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Knights of the Old Republic MMO Confirmed
Zafsk writes to tell us Gamespot is reporting that in a surprise move from E3 2008, EA's CEO John Riccitello announced that the long debated BioWare MMORPG is going to be a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic sequel of sorts. Currently the KOTOR MMO is slated for a 2009 release. "BioWare's first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game was released in 2003 for the original Xbox and PC, and was named the year's top RPG by GameSpot. An Obsidian Entertainment-developed sequel was released in 2004 and 2005 on the same two respective platforms. Both critically acclaimed games are set several thousand years before the events of the Star Wars films, and cast players as adventurers who eventually become powerful Jedi Knights."
If we can't play it online using gaming consoles with light saber emulators, like that of the Wii controller, it's just not going to be very good.
Half of the appeal is in emulating light saber battles.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Both KOTOR and its sequel were absolutely wonderful single-player games.
I'd been playing through KOTOR II on the PC recently (good luck achieving that on Vista; you have to replace a bunch of dlls in the game directory to get sound to work); the storyline, the influence system, everything is just absolutely spectacular.
I'd really hate to see it become another crappy MMO; I just want to be able to sit down at the end of the day and pretend to be a leet Jedi for a while. Turning that into an MMO really ruins that if you don't have the time to commit to the damn thing.
Actually, I was just thinking the same thing for the opposite reason. MMOs have a watered down grinding gameplay, they can't match the depth and complexity of a single player RPG. They're also a lot worse at telling stories. How can you have a good 'teenage kid discovers he's the chosen one and saves the universe' story, when there are thousands of protagonists?
MMOs are popular, not because they're better than single player RPGs, but because they have a good gimmick. To the hardcore fan, the single player, turn based, often tactical CRPG is obviously superior.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The article doesn't provide any real details, and says that Bioware refused to comment directly, so the only thing we have to look at comes from EA... I hope that Bioware make a Star Wars MMO deserving of the franchise, but I don't see it happening. Especially not now they're part of the EA family.
One of my favorite things about Baldur's Gate and KOTOR was the fact that it was single player. I've played my fair share of multiplayer games and MMOs, but sometimes you just want to play a game where the whole universe revolves around you. Where your actions alone determines the fate of the world. Those are the kind of games that Bioware makes and I kind of think they were forced to make this MMO because EA wants a piece of Blizzard's pie. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing what Bioware manages to comes up with.
The thing that bugs me about the KotOR story line is it implies a very, very lengthy period of technological stagnation.
It is as if the technological capacities of all sentient species simultaneously "capped out," and all that was left was to apply the same principles on successively grander scales.
The universe ran out of novelty and room for new discoveries. That kind of makes me sad.
And CRPGS are watered down PNP RPGS. How can you have a huge quest in front of you, but instead end up terrorizing the towns people and never get on to the actual quest in a CRPG? Maybe that was just indicative of my play group, but we hardly ever found the actual quest, but still had fun.
God spoke to me.
It's funny but we've been battling this kind of thing in MUDs for decades. It's a similar environment and you end up having a few power-users, a few hardcore RPers, and a a lot of in-betweens that just hack'n'slash because it is fun for them.
Galaxies attempted to give the player a reason to be a average Joe with professions and a classless system. Although I didn't play it extensively I think like most players out there, if the developer give us a reason to be part of the Universe instead of being the Universe than we'll be happy to. Keeping multiple servers based on game play preference like in WoW would be useful, so long as you enforce them, which WoW doesn't do. RPers can run the story where they want, PvPers can power there way through skills and fight each other Good vs evil, and In-betweeners can play on a Wow like quest realm.
Lots of developement? You bet, but it would be finally taking the lessons from the other MMORPGs and making something good for a change.
[J]
buggy releases go with the territory with MMO's thats not what killed SWG. Completley rewriting the way the game played was what killed SWG
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."