Is it just me, or does Zachary Quinto seem really less-than-thrilled with providing voice-overs for Star Trek Online? It’s cool they nabbed him, tho — it really will help their marketing to continue to provide any and all connections to the wildly successful Star Trek movie this past summer. And on a related note, shouldn’t they be just trucking in gobs of Star Trek actors for voice-overs at this point? I mean, it’s not like they’re really sparse or anything. You’d think that William Shatner or Red Shirt #6 wouldn’t mind another paycheck. Shatner’s done WoW, now he can prop up the franchise that really made him famous.
My theory continues to gain support: that Syncaine and Tobold are actually a married couple using the internet for therapy.
You won’t hear me talk a lot about Final Fantasy 14 on Bio Break next year — despite their claims of future awesomeness, I’m really ho-hum about it overall. Especially after a very lackluster experience in their current MMO a few years back (aka “The Incident In Which I Was Killed By A Sheep”).
I’ve been pretty impressed by The Old Republic’s planet selection — up to now. I’m with Moon Over Endor on this, it’s just disappointing that BioWare’s trucking out Tatooine for one of their locations. Yeah, it’s iconic, and ironic as this “backwards, nothing planet” is featured in almost all the movies and games. But it’s boring, it’s dull, it’s been-there-done-that, and even in the fantastic KOTOR, Tatooine was the lamest part of the game. Ah well, quibbles and bits.
On a brighter TOR note, this article’s pretty dang funny.
I agree. While marketing departments may think gamers want to experience Tatooine, the gamers do not. Like you say, it’s boring. It’s all sand! While I have a thing for reading about sand planets (I have no idea why), I don’t like to play them in my video games. I like my gaming to be vibrant and odd and exciting, not drab and ugly.
Maybe they’ll do something new with Tatooine this time around. But I doubt it. I probably won’t spend more than just the token amount of time there required by questing.
I’m sorry but Zachary Qunito will always be typecast as brain-eating Sylar for the rest of his career to me.
This has definitely taken Star Trek OFFline for me as I’m always going to be creeped out by Sylar’s voice over during the game.
Syp, it looks like the gameplay of FF 14 is going to be really different from 11, despite the character designs staying similar. I too was killed by a sheep, as well as a rabbit, a little bird resembling toucan sam, crabs, fleas, tigers, giant ticks, leeches, flying pots, small bats, large bats, ambulatory mushrooms, 1 foot tall imps, and various other nonthreatening things.
The rule in FFXI is the smaller it is, the more likely it will kick your ass. That’s why the big raid monsters are dragons-bunnies would kick everyones asses.
I didn’t like Quinto in the movie. Then again, I had other problems with that movie. I do find it interesting that they have Quinto in for a game set in the “old” ST universe, not the splinter AU formed in the movie.
Tatooine might be interesting if they dig into the Goblin Valley part of the world instead of the endless dunes. Also, as every good explorer knows, sand dunes can cover ruins…
I’m interested in what FFXIV does for game design, but as Yet Another Friggin’ Grindy Subscription game, I’ll never play it for more than a free trial phase.
Syncaine and Tobold are funny. “Train wreck funny” sometimes, to be sure, but funny.
I think that’s just his I’m concentrating face. You see him break into smiles when he fluffs a line.
I think they were just catching him in the middle of the recording session. It must be mind numbing reading the same line 15 times, then doing lines for 5 hours. I would be pretty apathetic as well.
BTW, the movie reboot was in serious need of about 45% less Deus Ex Machina
Re: the TOR article: “Monoclimes” are one of the things that bug me the most about the Star Wars franchise (and plenty of other sci-fi as well). I never realized quite how much it bothered me until I started playing KOTOR about a month ago. So for each planet I get to explore maybe half a square mile of the surface, and then if I ask my companions about the planet they say, “Yeah, the rest of the planet is pretty much EXACTLY LIKE THIS”.
Really, an entire planet of rolling prairies? A planet that is also a city???!!! I’ll grant you Coruscant, since having one city-planet is kind of cool, but a second city-planet? A second locale that managed to muster up the trillions of people and God-like amounts of wealth and resources that would make such a project at all feasible or desirable?
I wish Bioware put in a dialogue option so I could tell Karth “What you just said to me was so absurd that I now think less of you as a person.”
And thus the slow descent to the Dark Side begins…
I gotta say I disagree about Tatooine. For me, if it doesn’t have jawas, sand people, banthas in a Star Wars game, something is just missing! Yes, it’s in all the games, but it’s more than iconic to me, it’s THE Star Wars planet.
I think Tatooine can be made interesting. One option would be a cross faction trading hub: where people can go to punt goods and services without the fear of local law enforcement (or other career threatening bodies) looking over their shoulder.
Here you could have an Auction House, crafting stations, home to many crafting guilds, Jawa Sand Crawlers pulling up at certain times providing expensive and rare objects, gladiatorial arenas, Pod race gambling etc etc. It could become a bustling social hub rather than an endless sandy sea of XP potential and is a fantastic back drop to those role playing the quick witted ruffian.
Would be a shame not to include Tatooine but it would be a disastrous disappointment if it was used as another desolate XP grind fest just ’cause “we dun have a sandy zone yet…”