Bioware has a particular style of very disciplined PR that’s been consistent since at least the time of Mass Effect 1. “Hey, let’s be realistic, we’re not going to re-invent the wheel here” is basically the antithesis of that style, for better or worse.
Foxstab
1942
They aren’t reinventing the wheel, because then they’ll come out with a hectatetradrexahgon and then we’ll all be “WOAH! EPIC!”.
They’re more like redesigning the wheel onto a square and saying “look what we did there! this is better! POLISHED CORNERS MAN!”.
Ha-Ha Hoo-Ah. But, yes.
Story is nice and all, but I really don’t need a good excuse for slaying shit. I just want the overall gameplay to be enough fun that I enjoy it, repeatedly, and especially when I play with friends.
Then all the MMOs fail or are just too scared/dumb to take a different non-EQ/WoW approach.
UO still pwns all, lets be frank. No classes rules.
I loved Starcraft’s story. Infact, I liked it so much more than the repetitive missions that I just outright cheat-coded my way to cut-scenes and petty much skipped the entire game.
Multiplayer it was good, though.
In Warcraft I & II, by contrast, I skipped all cutscenes and got straight into the gameplay action.
Amusing how that works?
Financially it’s already a failure on a grand scale.
Maybe it’ll have some design impact on future MMOs in respect to cutscenes/voice/instanced story lines, doubtful, but that’s not going to earn it much points in my view because this isn’t really that much of a new shtick.
Betting an entire company on a product under EA? Hmm…hey, where are those Origin guys? Or them Mythic guys?
RIP.
I hope Soren & Crew will manage now that they’re Bioware instead of EA LA. They should probably be safe, given they’re now part of the Dragon Age studio, which is likely to get absorbed back onto EA under a new bombazling title like EA RPGIN’.
Teiman
1943
What you say makes sense to me. But that put lasers in the “WMD” category, so you don’t want to be seen using then in a war, if you don’t want your capitular house nuked by all the other houses in the ASRAAM.
Still… the harkoonen used it on the battle of dune spits harkoonen.
Is not our modern world. Is a new medieval age with artifacts from the old age, and drug powered human that do the role of computers. After the butlerian jihad all machines becomed suspicious so repairing then was not all that cool thing.
Is a world that as devolved in a medieval age…
Having just watched half an hour of a Live stream from a guy who’s been in beta for a while, it’s hard to say. Everybody loves the Star Wars universe (or knows it a bit at least). But he was basically saying that he couldn’t get into the story and was simply going from yellow point to yellow point on his map, collecting 5 marrows of this and killing 15 of that. And I have to say that it being voiced and having a few dialogue options didn’t make it more interesting
As for the mechanics, we know what to expect. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I play WoW like MMO’s and get enjoyment out of them.
The nicest thing I saw is that his char was being attacked by packs or groups of things. Made for some cool moves. And it could very well be that when we play the game and get to listen to the story for ourselves, we’ll feel more engaged. But it didn’t feel like Bioware was doing something brand new there.
Then again, in that time, I saw basic quests and probably missed out on some more interesting choices and dilemmas. So what I saw doesn’t mean much except the game doesn’t instantly amaze you with its innovation and storytelling. Keep your expectations reasonable and you might have a great time if you love the setting.
Wendelius
Make it Pre-Trammel UO and I’m with you there :-)
It really is going to come down to two things. People who’d prefer a shooty-sci-fi-and-to-some-extent-Star-Wars wrapper on their WoW grind. People who really enjoy Bioware’s storytelling approach.
I suspect the numbers for the first are pretty good. “More of the same but better” is only going to be interesting for so long but if you radically change the look and feel of combat, even if the mechanics are basically the same thing, this might be more successful. Maybe not enough for the investment but it should keep Bioware from being embarrassed in the long run.
So what will make or break TOR as a landmark product will be how the public reacts to long term, highly scripted, storytelling in an MMO. That we really don’t know. I’m sure the hardcore WoW grinder/raider crowd will probably be over it before it starts. But I’m not sure how much of WoW that really is and even less sure how much of the broader overall market that is either. Most MMO players are casual/social players which why we keep seeing more and more content and overall approaches aimed at them.
They might be quite entranced by the Bioware stories over multiple characters and probably go through content at a far, far, more relaxed pace than those fixated on endgame content.
Or they might start getting bored halfway into character number #2 and feel like, as good as the stories are, there’s just too much generic MMO grind in there to make it worthwhile.
Roleplayers I think will have a very mixed reaction. Some will love it simply because it’s Star Warsish. Some will be like the typical casual player and enjoy the story angle for a while at least. Some (especially SWG Star Wars MMO vets), though, seem to find missing RP friendly components to be deal killers on the face of it. Others may well become so focused on the story/solo aspect a broader RP community never really jells which means no safety net once the scripted content is exhausted or gets old.
I don’t think SWTOR, based entirely on what I’ve read as I haven’t gotten into beta, is going to be a smash hit long term but it could do fairly well along LoTRO lines. Maybe eventually moving into F2P territory. But it’s so generic outside of the, expensive, approach to Bioware storytelling that if Bioware can’t keep up the quality and quantity of scripted story they’re cooked. It’s a shark. If it stops moving it dies. The players it will attract and amuse won’t be those who are capable of creating their own fun. They’ll just suckle at the teat until it dries up.
Can’t remember much but isn’t the reason everyone uses melee weapons the same reason everyone uses melee weapons in the Dune universe, the huge amount of people using personal energy shields (but they dont explode in star wars ofcourse)
Yeah. And what Teiman said is, I think, probably most people’s presumption of why lasers aren’t often used on shields - perhaps that’s made explicit, I can’t remember - but it doesn’t seem like the laser+shield thing is treated with quite the same horror as nuclear weapons.
Leaving that aside, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of a hard sci fi justification for melee weapons. Knock em down with firehoses and gas them, run them over in vehicles, something other than knife-fighting.
Brian: Good points.
But maybe they have anti-water shields and gas masks!
Foxstab
1950
Melee will always be part of military combat.
By the way, Star Wars isn’t sci-fi, it’s fantasy set in dystopian space-age.
StarGate and StarTrek (excluding TOS) qualifies as sci-fi.
And there’ve been many examples of melee there, I do believe.
Or at least a (token, black) melee guy.
Rasputin
1952
Is that a Star Wars geek way of saying, “bullshit”?
Murbella
1953
Melee looks cool.
None of the star wars movies mention any reason why melee weapons would be used over energy weapons. They clearly do not cause a nuclear explosion like in the dune universe. I can’t recall any person using a personal shield either. The only real case of something ground based using shields is those rolling droids, which reflected energy beams.
Melee weapons are also not used in the star wars movies except by very low tech troops, like jabba’s guards. In that particular case, using a melee weapon in very close quarters might be of benefit, but probably the more likely reason is that they are an honor guard and the melee weapons are more for terror.
And as stated, the reason jedi can dodge/parry some guy firing a laser cannon at them in rapid fire is because… Midi-chlorians (read: they can do super human stuff with the force that doesnt have to make sense if it looks cool).
MrCoffee
1954
Not in the Movies, in the Kotor games era, it’s full of personal shields and also due to the amount of lightsabers, melee weapons have small shield generators to be able to parry (that i remember from weapons descriptions)
MattKeil
1955
No, it’s a disingenuous way of asserting Star Wars as being sci-fi, because the midi-chlorians are the one sci-fi element in the entire series. Fans hate them and completely ignore them except when they are desperate to prove Star Wars is sci-fi for some reason.
One stupid mistake (among many, yes, but midi-chlorians were unique) by George Lucas doesn’t change the fact that Foxstab is right. Star Wars is fantasy.
I’m cautiously looking forward to this, namely because I’m an MMO junky who wants a new fix, and this one promises to be nicely polished and full of bells and whistles regardless of its overall longevity or transcendent value. And if the stars align, it could be pretty darn good perhaps.
I am skeptical of how much I will value storytelling per-se, in an MMO. I agree with the general sentiment that MMOs are really Groundhog Day events, with the same crap over and over and over again, so that everyone can get the same experiences. Even with distinct storylines for specific class/careers, everyone with that class will get the same experience I imagine. Could be nifty, but it’s not the same as in a single player game where, yes, you ARE the ultimate bad ass and YOU save the universe. In an MMO, everyone gets to save the universe. Again and again, too.
But really, for me, it’ll all come down to how much fun it is within the parameters of my MMO expectations–leveling, exploration, mechanics, loot, PvP. I may well find the story parts really engaging–I hope I do–but if I don’t it won’t break it for me.
I just tire of new MMOs much more quickly than I once did. Once I figure out whatever is unique about the mechanics in the game my interest begins to wane. I suspect that it will take the promise of a compelling end game to drive me through the leveling process. For me that means good end game PvP. I hope Old Republic has good PvP.
Razgon
1958
Does anyone know if there are sights to go exploring? Its one of my favorite things to do in MMOs - while I don’t especially like WoW, they did this pretty well, with a huge and interesting world - Vanguard was awesome in this respect as well.
Pretty much, yeah. For the long haul, I need good (non-BG, non-Arena, non-baloney) PvP, but it’s pretty rare.
At least the first half of the game, don’t expect a ton of exploration, however there are rewards for exploring off of the beaten path that are very much worth it.
