LucasArts, BioWare Announce Partnership

Given the swirling rumours of a KOTOR MMOG, it should come as no surprise that BioWare and Lucasarts have announced they're teaming up for a project. They don't give any really concrete details, other than to say it is 'a ground-breaking interactive entertainment product'. They've also "launched a cobranded Web site, www.LucasArtsBioWare.com. 'Through our previous collaborations, we know that BioWare has an impressive ability to blend gripping stories with technological advancements, and we believe that our upcoming product will deliver an experience that will span the traditional boundaries of video game entertainment,' LucasArts president Jim Ward said in a statement. "

KotOR2

[Jaysyn]

Maybe they'll actually put out a complete game this time.

I miss the old LucasArts

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, when they made good adventure games.
Now they just make star wars games.

Re:ground breaking?

[Endo13]

And we won't even get into the issue of a Jedi being either weak but omnipresent among players, something you have to spend months unlocking, or hard to unlock and weak. Good luck solving that issue.

I can only think of a couple real solutions.

1. Simply don't allow anyone to be a Jedi.

2. Create a limited number of Jedi "slots" based on the population of the shard/realm. Like say for instance only .5% of the population can be Jedi. It would require both time and skill to become a Jedi. Jedi would be quite powerful - but the downside to becoming a Jedi would be that you could die permanently, creating an open slot for someone else to become a Jedi. Or at least be reverted to a "normal" character upon death or something like that, though I prefer the "permanent death" potential. Risk vs. reward.

Re:ground breaking?

[rhombic]

Probable results for your solutions:

1. Nobody buys the MMO, as everybody wants to play a Jedi. Game fails

2. People buy the MMO, because they think they can become Jedi. They find out that they have to be hardcore to become Jedi
          2a) Casual gamers quit, game fails b/c revenue from hardcores isn't enough to keep it open
          2b) Casual gamers complain until Lucasarts forces Bioware to let everybody become Jedi

The problem is, Jedi are rare, and have power on a level way above "normals" in the Star Wars universe. Everyone's a fan of the Jedi, so everyone wants to play them. So for an MMO, you either have to nerf Jedi, make it nearly impossible to become one, or accept that everybody can be one & the universe turns into "City of Jedis". Sony tried all three w/ Galaxies, how's that working out for them?

Star Wars is a great setting for a single player game, but I'll be astounded when somebody makes a successful MMO out of it. It's like LOTR if everyone wants to play Gandalf.

Re:I have to wonder

[king-manic]

How will they handle things like allowing players to be force users, or KOTOR's signature "Good and Evil" system? Assuming this is a KOTOR MMO, of course.

I enjoyed KOTOR and KOTOR 2 but I always felt the alignment system wasn't good vs evil but good and jerk. I always felt their evil options weren't that natural. You usually got:

1- don't accept a reward: +2 light side 0 credits
2- accept reward: 0 light side 1000 credits
3- Eat his children and take his credits: 1000 credits +2 dark side +3 hp

I felt they could have nuanced it a bit.

I miss the old LucasArts

[SmallFurryCreature]

You know, when they made good star wars games.

Now they just make bad star wars games.

Offcourse, if you are really old, you remember Lucasfilm Games as a flightsim company. Kids these days and their new fangled adventures. You want adventures, you go to Sierra.

Another company that went down the crapper.

Actually I have no idea if it was adventures or flightsim that came first.

Re:** Crosses fingers and chants "XvT MMO" **

[Chandon Seldon]

So... why don't they release a (traditional twitchtastic) X-Wing title?

Well, where is the money?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Look at happened to poor Oblivion when it dared to charge people for a small upgrade, why they were nothing more then common fraudsters.

Meanwhile a small company called Blizzard is raking in several times what that horse armour costs EACH month PLUS they charge 5-6 times for an upgrade. Oh okay so their upgrade is a lot bigger, but people been paying them a monthly fee for years and they still want more AND get it?

Companies got to be asking themselves why they spend years on a product that if it is a big hit might make them a small fortune once while they can also spend that time making an MMO and if it is a hit make more money then they can dream off.

On the other hand, will this be an MMO? With Star Wars Galaxies still running and it still having a lousy rep and neither company having any experience (except lucasrts with destroying one) with MMO's?

We shall see. But MMO's are here to stay, because Blizzard has shown you can get some serious money from them.

Re:I have to wonder

[meringuoid]

I enjoyed KOTOR and KOTOR 2 but I always felt the alignment system wasn't good vs evil but good and jerk. I always felt their evil options weren't that natural.

I think the chief problem is that RPGs are classically driven by the quest-issuing NPC. He's the guy who stands around in the marketplace saying 'Oh, won't somebody help me', and who gives you a quest when spoken to. Most of the sidequests revolve around helping these guys out.

What's the dark side option going to be? Kill him on the spot and just take the reward, that's one way, but makes the dark side game rather short and uninteresting. Better is an option like 'Turn him over to the bounty hunters who are the cause of his troubles and get a larger reward'. KOTOR had a fair few decent dark options - sell the medicine to the profiteering gangster rather than the doctor, say. KOTOR 2 was better - Kreia had some rather nasty teachings to impart, if you let her.

But in the end, I'm with the Korriban storekeeper. Why does everyone get the idea that 'dark side' always has to mean 'hooligan'?

Re:ground breaking?

[moderatorrater]

You're setting up a false dichotomy. General Grevious would require a lot of work for a jedi to take down, epic battles could be fought against hordes of sith, large beasts with lightsaber resistance (as seen in the expanded universe) could create challenges. If Boba Fett can beat Darth Vader, then mid-level bounty hunters should give low-level jedis problems. It's true that a lightsaber makes a significant number of encounters one-shots, but against a master or a large animal it's not a matter of hitting them once, it's a matter of wearing them down through swordplay.

As for ripping down big buildings, that's not very star-wars either. The biggest things we see being thrown around easily are girders. You can lift an x-wing with concentration, and that's it. The force has its limits, and in a world where it's plentiful, there are other ways to balance it.

Re:ground breaking?

[Rolgar]

What I'd be interested to see would be if each Jedi class player would be selected by a "Force Class GM" for their role playing ability. When somebody is selected, a fuller review (by 2 additional GMs) is performed before the player is selected to be eligible. The rest could then work as mentioned in the GP post. They are placed in the queue to become a Jedi/Sith when a slot becomes available, and they are notified that they are on the waiting list to become a Jedi or Sith, and how long they should expect to wait before they'll get their shot.

This should encourage behavior that would be conducive to having a fun SW MMO experience. Players on the waiting list would try to kill Jedi to open spots for themselves to move up the queue (such activity could be analyzed to verify the character doing the killing was acting in character, and the player be knocked down or off the list if it weren't.)

Likewise, Jedi/Sith characters that play out of character could have their characters revoked. That's not to say that a player shouldn't be able to wrestle with their conscience, but they shouldn't be allowed to do things clearly out of line of their character's basic ethos. So, if a Jedi starts to advance or use dark power skills, they should be watched and observed, maybe even questioned why by a Jedi GM.

This should raise the level of role playing in the game to improve immersion.

Note: I never played SWG, but I had a couple of friends that did.

Well, think of it this way

[Moraelin]

Well, think of it this way:

1. Blizzard also wasn't known as a MMO company, heck nor as a real RPG company either, before WoW. What people wanted Blizzard to announce at the time was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3. People were actually massively disappointed when Blizzard announced a MMO. (For an admittedly extreme reaction, see the VG Cats strip where Aeris mugs the Blizzard guy that announced they'll make a MMO. I'm sure a few people fancied doing that.) It sounded like something they'll surely botch, and a waste of manpower which could have been better used for something they were good at.

Needless to say, it currently has about 20 times more players than Everquest at its peak, and EQ2 peaked even lower.

2. Actually, WoW is very much playable as a single player RPG too. It does have about twice as many quests for either faction than is needed to get a player to level 70, it has more story and actually better texts than, say, Morrowind, and has more content than 10 Oblivions or so. It's certaily not _the_ best single-player RPG, but it's better than a lot of stuff we were perfectly content with, and even with the monthly fees still it's more content/buck than most.

In fact, that's my main problem with it: over time it's become increasingly difficult to find a real group for anything else than an endgame raid. Oh, you'll find a level 70 guildmate who'll be happy to run your latest alt through the Deadmines. Or even a perfect stranger if you ask nicely. (God knows I too have ran perfect stranger newbies through a ton of low level instances just because they were polite and well behaved and said "please".) But that kind of group does nothing to me. I want to feel like I actually contributed something to that group, and not like, say, may support-character priest was twiddling his undead thumbs while a level 70 mage was nuking the NPCs in wholesale.

Anyway, it _is_ used as, basically, a semi-single-player game by the majority of the population. They group when they really have to, then bugger off back to playing single-player as soon as it becomes possible. (Let's just say that even 90% of the people who were swearing that the massive level-60 MC raids are the meat of the game, went back to soloing 60 to 70 as soon as the portal to the Hellfire Peninsula opened.) The average WoW player _is_ playing a single player game with some multi-user chat channels built-in. Sorta the same as Unreal Tournament included an IRC client, except this time it's available right during the game.

So basically, even if you're a SP player, don't discount it yet just because it's MMO. A MMO can also be a good single-player game, and I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware gets that part even better done than Blizzard. In fact, if anyone can dethrone Blizzard in that one aspect, Bioware is probably the safest bet.

3. Well, allow some of us SW nerds our moment of hope, will you? Some of us awaited the launch of SWG like it's the second coming of Obi Wan. Some people kissed their wives, said goodbye to their friends, and expected to never be seen again in RL once a SW MMO opens.

And, frankly, it only appealed to a minority in the first place and disappointed everyone else. Yes, the (old-style) SWG fans will point out that it had its advantages over other MMOs at the time, such as allowing more customized characters. And I'll concede that. It had some damn good idea. But the rest sucked more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle. It was a SW game launched without spaceships _or_ jedi, for a start. And on the ground it was a baren sandbox that made some of us look back on even the old UO more favourably. It was a DIKU with graphics and a lot of computer-generated terrain. _Empty_ computer-generated terrain, where Raph Koster expected players to just create content by role-playing with each other... without even being given much tools or props for that. Add the constant bugs and heavy-handed dev/support team, and it wasn't much fun except for a minority of the most hardcore SW fans.

A

Re:ground breaking?

[Endo13]

You're setting up a false dichotomy. General Grevious would require a lot of work for a jedi to take down, epic battles could be fought against hordes of sith, large beasts with lightsaber resistance (as seen in the expanded universe) could create challenges. If Boba Fett can beat Darth Vader, then mid-level bounty hunters should give low-level jedis problems. It's true that a lightsaber makes a significant number of encounters one-shots, but against a master or a large animal it's not a matter of hitting them once, it's a matter of wearing them down through swordplay.

Well, part of the problem is that episodes I-III aren't entirely consistent (yeah, understatement, I know...) with IV-VI. General Grievous wouldn't be that difficult for a real Jedi in most situations. He's a machine. Use the force to push him off the edge, rip his limbs off, crush him into scrap metal, rip down stones to smash him, etc. etc. He's a lot smaller than an X-Wing. Yeah yeah, you can make up all kinds of "reasons" [wikia.com] why this or that boss isn't vulnerable to the force, light-sabers, etc. but then you're right back to fake Jedi. The simple truth of the matter is, in it's pure original form, the only thing that can block a lightsaber is another lightsaber, and the only thing that can block the force is the force. There are no other defenses. So that leaves us fighting Sith all the time. That would get old really quick.

As for ripping down big buildings, that's not very star-wars either. The biggest things we see being thrown around easily are girders. You can lift an x-wing with concentration, and that's it. The force has its limits, and in a world where it's plentiful, there are other ways to balance it.

Really? Yoda told us size doesn't matter with the force. So perhaps the reason we don't see more mass destruction of buildings, etc. is that the majority of the time when we see the Sith it's in their best interests to keep things intact, while Jedi simply don't behave that way. Or perhaps more likely, the story just worked better this way. Either way, if you unleash hordes of 12-year-olds with that much power over a virtual environment and no repercussions, well it doesn't take much to visualize what would happen.

Re:ground breaking?

[Rakishi]

Grievous is a cyborg, as in he has a human brain (and some organs) in that metal body so technically he could use the force is he was sensitive and all that crap.

Re:So, Star Wars Galaxies 2.0?

[aztektum]

And sony miscalculated.

That line right there speaks to pretty much Sony's entire handling of that game. Yes the profession system was interesting, but horribly unrefined, as was just about every other system. And they took a "fix it on the fly" approach, which would unbalance the game in an entirely new direction.

It really did need a fairly extensive over haul like was implemented in the first CU, minus perhaps some of the more intriguing mechanics being yanked.

But it wasn't just balance that screwed that game over. It was performance problems as well (I'm told the rubber banding can still be a huge issue.)

Mediocre (at times almost completely broken) gameplay + Shoddy performance and stability = Increasingly unpopular game

Re:So, Star Wars Galaxies 2.0?

[servognome]

SWG wasn't anymore flawed then anyother MMO I seen

SWG had one fatal design flaw, the HAM system. Most of the combat problems were the result of kludgy fixes to try and deal with a poor design. Doc buffs to allow heavy armor were a kludge to accomodate the fact that armor reduced your HAM. By shoving the effects of armor, weapons, special abilities, and the damage you abosrb all into the same pools of points, it made the game a nightmare to balance. Raph Koster overthought how combat should work. For decades "hit point" based systems have worked and been refined in all sorts of RPG settings (table top, CRPG, MMO, P&P, etc). Why then would you scrap the tried and true and instead create a system that makes absolutely no logical sense? I get hurt more concentrating on a shot than by getting hit by a rifle blast!

What is frustrating is all the other aspects of the game were great. I haven't found another MMO that offers as much variety in role playing, everything else is kill->level->kill and the NGE just decided to clone that.