I've genuinely enjoyed every BioWare game that I've played up till this point - they're one of the very very few developers who's games I'd buy no questions asked just because I'm confident that it'll be not only a quality product, but fun to play as well.
That said, there's a part of me that would really love it if The Old Republic plays much more like the KotOR games (only accounting for thousands of players) than your standard EQ-derivative MMO. Mind you, they'd have to drop certain standards like hitting the space bar to pause combat but that one's probably a given.
I guess the point is that with each new MMO release, we still haven't really seen any that deviate too far from the norm in any meaningful ways. Mind you, each game currently out is more or less it's own unique take on a style of game, but there's also a lot of cookie-cutter elements as well.
If you look at single player games, there's quite a few predominant genres across all platforms. So far with MMOs there's a good number of
settings (sci-fi, fantasy, superhero etc), but the genre (style of gameplay) is a constant.
Since we really haven't seen more than a singular genre in MMOs, we can only imagine newly announced titles as fitting into that genre. So with The Old Republic, with so little known facts on gameplay at this point we're all assuming it'll conform to familiar mechanics. It could very well be that those imaginings are the equivalent of trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
If The Old Republic is going to truly "have legs", it'll likely need to be a round peg - something that deviates enough from the norm to be it's own unique experience within the MMO space. BioWare has pulled that off with single player RPGs in the past, but only time will tell if that's what they bring to the online table as well. They are, however, one of the few companies that I can imagine doing so anytime in the near future.
Loading... October 22, 2008 - The Force is Strong with This One
(I THINK thats what it is called)
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