Planet Sillicon

Star Wars MMO, should we be excited?

By blog on Jun. 4, 2009.

If you have been following the happenings at this years E3, or are a Star Wars fan, or a MMO fan, you will have no doubt heard of Bioware and Lucasarts collaborating on a new MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. I had actually been looking this one up just a few days ago and was getting very, very, excited.

I will couch this by saying, I am not a huge fan of the Star Wars franchise. I appreciate the immense scale and interesting back story, but the last three films, the prequel series to those that came out in the 80’s, I found to be pretty much too bad to watch. They really sucked, in my opinion. I mean sure, some of it was okay, but my goodness, the petulant Anakin was too much for me! There was something so… uninspired about those films, considering the material they had to work with. I found them cliched and boring, even if some of the fight scenes were fantastic.

As a player of Lord of the Rings Online, I believe that MMOs can adapt good fiction into good gaming, so when I heard of a new Star Wars MMO being done by the people who created one of my all time favorite games, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, I was tentatively excited. I went over to their site and checked it out, looked at the classes listed so far, and thought it actually looked pretty fun. I really enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic so the idea of being a Jedi in game again, but with more depth, sounded pretty good. On the site, I liked what I saw.

Then IGN uploaded an article about the demo of the The Old Republic at E3, and I felt a little more uncertain about the game. Certain questions arose in my mind when I was reading the article, and so far I haven’t been able to satisfy them. For starters, what’s with the name in the demo? With the entire game being voiced – which could be absolutely horrendous – are we able to choose our own names for each class? Secondly, with all the dialogue options being set up in much the same fashion as Mass Effect, what happens if a few of your fellow MMOers want to take one option, whilst another two want to take another option? How does that effect the story line for group quests? Thirdly, and most importantly, how is this an MMO? I mean, we aren’t talking multiplayer online gaming like Diablo 2, are we? Because that’s not an MMO.

So yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions at this stage, but I acknowledge that it is still early days. I would like to see this realised as an awesome game. I am not going to stop playing LOTRO, but I am open to picking up new MMOs, especially when they look great, have an immense capacity for expansion and exploration, and aren’t WoW. Here’s the trailer from E3, there’s no denying it looks bloody fantastic, it depicts the sacking of Corruscant, and there is rumor of another trailer coming soon in which the Republic are repelling the Sith, which I would love to see.