Star Wars: The Old Republic

[Boohugh]

Seeing as there isn't an official thread started about this yet I thought I'd do the honours!

Bioware is developing Star Wars: The Old Republic, an MMORPG set a couple of hundred years after KOTOR2. It seems they are actually fairly far along too, although I'm not sure there will be a release anytime this year.

The official website is http://www.swtor.com/ and actually has some info about the game now, definitely worth taking a look at (the latest updates introduce the first class: the Bounty Hunter). It seems the story-driven aspect is central to the game development which is good news . Bioware acknowledge that a well-developed story is often what is missing from current MMO's, so they are putting alot of effort into that part (they see the story as 1 of 4 pillars that should make up an MMORPG, you can read all about it on the site). In terms of the amount of content they are creating, they describe it as KOTOR3-10 put together!

I know there are quite a few KOTOR fans out there, how do you all feel about it being an MMO, etc? Can't wait myself and Bioware definitely seem to be taking it seriously rather than just a title guaranteed to make money due to the brand.

[keravnos]

I LOVED KOTOR. One of the best RPG's I have played and I am really mad at myself for not finishing it. RL has a way of getting in the way, what can I say? Anyways, thing is that even if I loved KOTOR, a MMORG is a NO NO if only for the time investment needed. I would absolutely love to play it, but I am not 17 years old.

Anyways thanks for the link. It is deffinitely worth looking into this.

[Monk]

First let me get this out of the way:

I loved Kotor 1. I loved it. If i could I would package my love and send it to bioware with a pretty pink ribbon with a card that declares "To my heroes". The only thing that kept such fanboyish attitudes in check when kotor 2 came around was just how unfinished the final product was. It hated my ATI card and loved to crash, not to mention the ending was severely rushed and there was more plot holes present than in Phantom Menace. Which is impressive when you think about it. Most impressive.

Now that we've got my own personal feelings for the previous two games out of the way, let's talk about the MMO. It looks interesting but what makes me a bit hesitant is, as previously stated, it's an MMO. While I have nothing against the genre itself the very nature of it lends itself to needing vast swaths of time to be a sound investment. It's a very, very needy thing.

A KOTOR MMO could work, and that is why Bioware is making one. Yet the sad thing is it's just another MMO. How many of those are currently on the market? 08 was a crazy year for the MMO and it seemed like every single month a new game was being released. It's good to see that sort of MMO-arms race has stopped, but one wonders how successful this will be with such a saturated market. I know personally I will not be going anywhere near it for two reasons, one was stated above: the nature of the beast.

The second is simply that Bioware has zero experience with MMOs. None. And anyone who has played them will tell you, no matter how much polish they receive they are almost always buggy at release (Warhammer Online is a great example). One might ask why, well the very genre lends itself to that with how massive it is, it's right in the name afterall!

Sure with time the good ones are cleaned up and are very fun, but is Bioware prepared to commit the huge amount of resources they will need to survive the first year? Like an episode of X-files. I want to believe they can get it done, but I just can't make that leap of faith.

Bioware acknowledge that a well-developed story is often what is missing from current MMO's,

That is not at all fair on Bioware's behalf. Many of the "top dogs" of the MMO scene have amazing depth to their story. Everquest 2 is still going, not as strong as it used to but it still commands a respectable clientbase, and their story you need to buy a huge book just to get all the history of it. Warhammer Online.. well, it's based on the Warhammer franchise from Games Workshop. You can't tell me with a straight face that hasn't got a good story. Then the massive beast that is World of Warcraft, and again.. it's warcraft.

There's a lot of throw-away MMOs on the market true, but to think they are unique in having a central story driven forward by quests is just laughable. Bioware really should take a look around, if they are going into this thing with blinders on they don't have a chance.

[Major Robert Dump]

MMOs are businesses. No matter how well they are initially done, they are doomed to degrade to the WOW model and cater to the lowest common denominator for the sake of subscriptions, which ultimately screws the people who played from the beginning. I have a hard time justifying any sort of time investment -- even with AFKing and macros and offline economies -- when all of your in-game assets can we wiped clean or made irrelevant in a single unannounced game revision.

I would actually be more inclined to play an MMO that was free with an in-game item mall, because if all else fails I can always buy myself success. I played Voyage Century for a few months in the summer of 2007 and had an absolute blast without ever having to buy anything from the item mall, but had I kpet playing I would have had to for the sake of catching up with the Pkers.

As for KOTOR, loved the original story, still ranks as one of the best RPGs ever, and I still can't bring myself to get rid of my xbox copy and occasionally pop it in and play for a few minutes when theres nothing else going on. The deathmatch announcer was soooo funny.

I'll check out the website in a bit. At my age, though, I'm just about Star-Warsed out. The universe is cool, the original story lines intriguing, but really.....

[frogbeastegg]

KOTOR is one of my favourite games and my second most replayed games from the last decade.

KOTOR II would have been awesome if it had been finished. Pity it wasn't.

Bioware have made some of my favourite games ever, full stop and on any platform. Their last effort, Mass Effect, is my most replayed game from the last decade and I love it as much as that implies.

I'm an RPG nut. PC, console, western style, Japanese style, sandbox, dungeon crawler, grand epic, linear, sky high budget, puny budget, earth-shatteringly famous or painfully obscure - I adore them and play stacks of them. There is only one type I do not play: MMORPG.

The KOTOR MMORPG interests me as much as a proposition to have my fingers slowly lasered off without anaesthetic. MMORPGs are the anti-thesis of everything I like in an RPG save one thing: levelling a character up. That I can do in a few thousand other games, without monthly fees and the nuisance of needing to be online and surrounded by people who behave abusively or pretend to be Gandalf.

Not interested, never will be. If there's no singleplayer KOTOR then the series is dead to me.

[Major Robert Dump]

Looks like companions, aka pets, will be a pretty big part of the game, which seems to play on part-building. May be cool if you can shape and equip these companions as opposed to the cookie cutter ones you got in Diablo 2, for example.

Just watched the video. They said there are class-specific stories, which tells me you will be locked into a class tree from the beginning. This makes me also presume it will be level based. This makes me lose interest. While it may not be good for mass subscriptions, I find the far better MMO model is to allot a set amount of points, enable various class trees with ascending and descending point costs, and let players distribute those points however they wish as long as they meet the profession experience and prerequisites for the trees. It's called dabbling, and it makes for a much more immersive and entertaining game, more so than making all XP generic and locking someone into a set path.

I hate level-based MMOs. Hate them. Furthermore, I hate the idea that people can look at you and tell what class you are, or be able to tell what class you are by the shiny ring that flashed every time you use a particular move.

I also haven't been able to tell if there is space combat. For the games sake, I hope so, because Star Wars without space fights is pretty fruity.

[Meneldil]

MMOs are businesses. No matter how well they are initially done, they are doomed to degrade to the WOW model and cater to the lowest common denominator for the sake of subscriptions, which ultimately screws the people who played from the beginning. I have a hard time justifying any sort of time investment -- even with AFKing and macros and offline economies -- when all of your in-game assets can we wiped clean or made irrelevant in a single unannounced game revision.

Wait, what? Have you actually played WoW or are you just making that up?

I once again have to stand to defend MMO's, and WoW (even though I've stopped playing MMO's and WoW a while ago), because most opinions here seem to be completely baseless. MMO's are not more time consuming than other games (though they are more likely to create addiction).

You can play WoW 30min to 1h a day and still be a competitive PvP player. You can raid once or twice a week and still enjoy PvE content. You just have to find players who share the same view of the game.
According to the Left4Dead topic (which I enjoy reading because your AARs are fun), I know a lot of WoW players who spend less time on WoW than you do on L4D.
And I don't think WoW cater to the lowest common denominator. I'd say it's probably the most complex game ever created. It does not focus on PvP or PvE exclusively, it allows casual gamers to enjoy the game and get good gear, while the hardcore players get craploads of vanity/uber items.

And no game revision made anything irrelevant. All the "OMG I'LL STOP MY SUBSCRIPTION IF THAT PATCH IS MADE LIVE" is a bunch of crying by stupid spoiled kids, who will continue to play the game anyway (unfortunately).

As for a Star Wars MMORPG, I can see it failing right away. The licence is too big to be turned into a successful MMO, and all the "Our game will be much better than everything else (ie. WoW)" speech left a bad taste in my mouth after WAR online.

[Crandaeolon]

MMO's are not more time consuming than other games

The quandary of subscription-based MMO's is this: in order to gain maximum profits, the game company needs to keep people playing. The cheapest and easiest way to do this is to increase repetition of old content. This is a conflict of interest (assuming that most people don't want to grind) and while I'll admit that it doesn't directly translate to MMO's being more time consuming, it's certainly a strong indicator.

You can play WoW 30min to 1h a day and still be a competitive PvP player.

Really? Suppose I'll start playing WoW now, less than one hour a day, completely from scratch; how long would it take me to reach all PvP content and have the best gear, assuming that I could play the game perfectly right off the bat?

[Major Robert Dump]

Wait, what? Have you actually played WoW or are you just making that up?

I once again have to stand to defend MMO's, and WoW (even though I've stopped playing MMO's and WoW a while ago), because most opinions here seem to be completely baseless. MMO's are not more time consuming than other games (though they are more likely to create addiction).

You can play WoW 30min to 1h a day and still be a competitive PvP player. You can raid once or twice a week and still enjoy PvE content. You just have to find players who share the same view of the game.
According to the Left4Dead topic (which I enjoy reading because your AARs are fun), I know a lot of WoW players who spend less time on WoW than you do on L4D.
And I don't think WoW cater to the lowest common denominator. I'd say it's probably the most complex game ever created. It does not focus on PvP or PvE exclusively, it allows casual gamers to enjoy the game and get good gear, while the hardcore players get craploads of vanity/uber items.

And no game revision made anything irrelevant. All the "OMG I'LL STOP MY SUBSCRIPTION IF THAT PATCH IS MADE LIVE" is a bunch of crying by stupid spoiled kids, who will continue to play the game anyway (unfortunately).

As for a Star Wars MMORPG, I can see it failing right away. The licence is too big to be turned into a successful MMO, and all the "Our game will be much better than everything else (ie. WoW)" speech left a bad taste in my mouth after WAR online.

I played WOW for a couple of months. And I thought it sucked. Complex you say? You are kidding, right? All the templates are cookie cutter, with some subclass specialties thrown in along the way to make people think they are being original. The economy is a joke, crafting is a joke, and the level based system is a joke. Raids were much ado about nothing, guilds based around raiding was pathetic, and while I must admit the PVP could be fun it just boiled down to the same old pvp crap in every other game where your opponents know what cookie cutter template you are as soon as you use your cookie cutter special with fancy cookie cutter graphics, and the only way to make your cookie cutter template better was with elite cookie cutter equipment which required cookie cutter spawn grinding or cookie cutter raiding over and over and over again.


I've also played COH/COV/ DDO, Eve, and SWG pre and post NGE. DDO may be the worst game I've ever played. I wouldnt even rank WOW with Eve or COH, let alone the released version of SWG, that is, until they nerfed SWG to make it a WOW clone.

MMOs need real crafting, with real, harvestable resources, with real crafting professions, not heraldric cube crafting like every other game seems to use. MMOs need medics and doctors that heal and craft and fight, not medics and doctors that are useless on their own and only offer heals that are reflective, or reactive, I mean how about a point click and heal system, why does it always seem to be some crap like life leech, or reflective heals, or heals that have % chance to heal when hit....i hate all the gay diablo 2 stats that mmos are filled with.

And PVP. Pfft. I want open PVP, not some crap where you have to a special place at a special time and get absolutely nothing for pvping in the pvp zone. I don't expect to be able to go into any town and just murder noobs anytime i want, but a system of temporary enemy flags and declaration of pvp status while in the general public so others can declare too and fight with or against your faction....thats hella lot more fun then PVP "zones." I'm still undecided on penalties for dying, but any way you look at it what worries me most about the bounty hunter profession in this game is that it will be gayed down to prevent peoples feelings from being hurt. If anyone here thinks that players are just going to be able to wontonly place bounties on other players as long as they have the capital well then you are wrong, because people whine when they get PvPd. In fact I would be willing to bet that more than half the bounty hunter content outside the mani story will be tracking NPCs not players.

[Boohugh]

First I'd just like to point out, as a couple of you have brought it up, that KOTOR2 wasn't actually made by Bioware, it was made by Obsidian Entertainment (using Bioware's engine and some technical support from them), which is why it didn't have the normal quality you expect from Bioware games.

Secondly, addressing Monk's point

That is not at all fair on Bioware's behalf. Many of the "top dogs" of the MMO scene have amazing depth to their story. Everquest 2 is still going, not as strong as it used to but it still commands a respectable clientbase, and their story you need to buy a huge book just to get all the history of it. Warhammer Online.. well, it's based on the Warhammer franchise from Games Workshop. You can't tell me with a straight face that hasn't got a good story. Then the massive beast that is World of Warcraft, and again.. it's warcraft.

That is the exact problem. There is this great history and lore in these games but when you actually play through it, the story is just something that ticks along in the background, you don't feel you have any impact on it. I played WoW for a long time and one of my biggest gripes was how the world didn't seem to change due to your actions, it just all got rather stale doing the same quests and not really seeming to achieve anything, this is something I hope will be different with SW:TOR. From what I've read, I think Bioware's point in focusing on the story-driven aspect is that you actually get involved and have some sort of impact on your own characters story, which should significantly add to the immersion (I hope at least, we'll see how it turns out ).


It is very true that this is the first MMO Bioware are creating so that is also a point of worry but they do have a reputation for quality, so hopefully they'll make sure it is as bug-free as possible and they'll bring their normal quality to the table. There are always going to be some that sneak through but it seems unavoidable in games development these days, as long as they aren't totally game-breaking *cough* ETW CTD's *cough* then it shouldn't be too much of a problem. The one thing about an MMO is it probably gets better post-release support than almost every other type of game (there are always exceptions, of course, but it's true in general) just because the business model relies on keeping players.

My one area of concern, that I share with Frogbeastegg, about it being an MMO is the fact there will be lots of other people you have to share the world with. The fact there are other people alone isn't the problem, it's that there are always some who just ruin the immersion. To an extent that can be alleviated by playing on an RP server but it would need proper policing of rules for it to work. In a game where being immersed in the story is going to be one of the main selling points, this is perhaps the biggest pitfall Bioware will face and probably the one they can control the least unfortunately.

[frogbeastegg]

First I'd just like to point out, as a couple of you have brought it up, that KOTOR2 wasn't actually made by Bioware, it was made by Obsidian Entertainment (using Bioware's engine and some technical support from them), which is why it didn't have the normal quality you expect from Bioware games.

KOTOR II's problem was that it was rushed out by the publisher in time for Christmas. The game had a very short development period, and at the time most people were expecting an announcement that the release would be delayed by a few months. IIRC the release was actually moved forward a bit, hence the need to hack out wodges of content and crudely patch the overall story together.

Obsidian is packed full of ex-Bioware and Black Isle people, people who have made some of the finest PC RPGs we've had. The Fallout series, the Baldur's Gate series, Planescape: Torment, and so on. We had every reason to expect great things, and there's plenty of evidence KOTOR II would have been absolutely incredible with a few more months work. The cut content is contains some of the most outstanding plot and character material I've seen in a game.

KOTOR II broke my heart.

[jirisys]

KOTOR=somewhat bad characters but good finished gameplay.
KOTOR2=great characters but unfinished and rushed gameplay. However I loved all the concepts and complications of the plot.
TOR=Star Wars Galaxies, but with awful plot.

... Wait, just Star Wars Galaxies.

~Jirisys ()

[Samurai Waki]

I used to never write off games... but I'm just so tired of crap. Goodbye MMOs I hardly knew ye'.

[Motep]

This just ruined a long standing vague anticipation.

[Graphic]

KOTOR=somewhat bad characters but good finished gameplay.
KOTOR2=great characters but unfinished and rushed gameplay. However I loved all the concepts and complications of the plot.

I still liked it a lot, but KotOR 2 is such a missed opportunity. If everything that got cut was included, I think it would have easily been better than the first one.

Does anyone know if any of the restoration mods are actually done?

[Monk]

I still liked it a lot, but KotOR 2 is such a missed opportunity. If everything that got cut was included, I think it would have easily been better than the first one.

Does anyone know if any of the restoration mods are actually done?

The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod was released a while ago.

http://deadlystream.com/forum/forum/4-tslrcm/

Download link: http://deadlystream.com/forum/files/file/13-tslrcm/

Go forth and download, because it was a long time coming - and worth every moment of the wait.