When you meet a snooty nobleman in Star Wars: The Old Republic, there are many tactics of persuasion to get him to cooperate with your mission. You can be forceful and say “You’re wasting my time!” or attack the nobleman’s lack of diplomatic finesse with an indignant “So much for etiquette!”
Having such choices makes the game more engaging for players, according to Lead Cinematic Designer Paul Marino, who let us know why interactive cinematics are so important in the upcoming Star Wars MMO.
Marino said the goal is to immerse SW:TOR players in a “dynamic plot” where your choice of response to NPCs can affect how a quest plays out, like what we’ve seen in past BioWare games. For instance, Dragon: Age Origins often gave you options on whether to use brute strength or cunning to finish an objective, which developers hope to integrate in SW:TOR as effectively.
Fans bored with the robotic quests in most MMOs–Fetch this! Kill that!–are understandably excited about these interactive cinematics. Honestly, who among you still reads the quest dialogue instead of just scrolling down to the turn-in button? SW:TOR hopes to shake up this formulaic grind by giving you a bit more input on how to get those missions done.
Plus no one ever died of having too much cutscenes and voice dialogue, especially when it’s as polished as those we’ve seen in SW:TOR previews.
To learn more about how Marino and his team are making SW:TOR cinematics have more meaningful choices, go read the full developer post here. (Or just skip the text; the best part is watching the in-game videos whose pixel acting puts those Star Wars movie actors to shame. I’m looking at you Hayden Christensen and Jar Jar Binks.)
Yeah, but all the methods of persuasion end up at the same result. It’s like having five or six ways of doing the exact same thing.
Perhaps one day they’ll drop quests and instead players will be their own quest giver…oh, I like to intimidate? I’ll go into a shop and threaten the shop owner for money. It makes the world a worse, less trusting place and…there you go, changing the world.
These graphics are something to really look at, I like the way the characters look in this game. Meaningful choices are hard to make sometimes but this is a great game to play I believe. Maybe your review will allow me to play it more often.
@Callan S.
Based on the videos I’ve seen, it seems the options are different enough that it would be absurd for each one to have the same response from the NPC, which convinces me the result won’t be the same given two or three choices.
But I get what you mean about an MMO with total freedom to do what you want. I’m just not sure how fun it would be for millions simultaneously changing my world–I’d probably go bonkers at the anarchy.