PC Gamer Voyages Into Star Wars: The Old Republic

Those of you who are following Star Wars: The Old Republic definitely have to check out Moon Over Endor’s awesome breakdown of PC Gamer UK’s Hands-on look at Star Wars: The Old Republic. Ayane takes a peek at the salient points in the article, along with links to a a scan of the full text. She’s done her own analysis, but here’s some points I’ve seen that give a new hope (see what I did there) to the upcoming details. Let’s take a peek and the juicy details:

-The Jedi and Sith are “action-point based” classes that “earn points by swiping and smashing” which can be spent on “finishing moves”.
Well, this sort of pre-empted an article I planned on writing on how Jedi and Sith could be crafted into the healer and support class, as many on the official forums had speculated. From what was described, the class behaves more like a traditional rogue, using magic and melee to deal damage.

While many MMOs beforehand, most notably WAR, have made attempts at creating melee users that can also employ magic-like attacks, they’ve always had challenges. The challenge being, finding a good role for them that isn’t overpowering to other classes. Perfect place for that Bioware-Mythic group to collaborate so that Bioware knows what Mythic’s gone through, right?

Jedi and Sith combined with MMO’s arguably most popular class type (Rogue)? We’ll have to see how it pans out or if that means Bioware will see an upsurge of Jedi/Sith and nothing else in the live game, but descriptions like this build excitement for the class for sure:

“My Sith character is deflecting their blaster fire with his lightsaber while I get to grips with his abilities…I Force-choke one foe, hanging him by his neck, watching his legs writhe in pain. As he drops to the floor, trying to catch his breath, I turn away and slide a lightsaber into his ribs.”

-Unique, story-based quests for each of the classes have dialogue-driven choices leading to different outcomes.
We’d heard from E3 that there was a particular quest that involved killing or sparing a ship captain that had different consequences on the quest to ambush a freighter. But we didn’t have the full details that showed how The Old Republic’s quest choices panned out. PC Gamer, however, outlined them for us. According to the quest, sparing the captain meant that the attack on the freighter went smoothly, as the captain’s expertise meant that ambushing pods carrying invading troops and having medical bay help out meant the ensuring battle went much more smoothly. But killing the captain and having his more inexperienced, brash first officer take over meant that the quest took a rather rocky turn, forcing you to face a Jedi at the end of the engagement.

The idea that there are two (or perhaps more) outcomes to certain quests sure does things for replay value alone, since there aren’t any savegames as in Bioware’s non-MMO offerings. There’s also a curious bit of data to think about in terms of how you could make a choice that might mean a more difficult quest but which could yield a better reward or more experience. Either way, making the choices in the quests, which involve the whole party potentially, lead to a more engaging quest experience beyond “kill 10 rats”, which we should all probably know will be in The Old Republic too. Minimizing the grind, and making questing engaging and exciting depending on choices is just one way that I think the game will end up being interesting even through a re-roll.

-A blend of experience and new, unique experts comprise the Bioware Austin staff.
One of the main concerns people have about Bioware is that they haven’t ever made an MMO before. Anyone who reads this blog, or who reads anyone else following the game, knows that an MMO community is a rather, well, “unique” experience for developers to handle.

The article talks a bit about hiring the over 100 staff that have been recruited for The Old Republic, and how the talent pool spans story writers and authors responsible for TOR’s questlines, to designers with proven RPG track records like James Ohlen (Neverwinter Nights, Elder Scrolls, and the like), to what they call “hardcore MMO multiplayer” guys who are used to designing, developing, and implementing online RPG elements. The design process has thus taken on an element of back-and-forth between flavor and mechanics people that are out to create an experience that is unique but which also takes into account the mistakes of MMOs past:

“You’re playing this game live, in a hostile environment, on a buggy connection, and it works because we got the best-in-industry people from all over. We have a huge amount of programming experience from different MMOs, all of whom are terrified of launch day. They have every horror story, everything to prepare for going into the launch.”

Is this enough to allay people’s fears? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact that there does exist a dynamic between people who want to make the marketable features of the game (story-based gaming, choices, lore) strong and those who want to make the game actually work from a mechanics standpoint is heartening to hear.

-The TOR team’s design philosophy – ignore the hardcore, and the label of WoW-killer, and make a good game focused on core design elements.
A couple of curious things came out of the PC Gamer article about Bioware’s mode of thinking in terms of their development philosophy. Of particular note is how they plan on handling their very discerning player audience:

“”We have to ignore the top of the hardcore,” says Walton, talking about those players who will simply ignore the story and min-max their way to the top end of the game. “We need to make a game that is accessible to the Star Wars fan, and the BioWare fan. Because really BioWare is a company that is about making a great RPG experience, not about making games for a hardcore MMO audience.”

Anyone who’s followed any MMO knows that every so often, there are developer quotes which make it into the archive of quotes which people will pull out and hold to the light as the core ideas and promises that a developer will bring to their game. Some of them are mechanics ideas and some are philosophical ones. This is one of those.

As much as it may piss off the hardcore MMO audience, and evoke cries of concern that we’re looking at “yet another MMO looking to appeal to a casual audience”, it is good to hear that A)we are seeing this now, instead of near release, as a commitment to their style of development and B)that they have an idea of the big picture. The real challenge that other MMOs have shown, is that they confuse themselves and the players on which target audience they are aiming for, resulting in a “jack of all trades, master of none” design that ends up being lukewarm to everyone.

Bioware’s idea seems to be, if the the game is fun, then it’ll attract the hardcore min-maxers no matter what, but by no means are they the audience that butters the bread. The audience of “Star Wars and Bioware fans” is a good place to start, because they are most likely to be excited about the elements of the game that Bioware is marketing on. The idea of sticking to your guns means that you may attract less subscribers initially, but that you will eventually make people come around to your ideas with a blend of fun design and solid bugfixing. Time will tell.

The other interesting and good thing to hear is the idea that this game will be a “WoW-killer”. While the article gushes about how this potentially is credible enough to bring down the king of MMOs in terms of subscriptions, the Bioware team doesn’t share their thoughts. While confident that there is a ton of “WoW fatigue” out there and that the game itself can’t be appealing forever, Bioware says that competing with them is perhaps not the way to go, citing previous recent MMO releases as examples:

“Walton is simply upbeat: “If I was doing a fantasy RPG on the same plane as World of Warcraft, well, you better spend a shitload of money.” But he doesn’t see taking WoW on at its own game as a realistic, or even desirable, goal. He argues that new MMOs need to create their own template. “I thought Age of Conan would have been more differentiated. We were betting that both Age of Conan and WAR would have been bigger than they are, but that’s down to their execution, not the market…”

While I’m not surprisingly optimistic about the game’s prospects, to set expectations as high as bringing down WoW is a bit misguided, and it is great to hear that Bioware shares the same ideas. Learning from the mistakes of the past is huge enough, but knowing that Bioware is committed to making something that is good, unique, and sound to them, rather than good and sound to the typical WoW player, is a even better. It points to a confidence in the appeal of their own design, and a more realistic idea that they’ll be making a game that won’t be millions-strong to begin with, but which could potentially get their on its own.

All in all, thanks to Moon Over Endor for the great article analysis, and to PC Gamer for the details. It’s looking to be a great summer if we’ll be seeing more detail from development like this. Here’s to hoping some nuts and bolts mechanics will be in the next info reveal.