SWTOR = WoW in space?

[BloodOmen]

Interesting read on the Ensidia website.

Article below for those that cant be arsed to click link at the bottom of the page.

"Several articles have come out in the aftermath of E3 and the demo of EA and Bioware's new MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and they don't seem too positive. The first, via gamesindustry.biz, is from analyst firm Cowen and Company who called the game "highly derivative" of WoW and even ragged on the game's visuals, calling them "competent". The firm also doubts the game is coming in 2011, basing this on EA's silence about the release date and a drop in its share price.

"Despite promises from EA/Bioware that the title represents a major step forward in MMO design, what we saw was essentially a World of Warcraft clone with Star Wars character skins and the Bioware RPG nice/nasty dialogue tree mechanism bolted on for non-player character conversations."

The other is a much more extensive preview on Kotaku, with a somewhat misleading title "The more they keep telling me Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't like WOrld of Warcraft, the less I want to play". It's a very subjective article, with the author stating his opinions and thoughts on not only the game itself, but also how much of a Star Wars feel it has for him. The man certainly knows his stuff, as you can clearly see from his comments on KOTOR: "I'm fairly certain that most fans of KOTOR 1 and 2—games that themselves took dozens of hours to complete—just want more KOTOR." He goes on to clarify the title itself, mentioning how much the game looks like WoW, and the more they kept telling him it doesn't, the sillyer they looked. The article really is a blast to read and you should check it out, but here are a few great quotes anyway:

"(And Lord does Bioware think players of massively multiplayer games care about story; they've bet what is rumored to be hundreds of millions of dollars on it.)
"Then the players ran further into the castle to give Baron Von Space a stern talking to. When he appeared on the screen—fully voice-acted, as are all the random characters in SW:TOR—he was wearing a cape and what looked like a metal marching band hat. He looked ridiculous. Space ridiculous.
"And while its gameplay may be different from World of Warcraft, it's clearly only different in ways that passionate MMO gamers will be able to discern. To the rest of us, it's going to be World of Warcraft wearing a brown robe and carrying a lightsaber. It could have been so much more."

The intro trailer they showed at E3 was also mildly bad, as we discussed in the forum thread, and you can also check out my own feelings about the game here."


Original article: http://manaflask.com/article/994/the-old-republic-wow-in-space


Edit: must admit after reading it all I had a good old chuckle at EA/Biowares failings, yet another WoW clone as predicted when the closed beta started.

 

[Ctuchik]

Explain to me what exactly it is about SW:TOR that makes it a WoW clone.

 

[Helme]

I'd suggest looking at that 1 hour gameplay video in the other thread, it plays pretty much identical to WoW with the only difference being voiced quest givers - and poorly voiced one's at that.

 

[Ctuchik]

Yes it's similar, but it's not a clone.

Take a look at Perpetuum and compare it to EvE if you want to know what a MMO clonereally is.

 

[LordjOX]

The Bioware good / bad system is also quite bland. The options are so obvious and it's all black and white, making for some boring story really.

 

[BloodOmen]

World of Warcraft with lightsabers.

 

[Dreamor]

It is still in Development, not Beta...

And while its gameplay may be different from World of Warcraft, it's clearly only different in ways that passionate MMO gamers will be able to discern.

Maybe it is just me, but isn't Manaflask sponsored or in the Blizzard cheque book? fanboi much?

 

[BloodOmen]

It is still in Development, not Beta...



Maybe it is just me, but isn't Manaflask sponsored or in the Blizzard cheque book? fanboi much?

Stating the obvious doesnt make me a fanboy not my fault star wars fans can't handle the truth. And from what I remember Ensidia set up Manaflask who in turn have alot of different sponsors.

 

[Dreamor]

Stating the obvious doesnt make me a fanboy not my fault star wars fans can't handle the truth.

Difficult to take a review serious when there income is from WoW and then they say they are not 'passionate gamers'.. when they hardcore pvp

Also, isn't EA/Bioware's share price actually highest it has been for the past year? (Electronic Arts Inc.: NASDAQ:ERTS quotes & news - Google Finance)

 

[BloodOmen]

Difficult to take a review serious when there income is from WoW and then they say they are not 'passionate gamers'.. when they hardcore pvp

Also, isn't EA/Bioware's share price actually highest it has been for the past year? (Electronic Arts Inc.: NASDAQ:ERTS quotes & news - Google Finance)

Evidently you didnt read it then, not all the reviews come from Manaflask they came from outside sources, Manaflask merely pointed them out.

First one mentioned: Star Wars: The Old Republic "highly derivative" of Warcraft | News (Not Manaflask)

Second one mentioned: The More They Keep Telling Me Star Wars: The Old Republic Isn't Like World of Warcraft, the Less I Want to Play (Not Manaflask)

"Joel Johnson — I just had a hands-on demo with the hugely anticipated massively multiplayer role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic, but after an hour of watching self-described sizzle reels of prerendered and in-game footage, showing casually pirouetting Jedi and environments full of foxfire and crepitating tails of energy, I couldn't actually make myself actually play the game. This isn't the Star Wars I love. This is a cartoon fantasy of a world that once felt lived in, ancient and crumbling, but is presented now—three-thousand years before the events of the Star Wars movies—as mawkishly digestible neoteny.

Which isn't to say SW:TOR is going to be a bad game or that its story will be bad. (And Lord does Bioware think players of massively multiplayer games care about story; they've bet what is rumored to be hundreds of millions of dollars on it.) It's simply clear that the world that Bioware has created (or reinterpreted), the world in which they expect players to spend hundreds or thousands of hours within, is so unlike the Star Wars that excites me that I can't bear the thought of spending all that time living inside that universe.

Bioware is good at storytelling, certainly, and they'll be the first to tell you so. "Bioware-level RPG" is the term used a few times by Dallas Dickinson, a producer of SW:TOR and one of Bioware's presentation men. ("Boom!")

"People keep asking where Knights of the Old Republic 3 is," explained Dickinson as the box art for the previous two titles of Bioware's beloved single-player RPGs set in the Star Wars universe animated onto the video screen in the small presentation room. "But we've put Knights of the Old Republic 3 and four...and five...and six and seven and eight...inside The Old Republic."

Not that I will think less of you for playing SW:TOR.

I'm fairly certain that most fans of KOTOR 1 and 2—games that themselves took dozens of hours to complete—just want more KOTOR.

Not that I will think less of you for playing SW:TOR. It looks like a perfectly serviceable MMO, even if it is cast very much from the same mold that has made the seemingly eternal World of Warcraft a lifestyle choice for over ten million fans. I enjoy WOW (or did for the couple of years I played). I enjoyed SW:TOR's nearly forgotten antecedent Star Wars Galaxies even more in some ways, largely because it felt like Star Wars—a universe in which smugglers and cantina dancers were common and magical knights and wizards were rare. (Mostly I just liked setting up moisture harvesters. I'm a farmer at heart.)

But I've put in hundreds of hours into MMOs before. It's going to take a very compelling experience to draw me into another one. (I barely have time to play all the other games I want to play.) I have largely ignored SW:TOR in its previous demos because I believe that a few minutes here and there aren't enough to give a player real information about how a game will play. (So, you know, maybe the gameplay is brilliant. I'm just talking about my feeeelings.)

Before our small group of fans and journalists in the screening room were loosed on the PCs on which the game demo had been prepared, we were shown a five-minute tutorial video (also narrated by a pre-recorded Dickinson). He showed us how to play the game, how to properly prepare our characters for battle. "Press G to [my pen fell asleep]. Then right-click on the enemy to [my pen ran out of the room to play Battlefield 3]." I'm not totally trying to be a jackass about this, but after having spent twenty minutes previously being told how Bioware was bringing something entirely new to the world of MMOs, sarcasm is my only defense against the cognitive dissonance experienced when watching a game that plays more-or-less just like World of Warcraft.

More damning (to my poncy aesthete inclinations) is how much Star Wars: The Old Republic looks like World of Warcraft. A live demo (operated by Bioware employees) set on the planet Aldaraan—Princess Leia's adopted home planet and the first to feel the terribly disturbing power of the Death Star—involved a mission into some royal guy's castle. (His castle!) The party of Republic good guys did the sort of weightless, stand-in-place pantomime of combat we've come to accept in MMOs. (Backflip! Grenade that explodes next to a friend but only hurts the enemy! Force cracklin's!) Then the players ran further into the castle to give Baron Von Space a stern talking to. When he appeared on the screen—fully voice-acted, as are all the random characters in SW:TOR—he was wearing a cape and what looked like a metal marching band hat. He looked ridiculous. Space ridiculous.

I know George Lucas is largely to blame with the asinine allowances made in the prequels for clean-edged pageantry that barely alluded to the designs and styles of the original trilogy, but somehow SW:TOR—set three-thousand years before the movies, remember—comes off as even more ridiculous, a cartoon of a cartoon. Big, chunky architecture replicates known Star Wars settings but makes little logical, historical sense. Is this really a galaxy in which Sand People, a race of sentient marauders who live largely by scavenging, have worn the exact same types of goggles for thousands of years? After the Sith wiped out the Jedi, did they go after Ray-Ban? (It's all the more strange that SW:TOR feels this way when Bioware's own KOTOR series somehow held more authentic allusional heft toward the original trilogy of movies than the prequels did. They should be able to do this!)

In the introduction movie—prerendered graphics that look little like the art style of the game itself—someone giving a speech mentions how "the Empire returned", as if the Empire and the Republic are simply warring factions and not descriptive, political terms describing transitive, competing states of government. (Or maybe more simply "perspectives". The United States is a republic that could also arguably be called an empire, depending on which end of our guns you might be staring at.) The movies try to address this to a limited extent by making a distinction between the Empire and the Sith, the anti-Jedi who basically use the Force for selfish purposes with seemingly only cosmetic consequence.

But in SW:TOR, with its good faction and its bad faction both capable of making "light side" or "dark side" choices, the distinction-the dramatic tension of human consequence-is reduced to its grossest representation. Because of the way MMO gameplay works (because no one can apparently figure out a way to truly rejigger the tropes) your party often needs a healer. The Empire is evil so it can't just have a healer, right? So instead the Empire characters have an ability called..."Dark Heal".

But I am more dubious than ever that SW:TOR will be the sort of experience that will trigger and compound those deep-set feelings that Star Wars the movie can still evoke.

God bless 'em, I'll probably give Star Wars: The Old Republic a try. Even the most terrible game can be made fun with friends—and it doesn't look terrible, just uninspired—and I remain intrigued about how well Bioware has wedded story to a game type that I don't think actually needs that much story. (The way party members all roll a random number to select who gets to pick the dialogue spoken to non-player characters is a clever way to bolt some gameplay into a place that could get dreary quickly, for instance.)

But I am more dubious than ever that SW:TOR will be the sort of experience that will trigger and compound those deep-set feelings that the Star Wars movies can still evoke.

And while its gameplay may be different from World of Warcraft, it's clearly only different in ways that passionate MMO gamers will be able to discern. To the rest of us, it's going to be World of Warcraft wearing a brown robe and carrying a lightsaber. It could have been so much more."

 

[Ctuchik]

lol, that's just one big ass QQ against the storytelling.

He (or she) is wrong tho, a lot of MMO gamers *do* care about the story.

And if it worked in DA:O, DA2, ME and ME2, then why the hell not in a MMO?

All four of those games have TONS of interactive cut-scenes, so what makes it so horrible to have the same in a MMO?

 

[Punishment]

 

[Everz]

lol, that's just one big ass QQ against the storytelling.

He (or she) is wrong tho, a lot of MMO gamers *do* care about the story.

And if it worked in DA:O, DA2, ME and ME2, then why the hell not in a MMO?

All four of those games have TONS of interactive cut-scenes, so what makes it so horrible to have the same in a MMO?

A cut-scene in an MMO? Shoot me now if those pos ever made it into one. Story/lore plays a massive part in the game however, but it's Star Wars, how can you go wrong?

Said it before and will say it again, this has flop written all over it, the same as every cnuting thing that the MMO industry is offering now. Another WoW clone tarted up as something 'new'.

I'll give it a year after release before its closed.

 

[BloodOmen]

they'll not have it everz star wars fanboys through and through (not that being a fanboy is a bad thing, especially to star wars as its awesome) but this MMO will not be awesome, i'll give it 2-3 months after the majority start hitting max level before people start quitting.

 

[Everz]

Have they not watched that Gameplay video.. it looks like WoW in Space with a new UI :|.

 

[Helme]

lol, that's just one big ass QQ against the storytelling.

He (or she) is wrong tho, a lot of MMO gamers *do* care about the story.

And if it worked in DA:O, DA2, ME and ME2, then why the hell not in a MMO?

All four of those games have TONS of interactive cut-scenes, so what makes it so horrible to have the same in a MMO?

All those other BioWare games, yeah they aren't really that "well liked" if you look at the amount of sales they've gotten. ~2-3 million on all three platforms is really quite small, and this time they're focusing on the smallest of them in terms of pure numbers. I don't think story is that big of a draw, especially when you look at BioWare's own statistics on their games which showed that only about half the players actually finished them at all.

They'll also compete against already established MMO's, something singleplayer games never really do. I don't think their one defining gimmick will last long, and when people have raced to the top and ran out of content there's not going to be much left - and things like Guild Wars 2 which seems to focus on more dynamic content will probably steal most customers at this point.

Something else to take into consideration is that BioWare has no experience balancing an online game, it's really not that easy going by how imbalanced most MMO's are. Blizzard had a long background in competitive RTS games before they began on WoW, and it's still fairly imbalanced despite their good reputation in RTS circles. My experience with BioWare's so far has been pretty dire. Most of their games are heavily imbalanced, some of it might be blamed on the underlying rule set (the D&D games) but taking Dragon Age as an example, it's really flawed when it comes to class balance and that doesn't bode well for PvP or serious PvE.

I’m not saying the game is guaranteed to fail, but I personally don’t see it lasting that long when the competition is either established, or is taking more creative risks to try mix up the genre. I’m also curious about how well it will really be received by Star Wars fans, especially the ones who played Galaxies – because I believe most of them will agree that it was this same direction really that ruined the previous game, and I also believe they’d argue that it’s the world that is interesting, not the actual stories because they range from fairly terrible to really fucking terrible.

 

[Ctuchik]

Don't worry, they apparently have the best ppl from the DAoC pvp team on board to help with the balance... xD

 

[Xandax]

So .... a traditional MMO is a clone of another traditional MMO that is a clone of a third traditional MMO.... whoa - good thing that got uncovered. Who saw that one coming?


Good thing that Bioware set out to make a traditional MMO then.

 

[Xandax]

<snip>
Something else to take into consideration is that BioWare has no experience balancing an online game, it's really not that easy going by how imbalanced most MMO's are. Blizzard had a long background in competitive RTS games before they began on WoW, and it's still fairly imbalanced despite their good reputation in RTS circles. <snip>

Look at the MMO market. The biggest hits on the market all looks to be made by companies which had no previous MMOs under their belt.
And just because a company have not release a MMO does not mean the developers working in that company haven't.

And "balancing RTS" is hardly comparable to balancing MMOs for PvP/PvE. Then balancing D&D classes counts as well.

 

[Zede]

lol, that's just one big ass QQ against the storytelling.

He (or she) is wrong tho, a lot of MMO gamers *do* care about the story.

And if it worked in DA:O, DA2, ME and ME2, then why the hell not in a MMO?

All four of those games have TONS of interactive cut-scenes, so what makes it so horrible to have the same in a MMO?

With Lich King at least, i did the all the story quests, (and avoided others) for the thrill at "unlocking" the groovy cut scenes. The horde/alliance armies attack on the L.king was super. I think it will appeal to the more mature gamer

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

The problem with storytelling in most MMOs is... most people that make MMOs are shit at storytelling and engaging the player. Rift is a good example. Good fun but shit (like really shit) lore and very generic storytelling which is amongst the poorest I've seen in an pay-to-play MMO. In the entire levelling process I think I found two quest chains which were fun to find out where the story was going (the prison area in Shimmersand and a quest chain in Iron Pine where you're tracking down one of the big bads and the story has you sneaking around all kinds of places).

Bioware at least know how to make engaging stories. They have, after all, been doing this a long time. There's nothing wrong with making this the focus of an MMO. Longevity might be an issue but if it provides fun for a few months then I'll play it for a few months then move on.

 

[Ctuchik]

Bioware at least know how to make engaging stories. They have, after all, been doing this a long time. There's nothing wrong with making this the focus of an MMO. Longevity might be an issue but if it provides fun for a few months then I'll play it for a few months then move on.

The longevity of the story in SW:TOR will come down to how many branches the story has.

If it's purely a choice of good versus evil and then a straight path to the end then no, it won't be that great, but if the choices along the path branch out then it will have one hell of a potential as you can roll an alt and still have a story you probably haven't seen before.

City of Heroes/Villains does this fairly well, but as it's all just plain text (and a lot of it) it's fairly hard to keep focused on following the different story's...

One thing i also am hoping for is that at least some of the choices will come at a price so people will have to think about it, not just speed clicking their way through it.

Speaking of nothing at all, they won't allow addons in this game right?

God please say they won't!

 

[adoNix]

its gonna flop, just like WAR, aion, rift, conan etc..

 

[Fafnir]

its gonna flop, just like WAR, aion, rift, conan etc..

Well should atleast get a 2 weeks to a month out of it.

 

[Helme]

This is really a problem, if everyone just gives it two weeks they're still going to earn all the money back and continue doing the same things over and over and over. WAR was a financial success, despite being a shit game. Conan was a financial success. Aion too.

 

[Embattle]

You don't make MMOs for short term success but as a long term revenue stream.

 

[ECA]

its gonna flop, just like WAR, aion, rift, conan etc..

Do you have ANY idea how much money aion made?
It's the #1 mmo in korea atm, and it made a crap ton of money in europe/us as well.

Something like 3 million subs in korea alone.

 

[adoNix]

Do you have ANY idea how much money aion made?
It's the #1 mmo in korea atm, and it made a crap ton of money in europe/us as well.

Something like 3 million subs in korea alone.

daamn so i guess since they have made so much money the game is worth playing.. guess i should go back to WoW

 

[ECA]

Nice strawman, you said it was a flop, it wasn't = fail.

 

[Ctuchik]

daamn so i guess since they have made so much money the game is worth playing.. guess i should go back to WoW

Obviously it is worth playing for quite a lot of people. But it's not the games fault if you are not one of them...

Blame you're taste, not the game..