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LucasArts, BioWare Announce Partnership
Given the swirling rumours of a KOTOR MMOG, it should come as no surprise that BioWare and Lucasarts have announced they're teaming up for a project. They don't give any really concrete details, other than to say it is 'a ground-breaking interactive entertainment product'. They've also "launched a cobranded Web site, www.LucasArtsBioWare.com. 'Through our previous collaborations, we know that BioWare has an impressive ability to blend gripping stories with technological advancements, and we believe that our upcoming product will deliver an experience that will span the traditional boundaries of video game entertainment,' LucasArts president Jim Ward said in a statement. "
You know, when they made good adventure games.
Now they just make star wars games.
I wish that all the good CRPGs weren't moving to console bastardizations and MMO models.
Some of my favorite games ever are CRPGs... Morrowind, Fallout 1 & 2, Vampire: The Masquerade and Bloodlines, Darklands (old school as hell, but one of the best games ever; we need a remake with a less-clunky interface. I'd pay new-game prices for it), Planescape: Torment, etc.
My wife's a much bigger RPGer than I am, and any trip to the PC game section of a store will draw complaints from her about how every RPG with an interesting-looking box turns out to be yet another damned MMO on closer inspection.
Look at happened to poor Oblivion when it dared to charge people for a small upgrade, why they were nothing more then common fraudsters.
Meanwhile a small company called Blizzard is raking in several times what that horse armour costs EACH month PLUS they charge 5-6 times for an upgrade. Oh okay so their upgrade is a lot bigger, but people been paying them a monthly fee for years and they still want more AND get it?
Companies got to be asking themselves why they spend years on a product that if it is a big hit might make them a small fortune once while they can also spend that time making an MMO and if it is a hit make more money then they can dream off.
On the other hand, will this be an MMO? With Star Wars Galaxies still running and it still having a lousy rep and neither company having any experience (except lucasrts with destroying one) with MMO's?
We shall see. But MMO's are here to stay, because Blizzard has shown you can get some serious money from them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, think of it this way:
1. Blizzard also wasn't known as a MMO company, heck nor as a real RPG company either, before WoW. What people wanted Blizzard to announce at the time was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3. People were actually massively disappointed when Blizzard announced a MMO. (For an admittedly extreme reaction, see the VG Cats strip where Aeris mugs the Blizzard guy that announced they'll make a MMO. I'm sure a few people fancied doing that.) It sounded like something they'll surely botch, and a waste of manpower which could have been better used for something they were good at.
Needless to say, it currently has about 20 times more players than Everquest at its peak, and EQ2 peaked even lower.
2. Actually, WoW is very much playable as a single player RPG too. It does have about twice as many quests for either faction than is needed to get a player to level 70, it has more story and actually better texts than, say, Morrowind, and has more content than 10 Oblivions or so. It's certaily not _the_ best single-player RPG, but it's better than a lot of stuff we were perfectly content with, and even with the monthly fees still it's more content/buck than most.
In fact, that's my main problem with it: over time it's become increasingly difficult to find a real group for anything else than an endgame raid. Oh, you'll find a level 70 guildmate who'll be happy to run your latest alt through the Deadmines. Or even a perfect stranger if you ask nicely. (God knows I too have ran perfect stranger newbies through a ton of low level instances just because they were polite and well behaved and said "please".) But that kind of group does nothing to me. I want to feel like I actually contributed something to that group, and not like, say, may support-character priest was twiddling his undead thumbs while a level 70 mage was nuking the NPCs in wholesale.
Anyway, it _is_ used as, basically, a semi-single-player game by the majority of the population. They group when they really have to, then bugger off back to playing single-player as soon as it becomes possible. (Let's just say that even 90% of the people who were swearing that the massive level-60 MC raids are the meat of the game, went back to soloing 60 to 70 as soon as the portal to the Hellfire Peninsula opened.) The average WoW player _is_ playing a single player game with some multi-user chat channels built-in. Sorta the same as Unreal Tournament included an IRC client, except this time it's available right during the game.
So basically, even if you're a SP player, don't discount it yet just because it's MMO. A MMO can also be a good single-player game, and I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware gets that part even better done than Blizzard. In fact, if anyone can dethrone Blizzard in that one aspect, Bioware is probably the safest bet.
3. Well, allow some of us SW nerds our moment of hope, will you? Some of us awaited the launch of SWG like it's the second coming of Obi Wan. Some people kissed their wives, said goodbye to their friends, and expected to never be seen again in RL once a SW MMO opens.
And, frankly, it only appealed to a minority in the first place and disappointed everyone else. Yes, the (old-style) SWG fans will point out that it had its advantages over other MMOs at the time, such as allowing more customized characters. And I'll concede that. It had some damn good idea. But the rest sucked more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle. It was a SW game launched without spaceships _or_ jedi, for a start. And on the ground it was a baren sandbox that made some of us look back on even the old UO more favourably. It was a DIKU with graphics and a lot of computer-generated terrain. _Empty_ computer-generated terrain, where Raph Koster expected players to just create content by role-playing with each other... without even being given much tools or props for that. Add the constant bugs and heavy-handed dev/support team, and it wasn't much fun except for a minority of the most hardcore SW fans.
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