Star Wars: The Old Republic Rolls Out The Jump To Conclusions Mat

One of the benefits of writing for more than one site is the birds-eye view you get of its community and those who observe the object of its content. By being able to read comments, digest information that others have posted about your articles, and submit your own feedback, you get a better sense of what people are thinking. Such as it is with my little minor gig at Darth Hater, where the December 3rd lifting of the embargo on new information on Star Wars: The Old Republic has led to a whole shitstorm of speculation and opinion.

Much of the opinion is centered around the Companion system, a way for players to augment their groups or go it alone if need be with an AI companion that fills a certain role. The reaction to this has been interesting, with quite a few notable folks hating on the idea so hard that they’ve written off SWTOR. Snarky tweets have also filled my “following” list, filled with folks who are creating 140-character long smartass comments about Bioware’s “newest single player game”. Such hate!

True believers and fellow writers, I know it’s hard to not judge something, especially an MMO mechanic, before it’s even out the door, but the whole notion of SWTOR suddenly becoming a solo MMO with multiplayer options is rather silly, right? First off, there’s the whole idea that we don’t really know much of anything about the Companion system aside from a couple of interviews, which for the most part, contain only a couple of real quotables. If MMO players should realize something, it’s that feedback, beta, and other factors can change game design for a title before it’s even out the door. Complaining or drawing conclusion about a system prior to knowing about it – it’s just, well, a little bit like using that famous Jump To Conclusions Mat from Office Space. If you could sell those to MMO bloggers and players, you’d make a fortune on all the wild and awfully conclusive-sounding notions people are making based upon very little information.

There’s also the idea that, well, by definition, the game is being developed as an MMO, and while we’ve arguably lost sight of the RPG part of that acronym, the “MM” part of it is still very much alive – and my fellow blogger Ravious puts it best. There are certain types of players who play MMOs, and while there are vast and sometimes significant differences between them, being antisocial to the point of completely soloing one is not one of them. Soloers do play MMOs, sure, but they are a subsection of a grand majority of folks who, on some level, enjoy playing them because they get to play them with other people. While my ideas are as speculative as the ones declaring epic failure, I do think in the fundamental definition of an MMO, we’re not going to see a system that supercedes one of its core concepts. Companions in SWTOR will exist as a secondary support system for those of us with little time on our hands, and they’ll probably have nice storylines as is Bioware’s trademark, but make no mistake about it – they’re making an MMO, and MMOs need other players working with one another in ways no AI can.

Perhaps the reason why I’m giggling and shaking my head has nothing to do with the fact that I haven’t had enough coffee and everything to do with how premature, negative judgmental behavior hits against the core of why I write. I realize in the course of all this that it’s much easier to be a cynic than it is to be an optimist. This is because being wrong about being cynical is easier to cover up than being wrong about being optimistic. Honestly, I’ve always written with the notion that I will inevitably be wrong about something. No one is 100% right, ever, and that goes for any blogger whether you command a small, dedicated following like myself or the massive readership that most of us can only wish to aspire to.

In the realm of MMOs, where people have let their own judgments run away with them, becoming jaded, negative shells of themselves, I’m more than happy to be an idealist, even if those ideals don’t turn out correctly all the time. Why? Because an optimist is happy at least some of the time.