Five Reasons Why The Old Republic Is a Threat to WoW

[Kajt]

I really hope they get the combat right. I just hate that clunky feeling.

 

[Twad]

Trailer? meh. Overhype.

Its actually the only MMO im interested in. I will take some time to check it out.

Why? Because its futuristic-ish.

I hope its not just another bland, boring overhyped grind-fest.. because WoW is exactly that imo.
I hope that combat with and against jedi/sith is reasonably balanced... cuz i want to play a trooper, not a jedi/sith (i dislike jedis and their stuff), and that combat in genral will feel right, involving player skill.. not just a competition between number generators.

And i hope that i can play it for free online, if i cant in a way or another, i wont bother with the game.

 

[Abedeus]

You forgot the sixth reason.

It's Bioware. Bio-freakin-WARE! I have not played a Bioware-made game that I wouldn't love.

 

[ShadowKatt]

Whether this game topples WoW or not, I'm still expecting it to do well. Embarassingly, I didn't know anything about WoW until I started playing Guild Wars, and while it was never the MMO killer they wanted it to be, I still spend WAY too much time on that game. TOR will be the same. If it topples WoW it will be coincidental, but people will still flock to it simply because it will be awesome.

 

[warbaloon]

While I usually run to whatever has magical powers, kotor made me dislike Jedi in general. I wonder if you'll be able to play a droid bounty hunter like IG-88 or HK-47...

 

[JIst00]

They also have to top two other problems:
1) People to get to max level in wow give up a lot of time and effort - to give that up it has to be special
2) Subscription games are more expensive over the long run than single cost games - therefore most people have only one or two subscription games so the market is limited.

Thus, it becomes one or the other, and so it has to not just be better - but be better enough that people anticipate it will be worth loosing hundreds of hours of work on wow for.

For the record I think I will drop wow for it though...

I actually substantially disagree with you on Point 2. For the amount of playtime you get out of a MMOG, it's worth WAY more time-per-dollar than any other game.

I play WoW extremely casually these days, with only two or so nights of raiding for ~3 hours a piece per week. That's 24 hours a month, for $12. $0.50 an hour - and considering that Darksiders cost me $60 and I got 15 hours of play out of it? Yeah, WoW's cheaper.

It might. That's the purpose of these two articles to explore the pros and cons

I dont think its comes down to whats cheaper as such, for me personally I have to make a chioce with MMO's, due to my own reasoning I cant justify paying for 2 MMO's when, the games being what they are, time eaters, I only have time to play one. For example when SW:TOR hits, I'll freeze my WoW sub, as I aint paying for it when it wont be played, if TOR sucks, (highly unlikely) then I'll cancell my sub and crawl back to WoW, weeping apologies, like the WarCrack addict I am.

Also I just died a little inside hearing I MAY have to wait till 2011 for this game, it's like EA just cancelled christmas. Its far too early to tell, I think its gonna be prudent to wait till at least E3 to get a more accurate release date.

 

[HatchetDown]

You look like Rob Riggle. Also World Of Warcraft is our generation's Star Wars.

 

[JIst00]

is that the correct plural for jedi?

I think its just Jedi singular and Jedi plural.

 

[MisterColeman]

The fact that each side has unique classes could damage KOTROS pretty badly. It took WoW some time, but having Paladins and Shaman side specific turned out to be a poor decision on their part and they corrected the problem. I don't see any good way KOTSWR could twist the lore to free up class selection.

Also their acronym is too long and doesn't market as well as WOW.

I do want a game to dethrone/damage WoW so that Blizzard has an excuse to make something truly better, but I doubt KOTRROP will do it.

 

[BlindChance]

Not a single one of those five points couldn't have been applied to the original Star Wars MMORPG. Now, granted, it came out before World of Warcraft, so it could be that a new market has opened up. Plus, they've learned lessons since then.

But still. SW:G had money. (It was Sony backing it.) It had lightsabers. It had an existing fandom. And it flopped.

Plus, and I'll sing this until the cows come home: If you want to peel off a major part of WoW's fanbase, you need to support mac, out of the box. Why? Because fans in WoW don't often peel off individually. They peel off in groups, in guilds. They move their community around, not themselves. And if you don't have mac support, then it's that much harder for any guild with a percentage of mac users to move. Which may well be what stops any of them from moving.

 

[LewsTherin]

John, Jedi is going to be the way to go. Force lightning? We got healing, shielding, hasting, and mind trick. I dearly hope flurry is still a skill.

 

[Callate]

Granted, I haven't played CoH, but I hardly think that you're giving what the developer said a fair chance. He was doing a brief exposition on the Agent, and explaining the one element that set it apart from other classes. I'd wait until all the data is in before jumping down Bioware's throats about this class. What you quoted about the Agent sounds to me like "Rogues can stealth up to a target and stun them before they have a chance to react" - a concept that, in WoW, sounds overpowered from a soundbyte, but is actually not gamebreaking.

They'd have to be extremely foolish to let something so obviously unbalanced go into the game, and whatever gripes you (or I, as I certainly have a lot of them) have with Bioware, being foolish is not really one of them. (Nor is a tendency toward egregious class imbalance, and as I recall, CoH was Cryptic and NCsoft, not Bioware.)

I do not doubt that it is possible to create a stealth class which a) is not grossly overpowered, b) is well balanced with other classes in PvP and c) remains a useful and fun class to play, as well as a beneficial addition to the party whether they're playing PvP or PvE.

The Agent, as described, uses explosives and sniper attacks at range. I remain skeptical. This is the kind of attack that one would tend to suspect would be win/lose; either they kill their opponent, or their careful set-up and/or long charge time means they get their rear ends handed to them. Or alternatively, they make their massively powerful attack and the defender gets to spend half an hour searching for where it came from as they vanish in preparation for their next attack. None of these scenarios sounds like much fun for the defender- either you've just been killed, you're spending all your time hunting rather than engaging (possibly despite having to deal with the rest of the Agent's party), or you're dealing with a horsefly who doesn't really have a part in the battle but you can't quite be bothered to swat. Most of these scenarios don't really sound very enjoyable for the Agent, either.

I would like to believe Bioware won't mis-step, but it bears remembering that they've never done an MMORPG before. MMORPGs that launch smoothly are a tiny minority. Even WoW, which by most accounts did a fabulous job, had its share of hitches along the way.

Most of what I'm likely to say is going to fall under this: when I first heard about this game, I was entirely enthusiastic. "An MMO? With Bioware's passion for storytelling? In the same universe as their great KOTOR games? I want to be a part of this! I want to make a character who will have their own story! I want to see how their storytelling talents will work when players' stories intertwine with one another!" If they had been more a little more withholding in their info dumps and their media events, they'd actually be doing better in my expectations of this game.

I recognize that anything that comes out before the players get a hold of the game has, by nature, to be an incomplete picture. I also understand that the very nature of MMORPGs is that player interaction can radically change the game, even moving it far from the designers' expectations of how it was going to be played. (It may well be that half the battle in a given MMORPG is how much the designers accept how the players are playing it and roll with it and how much they're willing to tinker, tweak, and nerf- possibly annoying the players in the process- in the name of getting something that looks more like the game they had on the drawing board.) But again, I had high hopes for this game from the outset based on the designers' work and the KOTOR games; it's what's been released to the public so far that has shown me how things may well go wrong, and the designers' relative immaturity in the field of MMOs makes it all the more likely that they won't realize things have gone wrong until well after launch.

Now, I'm a fanatical Star Wars loretard, but having played a few video games in my time, preserving the lootless, relatively moneyless system you allege is central to Star Wars (rather than just an element of the films being, you know, films) would be a deathknell for an MMO. Sometimes lore and flavor have to bend in favor of adhering to industry standards, and one of those standards is that MMOs tend to be reward-based and have virtual economies. This is one of those times. I think you're being a little bit picky.

No, I quite recognize this. CoH was quite late to the game in offering items that are actually items; most of them remain quite minor in their effects, and some regard it as one of the game's enduring weakness. I realize something new may well need to be offered; what I'm saying is that the source material doesn't offer much encouragement. It would definitely be an uphill battle to create a game where "loot" had little value; while I'd be curious if someone made a real stab at it, I wouldn't expect it of a big-budget mainsteam title. But if the movies offer little suggestion of loot, and the KOTOR games loot system is out-and-out lame, what are we being offered in their place? And more to the point, what are we being offered in their place that's functional, retains some of the source's flavor, and doesn't look like a carbon copy of one of the withering MMO offshoots?

You don't sound like an EU fan, so this is probably forgivable, but I did a giant @_@ at this section. There are instances of Force users, especially Sith, picking up trophies of their battles all over the place. Palpatine was one of the worst, being several times described as basically a packrat, depositing giant hidden hoards of his confiscated goodies all over the galaxy like some kind of chipmunk dragon. The Sith embraced greed, and believed that if you were powerful enough to take something by force, you deserved to have it and had every right to do so. True, the Jedi at the height of the Republic tended toward a Spartan lifestyle, but that didn't mean they didn't carry around anything they might need. Then you have the bounty hunters and the smugglers, both explicitly for-profit occupations.

I've barely dipped a foot in EU, true. It's certainly going to raise some eyebrows when Jedi start wandering about with more bling that a typical rapper, though.

Second: Have you ever heard a WoW developer talk? I don't expect Bioware's devs to be loretards (except the ones who do the writing, and they hopefully aren't the ones who do the class balancing or the gameplay design), and neither should you. Developers are gamers at heart, and I'd prefer they talk about phat lewts and pwning noobs - at least they're speaking my language.

At the risk of making myself a huge target for angry flaming, I'm going to venture a guess that most of WoW's community doesn't play it for the storyline. Oh, it's probably fun enough to be a part of, you'd miss it if it weren't there, but it also seems to be enormously derivative. Warcraft's storylines from the earliest games seem to serve mostly to get from A to B, if you don't squint too closely at the road. It may well be that not having a deeper knowledge of the game's lore is in some ways like a tightrope walker not looking down.

Conversely, Bioware is known for writing reams of script, for trying to make you care about the characters and their paths, for investing worlds and people with enormous histories. And many of the people who are looking at this game now aren't looking to be "any" badass; they're looking to be Jedi or Sith. If there isn't a seamless connection between the world and the gameplay- or at least, sufficiently seamless that your suspension of disbelief will carry you past a few bare patches- the battle is theirs to lose. If the game has a familiarity that makes it easy to get into, all to the good. If it begins to look like half a dozen other MMORPGs with a thin coat of Star Wars frosting, people are going to notice. In particular, the early adopters are likely to wonder if that frosting is worth playing guinea pig to the inevitable glitches, storyline dead-ends, and rebalancing issues when there are plenty of games already on the market with their rough spots already smoothed off, including WoW.

I've lost my enthusiasm for being the first one into the pool, perhaps with the attendant chance to gain the polishers' ears and make my own mark on the lore of the game, if not the lore of the world. It doesn't mean I wouldn't love to be proven wrong and start hearing that TOR really was like the third KOTOR game expanded into exponential multiplayer bliss. What I have seen is not encouraging to me, based on my experience and what I know of the facts at hand. I do not hold it against others for believing differently. Time will tell.

 

[Chesterfield Snapdragon McFisticuffs]

It's not an immediate threat to Wow if it doesn't come out TILL NEXT SPRING!! I'm sorry but that news made my little mmo-depraved heart burst with rage. Guess I'll be going back to Wow for another year.. or worse... getting round to prestiging on mw2...

 

[John Funk]

Not a single one of those five points couldn't have been applied to the original Star Wars MMORPG. Now, granted, it came out before World of Warcraft, so it could be that a new market has opened up. Plus, they've learned lessons since then.

But still. SW:G had money. (It was Sony backing it.) It had lightsabers. It had an existing fandom. And it flopped.

Plus, and I'll sing this until the cows come home: If you want to peel off a major part of WoW's fanbase, you need to support mac, out of the box. Why? Because fans in WoW don't often peel off individually. They peel off in groups, in guilds. They move their community around, not themselves. And if you don't have mac support, then it's that much harder for any guild with a percentage of mac users to move. Which may well be what stops any of them from moving.

Shhhh. You're taking one of my points for next week

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Five Reasons Why The Old Republic Is a Threat to WoW

The reign of a king can?t go unchallenged forever.

Read Full Article

It's true that money put into a game does not necessarily equal game quality, but having the money and time to polish a game to perfection and hire talented designers certainly doesn't hurt. Oh, and if you think EA is just going to inject TOR with greenbacks during development and then fail to market it, you've got another think[footnote]Spelling mistake should be thing sorry for being a grammar nazi[/footnote] coming. When the game comes out, it'll have a marketing blitz unheard of for an MMORPG that doesn't have War or Craft in the title. Here's where brand recognition of Star Wars and KotOR does come in handy - I'd wager that while most people would see ads for EA's other MMOG Warhammer Online and think "Whathammer?" The universe of TOR is far more recognizable... and marketable.

On a whole I agree that it could be a WoW killer but I don't remember anyone saying Guild Wars 1 would be some are saying 2 could be but I hope it isn't as I don't an overly massive amount of people playing it. Sometimes when that happens the average community tends to suffer.

Also if Light sabers count as a reason then Dual Kightsabers should count as another one.

 

[kementari]

The Agent, as described, uses explosives and sniper attacks at range. I remain skeptical.

It seems nothing but the finished product will sway you one way or the other regarding the Agent (a mindset I understand and with which I sympathize), so let me only say one more thing regarding it:

Stealth sniper classes have been done before in dozens of games, and were balanced in the majority of them. As the giant Bioware fanboy you appear through your glowing descriptions of their games to be, well, I find your lack of faith disturbing.

At the risk of making myself a huge target for angry flaming, I'm going to venture a guess that most of WoW's community doesn't play it for the storyline.

And I'm likewise going to venture a guess that you haven't devoted a significant chunk of time (across real life months/years, not days /played) to playing WoW, if at all. The story is more important to the average WoW player than you'd think, but it doesn't change the fact that to keep players, an MMO needs to have good gameplay first, and a flawless story totally adherent to the source material second.

Some of the devs might be Star Wars fans, true, but it's their writers that matter when it comes to lore and immersion. I maintain that there's absolutely nothing wrong with a developer who's in charge of a class or loot or class balance to have the mindset of an MMO player. I don't want vegans making my chocolate cakes, and I don't want writers designing my gameplay. If I'm going to have a chocolate cake, it's going to be baked by the fattest, jolliest connoisseur I can find, and if I'm going to play a video game, I want its developers to talk like the people I used to hear on Vent at the pinnacles of raiding and PvP. In other words, it's reassuring, because I know they know what they're doing.

I guess I can empathize if you just get turned off by that type of speech no matter where you hear it, but please realize it's not the end of the world to hear an MMO developer talk about phat lewts.

 

[BlindChance]

Shhhh. You're taking one of my points for next week

If you like I'll even give you a great lead in quote for it!

"Among those who think corporately only a rebel would strike out alone, without consultation and without companions. The individual does not think of himself as a self sufficient unit, but as a part of the group." -- Donald A. McGavran

 

[soultwister]

Hey,

I fully agree with "The reign of a king can't go unchallenged forever.", the MMO to challenge WoW's success will be Blizzard's new MMO whatever they come up, whenever it'll be. There are challengers comming and going, even with WoW's class "balance" making it a one big meaningless blob, boring gameplay and repetetive encounters it's still the best MMO on the market, it will stay like this, other IPs aren't popular, there's barely any marketing compared and no one will touch Blizzard's quality, they're making timeless diamonds, like it or not.

NC will spew out annother shitty MMO no one cares about beside graphics whores, Mythic won't fix WAR (the only competetor for WoW, IMHO) becouse what's fucked up by EA will stay fucked untill it dies (exept for sports games, the target market is just developing it's second braincell). This will come, grab fiew subers and stale, like any other.

 

[chozo_hybrid]

"To start off, TOR is sci-fi, not fantasy, which is a huge advantage in itself. "

Funny, I've always seen it as fantasy. We got sword fights "magic" powers, prophecy's and the word destiny is thrown around a lot.

I agree, Star Wars is definitely fantasy. People should remember that a space setting does not mean something is automatically sci-fi. Similarly, you can have sci-fi in what appears to be a fantasy setting. Point 3 remains valid though, as it is offering a completely different style of setting to WoW.

Wow, you're the first that's agreed with me. It always starts arguments among my friends when I say it.

It does remain valid, you're right I look forward to having a go at this when they release it.

 

[SamSloth]

Would people please stop talking about the trailer? It's a good piece of entertainment but it wasn't even made by Bioware it was made by blur studios, the same people who made the trailers for Terminator Salvation, Warhammer Online and Goldfish Crackers: Blast Off. Its only relevance to the game is that it's based off of it.
Returning to the subject at hand I refuse to believe that this game will pose an actual challenge to WoW, mostly because I'm a Blizzard fanboy. Admittedly Blizzard also started producing their MMORPG without much experience and bioware have proven that they're badasses in game design but WoW wasn't first released alongside an expansion pack for a MMORPG with 11 million subscribers that had been running for 5 years. People (in my experience at least) always ***** about Blizzard for not getting everything perfect as if their success makes them some sort of tyrannical overlords, eagerly awaiting some shining revolutionary hero to free them from the opression of a badly made game, but with all the coverage and inspection each new game gets there's no way WoW would be this successful if Blizzard weren't better at MMORPG game design than their competition unless MMORPG players are either actively ignorant of better games or they play WoW *because* it's a bad game.
Just to reiterate I'm a fanboy so don't take this is an objective opinion.
On an unrelated note (Hennemore)thank you so much kementari for posting the link to that review of the Phantom Menace, It's really made me appreciate fights as more than just visual eyecandy.