After everything that has been revealed so far, I really want to like Star Wars: the Old Republic. I want to be excited for it to be released. It’s just that I keep having this nagging feeling about it that I can’t shake.

Let me preface this: I’ve never been an MMO fan. I don’t like investing a ridiculous amount of time into a never-ending game only to get repeatedly pawned by some snot-nosed teenager in Shanghai with way too much time on his hands. But my general dislike of MMOs aside, I’m just not sure what to think of this game.

As Zuke and I have discussed previously, the previews for this game look awesome, but all BioWare seems to be saying is “look at what a cool single player game we’re making!” We haven’t seen very much real gameplay footage yet. They keep saying that it’ll be different from other MMOs; unlike its competition (cough… World of WarCraft… cough…), BioWare says SW:TOR will provide a fully immersive game experience, full of story, an actual plot, character interaction, meaningful choices, and NPCs with actual personality. In other words, it’ll be an MMO without the classic MMO downfalls.

I’m not sure how they can accomplish this. After all, you will have to share your game experience with millions of people around the world. Some of them will doubtless be very cool people who are fun to play with. Others will be total imbeciles that will make you want to eat your own face rather than play with them again. Yet BioWare seems determined to fight even this most difficult of battles. Now they want to save us from our inner idiots. Check out this video, especially the second half. It purports to contain the first real gameplay footage of the actual game.

In the video, you can see two players interacting with each other and the game world at a “flashpoint,” a climax in the storyline. As you can see, this game will have a different form of character interaction from other MMOs. The game will be fully voiced, and by that I mean it will have more voiceovers than any other game ever. Every character will be fully voiced. That means every single NPC you meet, as well as every one of your own personalized characters will have a vocal recording for every line they say. That’s an awful lot of voiceovers, and would be an impressive accomplishment in its own right.

But I want to focus on the fact that your character is voiced. If I understand correctly, we will no longer have to deal with the idiots who can’t spell, or can’t speak, or who just want to mess up the game. BioWare is voicing their characters for them. They will have to choose from pre-scripted lines within the game world. I remain sceptical, but this might just be a viable solution for the most awful part of the traditional MMO community experience.

I still don’t know what to think about SW:TOR. I really want to hope that BioWare knows what they’re doing and will actually make an MMORPG that I will want to play. It may be a fool’s hope, but it is a hope nonetheless. I really think that this will turn out to be either one of the very best, or one of the very worst games of its kind to ever be made. We will just have to wait and see how things progress.

For now, you can go about your business. Move along.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 12:31 am and is filed under Awesome, Star Wars, fail, video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.