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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."
I hope this doesn't put off another Knight of the Old Republic game. I have no desire to pay a monthly fee to play in the Star Wars universe but on the other hand I loved the two KOTOR games that were made. ...and seriously, do we really need another MMO out there? I hope they at least do something original with this.
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I'm not saying it's impossible, but I really have a hard time seeing how story can meaningfully be integrated into an MMO. There's just too many people participating in the world in completely different ways. There's just practical matters, like what time zone do you put big events in? How do you evolve the story in a way that entertains the hardcore players on a day to day basis but also maintain consistency and meaningful interaction for more casual players who only put in a couple hours per week? What happens to your story when the players react in a way completely unexpected?
An real world example is EvE Online. Along side a mostly player driven universe, the devs have tried to run "storyline" events, and they hardly ever worked out. The players just didn't react as was hoped/expected (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully.) I remember one event where the devs tried to get a big bunch of casual players together to go fight a big scary ship that they'd never expect to be in combat with otherwise. But players of a large and powerful corporation accidently stumbled upon the target ship before the casual group could get there, and destroyed it first. When the casual group arrived and the ship was already dead, they turned against the dev characters' ships. And that's not even getting into the many cases where groups have purposely thwarted the devs' plans. Fortunately for EVE, these sorts of "story" events aren't a big part of the game, and not particularly important to its success.
If you're going to focus your game design on the story driven part, then you'd better find a way to let every single player be a part of it in a meaningful way. Otherwise a small group of hardcore players will dominate the storyline, and leave nothing for the rest
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The first Star Wars MMO came out 5 years ago. Star Wars Galaxies couldn't live up to the hype but it had some good ideas in it such as its crafting system. SOE essentially killed it by entirely revamping the combat system, not even the space expansion could save it. It also didn't help that the game really had no plot to speak of to begin with. This new MMO will undoubtedly be the final nail in the coffin for Star Wars Galaxies.
Lots of sad and cynical posts so far, but I have to say I'm looking forward to. I loved KotOR, and I've been hanging out for this one for ages. I just hope they do it right. I played SWG for a while, if for no other reason than being an MMO in the Star Wars universe. Bioware did KotOR right, hope they can translate it to an MMO format successfully.
So on behalf of the Star Wars geeks, YAY!!!
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
Eh ... the KotOR label was made precisely to escape canon. In the old Republic you have all the trappings from Star Wars plus no Jedi or Sith limit, and no messing with the original trilogy characters (or the games and prequel trilogy characters). It's not about a single storyline.
I loved Galaxies when it first came out. Looking back with my rose-colored glasses what I remember loving the most was the roleplaying it brought out in me. I'm not normally a strong roleplayer, but I will roleplay back at other people. I tend to blend in with the crowd in that regard.
Galaxies compared to most MMO's I've played enabled some of the best roleplaying I've ever seen (I realize my limited experience of course, I'm sure a lot of hardcore roleplayers would laugh at me). A lot of what the game entailed was interacting with other players which, naturally, enabled a lot more roleplaying. Some examples are you would go out and grind like most MMO's but after a while you'd have wounds that you can't heal in the field. You'd need to head to town and visit the hospital where medic classes will grind their skills on you and heal you back up. Your mind would also get wounds (fatigued basically) that would need to be fixed up by entertainment, namely dancers and musicians. These two simple features allowed for a lot of fun roleplaying. Yes you could walk in and just sit there, but you could also really get into the roles... I actually made a very low IQ medic for my roleplaying. I made macros for healing people's wounds where my character would do random things such as tasting the medicine before giving it to patients. It was quite enjoyable. One of my favorite roleplayers stood at the shuttle bay and stood behind the otherwise empty ticket counter saying random airline things that made me crack up. Most were just classic airline jokes with star wars twist but it was very well done.
Games like WoW on the other hand are fun in their own right, but I find it a real challenge to roleplay and can't remember ever truly doing so in that game. Everything is setup for playing the game instead of ROLEplaying the game. I'm not asking for SWG back, but if they can make it easily roleplayable like SWG enabled, I'll be happy. Star Wars is still one of the best backdrops for a geek like me to get lost in.
I thought Force Unleashed was OK. I bought the Wii version and other than getting too energetic and hitting the TV and Furniture a couple of times, I had great fun with it.
In all fairness, though, I don't think it was a general Sony problem. The SWG team was something different and let to play by its own rules. Stuff like repeatedly lying to customers, the Sith Lord approach to dealing with players and board posts, etc, were something I haven't experienced in other Sony games.
And while the NGE and its bad interface were bad, let's not kid ourselves: pre-NGE SWG was a one-trick pony. It had exactly _one_ saving grace that everyone remembers fondly: the flexible character development system. That's it.
It was launched as a largely-empty DIKU MUD with graphics, without Jedi _or_ vehicles _or_ spaceships. If that's what SW is about, I rest my case. It's been a scramble since then to figure out how to shoehorn Jedi in. And even the excuse "but SW doesn't have thousands of Jedi"... well, they made it even worse lore-wise.
I mean, basically the story of a typical Jedi in SWG was: You're a grizzled old veteran, you've seen wars and have been on the wrong side as often as on the right side. You learned that winning and getting out in one piece beat being right. You setted in somewhere and took a job as an entertainer in a cantina. You learned pretty quickly that the pretty semi-naked girl or the bishounen in gay outfits get all the tips, and nobody even notices the master musician. You got your pretty haircut and (if apropriate) your implants and strutted your anatomy for cash. You didn't end up a misanthrope, you ended up despising every sentient species in the galaxy. Then you decided to try your hand at crafting. You prospected every corner of every known planet, you've made backroom backstabbing and deals, and generally made Hutts look like Mother Theresa by comparison. And you rose to the top like the biggest shit floats to the top of the septic tank. Then for reasons you'd rather not talk about, you went into smuggling instead. The less talked about that period the better. Then you tried your hand as a bounty hunter, and it's been largely an exercise in being a paid assassin, and elliminating gamblers who didn't pay their debts and opponents of some of the biggest scum in the galaxy. You learned again that being paid beats being morally right.
And only after that, when you're a jaded, cynical, burnt-out shell of a former human, _of_ _course_ you're ready to be trained as a Jedi.
I mean, hello? Wasn't that why they took them as kids? So they _haven't_ learned all those bad reflexes and views yet?
But even that's reading too much into it, because it was basically one big empty sandbox, where players were supposed to create their own content... but without the tools or rights to do so. Smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle, quests were generally a late addition and mostly an exercise in merchandising the SW key characters, etc. Even the holocron grind wasn't as much thought to be the little story I wrote above, it was just an unimaginative exercise in taking the old "remort" system of MUDs ten steps too far and turning it into an _unholy_ grind.
I'm sorry, but that's not a _Sony_ problem, that's a Raph Koster problem. That's his ideas you have at work there. I don't think, say, Sony's old Everquest was like that. It only became a Sony problem in as much as they let him tell them what to do in other games too, and for example in EQ2 they've been struggling to fix that bad touch ever since.
And even after that bad era, SWG still is a... weird exception even among Sony games. They didn't turn EQ2 into a FPS, for example. Or I don't remember such SWG-typical idiocies as for example having classes which don't even have a combat level and can't do the quests, in any other Sony game. Talk about a fundamentally broken balance. On the contrary, most of the rest evolved to have better balance, get more story, etc. Nor, again, lying to the customers instead of fixing the damned bug reports. Etc.
SWG also had their own rules on Sony's website. It's the only Sony game where unsubscribing took me to a page which basically said, "go away, we don't wa
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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?
I actually look at it from the other direction. Maybe they're putting this game 300 years afterward for the express reason that all the previous characters are dead. That way, when/if this MMO fails (and even if it doesn't--there are a lot of people with no interest in these online games), they can go ahead and release another standalone KotOR game or two and finish up the KotOR story proper.
Or maybe that's just hope talking :(
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20760
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20757
Because it sound a lot like story is going to individualized as opposed to generalized. Every one is going to have a party of NPC's like the other two games. They have a lot of good things that makes me confident that this MMO might actually be worth paying a monthly fee for, and I have never done that before.
If you remember the old SWG website then you remember how long the load times where for simple things like âmenusâ(TM). Ironically this was directly reflected in the load times that where constant in the game.
When I first played WoW I wondered how it was that I didnâ(TM)t have to wait to see what was in my bag... But, then, if you go to the WoW page it loads instantly and has reasonable navigation.
Fast forward to SWtOR and look at the front page. It takes a while to load, it is un-intuitive, thereâ(TM)s a ridiculous splash screen, pointless graphics and obnoxious sounds every time you hit the front page.
This does not portend well for the KotOR MMO my young padawan.
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.
Shouldn't that be "between the Republic and the Sith"? Or was there an Empire before the Republic before the Empire we came to know and love? Thanks.
Not really. I once thought as you do, but eventually I realized that the player base is generally incapable of a decent, or even coherent, storyline. It is necessary that the developers string their clientele along with a story. Personally, I prefer the way Microsoft let Turbine handle it in Asheron's Call, at least at its inception. The storyline was mostly non-existent, but there would be events that would craft a general large-scale story that the players could take part in and one person per server (or group) would ultimately be considered the one to make a difference in the event. Thereafter, others could still go there and do *most* of the event, but they would never be able to do the whole thing or fight the non-scripted, PC bad guy being run by a dev. It made one try to uncover the next event, made getting good leads or even paltry information worth money/favors to those who could follow through with the events and made things generally more interesting.
Anyone that played during that time might have recalled the epic battles between the powerful mage of goodocity, Asheron, and the evil demon-thing, Bael'Zharon. Ah, good times.
"Little is much when little you need."
hopefully the people in charge of the new bioware star wars mmo will incorporate a crafting/merchant system as advanced and detailed as the one found in SWG, preNGE. for a few years my main character was a chef. it sounds weird in retrospect, especially when most of the mmorpgs out today are combat oriented, but i actually had a lot of fun. i was also part merchant and bioengineer. my days were spent decorating my restaurant and obtaining food resources and ingredients from players who would harvest the stuff. i would also spent a large amount of time exploring the planets, looking around for a good water spawn or a field of high quality space corn to place my harvesters. then, at the end of the day, i would do a lot of experimenting and i'd try to make the best recipe for bivoli or bespin port or mind brandy. then, i'd input the recipe to a food factory and a few hours later i'd have several crates of profitable food. the food system, after the chef revamp, i was pretty detailed, and different foods would buff different stats or abilities, and there was usually a decent demand for foods of various types. my character was a meek and mild mon calamari... if i ran into trouble trying to milk space herbivores or if bunch of spiders made a nest near my food harvesters, i had a scout blaster and a few pistol skills that i could use to try and defend myself. everything in SWG is horrible now, and the population issues are such that getting a new restaurant off the ground is impossible, and even leveling up a merchant is essentially impossible because of the complete lack of grind-quality ingredients, as well as a market for mid-level foods and stuff... ...but it would be great to see a crafting system like this in a new mmorpg. it would be such a refreshing change from the bland crafting found in warhammer online, or world of warcraft, for example.
(KOTOR 2 Spoilers)
The big unresolved plot point in KOTOR 2 was the looming menace of a Sith army outside of known space that the main character of the first KOTOR game went out to stop. It could be that this is the Sith Empire in the new MMO. (End spoilers)
It probably is intentional to set this after the main characters of the previous games are dead, if only to make it feel like the players, and not the characters from previous games, are the heroes, and to stay away from the bits in Galaxies where you just felt like a tourist.