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Interview With Star Wars: The Old Republic Devs
Kheldon points out a lengthy interview at MMO Gamer with developers from BioWare Austin about their upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. They provide details about the game's method of storytelling, and discuss how they divide up the scenes and conversations such that one player may not always see what the player next to him does. Lead writer Daniel Erickson said, "What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you're going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself. Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you. But you probably don't want a thousand people there, especially if a fight's gonna break out, because it wouldn't really make sense." Bioware also recently showed off the Smuggler class, and revealed that the game has hundreds of voice actors performing "hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue."
Each successive Bioware product this decade has gotten a little worse. They started amazing, and ever release took them to great, pretty great, to good, to decent. I expect this trend to continue as the last great minds leave
can you shoot first with these characters ?
Can I be a Jedi?
Yet Another MMO?
Zero Punctuation did a fair analysis about MMOs in general in this review. At about 2:30.
I never got into these kind of games so I might be biased.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
I hope this isn't just another MMO.
In any other area of games there are plenty. There isn't a single real time strategy game, a single first person shooter, etc. Why should MMOs be any different?
For that matter, we've seen very little in terms of what MMOs can potentially be. There hasn't been a whole lot of variety. Eve Online is one of the few that is really different, unfortunately it sucks. There is a whole lot of significant variation that could be done.
Even withing the typical "hack and slash" type of MMO, there's no reason there can't be more than one. Different people like different things and no one MMO will focus on all of them. A simple example might be difficulty. Some MMOs, World of Warcraft would be a great example, are very forgiving. While there are things in the game that take a good deal of skill to do, the over all game has a very low barrier for entry and doesn't punish you. This is one of the reasons its popular. Ok but not everyone wants that. Some people want a game with a much steeper difficulty curve, where failure is punished. Such a game won't see the player base WoW will, but it doesn't mean that there aren't some who want to play.
So I see nothing wrong with another MMO coming to market, so long as it is done well. It isn't as though a game "wins" and we no longer need to produce any more games of that type.
Personally, I'm hopeful for this one. I like sci fi, and Star Wars in particular. Sony made a total hash of Galaxies, so another one is needed. Bioware is a company I have a great deal of respect for, they've produce many awesome RPGs. Also, though I'm not a huge EA fan (who now owns Bioware), they have a few successful MMOs to their name, so they know a bit about running them. Thus I'm hopeful that this may prove to be a fun game to play.
Because really, that's all it's about. People like to whine and bitch about all kinds of things related to games in general and MMOs in particular as to what they "should" be but none of it is relevant if it doesn't relate to fun. Ultimately, the game needs to provide good enjoyment for the money. If it does that, it is a success. I don't care if it isn't "innovative", I care if I am entertained when I play it.
One of my favourite games still is Civilization 4. It's a great game, and I say that having played Civ 3, Civ 2 and the original Civ, as well as a host of other strategy games that are related. No, it isn't original, and it's title indicates that. It is "Yet another turn based strategy game." However, it's a good one and I enjoy it.
It certainly seems like Bioware might be *the* people to revolutionize the MMO. I mean, they've pretty much put out some of the best RPG's in the last five years, maybe arguably decade. Allowing them to take their storytelling onto the MMO stage, and given what's in this interview... I'm hopeful this will be something different.
They claim to want to make a cinematic experience, hundreds of hours long. A story that you create. Where you are in charge of your own Star Wars Saga.
A lofty goal, but this is Bioware and they NEVER done this.
In fact, the newer the Bioware game, the more it has been on rails, with little reflection on what your actions meant in the world at large. Fallout was the game were you changed the world.
Knight of the Old Republic really only had two paths both of which you could switch from instantly at the end. The planescape:torment team would be better. The Fallout team would be best but Bioware? Unless they had a massive rethink, this ain't going to work. I hope it does, but got serious doubts.
If few companies are already capable of making a user created story in just a few hours of gameplay how are they going to do it with hundreds of hours?
And just what are they going to do with the WoW kiddies who only care about the path that gives them the phat loot and are going to spam every chat channel with "which has better stats, killing my father or not?".
Ambitious project, but so far, I see only concept art that look intresting, while the actual game mechanics are still the same old MMO. The cinematic trailer is amazing, but the motion capture so far doesn't look anything like it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I played SWG from the first day it came out. I, and many others, were gone long before the big changes where they let everyone be a Jedi and so on. That was, in fact, the reason for those changes. They'd been losing people left and right and they were trying to figure out what to do. For some reason they thought "IF we make it more like the movies people will like it." No, sorry, that was never the problem.
Galaxies had two major problems that sunk it:
1) Bugs, bugs, bugs. Man was that game awful, especially from a company who allegedly knew what they were doing. After all, SOE ran Everquest, they know MMOs right? YA, not so much. The problem wasn't so much that the game had bugs, as all MMOs seem to, but that they never fixed them. They obviously had a split development environment where the "new content" people didn't talk to the "bug fix" people. Bugs would get patched, and patched and so on and the game would be pretty reasonable. Then a big patch with new content would come out and everything would be broken again. We aren't talking problems with the new stuff, we are talking bugs that were already fixed were reintroduced. They were using a old code tree and shit got broke all over again. It would then take a few weeks of patches before things were really playable again.
2) Sony's anti-fun team. I swear, they had a team of people who were dedicated to finding everything fun in the game, and taking it out. If people enjoyed something, they went after it. If something was hurting the game, it stayed in. As an example when cities came out one important feature was the militia. These were people who policed the city. If someone was acting like a jackass, the militia could warn them off, and then if they didn't leave, shoot their ass. It allowed players to regulate their cities. Well, someone found some exploit with it, that allowed them to gain combat experience. Ok, who cares right? That was so easy to get in the game. Nope, Sony went apeshit and disabled the militia's abilities. Of course as soon as this happened, the jackasses flooded in to cities and caused trouble, which the CSRs wouldn't deal with. They never fixed it and brought it back, at least not before I quit.
Now on the flip side of that was multi-splicing. People figured out a way to hack weapons and armor and make them waaaaaaaaay more powerful than they should be. Major imbalancing thing. So fixed right away right? Hell no. For over a month Sony denied it existed, then they said they were working on it but didn't do anything. Eventually they fixed the exploit, but didn't remove the hacked items, or ban players. I believe they did eventually remove the items, but the players didn't get banned.
What it came down to was that the game was extremely poorly run. In its original state the game probably with the Jedis being a hidden rarity (once we had all the Jedis on our server in our city for a meeting/show off, there were 3 total) it would have worked fine. Game needed some balance issues fixed and so on but over all, it was a solid idea. Hell it was the first MMO I ever saw where player housing was useful. The whole player cities were a neat idea.
However it was run by idiots. They didn't care to try and make it bug free, and they seemed to have no concern for what was fun. Thus people started leaving and then they REALLY screwed it up in a misguided attempt to fix it.
The part that sounds new is that you'll (in theory) have a reasonably personalized and cinematic experience the entire time. Whether you and the smuggler next to you will have essentially experienced the same plot? I don't know. I'd be tempted to say it doesn't matter because for sure every rogue in WoW has had the exact same plot and hasn't had any choices at all, plot-wise speaking, but that point is at the clutch of the single player claims that they make.
The interviewer asks them a hard question: what happens when the smuggler has a plot point, and you don't? And they were like, well, if you let Han Solo go off to talk to the Hutt on his own then the story diverges at that point. But the player will be asking questions like, if I help the smuggler do his thing, is he gaining XP while I'm not? Do we have to all help each other in a cycle, and what about the fact that the healer (not that there are really healers in the Star Wars universe in the MMO-style, but given it is an MMO, what do you think will happen?) has to go in 15 minutes?
They also talk all about the single player game, but then also talk about the same weekly raids WoW has, being designed by WoW raiders. This tells me that anything new is not really on the table. You will have tanks, healers, and dpsers. You will have big bosses, and need a guild and a weekly schedule, and if you don't do this, whatever pvp will wind up in the game will be horrible for you.
I dunno. They seem to be painting themselves into a corner.
On the one hand, they can make it where no one can be a Jedi (and who wants to play Star Wars where you CANT be a Jedi?), or they can make it where you can play Jedi (and who wants to play those other classes when you can be a ZOMGuberJediNinjaGankingn00bs)
I forsee bad things happening with this game either way they go.
Raise your hand if you'd rather have Kotor 3 instead of sending bioware money every month
i assume that at some point this main quest will end. at that point, what will motivate players to continue paying a monthly charge to play the mmo? will the game segue into WOW style raids? or, will the devs take a more WAR-like PVP approach to solving the endgame issue? as a matter of fact, i haven't heard anything about whether or not PVP will actually be in this game-- i assume there will be something since the game takes place during some kind of epic struggle between light and dark jedi. any information?