So your saying you want a top-of-the-line online game that doesn't require a good connection or decent hardware to run. There are thousands of those. They are called old games. You just can't make better games that run on the same old hardware. Unfortunately, things just don't work that way. In order to make a new game that people are willing to play, they have to take advantage of new technology. To get those fancy graphics and nice visuals, you need powerful hardware. To connect to a server and play a complex online game unfortunately requires a good internet connection. If you don't have these things, then you just aren't going to be able to play the game. Creating a game that is playable by 56Kers with 500MHz machines requires sacrifices. And those sacrifices probably mean the game just isn't going to be as good. And that isn't what sells.

It is sort of like hockey. If you want to play the sport, you have to buy the equipment. And that equipment costs money. Online games are the same. If you want to play, you need the equipment. If you don't have the money, that is unfortunate. But those who do want to play the best game they can, and are less likely to be willing to play a lesser game that caters to older machines.

If you can't afford it, you can't afford it. But there are many people who can afford it, and are willing to pay those prices to play the best games. And there are companies that are going to provide those games.

Besides, what do you think the limiting requirements should be for an online game? 56K? A 486? Less? How old a machine do you want to support? At some point you have to move on to newer and better.

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
The internet is dead now compared to a few years ago.That could possibly the single funniest thing I have ever read.

Originally posted by Prime
[re: the internet is dead] That could possibly the single funniest thing I have ever read.

Or the ... ermm... least informed (self-edit ;) ). The internet is still growing, broadband adoption is growing very rapidly. It just isn't as 'sexy' as it was when you could pitch 'iUWare.com' which would deliver fresh laundered underwear to your house daily - and become an overnight millionaire. See - eventually someone figures out the emperor has no clothes. The internet is not dead ... it is just becoming commoditized.

And that's a good thing.

Mike

To go off topic (sorry, Stormy!), the whole game situation has suffered as a result of wider access to computers. Companies like iD and Maxis have started making huge profits off games, so their budgets are a good deal larger than other campanies. Computer Games used to be something of a special interest, but nowadays, every kid in town owns a Playstation. I'm not saying that the games industry's transition to mainstream audiences is bad, but economics has taken center stage. A guy who wants to make a game can't do it unless the fat cats say that it would tuen a profit.

There are pop films, and there are art films. Why aren't there any "art" games?

Prime said: You just can't make better games that run on the same old hardware.

I totally see where you're coming from, but I just cannot agree with you. You don't need the Unreal engine or a huge server to make a good game. Half-Life is a great game, it uses a now outdated engine (Quake 2), but it's still a great game and people still play it. Graphics and technology are a big part of it nowadays, but the gameplay still sells it for me. If Monkey Island 5 comes out with the engine from the first games, I'll buy it anyway (assuming it doesn't suck like MI4, but I'm not going into that). Some games have great graphics, but suck otherwise, remember. Look at Q3A, I hated that game (maybe you didn't, but I though it sucked), because the gameplay was far too dumbed down for me. Does anyone still play that game? I hope not, they should all be playing UT2K3, which combines better visuals with better gameplay.

That's just what I think...

I think he was referring to graphics and technology, like you can't just "make an MMORPG" that runs on 56k. You can't just "make a new revolutionary 3D engine" that runs on a 486.

Oh, and Half-Life uses the Quake I engine.

Oh, and a lot of people still play Q3. Saying the Q3 community is dead is foolish (I know you didn't but others do).

To tell the truth i really don't care about the internet games, hell i don't play em and i don't wanna play em. okay you guys punked me on the internet being dead, whatever, but that wasn't my point. My point is lucasarts can in fact make a STAR WARS fps game game that doesn't require it to be an online game without having to have a high end machine. What does morrowind's requirements entail? a 700 mhz p3? And a good graphics card. The game has what, two three discs? And the game is huge as well. I think it would be awesome and anyone who doesn't agree, well...... They could incorporate awesome features such as space combat with some development time and maybe tweak the combat a little but the technology is there. Will they ever do it? Probably not, which makes this whole discussion rather moot.

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
My point is lucasarts can in fact make a STAR WARS fps game game that doesn't require it to be an online game without having to have a high end machine.

Enter the Dark Forces and Jedi Knight series.

umm i think you took what i said out of context.

I think you're just confused.

I think I'm going to take up tennis.




:)

Nobody would be happier than me if more and spiffier features were worked into SP. But realistically, the more you try to put in, the lower the overall quality of the game. Remember that. And while graphics are at best faintly relevant to me and my sensibilities, it would not do justice to the game if it had anything less than an improved graphics engine. Even Unreal and Half-Life, cutting edge in their day, are looking horribly dated these days.

They Hunger is still one of the best SP experiences I've ever had though, and I only played it for the first time last month.

Originally posted by Solbe M'ko
I totally see where you're coming from, but I just cannot agree with you. You don't need the Unreal engine or a huge server to make a good game. Half-Life is a great game, it uses a now outdated engine (Quake 2), but it's still a great game and people still play it. As Emon has stated, in this context I was saying "better" in terms of the technical aspects, such as graphics, internect connections speed, and so on. My point was you can't run a technically advanced game without technically advanced hardware. Certainly, a game does not have to be technically complex to be fun. That is why I use the MAME emulator to play all those old arcade games. NBA Jam represent! :D

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
To tell the truth i really don't care about the internet games, hell i don't play em and i don't wanna play em. Fair enough, but keep in mind that a huge percentage of the players out there do care a great deal about online play.

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
okay you guys punked me on the internet being dead, whatever, but that wasn't my point. My point is lucasarts can in fact make a STAR WARS fps game game that doesn't require it to be an online game without having to have a high end machine. It may not have been your point, but really, it is the point. Because the internet is growing, more and more people want to play online games. Many people want a great SP experience (like me and you), but there are also many people that don't give a rats ass about SP, and only want MP. It is a big enough share of the customer base that Lucasarts "has to" provide that experience, or they will simply sell less games. And isn't selling the most games possible the whole idea?

Originally posted by Tyler_Durden
They could incorporate awesome features such as space combat with some development time and maybe tweak the combat a little but the technology is there. Will they ever do it? Probably not, which makes this whole discussion rather moot. You're right, they most likely would never do that, even though they could. Why? For starters, making a game that relies on Jedi Knight level requirements will probably end up looking a lot like Jedi Knight. And that has already been done. People won't pay for that any more. Like movies, it has to be technically better. They do this simply because it will sell more games, because people want online play and better graphics. The market has spoken.

As for Emons comment about Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, I don't see how he took what you said out of context. You stated you want an SP only FPS that has lower requirements. Is this not correct? He merely pointed out that there are games like this already, and that they are called Dark Forces and Jedi Knight. Great games, at that. :)

I think we were talking about space combat integrated with a FPS. This is something that Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter is claiming to do. They needed to develop their own engine to do it - and the screenshots I've seen look an awful lot like recent Q3-based stuff. In other words, very nice, but not like HL2 facials or DoomIII monsters. They also claim ~70/30 for ground/space mix. And have attempted to make the control scheme 'work' for everyone. I'm not sure what this means in practice, but I hope my cynical expectation of a standard fare FPS mixed with sub-genre space combat. By sub-genre I mean something like comparing the Tiger tank part of MoHAA to a vehicular combat sim , but something that FPS players will find satisfying.

Graphics is a whole different issue. Do you think that if Valve came out with a HL2 sneak peek saying 'we're still using the Q2 engine' that they would have gotten much interest? Same for Doom III - check out our new sprites! Sure :rolleyes: In fact, JA got a bit of bad press for not 'looking advanced enough'. People want immersion. I'm playing JK1 again right now (well, not *right* now, but you get the idea) and the light stick coming up from ol' blockhead is not exactly real-worl immersive. Sure the game and gameplay rock - and clearly these weren't an issue 5 or 6 years ago when I got the game (was too busy having babies to get it brand new ;) . But now it feels fake - like dealing with some of the cliffs in Dark Forces, even at 'hi-res' on my Mac - I can't wait for the DF Mod for JKII for see Kyle 3rd person going through some of those areas. But even if I don't need *the best* graphics at any cost, realistic graphics and effects do make a difference and I want each new game to make graphical advances, as well as learning from past games about gameplay and interaction/immersion - and I'm willing to pay for it, both in terms of the $50 game as well as the computer hardware.

Mike

Would it be feasible to just make two games and smush them together? I mean, could you have, say, the U2 engine for the FPS part, and an engine simialar to TIE Fighter for the space part? You could just link the two engines together and have a game that passes from one to the other.

On that note, would it be possible to splice TIE Fighter-style action with Homeworld-style command, using two seperate game codes?

Originally posted by Solbe M'ko
Would it be feasible to just make two games and smush them together? I mean, could you have, say, the U2 engine for the FPS part, and an engine simialar to TIE Fighter for the space part? You could just link the two engines together and have a game that passes from one to the other. If it were to be done, that is probably the way to do it. It will still be a massive undertaking, though. Especially if the game is to be any good.