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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."
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
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.
Knight of the Old Republic really only had two paths both of which you could switch from instantly at the end.
KOTOR 2 was even worse, and it had a lot of boring dialogue to boot.
Looks like the best SW game is still Tie Fighter. I only wish I knew whatever happened to my CD :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.