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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games)

Movie Based MMO Updates 40

Posted by Zonk from the who-needs-original-content? dept.
Neo writes "The handover of The Matrix Online to SOE has finally begun with users given 45 days to convert their accounts over to SOE's Station system." Star Wars Galaxies, TMO's sister game, has been having its own troubles. A recent patch had to be removed from the live game because of overwhelming, crushing player protest. Another "Star" MMOG has new help this week, with none other than Michael Okuda signing on to work on the Star Trek Online Massive game. From the article: " A technical designer and all-around Star Trek guru, Okuda has worked as a technical consultant to the writers of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine television series, as well as seven Star Trek films. He will primarily design the game's interface, along with serving as a more general Star Trek universe consultant."
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Movie Based MMO Updates More

Movie Based MMO Updates

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  • VOIP (Score:4, Funny)

    by Boronx ( 228853 ) <evonreis.mohr-engineering@com> on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:31AM (#13369942) Homepage Journal
    If it has voice over IP, it will just degenerate into a ham contest, and endless stream of Shatnerian pauses-for-effect, "Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor", and horrible Scottish brogues
    • Nothing wrong with that.

      It'll be the first time people have actually roleplayed since typing dumbspeak to roleplay Ogres in EverQuest five years ago.

      Personally, I'm going with "Kiptin! Sensor readin's INdicate that ancient starship is rilly a nuclear wessel."

    • Not like they'd be doing it... In the... Chat interface... without the use of... VOIP.
  • Maybe you were thinking of The Sims Online (TSO) or you just thought you'd make up your own acronym and hoped no-one would notice. Fair enough.

    BTW, the transition to SOE billing happened on the 15th of August. It's now the 22nd of August. So most people have already gone through the (mostly painless) process. We had one faction member lose his character for an hour or two, but for most people it was flawless.

    The next major development event is the integration of the SOE cross game chat protocol. When t
    • TIKCFWAIIIAIITLTFOWTHATAMTIDTJTTWAIMYSCUTPWAA"GO" A YAUOTLVTEQUABLSBFTTACOHTCE*

      * = The internet keyboard cowboys' fetish with acronyms is irritating, irrational, and immature. It takes longer to figure out what the hell all the acronyms mean than it does to just type the words. Also, it makes your speech completely unintelligible to people who aren't as "geeked out" as you and up on the latest verbal trends. Everyone who uses acronyms beyong "lol" should be forced to take a class on how to communicate eff

  • Hard to have sympathy (Score:5, Informative)

    by BlightThePower ( 663950 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:27AM (#13370077)
    for anyone still playing SWG. Masochists really deserve what they get. It was clear literally years ago what SOE's strategy was. Its still carrying bugs from Beta, presumably because they are understaffed or underresourced or something, but they keep pumping those (purchasable) expansion packs out somehow. People waited for over a year for the promised combat fix/rebalance/revamp or whatever it ended up being called. And even then, its rubbish and not much better than the original system. From friends who foolishly stayed on I have heard some interesting stories. In particular, their CSRs have notably become steadily ruder, more isolated from management (they seem to know nothing more than the players 9 times out 10) and somewhat less able as time has gone by. Not surprised really, on a personal level it must be a nightmare to play the role of a steward on the deck of a virtual Titanic. Nerves are well and truly frayed in that quarter.

    SWG has long since transcended gaming; I hear they are up for a Tony award under the heading "Longest running farce".

    This is honestly not meant to be flame bait, if you're having a fine old time thats cool for you. But don't complain, SOE know for an absolute fact at this point their player base are essentially mugs who will put up with any old nonsense. If that wasn't true you'd have cancelled your account years ago.

    Really, the writing is not so much on the wall about that game as carved into your eyeballs at this point.

    • LOL (Score:4, Funny)

      by BlightThePower ( 663950 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @03:55AM (#13370135)
      Attention moderator: given I'm agreeing with the story as posted how can it be flamebait? John Smedley, if thats you, stop jerking around on Slashdot and get back to sorting some of your games out huh.
      • I'm not saying your post is flamebait (although you bring that possibility up yourself in the original post) but obviously you realized that by saying that the SOE consumers deserve this mess because they've put up with it, you're being provocative.

        The flaw in your argument is that you're assuming that everyone who becomes a SOE consumer is a forum poster-type who realizes from the get-go that SOE bungles everything it gets its hands on. There are a lot of fantasy/sci-fi fans who become subscribers to a MMO

        • Hi, yeah I think those are all reasonable points.

          Well, its only flamebait to the fanbois really and their view is not open to discussion anyway. Sure, I know ppl still playing and they admit they are fools; they weren't surprised by this latest issue anymore than they were by the last half dozen. They get enough out of it to keep going, thats cool. But they have and will continue to put up with a lot as consumers. I confess, as a general rule it does infuriate me that gamers as a group put up with so much n
    • So, if you're having a good time with the game you shouldn't complain when a patch comes out that screws up your good time? That makes about as much sense as you apparently believe SOE has demonstrated in creating and running the game.

      Of COURSE your post is flamebait. You're saying that anyone who continues to play playing the game is a fool. How can that not be modded down as a troll or flamebait?

      • Of COURSE your post is flamebait. You're saying that anyone who continues to play playing the game is a fool. How can that not be modded down as a troll or flamebait?

        As someone who has cancelled their SWG subscription, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. The game CAN'T be saved. Its too far gone. SOE has the license, and it has potential, but nothings ever going to come of it. I quit a few months ago when a bug (that reduced all creature pets to level 0) was discovered the day a pat

      • No. I say anyone who continues to play that game and is surprised by the way its managed is a fool. Its futile. If you're happy with that level of service, fine, but if not, exactly how many times are you going to let the crocodile bite you before you stop putting your hand in its cage?

        This nonsense has been going on since Beta. Over a year after the release some characters still didn't have skills that actually worked; I had a Carbineer toon, half his attacks did SFA because the code was never implemented.
  • The Matrix Online Joins the Sony Online Entertainment Platform - Effective August 15, 2005- 8/12/2005

    do what? is that span of days retroactive or something?

    • Re:From the article (Score:2, Insightful)

      by micpp ( 818596 )
      It could be written in the way that most of the world uses, i.e. DD/MM/YYYY, which would make it the 8th of December. Not all of us write dates in your wacky American format. Personally, I think they should be written with the year first (YYYY/MM/DD), because it's easier to sort, but that's just me.
      • true, but I would expect that an american-based site, with americans running the content would use the wacky american date format. I side-step the entire problem by using the first three letters of the month instead. ie today is 22AUG05
    • I would guess that the notice was posted on the 12th, and would take effect 3 days later

  • I can deal with Okuda (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @09:40AM (#13370928) Homepage
    Okuda's got imagination. The ability to think up a bucketfull of technobullshit at the drop of a hat that not only sounds cool, but somehow plausible. With him involved, there's a very good chance Trek Online might actually have a measure of depth and challenge that would make it worth playing. Just keep the braindead regurgitators like Rick Berman the hell away from it, and all will be good.
    • but would prefer someone like David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington SciFi novels. His universe is a lot more logical and contains less contradictions. Which adds greatly to the believability of the virtual world.

  • Alternate Headlines... (Score:3, Funny)

    by DrunkenTerror ( 561616 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @10:50AM (#13371761) Homepage Journal

    Zonk *heart* MMOs

    Making Bad Movies Worse

    Cashing In - How A Story Is Squeezed For All It's Worth

  • Okuda's good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kniLnamiJ-neB ( 754894 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @10:54AM (#13371836)
    hehe, as long as they don't let Berman and Braga near it, Star Trek Online should be good stuff. I read some of the articles about its basic design on one of the fansites and with Okuda designing the interface, it will be much like the real thing. I just hope they take the time to make it work well, rather than rushing it out the door if it's taking longer than expected.

  • Any ideas? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Taulin ( 569009 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @12:54PM (#13372671) Homepage Journal
    Anyone have any ideas what a Star Trek MMOG could be like? The series is mostly based on story and plot lines. This contradicts what MMOGs are mostly, which is the treadmills. Sure they all have small quests, and background stories, but nothing epic like a single player RPG has to offer. I am still interested in how it turns out since the Star Trek universe is pretty expansive.
    • Its tricky making a story based MMOG work. First your story and missions have to be fun to create a player base. Secondly, you need to have a development team that can create stories and missions faster than the players can run them out. Basically if you have 1 million subscribers or more, you have the chance to start running with the expensive development process. Its going to happen in one of these MMOGS one of these days... And the competition will have trouble ever catching up. This is a prediction

    • Re:Any ideas? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Easy, just have the entire universe on a pre-determined timeline. Whenever you login, it's as though you've really been gone for that amount of time.

      Basically give everyone a starting area so they can learn the system, and then send them out into the world that is constantly running one big as hell epic quest that everyone must participate in. How you interact with this quest is up to you. There would be things taken into account by the AI, parameters if you will, that would help inch the story in one direc
    • I have a hunch at some of the mission objectives:

      The Borg are invading Ceti Delta Gamma Lambda quadrant! You must kill 50 of them.

      Proptimis Minor has the plague! The only cure exists on Proptimis Major. Go to Proptimis Major and collect 50 vials of Mugato juice from the native fauna.

      The warp is teh asplode! You need to more dilithium or else you will be stuck in the Zeta quadrant. Form an away team to collect 50 Dilithium crystals from the rocky surface of Zeta Beta Meta. Beware of the local fauna.

      Wesly cru

    • Re:Any ideas? (Score:4, Funny)

      by EvilMagnus ( 32878 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @06:21PM (#13375103)
      You will start as a Star Fleet Cadet (Year 1). You will be tasked with cleaning out an Infestation of Tribbles from the Jefferies tube on the USS Treadmill. You will be given a bent pipe (poor quality) and sent on your way.

      You will then spend the next 10 hours beating Tribbles with this pipe to make it to Cadet (Year 2).

      Perhaps by the time you graduate the Academy you will actually get to use ranged weapons. Which you will then use to shoot that annoying Ferengi kid from DS9.

  • SWG is broken (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:23PM (#13372877)
    Star Wars Galaxies is dead, unfortunately. It was broken a long time ago. It's really a shame because the game has so much potential, but the developers have tinkered with the gameplay to such a degree, very little makes sense any more. There are entire classes of characters who now seem to have no usefulness due to changes within the system; there are stats on file with characters and devices in the world which either don't function any more, or keep changing their name, purpose, requirements, etc., that nothing makes sense any more. There are botched missions which are impossible to solve, and have been for months or years; Other missions end in the middle and toss you into an entirely different glass-eating class that is separate from your dicipline and makes no sense; there are NPCs that exist solely to trigger cleanup and salvage of legacy game flags that stand out like a Dairy Queen on the Death Star.

    It's really sad to see this game go down the tubes, and you can tell SOE is desperately trying to keep it from sinking, but it seems everything they do just makes things worse. They should just put it out of its misery.

    If you ask me, the whole station pass scheme is designed to not lose subscribers due to a crappy game that's part of their arsenal -- this way they can give you some other distraction in case their efforts fail, and they can claim X thousand subscribers even though very few may actually play a particular MMORPG.
    • So does the station access scheme (the keeping the subscriber number up part) ultimately benefit SOE management and stockholders? Or, does it help the devs & programmers who are trying to keep their jobs?

      It must be like a rite of passage for new devs at SOE now...imagine, you get hired on at SOE dreaming to work on a new game, but no way Jose! You've got to put in time on SWG before you can move up...but it's a catch-22. If you do well at SWG, they will keep you on it, if you do poorly but show po

  • World Of Warcraft (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Custard ( 587661 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @04:33PM (#13374356) Homepage Journal
    Took vacation and bought World Of Warcraft the day it came out, and I've never looked back.

    Classes are mostly balanced and varied, crafting does not gimp your combat abilities and vice-versa, and leveling fits very nicely with interesting quest lines.

    Crafting was fun in SWG, at least as a Doctor [sony.com]. Analyzing material stats, balancing all the different variables, judging resource quality. I even did some web dev to make it easier for myself and other doctors (http://swg.dailybuzz.net/ [dailybuzz.net]). But getting to be a top tier crafter SUCKED big time. Literally sitting there pushing a button every few seconds to make a macro repeatedly craft throw-away items to earn XP just so I could make desirable medicines? There were two parts to SWG - grinding or being a master crafter. Once you attained master, it got kind of fun. Until then, you were completely useless.

    In WoW, you do sometimes have to make things repeatedly, but they're not useless. There's always someone who'll accept or buy a leather armor kit to enhance their items. Any item that's hard for you to make is valued by others at your level, so you get a worthwhile price for your wares. And any lower stuff that you do need to grind doesn't cost much or take much time and lower levels kiss your feet when you donate it to them. By the time you've made 20-30 of one item, it no longer gives experience, and by then you can train up newer and better items to craft. Compare that to making literally thousands upon thousands of the same damn Advanced Biological Effect Controller so you can get to be a better medicine crafter and healer in SWG.

    Gathering materials in SWG meant buying harvesting machines, locating a good resource spot once in a blue moon, and paying to leave the machine there for a week. Gathering materials in SWG is directly linked to gameplay - appropriately leveled enemies drop materials that a player would need to craft items that would help those at around his level. Or randomly spawned herbs and minerals would appear in areas where appropriately leveled players could utilize them, and they'd be in the area questing or killing anyhow.

    Just can't get over how much more *fun* WoW is compared to SWG. Blizzard really got it right.
  • ...do we get a playstation II or III version?

    I mean, really. I love the whole idea of the Matrix Online, but I don't want to have to babysit a Windows machine just to be able to play one single game. And, anyway, playing a game about hackers on a WINDOWS BOX would be horrifying. You'd spend all your time waiting for the hammer to come down (pardon the pun). I mean, really -- hackers DO have a very well developed sense of irony.

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