BlackIce

People have spoken about how VO can be for good or ill; it is not an abstract benefit. With that said, what do these people think about the VO from SWTOR we've been treated to so far?

I personally found it cheesy, poorly integrated into the actual animations (Another development tedium.) and sounding even worse coming out of some of the wildly inappropriate character models. (See the crew of the imperial transport, very offputting haircuts and body proportions, I felt.) But then, it's hard to say what would take the place of those cutscenes, or even if you can skip through, since the dialogue trees seem to be vital to the game.

Our societies are so bloody consummerist at this point that I don't know you can truly separate the wants of 'gamers' and 'businessmen'.

Planetside free trial, I enjoyed it, but maybe not enough to think to spend too much time with it. That said I loved the idea of a persistent battlefield and have hopes for the speculated sequel. Dust is interesting, but merely perpetuates the style of FPS I hate. Having to find a squad and group to play with in a genre that leaves little downtime or sense of permanence of population. (Small talk is tedious enough in the real world, doing it in the context of a raging gun battle? Moreso...) Dust has no true permanent battlefields; Planetside gave me the BF1942 (As opposed to BF2's obsession with squads and infantry. That a Battlefield title has half it's servers set up with the option of No Vehicles is crazy.) sense of having a common goal and assisting your fellow teammates out of this common cause and making you feel like you are in an actual war instead of a death match. (Not that death match and CTF aren't fun in their own right)

First real MMOG? SWG and both it and Planetside have spoiled me for the diku games in the genre and leave me with the naive notion of having the common thread to brings people to these games (And, frankly, gives a site like Massively it's raison d'etre) be the prospect of a virtual world full of people and exploration and not to engage in tedious min/maxing.

Actually the Perpetual design was based around (At least partially) explorable ship interiors and a player crew. Their solution to the situation of a captain being present, but with no helm was to give the captain control over navigation and the helm be 'manned' by an animated npc which existed as an aesthetic place-holder.
The other stations would be controlled by npcs until such a time as a human player chose to take over. (In the same way we often saw nameless crew members brushed aside when the main cast appeared, or rush to fill their station when they left for an away mission etc...)
Their plan was to have two types of crews, permanent (Such as a 'guild' or clan) and temporary. (A group formed of strangers with a ship granted for a short mission.) From my reading of their intent, for the most part you'd just solo in a small craft when you were not part of a guild in a larger starship. Whoever had the highest rank would be in command of the guild starship if the assigned captain wasn't logged on.
Having said that, I don't think Perpetual would have done this concept justice. But it is a much better aspiration than what Cryptic have on offer. I wouldn't even mind as much if the graphics and animations didn't look so very cheap. I would have at least expected a game with as big a budget as STO to have better space visuals than EVE or Black Prophecy.

Hmm, strange feature for them to cut. I'm sure the two factions will be largely cosmetic in the end, making the one tutorial suitable for both, but it smacks of a lack of love for their game to cut corners like that. It can't possibly be that hard, what is in a tutorial for a game as simplistic as a Cryptic mmog that can't be finished in time?

Looks more like a Cheyenne class variant, maybe a Constellation (I know it seems impossibly obsessive of me, but really, there are not that many classes of ship in Star Trek) certainly not a Prometheus class. (A terribly silly ship design that Cryptic no doubt have no intention of making split in three, thus making it somewhat pointless to have ingame)

I have to say, Cryptic loss any joy or feelings of wonder for me when they started to show off their ships. They couldn't look like uglier fanboi designs if they held an open contest, to say nothing of Species 8472 in uber leet armour. (That they are in the game at all makes me feel great disdain for them.) Some are dark grey or black with very harsh or militant lines on them, not even the later ships in Star Trek went nearly so far, they look terrible. That and the phasers are now some kind of glowing yellow pistol now instead of keeping to their curved aesthetic.

To me this game is more and more seemingly like a glib exercise in making a basic diku mmog with a slight veneer of Star Trek on top of it. I do not relish the gameplay either. If you feel you can't make a Star Trek mmog with a player crew and explorable ships, fine, but please don't take the licence and make a shoddy game when somebody with hope or imagination and not the most venial avarice could be making something of it.

There is loads of information about the game and many videos demonstrating what has been said. What is not clear is if they still have the money to finish it. For my tastes it seemed to focus too much on it's combat system (If it is not twitch-based, it is not worth making the game revolve around it for me.) which seemed rather dull. Just because they aren't posting much on their news section, does not imply they do not post in their forums.
I would also like to quantify that I am not much interesting in this game due to it's tedious and seemingly all-consuming 'combat' mechanisms, (I am interested because I could yet be proven incorrect in my judgements and that I did follow it for a good two years with interest before.) if it launches or not does not make much difference to me, I just disdain this 'common sense' mantra when discussion things. Over-simplification is rarely good.

I'd have to agree with the notion that EvE lacks the infrastructure to produce the kind of narrative they claim. And my experience with the new 'epic quests' does not change my opinion. By the time most players get to these 'epic missions', they will have already done the tutorial chain if they are new and who knows how many if they are established. They will not read the text as they did the first time they got a mission in EvE; and it was interesting to read the text (The stories had black humour and enough side details and information, that, were it not for EvE's constant attempts to break your immersion, would have been universe-building) and learn the context, but these new quests and their stories are not overly-interesting, the disconnect from them and EvE's mechanics are just too great, people will just want to get 'stage 7: fly through 9 stargates to deliver something and fly back' done and over with.

Worse still CCP are touting the extensive travelling (Sometimes 10+ jumps) as an asset, it is not an enticement, there are many players who make a nice living acting as courriers because extensive jumping is such a pain in EvE. Going through systems is not exploration, it is a commute, a dull soulless journey through virtual nothing. The exploration mechanics in EvE do not emphasise such sojourns for a reason.

Having said all this, it is not a major part of the game, nor a distraction or appropriation of development, I am certain some players do enjoy these new quests. But to claim these things as something dramatically different is odd to me, they don't add much to EvE.

"Maybe it will involve the Khorne Daemon Prince in the image above." You know that said daemon prince is made out of resin and depicts a special character invented for the 40k universe in any event. http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/khornedpandh.htm

Dust 514? Let me guess, you die permanently (Turn to dust?) after 514 clonings?

Maybe I've been outside the loop, but the idea of going from a PC to console to make an FPS doesn't hold much weight with me. Particularly if you are going to create a massive environment, I cannot see a console controller doing well with any of that. I could see EvE being a console game and Dust being a PC game being a much more enjoyable (By aggregate) time for everyone. But then oviously CCP must know this. Still, console FPS titles aren't really a great attraction for me personally. Hopefully when they talk about integration, they really will turn it into one game eventually, with Ambulation being the bridge?