Comments on: Some Star Wars: The Old Republic Thoughts

By: Cecil Philpot

Cecil Philpot — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:50:23 +0000

I certainly hope so! I’m a huge fan of Mass Effect, so I’d love to see a similar conversation system in TOR. You don’t suppose that our toons will be able to talk back to NPCs, do you?! What exactly do they mean by “fully voiced”? Now I’m just indulging in completely unwarranted hype…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:55:04 +0000

I think you’ll find that – first time through anyways – the quest dialog will suck you in and you won’t WANT to skip it.

By: Cecil Philpot

Cecil Philpot — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:20:52 +0000

Now we can skip the quest dialog, instead of just skipping the quest text! Definitely a breakthrough in MMO gameplay.

By: spinks

spinks — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:10:08 +0000

Yeah, that sounds plausible. I was thinking about this afterwards and ended up thinking that streaming was most likely.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:03:55 +0000

As Tipa said, Wizard101 is fully voiced.

“More to the point, how much disk space is this MMO going to take? How long to download patches? Will we have to run it with the CD in the machine?”

Using Wizard as a guide:

- You don’t need a CD to run sound
- My Wizard101 installation is 890MB (WOW is 47.5GB)
- Patches are no longer than WOW patches; often less

I looked at the files in the Wizard installation and they seem to be doing some extremely smart caching – there are relatively few sound files – and I’ll bet it streams what it thinks it needs in advance, and ditches sound files it has finished with. This keeps the overall game footprint extremely tiny compared to WOW.

This is PROBABLY the same sort of thing that Free Realms does… you can see it streaming data all the time.

By: Veneretio

Veneretio — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:20:20 +0000

If you have to play the game with the CD in the drive that will be a colossal disappointment and will show a real disconnect with the target audience. That said, I can’t help, but be extremely excited for this.

It will be interesting to see what Blizzard’s response to this is. Perhaps, the new MMO they’re talking about?

By: Tipa

Tipa — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:57:41 +0000

Wizard 101 is fully voiced and is out before SWTOR.

Point taken about the trailers for video games not seeming to have to have anything to do with the game — EQ’s trailer famously had nothing to do with the game, and used to taunt you with that fact by playing in its entirety every time you started the game if you didn’t click through.

That doesn’t make the SWTOR one any more valuable. Yeah, I’d go see the movie. But it doesn’t make me want the game any more or less because I know it has absolutely nothing to do with it. So why bother with it?

By: Longasc

Longasc — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:34:08 +0000

No, Tobold is right. Too much flavor for something that does not even exist.