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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."
Galaxies is not still around. What remains of Galaxies is a gravestone on how to not make an MMORPG.
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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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Yeah, like there is a Highlander 2.
"There can be only one."
There should have been only one!
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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?
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.
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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