Starborne - MMO4X

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xzi

Mouthbreather
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was mildly interested for a minute and then they struck again

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uniqueuser

Vyemm Raider
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Can't wait until loot boxes get regulated like gambling and a whole generation of shit games are no longer viable.
 
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Utnayan

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Better be free to play if they have loot boxes. And then I would bet it's pay to win. Too bad. Bye bye any game with a loot box.
 
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xzi

Mouthbreather
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I'll still give it a try if it's free, half the allure of those games are because they're browser based for me to be honest, it's just more convenient than having a client but it's still a cool idea.
 
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Byr

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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With Starborne being time-based and free-to-play, Solid Clouds has openly addressed understandable pay-to-win concerns, saying "there will be in-game purchases but, importantly, everything you can buy with real-life currency, you can gain with meaningful in-game activities."

Anyone who drops this line these days is sending up a big red flag.
 
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zombiewizardhawk

Potato del Grande
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"Just play Everquest for 15,000 hours or buy my account with raid gear max level char in top guild for $2,499.00"
 
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Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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I'll still give it a try if it's free, half the allure of those games are because they're browser based for me to be honest, it's just more convenient than having a client but it's still a cool idea.
I probably will. It depends on the impact of the lootbox store.

From one of the videos, it looks like the guy got like 40 lootboxes over a day of hardcore playing, all of which give him 3-8 cards, which appear to be waaaay more than he can use, so he keeps the best. So a lootbox store may not be too unbalancing.

At worst, I play 2-3 weeks before dropping...
 

Skanda

I'm Amod too!
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half the allure of those games are because they're browser based for me to be honest, it's just more convenient than having a client but it's still a cool idea.

I never have understood this. What makes it more convenient to have it inside a browser vs as a separate program?
 

Skanda

I'm Amod too!
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At least until IT blocks every last web page in the world... I hate the firewall at my work.
 

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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I never have understood this. What makes it more convenient to have it inside a browser vs as a separate program?
Browser vs static clients is exactly the same for games vs business applications:

- Easier deployment
- Multi-platform portability (including mobile)
- Fine-grained control
- And require only a single communication channel (vs some business tentacled horrors that require disk mounts, 2 different DB connectors, RPC, and some arbitrary fucked up ports using a protocol designed by an untrained monkey)

The downside until recently was that there were no real middleware to make web games, and the interaction was horribly primitive, barely above the level of text terminals. Which is why people wrote games mostly in flash. Today, you have JS+HTML5+CSS3+WebGL to provide the basis, and you get engines that can generate web applications that hold water.

One could probably make a Starborne clone entirely in HTML5+WebGL. Probably with a slightly more constrained display, but the only part that is "hard" in a web game version would be the starfield rotation and zoom, which is (mostly) fluff. They strongly imply they're going to release on Windows/OSX/iOS/Android, so I'm betting they are using Unity. Probably too big to run as a WebGL project, but not entirely impossible...
 
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Fyff

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The real benefit of not being in a browser is you are not just another of 500 million browser strategy games.
 
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Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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The real benefit of not being in a browser is you are not just another of 500 million browser strategy games.
90% of the browser strategy games are clones of Travian anyway. But apparently, the devs do explicitly reference Travian anyway :)
 
  • 1Worf
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