Posts Tagged ‘community’

Prospective Players of SWTOR

One thing that will make or break anyone’s experience in SWTOR will be the players in the galaxy with them.

Pretty much since the beginning of online gaming many stigma have been attached to Gamers, which have been both bad and good. One thing the developers at bioware will have to do is to ensure these good traits, and try to minimise the number of players in the game world that embody the bad.

Now, to make an entertaining game for the widest number of people, there will always need to be the class clowns. A few trolls here and there never hurt anyone, and generally they pay more than their fair share of bills and make the game competitive for all.

One thing that is needed in no game world, or any world for that matter, is carebears. Cearbears and Roleplayers.
Since the beginning of MMO gaming such players have been the bane of your everyday player, as they have strived to prevent such players from enjoying the game in the ways they like to.
It is players like these that Star Wars Galaxies fans have to thank for riveting new game-play updates, such as the Combat Upgrade, and the following new game enhancements.

With constant wines of ‘this game is too hard’ or ‘people are better than me’ we see in any game, the developers starting to take notice. Once they have seen such thoughts vocalised, these are often the ideas they latch on to, as they are generally the most easy to implement and, from their perspective of a vocal minority in the community, quite popular among the players.

We can only hope that Roleplaying and excessive Care-bearing will be cracked down on in Star Wars The Old Republic. Hard.

Without such moderation rivers of tears threaten to well up on the forums, blogs, and even in game, and change the game in many ways which will certainly not be for the best.

What can players do about this you may ask? There is only one known antidote to players such as these and that is formidable trolling, which brings us nicely back to the beginning of this article. Get your blasters ready trolls, there are Roleplayers to be farmed!

We took the liberty of finding your first target, watch out for carebears such as this:

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Fan Art Developments

Recently on last week’s fan Friday we saw some further glimpses of the vibrant SWTOR community’s creations. This included works such as the very menacing General Grevious look-a-like pictured below, which shows tremendous creativity and artistic skill.

Also released was information on other fan blogs, such as the femi-nazi Corellia Run Radio. These blogs seem to invest copious amounts of time into their SWTOR hobbies, which begs the question whether their supposedly original and accurate content is really respectable at all.

Also released was further information on the Fan Site kit which allows good sheep-like fan sites to have easy access to SWTOR’s content, for the small price of their own journalistic integrity. Many have taken up this gift from the developers, and it is them and only them that we see featured on the official web site, as acknowledging a non-compliant fan site is far from the top the bioware developers’ list of things to do.

Also with the fan site kit we saw the release of a wide variety of forum avaters and icons. These Further allow players to customise their free forum accounts to show a bit about themselves, and how they plan to play the game upon its release.

With the release date looming more and more fan sites are coming into being, some of which seem to offer valuable content, and others which give readers nothing at all other than regurgitated content from the official SWTOR website. We hope that the increasing trend of the later will continue, which should put the game’s community in good stead pending its release.

A Grevious look alike from SWTOR

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Fan Art in The Old Republic

A fan's impression of a Wookiee

Along side the many pieces of concept art released by the developers of The Old Republic, there has been an incredible wealth of fan-made art, most of which is of an incredibly high quality.

A lot of this can be found on the SWTOR forums, as well as websites such as DeviantArt which have long been go-to places for computer artists from around the world.

Players tend to create art about whatever they are interested in, so to date there have been many many pictures of Jedi in various combat situations. Most of these artworks are produced in software such as photoshop, which may surprise many people as being an incredibly powerful tool for drawing and creating otherwise original artwork from scratch.

These concept art works are generally free from copyright, so can be reproduced at will by interested fans. However, it is still good to leave any artist’s signature in tact, as they have put hours of work into each piece.

Bioware has kindly featured many of their fan’s works in their blog and news posts, which is a very good thing to do for the community. Not only does it show players what others are doing, but it gives the artists good publicity, which could even help their job prospects and professional reputations.

Below is an example of a Fan’s art work, and the skill and dexterity of the artist can clearly be seen. Who would have known photoshop, originally an image editing program, could produce such imagery from scratch.

A piece by Redding depicting a Jedi and Krayt Dragon face off.

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