IGN calls it “one of the worst kept secrets in the industry“, but the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO was announced at a huge event yesterday.
Details are still scarce, but like any number of other MMOs, you can join the Good Guys or the Bad Guys, with some potential moral grays. (“For the Sith!”) Yes, there was a previous Star Wars MMO that didn’t work out so well (despite some fun touches), but if they can learn from the mistakes of the other company and make it anywhere close to the awesomeness that was KOTOR, I might have to break my MMO boycott.
As I was discussing with NukeTown yesterday, Star Wars is one of the properties that makes me want to play an MMO. Star Trek is the other, but there’s already some things that I don’t like about it (gimme Romulans!)
In either case, I’ll be watching the reviews closely, but not holding my breath.
I actually heard that SW:G was pretty great until they let *everybody* and their mom be jedis. You couldn’t tell by looking at someone whether they were Alliance or Empire, and becoming a jedi (or a sith) was an arduous process that took lots of time to achieve. Jedi were rare and special. And you wouldn’t necessarily know you were talking to a jedi until the lightsabers were out and flying. The person I knew who played it described it as such, anyways. But then he quit the day an expansion hit and he walked outside to see a gigantic herd of jedi and sith fighting in the middle of town. It kind of ruined the experience for a lot of the existing fanbase and caused a mass exodus from the servers. ‘S what I heard anyways.
Nerdvana: I didn’t play SW:Galaxies either, but what you said sounds about right from what I heard also. It’s really a shame, because the early jedi rules make a lot of sense but it really sucks to tell customers, consumers, and fans that they have to put a certain amount of work into a game in order to play a Jedi. If they’d stuck to it, and really advertised the hell out of it, honestly the system encourages players to be more hardcore and to play more which is what the game wants to do anyway. WoW does a lot of that, but it’s all in much more subtle ways than a class requiring a certain amount of time/skill to be.
Permanent/semi-permanent death is still something I want to see in an MMO, I heard for a while that Conan was supposed to have that but it launched and I haven’t heard much about it since then.
Bartoneus, I feel like a strong death system, permanent/semi-p, kills mmo’s, they are a rare breed of MMO because a systme like that gives little room for error. I cannot find many games, platform or pc, that don’t give you ‘nearly’ unlimited retries.
In my opinion, if a death system, as previously stated, was implemented, then characters shouldn’t level up, and instead the gear whould just become more powerful; similar to reality.