Star Wars: the Old Republic Launches 389
Today marks the official launch of Star Wars: the Old Republic, a new MMOG from BioWare, EA, and LucasArts. The game's population has been building throughout the week as players who pre-ordered were granted early access, but now the gates have been thrown open to everyone. By using the Star Wars universe and a 'story-driven' approach to MMO gameplay, BioWare hopes to draw in a new group of players who don't typically consider themselves MMO gamers. Since the game is still largely unexplored, comprehensive reviews have yet to be written, but Shack News has a write-up about the early game. An article at Eurogamer discusses whether this sort of game launch marks the end of an era for the MMOG industry — the game's budget is estimated to be as high as $100 million, and it relies on a traditional subscription model when many games are making the switch to free-to-play.
Looks like a good game, but I wont be playin'. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WoW 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand who you're talking to. It's the best leveling experience I've ever experienced in an MMO. Sure, it's not a completely new genre. If you were looking for something that doesn't play like an MMO, then you were looking in the wrong place. You can downplay the effect that the conversations and story have all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that those elements make leveling feel extremely different from World of Warcraft (unless you spacebar every conversation, in which case you're missing the point of the game).
What you seem to be saying is that you don't enjoy MMOs. That's a valid opinion, but it's not a valid criticism for this game.
Re:So, when did subscriptions become traditional? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:$100M really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Napkin math:
200 employees (random guess, but my gut says that's a low number)
x $75k per year (another random guess, but I don't think it's absurd)
x 5 years in development
= 75 million. Add in marketing, management, and server costs, and you might be there.
Oh, and don't forget license fees. I won't speculate on what Lucas is charging them, but I bet it's mindboggling.
Re:Irking (Score:5, Insightful)
$60 for a game, then $15 per month vs paying $60 for a game you're done with in a month, so then you're bored and go buy another one at $60. Which is cheaper?
Re:Looks like a good game, but I wont be playin'. (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe me, it wasn't the fans that ruined Galaxies, it was Sony. They drove that property into the fucking ground. The "New Game Enhancements" killed it permanently back in '05, it just took them 6 years to put that final nail in the coffin.
Sony should never be allowed to touch a fucking MMO again.
Re:So, when did subscriptions become traditional? (Score:3, Insightful)
Guild Wars is probably the most underrated MMO in history. Way better story and graphics than WoW, it was free to play from the beginning, and moving a character between servers was as easy as a drop-down menu (allowing you to easily play with friends on different servers, something that should have been standard on all MMO's a long time ago). And yet it never got the attention it really deserved.
Re:Looks like a good game, but I wont be playin'. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your analogy would work perfectly, if you include the necessary bit.
I won't eat at a restaurant because there are too many slobbering, loud, annoying food fanbois there.
If you can eat and enjoy yourself without ranting endlessly how the executive chef sold out years ago, complaining about how the lobster shot first, or otherwise being a overzealous and clueless food otaku... then you won't detract from my enjoyment of the restaurant. But if you are, I'll go someplace else. And it's just unfortunate that this particular restaurant franchise has some of the worst customers ever.
Re:So, when did subscriptions become traditional? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think one of the long term players from beta who is a friend of mine put it best.
"I played the entire early part with my friend. We share start point for our characters, so we can "watch" each other's plot lines. So I walk with the quest giver NPC, and he says "Now that we're finally alone..." and my friend's character is right next to me. Jarring".
The best question was "so if this truly is MY story, why are there twenty guys who look just like me talking to the same NPCs and doing the same quests?"
Fact is, you just can't make a good, immersive story about a "hero that stands above the crowd" in an MMO. You have to be one of the masses, and by extension, not really a hero that stands above others. When MMO's pretend it's not so, like TOR and some of the new/remade zones in WoW, it looks silly and breaks immersion in a very bad way.
Difference is, WoW doesn't hype it up as a major selling point. TOR does, and while it works for people who are experiences with MMOs and don't really expect anything truly new, just an improvement, those who actually do expect something new end up sorely disappointed. Which is what happens to people who believe that TOR is not WoW with lightsabers. Because in the end, under all the extra fluff, there's still going to be twenty guys who have a story largely identical to yours right next to you reminding you that you're not the "hero that stands above the crowd" that game tries to make you believe you are.
Re:So, when did subscriptions become traditional? (Score:5, Insightful)
MUDs preceded MMOs. They were also by and large F2P.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD [wikipedia.org]
Not really, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Also as someone who actually plays it, I think it's inexact. It's like calling Skyrim "Fallout 3 with swords."
The only similarity to WOW is that both are games in the same genre. So, yes, certain mechanics are going to be shared between the two, by necessity. Some because frankly, they're part of the whole MMO premise, and some because we have a decade and a half of figuring out what players like and what players don't like. In a new game you want more of the former and less of the latter.
And it's not even a bad thing. We had an attempt at ignoring everything that other MMOs showed that works or doesn't work. It was called Tabula Rasa. Yeah, Lord British thought he's so great that he can simply wipe the slate of everything that had been learned in a decade of MMOs and reinvent everything his way. It wasn't much fun to play for most people who've tried it and it bombed badly.
And really, most of that stuff isn't even particularly specific to WoW. As someone who's played half a dozen MMOs before, I don't see why I should reduce a whole genre to one game. It's called MMO, not "WoW clone". You could just as accurately say it's Everquest 2 with lightsabers, or City Of Heroes with lightsabers, or, really, whatever.
The classes for example are not really clones of WoW, suprisingly enough. The companions mechanic is also not very WoW. Actually branching available quests based on what you did before (e.g., alignment) is also not very closely mirroring any WoW mechanic I can think of. Having a choice of how you want to end a quest is also not very WoW-like. Etc. The point is that it's different enough to feel different and interesting, and in the end that's all that matters.
As for what happens in a few months, meh, nothing is for ever. I bought a game, not entered a marriage and made a kid, you know? If it stops being fun to play in a few months, for whatever reason, I'll move on then. And hey, at that point I will have got a couple of months of fun. Am I right?