Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Will DEs be building Vehicles?
There are no clear answers on this one. We are the logical choice to select amongst existing professions, but SOE could instead use Vehicle vending machines instead--to act as a money sink and to prevent giving Vehicles to a profession (DE) that they may later take it away from in order to give it to a more specialized profession that has yet to be announced/released (such as Mechanic).
So short version goes:it's unclear at this point in time. SOE has been intentionally (and quite successfully) vague on the topic.
Here is what is know from a post made not to long ago...
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=816360#M816360
JustG wrote:
Vehicles will not be introduced with a new profession, and there will be three base models.
But down the line, who knows... they are architected to be extensible.
Most believe that Artisan will gain at least the ability to craft one of these three starting vehicles. As for the other two, we will have to wait until it hits Test Center.....
Drashk wrote:
Most believe that Artisan will gain at least the ability to craft one of these three starting vehicles. As for the other two, we will have to wait until it hits Test Center.....
Fair enough, but I still would not consider what happens on test center to be an exact implementation of what happens on live servers either. Remember they had mount vendors giving out mounts to stress-test vehicles. Certainly they won't do that on live servers, but my point is that it is not unlike them to move things from here to there to make it easier to build/craft on TC.
Rkorik wrote:
I believe it was either Raph Koster or Kevin who said that the initial vehicles would be in the engineering IV tree and maybe one in the Master Artisan tree. After that they would probably have a vehicle crafting profession to create the multi person vehicles when they implement those. That post was quite a while back though so I don't remeber the specifics other than being pretty sure the first vehicles will either be crafted by artisans with the Engineering tree or being bought off of vendors. For some reason, I also seem to remember them saying the vehicle profession would be an elite profession off an already elite profession. The speculation from that was an elite profession off of DE. Don't quote me on that last though. I may have eaten a bad mushroom on a pizza that day and hallucinated reading that the devs would actually make DE worthwhile in some form or fashion.
I did an advancedsearch on the boards for any post from JustG, Thunderheart, Q-3PO, or Holocron on vehicles and could not find anything that had a distribution of where the vehicles would be (Engineering branch, Master Artisan, etc.). I did those searches with multiple words (started with just Vehicle, then added Engineer, Engineering, Artisan, Master, etc., one word at a time) and search on all of those names individually.
With those searches, I found two things that had ANY specifics: the post from JustG that was referenced earlier in this thread about there beingthree based model vehicles initially released and no profession specific to them, and I also found a post from Thunderheart on 13-Nov that said that Vehicles were slated for publish in the next patch (in December). That was it.
Clearly, other vehicles are coming, they will probably have a profession attached to them, and will probably be a branch off the Artisan tree, and will probably be tied to the SWG Space Expansion which is presently rumored for release between April and June of 2004.
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Holocron wrote:
RK: We'll probably start out by putting simpler vehicle creation directly into the engineering profession, but eventually I'd expect it to go into a profession. We really see a lot of the strength of the game as being able to add professions. It's not just content. We can add entire new ways to play. I'll be vague here, but expect us to be adding many professions to the game
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Keep in mind that there were alot of grandiose plans that have crashed to earth since the time Raph said this, even the space expansion stuff now sayspersonal starships,(which I read as singleoccupancy),as opposed to the one time feeling that we would have ships that could cart players around.
What you have to understand is that the game is now reality, a very broken reality, so the best thing the devs can do now is work with what they have to make it better, why add a new class that would just add a whole new level of complaints.
I can pretty much guarantee that vehicles will somehow have to be 'tamed' and then 'trained' somehow by CHs.
After that, CH's will be the only ones to be able to mount the vehicles. Everyone else will only be able to ride around in some gimpy little buggy or something.
Well, for what good it would do I think we should start a petiton.
DE's crafting the vehicles would be a good start to the "love" we were promised.
Rkorik, Marc_Deltramis correct in his search. No where has any information really been stated by the DEV team, in regards to Vehicles and who will build them, besides the quote that I supplied. If you will notice, it did not state that who will be building the inital vehicles, but rather states who will not..a new profession.
Marc_Deltram, the mount vendors were added a few weeks after mounts were already introduced on the server in their correct form. The vendors were added to stress test the system, since the mounts were not matureing or being trained fast enough do to the low numbers of trainer on the Server. I would expect that vehicles will be handled the same way. What I was refering to was that we won't know who for certain who will be able to build them until the new code hits TC.