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  • Locked thread
whowhatwhere
Mar 15, 2010

SHINee's back
Man, I was kinda hoping for a Male Sith Warrior LP because of a specific romance questline. Since that's not going to happen I've got no preference.

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Weed Wolf
Jul 30, 2004
I was a big fan of the fact that one of their download servers had corrupted versions of a file. The way it worked, you'd download the entirety of the game (~16gb I think? I could be wrong there), and then it'd run a file integrity check. If the check failed, you'd have to restart and download. The entire. Game. Again.

The best part was, you'd probably be downloading from the same server. So there's more time and data wasted.

And for what its worth, Imperial Agent - pragmatist is widely regarded to be the "best" writing of the game, with Sith Warrior - good guy a close second (just because everyone expects you to be a horrible rear end in a top hat and gets completely thrown off when you DON'T force choke everything in your sight). Jedi Knight - good guy is the canon storyline. It's all Bioware writing though, so it varies from passably decent to laughably bad.

I'm going to go for Option 2 though, because that was the path I picked before getting burned out at level 28. I can handle insipid WoW-stolen combat, and even the clunky button response/absurd load times. But goddamn, running around Alderaan and Tatooine for the umpteenth time just destroys a man's soul.

e: That comment above about multicore processors reminds me of yet another Weird Thing about this game (I'm sure people will be coming out of the woodwork to talk about their favorite bugs). For some reason, the game used two separate processes, each of which handling different aspects of the system. No one's really sure why it needed two processes instead of one, but as a side effect of that it had a major RAM footprint but used almost none of it. Leading to those hilariously long load times mentioned before.

Weed Wolf fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Aug 30, 2012

Deadmeat5150
Nov 21, 2005

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLAN

Zaodai posted:

The best part about all the bugs they attributed to players not having good enough systems was the fact that there was an interface bug for like the first 3 months the game was out where skills would randomly not go off, or they'd go off like 5-10 seconds after you hit the button (and it not being a network latency issue) or they'd trigger the cooldown but not actually use the skill. Several months and many bug fix attempts later, what do they eventually find out the issue is? Multicore processors. If you played the game on any kind of remotely modern system, the UI wouldn't work in any kind of useful manner.

How did that make it through testing?

God don't I remember that. Part of what killed the game for me. I really finished the Agent storyline because I loved it then tried played through a few other classes before throwing up my hands in disgust.

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER
Say, I heard the game's going F2P- any idea when? I might actually play it for the storyline if that's true.

Bruceski
Aug 21, 2007

The tools of a hero mean nothing without a solid core.

CommissarMega posted:

Say, I heard the game's going F2P- any idea when? I might actually play it for the storyline if that's true.

Only current date last I heard was "this fall." My money's on either a week before the 25th hoping to swipe guys from Pandaria, or two weeks afterward to soak up fallout once the panda buzz burns off, but that's a complete guess no better than that of a blind monkey.

Eifert Posting
Apr 1, 2007

Most of the time he catches it every time.
Grimey Drawer
Instead of KotOR 3 we got: Star Wars: The Old Republic

... And I was pissed as hell.


I'll probably follow this but I was never more angry at videogames than when they announced this would be a Bioware MMO. My precious, precocious Star Wars with good character development... Gone forever. :smith:


I get that other people liked this game and I'm over it, and I'm only saying what I subjectively think, but those were a couple of seething, grumbling months.

Chewbot
Dec 2, 2005

My Revenge Meat!

Moon Slayer posted:

One thing I've always wondered about TOR, since I don't really know that much about the video game industry, is what was EA's involvement in everything? I've heard people say the game was released too early because of EA and that's why it felt so unpolished but I don't know if that's true or people talking out their rear end on the internet or even possible.

I got hired on the exact same day that EA bought BioWare, which was ominous, but to be completely honest I think EA was very fair in how they handled SWtOR. Maybe too fair. The truth is that the game was coming way over budget and over schedule and EA bankrolled the majority of it without much interference until the end when they sent in the "get it done" managers. At the end of the day it shipped with minimal polish because it was one of the most expensive games ever made and they were bleeding money like noone had ever seen before. Without EA I believe it would have come out in a lot worse condition.

CommissarMega posted:

Didn't stop you in the Banner Saga thread

(How is that going, by the way?)

Well, that was something we wanted to try and rectify. Banner Saga's coming along great, btw! I work 12 hour days almost 7 days a week now and relax by hanging out on LP in the mornings. I think I may have a vidya game addiction despite not playing a game in months, which is weird.

1stGear posted:

I don't know how much you would know about this considering you were on the art team, but why did the game come out so, uh, rough? Things like the really archaic quest design, the excessive amount of mobs you had to kill to get any where, even down to the absolutely terrible Auction House interface all smacked of a game the genre's 10-ton elephant left behind a long time ago.

Did the game feature-lock really early, was Bioware Austin just in over their heads, was there too much focus on the voice work and storylines?

The answer to all these questions is yes. BioWare intentionally put all their eggs in the "BioWare story in an MMO!" basket and played it safe with almost everything else because 8 games worth of story content is enough to worry about. Remember that production started nearly 7 years ago and most of the system designs were based on WoW... 7 years ago. The game content was so massive in scope and dependencies ran so deep that you literally could not change the smallest thing without breaking 10 other things. System overhauls were out of the question. I think they were intentionally trying to play it safe and the MMO market bottomed out during the long production time.

---

Incidentally, about class voting though I did say I thought Agent was the "best" story in terms of quality, I think Male Sith Warrior would be the most entertaining to watch. While Agent stays Bourne Identity "cool" throughout, there are some parts of the Sith Warrior story that are just plain ridiculous. And in terms of sheer WTF, Inquisitor wins hands down.

Chewbot fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Aug 30, 2012

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER
What really got me was how they turned the epic (and I'm using that word in its most classical sense) story of the Jedi Exile into a watered-down running-away-from-home dealie. But people keep saying the Imperial Agent/Sith Warrior stories are nice, so :shobon:

Chewbot posted:

Banner Saga's coming along great, btw! I work 12 hour days almost 7 days a week now and relax by hanging out on LP in the mornings. I think I may have a vidya game addiction despite not playing a game in months, which is weird.

That is genuinely great to hear! :)

CommissarMega fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Aug 30, 2012

El Generico
Feb 3, 2009

Nobody outrules the Marquise de Cat!
This will probably be the first MMO I ever hit the level cap for. Having voice acted cutscenes instead of a quest text is so valuable to me I'm willing to overlook a lot. It also helps that I did not sign up for this until a ton of the rough edges had been ironed out, which is good advice for any MMO. Do not be an MMO early adopter. Do not buy into MMOs at launch. Wait as long as you possibly can.

Turncoat Mommy
Oct 3, 2010

I believe in you.
Some of the romances and stuff in this game are really creepy or have troubling implications, please show these off, thanks.

I feel like any problem with this game can be traced back to the idea that people who would play a monthly fee mmo would give a poo poo about story. Chewbot, there any part of the game you feel shouldn't have been in the game at all(or rather the most glaring example)? In the reverse, any cool cut content you can share?

Turncoat Mommy fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Aug 30, 2012

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


El Generico posted:

This will probably be the first MMO I ever hit the level cap for. Having voice acted cutscenes instead of a quest text is so valuable to me I'm willing to overlook a lot. It also helps that I did not sign up for this until a ton of the rough edges had been ironed out, which is good advice for any MMO. Do not be an MMO early adopter. Do not buy into MMOs at launch. Wait as long as you possibly can.

The thing is, it was rough at launch even by "be wary of MMOs at launch" standards. There were shitloads of bugs and terrible design and their decision on how to deal with it was to collectively tell the playerbase to go gently caress themselves, the problem is in how the players preceive it not in the game.

Chewbot
Dec 2, 2005

My Revenge Meat!

Lazy Programming posted:

Some of the romances and stuff in this game are really creepy or have troubling implications, please show these off, thanks.

Chewbot, there any part of the game you feel shouldn't have been in the game at all(or rather the most glaring example)? In the reverse, any cool cut content you can share?

Yeah, the implications with Vette being the Sith Warrior's personal sex slave complete with shock collar and stockholm syndrome are pretty questionable.

As an artist I had little to no influence over direction but honestly I would have cut out all the chapter 2 and 3 story content, rebalanced the pacing of chapter 1 a bit and used that time to make more and better end game content. I agree that too much emphasis was put on the story for a multiplayer game. They really expected people to play through multiple classes and by and large nobody did. Plus for a lot of classes the stories just keep going on and on way past their welcome until it becomes absurd. Basically every class becomes The Most Important Person in the Galaxy three times over.

As for cool cut stuff, yeah there's lots of that. I'm not sure how many people realize this but there is exactly one plot decision in the entire game that actually branches, and that's the chapter 1 Agent finale. Every other major branching decision across all classes was cut due to high complexity.

There was also a lot of environment cut due to optimizations. For example, Hutta was nearly twice as big up until very close to ship. Dromund Kaas (the city not the planet) was almost three times as big. This may or may not have been a good thing.

Playable alien races were cut early on, by which I mean aliens requiring more than a hue shift like Ithorians, Wookiees, Mon Calamari, etc. The reason was because they didn't want disgusting companion romances to emerge. Many of us suggested that if you were a weird alien race you just didn't have romance options but it would have been too much work.

Speeder bikes originally looked like actual speeders and swoops and moved really fast. They were intentionally made to look "slower" because we had to lock how fast they traveled in the game due to the world being unable to draw in quickly enough. There's one we lovingly called "The Zamboni" because it was such a huge chunky slow moving hover box.

On Tatooine we made bleachers and a tightrope stretching over the Sarlacc pit. They didn't care for that.

Chewbot fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Aug 30, 2012

Alectai
Dec 31, 2008

It doesn't matter how long I live, I will never have a hat as dashing as this.
1: Imperial Agent
2: Chiss
3: Female
4: 2
5: Heart of Gold

Though if I hadn't already beaten it before, my vote would look like this.

1: Sith Inquisitor
2: Human
3: Female
4: 2
5: Heart of Gold

Because in this sense, you are quite possibly the Worst loving Sith Lord Ever.

Incidentally, if you're playing on Jung Ma, and you need an extra set of hands for an FP or something, I'd be glad to hop in.

Alectai fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Aug 30, 2012

Woozey
Feb 20, 2011

RIGHT NOW MY POTENTIAL IS LITERALLY THAT OF A WORM
1: Imperial Agent
2: Chiss
3: Female
4: 4
5: Heart of Gold


Because that is exactly how I played the game and dammit, I enjoyed it.

Veotax
May 16, 2006


Chewbot posted:

Playable alien races were cut early on, by which I mean aliens requiring more than a hue shift like Ithorians, Wookiees, Mon Calamari, etc. The reason was because they didn't want disgusting companion romances to emerge. Many of us suggested that if you were a weird alien race you just didn't have romance options but it would have been too much work.

Speeder bikes originally looked like actual speeders and swoops and moved really fast. They were intentionally made to look "slower" because we had to lock how fast they traveled in the game due to the world being unable to draw in quickly enough. There's one we lovingly called "The Zamboni" because it was such a huge chunky slow moving hover box.

On Tatooine we made bleachers and a tightrope stretching over the Sarlacc pit. They didn't care for that.

God drat, Bioware sounds loving boring.

Anyway, voting.

1. Bounty Hunter
2. Cyborg
3. Female
4. 3
5. Sadist

whowhatwhere
Mar 15, 2010

SHINee's back

Chewbot posted:

Yeah, the implications with Vette being the Sith Warrior's personal sex slave complete with shock collar and stockholm syndrome are pretty questionable.

...

Playable alien races were cut early on, by which I mean aliens requiring more than a hue shift like Ithorians, Wookiees, Mon Calamari, etc. The reason was because they didn't want disgusting companion romances to emerge. Many of us suggested that if you were a weird alien race you just didn't have romance options but it would have been too much work.

Yep. That's...that's Bioware alright.

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

Voting will remain open until 2:30am GMT (10:30pm EDT). Right now female Chiss Imperial Agent has a commanding lead.

Psion
Dec 13, 2002

eVeN I KnOw wHaT CoRnEr gAs iS

whowhatwhere posted:

Man, I was kinda hoping for a Male Sith Warrior LP because of a specific romance questline. Since that's not going to happen I've got no preference.

And I kinda hope you get hit by a bus!

there is no reason to "hope" for that. ever.

RottenK
Feb 17, 2011

Sexy bad choices

FAILED NOJOE
This game is horrible and it killed the last remnants of my goodwill towards Bioware. Not that I had much left after their 2 games before TOR.

1. Imperial Agent
2. Cyborg
3. Male
4. 4
5. Whatever It Takes


Psion posted:

And I kinda hope you get hit by a bus!

there is no reason to "hope" for that. ever.

The wall of :stare: posted by goons in reaction to it would've been pretty funny to look at.

Losem
Jun 17, 2003
Slightly Angry Sheep

Moon Slayer posted:

Voting will remain open until 2:30am GMT (10:30pm EDT). Right now female Chiss Imperial Agent has a commanding lead.

You must play her as the biggest tease ever! You need to flirt with everyone right up to the point they think they are getting some shoot them down. It did this a few times and it was great.

Rinkles
Oct 24, 2010

What I'm getting at is...
Do you feel the same way?
1 Bounty Hunter
5 Whatever It Takes

Arbite
Nov 4, 2009





1. Imperial Agent
2. Human
3. Male
4. 2
5. Sadist


I played through IA as a light side sith hater and I think this is the class with the biggest branches in story, so I'd like to see the contrast.

whowhatwhere
Mar 15, 2010

SHINee's back

Psion posted:

And I kinda hope you get hit by a bus!

there is no reason to "hope" for that. ever.

The reason is because it's so, so horrible that people need to see it.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Woozey posted:

1: Imperial Agent
2: Chiss
3: Female
4: 4
5: Heart of Gold


Because that is exactly how I played the game and dammit, I enjoyed it.

I think I'd like to see this the most, as well.

Kaboom Dragoon
May 7, 2010

The greatest of feasts

whowhatwhere posted:

Yep. That's...that's Bioware alright.

When people asked why you couldn't change your companions' armour in DA2, they pointed to the cosplayers and essentially said 'we wouldn't want to make things hard for them'.

It wouldn't be the first time Bioware catered to the fringes of their playerbase, and probably won't be the last.

Have to ask though, every time someone brings up this game, the Imperial Agent gets mentioned for being awesome. Can someone just give me a short version as to why it's so highly regarded?

evilmiera
Dec 14, 2009

Status: Ravenously Rambunctious

Woozey posted:

1: Imperial Agent
2: Chiss
3: Female
4: 4
5: Heart of Gold


Because that is exactly how I played the game and dammit, I enjoyed it.

Sounds reasonable. Then again, I never got that far playing as an Agent, mostly distracted by the boring as heck grinding.

JamMasterJim
Mar 27, 2010

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

When people asked why you couldn't change your companions' armour in DA2, they pointed to the cosplayers and essentially said 'we wouldn't want to make things hard for them'.

It wouldn't be the first time Bioware catered to the fringes of their playerbase, and probably won't be the last.

Have to ask though, every time someone brings up this game, the Imperial Agent gets mentioned for being awesome. Can someone just give me a short version as to why it's so highly regarded?

Essentially, Space James Bond.
Also, involved in actual 'politics', not just Sith vs Jedi.
And funny accent.

Bruceski
Aug 21, 2007

The tools of a hero mean nothing without a solid core.

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

Have to ask though, every time someone brings up this game, the Imperial Agent gets mentioned for being awesome. Can someone just give me a short version as to why it's so highly regarded?

Aside from the style it was the storyline used in a lot of promo stuff, and so got the most attention and polish. I believe there are five different ways the overall story can end, even though it doesn't diverge much in the middle (if you choose decision A or B it'll affect things later but you're still going to continue on to do job C for guy D). Everyone else gets one, maybe 2, that don't reflect any game choices. SW gets a heavy tonal shift if they're light or dark (but you still do the same stuff to the same people), not sure anyone else can really influence things more than cosmetically.

Arbite
Nov 4, 2009





JamMasterJim posted:

Essentially, Space James Bond.
Also, involved in actual 'politics', not just Sith vs Jedi.
And funny accent.

Two funny accents.

Chewbot posted:

On Tatooine we made bleachers and a tightrope stretching over the Sarlacc pit. They didn't care for that.

Now that sounds entertaining. On the other hand, were these the same people who made jumping puzzles for holocrons?

Arbite fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Aug 30, 2012

Arbite
Nov 4, 2009





Quote not edit!

sweet geek swag
Mar 29, 2006

Adjust lasers to FUN!





I'll hop on the bandwagon.

1.Imperial Agent
2.Chiss
3.Female
4.4
5.Heart of Gold

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


Arbite posted:

Now that sounds entertaining. On the other hand, were these the same people who made jumping puzzles for holocrons?

And that stupid loving Jawa balloon. I attempted that a single time, it got 85+% of the way there, to the point I could actually see the holocron and the relic piece, and the balloon glitched out and disappeared from under me. The balloon that moves so slowly it takes like 20 minutes to make a one way trip, that you can only get on at the very opposite end of its path, and that you then have to sit around and do nothing on for another 20 minutes so you can then make a jump on top of a specific location to grab two macguffins.

AMReese
Jan 31, 2011

I'm driving with my mind!

Kaboom Dragoon posted:

Have to ask though, every time someone brings up this game, the Imperial Agent gets mentioned for being awesome. Can someone just give me a short version as to why it's so highly regarded?

Also, I believe the developers have personally said that the Imperial Agent story is their favorite, and it shows.

Zaodai posted:

And that stupid loving Jawa balloon. I attempted that a single time, it got 85+% of the way there, to the point I could actually see the holocron and the relic piece, and the balloon glitched out and disappeared from under me. The balloon that moves so slowly it takes like 20 minutes to make a one way trip, that you can only get on at the very opposite end of its path, and that you then have to sit around and do nothing on for another 20 minutes so you can then make a jump on top of a specific location to grab two macguffins.

That happened to a lot of people, myself included. I just said "screw it" and went on my way, since it was just a beta at the time and collecting all of those holocrons would have been pointless since they didn't carry over.

Zurai
Feb 13, 2012


Wait -- I haven't even voted in this game yet!

Zaodai posted:

And that stupid loving Jawa balloon. I attempted that a single time, it got 85+% of the way there, to the point I could actually see the holocron and the relic piece, and the balloon glitched out and disappeared from under me. The balloon that moves so slowly it takes like 20 minutes to make a one way trip, that you can only get on at the very opposite end of its path, and that you then have to sit around and do nothing on for another 20 minutes so you can then make a jump on top of a specific location to grab two macguffins.

At one point in the beta, that balloon was something like a 2 hour one way trip. And that "one point" was "up until a couple months pre-release".

Anyway, on topic, Imperial Agent. I've heard it's the best storyline, although I never got past the capital world with it in beta. Sith Warrior had a good storyline and I got past Act 1 in that, but only just barely, so that's an acceptable alternative. I've heard some pretty lovely things about the other two Imperial stories and most of the Republic ones.

Zaodai
May 23, 2009

Death before dishonor?
Your terms are accepted.


AMReese posted:

That happened to a lot of people, myself included. I just said "screw it" and went on my way, since it was just a beta at the time and collecting all of those holocrons would have been pointless since they didn't carry over.

I was a Bounty Hunter and if you wanted the third Blue relic piece to make your level 50 relic you had to take that balloon ride, there was no way around it. That and the crafting window eating all the materials for my epic Cybertech mount pretty much made me say "gently caress this terrible game" and never play again. In both cases I submitted tickets in some vague hope that maybe this time their support staff would actually do something. But no, both times the ticket sat there unanswered for a week and then I got a form letter response thanking me for reporting the bug and that nothing will be done because having useful GMs would be too much like WoW.

Okay, so that last part was only in my head, but their GMs seriously never did anything to assist anyone, ever.

1stGear
Jan 16, 2010

Here's to the new us.

Zaodai posted:

And that stupid loving Jawa balloon. I attempted that a single time, it got 85+% of the way there, to the point I could actually see the holocron and the relic piece, and the balloon glitched out and disappeared from under me. The balloon that moves so slowly it takes like 20 minutes to make a one way trip, that you can only get on at the very opposite end of its path, and that you then have to sit around and do nothing on for another 20 minutes so you can then make a jump on top of a specific location to grab two macguffins.

Ahaha oh man, holocrons. Can we talk about holocrons and what a loving stupid idea they were or did you want to cover that Moon Slayer?

Nothingtoseehere
Nov 11, 2010


On storylines, empire as a whole had the best. Imperial agent is awesome awesome you do it and light-side sith warrior are the best in the game, and from what I hear bounty hunter and inquistor arn't bad. In contrast, republic has smugger (pretty good, not near IA levels), trooper (do you like action moives and space?) jedi warrior (standard fight evil questline, boring) and consular (dont know much more than first act is a boring piece of poo poo). But the non-story quests are the same for each fraction, so if you play a sith warrior and a IA you have to do each sidequest twice. This makes it harder to do more than one character per fraction before getting bored and quitting. Plus a lack of endgame...

Weed Wolf
Jul 30, 2004

1stGear posted:

Ahaha oh man, holocrons. Can we talk about holocrons and what a loving stupid idea they were or did you want to cover that Moon Slayer?

Holocrons wouldve been great if they functioned like the little hidden puzzles in Rift -- rewarding a nice rare of a level appropriate to the character completing it. Instead, Bioware had to go and make the Matrix Cube the best relic, bar none, and much shitiness ensued.

Moon Slayer
Jun 19, 2007

1stGear posted:

Ahaha oh man, holocrons. Can we talk about holocrons and what a loving stupid idea they were or did you want to cover that Moon Slayer?

I will talk about them, yes. I'll probably show off grabbing the first few until they become too annoying to get.

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whowhatwhere
Mar 15, 2010

SHINee's back

nothing to seehere posted:

light-side sith warrior

:crossarms:

I mean, I know that's part of the game, but that never made sense to me unless the questline involves defection.

As for the general runthrough of the period between KOTOR 2 and TORO, is that going to be revealed in the questlines or will that be open season?

  • Locked thread