By Jim Rossignol on December 13th, 2008 at 8:36 am.
Impressive developer-narrated video of The Old Republic after the jump. It includes the first footage of the game in action, with some dudes thrashing about with their light sabres. More interesting, perhaps, is the continued explanation of story within the MMO, with discussion of your journey towards the light or dark side, and the role of companion characters. There’s also a closer look at the visual style of the game, which they’re calling “stylised realism”. You’ll want to watch this one.
13/12/2008 at 08:43 Konky Dong 1000 says:
I have hope for this. I really do.
13/12/2008 at 08:56 O.jones says:
No decapitations or dismemberment???? That is what made Jedi Knight the best Star Wars based game. I know it required a code, but it should be a requirement for light saber combat. Making yourself a human wood chipper is the ultimate in escapism.
13/12/2008 at 08:57 gori says:
Hope leads disapointment, disapointment leads to the dark side of the force
13/12/2008 at 09:02 Leelad says:
your your your your
story story story story
It’s meant to be an MMO meaning other peoples, if it’s all about your story then what’s the point in having it as an MMO.
I want it to be good but they’re making it hard for me to get on the “I believe” bandwagon.
13/12/2008 at 09:16 garren says:
Story and plot in MMOs? NO WAY!
13/12/2008 at 09:17 Meat Circus says:
@Leelad:
You speak true.
TOR makes no sense. So, you want me to pay a monthly subscription to play a single-player RPG with a pre-written story? Um, right.
13/12/2008 at 09:19 Nicky says:
One of the biggest issues i can see with regards to combat is when you look at two characters fighting each other with lightsabers. they’re actually hitting their opponents body parts wildly without defence. Now, unless these are fake lightsabers, surely as soon as the sword made contact with their body, it’d cut through it.
They should have developed a system where all attacks that players make to one another are matched and blocked, (even successful attacks) but successful attacks take away – not life – but an energy of some sort. when the energy is depleted, you’re unable to defend yourself or attack properly (ergo defeated state) and you can be proper killed.
slashing people wildly with lightsabers and seeing no limbs fall off, is bad.
13/12/2008 at 09:19 Meat Circus says:
@garren:
The best MMOs have story and plot as an entirely emergent thing that is brought about by the interactions and decisions of the players within the Universe. See EVE for example.
This is just a single-player RPG without the ability to save and a subscription fee. It’s *monumentally* stupid and ill-conceived.
13/12/2008 at 09:21 Pavel says:
One of the biggest issues I can see with the game is the fact that it is a MMO.
I want my proper KOTOR 3, dammit.
13/12/2008 at 09:24 rei says:
Frankly, I didn’t see anything that would suggest this being any different than other MMOs. For all this talk about ‘story’ and ‘choices’, I’m willing to bet your actions won’t make the slightest difference in the world.
13/12/2008 at 09:29 Meat Circus says:
The endlessly irritating thing about the way MMO developers endlessly reinvent the wheel, at least to an EVE player, is that THE MMO STORY PROBLEM HAS ALREADY BEEN SOLVED.
Please, just copy EVE. Pleeeeeease?
13/12/2008 at 09:41 Mister Yuck says:
Personally, I think Tetris got it right.
Please, just copy TETRIS. Pleeeeeease?
13/12/2008 at 09:44 Reid says:
As an (albiet ex) longtime eve player, I can say that there’s a big difference between dev story and player-to-player stories. The dev “storyline” in eve is pretty poorly executed, it’s nothing new or amazingly special. Player created storylines on the other hand….
13/12/2008 at 09:45 Dan (WR) says:
Uh. I think saying EVE has solved the story problem is going a bit far. It’s a pointer in the right direction for emergent stories. It’s just a shame that no-one has the balls to carry something in that direction. But there’s another factor – EVE bores the arse off many people.
Rightly or wrongly, it’s not considered the ‘best MMO’. That’s WoW. And this will probably just copy that while throwing in a bit more narrative to the questlines. I wonder if any of these developers have ever played a MMO though. Most of the players won’t make a story choice based on characterisation or care about a moral dilemma. They’ll choose the one that gets them the Epic Wang +5 for their character.
13/12/2008 at 09:52 Mara says:
Do you have to be a jedi?
13/12/2008 at 09:53 Meat Circus says:
My point is, that MMO stories should be emergent. Otherwise you’re just trying to fleece people into subscribing to a single-player RPG experience with broken saves.
13/12/2008 at 09:54 Tim says:
I believe.
13/12/2008 at 09:54 Therlun says:
The Replublic is in danger!
You, Jedi, are required to provide me with [10] Bantha hides to save the Republic!
13/12/2008 at 10:06 Jim Rossignol says:
Eve does provide principles that other MMOs could use to put the stories in the hands of the players, rather than dictating the stories to the players. It’s a horribly broken game in many ways, but its foundations are sound: look after the reasons for co-operation and conflict in a game world, and the stories look after themselves.
13/12/2008 at 10:28 SanguineLobster says:
Hmm, I guess I’ll be optimistic, I don’t really have anything else to do.
Emergent player stories are great and fun, but they tend not to have much depth to them, people fighting each other out of boredom and greed. From there throw in betrayals and long term plans from the same motivation, rinse and repeat. It’s involving, but player motivations are shallow at best. If this game could move past this, get the players involved with the world and the characters….. but that may be too much to hope for.
I hope they’ve put some thought into this. If they have as many tricks up their sleeves as they claim, it may have a chance to be something special.
13/12/2008 at 10:47 Corbeaubm says:
I’d love for this to be good, but I really doubt it. And I didn’t see anything particularly compelling in the trailer either – it’s passable, but no *whoa* factor.
I also agree that Bioware and LucasArts have completely missed what makes MMOs compelling: procedurally generated content from player interaction. Otherwise, why on earth is it an MMO rather than a single-player game?
In all honesty, I bet that part of the reason why it’s an MMO is because subscription fees solve the piracy problem.
13/12/2008 at 10:49 Xercies says:
LOTRO did a pretty good story progression thing with its books i have to say. It has a relatively good story, the books are nearly always group instances/quests, and there really good to do since you get soem of the best gear from them.
I don’t see Old republic working as a monthly subscription MMO, and thats probably one reason why EA was saying microtransactions. But i can see this as a Guild wars style game where you have the missions and you go through the game going from mission to mission and it tells a story.
But i can’t see how the choice thing is going to work, and how will it work with other players in your group. They have to really get that out there i think.
Not entirly sure about this one, I think I will stick to Star Trek Online.
13/12/2008 at 10:53 Frank Comment says:
This looks like an oily heap of shit.
13/12/2008 at 11:01 garren says:
Well at least if they got rid of those kill/collect X things quests I’d be happy.
13/12/2008 at 11:17 J. Prevost says:
If they can deliver on what they’re aiming for, this will at least shake things up in the MMO world, which is a good thing. There are a lot of ways it can fail, but… honestly, without accepting the possibility of failure, you can’t progress. If it succeeds, even partially, it’ll have a big impact on any future MMO development.
I think the real trick is going to be in how the story and the MMO interact. You can’t make it just a bunch of players each playing single player and call it an MMO–you need to have the ability for people to get together with friends and work together towards goals. Even more, you have to encourage it. If you divide the two completely (like the “night-time” story-mode in AoC), I think it can work, but it’s a little unsatisfying in ways. And, of course, that can’t be everything. You need to have opportunities to play together while progressing in the story, as well. And that raises all sorts of questions, like “Okay, so what if you have two friends who want to play together, and one is generally a light-side sort of person and the other is generally a dark-side sort of person?” And of course, the perennial “What if somebody needs help with a ‘group chapter’ (or whatever they call them) and their friend has already done that?”
Choosing when and how to “break” the single-player story progression? That’s an interesting hard problem. I think most of us can imagine ways to do it, but it seems like an awful lot of work. If Bioware has come up with some good design models for how to do that, it’ll be awesome. (The most awesome thing I can imagine is if players can thread into the stories of their friends. Imagine the light side hero and dark-side anti-hero who grudgingly join up to… er… fight crime? Fight something. Then later they meet up for another mission, and their companions snark it up about what they’ve done before. Maybe you see news stories about what friends and other people you’ve grouped with have been doing on other plot-lines.)
Blizzard’s phasing stuff in LK is an interesting work-around for plot points, by the way. There are a lot of things where a character’s quest progression determines how they see the world–but the areas that are affected seem carefully chosen to not *require* grouping for content somebody may have “phased out of”, and generally the combat quests tend to be arranged to prevent confusion between people who are out of phase. (I can only think of a couple of areas where an area you need to do quests in changes drastically based on what phase you’re in, for example. Yet, it feels like the impact on the world is much larger because those areas are chosen so carefully.)
Alternatively, maybe they just go for “single player only mode for really significant stuff”, or say “if you want to play together and help out, you can take the place of an NPC of the appropriate class for that other player in their story”.
Actually, that scenario could be kind of cool: when you’re grouped for a story quest, one person is the main character and everybody else becomes an appropriate companion (without needing to learn a new skill set)? Hmm.
Anyway, *if* Bioware has come up with some new approaches or approaches to this problem, this is going to be very interesting. And I say that whether or not there’s any traditional raid-type scenarios available at end-game. I doubt the game’s longevity if they don’t keep there being something really hard to do up there at the end, but if the getting there is done well enough, other MMOs will be able to steal some of the techniques and maybe we’ll see some other experimentation.
Experimentation is good. :) AoC was fun in seeing how the nighttime stuff worked out, even if the game mechanics and game as a whole were kind of a let down. At the very least, this is probably going to be worth buying a box and a couple of months of play. If it’s worth more than that, Bioware might make some profits off of it and we’ll see how they continue to develop things. If it’s not worth more than that? Hopefully everybody else learns some lessons from the failure.
13/12/2008 at 11:26 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
@garren, Yea it should be, kill x,y,u,v and collect x.a, y.b, y.d and v.c. Where u has to be killed to get to v.
Nah… thats just trying to make a joke, but I would like to see a lot more depth… also, I want to have hyperspace exploration. Where you are not sure where you are going to end up, but when you’re lucky, you can sell planets or mining rights to other people… something like that.
13/12/2008 at 11:34 cHeal says:
Looks awful. Stylised realism? No it’s just looks rubbish, your art will not stand the test of time, infact it already looks like it was ripped straight from the Knights game.
Is the entire game going to be populated by Jedi and Sith? If so, that’s not star wars! The combat looks clumsy and unintelligelible.
the smell of my fart/10
Thank god I don’t do MMO’s or I might have cared.
13/12/2008 at 12:02 Gnarl says:
I hope it won’t be too hard to run a private server if they are asking for subs. I just maybe judging a tad (just a tad) early, but nothing I’ve seen suggests a reason to play this game with others.
13/12/2008 at 12:02 Barky says:
It looks like WoW with lightsabers.
13/12/2008 at 12:17 Larington says:
Stylised realism. That literally sounds to me like, “lookit what WoW did with its art, lets do something similar”. Which is fair enough I suppose, and I agree with their reasons for doing it, but lets just be honest about it eh?
The visual style of WoW is most definately one of the things it did get right, just a shame I found the moment to moment combat of that game tedius by level 52.
As for this, I’m still not convinced and won’t be convinced ’til the reviews start coming in. This is partly because a lot of their talk of story being important could easily fall flat on its face – Just look at the number of MMOs where the players skip through the dialogue and only pay any attention to the quest goals because their only concern is ‘nxt lvl pls’.
13/12/2008 at 12:18 Tei says:
WTF?…. autoplayed videos? that is a horrible idea. is NSFW!
13/12/2008 at 12:32 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Well, at least the art direction’s on track. (It does look KOTORy, and that’s not a bad thing) I’m still in the “Wish this was KOTOR 3 proper” camp, though.
As an MMO in this age of MMO disappointments, it’s hard to stir up too much enthusiasm over it.
13/12/2008 at 13:08 Rei Onryou says:
I’m hopeful. That’s all I can say. If indeed it succeeds in each person having their own in-game history/story/goals within the world (indeed, this is what EvE manages), then it extends on the single-player idea by filling in the Billy EveryNPC with others with their own in-game history/story/goals.
However, as with every other MMO, if there’s a million players, you’d want a million different stories. Rather than “Wow, your here to save the universe? Me too! But why does that guy need 10 Bantha hides from both of us?”
Give us EvE player-driven freedom in a Star Wars world. If they manage that, I’ll pay, play, and need a change of clothes…
13/12/2008 at 13:15 Mattress says:
Art director on track?
Say what?!
The game doesn’t look Star Wars, heck it barely looks KOTOR.
This “stylised realism” looks uncanningly like World of Warcraft (a game praised upon it’s release for eschewing realism for cartoony and emotive visuals) with lightsabers.
The video above doesn’t seem to evoke any childhood nostalgia associated with Star Wars. Instead we see lightning and lightsabers put in a context with little meaning, it feels like a crudely rendered imitation lacking the intricate qualities that made the original special. Like a Chinese stitched clone pikachu doll you win knocking tins over at the fun-fair…
As for trying to merge personalised narratives into a massively multiplayer world? Aren’t they kind of missing the point of said world?
13/12/2008 at 13:15 Bema says:
Wait…this is an MMO? Bah. All the story shit they’ve been peddling made me thought it’d be a decent RPG. Ah well.
*Crosses it off the list*
13/12/2008 at 13:48 Jahkaivah says:
@Dan (WR)
But the boring elements of EvE was separate to the “these guys get it” elements.
If someone were to Remake EvE without the horrible learning curve and removed the travel times (or gave them something to do with those periods), we would have an MMO which solves the “why am I paying Monthly for this when the games’ persistence is being underused” issue.
13/12/2008 at 13:55 Dan says:
I’m depressed now. I was looking forward to this, but having read the other comments and thought about it, it certainly seems that they could have gone down the single-player RPG route, with expansions for additional content.
The BioWare guys on the video didn’t mention interacting with other players once. Which again begs the question – why is this an MMO? You could even argue that it simply isn’t; it’s a single player game where all the players are in the same place.
Sigh.
13/12/2008 at 14:04 Conquests.of. says:
I just believe the reason why you boys don’t think story and mmos can’t work it’s because you can’t shake off the rotten rags of old mmos clichés.
13/12/2008 at 14:06 Conquests.of. says:
ah shite phrasing. Minus the first “don’t”
13/12/2008 at 14:13 Pidesco says:
Considering that Bioware can’t make proper choices and consequences in a directed, controlled single player game, there’s no chance in hell they’ll be able do it in an MMO.
13/12/2008 at 14:23 bruno says:
@Mara : Yes, it looks like to me you’ll have to be a jedi… And that would suck !
13/12/2008 at 14:36 Tinter says:
They have said before you don’t have to be a Jedi. They are certainly not giving any else much screentime though. Was that guy with the flamethrower a different class? Because it didn’t look like it played very differently…
13/12/2008 at 14:47 demonknight01 says:
i am very interested in the way this game is going and most of the people who have commented have to remeber this is in the early stages so there a lot more to be revealed and lot more work to be done, next to the new star trek MMO its going to be my next MMO buy
13/12/2008 at 15:08 john t says:
Eve doesn’t have ‘story’. It has ‘HIstory’. If you want to copy it, you just need a single shard, and real, permanent player control of resources.
13/12/2008 at 15:09 Feet says:
Yeah I’m failing to see why this game should be an MMO and not just KoToR 3. I don’t want another WoW\LOTRO\WaR clone, don’t get me wrong.
I just fail to see how having 1000s of Jedis\Siths walking around together in the “Public” “city” areas is going to work.
This whole well told story and character thing has been done pretty well in LOTRo and Guild Wars already via instancing so I really don’t see how what they’re proposing is going to change the way MMO stories are seen. Unless they have a better idea.
So yeah, I’m looking forward to it, but I’m going to pretend they never said it was an MMO, cause quite frankly it makes no sense.
13/12/2008 at 15:50 Tim says:
ohh this is going to be sooo hyped by EA. I must remember to not give money till we /know/ if it’s good.
13/12/2008 at 16:06 tmp says:
Could be as simple as having choice between pursuing quest arc A, B or C (each affecting the dark/light alignment of the character in different manner) and then grouping with people who made the same choice.
13/12/2008 at 16:08 PaulMorel says:
I’m with you, Tim. I’m not going to go through the whole SWG thing all over again.
I hope that Bioware tries to control the hype train for this game. The game will hype itself.
13/12/2008 at 16:30 Panther says:
Dark side or Light side? Lightsabers or guns? The choices you make will be with you forever……
13/12/2008 at 16:44 JulianP says:
Considering that Bioware can’t make proper choices and consequences in a directed, controlled single player game, there’s no chance in hell they’ll be able do it in an MMO.
What I was thinking.
13/12/2008 at 17:19 rabbitsoup says:
@ Feet
surely it should be KOTOR 3 + diablo style multiplayer (and not with just jedi or sith)
13/12/2008 at 17:36 TooNu says:
This will be great, Firstly you make a character if you want to play the “OMFG I HAEV EPIX NOW!!1″ making all the choices best for gear.
Then you make a character for the story as a light side and then a character for the dark side story.
This is how most gamers with actual souls that love games would do it. The “+5 Epic Wang” types can find enjoyment in this game also of course, but, I think I would much rather be emmersed in the Star Wars universe that SONY can’t fucking ruin.
13/12/2008 at 17:37 SanguineLobster says:
Wow, I didn’t notice it, but apparently this game is worse than any game ever created.
Maybe we should wait until after the second, or hell, maybe the third trailer before we crucify it because we don’t know how it will work.
13/12/2008 at 18:02 DigitalSignalX says:
I want to believe. I do. However will still put my eggs in Stargate worlds. Star Wars fans have been burned too often by Lucas Arts.
13/12/2008 at 18:41 Pattom says:
I think my biggest disappointment with this game so far isn’t the focus on storyline, though I’ll trust the people who believe EVE’s methods superior. The thing is, I don’t really consider this to be a KotOR game. It’s a Star Wars MMO, but it’s a different part of the timeline, and the events of the KotOR series seem largely irrelevant. I don’t really think the claims that this is a successor to those games are fair, because it’s so clearly a different beast. Does anyone else feel this would have been more promising if it was an EVE-style game set in the Mandalorian Wars (that is, before the KotOR games and in the era of the KotOR comics)?
13/12/2008 at 18:47 Ian says:
Looking promising.
13/12/2008 at 19:05 Johnson says:
Hate to be hating on your hate parade but I for one am really excited about this whilst trying not be. I guess theres so much negativity because tbh we have mostly all been burnt by an mmo that promised too much (well I have). But I’ll wait until someone whose opinion I value has played it and then I’ll ignore them too and probaly buy it to find out for myself. I like bioware I LOVED Kotor so I’m a believer.
13/12/2008 at 19:26 Iain says:
I need to know more about how the combat mechanics work before I get off this nice, comfortable fence I’m sitting on at the moment. But the video doesn’t inspire me with too much confidence right now that it will be anything more sophisticated than WoW’s.
13/12/2008 at 19:31 jackflash says:
Not a real fan of the “stylized realism” look. Also, without seeing more of the gameplay, it looks just like any other MMO.
13/12/2008 at 21:30 MeestaNob! says:
Combat reminds me of Force Unleashed (ie, Jedi/Sith just club each other with glow sticks rather SLICING THE FUCK out of each other with Lightsabres).
Immediate fail in my book.
And whilst it’s early, the graphics look barely passable now, and cant imagine what they’ll be like in 2 year time when this finally comes out.
13/12/2008 at 21:43 Xercies says:
Could be as simple as having choice between pursuing quest arc A, B or C (each affecting the dark/light alignment of the character in different manner) and then grouping with people who made the same choice.
The problem with that is that it brakes up the population, what happens further down the line? Will you just have one person that made your choice, zero. You can’t really do any group quests if that happens.
13/12/2008 at 23:19 Bhazor says:
Oh god. Does this mean the core team in Bioware have been sucked into a ten year development cycle?
Still I have to admit I can see single player working if the single player quest line is a “pick your allegiance” scenario where you’re then introduced to those who picked the same side as you and are set loose . Set loose into all that lovely soul crushing grind.
13/12/2008 at 23:33 matte_k says:
I imagine if they ran the light/dark system as something akin to WaR’s Order/Destruction split, i.e. the further you progress down one path or the other, then areas of the opposite orientation become closed off to you (for instance, if you tend towards being an evildoer, you’ll get so much grief in light sided areas you wouldn’t be able to last long in there) and newer areas aligned to your orientation open up. Of course, there’ll be large areas where both sides will meet in conflict, with the possibility that enough players could swing control of the sector to whichever side wins the conflict. Providing that it doesn’t get top heavy on either side, that could be promising.
Also, non Jedi/Sith classes could proffer themselves for hire as mercs or commandos, or traders/arms dealers, etc. to back up whichever side they feel like joining.
It’s a bit early to beat up on it really, i can see why people are, because so many MMO’s have promised big ideas and then failed to deliver, or been ruined in the pursuit of players cold, hard, cash, but it’s Bioware behind it-give them the time and space to grow the concepts properly, and it could produce something different and worthwhile, even if it isn’t a revelation.
Also, as far as the video goes, they’re just touting lightsabers and all the trimmings associated with that to get people interested, because they know that’s what the majority want. You wouldn’t want to see a video of just some guy walking down the street buying a new robe, would you?
Fingers Crossed, anyway…
13/12/2008 at 23:42 Wedge says:
Yes, it sounds like it’s just going to be a single player RPG with no saves and PvP after you finish the main quest. Stupid, perhaps? But they aren’t going to be charging a monthly fee if I recall either.
And the combat looks the same as KotoR but with better animations, anyone who thinks different never played KotoR.
14/12/2008 at 01:52 tmp says:
But that’s presuming each choice actually does split the population and sends the players down completely separate plot branches with absolutely no converge points… and even if such was the case it still boils down to total amount of possible choices vs the size of population. I’d expect this number to be quite limited — how many ‘real’ big choices does a player get to make, even in single player story-driven RPG? Really not that many…
14/12/2008 at 05:45 tabasco says:
It seems that everyone (especially Meat Circus) in this thread, except Wedge, is under the impression that TOR will have a monthly subscription fee. It will not. So to the people saying that it seems like it’ll be a single player game posing as a MMO, if it does, and that’s a big “if”, then you can’t bitch about paying $15/month for it. Of course, it remains to be seen what things players will have to pay for in their microtransaction business model. Hopefully it’ll only be for minor and/or cosmetic things, and not core aspects that should be free.
And another thing.. TOR is probably 2 years from release, and one of the devs in the video said that the footage is “pre-production”, so all the complaints about the graphics are just ignorant. I won’t ask you to have faith in EA, because they don’t deserve it, yet, but I think Bioware have earned enough respect for people to have faith in them.
14/12/2008 at 08:10 Rakysh says:
umm… Just cos they talked about the single player a lot, it doesn’t mean that is all.
It goes like this:
New Stuff: MASSIVE single player
Not so new: PvP, raids, groups, standard MMO stuff.
If they made a trailer solely about the second list of stuff, this thread would be filled with “And? What’s new?” ‘s. The devs are not going to make their first diary thingamajig about how it’s doing WoW slightly differently- they are going to emphasis the differences.
Just sayin’.
Personally, I hope that it’s not all jedi, or the server size is really small- like 500 or something. That way, there will never be way too many jedi. Obviously that has inherent problems, but it’s just an idea.
14/12/2008 at 10:09 Anthony Damiani says:
Dunno. If I could play $15 a month, and have access to KotOR-level single player story, I think I could go for it.
People overestimate how much the multiplayer component is key to the success of MMOs, and how much of it is just having so much content that it doesn’t run out– being able to absorb peoples’ time for 10 or 20 or 100 days /played if they’re sufficiently obsessive. Having other people there IS an important factor that adds replay value and extends the life of the game– but it’s historically come at the cost of narrative and meaningful player choice. That’s not a small tradeoff, and if you can have both, you’re accomplishing something.
As to being microtransaction based– obviously, this is a dealbreaker for a lot of people, and probably me. I certainly hope they don’t continue to attempt to export this model from the unique cultural and economic conditions of east Asia from which it originated. There’s at least some reasonable evidence that western consumers aren’t eager to embrace it (and, indeed, find it confusing– especially when hybrid models are attempred).
14/12/2008 at 11:40 Trithemius says:
A good idea for how story emerges from play-based conflicts might be to look at how the “traditional” (i.e. bits of paper and polyhedron based) roleplaying games have done it: Vincent Baker’s “In A Wicked Age” has produced some quite neat and coherent narratives out of more or less unplanned conflictual encounters with other players.
14/12/2008 at 12:01 Johnson says:
@ tabasco
I totally agree with you, also they have said that the period in which it is set wont be all out conflict between the sith and the old republic rather wary hostilities and there will be some mixing. Also they have said that the sith and the republic aren’t going to be simple light/dark side splits you can just as easily have a dark republican (read: Dick Cheney) as you can a light Sith player.
14/12/2008 at 12:34 Morte says:
@Sanguine Lobster said “Emergent player stories are great and fun, but they tend not to have much depth to them, people fighting each other out of boredom and greed. From there throw in betrayals and long term plans from the same motivation, rinse and repeat. It’s involving, but player motivations are shallow at best.”
Yep. That’s why I eventually stopped persevering with EVE, a game I originally hoped would be a bit like pen and paper RPGs in its freedom and creativity. It turned out that you have freedom and creativity to fight over turf, make deals, and cheat on them. There just isn’t much you can improvise in a computer game compared to what a group of people around a table can do in their imagination.
“If this game could move past this, get the players involved with the world and the characters….. but that may be too much to hope for.”
But how do you have something like Planescape Torment in a MMO, where nobody is allowed to change the world enough to stop anybody else doing the quest fifteen seconds later? I’ve seen many solutions to this, mostly involving instancing (WoW, GW) or limiting what players can do to narratively simple stuff (EVE, Tabula Rasa). None of them seem satisfactory.
Ultimately massively multiplayer persistent world gaming seems like a bad idea. TF2 and COD4 and L4D, those are good massively multiplayer gaming. But if this Star Wars MMO is going to be a Massively Singleplayer Online RPG with occasional grouping and a chat channel… …maybe it would be better to admit that. Make KotOR3 a singleplayer RPG, plus drop in co-op and chat channels and guilds and whatnot.
14/12/2008 at 12:44 Valentin Galea says:
Post Grim Fandango Lucas Arts is non existent to me.
I have implanted this chip in my brain that actually blocks any reception and storage of notion or memory of everything Star Wars milk-cow related!:)
14/12/2008 at 13:07 Neil says:
Lightsaber battles will probably be handled the same way as martial arts in The Matrix Online. Hit a button and watch a few seconds of canned animations.
The light/dark reminds me a bit of the good/evil separation in EQ2. Sounded interesting in concept, but in practice it was just annoying.
At this point I’ve had all I can stomach of these games where the entire design revolves around killing the level 10 orcs so that you’re strong enough to beat the level 20 orcs. You can’t change anything in the game world except how powerful your character is, so that becomes the point of the game by default, which is why design and budget-wise, everything revolves around combat progression. It’s not a role playing game, it’s a glorified slaughterhouse, the only place where killing by the hundreds is boring and passe. Check in, do your time while you chat with your buds, collect your paycheck, check out.
And don’t get me started on how tired I am of every MMO putting a new facade on “tank, healer, damage”. “Taunting” as a character role is such idiotic, unintuitive game design. So is watching life bars.
How about making an MMO that employs varied interactions (not just collecting and killing) with a simulated, dynamic game world? Where the most meaningful rewards are not doing 0.5% more damage than you did before, but in seeing the effects of your actions on the course of the world?
What passes for innovation in MMOs makes me ill.
14/12/2008 at 18:59 Myros says:
What he said (Neil).
MMO = been there done that (100)
I really enjoyed the kotor games so I have some hope for this mmo, but based on what the devs have said so far it looks like the same old sheet. No MMO has a save game function wht would they continue to talk that up as if it was am innovative new feature? It’s like they dont realize there is a gaming world outside of kotor ;p
Myros
14/12/2008 at 19:09 Erlam says:
“They should have developed a system where all attacks that players make to one another are matched and blocked, (even successful attacks) but successful attacks take away – not life – but an energy of some sort.”
Despite all the story comments, all the ‘but it doesn’t LOOK like starwars,’ etc, I think the above will be the largest problem with the game.
Look at the (real) star wars movies. In all three, lightsabers are used sparingly, and end fights fast. If you are going to include them, you have to do something like the above mentioned, which people (including myself) have asked for before.
Lightsabers cut through anything – anything – thus having a wild swinging contest between two combatants won’t ever work. Starwars was largely about the Empire vs. the Rebellion, and how that happened. This is a Starwars game about the books, basically, which will significantly shrink the larger userbase. If you asked the average person who was between 20-40 what Starwars was about, how many of them would mention anything related to this game?
14/12/2008 at 19:49 MrMelons says:
After KOTOR 2, where i pretty much had every decision i had made in KOTOR 1 and 2 dicked by some stupid witch who “sumed” it all up for me, i’ve been skeptical of a 3rd KOTOR. Am i going to hit high level beat the big bad and then be told im going off into deep space after that last 2 KOTOR heroes? But its okay my choices will determine whether im good or not when i do go out there and leave everything i worked for behind.
Also i didn’t see any other classes other than jedi fighting in the preview. Now admittedly i haven’t been reading up on this game, but if jedi are the only playable character then im out. I LOVE jedi, but lets not forget the Fett, he just goes to show that you can be cool with the just guns and a will to kick some ass.
14/12/2008 at 19:55 MrMelons says:
@Neil
*CLAPCLAPCLAP* Bravo good man, just read your comment and i hope for that day to come as well. Just remember that the gaming industry isn’t about story anymore, that died when games moved on from 16bit when they needed a story for lack of graphics. Now everything just needs to be pretty and have achievements that make you feel like you have done something that day.
14/12/2008 at 21:39 tmp says:
It did work in two KotOR games so far.
15/12/2008 at 10:04 Lu-Tze says:
Taking all bets on ratio of Sith to Jedi. Current favourite is 10:1.
15/12/2008 at 10:04 Bobsy says:
Anyone saying Eve doesn’t have story is a big pile of super-wrong I’m afraid. Eve’s story is player-driven, the constant gnashing of empires built and populated by players grinding up against each other.
Put as simply as my Monday-brain can get it: a story does not have to have been written down first.
There is hope for the future, a ludicrously over-ambitious hope at that. Infinity! Inf! In! Ih! Tee! But beyond that… eh.
Frankly, I’m not holding much hope for TOR. I don’t want it to fail, because it would lose Bioware money, but at the same time I don’t particularly feel any urge to play it.
15/12/2008 at 11:47 myname says:
They really need to take MMO’s out of the quest/kill grind – make the story and progression the player’s, not “the game’s”. That’s why skill based level systems are the way ahead.
As someone above on this page said, let the players create the stories and the content, and then “lift” that to everybody’s attention.
15/12/2008 at 12:47 Larington says:
Bearing in mind that recent 10 page piracy article, maybe the people saying this sounds like a single player RPG as an MMO are more correct than they realise – That its at least in part Bioware being forced to adopt an alternative business model in order to ensure the game gives a proper return on investment (In otherwords, so the game sells well enough that it doesn’t potentially kill the developer).
15/12/2008 at 15:22 Eamo says:
Everytime I hear them say something like “we made choice so important, every choice you make impacts your character” I hear “we won’t allow you to respec and you will have to start over from level 1 if you want to change anything about your character”, choice that limits your options is not fun in an MMO.
As for people claiming EVE has story solved, for your first month playing EVE you won’t encounter any story whatsoever. The fact that you can capture regions of space and develop your own corporations isn’t story, it is game mechanics.
In the EVE universe things change but that isn’t really a story. It is just the passing of time. I am sure a few players could recite the history of big corporations and alliances in EVE but it is not a story. It is just history. Without narrative arcs, without plot twists, without character development it isn’t a story, just a sequence of events.
15/12/2008 at 16:31 Bobsy says:
History is a story. It is THE story.
(I took a history degree. Can you tell?)
15/12/2008 at 21:15 jon says:
But can I be a Han Solo style smuggler and have a pet Wookie?
16/12/2008 at 16:40 bazzy says:
This is why I don’t think such a game will ever work (for me, at least). To truly capture the star wars feel, you need to have the option of being a Jedi and facing overwhelming odds (waves of stormtroopers/clone warriors/etc), if EVERYONE is a Sith/Jedi then they’re no longer special, everyone may as well be an Ewok, you’re all equally matched.
The only way this could work is if you could somehow incentivise people to play as the cannon fodder, but how do you do that? Give them awesome equipment/phat loots and you’ll soon be back to square 1. You could perhaps have people play two distinct characters and allow them to build up time (ten hours as a bog standard trooper buys you an hour with your Jedi), this theoretically would mean the ratio of Jedi to everyone else is 10:1, but how do you ensure the 10 hours is productive and not just the PC running overnight, or that your Jedi time doesn’t run out during an important quest, etc. I just can’t see a way to make it work, unless we pay everyone in China WoW gold to play as grunts… hmm…