Overly Positive

Today as I was browsing along in the Star Wars: The Old republic official forums I came upon a post by SpockO in page 9 of a TOR interview questions thread that talked about Bioware‘s communication with its potential players:

“Too many games have been ruined before they were even completed by early open betas, unkept promises from early interviews (even if they say “this may change before release”) and other forms of early leaked information. Just watch the swtor.com forums…There can be 100 page threads about 2 sentences of an interview. People way, way overreact to *everything*.

In the past, games didn’t take 5 years to make. But MMOs do. So there is all this build up time to fill. Bioware does a really professional job of keeping their mouth shut, while still giving out info they can talk about because they are sure it will go in.”

Even though Bioware is taking a lot of heat right now for not revealing the nitty-gritty details of the game, you have to wonder if their reticence is due to the fact that they are strategically withholding details to prevent the blender of the community from getting at things that aren’t final. This seems to be supported from the PCGamer UK interview a while back, where it was stated that they wouldn’t have been this confident to roll out a demo to the press if they weren’t absolutely sure it was polished and ready.

I think this same strategy applies to what they’ve got planned for the meat of the game. I think it’s no secret that beta is going to bring with it a variety of leaks, bugs, and impressions about TOR that could dictate player opinion. If by the time closed beta hits and these things come out that Bioware has a product they are confident can be leaked with impunity, they’ll have a good strategy of approaching things. This is, by the way, a familiar strategy – one that a certain company named after a winter storm employs – when it comes to communicating about what they are doing.

So while people fret about Bioware not revealing too much information about TOR, just consider what we already know, and how interesting and intriguing that is. How much more interesting will the real juicy info and mechanics be? Time will tell.