“Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.”
Star Wars: The Old Republic will be similar to other MMOs but with several key innovations. Traditionally MMOs are built on three pillars; Exploration, Combat, and Progression. We at BioWare and LucasArts believe there is a fourth pillar: Story. Our mission is to create the best story-driven games in the world. We believe that the compelling, interactive storylines in Star Wars: The Old Republic are a significant innovation to MMOs and will offer an entertainment experience unlike any other.
“No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”
Alternative title:
“That’s no moon. It’s a hype machine”.
Damn. I was sure swtor.bioware.com was a placeholder for the new “SWAT or Bioware?” game, where you had to guess if someone was a member of an armed response unit or a game dev…
Hmmm focusing on story huh?
“The choice is yours Bioware, but I warn you not to underestimate my nerd-rage”
You guys crack me up :)
Does this mean we’ll have to start reading pages of quest text? Oh, man.
I foresee cut scenes. Long cut scenes.
The great thing about acres of quest text or long cut-scenes will be the repeatability of the game, because LucasArts will be retconning the thing to fit the Star Wars canon so fast that every time you start a new character it will be in an entirely different story from when you played it last.
Still, with any luck, through the sheer number of people playing and the power of the Chaos Effect, we should at least be able to keep tweaking things in the time the game is set, until Han shoots first again in the future.
It’s a small galaxy, after all.
It’s going to be set hundreds of years after Knights of the Old Republic, and thousands of years before the films, so Bioware have pretty much a free reign with the story telling, as long as it ‘smells like Star Wars’.
I wonder how they’ll handle the storytelling? Will we all be the main protagonist, heroically saving the universe while conveniently ignoring the fact that everyone else has done pretty much the same thing (could make for tricky roleplaying), or will our personal stories happen ‘behind the scenes’ in relation to the greater events in the wider world?
A friend of mine directed me to that site the other day. The general discussion thread cracked me up. Other than “hey, we’re doing a game based on some stuff which will appear at first blush to resemble things you saw in the movies” there wasn’t any detail about what the game would entail (other than Jedi and Sith).
But ooooh, the speculation.
Luke: “Master … I don’t believe it.”
Yoda: “That is why you phail.”
@unwise: Best guesses so far are that it will be either like LotRO’s book chapters or AoC’s Tortage (but slightly more than twenty levels worth). To be honest, I’m hoping they’re clever enough to invent something new; I’m all out of ideas though. I do think that this is the concept that, if it can be cracked, will make the next great MMO with respect to subscriber numbers.
@Khan: Ah yes, speculation is the foundation on which MMO communities are built upon, only to come crumbling down when all their wild ideas and concepts aren’t fulfilled in the remotest. And I tried to cram the “Master… I don’t believe it” quote in, but couldn’t justify the “That is why you fail” response just yet. I’ll save that one for a few years time when they launch, I guess.