Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Star Wars: Old Republic (PC) commentary

So, I'm a huge fan of Knights of the Old Republic and am not ashamed of the fact that I bought an Xbox in 2004 just to play the sequel before it came out on the PC (although, looking back, the money I spent on the Xbox would have been better served buying a graphics card and waiting*) and have spent incalculable hours playing the series. The stories always offered something that was just amazing and made was able to suck me in for hours at a time.

I'm currently playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and enjoying some seasonal beer and realized what I truly enjoy in an RPG and why I'm frightened of the upcoming Bioware/Lucasarts MMORPG coming out in 2010: the story will be lacking. I spent a few months playing World of Warcraft and quickly fell behind my more serious friends and found that I didn't enjoy playing as a gimped character at level 12 while my level 30 friends did "awesome dungeons" and picked up awesome loot. I even spent a couple years playing the original Star Wars: Galaxies, as well as the "New Experience" and found that they lacked any kind of continuing story that I look for in games.

Which is why Star Wars: Old Republic scares the hell out of me, I'm afraid that turning the franchise into an MMORPG will sully the good name that Bioware worked out for this IP. I read the comics, I played the games and I waited years for the Team Gizka patch that never came, hoping for some extra bits and pieces of the story. I wanted to find out what happened to Revan and the Exile after the events of the games. I wanted to find out how the Exile came to have Reven's droids, I wanted to play more of the story...

But, by transforming it into an MMORPG, I can't see the story being exposed to the player. I have no doubt that this joint effort of two titans of the industry will produce a spectacular gaming experience, but I doubt that it will be able to flesh out the story in any shape that fans of the series are looking forward to.

I know that it'll be awesome to play as a Smuggler on Nal Hutta and pick up some awesome missions and such, but I fear that the ease with which a player can pick up a lightsaber will also create a void of homogeneity, leading to a server full of Jedi and Sith.

I really just want to play Knights of the Old Republic III, not an MMO where I'm forced to listen to idiots blather on in chatrooms and over microphones like I'm on Xbox Live. I just want to learn what happened to all my favorite characters.

I know that I'll sink the cash and time into the game, but I'm worried that I'm not going to get what I want out of the game...

(* I was running a Pentium 4 3.2ghz CPU with 512 DDR Ram at 577 and a Geforce FX5200GT at the time, premium and top notch, aside from the 5200. Only thing I ever upgraded in that system was the ram, up to 1.5gb. Now, it's an Intel Q6600 clocked at 3.1GHZ with 3 Gigs of DDR2 at 800MHZ and a Geforce 8800GT, not the cream of the crop, but, decent.)

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