Why “The Old Republic”?
I had never really considered this, but somebody put the idea in my head that Bioware’s upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic could have been based on Mass Effect rather than Star Wars. He wsa an unabashed Star Wars non-fan and I get his point of view. I on the other hand am a closet Star Wars die-hard. I like the movies and will be getting the six movie Blu Ray set later on this year. I have read a few books. I played Star Wars Galaxies when it launched, and cried real tears when Sony Online Entertainment gutted that game by implementing one stupid design decision after another. Star Wars Galaxies, had it been allowed to naturally evolve with the template they had in its development and early launch, it could have been the best MMO of its generation. I might have never played WoW because SWG was so good in its own way.
Star Wars: The Old Republic has one thing going for it, and that’s Bioware. Bioware are a great development house that genuinely give you the feeling that they love their games. They get it that games should be interesting, deep, and enjoyable to play. Knights of the Old Republic was good, and it set the stage for this MMO. Dragon Age 1 and 2 were both good (even though I found 1 to be boring at times), and Mass Effect 1 and 2 were both OUTSTANDING.
Bioware will make this game great. I trust that they will find every way they can to make the game great. However the Star Wars theme seems pasted on. If I were to make an MMO in space, and make it a primary objective to make it story driven, Star Wars seems like as good a place as any to start. Star Wars lore is deep, it has a long storyline, and there are a lot of angles that can be covered. However, the game is set 3500 years before any of the Star Wars movies. I suppose this is meant to cover the Star Wars universe well before the more thoroughly covered time frame of the movies. This is a good idea, but the character classes seem a little too familiar with old school Star Wars, in particular the Smuggler and Bounty Hunter classes. I guess I take issue with the concept that the game is Star Wars so it HAS to have smugglers and bounty hunters. I can’t say for certain that this is why those two playable classes are in the game but I can’t get it out of my head that it is because a couple of marketing guys from Bioware and LucasArts sat in a meeting room and agreed that because it is a Star Wars game, there must be smugglers and bounty hunters as playable classes.
But it seems counterintuitive to me that this game is set three and a half millenia prior to the events that were depicted in the six Star Wars movies to prevent too familiar a landscape from being painted and to give Star Wars fans something new to look at rather than a bunch of Han Solo and Boba Fett lookalikes running around the central hub zone when that is exactly what we are going to get. This game is going to take place 3500 years before Star Wars, but there are going to be hundreds of Boba Fett and Han Solo lookalikes running around the central hub zone. I wouldn’t bet against at least one of those zones being from one of the Star Wars movies.
Mass Effect is an outstanding storytelling game. There are things going on and you are in the middle of it. As you play through, you are interested in what is going on because it feels important. The games are that good. There are so many side plots and relationships between characters, races, species, organizations, etc. The last time a game that did a great job of telling a story was made into an MMO that fleshed that story out in detail was … World of Warcraft.
Warcraft was a real time strategy game. Those are typically pretty limited in the story they tell. Blizzard went deep into the details of the backstory and that story was told in the battles of the war that played out across three games and expansion packs. The foundation was laid for a MMO that was very story driven if you allowed yourself to be troubled with the story. If it were one way for The Old Republic to truly follow in World of Warcraft’s footsteps and possibly be the “WOW Killer” that many people want it to be, they could have followed that one basic fundamental aspect of the game. Base it off an in-house intellectual property that has major plotlines fleshed out but has a million untapped avenues to explore.
The more I think about it, the more it just screams “MISSED OPPORTUNITY”. I would honestly be more excited about their MMO if it were based on Mass Effect.
