Over on this site called Massively — perhaps you’ve heard of it — Bree wrote up her experience playing through The Old Republic’s Jedi Knight starter zone. It’s been a while since I’ve turned my attention to TOR, so this ended up being a great back-to-basics article.
Two things stuck out from her writeup. First of all was how BioWare’s storytelling and cinematic style enhanced — not detracted from — the play experience:
The dialogue system guarantees that returning to your quest-giver isn’t just a mad dash of clicks. Your quest choices actually matter. The NPCs talk to you, and you’re going to want to talk back. I never once had the urge to skip the quest text (in fact, I was terrified I’d miss something if I looked away!), and while sometimes I felt as though I were performing menial tasks in between watching a really awesome movie, I didn’t care, because it was a really awesome movie (and the menial tasks were amusing too).
When players think of voiceover dialogue, they inevitably think of how it has gone so wrong in past games — including past BioWare games. But in SWTOR, I knew by the third dialogue session that whatever BioWare spent on this stuff… it was all worth it.
Now to anyone who’s played Dragon Age or Mass Effect or any of BioWare’s games, this shouldn’t sound too unfamiliar — it’s just that we’ve been wondering if it really could be adapted into MMOs and if MMO players, with their penchant for skipping quest text, would respond well to it. Some have expressed annoyance that BioWare’s placing so much emphasis on this, some have claimed it makes it into a single-player game, and some have welcomed it like a glass of cool water after a week in the desert.
I think that we’re going to see more statements like the above, even with the haters out there. I think we see it even now in games like LOTRO and WoW and AoC, whenever players hit upon quests that actually tell a story and feel involved and use memorable characters — there’s excitement as the game lurches above the low standard set for quests, and there’s a hunger for more. A whole game of this sort of thing sounds too good to even believe, and so perhaps we swing the other way into premature despair.
Eurogamer points out a somewhat unexpected boon of how BioWare’s set up multiplayer conversations — it has the potential to bring back group roleplaying in a big way:
It’s a gentle but significant encouragement towards group role-playing, in other words, and that is absolutely no bad thing. It’s an interesting aspect of MMOs’ roots in tabletop RPGs that was in danger of being lost forever, presented in a palatable and modern fashion that never requires you to type the word “forsooth”.
Anyway, another point Bree raised:
The team obviously has a long way to go to color in the lines of the structure it’s laid out (and consequently, I think the game is a lot further away than most of us imagined), but the foundation is in place for this to be a revolutionary MMO — note that I said MMO, not game. I think Blizzard and BioWare have a lot in common on this front. What Blizzard did so brilliantly with World of Warcraft was replace the “grind mobs to level” trope with something from the single-player RPG genre: quests. BioWare is taking that a step further and replacing the “silent questing” model with a truly interactive quest system, the kind popularized by (and now expected in) modern single-player games. That doesn’t mean SWTOR is a single-player game that just happens to be online (especially given how much cooler quest dialogue is alongside your mates), but rather that SWTOR is employing beloved single-player mechanics to fill gaping holes in MMORPGs, holes that formed naturally when the very first designers tried stuffing thousands of people into a MUD/RPG hybrid.
I can see TOR being further away than Spring 2011, depending on how testing goes and how EA and BioWare want to balance speed vs. polish. I’m quite content to wait, especially if it will be something very much worth playing.
I have a new hope in TOR today. It’s a good, good thing.
Bio Break 
I watched the latest videos over at Darth Hater, and was immediately struck by the same feeling Bree expressed. I was happy to consider the level of immersion that we’ll be getting when we pick up and deliver a mission, but worry that having to wait through it all will make people’s willingness to go back through the same content with an alt almost nil…I guess if you choose a different response that leads to a different outcome, it might work, but I don’t know if they’ve coded for that kind of eventuality. After all, you’ll still merge into the mission that they want you to do.
I don’t know. I think a large group of people will still just randomly click through the conversation get pissy about cutscenes and such.
For example, the the newest WoW expansion, one of the zones has a ton of cutscenes that enhance the story of the zone and players were complaining because the cutscenes slowed down their leveling.
It is unfortunate, but people who actually care about story are in a small minority. 😦
fall 2011; just like the bulk of video games 😛
I look forward to this. I hope all the people that get annoyed their levelling is slower don’t come to this game. I’d rather have a group of players with my own sensibilities playing than the usual WoW “GOGOGO” crowd.
I don’t know, call me old-fashioned but if I want to see a movie I watch a movie. Watching a movie in a long series of short segments interrupted by being sent off to perform “menial tasks” really doesn’t sound all that attractive an option compared to just, y’know, “watching a movie”.
As someone who found the voice acting in Dragon Age amateurish to the point of embarrassment in places and barely adequate at best, I can’t say I have a high regard for BioWare’s standards in that regard . But then, most of the acting in the actual Star Wars films is only professional in the sense that the actors did indeed get paid for it.
I don’t like voice acting in MMOs in principle though, largely becasue I almost always listen to speech radio while playing and it’s a pretty unpleasant experience having both sets of speech competing. It’s almost always the game speech that gets turned off.
I usually fast forward through dialogue in games anyways because I read faster than they speak, although I start out listening. She played for a few hours, this is going to be something where the trick will be how much you care after the 20th hour.
I also still think linking it to a light/dark side dynamic is bad, if they make the sides unlock rewards. You’ll see people start to metagame the response tree, which will hurt immersion. Wait and see I guess.
BioWare is significantly increasing the cost it takes to make content for their game. The problem with themepark MMOs is that they are overly reliant on static content. Their real challenge is making enough content to keep people playing and paying. Making content more time and dollar expensive does not move towards solving this problem. It may be very pretty and enjoyable in the short run, but what about once you’re out of the high-polish zone? Will SW:TOR have its own Tortuga Effect?
Everyone is going to love TOR’s mission briefings for the first three weeks … and then everyone is going to skip by them as quickly as possible, and mock the noobs who pay attention to them.
One of the key things about an MMO is that it’s all about the group, and the group inevitably wants to get to the good stuff (combat and loot) right away. So unless they’re giving away experience or crafting components during these cutscenes, the hive mind is going to deem them a waste of time. You’re going to have to play the missions solo to find out what the heck is going on.