The Old Republic....I've got a bad feeling about this
I've been following the coverage of The Old Republic MMORPG that's due out sometime this year, and I'm starting to get nervous. Increasingly, I'm wondering if TOR is going to boil down to just being World of Warcraft with lightsabers. The most recent thing that made me wonder that was when The Old Republic opened up pre-game guild creation. A quick glance at the server types shows Player vs Environment, Player vs Player, and Role Playing. That sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? It should, as that's exactly how World of Warcraft does it. Likewise the way characters have specific roles, that so-called trinity system of Tank, Healer, and Damage per Second are straight out of the World of Warcraft handbook. Guilds seem to work the same, you've got instanced "flashpoints" that are equivalent to World of Warcraft dungeons, you've got battlegrounds that function the same as their World of Warcraft counterparts, and so on and so forth. The basic game mechanics and interface are very similar, in that you have a series of attack commands on a toolbar along the bottom of your screen. Hell, you even have races that can only be played by one side or the other, though obviously humans can be both Jedi or Sith. It all feels very samey, you know?
Obviously, I can understand the impulse to copy the most successful PC game of all time. But what concerns me is that it's coming at a time when my interest in World of Warcraft itself has faded away to almost nothing. In fact, with my guild going inactive, I'm giving serious consideration to just uninstalling World of Warcraft completely so that I can finally finish Dragon Age: Origins to set up a later purchase of Dragon Age II.
Even Blizzard is trying to move beyond World of Warcraft. Bioware and EA feel like they're a step, or several, behind.
That's not to say that all is lost. There are new things going on. The Old Republic is fully voiced. What's more, it focuses much more on stories, both your personal story and that of the larger war beyond. These days, I don't even read the World of Warcraft quests unless I can't figure out what to do from the abbreviated quest log. A story in World of Warcraft exists, buts it's such a fragmentary and ridiculous thing that I treat it exactly as Blizzard does: as a useless adjunct to the real game that has no purpose beyond the fact that they feel obligated to have one.
The Old Republic, on the other hand, is descended from Knights of the Old Republic, where story was everything. I wanted to know what happened next in Revan's tale, and I cared more about that than I did going up another level or scoring another crystal for my lightsaber. Likewise, I cared about the story in the Mass Effect games much more than I did the mechanics of them. I want to play ME3 to see how the story ends, not to participate in more mediocre shooting levels. Not so World of Warcraft, where the mechanics are everything and the story is nothing.
Likewise, The Old Republic has other nice additions that World of Warcraft doesn't. Your own ship to act as a home base and to fly around in the "tunnel shooter" bits, for one thing. There are companion characters who have their own stories, who you can lose or gain based on your in game decisions for another. And it is Star Wars.
I can't emphasize enough how important that is, at least to me. I was five years old when I saw Star Wars. It was my first movie, and it has influenced much of my life since then. I've always wanted to fly an X-Wing and be a Jedi, and if X-Wing was my favorite of those games in my youth because it let me do the former, Knights of the Old Republic was one of my favorite RPGs because it let me do the latter. And now The Old Republic is coming along to let me do both after a fashion, while playing alongside my friends and family to boot.
How can I not play it? I can't. I'll pick it up, and I'll play it. I'll even try and get a guild together, because playing an MMO by yourself is a sad and lonely thing, but with friends and family becomes something better.
But I just can't help but wonder if the game might have been even greater still if they hadn't felt the need to follow World of Warcraft's footsteps quite so closely.
Obviously, I can understand the impulse to copy the most successful PC game of all time. But what concerns me is that it's coming at a time when my interest in World of Warcraft itself has faded away to almost nothing. In fact, with my guild going inactive, I'm giving serious consideration to just uninstalling World of Warcraft completely so that I can finally finish Dragon Age: Origins to set up a later purchase of Dragon Age II.
Even Blizzard is trying to move beyond World of Warcraft. Bioware and EA feel like they're a step, or several, behind.
That's not to say that all is lost. There are new things going on. The Old Republic is fully voiced. What's more, it focuses much more on stories, both your personal story and that of the larger war beyond. These days, I don't even read the World of Warcraft quests unless I can't figure out what to do from the abbreviated quest log. A story in World of Warcraft exists, buts it's such a fragmentary and ridiculous thing that I treat it exactly as Blizzard does: as a useless adjunct to the real game that has no purpose beyond the fact that they feel obligated to have one.
The Old Republic, on the other hand, is descended from Knights of the Old Republic, where story was everything. I wanted to know what happened next in Revan's tale, and I cared more about that than I did going up another level or scoring another crystal for my lightsaber. Likewise, I cared about the story in the Mass Effect games much more than I did the mechanics of them. I want to play ME3 to see how the story ends, not to participate in more mediocre shooting levels. Not so World of Warcraft, where the mechanics are everything and the story is nothing.
Likewise, The Old Republic has other nice additions that World of Warcraft doesn't. Your own ship to act as a home base and to fly around in the "tunnel shooter" bits, for one thing. There are companion characters who have their own stories, who you can lose or gain based on your in game decisions for another. And it is Star Wars.
I can't emphasize enough how important that is, at least to me. I was five years old when I saw Star Wars. It was my first movie, and it has influenced much of my life since then. I've always wanted to fly an X-Wing and be a Jedi, and if X-Wing was my favorite of those games in my youth because it let me do the former, Knights of the Old Republic was one of my favorite RPGs because it let me do the latter. And now The Old Republic is coming along to let me do both after a fashion, while playing alongside my friends and family to boot.
How can I not play it? I can't. I'll pick it up, and I'll play it. I'll even try and get a guild together, because playing an MMO by yourself is a sad and lonely thing, but with friends and family becomes something better.
But I just can't help but wonder if the game might have been even greater still if they hadn't felt the need to follow World of Warcraft's footsteps quite so closely.