I probably am really slow on this, but Aaron Douglas tweeted this:
Battlestar Galactica’ multi-player online game coming this fall. FRAK YEAH!!!
er… that true? if it is, how come no one has talked about this?
i wonder just what part of the BSG experience inspired them to make it a MMO… couldn’t they have made it something like Halo or Mass Effect?
is that the real Aaron Douglas? his twitter id is not verified ?? 
Who’s Pete Nema? and why does he have Aaron’s photo?
This looks to be a very dangerous time-waster!
In a good way. Can’t wait to check it out!
Battlestar Galactica is part of a new wave of games playable entirely in a Web browser for free.
Gonna be crap =/
actually a lot of the star’s account aren’t verified. for example, Jane Espenson’s CapricanSeven still hasn’t been verified. Neither has bearmccreary, msleamichele, Tobolowsky, feliciaday, ZacharyLevi been verified, even though those are clearly them.
I don’t know if theaarondouglas is the real Aaron Douglas, but what sold it for me is Adam Savage, Grant Imahara and the Mythbusters accounts all follows this guy…
So does SolaiGWC, Bkitty, badger spoon, actually a lot of GWC people follows him. So I am banking on their research powers.
Yeah. Being into MMOs and following the industry quite a bit I was amazed that one would be announced and then released less than a year later. That just doesn’t happen when you are talking about quality MMOs. Ever.
Oh well.
Also, that is the real Aaron Douglas.
I’m just waiting for a truly realistic Colonial Viper flight SIM… sigh… 
Battlestar Galactica Online went live today in the first round of closed beta testing.
The best information I could get from the beta forum is that Bigpoint is still accepting closed beta applications. Open beta might come as soon as a month. The original schedule to go final and public is still set for late 2010.
http://beta.battlestar-galactica.bigpoint.com/
BGO runs on the Unity3D engine, which is a DirectX wrapper for browsers. Once you launch the game you go full screen DirectX. Similar to EA’s Battlefield Heroes.
I don’t want to screw with my NDA. You can divine this info anyway from the publicly released details and screen shots.
BGO is visually competitive with Beyond The Red Line, the excellent Freespace 2 mod for BSG. Both pay impressive meticulous attention to detail. I guess per pixel lighting is better in BtRL.
Core PVP gameplay is built around a feature Star Trek Online is only promising for “Season 3.0” That was an unexpected surprise.
BGO has a fairly respectable storyline that inserts the game cleverly into BSG’s season two time line. Got the Bucket. Got the Beast.
Physics ain’t bad. On my first flight I clumsily flew into the giftshop. Just call me Boomer. People will want, and the game merits, joystick support. The Viper requires a delicate touch as Starbuck once warned her nuggets. Raptor is much easier to fly and can be loaded to the brim with ECM/ECW gear.
Lots of familiar MMO grind features. The game has depth in the way of upgrades and missions. Plenty of PVE stuff to do for timid nuggets.
Much of the cast will be doing voice acting for BGO. Those assets, and many sound effects, are not added as of yet. But guess what’s in there now? I’ve heard about six Bear McCreary tracks so far.
Provided Bigpoint continues to polish BGO in the long term, I think this one is a winner. Adding fresh missions and shepherding the player vs. player Cylon - Colonial war will be an absolute must. Something that Cryptic Studios is trying very hard to do right now with Star Trek Online. Certainly this is a lot of game for a free to play MMO. I was pleasantly surprised.
I’ve registered. Let’s see what happens.
if they want to wrap anything in the browser, why not use HTML5?
Unity uses the browser as a front end. It uses the browser for authentication, managing your account, the Store (all important for a “free to play” game but no Store during beta), and most importantly streaming modular game data on the fly. There are no downloads after installing the small Unity plugin, everything else is HTTP streamed as you play the game. There are load screens when moving between areas but no streaming during gameplay within an area. All that is saved in a persistent temporary cache so only the first load is the slowest.
Since sector space is large enough for newbies like me, I have not jumped away from the fleet yet. Especially since lone recon? raiders were jumping in every so often, just like in the first two seasons of BSG. I don’t know if they were NPC or Cylon players spoiling for a fight. I was in a Raptor but fortunately I had an ad hoc Viper escort. Add to that tooling around inside Galactica to customize your toon, equip your ship, have Papadama tell me what’s going on, and get a mission list from Apollo.
I didn’t do too much in two hours. I checked my cache and it’s 236MB. I figure there’s at least 1GB - playing as Cylon with all their baseship stuff, going everywhere in the nebula, so forth.
Star Trek Online is a 6GB download up front. Then it has to be patched after installing. Even to play the STO demo all that must be downloaded before you can play at all. Unity gets you inside BGO in two minutes. STO has ground combat, larger interiors but in terms of space combat/exploration the two games are very similar in look and feel.
For more technical info on the game engine see unity3d.com
This game sounds interesting. I’ll have to check it out.
Edit: At registration, what is the bonus code and what is it for?
I got accepted into Basic Flight Training today. Can’t wait to get home. So say we all!
So yeah, I played a bit, and mostly I just desperately tried to right my ship wihle facing a first single Raider. Also, the controls take about a second to translate into the browser. So far, not a very engaging experience at all.
Been playing this for about the past week or two in closed beta (why I haven’t been around much). Up to level 10 and about to finally buy another ship outside of my starting viper. Here’s a quick liddle rundown.
You get to pick Cylon or Colonial when you first start. Having picked Colonial, I then opted for being a Viper pilot over a raptor pilor. Speed and engines over computers and missiles. The customization of your ship is actually pretty fun. You can swap out engine and weapons components, etc. Controls take more than a small amount of time to get used to. Basically, though, you hold your mouse over where you want to go, and then holding down right-click moves you there. It sounds simple, but trust me when I say it’s a little awkward.
How do missions work? Well, the Colonials start in a corner of the sector, and both Pegasus and Galactica are stationed there. You land on the Galactica to get and turn in missions to Apollo, Starbuck, the deck chief, etc. It’s a pretty simple system that for the most part works well. All the missions are in space. There’s no division between space/ground combat like there is in Star Trek. Ground is strictly for upgrading, getting missions, etc.
What are the missions like? Frankly, this is the biggest problem with the game. The missions are boring. You can earn accolades by killing X number of raiders, but until level 12 and up, combat versus the cylons is actually pretty rare. Most of the time you’ll hop into a sector and maybe one basic raider will pop up on Draedis your entire time there. Most of your time in the early levels will be spent scanning asteroids and blowing them up so you can harvest tylium or water. You’ll also get system patrols from Lee, which basically involves jumping to a randomly-selected system and flying around for a while. I’ve done it before without a single enemy encounter. These missions suck especially bad because normally they’re 8-10 jumps away from the Galactica, which, after flying all over a system and having nothing happen, you’re 8-10 jumps away from all your other missions. Combat is simply too hard to come by. Which is unfortunate, because combat (in a viper at least) is frantic, wild, and extremely fun. The best time I had was slapping three missle launcher on my viper, forgoing the guns altogether, and taking out slow-moving heavy raiders two levels higher than me. But since that wasn’t one of my missions, it gave very little experience.
The system all works, and it’s fun. It’s slow (very slow) to load on my home connection and I wish there was at least the option to download some kind of client. However, at work, where I have a fast connection, it’s quite a smooth system.
The game is solid, the basic building blocks work well. It’s just plain boring. Instead of mining asteroids for eight levels, why not make it three? As it is right now, this isn’t a game I would pay for if I had to start over at level 1. If I got my character as she is now, at level 10, then I’d pay.