TOR's travel system

Posted by Suzina On 6/17/10 8 comments

I think I've finally given up on space-flight.

When asked about the navigation system, Rich Vogel said in an article: "Think of the map in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. That's kind of what our navigation will be for traveling around in your spaceship."

We've seen Mass Effect 2's travel system, and it's not space flight. It'd be better to describe space travel in Mass Effect as interacting with a graphical menu. An icon of a ship follows your cursor as you move it around to select the planet you want to load to. Upon selecting your destination, you get a loading screen. If you cancel out of the menu at any time, you'll find your ship has not moved an inch: You were just interacting with a menu screen.

This is drastically different from the Jump to Lightspeed expansion for Star Wars Galaxies. In SWG, the ship shakes as you pilot it and really moves. You can switch your view from inside the cockpit to outside while you fly towards the Imperial Star Destroyer in the distance. Group members inside your ship can move freely around, or find a nice window to watch as the stars, nebula, enemy ships and space stations fly by.

Now normally, a single developer quote isn't given too much credit because the person could have phrased their statement poorly, been mis-quoted or mis-spoke. However, there's reason to believe that this statement was dead-on the money. Approximately 8 minutes and 30 seconds into an interview with Sean Dahlberg, he referred to Rich Vogel as "The Canary" because he "sang about something yesterday".

Sad to say, it doesn't look like TOR will have a very interesting space travel system.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go QQ more.
-Suzina

8 comments:

Unknown said...

I kind of took this for fact a way back, tho not knowing the specifics of the travel option. BW stated a while back not to bring in space combat like SWG did in the past.

They are going slowly integrate it into the game. So it will come for sure but not at the start, and there well be a slow progression to full space combat.

Kalvod | Java Jawa said...

I agree and as i keep saying, i highly doubt any sort of space will be in at launch. It's an entirely different game essentially with having a free moving Z axis.

This can easily be a huge expansion. I agree Micky, i think i remember them stating something along those lines that it won't be like SWG aka Xwing vs TIE Fighter

Ajay said...

Yup, sort of what I expected at this point. There's still a year to go, but other interviews have indicated they are going to do something more with space. Not time to QQ just yet!

Unknown said...

If they include space combat at some point, I think they would do well to make it similar to STO's space combat. It was about the only thing that was good about the game, and really felt like MMO combat despite the addition of a z-axis.

As for "The Canary", I thought Dahlberg's remark was more likely to refer to Vogel's remarks either about open and instanced PvP, about crafting, or (most likely to my mind) about scalable instances depending on group size.

Kalvod | Java Jawa said...

Yea i agree about the Canary, probably 'singing' too much hehehe. STO had interesting combat i'll give it that. I liked the tactical feel of it, although sometimes it could feel a bit slow, but over all i liked it. It's a good alternative to what we see w/ a traditional flight sim.

Ajay, i agree, we still have a year to go and will get tons more of updates!

Unknown said...

I was browsing through the old video available on swtor.com, and re-watched the Designing the Dark Side promo. What struck me was that they described two playstyles for the Sith Warrior which are actually, as we now know, the two advanced classes. And they did the same for the Sith Inquisitor:
The Sith Inquisitor can specialize in melee combat and uses force abilities to boost his survivability to make up for a lack of heavy armour. Or he can specialize in ranged combat utilizing a lot of force lightning.
No mention of healing abilities for the Inquisitor, so they could go in either Advanced Class or in the shares tree. We will just have to wait and see about that.

Unknown said...

Ahaha, and in the Diverse Worlds video one writer said about Ord Mantell: "It is a planet full of thieves. They are people who will steal your star ship if you're not careful."
This is part of Smuggler story, as we learned from E3. So much fun discovering these little hints in old promo materials.
Also interesting is the description of the video: "Majestic forests, toxic swamplands, desert landscapes, and hazardous WAR ZONES [emphasis mine] – the worlds that make up the Star Wars™ universe are unique and enriched with compelling storylines."

Ajay said...

Many people tend to overlook the captions for the media on the website. The captions usually have a good bit of info just like that!

As for the Smuggler story, read through Rob Chestney's short story "Smuggler's Vanguard." Not only does it refer to various story elements for the Smuggler, but it also directly talks about the Vanguard ship. There are hints everywhere! That's why I enjoy dissecting all of our updates because they generally do correlate to in-game material.

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