Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Almost forgot there was another Bioware game in the offing (two, in fact – Mass Effect 2 also looms) amidst all this cheery chatter about Dragon Age. The Old Republic remains The New Hope of both Star Wars games and mainstream MMOs, and while we’re all lacking a clear picture of quite how it’s going to play, Bioware are at least providing a steady drip-feed of new info. This time, some of their thinking behind the Jedi class, and the revelation of what another class will be – boo-hiss-baddies, these ones…

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The time when I get really envious of game developers is usually when they get down to the full sweep of world building. In this latest video Bioware talk about the making of the city-planet of Coruscant in The Old Republic, and explain how they’ve had to build a planet entirely without terrain – a purely urban setting, miles deep – while also getting across a spectrum of political power and corruption via the gradation of environments through layers of the capital of the Republic. Ooh, there’s also some boasting! This is an unprecedented city environment, they claim, with the kind of infrastructure that would be required for a sort of endless Manhattan, which dwarfs any city environments in other games. From the shiny surface mega-structures of the senate and the spaceport, down to the endless dereliction of the lower levels. It’s a kind of architectural encyclopedia of Star Warsian styles all on its own. And what is going on with Robert Chestney’s t-shirt? Ah, the many mysteries of Star Wars…
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And the internet has flattened the SWTOR site. Theoretically you can sign up here, with the beta stuff here. But the site is now unavailable. Basically you sign up to the SWTOR site and then opt in for testing in your profile blather. No date for commencement has been decided upon, and places for the test are described by LucasArts as “limited” so getting in might be a long shot. Probably worth having a go if you’re interested, of course.

Did we mention we were rather warm in our anticipation of The Old Republic? John had some pretty hefty preview thoughts to unload after E3, and we’ve been eager to learn a bit more. It seems IGN scooped the internet on that count, with a four part, twenty-minute developer walkthrough of parts of the game, including the early bounty-hunter, smuggler and Sith sequences, with lots more besides. Posted below, it is. This is heavy spoiler territory, obviously, so those of you who are definitely on course to play this game might want to avoid it. On the other hand, that bit where he walks out onto the surface of Hutta…
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The LucasArts peeps reveal the motivation to have Star Wars: The Old Republic be a fully voiced MMO, in a video below. None has done it before (although it’s not the only MMO in development aiming to do it), and it’s a huge task. Especially in a game that’s essentially two games, since there’s no shared quests between Republic and Sith campaigns. It’s hundreds of thousands of lines.

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I adore the sheer arrogance of this video. The Old Republic setting requires leaving familiar Star Wars characters behind, right? Well, seems Bioware have said “fuggit – let’s just put Darth Vader in there anyway.” Clearly it’s not actually ol’ talk, dark and bronchial, but, y’know – it really is. And, come the end of this video, it’s the Vader vs Obi-Wan lightsaber fight the world had been praying and hoping Episode 3 would offer, and that it so summarily failed to deliver upon. This cinematic, then, may not be explaining all that much about how the game plays, but it is saying one thing loud and clear – “we’re going to fix Star Wars.”
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Bioware have released another trailer detailing the development process of their MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. There’s a bunch of stuff here about the art direction of the individual planets, Tython, Korriban, Hutta, and Ord Mantell. The stuff about the Hutt world is particularly fun.
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Thanks to Bioware’s original brilliant idea to set Knights Of The Old Republic safely 4,000 years before the Lucas films, the forthcoming MMO, The Old Republic, can distance itself from the events of KotOR and KotOR II, without having to worry about nibbling at the heels of the movie story. But it still gets confusing, so Bioware have put out a video explaining the timeline of events that led from the KotOR games to the events at the beginning of SW:TOR. Or at least we think Bioware have. It’s made with unanimated artwork, which makes it all look like the illustration from a Bible story you were shown in primary school. Ignore the pictures, and focus on the voice over.

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Bioware have continued to pump out the awesome preview content for The Old Republic MMO, this time with a detailed web page on the Bounty Hunter class. It explains the character type’s background, complete with some mini movie clips of the Mandalorian armour showing off its flamethrower and jetpack functions. See, not everyone will want lightsabres.

This latest huge documentary from Bioware/LucasArts (below) features of tonnes of new information about the upcoming Star Wars MMO, although the in-game footage is somewhat lacking. The piece mostly looks at the story and player experience, heavily illustrated with concept art, whilst also exploring some of the context for the Old Republic – the treaty between Sith and Jedi that creates the tense period in which the game starts out. It’s pretty interesting – suggesting more and more than this might just be the Star Wars MMO that works. Go take a look.
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