Droid Engineer Archive

Hi all I have been reading the treads on the board and seeing how DE need a lot of love I had a though. I am sure this has been voiced before.
Give Droid Engineers there own mounts (swoops and speeder bikes). I as a player want to ride a swoop like Darth Maul a ride that you Droid Engineers can build for me. I think that the DE line should be a stop on the way to Space ships (when we get that expansion). What I am saying is that I really do not want to ride a Duck or do the splits on a Dewback (that’s what it looks like to me). I want a metal Hog that I do not feed and looks like something more technical. The code is there all ready for the mounts the swoop or speeder will follow you if you get off so it will need a brain but you ride it. Same rules apply from Dewback to swoop just change the model with a small animation add and you have it. With storage and armor that will be a hell of slick ride that will get you guys rich in the process. I hope that my suggestion finds fertile ground and sounds good to others.

Mort

That would be very cool. I hope the devs agree.

The topic of Vehicles and DEs has been brought up more than once. It's even been asked directly of TH and Q and others. So far, we have gotten less than clear responses on this. I think the only answer here is...we'll see when we see, unfortunately.

Actually, the devs are a step ahead of you on this one...they've already discussed this at length in other forums.

DEs will indeed be able to build vehicles, because Swoop Bikes are being put in the Engineering IV skill slot and Landspeeders are being put in the Master Artisan skill slot. There are initially going to be1 type of swoop and2 types of speeders.

The only problem with this is that practically everyone who is in some form of crafting profession will be able to build vehicles...as long as they went that extra mile and got Master Artisan. This pretty much means that the market for speeders and swoops has been saturated even before they've been added to the game...unlike Creature Mounts, which are pretty much limited to Master Creature Handlers and Master Bio-Engineers.

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Bail_Runningrider wrote:

Actually, the devs are a step ahead of you on this one...they've already discussed this at length in other forums.

DEs will indeed be able to build vehicles, because Swoop Bikes are being put in the Engineering IV skill slot and Landspeeders are being put in the Master Artisan skill slot. There are initially going to be1 type of swoop and2 types of speeders.

The only problem with this is that practically everyone who is in some form of crafting profession will be able to build vehicles...as long as they went that extra mile and got Master Artisan. This pretty much means that the market for speeders and swoops has been saturated even before they've been added to the game...unlike Creature Mounts, which are pretty much limited to Master Creature Handlers and Master Bio-Engineers.

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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. If you've got links to the discussions you're recalling, I'd love to see them: I'd love any data on what can be expected from vehicles between now and whenever they appear.

If I read between the quadruple-spaced lines left by the two posts I could find, clearly other vehicles are coming later, 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.

I remeber a post or an interview where was said that the swoop would be a thing a master artisian would be able to craft....i think it was in an interview..

the interview was with Raph Koster on August 18th I think. I cannot find the actual interview but koster did post in response to a post about it. The first is his reply to a thread posted about the interview (see the link) and the second is his quote posted from the interview. You can find the post if you wish under advanced search by putting in the the words vehicle, vehicles in the Find all Words section and then posts by Holocron.

We've always stated that vehicles will go in at first in the form of one seater swoops and speeder bikes. That's what I am referring to as going in Engineering. We definitely do see the potential for a vehicle engineer down the road, but the first step is to just get the basics of vehicles working.

-Raph Koster,


Creative Director

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=362240&highlight=vehicle%2C+vehicles#M362240

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

The problem with both of those quotes are the dates that they were made. Near that same day, Ralph also stated that a number of Droid fixes where in the mix.

It has recently been stated by JustG that first vehicles will not be built by a new profession. A Vehicle profession might be added at some later point, but not at this time.

Drash,

Those quotes from Raph do not go against what JustG has said either. I was just answering the original question, are DE's going to be building vehicles. From the information that has been given out, the FIRST vehicles will be player only vehicles and will be constructed by the ARTISAN class. That is what hass been said here. The later vehicles may or may not be put into a seperate class, and if they are not, noone knows who will build them. Both JustG and Koster are saying the same thing. Swoops and speeder bikes will be implemented first and be done on the Engineering line. Anything after that is up in the air. Either way, it does little to help DE's unless the later profession is implemented and is an elite based off of DE's.