Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
We stood in the fire!
Majordomo Staghelm and Alysrazor defeated this past week.
Alys was a bit of a pain, with people not standing in the fires or worms and keeping the tanks alive. Postcards went full throttle with air mileage while we controlled the bottom.
Domo went down in one night of attempts. This was a crazy healer fight with only one random mechanic - the orbs. Taking the orb damage was easy, running out of the cat-leap fire while low health from the orbs is almost certainly instant death.
Not the best kill-shot of Domo.
Tribe is now 6/7!
Ragnaros, we are coming for you - again!
I'll post the Alysrazor kill-shot soon (I hope)
Alys was a bit of a pain, with people not standing in the fires or worms and keeping the tanks alive. Postcards went full throttle with air mileage while we controlled the bottom.
Domo went down in one night of attempts. This was a crazy healer fight with only one random mechanic - the orbs. Taking the orb damage was easy, running out of the cat-leap fire while low health from the orbs is almost certainly instant death.
Not the best kill-shot of Domo.
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| "Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto" |
Ragnaros, we are coming for you - again!
I'll post the Alysrazor kill-shot soon (I hope)
Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
SW:ToR CE
Star Wars: The Old Republic Online Collector's Edition - with Bonus! now On Gamestop.
$149.99
- Early Access
- Color Stone to change your weapon effect
- Exclusive Gentle Giant Darth Malgus statue
- Game disks collectible metal case
- The Journal of Master Gnost-Dural as annotated by Satele Shan
- The Old Republic galaxy map
- Music of Star Wars: The Old Republic CD
- High-quality Collector's Edition box
- Includes 7 additional Digital Items:
- Flare Gun: Fire flares into the air
- Training Droid: Hovers at your side for combat assistance
- HoloDancer: Project your own holographic dancer
- HoloCam: Keep visual records of in-game adventures
- STAP: Sleek and unique in-game vehicle
- Exclusive Mouse Droid: Spunky Droid to join your adventures
- Exclusive Collector's Edition Store: Unique in-game vendor with an assortment of items
- Custom Security Authentication Key
Baleroc defeated!
"None shall pass!"
We defeated Baleroc on Saturday July 16th.
Last night, Tribe Guild spent numerous attempts on 25man on this boss, but we just couldn't down him. With a half hour left, we broke the raid group into a 10man and one-shotted him. This is the second time we've downed the Gatekeeper.
Also, congrats to Mano who was ranked 4th as Combat Rogue in the world on Baleroc 10man according to World of Logs!
We defeated Baleroc on Saturday July 16th.
Last night, Tribe Guild spent numerous attempts on 25man on this boss, but we just couldn't down him. With a half hour left, we broke the raid group into a 10man and one-shotted him. This is the second time we've downed the Gatekeeper.
Also, congrats to Mano who was ranked 4th as Combat Rogue in the world on Baleroc 10man according to World of Logs!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The Polaris
Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, wreathed in strange weed and an eldritch fog, lies a warped place.
Seafaring cultures for as long as there have been seafaring cultures have run afoul of the strange magic of this navigational dead zone.
Their ships have endured as forsaken monuments, their unfortunate crews transformed into the aquatic corpse-horrors known as the Draug.
Few who have seen this cursed place ever leave it. Those that do are marked, doomed to be reclaimed by drowning, or by the rare visitations of the pale Draug. And so, when the fishermen of the Lady Margaret escaped as unwitting tomb-robbers, they drew the full attentions of its dark powers.
The Draug rode out in pursuit on a pale carrier -- The Polaris, a cargo ship, broken loose from the outermost ring of derelicts and carried across the sea north and west by the roiling, creeping fog bank. In its hold, an ancient lord of the creatures, long since outgrown its human form, exercised its powers to command flesh and fog alike.
What no one knows, however, is that a greater threat has traveled in the wake of the ship. An immense beast, born from the material that re-made the first Draug, and formed in an echo of the terrible thing dreaming beneath the sea:
The Ur-Draug, watching over its foul progeny from between dimensions, waiting.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Lord Rhyolith dead!
Sorry for the late post.
On Saturday July the 9th, we killed Lord Rhyolith in Firelands with 2 people alive. Another add control, and "don't stand in the fire" type fight. I'll update this with the killshot when I get it :)
Flickering Cowl of the Flameblaze - Lanfear
Shatterskull Bonecrusher - DE'd
We spent the rest of the night on Alysrazor, and this fight is pure chaos.
Go Tribe!
On Saturday July the 9th, we killed Lord Rhyolith in Firelands with 2 people alive. Another add control, and "don't stand in the fire" type fight. I'll update this with the killshot when I get it :)
Flickering Cowl of the Flameblaze - Lanfear
Shatterskull Bonecrusher - DE'd
We spent the rest of the night on Alysrazor, and this fight is pure chaos.
Go Tribe!
Black Prophecy going live - North America
After months of beta testing, Black Prophecy can finally be enjoyed by all North American players with its official launch tomorrow, Wednesday the 13rd of July 2011! With the launch comes a huge content add-on titled “Inferno in Tulima”, giving beta players many new elements to explore while increasing the breadth of the new user experience!
We would like to thank all of the North American beta testers for their incredible support and feedback. Your participation has helped us stabilize the dedicated U.S. servers, and your voices have shaped and will continue to shape the gameplay experience.
We would like to thank all of the North American beta testers for their incredible support and feedback. Your participation has helped us stabilize the dedicated U.S. servers, and your voices have shaped and will continue to shape the gameplay experience.
Saturday, July 09, 2011
A Path to Success: Maps, and their Making
As our game testers play The Old Republic™ and we track their characters, they produce a lot of data - on everything from how long it takes them to move across a planet, to where they stop and look at the scenery. We bundle all this data together into what we call ‘metrics’.
Our design team loves metrics.
We love them because when designing a game, it’s one thing to say how things should be, but it’s quite another to see how things actually are. When we see metrics, we see exactly how the game is being played in pure numerical form. Getting this level of insight into what you’ve designed is often vindicating, invigorating and sometimes even humbling. Of course it can also be panic-inducing at times, too!
Let me give you an example. Some time ago, resident metrics enthusiast (and Lead Combat Designer) Georg Zoeller posed a simple question to the design team: “Which part of the user interface is opened more than any other when playing Star Wars™: The Old Republic™?” It was a simple question, but the answer wasn’t any of the UI parts you might expect: not our character sheet, inventory or the Crew Skills window. No, the winner was the World Map. And it won easily - by more than an order of magnitude. Let me tell you why.
Galactic cartography
Having good navigation is important for any game, but particularly so in any massively multiplayer game, where wanderlust is positively encouraged. For The Old Republic, we realized that we had some relatively unique problems early on.
First off, once your character leaves their Origin World, other planets tend to be significantly larger in terms of land mass than those you might find in other MMOs – sometimes five or six times as large. While this is really cool for creating canonically expansive worlds in the Star Wars™ universe like Hoth or Tatooine, it also creates interesting design considerations. As the player is only adventuring in perhaps one-sixth of the map at any given time, having one world map would result in everything he cares about at a given time being compressed into a tiny corner of the map, making that map pretty much unusable.
The second problem is that Star Wars is a science fiction setting (well, perhaps science fantasy) at heart. As a result of this, a great deal of our content happens inside - inside buildings, compounds, space ships, space stations and so on. Nowhere is this truer than on the city worlds of Nar Shaddaa and Corellia which, from a map sense, are closer to a dungeon you might find in another MMO, than an open world zone. We decided fairly early on that we needed to find a map solution that would do indoor areas well.
The third issue is that our worlds and content flow were still in a lot of flux at the time that we needed maps. As we experimented with marrying BioWare-style content with MMO-style freedom and zones, we were frequently expanding and shrinking planets, adjusting flow, adding and removing missions and adventure areas… all of this happened as we got better feedback, and a better sense of what worked for our gameplay style. This created a unique problem for our maps – being sure that players could navigate to their mission objectives was hugely important for us to validate our content and planet design flow. Practically, we could not wait for our artists to hand-paint maps every time the world builders made changes.
Making a map - automatically
What we decided to do was to have a design process which generates maps based on the objects that exist inside of any zone in the game world. To start off, a designer draws a trigger box around part of the world, and then designates which map that trigger box belongs to. He then uses a tool which effectively renders only the objects that are inside of that particular trigger box. This gives us a basic map image. After this, he runs a Photoshop tool which applies a filter that makes the resulting image look techy, holographic and vaguely architectural (if indoors) or topographical (if outdoors). Finally, an artist does a cleanup pass, removing visual artifacts and other noise that might have crept into the process.
The end result is that we have maps that can show astonishing details about the game world. Chairs, crates, statues – all manner of items show up on the map from a birds-eye view, giving the player a real sense of where they are in the world. The resulting map was in fact so good that early on, we found unexpected obstacles were appearing on the map. After investigation, it turned out they were chandeliers and rafters rendered near the ceiling.
A map of the Sith Warrior’s ship in his hangar on Tatooine. The map process picks up most of the detail of the zone and automatically renders it to the map – as an example, you can see that my character is standing next to a forklift.
This mapmaking process is repeated dozens of times per planet. Each planet has a master world map, a handful of smaller hub maps that more closely approximate an adventuring zone, and dozens of interior maps (pretty much any building with more than one room gets its own map). The resulting workflow is more complex than I had imagined when we started the process, but not impossible. One full-time map designer does most of the work, and near the end of our development milestones when the world builders all finish up their deliverables, we give him a little help to be sure all the new areas get maps that are usable and polished.
The final product is a map that looks very slick, but is still relatively easy for designers to keep accurate. For example, when the artists move or change the objects placed in a world after the initial map volumes are placed, we can use the process to quickly adjust those volumes and regenerate the map.
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Maps with a Mission
Of course, the look and feel of maps is really only a small part of their usability – what is far more important is the information that is shown on the map, and whether or not the player can find what they’re looking for. That task is handled by icons we put on the map. The obvious suspects are there: icons for trainers, mailboxes, galactic marketplace terminals, etc.
What most players are looking for on their map are missions. We want to ensure players can find all of the cool stuff that our worldbuilders put into the world, so every mission has one or more icons on the map that show you where to go. Moving your mouse over an icon shows you which mission is satisfied in that area, your progress in that mission, and a rough area where mission objectives can be found.
I know some people like hunting far and wide in a zone to find an objective, or reading between the lines in obscure mission descriptions to find their goal. However, from our point of view, we wanted to be sure that players were spending time on missions doing fun stuff. Getting missions and completing them in The Old Republic is uniquely fun due to our conversation system, the cinematics you’ll take part in and, of course, the story itself. Going to a mission location and laying waste to your enemies is also fun. By contrast, hunting for one clickable object in a large 3D space is typically not fun, nor is travelling through all of Tatooine (which is, again, several times the size of other typical MMO zones) trying to find which of the many Sandpeople tribes is headed by Bob, the Mission Objective.
On this map of Tython, you can see mission icons for the two missions I’m on, and one icon showing a mission offer. The circle represents a mission icon that I’ve moved the mouse over, offering me a better idea of the hunting radius, as well as what I’m hunting, in a given area.
Leaving a breadcrumb trail
Of course, all of this is complicated by the fact that our planets have dozens and dozens of maps. Having map markers showing where your mission objectives are in the wilds of Tython isn’t incredibly helpful if, for example, you’re inside. This is, again, much more problematic on the city worlds, which have huge numbers of interiors.
In order to combat this problem, we introduced a system we call ‘breadcrumbing’. This system allows the designer to specify which map ‘owns’ a mission. If a mission in your mission log is on your planet but not on your map, it will highlight an exit to that map, telling the player which way to go to get to the ‘right’ map. Moving your mouse over the exit will tell the player which missions are to be found in that direction.
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A map of the Jedi Temple on Tython. The green icon shows you there are quests outside - mousing over the icon shows you which ones. (A colorblind-friendly version of the iconography is being worked on.)
This system started out very simple, but over time has become more powerful in order to deal with the intricate content and complex worlds that we wanted to create. For example, if a mission objective is on your map, but requires you to go through a tunnel to get there, the breadcrumbing system will intelligently lead you through that tunnel.
Like many games, we have shuttles and taxis designed to help you traverse the world quicker – a fact you’ll be abundantly thankful for when traversing the massive expanses of Hoth and Tatooine. On some planets, such as Coruscant and Korriban, there are areas that can only be reached via these travel mechanisms. Fear not, the breadcrumb system handles that, too.
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If you have to take a taxi to get to a mission objective, the breadcrumb system will tell you which path to choose.
Maps for all
As we develop almost any system in the game, we ask ourselves if there are opportunities to add improvements to that system in order to make better group and social gameplay. As we were developing the map and breadcrumb systems, we realized we had a prime opportunity to make grouping and running missions with other players easier and more fun in The Old Republic with one simple addition: we show your group members’ mission icons too.
If other players in your group have the same mission you do, their name will be listed in the mouseover text for the mission icon or breadcrumb. If they have the mission and you do not, the icon will be purple. Mousing over the icons will give you more information about what your party member is trying to accomplish.
This simple feature makes it much easier to group with other players. Players can compare their missions, figure out which missions should be shared, and easily optimize a path that allows both players to accomplish their goals while out adventuring.
This map shows that my party member has three missions on Tython I don’t have – two on this map, and one following the moused-over breadcrumb into the Jedi Temple.
Showing the Way
In general, throwing maps into an MMO is easy. On the other hand, making maps that are comprehensive, accurate and useful to the player is much harder than you might imagine. Luckily for us, it was an area that we realized was hugely important very early on.
When Georg told the design team that maps were the most-opened part of the user interface in the game, our map specialists just nodded in understanding. They already knew that being able to find your way around the world was going to be hugely important to our success. Thanks largely to the enduring efforts of those on the map team who believe passionately in the importance of what they are doing, our maps system are a core, essential part of the adventuring experience in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Bonus feature: The map goes semi-transparent once you start moving, so you can keep it up to navigate as necessary.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Ragnar Tørnquist On The Secret World: Part 2
Yesterday we spoke to The Secret World‘s project lead, Ragnar Tørnquist about the game’s factions, mythologies and more peculiar ideas. Today we get a bit deeper, and dig into the motivations behind it all. Why the recurring themes in Tørnquist’s work? Does he have an agenda? And why does most of gaming not? We have a good argument about the nature of truth, and ask where games are falling short. And then somehow again return to the topic of Ragnar’s death.
RPS: There seems to be this repeating pattern in all the stuff you’ve done, where there’s the regular world, and then this hidden world, whether it’s…
Ragnar: Whether it’s Arcadia, or just in the shadows…
RPS: So what is that? Is the real world just not okay with you?
Ragnar: I was thinking about this recently. My family has always had a cabin in the Norwegian mountains, and I’ve always loved going up there because when you’re up there you look at the massive, monumental mountains, and you feel small. And you know that behind there there’s just mountains, and you can walk for days, and there’s nothing there. There’s this sense that what we perceive is such a tiny proportion of what’s out there, and once you go out there you feel very small, underneath a massive sky with massive mountains around you. So I grew up feeling… I guess feeling that there are just an enormous number of mysteries in the world. There’s an enormous amount of things to discover, things we don’t know about, and I just love the idea… I love that feeling. And I just want to share that feeling. Of the joy of discovery and exploration, and again of mystery. And I think it’s so sad when that sense of mystery vanishes, when we feel like we know everything, we’ve seen everything.
RPS: Why do you think that happens?
Ragnar: It’s a good question. I think a lot of people feel that they can live without mystery, the fear of the unknown, maybe? For me the unknown is nothing to feared, it’s something to be embraced. I don’t know if people have lost it – I think people actually crave it. But in our daily lives there’s very little mystery. We go from our safe homes to our safe commute to our safe jobs and live in a safe environment. Of course we face things like death and disease, poverty and crime, but that’s really not about a sense of mystery. That’s just a sense of fear. I think we’re so closed in by the routines of our normal lives that mystery becomes something abstract that we don’t crave any more. When something kindles that sense of mystery in us, I think that’s very intriguing.
RPS: So…
Ragnar: I also think that the Western world has lost the sense of religious mystery too. People knew there was something bigger, but they didn’t question it. Now we question everything, and everything has been reduced to facts or data. What we’re doing with this game, and what I do with all my stories, is to reintroduce that mystery. That sense that you don’t have to know, you don’t have to get all the answers. And that’s frustrating too. I think the end of Dreamfall is about making people understand that you don’t have to understand everything.
RPS: But people didn’t understand that! People are furious about the end of Dreamfall! But the ending’s brilliant – don’t they get it?
Ragnar: It’s about maintaining mystery. One of my favourite TV shows of recent years – and I know a lot of people were disappointed with it – was Lost. Lost was absolutely brilliant, and you can argue about the final season, especially the last episode, to death. And people are going to be furious about that too. What it managed to maintain until the very end was the sense of mystery, that not everything has to be explained. And that means people talk about it. We discuss our stories ourselves. We don’t agree on what the answer is to everything, or what the truth is, because there are multiple truths. I know the “answer”, but it can be interpreted, and that’s important. You can discuss it, you can theorise, discuss on forums. And that’s what we want – we want the community to come together and talk about the story. We’re creating a lot of hooks that people can build their own stories from, their own theories. And then we’ll answer some of them, but maybe not all of them.
RPS: You’re taking that Barthesian philosophy that says the answers are in the interpretation, with a Death Of The Author argument, but at the same time you’re saying that you have the core ideas and the right answers. If the interpretation swells in one direction, do you think you’ll acknowledge that? Maybe even change your own interpretation.
Ragnar [laughing]: That’s a dangerous question. A dangerous thing to answer. [sighs] For the things that are really important, of course not. They’re not going to be swayed by what people think. But I want people to talk about it…
RPS: So when…
Ragnar: …they might all be wrong, but when it comes to things that are always going to be left to interpretation, then we might take cues from the discussions, because some things aren’t necessarily either this way or that way – they might be somewhere between those two things. And if people discuss it, they might of course provide… It’s difficult to answer! It’s not like we’re going to let the community write the story for us, but what we always do is listen to people to see what they’re most interested in hearing more about. So if people latch onto a couple of points in the story, something we thought we were never going to explore, then of course we might explore that piece of the story more. So that might influence it. But at the end of the day, there’s a very clear vision behind this.
RPS: So when you say there are multiple truths, that’s not true. There is only one truth.
Ragnar: Puh… Things can’t… [sighs].
[We both laugh.]
Ragnar: In a way, yes. But yesterday, Dag [Ragnar’s co-writer] and I were discussing whether something in the story was one way or the other. For that specific thing I have an opinion, and Dag has an opposite opinion, and I’ll still believe that my opinion is true, but it’s not something we’re ever going to land on. It’s in the structure of the story that it’s left up to interpretation in that way.
RPS: But I would say that’s an interpretation surrounding a central core truth, that you say is not going to change.
Ragnar: Yes, that’s probably right. It’s something I have in my head, and written down. But it’s not something that’ll ever be spoken of or written in a form that anybody else will see it. And the same goes for The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. There are certain things that I know, that will never be spoken about.
RPS: Do you think they’re therefore irrelevant?
Ragnar: No, definitely not.
RPS: So if they’re never going to be spoken of – I know they’re a driving force, a seed from which these things grow – but if no one’s ever going to hear them but you, are they ever…
Ragnar: They’re relevant for the writing. For us to discuss and to base everything we do on. We’re very much bottom up when it comes to all that story writing. For us to write anything, the top layer that you see in the game – the cinematics, the lore, the names of items, all the stuff that goes into the game – that’s the tip of the iceberg. We have to know everything below the surface. Without knowing that, we won’t have all the – not only information – but the whole soul of the game. We have to swim in it. I’m mixing a lot of metaphors. We need to think about that in order to get the writing at the very top right. Everything we write, every sentence is informed by years of research and lore and depth. Even if all someone does is listen to the cinematics in the game, or talk to characters to get the dialogue, you’ll still feel that there’s depth there. We carry that around, and we delve into it. But it’s not important for the player to know everything.
RPS: There seems to be this repeating pattern in all the stuff you’ve done, where there’s the regular world, and then this hidden world, whether it’s…
Ragnar: Whether it’s Arcadia, or just in the shadows…
RPS: So what is that? Is the real world just not okay with you?
Ragnar: I was thinking about this recently. My family has always had a cabin in the Norwegian mountains, and I’ve always loved going up there because when you’re up there you look at the massive, monumental mountains, and you feel small. And you know that behind there there’s just mountains, and you can walk for days, and there’s nothing there. There’s this sense that what we perceive is such a tiny proportion of what’s out there, and once you go out there you feel very small, underneath a massive sky with massive mountains around you. So I grew up feeling… I guess feeling that there are just an enormous number of mysteries in the world. There’s an enormous amount of things to discover, things we don’t know about, and I just love the idea… I love that feeling. And I just want to share that feeling. Of the joy of discovery and exploration, and again of mystery. And I think it’s so sad when that sense of mystery vanishes, when we feel like we know everything, we’ve seen everything.
RPS: Why do you think that happens?
Ragnar: It’s a good question. I think a lot of people feel that they can live without mystery, the fear of the unknown, maybe? For me the unknown is nothing to feared, it’s something to be embraced. I don’t know if people have lost it – I think people actually crave it. But in our daily lives there’s very little mystery. We go from our safe homes to our safe commute to our safe jobs and live in a safe environment. Of course we face things like death and disease, poverty and crime, but that’s really not about a sense of mystery. That’s just a sense of fear. I think we’re so closed in by the routines of our normal lives that mystery becomes something abstract that we don’t crave any more. When something kindles that sense of mystery in us, I think that’s very intriguing.
RPS: So…
Ragnar: I also think that the Western world has lost the sense of religious mystery too. People knew there was something bigger, but they didn’t question it. Now we question everything, and everything has been reduced to facts or data. What we’re doing with this game, and what I do with all my stories, is to reintroduce that mystery. That sense that you don’t have to know, you don’t have to get all the answers. And that’s frustrating too. I think the end of Dreamfall is about making people understand that you don’t have to understand everything.
RPS: But people didn’t understand that! People are furious about the end of Dreamfall! But the ending’s brilliant – don’t they get it?
Ragnar: It’s about maintaining mystery. One of my favourite TV shows of recent years – and I know a lot of people were disappointed with it – was Lost. Lost was absolutely brilliant, and you can argue about the final season, especially the last episode, to death. And people are going to be furious about that too. What it managed to maintain until the very end was the sense of mystery, that not everything has to be explained. And that means people talk about it. We discuss our stories ourselves. We don’t agree on what the answer is to everything, or what the truth is, because there are multiple truths. I know the “answer”, but it can be interpreted, and that’s important. You can discuss it, you can theorise, discuss on forums. And that’s what we want – we want the community to come together and talk about the story. We’re creating a lot of hooks that people can build their own stories from, their own theories. And then we’ll answer some of them, but maybe not all of them.
RPS: You’re taking that Barthesian philosophy that says the answers are in the interpretation, with a Death Of The Author argument, but at the same time you’re saying that you have the core ideas and the right answers. If the interpretation swells in one direction, do you think you’ll acknowledge that? Maybe even change your own interpretation.
Ragnar [laughing]: That’s a dangerous question. A dangerous thing to answer. [sighs] For the things that are really important, of course not. They’re not going to be swayed by what people think. But I want people to talk about it…
RPS: So when…
Ragnar: …they might all be wrong, but when it comes to things that are always going to be left to interpretation, then we might take cues from the discussions, because some things aren’t necessarily either this way or that way – they might be somewhere between those two things. And if people discuss it, they might of course provide… It’s difficult to answer! It’s not like we’re going to let the community write the story for us, but what we always do is listen to people to see what they’re most interested in hearing more about. So if people latch onto a couple of points in the story, something we thought we were never going to explore, then of course we might explore that piece of the story more. So that might influence it. But at the end of the day, there’s a very clear vision behind this.
RPS: So when you say there are multiple truths, that’s not true. There is only one truth.
Ragnar: Puh… Things can’t… [sighs].
[We both laugh.]
Ragnar: In a way, yes. But yesterday, Dag [Ragnar’s co-writer] and I were discussing whether something in the story was one way or the other. For that specific thing I have an opinion, and Dag has an opposite opinion, and I’ll still believe that my opinion is true, but it’s not something we’re ever going to land on. It’s in the structure of the story that it’s left up to interpretation in that way.
RPS: But I would say that’s an interpretation surrounding a central core truth, that you say is not going to change.
Ragnar: Yes, that’s probably right. It’s something I have in my head, and written down. But it’s not something that’ll ever be spoken of or written in a form that anybody else will see it. And the same goes for The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. There are certain things that I know, that will never be spoken about.
RPS: Do you think they’re therefore irrelevant?
Ragnar: No, definitely not.
RPS: So if they’re never going to be spoken of – I know they’re a driving force, a seed from which these things grow – but if no one’s ever going to hear them but you, are they ever…
Ragnar: They’re relevant for the writing. For us to discuss and to base everything we do on. We’re very much bottom up when it comes to all that story writing. For us to write anything, the top layer that you see in the game – the cinematics, the lore, the names of items, all the stuff that goes into the game – that’s the tip of the iceberg. We have to know everything below the surface. Without knowing that, we won’t have all the – not only information – but the whole soul of the game. We have to swim in it. I’m mixing a lot of metaphors. We need to think about that in order to get the writing at the very top right. Everything we write, every sentence is informed by years of research and lore and depth. Even if all someone does is listen to the cinematics in the game, or talk to characters to get the dialogue, you’ll still feel that there’s depth there. We carry that around, and we delve into it. But it’s not important for the player to know everything.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
Firelands - The First Week
Shannox and Beth'tilac are dead on our first week of Firelands raiding. There was two 10man groups that killed Shannox, and we went back on Saturday with people from both groups to kill Beth'tilac.
I don't have a screenshot of our Shannox kills (yet).
Loot that dropped from both teams:
Necklace of Fetishes - Auticus
Crystal Prison Band - Lanfear
Uncrushable Belt of Fury - Eclipsis
Coalwalker Sandals - Hugejunkk
Beth'tilac
Carapace of Imbibed Flame - Trilynne
Spaulders of Manifold Eyes - Sharded 0_o
Great work Tribe!
I don't have a screenshot of our Shannox kills (yet).
Loot that dropped from both teams:
Necklace of Fetishes - Auticus
Crystal Prison Band - Lanfear
Uncrushable Belt of Fury - Eclipsis
Coalwalker Sandals - Hugejunkk
Beth'tilac
Carapace of Imbibed Flame - Trilynne
Spaulders of Manifold Eyes - Sharded 0_o
This currently puts us at:
Great work Tribe!
Saturday, July 02, 2011
New Bounty Hunter character progression video
Bioware and Star Wars: The Old Republic dev team have released a new trailer showing off the Bounty Hunter progression through skills, equipment and advanced classes.
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