"Go for the eyes, Boo!"
I have a good feeling about Star Wars: The Old Republic, a very good feeling indeed. Yet until Apple makes an iPhone app that lets me rip open a hole in space and time to peer into the future, I can’t speak for certainty as to whether or not TOR will be a raging success, a pathetic failure, or something in between. But as a longtime BioWare player, I certainly can speak for the past, especially when quickly dismissive comments call for a little BioWare apologetics.
From Boathammer (aka “Boaty”):
It seems like everywhere I see the assumption that Star Wars : The Old Republic will be awesome. After all, BioWare has a reputation for great RPG’s, right?
Sort of. The first thing people say about BioWare games is that they “have a great story.” Huh. Saying a game has a great story is a lot like saying a girl has a nice personality. You are giving a compliment while avoiding other issues entirely. In the case of BioWare, you aren’t saying “it’s a great game.” You’re saying that you completed the game because you wanted to see the end of the story, not because any sort of compelling gameplay was sucking you in.
It’s hard to make the leap from regular games to massive games. Blizzard did it, of course, but they also knew how to make fun games before they started.
As much as I’ve always loved Boaty’s writing (and I do), this post really irked me, because it’s based on two presuppositions that are completely untrue: that BioWare’s previous RPGs weren’t good “games”, but just gussed up novels or somesuch, and that story is an inferior component in a game.
Speaking for myself, when I say a game has a great story, that’s a high complement indeed. That means that beyond the combat and twitch mechanics and puzzle solving, the game’s developers and writers managed to craft a tale that made an impact on me and will most likely stick in my mind for a long time to come. I played a lot of twitch shooters and platformers growing up, all with terribly minimal story (all you needed to know about Contra was that you were fighting aliens who had perfected 2 mph bullets). Those were great for what they were. But when it came to adventure and RPG titles, that’s where I fell in love. Story wasn’t incidental to those games, it was essential to them. It was as much of a reward to be treated to a new chunk of dialogue or a twist in the tale as getting a 1UP powerup or a new spreadgun.
Sure, some adventure and RPG games had terrible gameplay outside of the story — tedious or obscure puzzles, far too much grinding on random combat encounters. But some managed a great balance between — dare I say it — these different pillars of gameplay.
Wasteland. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. The Longest Journey. Beyond Good and Evil. Metal Gear Solid (the first one, before they got too random and drug-fueled). Baldur’s Gate II. Final Fantasy VII. Planescape: Torment. Knights of the Old Republic. Secret of Monkey Island. Saying these games had a great story wasn’t a consolation prize in place of winning camp awards for “Most Athletic” and “Miss Beautiful” — it was a personal exclamation that a game meant something beyond just fleeting fun. That it made a connection.
BioWare doesn’t have a perfect track record as a developer — I was less-than-enthralled with Jade Empire, for example. But I promise you I wouldn’t have played Baldur’s Gate II for so many insane hours, or re-devoured KOTOR time and again, if it was just the story and only the story. The combat in those games is fun, strategic and varied. The character creation and development fascinating. They were great *games* as a whole package.
The thing is, story is so interwoven into our gaming experience these days that it’s really not possible to fully separate that from the rest of the game. Even if you just play Halo and nothing but, on some level you understand that there’s a story happening here, and how you fit into it, and why it’s imperative that you win. We’ve long passed the days where the Atari 2600 would throw you in the shoes of a burger flipping alien and expect you to make up the story for yourself.
I’m psyched about BioWare doing TOR exactly because of their huge talents when it comes to storytelling. MMO gamers have been complaining loudly over the past couple years that our genre seems divorced from great storytelling, or at least a decent storytelling delivery system that doesn’t involve reading huge text boxes doled out by each quest giver. I’m pulling for this game because they know that story’s as important as any other part of gameplay — and not MORE important, mind you, just as — and are pouring so much effort into crafting multiple tales for our future characters to experience.
Now, to be fair to Boathammer, what he might want out of a game could be much different than my desires. And it’s not a bad thing to take a stance of “We’ll believe it when we see it” when it comes to developing MMOs, because the company and player hype does get out of control from time to time and needs a devil’s advocate to keep the conversation level. But I don’t see, with BioWare’s track record, why we might jump to assuming the worst instead of the best here.
*hide* I swear I don’t do this on purpose. But I didn’t think KOTOR was an especially great /game/ — it had a great story and some awesome storytelling though and those were the bits I really remembered and would tout to anyone else if talking about the game.
The combat was certainly OK. The bits where you had to shoot down enemy ships were bleah. And the swoop racing was weirdly tuned (the bits you NEEDed to do for the story were really easy, all the other bits were really hard .. for me at least.)
I think they really made good RPGs. But I am not sure if they will really manage to tell their story in a MMORPG as well.
There is even an entire line of thinking says that players must create the stories themselves by playing, not follow pre-planned plots with some decision points.
So yeah, the name Bioware does not guarantee a successful MMO at all. Heck, Jacobs, McQuaid, Garriott, Roper – they were pioneers of the genre, and their latest games failed.
Let’s wait and see. Feel free to hate me now: If it fails, it was only a Star Wars based MMO, after all. And maybe a sign for true innovation, not the x-th mega-improvement of a certain old MMO formula.
Well in fairness, while you may have loved games like KOTOR, not everyone did. I didn’t. Actually I much preferred Jade Empire!!
The Baldur’s Gate games never clicked with me, either.
But I think for me, it was the combat that I didn’t like, not the story or lack thereof. I don’t like controlling a team of characters unless in a turn-based game, and I know you can play Bioware games in a pseudo-turned based fashion, it still felt cumbersome to me.
Now TOR probably won’t have you directly controlling a party of characters, so I remain hopeful, but I don’t see it as a no-brainer that it’ll be great. Sure, Blizzard transitioned from single player game dev to MMO game dev, but they’re the exception rather than the rule (I think).
I think all the people oohing and ahhing over the full voice thing, for instance, will quickly change their tune. I read somewhere the game has 4 novels worth of voice, or some crazy figure?
People (including fake people) talk a lot more slowly than most of us read. People who click through a paragraph of text because they can’t be bothered to read it will be even more inclined to ‘click through’ a speech from an NPC quest giver.
I look forward to coming back here and saying “Wow, you were right about TOR, Syp. Bioware delivered a great MMO with a great story. I was totally wrong!” But if I was a gambling man, I wouldn’t be betting on the side of the good doctors.
Guarded optimism, basically. No one wants to be wrong on the internet – so they’d rather hedge their bets and say “maybe, maybe not”.
Thankfully, I don’t care whether I am going to be wrong on the internet. I’m concerned about the present.
It’s odd how Blizzard gets a free pass when by today’s standards they would be totally in the same boat as all the other recent MMO’s that have come out. My original server, Archimonde, had tons of downtime, Molten Core didn’t even work right, end game dungeons had bugs galore. Some classes didn’t even work the way they should have.
But what Blizzard had on its side was timing, and a willingness to polish despite what players were saying. It’s an anomaly in an otherwise normal landscape, and with the loss of its Chinese playerbase and their content “more of the same”, people are looking for more – and they’ll get it from titles like Aion, Champions, TOR, and more that continue to survive.
Expectations need to simply be managed better.
Great post but i would hardly say Jade Empire is an example of a not perfect track record for Bioware. You may not have enjoyed it because unlike many of their titles it was created in a completely original world designed by that team of developers and not taken from a widely popular preexisting license.
It was also a world centered around martial arts, and while that is fairly popular theme it is not everyone’s cup of tea. The game itself though is another shining example of great Bioware story telling mixxed with catchy gameplay and enough challenge to keep the most hardcore players gaming. It’s a great title and continues a great track record for Bioware but is in itself an offshoot of their norm.
Great points, all. But I think I’m on more solid ground defending BioWare’s reputation as a gamemaker — their reviews, sales and reputation back them up in this regard. And sure, cautious guarded optimism is always great to have in your medicine cabinet, but let me say this: if we can’t hold hope that one of the best RPG companies out there has a solid fighting chance for making a great MMORPG, then I guess we’ve passed the cynical point of no return. TOR isn’t a lock, but can we at least agree that it has a lot stacked up in favor of it — an established RPG company with a terrific history of working in this genre, a killer IP, huge publishing/advertising muscle and lightsabers?
And forget Blizzard — you could point to Square Enix as an example of a single-player RPG company who successfully made the transition to MMORPGs (so much so that they’re working on their second game).
Wing Commander was one of my favorite series of games.
That has nothing to do with concerns over SW:TOR, but I thought it should be mentioned if you were naming off great RP/story games
I really might be in the minority, but in RPGs (including MMOs at this point, but not always), I prefer to have a great story over great gameplay. Sure, the gameplay has to be adequate, but I can suffer with a few mundane menus and systems if the plot is engrossing.
If TOR has that, then it can play just like WoW for all I care. I just hope that BioWare’s resume (like you said) comes through and proves that their games are fun as well as enthralling.
But at the same time, given the narrative mood I’ve been in lately, I’m fine with a trumped up novel in an MMO if I could find one worth my time.
Just because they are good at making offline single player RPGs has no bearing on whether or not they can deliver a MMO experience. If anything, its more of a hurdle to overcome, because they will have to learn to give up creative control.
That’s the reason why despite being probably the go-to brand for offline RPGs, square-enix has had at best modest success with Final Fantasy XI. Bioware though working with cryptic is a very good idea, cryptic can help them avoid the hurdles specific to MMOs that will blindside them otherwise.
As an aside, I think Apple may have already made that app, but it’s buried under the bucketloads of shovelware on the app store. It’ll probably be dug up and discovered sometime in the future, which by then it’ll be peering into the past.
Syp, you’re right. I absolutely do hold out hope and I’m looking forwards to playing SWTOR and deciding for myself. And I loved KOTOR even though I didn’t think the gameplay was all that, it didn’t really matter.
Being realistic is a hard thing to achieve. We all tend to either get sucked into the hype and push games without any evidence that they will actually be amazing or dimiss them based on a few simple statements by the developers or their premise. It’s just human nature.
I think Bioware are great developers so I’m using that as evidence to assume they have a higher chance than most of creating an engaging game. I could be wrong though.
good read. agree on literally everything.
WoW was appealing for me because it was a Warcraft setting game, and when they basically ruined the feel i lost interesting to it and played only because i had friends in it (and yeah i am a hardcore raider, 40 EU Yogg kill etc).
SW ToR is looking intimidatingly good for now.
@Dblade
I think you meant Mythic, not Cryptic.
Modest success is still success. You don’t have to have a blockbuster game in order to be profitable and contiue operations. FFXI’s longevity in this market, even with WoW, shows that they are successful, so much that a spiritual successor to the game has been announced.
People really need to stop attributing “millions” of subscribers with success. There are some cold hard numerical facts out there, but if Bioware continues on a path that they are and doesn’t put up hype-worthy quotes, they’ll set expectations accordingly.
Defending BioWare simply because of their reputation makes as much sense as this time last year when everyone was all up in arms defending Mythic saying how *great* and *awesome* WAR would be simply “because it’s Mythic.” Mythic. Who had put out a grand total of ONE MMORPG which by all accounts I have ever read, was pretty good initially then Mythic ruined it. Sure they’d had a bunch of semi-obscure single/multiplayer games prior to DAOC but as has been noted by others, cranking out decent, good or even great single-player games does not grant one an automatic success in the massively multiplayer sphere.
BioWare makes probably the “best” Western RPG’s, possibly followed by Bethesda next, in terms of the overall RPG-ness of their games, but as “games” most of them have serious issues. I have yet to finish KOTOR despite having owned it for a number of years. Mass Effect is the only BioWare game I’ve ever finished and *as a game* it has tons of issues. I slogged through it for the better part of a year until even the story became cool enough to make me want to forgive the myriad *game issues* it had.
Did you actually say Final Fantasy VII? Seriously? Horrible game, horrible dialogue, which in turn made for a nonsensical story. But it was the first RPG with that level of CGI to brag about. And it did have a couple emotional moments, but again those were both shown in CGI *not* in the game itself. It’s been 12 years, maybe re-check FFVII and see if it actually lives up to that “zomg look at these CGI movies” hype the game got back then…
Blizzard got lucky, mostly by their timing for WoW and making the leveling fun (and polished) enough for everyone to jump on the bandwagon. Look how people treat Blizzard now. Are we wanting BioWare to become the next whipping boy if SW:TOR is as great as some people hope it will be?
Frank: yeah i meant mythic. My bad.
I play FFXI, it’s longevity is due to things like a captive console and japanese market, the pricing structure of charging players a dollar per month for an alt (and often requiring them by doing things like limiting storage and capping crafts per character) and the SE brand name. The game itself is very meh, and FFXIV is probably going to be more along the lines of Aion or WoW than it.
A modest success works for modest games, but you have to keep in mind the pedigree. I don’t think with the amount of effort Bioware is spending they will be satisfied with a “modest” success-fully voiced dialogue isn’t cheap. The reputation of the company can actually work against them, like it did with SE-both companies are known for delivering high-quality product, but the final product in SE’s case is a “forgotten” game that for the longest time got bad press when it got any, and often deserved it.
I’m not certain how I missed this article! I am sad that I did too.
Directed story is extremely important to me in my non-MMO gaming. It is not something I give as a silly superlative. I’ve played some RPGs that were so great at telling the story that I just couldn’t stop. I’ve also been turned off by the story of others (KotoR II for instance). I am with you on this Syp, bring on the story! If it turns the game into a single player online game I’m okay with that. Either way, a good game is a good game.
@ Pete S:
Interesting comment – I hadn’t even considered how impatient we are as gamers and that we might just click through NPC speech, especially if quests are still given out like they are in WoW / WAR where you can just check on your map to know where to go. On the other hand, to be forced to listen to NPC speeches if you already know what they’re going to say would be quite annoying.
@ Scott:
You’ve stolen all my piss & vinegar!
But yeah, I agree with most of what you had to say.
I “enjoyed” the KOTOR games for the most part, but I think the only reason I finished them was to see the end of the story. Never reloaded them onto my computer or tried to play through them again (except maybe to jump back to a save game right before a major decision point that would irreversibly make my character evil just so I could play as a baddie the rest of the way through).
Don’t remember falling in love with WAR because Mythic’s name was attached, but because I love the IP and Paul Barnett (a.k.a. Jo-Jo, Idiot Circus Boy) promised me the concept of a game that could not be delivered.
FFVII = balls… I agree. Always hated how that game got so much of the limelight when FFVI (FFIII here in North America) was clearly a much better game & story (to me, anyway). I even enjoyed FFVIII more, though it fell apart at the end with some weirdo time-travelling witch… ugh…
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“If it turns the game into a single player online game I’m okay with that.”
I’m not. I can’t stand when a company requires me to check in via the internet to get permission to play their game. I *really* can’t stand it if they charge me monthly for that process. It’s DRM of the worst sort.
Mind, I’m very happy with sharp single player games, and the ability to solo in MMOs, but if an online game doesn’t give me more justification for being online than “we want to make sure you’re legit and take subscription money from you”, I’m not going to bother with it, even if it is a “fantastic single player online game”. I can get offline RPGs cheaper, and play them whenever I feel like it, without an internet connection.
SWTOR might be a fantastic *game*, but the more I dig into MMOs, the more I’m convinced that they aren’t the place for dev-controlled stories. They are great places for people to get together and tell interesting player-driven stories, but the narrative structure just isn’t conducive to making a strong author-driven narrative. MMOs are better at being settings, rather than stories. They have too many inputs and too many directives to make story more than a framework to hang the rest of the game on.
So my concern isn’t that SWTOR will be a bad game, it’s that it will be a single player game stuck with the overhead of an MMO, including internet connectivity and subscription fees.