Jumpgate and Final E3 thoughts

I know I'm a little late in posting this but I had some ISP problems the past couple days and was unable to update here. But here we go.

I got to say that between the presentation and the Q&A I was satisfied with the information I got. It seemed that they really wanted to emphasize the focus of this game. They commented on the fact that because there was so little specific information about the game, people had made up their minds about what kind of game this was going to be. They emphasized that it would be action oriented with PVP being the focus, with some PVE. Things like crafting, trading, mining etc. would be there only to supplement the combat, not as a main focus to the game. Something I didnt happen to get answered (I forgot to ask) is about how the factions differ as in skills/stats/ships and so on, but that will be revealed in time. And Just a small correction about Soulmirror's post- They said you can only create one faction per server, not account.

As far as my playtest went, I was very impressed by the visuals and the controls were pretty much what you'd expect from this kind of game. Which is a good thing, they worked well. They seem to have really gone through some great lengths to make space look interesting. From a great distance you can see NPCs flying around, shooting at each other, flying around a huge space station with debris floating about. In the presentation, he actually flew the ship inside an asteroid to blow up some kind of structure. It's these sorts of things I would love to see more of because it really adds a lot to the immersion in a space flight type of game. There's nothing more boring than flying about in a great big nothing shooting wave after wave of ships. It makes for very boring dog fighting (I'm looking at you SWG: JTL). They did however reassure me (during the Q&A) that navigating cramped areas during combat would be a regular part of the game.

They also talked about how the story in the missions will update or even change completely on the fly. An example of this was seen in the presentation: The mission tells you to go fly to this huge moon but upon nearing the moon, a huge chunk of it is blown off, and your mission is updated according to what just happened. They commented that this sort of thing would happen a lot in the game- You might be told to go collect 10 of an item but then there's a plot twist that interrupts your collecting and you are told to go accomplish a different objective. The star of the game is the player; there's not a ton of back story about heroes who fought some giant war in the past while you're some nobody collecting eyeballs for some guy that wants to make stew.

People play videogames for different reasons. Therefore different features are important to different people. Myself, I play games to be immersed in a world, story, or ideally, both. If a game does that well, things like PVE vs PVP, guilds, crafting, raids are all just added bonuses for me. JGE appeals to me because they really spent some time trying to make you care about the story via the updating missions. If I'm told to go out and kill 10 X and I go and do that, then I'm told to do it another 100 times, I will never, ever read the quest text and I will never feel immersed in the game. But if I'm told to kill 10 X, then the nearby planet explodes, I'm going to think "Wait a second! why did that happen?!" and I'll be immersed in the game world. That will make me care about why I am completeing missions even if it is "Kill 10 X". So if they keep this sort of variety in the missions, then I think JGE is going to be a great game.

Thanks again guys for sending me to E3!