This is all very true, but it was also very apparent that this game would be "World Of Warcraft with lightsabers" to anyone who looked at even a single gameplay video before starting to play.
I'm not arguing they were deceiving anyone or anything, I'm not even arguing that it's a bad game. I guess I'm not even really doing this to inform other people about their purchasing habits, because as you said, most people know already, but more I guess I want to make sure people are thinking about the idea that MMO/games don't have to be like this.
"World Of Warcraft with lightsabers" is an interesting description though. Because in my head I think 'Star Wars MMO' but actually thats not what we're talking about here. We're talking literally World Of Warcraft with lightsabers because the star wars flavouring doesn't actually work
Well, consider that this game was in development for, what ... 7 years? It was obviously pitched to investors as "You know that super popular money printing license that is World Of Warcraft? We'll make that and combine it with another super popular money printing license, like Star Wars. People will LOVE it!"
That probably sounded like a good idea back then, but in the meantime there had been a ton of MM Os that tried the same thing and failed, which would have been something that EA and Bioware could have learned from if they had waited to see what happens in the industry before dumping 200 million dollars into this.
The lesson that MM Os can be more than just World Of Warcraft with a different paintjob has finally been learned, so now we have stuff like Planetside 2 and Defiance, which, quality aside, are at least different in concept.
It's slow, Planetside 2 is one of the best examples of it done right, but even Defiance is treading through a lot of the same mucky tracks. We'll still pretty much Eve Online only in terms of experience.
It's the idea that someone can design a game without thinking that absolutely dazzles me. Bioware have never been particularly good at actually designing a game to do something but it just seems sensible that before you add an element to your game you'd learn what that element is meant to do and decide if it's appropriate.
The best thing is, TOR was designed by the Mythic people right? So they'd already made a failed World Of Warcraft clone and then they just did the same thing again
- partially made
Well of course it's slow. World Of Warcraft is still insanely popular and, as long as that remains the case, it will be like a giant anchor on innovation.
Mythic had little, if any, involvement in SWTOR. They're just somewhere under Bioware and EA's umbrella and probably not for long since that Warhammer game they were working on didn't even make it out of beta before it was shut down. They'll probably get demoted to developing for mobile devices soon.
Okay, but other developers being equally bad at making MM Os doesn't make me particularly more forgiving of this one. Especially since they had the star wars license
You don't have to forgive them. This is just about understanding the "how and why" of it.
Personally I would have liked SWTOR to be like the Jedi Knight series multiplayer adapted to an MMO format. That had guns and lightsabers and Force powers in it, and it kinda worked but oh well. What's done is done.
The flaw in attempting to appeal to both Wow and Star Wars fans is multi-faceted, but I can at least add my input as someone who never played World Of Warcraft: that's exactly the reason I didn't go anywhere near TOR. If I'm not playing World Of Warcraft, why would I want to play World Of Warcraft with Star Wars skins? And heck, if I WERE playing World Of Warcraft, why would I switch over to a copycat instead?
I think the most grievous error was attempting to extend the Kot OR franchise with an MMO. They would have made bank off of Kot OR 3 or a decently-thought-out MMO (or both, as separate games), but instead they chose this. What a shame.
Honestly, if they'd decided that they wanted to make an actual kotor mmo it could have been interesting. Lightside/darkside interaction (actually swapping sides), forcepower/lightsaber combat. The galaxy setting. Those are all things that could create a really unique decently thought out game. (Star Wars Galaxies was a sandbox mmo right?)
But probably EA wanted an mmo and saw the license as nothing more than a way to guarantee some money. Although it could have been a good game, I suspect not many of the designers were actually particularly passionate and had thought about extending kotor into an mmo which would be the mistake
"The problems kicked in -10 seconds before gameplay actually started. Started character creation, signed up for the roleplay server*, figured out a rough character outline and backstory...-and wait a minute 'special'? Predefined background? The story is a Only You Can Save Mankind affair makes no sense for an MMO. Instead of embracing the massively multiplayer concept and telling a story about how you and thousands of others are giving everything they have to fight the sith threat, it requires us to pretend that no-one else is playing the game at all, because they are The Chosen Ones too. The lightsaber all the Jedi consulars are holding? The first lightsaber in history."
Exactly my problem with this game. It pretends that it's single player.
Find the Light in the Dark
Oh, and it has NO original ideas. Literally everything is reused from other parts of Star Wars canon and non canon alike.
Find the Light in the Dark
Yeah, I see the reused stuff everywhere. The Hero of Tython for instance.
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A Star Wars Painted MMO
So The Old Republic is actually a pretty good game. But its problems are deep seated and fundamental to the way the game was designed, making it a fraction of what it should have been.
Ultimately the game was designed with no central goal. No-one sat down and asked what a Star Wars MMO should be and how it should feel like. They sat down to make an MMO, noted that World Of Warcraft is indeed an MMO and assumed that must be how you have to make one.
The problems kicked in -10 seconds before gameplay actually started. Started character creation, signed up for the roleplay server*, figured out a rough character outline and backstory...-and wait a minute 'special'? Predefined background? The story is a Only You Can Save Mankind affair makes no sense for an MMO. Instead of embracing the massively multiplayer concept and telling a story about how you and thousands of others are giving everything they have to fight the sith threat, it requires us to pretend that no-one else is playing the game at all, because they are The Chosen Ones too. The lightsaber all the Jedi consulars are holding? The first lightsaber in history.
So the story doesn't mesh with the MMO. But the cracks aren't just there. The MMO doesn't mesh with the lore. This is a Star Wars game where you can play a dark side Jedi or a light side sith but there's no chance of changing sides. No matter how many puppies you kick, you will be kicking them in the name of all that is good.
The gameplay doesn't mesh with the setting. Force powers feel indistinguishable from generic sprint or 'hit them harder abilties'. What's stunning is, even Knights Of The Old Republic handled combat and force powers better than this. It was boring, but at least it wasn't boring and felt absolutely nothing like the sort of thing a jedi or a stormtrooper or a bounty hunter would do.
It's hard to believe when tapping into the interconnected power that controls all life involves going to a skill trainer and giving him some money.
Every design decision of the game wasn't based on 'how can this feel like the Star Wars universe' or even 'how should this work in a massively multiplayer online game' but on what the competitors were doing