Star Wars Battlefront (Cinimatic) Trailer released

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Planetside 2 had basically a New Game Content like another SOE game, Star Wars Galaxies where in they fully changed the game balanced, redid handling and changed a bunch of things to make it more access to a console audience.

Which was promptly shat on by the entire community because it took was had been an interesting MMOFPS and tweaked it so everything either handled like mud or was much slower and doubled the average TTK.

I've played it off and on since release, and I've never gotten a whiff of any of that. But it's likely a moot point now anyway, since I don't think the game will survive the year. Ex-SOE's new owners have already sacked most of the big name leadership in the studio.

[RogueIce]

I'm tired of small-scale bullshit. The market is flooded with 12-18 MP games. I want my 64 vs 64 battles back. We did that shit on dial-up and 128k DSL. It's 2015: get it together.

Nobody else actually wants those though.

See, the problem with super large scale battles is that you basically don't get to feel like you did anything relevant to winning. 20 is already kinda pushing it for the ability for one player's individual contribution to make a difference to the outcome of a match, and if you didn't make a difference by being there why bother?

People who care about team-based combat and would enjoy a large-scale battle like that?

I know most of the FPS kiddies who obsess over their precious K/D ratios won't care and just want a run'n'gun Call of Duty: Star Wars, but still. And as others said, the market is there.

[Purple]

See, the problem with super large scale battles is that you basically don't get to feel like you did anything relevant to winning. 20 is already kinda pushing it for the ability for one player's individual contribution to make a difference to the outcome of a match, and if you didn't make a difference by being there why bother?

Because the gameplay is fun? I like to play BF1942 against bots. I jump into an aircraft and bomb stuff for fun. I could not care less if my side wins or loses as long as I get my fill of bombing stuff. And I suspect there are quite a lot of players out there like me who just want to casually enjoy doing their favorite thing in a game without having to "contribute" to the overall score, chase achievements or what ever.

[Lagmonster]

At some point, you'll realize that you're part of many different consumer markets, some of which are too small or poor to give a shit about.

But that there is probably at least one or two indie devs who've already made the kind of game you like, just less shiny.

[Purple]

At some point, you'll realize that you're part of many different consumer markets, some of which are too small or poor to give a shit about.

But that there is probably at least one or two indie devs who've already made the kind of game you like, just less shiny.

Like the original Battlefield series. Where you could basically play for fun all day long without caring or actually push to make something happen depending on your preference at the time.

[Lagmonster]

I understand the mindset that would move team-based FPS away from single-player matches. The best bots are too stupid for the competitive gamer and the maps too limited for the 'just wanna drive a tank over things' sandbox gamer. So, there are sandbox FPS games where you can just exhaust yourself doing whatever makes you feel funky, and games built around the competitive multiplayer experience.

[TheFeniX]

I understand the mindset that would move team-based FPS away from single-player matches. The best bots are too stupid for the competitive gamer and the maps too limited for the 'just wanna drive a tank over things' sandbox gamer. So, there are sandbox FPS games where you can just exhaust yourself doing whatever makes you feel funky, and games built around the competitive multiplayer experience.

UT99 and Quake bots were more than competitive and would rely on more "human" tactics. AI in BF1942 was fairly gutted because hardware requirements were already off the charts considering the maps, graphics, and amount of assets on screen, but the technology has always been there.

Even the Jedi-Knight series had decent bot AI in Multi-player (and excellent AI in the SP build). The Raven Jedi-Knight games forwent pretty much any and all decision making for their MP bots and put them "on-rails" so they basically ran laps around the maps. You could get the NPC AI into the multi-player build, but it was resource heavy and could slow your server to a crawl.

What really killed large-scale games like BF1942 was the success of Halo and the increasing FPS console market. Console gamers, due to the nature of the control scheme, are not nearly as aware of the "big picture" as KB/M players are. But really, CoD put the final nail in the coffin because whereas the Battlefield series always made good money, CoD blew the fucking lid off the whole thing. FPS was always considered where the "hardcore" gamer was at, but the sales numbers never reflected that until their success on consoles. The only break-way FPS before Halo was Counter-Strike, and that game was "free."

It's the same reason WoW killed the MMO genre by being so wildly successful: other companies looking to break into the genre feel they have to directly compete with WoW, even though experience shows those MMOs that do their own thing are the ones that actually eek out their own decent profits.

So saying "people don't want a large-scale" game is true and false for a few reasons. True because they aren't making them and consoles really can't support them, so they won't sell as well. But false because you could release an updated BF1942 today and you would make money. Just not as much money by pandering to consoles.

I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure the cut-down version of BF2 (Modern Combat) outsold the original, just by nature of being on console and those gamers being starved for good games at the time.

[Sea Skimmer]

You say nobody wants them... yet Planetside 1 was popular enough to be a subscription game for years. BF2's modded 128 player servers were very popular and outside the Battlefield series has anyone reached higher than 32 players?

Someone actually made a very battlefield 2 like game for consoles years ago, an early PS3 game I believe, that supported 64 players, but it had dedicated servers. I played it all of twice, it was completely a battlefield 2 clone except a few gadgets and only helicopters, no jets. Dedicated servers though were the key. System resources won't stop merely playing in a 64 player game, but requiring one of the consoles to also host the game is a deal breaker without big big graphical sacrifices.

So saying "people don't want a large-scale" game is true and false for a few reasons. True because they aren't making them and consoles really can't support them, so they won't sell as well. But false because you could release an updated BF1942 today and you would make money. Just not as much money by pandering to consoles.

Yeah that's exactly it. The bar isn't profit, its massive unrelenting profit. And with companies like EA buying out developers for decades now and shutting them down the industry while growing in revenue isn't exactly robust as far as large budget game developers go. Of course some of this is inevitable because if you have to spend 50 million to make a game you are rather vulnerable to a bad game sinking you completely. Same reason almost all the movie studios ended up huge in the US.

[TheFeniX]

Yeah that's exactly it. The bar isn't profit, its massive unrelenting profit. And with companies like EA buying out developers for decades now and shutting them down the industry while growing in revenue isn't exactly robust as far as large budget game developers go. Of course some of this is inevitable because if you have to spend 50 million to make a game you are rather vulnerable to a bad game sinking you completely. Same reason almost all the movie studios ended up huge in the US.

This is pretty much why we'll never see a new Jedi-Knight game with EA in charge.* The series was always just moderately successful. Even back when LA was in charge, they told Raven to fuck-off because they had another in-house project they felt would resonate better with current gamers since "Arena Shooters are dead" and Jedi-Knight relied on too many dated mechanics (such as the old "key hunt" and levels that weren't narrow corridors). That game turned out to be the corridor slasher, QTE-fest, "omg beat up Lord Vader super-special Jedi-San" Force Unleashed. They marketed the shit out of it, expected it to break record sales, and basically wrote off any Jedi-Knight style games when people didn't eat up the garbage.

The sad part is: the game sold really well even though it got beat up by critics and players. But you have to have either "10/10 GOTYAY!!!!!" or break the ceiling off the bank in order to not get the series destroyed by quickly releasing a sequel cash-grab: Star Wars games do not do that. Look at Dragon-Age: that EA even bothered to put that much time and effort into DA:I is amazing. Only thing I can figure is they had nothing else for the semi-dead corpse of Bioware to work on, so just let them have at it and finally got excited when they realized they were on to something. The days of "I got an idea, it might make us some money in the process" is dead when all the people in-charge give a fuck about is sitting around bragging about units they pushed or their paid review scores.

*I hope I eat these words. Really do. But I still wouldn't buy an EA in-house JK game. Maybe if they brought back Raven and just handled the marketing.

[Vendetta]

Maybe if they brought back Raven and just handled the marketing.

Raven aren't even a thing any more. There's a sort of sad remnant chained up in a dungeon at Activision that churns out multiplayer maps for CoD, but that's it.

[TheFeniX]

Raven aren't even a thing any more. There's a sort of sad remnant chained up in a dungeon at Activision that churns out multiplayer maps for CoD, but that's it.

I'm pretty sure they've never been bought up, just forced to do grunt work for Activision. I read they were doing some Chinese MMO thing. But I'll need to look it up.

F2P Chinese CoD? what

[Lagmonster]

RE: Raven, I'd say that 'getting the gang back together for a triumphant return to form' is statistically a shitty, shitty bet in art and entertainment, especially film, TV and video games. How many people in those mediums have managed to churn out consistently good work, or progressively better work, through the lifespan of their career?

[TheFeniX]

RE: Raven, I'd say that 'getting the gang back together for a triumphant return to form' is statistically a shitty, shitty bet in art and entertainment, especially film, TV and video games. How many people in those mediums have managed to churn out consistently good work, or progressively better work, through the lifespan of their career?

I'll start by saying: when the new movies come out we're likely to get another Jedi-Knight style game due to the revamped interest in lightsabers. That said, it won't really be a Jedi-Knight game, it will be in the vein of "Obi-Wan" or "Force Unleashed." Namely: Boring

And Raven has been making games for 20 years, across multiple genres and tech platforms. Really though, they just knew what "fun" was. They made an enjoyable Quake single-player game and left us all scarred by Stroggification. That's an accomplishment in of itself.

Either way, it's just the rambling of a nostalgic idiot as he prepares for a new Battlefront game that's likely to be loaded with microtransactions and no mod support because "man, modding Frostbite would be so haaaaaard." Also, to discourage hacking... because that's worked out so well for them in BF4.... or any game that uses a network card.

[Elheru Aran]

I'm not sure why a new Jedi Knight style game would be difficult. The basic concept is that you take a young mook, go through a few adventures, he (or she) finds out they have Force potential, give them a lightsaber, they go through the rest of the game chasing the big bad and improving their Force skills until the last big battle. Have a bunch of puzzlers where you have to hop around platforms or hit the right buttons in order or whatever to get to the next side. It's really not that difficult. Repetitive? Maybe. But it's comfortable.

The main problem I have with the notion is that when I played Force Unleashed, it seems geared so much towards console versus PC-- the controls are all hotkeyed. I preferred having single action buttons-- flip through the Force actions until you find the one you want and hit "F" to use it. Slower? Maybe, sure. But you got more options rather than just "Toss! Smash! Lightning!" all the time. If you wanted to bind a key to a specific action, you can do that in the Options menu. Hell, hit shift-tab and edit it in. That reminds me of another thing-- modern games don't have cheats anymore. Good thing? Maybe. But Jedi Knight wouldn't be the same without 'yodajammies' or 'deeznuts'.

[PREDATOR490]

I used to play JKA a lot for the MP. Dueling was usually fun and the siege mode a nice addition if you discount the cheap bugs and horrific abuse.

I do not see much traction for a modern JKA until the new films come out. Star Wars as a gaming franchise is pretty dead with the only recent activity being from Bioware. Only so many games can really do the same Trench Run or do another take on Hoth before it is completely pointless. That said, new movies means new characters and possibly new locations to fuel interest in new games. Not to mention it is supposed to be a new era and depending on how they want to run the EU. Games might actually get a bit more latitude to play with the IP.

I would rather have a Star Wars game that is built like the Arma simulation or Planetside rather than battlefield. The Old Republic is a nice enough game and genre but it would be nice to get some games or even an MMO that is set in and around the movies.

[Borgholio]

Hell, I'd love to see a 4x game based on Star Wars. And I don't mean Master of Orion with SW skins, I mean a game that lets you manage all aspects of the Old Republic, or the Empire, or any galactic government from the large fleet-deployment scale down to building up individual planets.

[Purple]

Isn't that kind of game dying out though? Looking at the latest editions to the gaming world (such as Civ V) it seems that complexity is going out of fashion for automation, simplicity and appeal to a wider casual fan base.

[Borgholio]

Isn't that kind of game dying out though? Looking at the latest editions to the gaming world (such as Civ V) it seems that complexity is going out of fashion for automation, simplicity and appeal to a wider casual fan base.

Master of Orion 3 tried to fix that by having a very complex game that you could micromanage if you wanted to, but had planetary governors and other AIs that you could enable if you wanted so you basically just sat back and hit "Next Turn" 50 times in between giving actual human input. Unfortunately, they borked the AI so it made some really head-scratching decisions and required you to micromanage to some degree anyways.

So having micromanagement mixed with a macromanagement AI would work very nicely if it was implemented correctly.

[Purple]

Thing is, I doubt anyone today would bother when they can just make another mindless cash raker.

[Vendetta]

Hell, I'd love to see a 4x game based on Star Wars. And I don't mean Master of Orion with SW skins, I mean a game that lets you manage all aspects of the Old Republic, or the Empire, or any galactic government from the large fleet-deployment scale down to building up individual planets.

4x games tend to assume multiple evenly matched starting polities though, rather than one which already controls most of the galaxy. So the mechanics and theme don't really line up too well.

A grand strategy game which was basically Crusader Kings iiiiinnn spaaaace! would probably be better for the theme because you could have the multiple layers of goals that CK allows from taking over the republic with shenanigans to carving out your personal fiefdom to whatever you can think of.

Micromanagement is an odd problem in 4x games because you actually want micromanagement in the early game where there isn't a lot of interesting stuff to do otherwise. All the (space) ones I've tried recently have super dull early games with little to do because you can only build one thing on your planets and it takes a million turns and it takes another million to research a second thing to build so you don't have any decisions to make as a player until you've done a lot of bitch work.

But you don't want micromanagement in the late game, the bane of MoO2 was that the late game space combat was infinite hours of clicking on enemy doom stars to blow them up because it built megafleets every few turns which you had to keep killing because the autoresolve would instantly lose battles you won without casualties manually.

From the looks of it StarDrive 2 might have enough events happening in the early game to give you stuff to do as a player whilst you haven't unlocked many strategic options.

[bilateralrope]

Hell, I'd love to see a 4x game based on Star Wars. And I don't mean Master of Orion with SW skins, I mean a game that lets you manage all aspects of the Old Republic, or the Empire, or any galactic government from the large fleet-deployment scale down to building up individual planets.

4x games tend to assume multiple evenly matched starting polities though, rather than one which already controls most of the galaxy. So the mechanics and theme don't really line up too well.

Before ROTJ you are correct. After ROTJ the Empire might fragment sufficiently to allow a 4x game to work.

[Purple]

But you don't want micromanagement in the late game, the bane of MoO2 was that the late game space combat was infinite hours of clicking on enemy doom stars to blow them up because it built megafleets every few turns which you had to keep killing because the autoresolve would instantly lose battles you won without casualties manually.

I have heard this argument a lot. But it seems to always be a result of bad game design in terms of build options. As in, why are you allowed to build a million ships? Why not have a limit on how many ships you have to make sure your end game fleet is as big as your early game fleet but scaled up for empire size? Etc. It just seems to be something you can circumvent with good design decisions in other things.

[Borgholio]

But you don't want micromanagement in the late game, the bane of MoO2 was that the late game space combat was infinite hours of clicking on enemy doom stars to blow them up because it built megafleets every few turns which you had to keep killing because the autoresolve would instantly lose battles you won without casualties manually.

I have heard this argument a lot. But it seems to always be a result of bad game design in terms of build options. As in, why are you allowed to build a million ships? Why not have a limit on how many ships you have to make sure your end game fleet is as big as your early game fleet but scaled up for empire size? Etc. It just seems to be something you can circumvent with good design decisions in other things.

That's kinda what Civ 5 did. Previous versions of Civilization allowed what was called a "Stack of Doom", where you could put as many units as you wanted in a single space on the map. You could literally have 50 units in a single square. That was a horrible imbalance when that single square was a city or a fort and you could practically hold out forever unless the enemy managed to send in their own stack of doom (which outside of a city or fort was actually fairly vulnerable). So what Civ 5 did is promote gameplay where you had a smaller number of highly upgraded and experienced units instead of a horde, and you could only have one unit in a square at a given time...thus eliminating the stack of doom. I personally liked the change but other longtime fans of the series were less than impressed.

With MOO 3 they didn't go that route, they still let you build a million ships...but the AI was "good enough" to make it fairly easy to manage. Except that combat only allowed 180 ships per combat, so if you both could reinforce faster than that, the battle would never end...

[Purple]

I have seen video footage of Civ 5 and I am unimpressed, but not for those reasons. I have played game mods for Civ 4 that impose stack limitations as well and it works good. Although if you want to see a really good implementation of it look up The History of Three Kingdoms mod. It has a system of generals where each general has a limited number of troops he can lead, but on the other hands troops lead by a general are much better than those without. And when you combine that with a unit limit per tile that's great.

Honestly though I'd actually like to see a flat tax on units. Like you can maintain X units per planet/city and each unit over that costs more and more and more to maintain until you bankrupt your self quickly. Civ 4 has a system to that effect but it's far too meager and slow effecting.

[Adam Reynolds]

So Battlefront will definitely feature bots.

It honestly looks like they are simply doing a remake of the first Battlefront. Which personally I vastly preferred to the sequel, despite the new features. Something about Battlefront 2 just didn't feel like Star Wars in the same way as the first game. I'm not sure what it was but something about that game just felt off to me.

As for a Star Wars strategy game, I would love to see a game that realistically models the Rebellion and Empire.

So as the Rebellion you objective is to survive more than it is to win. A major objective is destroying any Death Stars that the enemy creates as those make it almost impossible to find any support. Eventually your goal becomes one of targeting the unrest within the Empire and convincing worlds to support you, at least covertly. That support grows and as you recruit Luke, you also gain the ability to go after Vader and the Emperor directly. After killing the Emperor, then it becomes a question of unifying worlds behind your growing movement and creating the New Republic.

As the Empire your goal is to keep worlds in line, with destroying the Rebellion the ultimate goal. The only true failure condition is the death of the Emperor. If he dies, you loose, regardless of whether or not the Rebel Alliances survives the attempt. But a major bonus is converting Luke to your side, which requires putting the Emperor in jeopardy.

Similarly, we could see something that models the Clone Wars. Though the two factions should be the Jedi and Sith rather than the Republic and Confederacy, though the Jedi effectively control the Republic and the Sith largely control the Confederacy. This would actually play out as a mostly conventional war, but the key struggle is between the Sith trying to subvert the Republic and the Jedi trying to find out who they are. Winning the war is actually secondary to both sides and in fact a negative for the Sith.

Though I have no idea how a game would properly model any of that with any quality.