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Bioware's MMO has to do with KOTOR?


JoeyN

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This has been a rumour for over a year now, but no one from Bioware has fessed up to it. It started when Bioware opened a branch in Austin, where Galaxies is developed, and began to hire several from the Galaxies dev team. Couple that with the fact the SOE has squandered the Star Wars license, and Bioware is still highly respected, both by Lucas Interactive AND the SW gaming community, and it just seems natural.

 

Would be wicked news if true.

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This month's OXM has a feature called "5 Top Secret Games Coming to 360" or something like that. One of them is KOTOR 3. They "predict" that the Jade Empire team is working on it, but they didn't say anything about it being an MMO.

 

FYI, the other 4 games were Hellgate: London, Crimson Skies 2 (:rock ), Duke Nukem Forever and a console-only WoW game.

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I'd love to see this happen, as the first KOTOR was one of the most enjoyable RPGs I've ever played. But at the same time, damn am I ever leery. I mean, you still have to overcome the big, big, big problem with any Star Wars game...

 

90% of your playerbase just wants to be a Jedi :P.

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I'd love to see this happen, as the first KOTOR was one of the most enjoyable RPGs I've ever played. But at the same time, damn am I ever leery. I mean, you still have to overcome the big, big, big problem with any Star Wars game...

 

90% of your playerbase just wants to be a Jedi :P.

 

Bingo.

 

That's one of the many reasons why Galaxies was ultimately a failure.

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I'd love to see this happen, as the first KOTOR was one of the most enjoyable RPGs I've ever played. But at the same time, damn am I ever leery. I mean, you still have to overcome the big, big, big problem with any Star Wars game...

 

90% of your playerbase just wants to be a Jedi :P.

Difference here is that the game will be set in a time where everyone can be a jedi without rewriting the SW mythology.

 

What's the problem with everyone wanting to be a jedi? It should be possible to diversify the jedi skills and professions that enough unique roles can be created (like Galaxies, actually). If it is, how is this any different from any other MMORPG? Generally speaking, in other games, you're one of 5 to 9 classes. Surely they can create a game where all those classes are some flavor of jedi (not to mention jedi/sith a la alliance/horde) such that everyone can be a jedi yet still dependent on other classes - just like every good MMORPG.

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I'm bloody tired of playing as a Jedi or Sith.

Are you also tired of playing a bald space marine, Ninja, Sword-wielding Warrior.... troll, wizard, elf, dwarf ... or whatever, because that's pretty much what we have to work with here.

 

It's like television. Every show is about doctors and lawyers because those environments contain a lot of interesting material to write against. Sure we have gems like Six Feet Under, but they are rare.

 

If its a great game, I'll take a Star Wars theme.

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I really liked SW:Galaxies initially and never played a Jedi in it because at that time it was fun (and feasible) to play a Bounty Hunter. I think the whole issue with the Star Wars license is that only a rare few games make playing anything other than a Jedi interesting... (Dark Forces and Tie Fighter come to mind)

 

Make being a smuggler or Imperial officer or Bounty Hunter fun and cool and you won't have so many Jedi running around :)

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I'm bloody tired of playing as a Jedi or Sith.

 

That pretty much narrows down your choices to dewbacks, banthas, wampas, mynocks, nerfs, galactic cooks, Hutt slave dancers, protocol droids, or some schumck with either a gun or a Gaffi stick waiting to get moved down by either the Jedi or the Sith.

 

Pass my lightsaber!!! :D

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Are you also tired of playing a bald space marine, Ninja, Sword-wielding Warrior.... troll, wizard, elf, dwarf ... or whatever

 

A quick glance at the games in my collection would suggest that yes, I am, which is surely why my library of titles is relatively small compared to some here. A good game, at its core, will always be a good game. No arguments there, but with Star Wars games I personally believe there's ignored potential for great non-Jedi stories that remain unexplored by Lucasarts and the dev teams the often collaborate with on games which explore Lucas' universe.

 

There's huge potential for variety. I basically want a new Super Bombad Racing.*

 

 

*possibly an outright lie

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I for one am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

 

After all, we've only had a bare handful of MMORPG games on consoles and those have been ports. Who is to say they must be exactly like the PC versions? What about an instance-type interface where it is only you and say 63 other jedi in a world shard at any time with the ability to jump shards quickly to join your friends/enemies elsewhere? Would an entire galaxy of planets (or realisticly say 15) be too small to hold 64 PCs at one time?

 

Just like Halo, even though FPS games were birthed on the PC doesn't mean they have to be EXACTLY like the PC versions to be just as fun. I love Half Life, I love Halo. They are totally different in playstyle and I couldn't really care less.

 

So much pessisism, so little faith ;)

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Daniel, Then you might have really liked Galaxies as it launched. Not a single jedi for as far as the eye could see. (They weren't introduced until several months, and many patches, later)

 

Well I must admit that I'm not big on the MMORPG concept really, so although some aspects of Galaxies intrigued me, that general type of game was never going to do anything for me. It would take an awful lot for a Bioware developed Star Wars MMORPG to lure me in as a result.

 

I should add that I don't neccessarily think the gamer not playing the role of a Jedi means a game's story would have to be void of Jedi, but personally I'd like to be thrown into the mix of the rebel alliance in a story. Perhaps we'll start seeing games based within such a scenario when the live action TV series starts airing, and I guess that as far as a Star Wars MMORPG goes, 'story' is never really able to enter into things since it is such a user driven enviroment (perhaps the key reason I do not like MMORPGs).

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Initially, Galaxies was going to have a more organic approach to its story development. Players were to choose factions (rebel/empire) and war between each other. The results of which would alter the landscape from planet to planet. For instance, factions could "control" planets - which would alter economics, points earned, faction perks - but also allow for events to "trigger" a change in the overall story arc. The effect would have been that each server would look and play drastically different from the next - because of the player affected changes.

 

It was quite ambitious, but proved to be more than the devs could chew. As far as complexity went, Galaxies was the benchmark, and will probably go down as a lesson for all other developers to keep their games more simple.

 

For which WoW is the standard barer. A fun game, to be sure, but comparitely simple. Its simplicity and ease of use is its greatest strength.

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