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LucasArts, Bioware Announce Star Wars MMO
LucasArts and Bioware held a press conference today to confirm what has been suspected for a long time: they're working on a Star Wars MMO. It will be called Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. Further coverage is available at Gamespot, and IGN has some of the concept art. An official website for the game was launched as well.
"According to the game's official announcement, Star Wars: The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the rise of Darth Vader, with the galaxy divided by war between the Empire and the Sith. That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR, a time frame that, according to Zeschuk, 'is completely unexplored in the lore.' Players can take the role of either a Jedi, a Sith or other classic Star Wars characters -- and, as perhaps can be expected from BioWare, Muzyka says story will be a major component, underlying and driving all of the player's actions."
After a few years of relative peace in the galaxies, Darth Arts will turn to the dark side and fsck up everyone's game to make it more "appealing" to new players....
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to keep watching reruns of Episode 1....
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I dunno, I think killing him or her would be a better use of your time and would ultimately be what's best for society.
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Galaxies is not still around. What remains of Galaxies is a gravestone on how to not make an MMORPG.
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it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I think it's probably more like they think they can make more money making people pay monthly payments.
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Eh. The problem isn't how they made it. The game they made was okay, and it developed a nice little niche following.
And then WoW blew up, and they decided to try and be WoW, even though the game had been pretty much designed to be NOT WoW, at which point the whole thing caught fire imploded and shit itself into a grotesque mockery of life.
Look at Eve...Same era, also sci-fi themed, similarly geared toward the hardcore contingent, but Eve stayed true to itself and is quietly prospering.
What Blizzard does well is figure out what they want to do, and make it into a good game. What Sony (and EA) does well is try to figure out what will make them the most money in the shortest time.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...make it Binary only for all I care... compiled for 32 and 64 bit.
Yeah but MMO players play their one or two games for years. Those of us who loath the genre and have no desire to pay monthly fees for a game we've already payed for generally play through our games in months or even weeks. While MMO players happily run about in Eve online those of us who don't play those types of games have to wait longer and longer periods of time for new games as more and more developers jump on the MMO bandwagon to milk those monthly payments. Shoot, we'd probably be patiently waiting for Starcraft 3 or 4 if it weren't for WOW.
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it will be a continuation of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise.
That's about 300 years after the events of KotOR
Uh, you're going to make a continuation of the KotOR franchise... 300 years after the events of that franchise?? LucasArts forced Obsidian to rush out KotOR II before Christmas and so they didn't have time to give the game the ending it deserved - no conflicts were resolved in a satisfactory manner, leaving it up to a future sequel. And now they're just going to jump 300 years into the future, a time when most of the characters from the last two games are dead, and expect it to make sense?
Yeah, good luck with that.
(Or more likely, they're going to start a new storyline entirely and they just slapped on the KotOR label for name recognition.)
I doubt it. EA (Bioware's parent company) and Sony are competitors.
Anyway, it is in EA's interest for you to grind a new character for a few months before starting the endgame.
Yeah, like there is a Highlander 2.
"There can be only one."
There should have been only one!
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That's exactly my point (that you claim I'm missing) though. You need to design your game so that there CAN be exceptional achievements. Things that can only be done once. An evolving story line that remembers the actions of those rare players who achieve greatness. Actions and powers given out only to a tiny fraction of the players.
Then the challenge is to inspire hope in players that it could be them, and to make the game fun enough just to play to keep around those who never get such an achievement. This stuff is not hard to do as a game designer, it's just risky, and it has to be done with great care so that the core of your game remains great fun.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I don't know, it's kind of comforting to see that not everyone has grown up into a boring person as most seem to do. At least you're excited and happy about something, right?
The reason there are no MMOs for the current crop of consoles is down to how the online games are hosted.
With PC MMOs, there is a massive server infrastructure that you as a client connect into, this infrastructure keeps the game going even if no-one plays it, and has to be maintained for as long as there is (enough) player demand, which could be several years.
Publishers view the console market as crash-and-burn with each new game typically expected to be played by more than 10% of players for only about 3 months or so (Halo being the obvious exception).
So that the console game publishers don't have to constantly invest in server farms for games that only have critical mass for a few weeks, they went with peer-hosted online gaming; One player becomes the 'host' and the other players connect to them as peers. If that 'host' disconnects then the game is over.
I'm glad that Sony have thrown their hat into the ring with regard to console MMOs and I do hope that other publishers follow suit, however, I feel that as the console player demographic is mostly 10-25 in age it is unlikely that MMOs on consoles will take off - mostly because that demographic would rather spend the monthly subs that most MMOs require on the next new shiny war* game that's just come out.
Also, it has to be said, can a console REALLY provide the complex interface that makes most MMOs so involving ? I'm a WoW player (not uber, lvl 70 is still WAY off for me), and the amount of key bindings needed to make the game effective is mind-bending - not sure how you'd translate that to a Wiimote or 360 controller.
-Jar
(* I mean, how many war games do we really need? They are all the same, no really, they are. And then there's all the samey driving games, plus not forgetting ALL those EA Sports games. Console gaming is in a rut, which is why my 360 gathers dust while I slaughter Elementals in WoW for hours on end.)
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Seriously? The only "MMO" I know of that really told much of a story was Guild Wars, and that was because the entire game was instanced gameplay. Honestly, I haven't experienced anything of a real story in MMOs before (although I hear Age of Conan does a fairly decent job for the first twenty levels).
In general, it seems MMOs are more about creating a themed sandbox environment for people to play in than creating a story. Nothing wrong with that - they're obviously fairly popular. But it seems sort of odd to hear people talking about stories in MMOs when it really hasn't been done.
As I have no real desire to play another pay-per-month grind-fest, so I guess I'll be missing this one. I'm sure plenty of people that haven't yet been burned out by this style of gameplay will enjoy it, though. I'd love to see a new Kotor, myself.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Don't worry, it seems blizzard has found a solution to your problem. There will be 3 Starcraft2 games. This way, you too can pay the equivalent of a yearly subscription to play a game even though you hate MMO. The reason given is the abundance of stories to tell. Does it sound familiar?
It's funny, I got tired of doing the exact same thing over and over again, so I quit WoW and bought a 360. I haven't played a pc game in months.
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
Give me a break. The reason is to get recurring revenue (monthly fees) for the game rather than a one shot deal. If you buy their 'reasoning' then you're very gullible.
This game could become the first MMO that I will play, but only if there is a roleplaying server that I can join. The KOTOR games were immensely enjoyable, but to me at least, that was because of the atmosphere, the great characters, the backstory, the moral dilemma's and other roleplaying related things. The combat honestly wasn't particularly great.
If I can play a KOTOR MMO full of Kreia's and HK-47's, I'll be a very happy guy, but if it's going to be a world full of LrdKillMeister123's, then I don't even want to get anywhere near it.
I can't believe how many people are bashing this without even seeing more about it. Personally I think Bioware did a great job with KOTOR and might actually do this MMO pretty well.
why the execs in sony are being paid for anyway ? to run, govern things right ? if they let some fucktards ruin one of the biggest merchandises in the world, that means that they didnt do their job well.
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Kotor was considered rubbish?
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Star Wars is all about the fantasy of being a hero. The problem is that playing minor characters in world where the heroes get all the action sucks.
Exactly, and all the replies you have received so far completely miss the point. In an old school offline game, you are the exceptional hero and everything in the game centers on you. This is the fantasy that makes games so unique as entertainment. You are the hero, not just watching the hero.
Making it possible to become an exceptional and unique in an MMO is completely besides the point. I will never become that hero. I am not good enough and not devoted enough and neither are 95% of all the people playing World of Warcraft. Only the small elite can by definition be good enough to be an exceptional hero, otherwise there is nothing exceptional about it.
You then have to wonder what the point of playing an MMO is. I play games to have fun, to relax and probably to get a feeling of mastering something. An MMO can never give me this unless I devote an obscene amount of time and effort into it, and it may still not be good enough. This is exactly what real life is like, so why seek it out in games?
Well, I guess we'll never know exactly what went on in there, but I just have to wonder.
Did Lucas actually tell them how to code it? Get into the tiniest details of the interface? Surely nobody (sane or half-competent) drags the client into that kind of talks.
I don't doubt that _some_ details got vetoed by Lucas, but I doubt that the whole NGE fiasco can be blamed on them. How much of it is really to blame on Lucas, and how much just on incompetent design and implementation?
The reason I wonder is that Bioware seemed to have had a lot more free hand with their KOTOR. I don't doubt that they had a bunch of details vetoed by Lucas or forced upon them, but the result was still a thoroughly enjoyable game.
For example, on one hand Bioware was free to move their game completely out of the trilogy time and invent their own story and planets and characters... on the other hand, the NGE turned the whole f-ing storyline into nothing more than a merchandising exercise for key SW characters. (You know, same as printing Vader's head on a t-shirt.) Did Lucas demand that? Is Lucas as schizophrenic as to behave that fundamentally differently to the two teams? Or is the unimaginative story in the NGE really just to blame on the SWG team?
Did Lucas force them to make the NGE first person... and not even update the enemy AI or interface to actually be fit for FPS play? Well, they didn't demand that KOTOR be first person or anything. How much of it is really due to Lucas's demands, and how much of that fucked-up interface is just... design out of spite, for lack of a better word? The whole thing almost feels like something designed out of spite.
And if SWG ended up practically micro-managed by Lucasarts, how did it come to that? Not many end up managed that way, even by Lucas, so it's a valid question. Just to play the devil's advocate: Can it be that Sony and RK just couldn't manage that team and that franchise, and Lucasarts ended up having to do that job too, whether they actually want it or not?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Lucasarts fanboy or anything, and I'm sure they have their share of the blame. I'm just wondering how much of it, and how _did_ it come to that.
Ah well, as I was saying, we'll probably never know.
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I think you are both a little too far on either side of this. Frankly, the amount of content they have to release *is* too much to charge a mere $45 or so for. I don't feel that the quantity of content quite makes up for a full price game, but that is only secondary to the point. I'd say they should charge maybe $30-35 (I don't know what their pre-markup prices are here, just going with a guess) for each. That is to say, I think they're charging roughly 50% more than they should on these games.
Enough of that - where skam seems to fall short on the MMO storyline thing is that he doesn't realize there really is a lot of lore packed into the quests, cameos and even the visuals of each zone/instance. The problem is perceptual. In single-player games, you are forced to be deeply involved with the lore, whereas in the MMO it is simply a backdrop that you can immerse yourself in, if desired. When the lore isn't pushed into your face, some people perceive the lore to be lacking. Hint: it is there if you look for it.
"Little is much when little you need."
I already said that it was a matter of personal perception. If you have the time to play MMOs and enjoy them then they are worth every penny to you. If you like Starcraft then the more games you can get the happier you are.
I don't understand what you mean? I did not demand that they release what I want. I did not try to persuade others to not buy what is offered. We were discussing the GP's dislike of MMOs and want of normal games so I gave him an example of how normal games are being stretched to cost as much as MMOs. I wasn't interested in Starcraft before and I'm not interested in it now.
Now that horse is way too big for you. Get off before you fall and break something.
Ah, but that's where I feel the critical flaw of MMOs today lies. There's only one single factor that separates the High Warlords, armored netherdrake riders, and Scarab Lords from those who are not.
Time spent grinding.
That's it. There's no substitute for it, no work around, no lottery, no skill-testing question. You want High Warlord? You grind for honor. (And also, game the system by conspiring with the other side over Vent)
If I chose to, I could quit my job, stop going out, give up all other parts of my life, and commit myself to playing WoW for 90 hours a week, and attain all of these honors. I don't feel that kind of behavior should go honored.
The problem with MMOs is not that grinding is one path to these honors. It's that it's the only path.
The only real alternative to the grind-fest I can see is a real risk-reward system.
Personally, I feel a Scarab Lord has nothing to feel special about. He didn't play WoW better than I did. He just played it more, a lot more, to the sacrifice of everything else in his life.
Games are great. I love games. But they need to strike a balance with life too. And good game design, I feel, should recognize this.
I don't quite understand your concerns. Consider some solid single player RPG, say Final Fantasy 12 but any is ok. Is this a story driven game? Yes, it is. Does it somehow bother me that anybody can buy this game and replay any part of the game? No. Not at all. The game is still driven by the story and I cannot see how that a few million other people playing the same game changes this. Say the same game had a cooperative mode and instead of AI controlling other characters in the player's party other people did with additional controllers - what would have changed? Probably something would but I don't see anything changing in the story aspect of the game. Now say those people controlling other characters were doing this through network - would have this somehow turned everything around and disabled all the story-driven business? Again, I don't see how.