Knights of the Old Republic MMO Confirmed 179
Zafsk writes to tell us Gamespot is reporting that in a surprise move from E3 2008, EA's CEO John Riccitello announced that the long debated BioWare MMORPG is going to be a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic sequel of sorts. Currently the KOTOR MMO is slated for a 2009 release. "BioWare's first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game was released in 2003 for the original Xbox and PC, and was named the year's top RPG by GameSpot. An Obsidian Entertainment-developed sequel was released in 2004 and 2005 on the same two respective platforms. Both critically acclaimed games are set several thousand years before the events of the Star Wars films, and cast players as adventurers who eventually become powerful Jedi Knights."
If we can't play it with real light saber Wii (Score:3, Interesting)
If we can't play it online using gaming consoles with light saber emulators, like that of the Wii controller, it's just not going to be very good.
Half of the appeal is in emulating light saber battles.
Why'd they have to ruin that? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd been playing through KOTOR II on the PC recently (good luck achieving that on Vista; you have to replace a bunch of dlls in the game directory to get sound to work); the storyline, the influence system, everything is just absolutely spectacular.
I'd really hate to see it become another crappy MMO; I just want to be able to sit down at the end of the day and pretend to be a leet Jedi for a while. Turning that into an MMO really ruins that if you don't have the time to commit to the damn thing.
Re:Trend in the industry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I was just thinking the same thing for the opposite reason. MMOs have a watered down grinding gameplay, they can't match the depth and complexity of a single player RPG. They're also a lot worse at telling stories. How can you have a good 'teenage kid discovers he's the chosen one and saves the universe' story, when there are thousands of protagonists?
MMOs are popular, not because they're better than single player RPGs, but because they have a good gimmick. To the hardcore fan, the single player, turn based, often tactical CRPG is obviously superior.
No info (Score:2, Interesting)
Bioware MMO? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thousands of years (Score:1, Interesting)
The thing that bugs me about the KotOR story line is it implies a very, very lengthy period of technological stagnation.
It is as if the technological capacities of all sentient species simultaneously "capped out," and all that was left was to apply the same principles on successively grander scales.
The universe ran out of novelty and room for new discoveries. That kind of makes me sad.
Re:Trend in the industry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bioware MMO? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can see why LucasArts chose BioWare to make the Star Wars MMO, as they've made what is arguably the most successful Star Wars game in recent history, but I wonder how many of the people working on this project will be from the team that did KotoR, and how many will be outsiders?
Re:Trend in the industry? (Score:2, Interesting)
Galaxies attempted to give the player a reason to be a average Joe with professions and a classless system. Although I didn't play it extensively I think like most players out there, if the developer give us a reason to be part of the Universe instead of being the Universe than we'll be happy to. Keeping multiple servers based on game play preference like in WoW would be useful, so long as you enforce them, which WoW doesn't do. RPers can run the story where they want, PvPers can power there way through skills and fight each other Good vs evil, and In-betweeners can play on a Wow like quest realm.
Lots of developement? You bet, but it would be finally taking the lessons from the other MMORPGs and making something good for a change.
[J]
Re:Big shoes to fill (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Thousands of years (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing that bugs me about the KotOR story line is it implies a very, very lengthy period of technological stagnation.
It is as if the technological capacities of all sentient species simultaneously "capped out," and all that was left was to apply the same principles on successively grander scales.
The universe ran out of novelty and room for new discoveries. That kind of makes me sad.
It's a staple of SF. Read Asimov's Foundation, for exmaple. Star Wars never struck me as a universe where lots of new research was being done, and long periods of technological stagnation or even retardation are common in many SF settings.