So I bit on Star Wolves 3 in the sale...

So I bit on Star Wolves 3 in the sale…

…but just loaded it earlier today(also picked up KB:tL, and AFtD — giving this a break as having to re-translate almost every dialog Engrussian to English is tiresome as is the AWFUL pathing).

Anyways, only had a chance to run through the tutorial so far, which IIRC is a carbon copy of Star Wolves 1 & 2 tutorials, move here, blow up those satellites, fix my ship, blow up pirate w/missile, escort patrol.

NO voice acting at all w/in the game itself so far, although SOME of the cutscenes do have some voice acting. (Sounds from the forums like the Russian & German versions MAY have more voicing. Another guy and I had similar questions about AFtD voicing, but started noticing some short quips now and then, but we're still not sure if there's supposed to be more or not, but given the translation job I shudder to hear it spoken… trying to read it is bad enough…)

Feels like the same engines as in SW1 & 2. I'm getting c. 500fps! All the usual control suspects are the same as I recall them from the earlier two games, so it's down to how the missions & "quests" work out now I guess.

That's about it on it from me for them moment as I don't have time to play the first real mission ATM, but I wanted to try it far enough to get a save in it and check out the tutorial.

From my brief look, I put it's production quality below Drakensang, SR, and KB series(budget level high marks) and way above AFtD(my current all time low marker unless I decided to try Borderlands from Gamersgate which I'm sure would be the new low marker).

[EDIT]
Just to be clear on the "voice acting", by cut scenes I mean the ones that are video file based AND NOT the engine based cust scenes. There are LOTS of engine based mini-cust scenes…

Also I reread the voice thread and it does appear that someone stated that almost everything in German version is voice acted, so presumably the Russian version is as well…

They ditched the voicing in English by giving us the files, but they contain nothing or "silence". (If I were doing a review they'd lose 3 stars for this idiotic move.)

Anyways, to re-iterate yep, feels like a Star Wolves game.

Played as far along as getting my first real mothership and an extra character, so I can now use fighters. Unfortunately the mothership has a bit of a stigma attached to it which I am in the process of attempting to correct(I'll leave this vague as it's a minor spoiler otherwise), however I've run into a slight bit of difficulty in traversing one system in the form of a bunch of automated turrets. (This is also the first place where you apparently get a couple of options as to how to handle things, so far I'm working on one of them, but none of my bright ideas so far have managed to let me get through this option yet, so I may go back to an older save and look at the second option…)

Additional misc details: widescreen is supported and it listed up to my max screen res of 1680x1050.

Sound volumes MAY be set a little low for some people. I found music to be set by default WAY too low, as I could barely hear it.

Graphics options: definitely check here as everything gets defaulted to minimum values, so most will want to up them.

'W' I accidentally found out in about 2s of playing the game shows FPS & memory usage of something or other… I was getting about 400-500fps with a mobility 4850 in open areas, have to check again now that I'm in a dust cloud as I've read of people complaining that it killed their perf. Mine still just as fluid as ever…

Back to working out the auto turrets, through and under didn't work, no did trying to blow them up. (They can destroy your shiny new mothership is about 3 shots… so I'm guessing that I accidentally found the correct path through the first batch, but haven't found it for the 2nd…)
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Didn't end up going back to check the other other, but the success route was just stupid for this turret mission. Had to blow up 3 of them, and there, apparently was some magical line that you could stay behind and kill the turrets with no retaliation, o.w. it was almost mothership instakill by turrets.

Did check FPS in the dust cloud, down to 60fps.
[/EDIT2]

[EDIT3]
So, I'm taking a, hopefully, brief break from the main storyline to grind out some extra xp. I've taken advantage of a bit of scripting to remove the non-storyline/quest xp penalty in my game.

...\include\LevelUp.script commenting out the lines about if ... ~= ... end;

by adding a "--" in front of all lines in that 3 line "if" block.

Anyone else now missing their Steam achievements? They seem to have gone missing from my Steam "homepage" as clicking on games only takes me to their sotre page.

This webkit change is turning into a monumental cockup AFAICS, as I also have problems with it updating my licenses when I buy a game UNLESS I restart fscking Steam again...

time for a new post next update, I think... probably a while as I want to grind out some xp and will attempt to refrain from posting about anything other than new storyline quest missions... (IF I had MORE disk space I'd dig out SW1 & 2 and replay those first, but...)
[/EDIT3]

Oh my, I discovered that I still had SW1 still kicking around installed on my hdd, and wow, SW3 is more a SW game than I thought.

Same start menu.

Nearly same game options. (SW3 has some extras like antialiasing support… might be available in SW1 in the config files as I had, apparently, already modified it to run @ 1680x1050 last year…)

Identical gameplay.

Going to likely take break and play some SW1 now since I have it already installed, then go back to SW3 to do a bit more detailed comparison of gameplay. So far it looks like only the storyline is the thing going for SW3.

As another odd sidenote, I went through and look at the credits in the manuals for SW3, KBtL, and AFtD and came up with the same guy responsible for all localizations. Quite a spotty records, so I wonder who really was responsible for AFtD localization and dropping voicing from SW3(english)…

(Speaking of voicing SW1 already has more than SW3…)

[EDIT]
I'm guessing that this Oleg character that is continuously listed in all of the 1C translation credits repertoire of English consists of:
Yes
Hello
How are you
I am fine
…

and that the REAL translations come from the devs themselves… sad…
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
The gameplay setup in SW3 is different than in SW1, as in you actually get to pilot your mothership through sectors, jump at gates, etc. rather than just using the News section and picking up missions from there which just pops you into a sector, after which you magically return to a station with News for more missions.

This makes SW3 much more fun for me, and IIRC SW2 had a similar mechanism to SW3.

Apparently a good deal of modding potential as well since quite a bit of it is setup through lua scripts. Apparently the Germans must've modded at least SW2 quite a bit as there are a couple lengthy guides in German to modding SW2 which also applies to SW3...
[/EDIT2]

Looking forward to playing this but I do hope they've made some improvements since I finished SW1. Mind you, that was so long ago I might not remember the differences.

Noticed any other changes?

Dhruin said:

Looking forward to playing this but I do hope they've made some improvements since I finished SW1. Mind you, that was so long ago I might not remember the differences.

Noticed any other changes?

Click to expand...

They have IF you like to wander around on your own. OTOH there don't seem to be the random missions of SW2, but still, I like it, so far.

[EDIT2]
The new game Star Wolves 3 Ashes of Victory sounds even better as they seem to be making it even more open and, hopefully, feel more lively. (SW3CW feels kind of dead unless you're on a mission.

(I've just gotten my first real mothership with two pilots, and was advised to build xp and $$$ so I'm killing pirates ATM. Not alot of excitement. I'll also admit to modifying the xp award slightly, as killing pirates(and other things) out of "missions" gives you VERY LITTLE xp by default, so I commented that section right out of the script.)

…Data\Scripts\Include\LevelUp.script Change these lines to have the '—' at the front as above(comment). As you can see it defaults to giving you 10% of the normal xp if not on a mission which is crappy. (BTW: that's two '-'s and not the elongated dash that the board is converting them into... should be obvious from the script though...)


[EDIT]
I do plan to play SW1 again as well. I put a couple of hours into it the othe rnight once I discovered that I still had it installed(thought that I had deleted it long ago).

so differences that I can really see so far condensed:
"open" play (you can skip the main quest for a while to build xp and $$$, which I've been advised to do after getting the first "good" mothership)

they added "major" calibre weapons for the mothership, which I don't have any of yet(mainly using things that were dropped in fights by the losers, only bought some fighters)

apparently you're stuck with only 3 pilots throughout a good deal of the game because of the storyline(which kind of sucks as when I quit last night, I had three instances in a row of one of my pilots getting killed in fights that before just wasn't happening — NPC AI weirdness as in it suddenly behaves like it should have ganging up on one of my guys. I suspect the problem was that the fighters were too far from the mothership as the enemies seem to like to swarm it which is useful when you only have two pilots to distract 4 or more enemies.)

money seems to be lower, although I'm hoarding everything that I've picked up so far, so I expect that I can likely safely sell the 22 systems that I picked of the same type although they're not worth much.

you can pick up escape pods now(sometimes) after a fight which you can turn in at a "patrol station". If the pilots in the escape pods are from a different faction you get $$$, if they're of the same faction you get xp. (I guess that this is the "bounty" replacement.)

Trying to remember what else was different, traders will offer deals in space, sell information, hidden caches of items, mercenaries will offer services in space as well as through stations(may have just been scripted for a mission though as none have done it since).

I'll have to play SW1 more before I really notice anything else as it's been years since I really played it…
[/EDIT]

You MIGHT REALLY want to do the xp edit as ow it is REALLY slow gaining xp when you go off between missions, and I was heavily advised to get Gen 3 piloting capabilities & some cash(unspecified) BEFORE continuing on with the missions after getting your shiny new(and useful) mothership fixed up… (re-textured, although I was kind of partial to the first texture, oh well, probably can mod that too… )

[EDIT]
It's notonly slow, but it's also really boring, plus you sometimes get "friendly" & "neutral" ships who help out and AFAIK steal your xp... (Not sure how the actual xp system works as in does it go to the killer, damge % or what... probably buried in the scripts somewhere...)
[/EDIT]

This is now on sale at Gamersgate for c. $3.50. May as well buy it... Also might think about picking up SW2 as IIRC it was pretty good, but buggy as expected(or not).

Anyways, I haven't had timeto play much over the last few days but think that I will be spending some time slogging through at least part of SW1 to see exactly what changes were made besides the obvious,

So, I've ground through more SW1

basically what we've got in differences is that SW3 is pretty much free roam while SW1 is purely mission based.

The engine's pretty much the same, but upgraded here and there a bit, e.g. "natively" supporting widescreen(although you can set SW1 to pretty much any res and it scales fine already)

They removed voice acting excepting movies in SW3(there's a voice pack put together from samples from SW1 & 2,it's not everything, but better than what ships which is NOTHING excepting videos)

Storyline is different of course, and there are several of those(note, InoCo story line is borked, but there's a fixed script set linked to on the official forums)

Few gameplay changes, e.g. major calibre weapons for motherships, and other mechanic changes plus new AI brokenness like ignoring missile attacks, and gimping of "laser"(including kinetics?!) weapons.

Also, BTW I discovered today that the data.dat file in the DATA folder of SW1 is really just a zip archive of all the godd stuff that you can mod in SW3. The only difference being that in SW1 it's a renamed zip file while in SW3 it's just the directory structure in the "clear". (Stumbled across this on gamefaws while seeing if they had any better info on weapons…)

Apparently SW1 only punishes you in xp for playing on hard, such that you get about 80% of xp as you would get on other difficulty settings…

[EDIT]
SW2: they NEVER released an English version patch but a 1.1 Russian patch, and some(?) for German and Polish...

I never had a big problem with SW2 bugs myself, but IIRC I never ended up finishing it before my desktop died which is holding my save games hostage, and in the meantime my SW2 disk has gone missing...

Sw2 had free roam, and some random missions.

SW3: Civil War was really, originally, SW2: Civil War which is what was released as in Russia AFAIK...

Translation in all is about the same, which is to say not the best, but way infinitely better than, oh, say AFtD or Planet Alcatraz...
[/EDIT]

I liked the first game, but didn't think the "open world" concept was implemented successfully in the sequel.

I can't compare to Elite or Privateer, but I have played IWar2, X:BtF and Escape Velocity. I felt X:BtF was boring. However, IWar2 handled the "open world" pretty well IMO. Really, IWar2 was mission based, but you could explore wherever you wanted to between missions, and even do a little trading (though there was no functional economy IIRC).

Also, in IWar2 flying between locations was seamless, whereas X and Star Wolves 2 are split into squarish sector "maps", which I don't like. Escape Velocity was also "map" based IIRC, but the warp effect and short travel times negated the problem somewhat.

I've played Space Rangers also, but didn't really like it as much as a lot of other people have. I doubt I'll ever buy Star Wolves 3 if it's like #2.

BTW, I started helping them translate SW3 back when it was still just a mod for SW2, but got into nasty disagreements with the devs about proper English grammar. Things escalated to the point that threads started getting deleted. I still have the work I did saved on my hard drive - I wonder how it compares to the game in its current state.

Russians think they are absolute experts about everything, LOL!!