General Discussion

The folks from NetDevil's Jumpgate Evolution have sent along these new screenshots from their upcoming MMORPG.

Check out all six screens here.

 Oh don't tease! I'm itching to play this game. A MMO keeping true to the old classics of Wing commander Privateer, Tie Fighter and X Wing, and Freelancer some years after that.  *dusts off joystick*

Yes, it looks great!

Personally, I like the graphics on Eve ships much better.

I wonder if they're taking it too far with focusing on graphics early on. With Auto Assault, they were REALLY ugly in beta, and got badmouthed alot for it. Anyway, it seems like another way they're trying to imitate EVE, visually (did you see some of the buttons on their site? I could mistake it for EVE website if I switched the language to something I couldn't understand...). I hope they don't immitate EVE too much, ND has always tried to make something that will succeed because it's different, but even if we get EVE with joystick controls that might prove interesting. But having seen JGC, I'm pretty sure the game has potential to live up to being more than that.

Amen Ozmodan - love the graphics and spectral effects in Eve-Online.

I'm eager to try this game out - see if it will satisfy my space mmo desire :)

I've always had my idea of an idea space MMO... think Eve-Online (graphics, size, resource mining/provision), crossed with Planetside (planatary/system conquest along with individual FPS-type pvp) and DAoC/WoW (player housing w\ individual player item crafting; large items would be handled with the Eve-like crafting system)

 How fun would that be? :)

Grafics are for obvious PR reasons a must in screenshots like that. Industry survives on HYPE, and when screenshots is the only information available in the begining, grafics play the biggest part of getting atention. I wouldn't be suprised if these would be post-polisted with photoshop or sum.

Looks interesting indeed, but there is so many rabbit holes a space MMO can fall into, that would make the game not fit the certain kind of people (and ofc fit only the other kind =). Always we hope "this one" doesn't fall into them, but eventually its just a game of luck and knowing yourself, what fits you.

What I'm interested, and if someone knows its also a question, does JE have free crosshair style of fights? Or something similar, like controlling auto-aiming computers on gunpoint view? That certainly would make a difference to other games on this field these days. And be the one point in EVE I didn't really enjoy, fights were so ... static ... boring.

Smoothly rolling real space flight from the cockpit with a fighter type of a vessel, on top (or under) the side of a large scale battleship. Dogfight other fighter pilots very close to asteroids and large enemy vessels or structures, knowing that the one piloting the mothership and controlling its broad side of gun batteries wich I need to dodge is also a human player. Thats my dream to see.

I love the Eve-O folks and their immediate assumption that nothing will ever compare.  I'm thinking that more space MMO's are going to be enroute soon... so soon it might even be by the end of the year when they release the beta for this game!  Just finished reading a KOTOR post which makes me think that mankind trully desires to get off this planet every once in a while to see through our smogged atmosphere.  Eve doesn't have the planet-side yet, but ambulation (walking around instead of having to fly or simply stare at your ship in station) is supposed to be an activity that CCP (eve online's publisher/etc) has been researching.  Many of the people that I've spoken to on the situation (with any serious ideals on it) have spoken against it happening any time soon, due to the time it would take CCP to develop the programming for it and integrate it into a 3-D tactically-related game.  Not because it's something the people don't want...

...People want to shoot something in the groin and watch the enemy cringe in their e-peen getting a good kicked!

~The Doc

I should note -rambling about Auto Assault yet again-  that in Auto Assault you were able to walk about the towns. There used to be emotes, but the code was so shaky a handshake could nearly destabilize a server, and they had to be removed. All that remained was jumping and making human totem poles. Anyway, the physics and coding and animations kind of stinked because they neeeded to cut on on what was already a ton of time spent with programming. But they also wouldn't just remove the feature, of course- it DID add a great cinematic element, some of the towns were truly disturbing and told a story on their own. But the game might have been better if they had dropped that, replaced towns with a menu and a a background picture of the town you were in, and focused on removing glitches that turned off many players. Not that CCP can't make towns work properly as far as coding *cough* but I think they would be fine spending their development time expanding the game. Enough on EVE.

Here's an explanation of Jumpgate Classic. Many concepts are outdated and wouldn't go over too well, and others have been copied by EVE and improved in the years since, but's probably still worth a free trial, seeing as the download is extremely small...

Jumpgate is a first-person flight sim. You can look at your ship in third person, but that takes away your HUD and the camera is clearly only meant for looking at how cool your ship is. Anyway, from your cockpit you fly around and babbity blah. Like EVE, you don't have to fight mobs if you don't want to, and endgame is largely PvP. Combat missions in Jumgate consist of simply farming around,  and killing the spawns that attack you when you enter a system. They attack solo or in small groups of up to 3, and are harder to kill than your typical mob (actually, don't expect to kill anything before level 9) There are no 'roid belts to warp to, you ahev to fly around and spot them on radar if you want to mine. There are six non-PvP kinds of missions to take: Transport (transporting one item), cargo (transporting items for a reward and resale and profit), combat (hunting down X enemies of level Y+), patrol (going to areas and flying through the capturable beacons, even if you cannot actually capture them- I'll explain later), scout (scanning or taking photos of something X times, often near a powerful enemy spawn), and Mining (selling an amount of ores to a station- you can stock up on ores and then turn in a bunch at once). These tend to get pretty boring, and there's no interesting dialogue surrounding them. They grant you credits and XP- XP levels you up. WHile there are no character stats but rank and faction standings, you need to be a certain level to purchase items from stations, although you can buy these items off of players. Since the population is so low, there's nearly never a WTB or WTS message, and if it is it's for a rare archaeological item.  Ship equipment is pretty straightforward, no need to go into that. Now, the big thign is, transport and cargo running can be a dangerous as fighting. Not only will enemies shoot you, but you will have to dock (or if mining navigate asteroids and dock). When your ship is full to the brim with heavy stuff, it's rather possible to crash during the docking operation. The game is more unforgiving than EVE in how it treats death, seeing as how suddenly and unexpectedly it can occur. Anyway, ultimately: Jumpgate's action is based on flight simulation. I hope they don't lose that.