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Profile: Gestahlt (SWTOR forums roleplayer)

July 24, 2010 By

No this is NOT the person

For this week’s piece I am interviewing another regular at the TOR forums. Just about anyone who follows any of the Star Wars: The Old Republic Website forums at all has likely seen a post by this writer. Love this writer’s work or hate it, you have to respect the skill and sheer writing ability that is shown. Give it up for Gestahlt!

E:  Hello ­ Gestahlt, I have a few questions for you today, if you don’t mind.

G:  Mind?  I’m absolutely honored to be even be considered for an interview.  The pleasure’s all mine, really.

E:  In very general terms, what are you in real life?

G:  Perpetually bored?  No.  I’m a full-time student finishing out a degree in English, as well as the committed boyfriend of a woman I’ve been in love with for just about three years now.  When I’m not writing I’m usually with her, and if I’m not with either – well, that’s where that whole student thing comes in.  I’m an amateur health nut and love to work out whenever I can.  It keeps me relieve stress and on top of that, think out stories while I exercise.

E:  How long have you been doing RP and fanfiction in online forums?

G:I’ve been writing in general since I was about 8, which is to say I started putting together terrible ideas ever since I was a kid.  When I turned 13 we were given America Online 3.0 (Oh god, I just dated myself, I think?) and from there, it was almost an instant gravitation toward roleplay. I’ve since used AOL, WoW, Age of Conan, Star Wars Galaxies (briefly), and Final Fantasy XI as means of roleplay.

But, at the end of the day, it’s writing my own story that really gets me into the creative mindset.

E:   What got you started in this?

G: Reading, without a doubt.  I’m a military brat (Chair Force, represent!) and we moved around a lot.  To compensate I started reading more than I would have otherwise and fell in love not only with the written word, but the world that it could create.

In many ways, it has become a sandbox without boundaries.  My friend, Terminalpleasure, has often compared roleplay to kids playing “make believe”, and I think he’s on the right track.  I actually never played DnD or anything of the like; Bioware was my first time testing out a D20 system, yet it was their story telling that further encouraged me to try out my hand at roleplaying.

E:  What do you think is the most rewarding thing about writing fanfiction?

G: It’s two-fold.  The first is the sense of completion that you get when your protagonist works out something that you’ve been trying to have them solve for awhile.  It’s as much a journey for me, I believe, as it is for my readers.

The second part is the readers themselves.  If someone can read a piece of writing I did and glean some entertainment from it, then I know I’ve done a good job.   I recently put in my sig that if a person has a story in their head they should just write it.  No matter if you think it’s bad or good, get it out.  When we create we encourage others to create and when there is a creative community then we’ve established something that’s lasting.

Let’s put it this way.  I played WoW for about six years.  After the first three, it became boring.  But the ability to roleplay with other creative people made it a wonderful thing.  I hope that in time TOR gets that same feeling (if not one more focused on the creativity) and enables us to look back six years in the future and say “Man, I wasn’t ever bored for a day with that one.”

E:  What do you think could be improved in general about the fanfictions we see on the forums?

G: I think that people should have a little more confidence in what they do.  Yes, a lot of the stuff is new but it’s well worth trying your hand at.   We have a lot of good writers, I have seen, with excellent ideas but they all become somewhat insular.  TP tried to combat this with his Circle of Reviewers thread, but the problem with that was if you didn’t start a story early on, it’d be hard to catch up.

I think it’d be nice if the moderators gave thread creators a bit more control over their threads, so we could weed out the posts that are just problematic as well.  But, I suppose that is only really a problem if you write a story in which Revan loves Alek!

E:  What on Earth made you write about an alternative lifestyle Revan?

G: Well, the fact is we don’t know a lot about Revan.  Bioware’s been working to fill in gaps, but I feel like we’re trapped in some archetypical Heisenberg’s Principle: the more we learn, the less we know.  I can understand that Revan was a charismatic Jedi that made sacrifices and ended up falling, but what does that mean about the MAN himself?  Well, there’s the disconnect.

I wanted to make Revan more of a person.  I’m not saying that having him fall in love with Alek makes him more “interesting” than if he was entirely straight, but by the same token we didn’t see Revan always around a woman, did we?  No, he was with Alek and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with two people finding love in one another.  From that alone, I knew there’d be a problem… but I didn’t care.

To be completely honest, I like Revan.  I dislike his fanatics, though.  The people that go on and on about how Revan could defeat Sidious, Mace Windu, and Bane at one time just irritate me.  Not because I think Revan is weak, but because they don’t even like Revan.  They like the concept of some all-powerful jackanapes that can run up and destroy everyone without feeling or effort.  That’s boring; if that was who Revan was, KOTOR would have been a very flat game.

I’ve had my story referred to before as the “Gay Revan” story.  Shocking?  Not really.  In the start of the story he is in love with Alek – to be honest, I think he even loved Alek after he struck Malak down on the Star Forge, but the story itself was much more about what happened between those events.  I was allowed to explore the Exile and show her in three important stages: Broken, Mending, and Completed.    I was able to elaborate on the Bastila and Revan Dynamic – on the Revan and Arren Kae relationship.  There’s just so much out there that we could know, and I wanted to put attention to those important details.

So in the end, do I think I made Revan “gay” just so he’d be “gay”?  No.  I think I made Revan a person, just so that we could have something to like more than a mask and a red lightsaber.  I’m quite certain my vision of Revan and that of Mr. Karpyshyn does not match up all that much, but I can live with that.  What I was most concerned with was giving answers where only questions were before, and in the end maybe helping other people really think about who Revan was and what he was capable of.

TOR should answer a lot of things.  I wouldn’t be shocked if 99% of what I said is refuted by what is revealed, but that 1% will mean a lot to me.  I’m eager to see just how far off the mark I was.

E: What do you think is your best piece of writing?

G: It’s up in the air.  I have two pieces of writing for my own personal stories that have competing places in my heart.  The first is the story of a young girl who grows up in a horrible situation and rises above it.

The second is the story of an alpha-male, take-no-prisoners, itinerant swordsman on a quest to rescue his bastard daughter from the hands of a megalomaniacal despot… so that he can kill her.  An amazing tagline, isn’t it?

=====

In conclusion… Ladies and gentlemen, feel free to check out the really cool writing of Gestahlt on swtor.com. You won’t be disappointed. Surprised, sure. Possibly shocked – but not disappointed.

Photo is courtesy of www.swtor.com

Filed Under: Community

Sith Sunday – SWTOR in the news

July 18, 2010 By

It’s been a rather big week for SWTOR news this week – the larger number of people involved with beta-testing is certainly creating some momentum, including on our own forums:

1. Bioware released a music trailer (more on that from us later in the week), an in-depth developer blog on music in SWTOR, and the seventh issue of Blood of the Empire.

2. From the TOROZ Forums Part 1: There’s been some enjoyment of Star Wars-related humour, including the Yoda TomTom video and the classic Chad Vader series.

If you’ve got some favourite Star Wars humour we’d love you to share it. We’re already excited about some of the comedy that’s likely to come out of SWTOR.

3. Darth Hater have hit their first anniversary and are giving away booty. Happy birthday folks!

4. From the TOROZ Forums Part 2: Scottyy posted a link to a leaked video of skill selections for Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter classes:

Filed Under: Events, News

Is privacy going the way of the dodo?

July 18, 2010 By

Say it ain't so!

Well, it’s official. Anonymity is on its way out on the internet. Recently, Blizzard Entertainment announced the RealID system for the World of Warcraft MMORPG. The stated idea of the system as to provide a social aspect to the game. If that was what they intended, they failed miserably. What they have created, is a firestorm of protests as well as a drop in subscriptions. Of course, since they had about 20 million subscriptions, they likely didn’t CARE if they lost a few hundred thousand to poorly implemented ideas. Though given their backdown, maybe they did care a little.

On the surface, RealID is not a bad idea. The concept is fairly simple. Take a new WOW player. In order to subscribe, that player must create a battle.net account. This allows them access to the game. They also are allowed access to the game forums. Now I don’t know about you, but I avoided the WOW forums after the second day I played the game. It was flame, troll or die, all day, every day. Any time someone asked a serious question, they got hit with so much spam it wasn’t funny at all. But to create their account, they have to give their real first and last names, the same ones they used to pay for the game. So… Unless you have a very good fake ID with credit attached… You have to use your real information. Hence the title, RealID. And these names will show up in game. (If the player chooses – it’s optional in-game – Ed.)

Now the internet is not a nice place, we all know that. We may not like it, but there isn’t a lot we can do about it. Some people seem to think that as long as no one knows who they really are, they can act as they wish, be as insulting, rude, crude or socially unacceptable as they wish with no repercussions. They can use racial slurs, sexual innuendos, or any other things they wish with no fear of repercussion. They can threaten, they can intimidate, they can do anything they want, because they are anonymous. And hey, it’s not real, right? Who cares if some people take it seriously, they are just nuts, right?

Not really. The entire concept of privacy on the internet is laughable to say the least. Any information that anyone has ever transmitted online is out there, somewhere. The whole idea of stalking has been taken to a new low by the internet. With so much information available online, it is easier than ever for perverts and creeps to get hold of what they want. Where once they had to go through people’s trash to find out the addresses for their targets, now they surf Facebook and other such social sites. That is one reason that I don’t use Facebook. So, now Blizzard had decided to implement such a ‘service’ themselves.

Ok, how about an example? A divorced woman with two abused kids is in a new home far from her ex husband who liked to hurt all three of them when he got drunk. She has been hiding from him since she escaped. She likes to play WOW and she plays as a new character with friends that her husband knows. Suddenly, her information changes in game, and her real name pops up over her character. And guess who is there, sending her a nice, private message? ‘See you soon’. What can the cops do to keep the ex from harassing her in a game? Nothing. What can Blizzard do? Why should they care? It’s not their problem, it’s hers.

Harassment is nothing new. It has been around since humans started coming down from the trees and likely will for as long as the species is in existence. Many humans seem to have a deep rooted need to dominate others. Of course in real life, there are laws against such things now, for good reasons. Harassment can lead to worse crimes. It is degrading, humiliating and just plain wrong. And no, it doesn’t just happen to women, or gays, or people who are not of mainstream religions. It happens every single day, to many different people. And on the internet it happens every minute, every second probably. Because there is no accountability.

Blizzard was attempting to instill some of that accountability into its game. They have backed off of it now, probably due in no small part to the overwhelmingly negative response that they got from their customers after the announcement. RealID is still in the game, but now, it is optional, as opposed to mandatory. Of course all a player has to do is download a utility called GameStore to access it anytime. But that may be a bug. We HOPE it’s a bug…

It was and is an interesting idea. But the concept of allowing other people, strangers, to view so called ‘private’ information cuts deep into the heart of many gamers. We want to feel we are safe, even if it is an illusion. We want to have fun in games, not worry about our identities being stolen or worry about being harassed or stalked in real life. We want the illusion of privacy that we cling to online to be secure.

In closing, I will say this. The internet is still very much a Wild West type of environment at the moment. People can say anything and do anything. The worst that can happen is that they are banned from a forum. So they make new account and come back worse than ever because now they are mad. But this is liable to change. New laws are making their way laboriously through the process of being approved by state and federal authorities that will tighten the strictures that are so lax on the internet. Just as law and order eventually tamed the Wild West, laws will eventually tame much of the internet. While there likely will be trolls, flamers and fools with causes as long as there are humans, with less freedom to inflict their cruelty on others, they will become a nuisance as opposed to a normal thing. And it cannot be soon enough for me.

Over to you: if an online game required you to show your real name, would you play it?

Filed Under: Events, Opinion Tagged With: , , , , ,

To Beta or Not to Beta

July 10, 2010 By

It's time...

Ok, the day has finally come. Lucasarts and Bioware have finally announced game testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We are approximately 10 months from launch and from what we have seen so far of the game in demos and videos, it looks remarkably well polished and ready to go for a game just out of alpha stage.

The usual computer game stages run: alpha, closed beta, open beta and then release. For anyone who might not know what those are, alpha stage is in house development, tweaking, testing and revamping. Computer program beta testing is when a company allows people outside the company to try the program.  A closed beta is by invitation only, such as what Bioware is running at the moment. These stages are usually less polished, less complete and often have gaping holes in places that need to be found and fixed. One of my favorites was in the beta for a game called Global Agenda where if you fell through the map, you wound up upside down on another map. It was annoying at the time, mind you and they fixed it fast. But looking back it was hilarious. The whole point of a beta is to find the problems that the alpha stage missed so they can be fixed.

Open betas are usually for games that have a large multiplayer section, or games that are totally multiplayer, like MMOs. The point of an open beta is also to find bugs, crashes and other potential fail points, but also to stress test the servers. Nothing is more annoying in a MMO that you pay a subscription fee to every month than having it say ‘I am sorry, the servers are full’. Or worse, being in the game and not being able to move because of the transmission lag. Or the game launcher crashes due to a massive influx of players. All of which I have had happen in various MMOs since my first, Star Wars Galaxies.

There are of course problems with betas. The public sees things that can sour them on the game. I have taken part in several closed and open betas for games and have to say that after the betas, I bought one of the games. None of the others held my interest. This is one problem, another is that beta is not about getting to play the game before anyone else. Many people see betas as just that, an advance showing and in some ways they are – but the point of a beta is to find and fix problems, not to have fun. You can have fun in a beta, I have on several occasions – but it is also a lot of work.

First you have to find the problems. These can be game-breaking bugs such as crash to desktop errors. They can be as obvious as a hole in the ground where the code doesn’t show and your avatar falls through and keeps falling. Or they can be as subtle as a single misspelled or wrong word in a quest dialogue box that sends the player to the wrong place to do the quest. Or even worse, the quest location icon shows the wrong place. That can get very aggravating. They want all of these things fixed before launch, not that they can be, but they seriously want to try. Most of the problems I found in betas were somewhere in between. But then comes the really not fun part.

You have to report the bug, in as much detail as you can possibly achieve. Sometimes you have to try and repeat the bug. If it is a game crash, was it your system or the game engine? That hole in the ground that your avatar fell through? Is it easy to find or hard? Is it on a critical quest path or off the beaten track? Either way it needs to be addressed, fixed if possible, blocked off somehow if not. And yes this means you have to read every single line of quest dialogue. Often two or three times. Then you have to run every single quest. It is a lot of work, and most of it is boring as all get out. And whatever work you put into the game, usually gets wiped every week or two, or will definitely be wiped when the game launches. It wouldn’t be fair to regular players otherwise.

Now, the fun part. You get to see the game before almost anyone else. That is cool. You get to try the game before anyone else, which is very cool. You get to be a part of a living, breathing entity and watch as it takes shape. You get to meet other, like minded players, and sometimes those relationships last past the launch of the game.

But the main focus of beta testing, is the testing. You are not there to have fun, although you can. You are not there to meet people, although you can. You are there to find and report problems to the development team so they can be fixed. Many people seem to forget that. Beta testing is not just about playing the game. It is work, hard work. It can be incredibly rewarding when you go into the game later and say to yourself: ‘I reported that, and they fixed it, sweet!’ It can also be incredibly annoying: ‘What? They haven’t fixed that hole in the floor of this instance yet? Geez it’s been there since the beginning of beta…” Some problems take longer to fix, and some problems simply can’t be fixed. But the job of a beta tester is to find the problems and report them so the development team knows what is wrong and where.

I for one, hope to get an invitation to the closed beta portion of Star Wars: The Old Republic. I hope to be able to give hands on help to the development team in creating this piece of Star Wars history. I hope to play a trooper and see just how effective a heavy repeater can be against those pesky lightsaber wielders. I want to play an Imperial agent and snipe enemies of the Empire down from cover. I want to help balance and tweak the game so it is as epic as I believe it can be when it launches.

Do you want to take part in the beta? Why or why not?

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ,

How Do We Get There? And Can We Smash Things Along the Way? Huh? Can We?

July 8, 2010 By
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/All_Terrain_Armored_Transport

Oh.... Dear...

We all know what this is, right? Who doesn’t want to drive something like that? As long as those pesky airspeeders are kept away, you would be virtually unstoppable. One of my favorite memories from a video game is from Battlefront 2 when you get to pilot the AT-AT in an assault on the Rebel base on Hoth. Silly Rebels. Can you say CRUNCH?

Vehicles have been a big part of Star Wars since the beginning. We have spacecraft sure – the opening scene in Episode IV, the space battle between the Devastator and the Tantive IV is epic to say the least. But starships and starfighters are not the focus of this piece. After the droids escape, we see a huge sandcrawler, a landspeeder and others including living mounts (am I the only one who thinks dewbacks are kinda creepy?) before we get into space again.

And then in Episode V we get the real deal. Airspeeders first and then Imperial Walkers. It is not entirely clear how many walkers attacked Echo base, but it had to be a bunch. Figure each of the six Star Destroyers in the Imperial Death Squadron had a full complement (are YOU going to tell Lord Vader you are short an AT-AT? I wouldn’t want to either…) That is twenty per Star Destroyer. Add to that the Executor’s complement of thirty. A hundred and fifty AT-ATs… No wonder the Rebels ran away.

In Episode VI, we see a hoverbarge, repulsorlift sleds and up close and personal views of AT-STs. We had a quick glimpse of one in the battle of Hoth, but on Endor we see them a lot more. We see them get swarmed and smashed by a bunch of rock throwing primitives. Sigh… Some days it just doesn’t pay to serve the Empire.

The Prequels showed more vehicles of all kinds. In Episode I, we see droid tanks, armed landspeeders, living mounts… the works. Episode II of course we see the clone army in all its glory with artillery, gunships, tanks and all sorts and sundry of other vehicles. In Episode III we see other vehicles, including the only film representation of an A6 Juggernaught Heavy Assault Vehicle during the battle of Kashykk.

And now, we come to games. The starfighters get a lot of press of course. After all, the attack on the first Death Star was one of the most iconic scenes in any science fiction movie. Most of the times in Star Wars games, vehicles were things to fight, all the way back to Empire Strikes Back for SNES. Star Wars Battlefront was an anomaly. The first version had no space combat at all, the starfighters could only be flown within the confines of the ground maps. But the tanks and the landpeeders more than made up for it. Battlefront II added space to the mix and then boarding actions on enemy ships, which were also VERY cool but somewhat hard to pull off properly. Especially when the AI of your allies told them to get into the transport that you just carefully landed on the enemy hangar deck, to then immediately crash it.

So, now we come to another game in Star Wars history. Many people who played it loved it. Until things were changed. Star Wars Galaxies had one of the coolest ideas ever. A full online world populated by AI driven characters AND players. And in STAR WARS? What more could anyone ask? Well, aside from them changing things so thoroughly without telling anyone, lying to their customers and treating their customers like trash?

The game itself had flaws, no question. But it was STAR WARS. You could, after they fixed the launch bugs, go anywhere, do anything. You could ride a swoop, get into an X-34, or speeder bike. You could even have an AT-ST as a pet. My only true complaint was that you could not fight from the vehicles. Some of the creature handlers could fight from their mount which was very cool, but still…

Single player Star Wars games have had vehicles as well. The swoop races in Knights of the Old Republic I and II. Jedi Outcast had the illustrious Kyle Katarn ‘borrowing’ a series of AT-STs from the Imperial Remnant during their attack on Yavin IV. Yes, he WAS going to return them. Are YOU going to tell him, to his face, that he wasn’t? Thought not… Jedi Academy had a mission in which you flew a swoop and either used a lightsaber or on board cannon to fight with. The Battlefront series of course had vehicles out the wazoo, and even Republic Commando had a scene where you ‘appropriated’ an AT-TE to dispense some pain on a horde of battle droids. Lego Star Wars has vehicles to use as well.

So… what can we expect in Star Wars: The Old Republic? As an MMO, we will likely not see the same level of sophistication, the sheer scope of The Old Republic defies such things. Any MMO is a huge undertaking, This MMO is supposedly the largest one ever conceived. So… What would we want in a vehicle?

Speed and maneuverability. These things go without saying. In almost any human there is a deep rooted need to go fast. To make him or herself move faster than others around him or her. We want style too. We could drive around in a box. My sister drives around in a box in real life, but then again, she has two kids and a hyper little dog, so she needs the space. I don’t want to drive a box, I have some taste.

Do we want combat vehicles? I can’t say for anyone else but I like driving around and blowing things up. There is something visceral to driving a tank, even a simulated one. Having been in a real tank, I would prefer never to do it again. It smelled of VERY old socks. Thank goodness games don’t have a stench component yet. Combat vehicles though would be much harder to program I assume. Different weapons, different animations, different types of damage taken, different companions manning the guns need different animations… Ick… Just the thought of all the stuff required makes my head hurt. And if we want more than one kind of vehicle… AGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Exotic vehicles are a major part of the Star Wars experience. Whether they are spacecraft or a humble landspeeder, they all play an important part. In an MMO, vehicles provide speed to get to places, or away from them. This is unlikely to change in Star Wars: The Old Republic. But we can expect some new twists, and probably some cool surprises as well.

As for myself, I want to drive this walker APC that was shown in the concept art. What can I say? I LIKE crushing things under the feet of a metal behemoth.

Over to you. What kind of vehicles would you want to see? Do you want vehicle combat?

AT-AT image: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/All_Terrain_Armored_Transport

Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: , ,

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