Talk of story aside, I think that this ends up being a fairly conventional MMO using all of the established conventions from the existing MMOs wrapped in a Star Wars skin(storytelling/chapter system from LOTRO, a little RVR from WAR and some PVE from WOW etc.).
My guess is the people at Lucas look at WOW and say “That should have been us!!” but instead we got dancing with the Star Wars. So my thought is that rather then try to break new ground and try something different they will stick with what works.
By speaking in generalities you’ve got it exactly wrong. For example the Force is very specifically prescribed and limited to a specific set of magic. It has it’s own physics, of a sort, that greatly limit what can be explained by it. It also implies this really weird system of ethics (don’t “feel” anything, it’ll turn you evil!). Instead of orcs and elves you have Rodians and Twileks. ETc.
There’s a reason why the more successful Star Wrs franchises focus on specific pieces of the universe and not the whole. The implicit mixture of guns and melee weapons is a design problem. The power of Jedi as opposed to the power of regular soldiers is a design problem (even Force Unleashed had a problem with this and it was a purely single player Jedi romp). The mixture of space combat with fencing battles is a design problem. The “light” side will always be significantly more popular than “dark”, another design problem. Where there certainly is an element of the fantastical in Star Wars, it is so strongly defined that any strong deviations from the canon will quickly stretch plausibility. Generally speaking it’s a really poor MMO setting.
I think that Bioware is aware of this – the focus on a singleplayer experience speaks to it – but I don’t think the problems go away that easily. SWG struggled with a schizophrenic game design but it also struggled with all of these issues I’ve mentioned and never really found good solutions for a lot of them – not because they didn’t try but often because there simply weren’t good solutions.
Also I think you’re focusing a lot on the aesthetic (which I like) when it’s the design of the setting and the stories behind it that really matter for game design. And from that perspective I think there is far better space opera out there and potential to create a new setting that would be far better suited to MMO development. As someone said, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic which actually works better for Star Trek than it does for Star Wars which loses focus when it comes to technology given that the setting is more interested in setting up lightsaber duels and dog fights.
That’s not my quote ;) . Still I think, I get what you had in mind.
There is a reason why I wrote ‘was’, since so many people meddled with it, it is hard to find that ‘set’ of information that you can/want to use to keep canon/introduce your own stuff/ expand. There I agree with you but subtracting all this already existing content, the setting itself was/is great for an MMO.
What I meant with the burden of using elfs and orcs, is the general simplistic Tolkien approach of elves = good, orcs = bad. You still have that in light vs. dark side but it is not superimposed on a specific race (apart from the sith, who as mentioned in some interviews can still be played “good”.)
It’s just that the generic, orc and elves specifically are outworn for me personally having played almost two decades lots of PnP RPGs with those two races, having only Earthdawn and Shadowrun giving some “new” input on those two races.
Not to get into super nerdy territory here, but I don’t believe the light side will always be more popular than the dark. In the movies, the dark side was portrayed as pure evil; it looks like Bioware is trying to move more into seeing it as passion, embracing your feelings, including pride, fear, hatred, and love, in opposition to the asceticism and purity of the light side. But then they promised something similar in Jade Empire and that certainly didn’t deliver, so I guess we’ll see.
Yeah, I misquoted. Fixed it. :-) Sorry if my post didn’t make sense pre-edit.
I see what you’re saying about elves/orcs. I still think there is far too high a burden on the game designers to conform to a template that is a poor fit for an MMO. Twileks and rodians are not as big an issue as the power imbalances, the nature of the force, the structure of the world (even in the “old republic”, etc.). Now mind you, I really like BioWare so I’m still hopeful they can make it work. I just think that if they weren’t spending all their time designing around the difficulties of the Star Wars universe that they could come up with something far better.
Oh yeah regarding light and dark side, rebellion vs. empire, SWG already showed that people will still distribute more or less evenly.
On most servers, including my own, it was overwhelmingly Rebel. Some servers self-corrected half a year in but in part this was only possible because the game wasn’t that successful and server populations dipped to where a smaller group of people could make a difference in the overall population. Take a successful Star Wars game with full servers and I think you’ll find a very strong, consistent bias.
They really can’t go that far both because they have LucasArts looking over their shoulder (which is another huge reason why the setting is bad for an MMO) but also because there is such a strong preconception among fans as to what the dark and light side mean. I think in the past they’ve explored this a little bit with their singleplayer games but they’re clearly on a leash.
You may feel that way, but neither SOE nor LA agree with you. Raph’s SOE was a failure, and all the attempts to fix it merely alienated what few customers they had.
Except for the jump to lightspeed expansion, which was pretty awesome but didn’t attract new players.
I was a long time SWG player but I don’t think anyone really felt that it was a success. I was basically told by someone at Sony that the NGE was a “we have to try this, or turn off the servers” kind of thing. That probably was overstating things a bit – SOE rarely shuts anything down and I was also told that they hit break-even on the project around JTL – but certainly the company felt that the game hadn’t met expectations and that drastic measures were required to get a better return on the investment.
Well, they have been asking for something different. A truly good story would count as different.
There are online RPG’s with good stories, they just aren’t massive. The best RPG stories are still going to be singleplayer. That seems, in part, what Bioware is shooting for – a massively singleplayer experience – but that still seems like it’s not really offering a story to an MMO but really circumventing the issue by adding chat channels to singleplayer experiences.
Especially with an IP where words like “iconic” are ever on player’s tongues I think LucasArts is really going to want reign in diversions from the core IP and game experiences offered in past games.
I’m a little unsure of how they tend to make “your own story” unique. Yay a unique story per class…but even ten classes spread out over a million people doesn’t have any uniqueness. Same with the companion choices, so you’re very likely going to run into someone with the same companion with the same quests, etc.
Its also very hard to get sucked into a story when you have “L337 D@RTH” running and jumping around talking about the latest football scores or “pulling” monsters.
I’m of the opinion that the majority of MMOers aren’t looking for story in their games(look at the popularity of RP servers compared to normal servers), they tend to create the story and the community by who they play with.
Oh yeah, and all the KOTOR games Jedi and lightsabers were head and shoulders above everyone else, how do you balance that and not make it weird?
As a rp’er and Star Wars geek, I cannot wait for this. I was skeptical of story in an mmo before playing LOTRO. It truly enhances the world if there is cooperation between the devs and players in the creation of a collective story.
I do hope there are other classes beside Jedi/Sith. I can’t see gameplay varying that much between exclusively force wielding classes.
Yeah, I tend to be skeptical about the ‘unique’ story aspect. People are going to know inside of a week all the different branching trees and it will end up being just a route to custom build (or lemmingly chase after the optimal build/uber template) a character with the best lewts and sidekicks. That said, I’m somewhat curious about this. I’m somewhat curious about all new MMOs in order to try and figure out how they work and what they do well.
Ultimately, scripted stories generally don’t do as much for me as dynamic engines and sandbox environments.
Anyway, most of this QQing about MMOs is beside the point, and in fact applies just as equally to single-player CRPGs. My most recent experience is with Mass Effect, which is one of the easier games out there, and it already has its own community of players dedicated to finding the strongest builds possible. You get kiddies abusing l33tspeak in any game. And if I managed to play Guild Wars essentially as a single-player game (by turning off chat, never pugging, and ignoring people in the shared areas), I’m sure I’ll beable to do the same here.
Ugh, that was a side effect of having too much health/invincibility power ups compared to the guns’ firepower. It wasn’t so bad early-mid game, but late game it was obnoxious.
