BioWare has popped up a new video with a lot of talking heads saying how great the new Star Wars MMO — and, by extension, their own creative efforts on it — is going to be. And it again trots out the whole, “We’re bringing story to MMOs…” line that the company started spouting when the game was first (officially) announced, and is hammering even further today. And you know what? For my two cents, it’s starting to border on arrogance. There are loads of MMOs with storyline. If BioWare’s big point of difference is stopping the action every now and then to ask stuff like, “Do you help this old lady across the road, or Do you chop her head off?” and then adjusting some minor part of your character based on the answer, it’s hardly ground-breaking, revolutionary stuff. I’m also more than a little pissed that they are seemingly pushing the whole focus of the game towards Force users. I mean… yawn-a-rama. Good for kids though, I guess.
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OK, this is the Knights of the Old Republic MMO. You did play those RPGs, right? And you were expecting the game to focus on non force users? !? You can’t finish either of them without going Jedi.
In the Star Wars universe, force users are well and truly more powerful than non force users. You either assume most players will choose force users and plan for it, or you create a universe that violates the lore by making non force users dead even with force users (see current SWG).
In this respect, the Old Republic has a huge advantage over the time that SWG is set in. There were tons of jedi on both sides, so letting players roll whatever they feel like does not fuck with the lore.
And more importantly, GL has no input. The game designers are free to go with what they find compelling, as opposed to the retarded BS that GL has sprayed all over the SW franchise in the last decade. I’ll take good game design over sperm any day.
First up, this is NOT a Knights of the Old Republic MMO. BioWare has actually been at great pains to point that out to people; to the extent of not putting the word “knights” in the title of the game, and also setting it 100s of years into the future after those games. This is simply an MMO set in the Old Republic.
As such, it stands to reason that it should have featured the full range of people living in the Old Republic, not just Jedi and Sith. But at this stage it doesn’t even look like people can play Mandalorian commandos. That’s just ridiculous. Jedi and Sith on their own are boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Did I mention boring?
Second, you can drop the idea that Jedi are uber therefore non-Force users in a game like this are a waste of time. Star Wars canon shows us that Jedi can be taken out by relatively small groups of Clone Troopers. I repeat: Jedi are not uber. In MMO terms, they are the equivalent of a Nuker class – deadly, but useless against large mobs. And that’s precisely how they could be treated in an MMO environment that features non-Force users. Simple.
Third, I’m not sure what wacky tobaccy you’re smoking, but George Lucas certainly does have input. He has input, to some degree, on everything his companies do. How on earth could you possibly conceive he wouldn’t? Or what idiot has told you that he doesn’t, and you’ve decided to believe them? He’s already had the game demo’d directly to him for his comments, ffs. See here: http://play.tm/news/21958/george-lucas-backs-old-republic-mmo/
I suggest you get familiar with these facts before you go mouthing off on the comments section of a blog with “information” that is totally bogus and wrong. We like providing people with solid information here, not erroneous crap.
“I’m also more than a little pissed that they are seemingly pushing the whole focus of the game towards Force users.”
Kinda like Mythic’s videos kept pushing Destruction as the “cool” side? They’ll eventually have to show everything but the scripted lightsaber duels are a huge part of Star Wars. On the plus side, at least they’re emphasizing *both* Jedi and Sith right now, unlike Mythic who was Destruction, Destruction, Destruction for the longest time and that first month or so was rough when *imagine that* a vastly higher player population jumped on the Destruction train rather than Order.
Bringing story to MMOs? Great, that’s why I play LOTRO as my main and also why I enjoy Guild Wars. If BioWare can top that *without* forcing me to sit through long dialogue trees (especially if my choices end up not mattering in the end) that piss off the group if I don’t skip through and spam the easy answers, maybe I’ll be on board. But for now, I’m sick of all the broken promises and hype that was never delivered upon. I’m not jumping on anymore fanwagons over marketing’s catch-phrases.
@Matt: “can be taken out by small groups of clone troupers”…that in itself implies that one on one Jedi are simply more powerfull than most characters. It was a fundamental issue with the idea of player Jedis that SOE was never able to get a handle on.
From all that has been shown so far, this is KotoR the MMO. BIOWARE can say it isn’t until they are blue in the face. The video supports my contention. Heavy emphasis on story, darkside/ light side plot branchpoints, Jedi leading around a non-jedi companion….that all screams KotOR. They even start the interview by pointing out that KotOR was the most financially successful games BIOWARE has made. Given the huge fanbase of those games BIOWARE would be absolute dumbasses not to try and rope the same players into their MMO.
If you don’t want an MMO that plays a lot like KotOR, prepare for disappointment.
That said, I assume that we will be able to play non-Jedi if we feel like it. Presumably you’ll be a bit gimpy compared to a jedi if you go that route, save for in a very specific realm. For example, being a jedi doesn’t help you craft or hack computers. And in one on one combat , a bounty hunter can be close to as powerfull as a Jedi. However, who can say, they haven’t stated one way or another.
Honestly, I doubt the bulk of target market for this game really wants to play anything but Jedi. Very few players would have gone all the way through KotRO as a non-jedi even if they could have. I certainly would have done it (and I did put it off as long as I could in one play though), but I like to push envelopes in whatever games I play.
And by at Matt, parrently I meant @Rob
Oh yeah, and by GL won’t have any input, I meant he won’t be writing the story. Sure he can wade in a screw it up if he feels like it. But he hasn’t done it with any of the previous Old Rebulbic products, I doubt he’ll do it here.
“In the Star Wars universe, force users are well and truly more powerful than non force users. ”
Are you talking about just the movies or the EU? Your memory of the EU is flawed if that is the case. The Yuzhon(sp!) Vong pretty much were immune but they were basically a plot device. There have been non force users the Jedi and Sith could fear. Rare as hell but they exist.
@Mutant: I was thinking more as depicted in the movies and the existing Old Republic products. Even in the cannon there were a few non force users that were as much or more powerful than an average Jedi. General Grievous is a good example. However, most of those were rare exceptions to the general rule.
I did mention a few roles where I thought it would be logical for non forces users to potentially equal or exceed jedi in my follow up post. I’m sure you could come up with others.
Story in mmos is the bits you skip, unless you are the 1% that actually reads the quest text.
SWTOR will be a wowclone. cartoon disney garbage for children that found mommys credit card. doubly so now that its gonna be micro-transaction based (money grubbing)
Wow…
A convenient deletion of a mass of comments about how wrong this article and you as a poster are.
Interesting.
You assume a little too much to suggest I’ve done this. It seems a site admin has done some deleting for some reason. I don’t run the site; I don’t have the ability to do it. And I haven’t really been following the thread in recent days even if I wanted to, to be quite honest with you. Personally, I’m happy to go toe-to-toe with you, Openedge1, on anything to do with this game, or BioWare as a whole as this rampant fanboi-ism of “BioWare can do no wrong…” is extremely wide of the mark and I can’t stand it. I’ll point it out for being extremely misguided anytime you like. So… long story short, I have ***nothing*** to shy away from, nor do I see the need to delete anything from my POV. What others do, however, I have no control over.
If their intention of “brining story to MMOs” is glorified nursery rhymes and horrible teenage fanfiction with a company brand, then yeah I guess we can count on Bioware to deliver.