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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."
Noooooooooooo!!!!
Anyone ever see those anonymous death threats directed at random people online? Well, I'm going to do the opposite. I vow to track down the parent poster, where ever he is, drag him kicking and screaming out of his parents' basement, bathe him, put him in the sun until he gets a tan, teach him to speak English (as opposed to Trollish), set him up with a real job and girlfriend, and give him a life.
I wonder if there would be a class whose sole purpose is to spam laser blaster fire all over the battleground during the entire fight.
Isn't star wars galaxies still around? How does it compare?
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
Failing? Didn't the game sell almost 2 million copies?
"LucasArts has already shipped 4.3 million copies of the game, but it's proved so popular they've told the factory to make some extra copies. Looks like The Force Unleashed could be the most popular Star Wars game to date - unsurprising when you consider it's one of the least rubbish"
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=243312
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I hope it brings back the fantastic Dancer class.
I can't wait to do me some dirty dancing, Wookie style!
BLARRRHHAHHDHDDDDDDDDD!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Where do we sign up for your program?
Yeah, like there is a Highlander 2.
"There can be only one."
There should have been only one!
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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.
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. You don't get to be familiar. Hell in an MMO you don't even get to be special otherwise everyone is special just like you. What does that leave you with - unnamed wookies, droids, ewoks and storm troopers??? Yoda's dim witted 3rd cousin shlopwitt of the planet schnarf?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
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?