e3 is now over and done and all info is pretty much out. The JGE VIP guests have done their writing, there is more articles out and even great gameplay videos that really are a pleasure to watch.
Gazillion had a live stream earlier with a QA together with the lucky few from the JGE forums. The feed was recorded and you can view it here! UPDATE: Tikigod from the forums did a great writeup about the feed.
Summary of what is said (Though if you connect now you will get the recording):
EU website & Forums: They're aware of the issue they're working with Codemasters, they hope it won't continue and they're on the case, it's not a attempt to screw Europe.
Cargo loss on death: Clear No.
Guild owned battlestations: Guilds are going to play a massive part in sector capture, but they're not talking strictly owned station, so they'll dodge the question for now.
Guild wars: Guilds are going to be very compelling but not prepared to talk about details.
Sector clutter & collision damange: Lots of sector clutter in sectors, taking shield damage on collisions.
Ship stats versus player skill: A level 10 fighting a level 50 will find they can damage the level 50, but the level 50 will take the kill unless the level 50 is horrendously bad, but if you're really bad you likely won't get to level 50 to start with. So the level will really need to take other level 10 buddys with them.
High level guys can serve to distract and draw fire, whilst low levels achieve other objectives in sector, or level 10s serve as cannon fodder to distract the enemy's level 50s.
Level is still apparantly more a representation of options available.
AFK: Will look at that in beta for solutions to avoid people sitting in sector and sucking up XP. But the game is designed to track contribution of your actions rather than just being there, so you get rewarded for your actions. If you turn up late, you will get a reward for your contribution but it will be reduced rewards.
Risk versus reward: Why would you want to take the risk? Well the reward is much higher, but the death penalty is not extreme. It's about getting back into the fight quickly. You won't have long travel times, but you will have to repair.
The game is about the war, it's not about you and your buddy's fighting other groups small groups, it's about pitching into the massive war battles being waged.
The game design will push you through to your destination through combat, when doing the tutorial to unlock more sectors, you go through a certain number of sectors and hold them for your nation which unlocks other sectors, to win the war.
It's national focus, but squads play a major role.
Wars are won by armys, but at a root level are made up of squads.
There will be reasons to accomplish things at a squad level and other bonuses you can get off of that.
Radar: Yeah radar is currently being worked on, probably going to be a variety. Any Stealth systems? It would make a lot of sense, but they can't answer the questions as they're being stealthy.
Haulers/Mining: Will mass effect pitch/yaw, will cargo effect mass? Not going to talk about mass right now, but if you turn off dampners it will be way more newtonian. More info coming.
The game is about combat and dog fighting, there are going to be system that may scratch that itch, but it's not the key core features. They want you to play the soldier on the battle field.
You will have activities that cover support, but it will still involve protect/assault etc.
Maximum population in a single sector: Hundreds of hundreds and they're pushing it at the moment to see what the highest they can go, already comfortable of scratching the surface at around 700 AI in one sector, couple that with hundreds and hundreds of players for epic big fights.
Not small fights, it's a big part of F&F testing to push.
Over population in sector: They leverage the advantage of Jumpgates, they can lock and unlock sectors at will. But it rarely happens that thousands of players spontaniously get together, but it's being designed to be as big as possible and support it.
You're not on a plane terrain, everyone is distributed in the sector, players are spread by design across the sector to different points of interest.
Working on sending as much information as possible using as little bandwidth as possible.
No instance, but is it sharded? Yep it's sharded. They need European servers for European servers, they need NA servers for NA, and maybe even a west coast maybe just maybe for Australians.
Nations? 3 Playable nations. You will be locked to one nation, if you have 1 character that is oct, your alts will have to be oct on that shard.
Safe zones: Will there be safezones? PvP presentation there are different areas some for story based and others are AI. Some will explain why you hate the other guys and so forth but saying that you can branch over into PvP game and open freedom to go between the two.
You go into unregulated space, there will be lots of PvP content, you will be attacked. It's not just about shooting other people and flying around aimlessly.
There will be great missions and other things to do.
You'll be pulled out there through mission updates taking you further.
Are there freedom fighting? Freedom fighting makes sense for 'some' space games... (That's about it.)
F2P: They're not talking about business models today. (Lots of laughing)
Ship customisation: As you get upgrades and achievements you will see extra effects, but you won't see things like "I want extra stripes" or "I want my Octavian military colours to be pink". Big reason for this is game specification, and focusing on combat.
There will be some graphical representation, such as gun effects.
Tradeskill, crafting, social systems: They will be huge, there will be systems in place to scratch that itch, but they're not talking about it today.
Single player ships for now, any plans for guild piloted capitals? Even just 2 players? They love to talk about that kind of thing, but they swept back and really drilled into what is this game, it's about fighters. You want to be Luke Skywalker not General Ackbar.
Joystick support? Yes.
Alpha/beta? It's coming Soon and... <Stream cuts out the rest of the answer, but most should know what was said... same out reply>
Second day wrapped up and so far there is three new articles out from massively, gamezenithand gaygamer. Links are by name.
Too bad the articles don't give out anything groundbreaking and are pretty much old/obvious news to most of the hardcore followers but if you are one of those you still have to read them ;) .
Stay tuned for more, there is still the VIP guests testimonies to look forward too and that will be interesting.
Edit: Here is another one. The second to last paragraph has some nice info. Thanks go to icrontic.
To further realize the intended feeling of constant immersion in a warzone, the server will also auto-populate slower zones with AI ships to prevent a player from feeling like a sector is dead when they log in. And from what I saw, every moment really was action-packed. The view is a third-person look from your space ship, though the attacks and steering feel more like a very fast-paced first person shooter. Typically, I am incredibly bad at most vehicle-based movements in games, but the flight/steering was so fun and intuitive I feel like just about anyone could pick it up. You have boosters and slows, can use WASD/mouse or joystick, and can do barrel rolls (!!!!!). You can earn and buy new ships, or pirate them. The point was also made that though level differentials do play a factor in ship to ship combat, skill in flight manuevering and tactics has more gravity
--- Also Gamespot tried out JGE there is some interesting mentions about pvp, as well as nfamous with some tidbits regarding the PVP risk and reward system.
Here is an article from awesomegameblog who tried out JGE, they are also the source of the video I posted earlier. It was a nice and comforting read and did contain one bit of gold too. More exactly this:
Despite promising low system requirements, the game was very nice to look at as well as listen too, with all manner of pretty lights, rockets, and explosions going off at once, accompanied by the screech of lasers, booms of missiles exploding, and full-voice overs for all the in-mission dialogue! Additionally, we were told that nothing would be instanced in the game, with every area being open to players exploring the world. Additionally, all players from different factions will be considered fair game for PVP from the beginning, but due to a very small death-penalty, players will come back into the action almost immediately. For areas that feature fewer players, competent AI controlled ships will fill-out the battle-lines to make combat more intense for the few players participating.
Then there is also a bunch of new screenshots on IGN!
EDIT: I almost missed this article on IGN from Nick Kolan who tried out the game @ e3
Read his first impressions here. Here is what caught my eye:
Entering the game, I was pitted against some neutral ships flying around what I assumed was one of our bases. I toggled my speed and strafed using WASD, and aimed and fired with the mouse. Each individual shot is tracked and each impact matters. It was basically Rogue Squadron, but on a huge scale, and with the potential for hundreds of other players to be blasting at each other.
As I shot down the required number of ships, my quest giver immediately told me what my next task was, and my HUD pointed me in the right direction. I was genuinely having a blast. The developers have tried to make some of the missions a little morally ambiguous. In a quest we were shown, the player took out strategic space station targets that ultimately caused civilians to flee. Then we were told to blow up the escaping civilian crafts.
Fresh fancy video from mmorpg.com shows of the Octavian faction together with some crispy clear graphics and a lovely british accent.
Also makes the idea of an playing an industrial mania a lot more attractive, I just wonder how much of the infactory stuff anyone will actually see when playing, even big machines with dramatic music gets bored after a while.
So finally this blog can take up existence again, I thought I could keep it together when we were all in the dark but I couldn't but now we have life again so I'll jump on the wagon once again.
So I'll start of by making the stereotypic apology to not writing anything here for a while. As most bloggers who aren't a) making money of the blog, b) all anal about writing it, I've lost touch on updating it since my Ocz Nia project is somewhat on hold and there has not been really anything to write on considering JGE.
However (!), there has now emerged an update that has gotten people all rallied up on the forums. Was this an actual crowd booze would be comsumed and clothes would fly off. Its like some see this update as the second coming of jesus or something. I admit that it was nice to see something come out of the devs and read the few lines they had to share but C'MON!
None of the info shared was actually worth anything, nor was it that surprising or new. I'm not complaining about it, rather pointing out to the rallied crowd that the flying man has a string attached and its something we could all do and have seen before. We could all have guessed that they would not screw up the game entirely and that they were actually doing their work and not moping around drinking pinacoladas. Cant we just wait semi-patiently?
Anyhow, I might not make a post until I feel inspired enough to pick my Nia up again and try to learn to use it or when they get around to doing a dev blog post. But until then, ay revoir!
Well theres not an awful lot happening on the JGE boards or here, but atleast I decided to make a post showing that something is happening behind the curtains. Lately I've tried getting used to the nia and its not going too well. I might break out some tinfoil as I've heard that it does wonders against interference, what I'm starting to blame for my own inability to control the glance and brainfinger joysticks in the NIA.
On the forums Khatie anounced that she left some time ago, apparently it was to be expected since she worked out of the main office. Now Rockjaw is left alone with Dnote, this led to Rockjaw following some requests on tightening the moderation on the forums. I find that pretty nice since spam makes ragers of us all. Well Rockjaw tightening the rules probably had nothing to do with Khatie leaving but it just happened close to eachother so once can always make grand schemes of it all starting to move toward launch. ND gathering up, and Rockjaw preparing the forums for some serious business, ya know???!? Well one can dream right ;)
Also it seems the DNS for JGE went down, perhaps a new site is rolled out! Or prehaps its just a misfunction... Who knows...
Well here are a few more thoughts on the NIA, however I should say that I've yet to sit down for a good hour of only NIA time so I cant say Im still anything like experienced with it. But still:
As the thing is somewhat of a dodgy thing to use there really are no sort of manuals for it. This is a problem, not one of those BSOD type problems that kill the idea entirely, but it does make it all harder to use. Especially when it comes to the brainfingers (I promise to make a post detailing all these things) since they work on brainwaves its really hard to control them just like that and I really dont have that much of an idea of what I'm supposed to be doing, some kind mental images or guidelines as what I should be going for would be helpful.
Another thing thats giving me a bit of an headache is not knowing what kind of configuration I should go for. There are a lot of values like Smoothing and Magnifying that can be adjusted for the signals and it will take a lot of work to figure those out. Would be great to have them explained and a few usage scenarios as well so that I'd know what I would want.
I guess all of this is in its current state since this is a very individual product and the fact that each brain is different is somewhat hard to overcome. I just wish I wouldn't have to swim through hours of forums to get what I want.
Ps. Unfortunately today is pnp roleplay night so today wont be the NIA day I want either.
Well, yesterday I was finally able to pick up my fancy new neural impulse adapter from OCZ. As expected I was exited like a kid at xmas. Unfortunately I had made promises to cook so I was not able to startmy testing right away. But once the food was in the oven I glued in front of the computer, ready to tackle and grounding issues that I've come to expect from reading the forums. Its safe to say that I did have my share of the problems but I managed to solve to the extent that the device was usable. I'm planning on combining a usb cord and a 5v power supply later on to fix it entirely.
But once I understood the NIA utility a bit, I got to the part where I got to test it. As expected, again, it pretty hard to use and even using the facial muscles for pressing a button felt hard. I explored and tinkered for a while coming to the conclusion that brainfingers are damn hard to get to work. After a while I fired up X3 Reunion and bound my face muscles to the fire key. This worked somewhat well but due to me being really new to x3 I had a lot of work finding enemies so there was not that much testing. In the beginning I kept shooting by accident all the time but it got better after a while.
Unfortunately I had to take a longer brake then but I returned to the game a again later. This time I felt I wanted a challenge. So I bound muscles to fire, eye lateral movement (glance) to left and right and finally alpha brainwave 1 for up and beta 1 for down. Then I was ready to try flying. And it was every bit as hard as I expected it to be. I kept spinning wildly for 10 minutes with veeeery little controll but at 20 minutes it felt like i had some controll over the situation. I could stop the spinning for a while and also turn left and right. It was very exhausting trying to figure it out.
But today I'm off for 3-4 days, so I'll be back then to tell you more about the NIA
Well some writer at MMORPG made a pretty good article about the main problem most scifi and space MMO's have had and what would be ways for NetDevil to avoid those. If nothing else it was a good read and somewhat interesting. Its not always you get to read about MMO history in a way that is actually interesting.
NetDevil quickly commented on the article and ensured all fans that they were already aware of all the points introduced and had taken steps to avoid them. This was on their twitter feed in case you are wondering. (can be found on the right of the page)
But now on to what I consider more interesting! I get my OCZ NIA today, its the thing I wrote about recently. Too bad I'll be away until Sunday from Thursday, so youll have to wait for my hands on experience.
Continuing with my line of gaming peripherals that might be nice to enhance the JGE experience with when it finally hits us, I will introducing yet another gadget for all of you. This thingymajobbie is the reason for all the quietness here this week, since I've been reading every scrap of info I could find about it trying to decide if I can resist purchasing it. However it turned out to be somewhat cheap compared to what it might provide so I went ahead and bought it.
Bought what you ask?
The OCZ NIA!
All right what the hell is this thing then?
I'd describe it as best as brain joystick. Its best described as a joystick that you can controll using your facial muscles, eye nerves and your mind. Yes thats right, your mind! As incredible as it sounds you can map commands to it from your alpha and beta brain waves. It sounds too good to be true, for me its still too early to tell but I'll test it out in X3 and see how it goes.
I've understood that it needs the patience of the earth itself to master, so I thought it would be the perfect project while waiting for JGE to come out.
I'd write more about it but mine is yet to arrive and so far the internet knows more than I do, so if you are interested go google :)
I'll tell you about some first hand experiences and keep you posted of how I like it once I get it.
Ps. Thanks someone on the forums for proving me wrong that pointing and clicking no longer is a must in gaming ;)
So soon its 14 days ago since we got the last dev blog post from the QA team. So lets hope that they are going for a biweekly post so that we can get some interesting info goodies to go over.
Well its nothing new that there are lots of sites out there selling you JGE preorders already, most of them even promise a "release date" for you to believe in. So not only do you get to buy a product that they cant sell, but you also get a date that with 99% accuracy wont be real. Yay?...
Well I guess there is a bit of comfort and in ordering the game already, you might even get it when it releases. But don't expect to just wait for it to pop up in your mail since many places promise you the game at a price that is most likely something around half of the price it will be at release. Some are decent enough to let you have the game at that price, but some will charge you more closer to release when the price is established. The whole thing does seem wrong to me but I'm not forced to make business with them so I shouldn't complain.
Just a few quick thoughts while we are all pondering on the next news released...
Well, after I wrote my last post on various gadgets and gizmos that might well make JGE an even better experience it only made me want them more. Alas as a lot of them are quite pricey I found out that there is a smarter way than go and blow 300€ on a TripleHead2Go instead.
Since these things are a bit of niche products not that many actually use them for more than one game or two that supports them. After that they are left to collect dust. So go look for used simulator stuff and game controllers. There are literally tons of them out there. I bought my x52 40% off the original price and it was barely used. I even got it in the original packaging with the manuals!
I know atleast ebay does provide if you have the credit card, but I suggest you check your local places for things as well. Its pretty easy to make good deals thanks to the good 'ol internet.
Well now the excitement about the new QA dev blog is dying down. So the question arises, will we get a new bag of goodies next week or is this something of a once a month thing?
Well lets hope for the best. Have a good weekend, hopefully you're doing something fun, or like me found a good game to play :P
I've been giving the subject some thought and its become very clear for me that if I was a hardware manufacturer for any of the game controller companies I would truly hope that JGE is a raging success, especially if I'd be working for a brand like Saitek or NaturalPoint. I'm sure that these companies and a few more like them are already doing quite well and are in no way dependant on a single game. However since gear like the saitek x52, which is considered as one of the joysticks, or the TrackIR are both a bit of niche products it would seem like an excellent idea for manufacturers of these products or similar peripherals to support the development of the game as best they can, due to the raw marketing potential that JGE would give them if it will make it as a "mainstream" game. The reason I write mainstream inside quotation marks is since a mmo scifi fighter game can't be really seen as a mainstream game.
Although it seems that the companies have already realized the idea behind since even the devs have promised support for at least the TrackIR, Saitek x52 and the TripleHead2GO. This is in my view a very exiting as I've have no problems with my conscious to spend a few weeks eating porridge if I can get my hands on something that many gamers would consider overkill. At the moment I'm actually considering getting the TrackIR since it seems it seems like a cool piece of hardware. Currently I'm however trying to stop myself from buying it before beta to make sure that this is something that I'll actually "need" and have some us of. I'd love to hear comments from anyone who has experience from using it.
Also an interesting forum thread I read some time ago where fans of the gamepads where discussing using a gamepad for controlling their ship. Myself I've already picked up my weapon of choice but its fun to see interesting ideas on the subject. Since I'm pretty much against many console games I have a bit of a problem on using the pads for aiming if there are other alternatives, but in a game like JGE it might work out really good if your used to aim with a pad.
Lastly I've been thinking of the TripleHead2Go since I have the option of utilizing three screens for my gaming needs. But still I've yet to see a mmo that actually functioned better with it. I remember looking at a review of it from someone who wanted to use it for WoW. Now I know that JGE and WoW are two totally different things I'm just worried since instead of giving you more to see it actually showed you less but on three screens. I really hope that this wont be an issue for JGE. Also then there is the matter of a competitor with TH2GO, softTH a small bit of program injected into most games that makes the game work on all three screens without requiring an annoying box to run your cables through and best of all, its free.
Well thoughts like this are usually more popular before a game launches and tend to be less important when you actually get to play the game. So for me at least its a question of waiting before buying too many devices to keep my spirit up before I get to test out the actual game. But of course its always fun to dream ;)
Seems like there are appearing ripples on to the surface of the otherwise still and calm pond. The twitter feed began updating again, although that is nothing major its at least a small comfort. Then there is also the new big news from yesterday, a new dev blog! That is to say if QA testers go into the category of developers, in my eyes they do.
The blog is over att mmorpg.com and titled "Breaking Jumpgate Evolution". I suggest everyone reads it and I do think everyone has already read it. Personally I found it very interesting to read what a QA tester actually does, I didn't exoect them ot just go around playing the game for fun but didn't know either what they were actually about. Naturally I'm also jumping of exitement every time the game is mentioned in any grade so picking up any details, no matter how small they are, is always interesting.
There's already been promises of more from Khatie so these small ripples could very well lead to proper waves that one day make up a good 'ol beta storm.
Although it seems that the companies have already realized the idea behind since even the devs have promised support for at least the TrackIR, Saitek x52 and the TripleHead2GO. This is in my view a very exiting as I've have no problems with my conscious to spend a few weeks eating porridge if I can get my hands on something that many gamers would consider overkill. At the moment I'm actually considering getting the TrackIR since it seems it seems like a cool piece of hardware. Currently I'm however trying to stop myself from buying it before beta to make sure that this is something that I'll actually "need" and have some us of. I'd love to hear comments from anyone who has experience from using it.
