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Star Wars: The Old Republic Looking for Public Testers!

Nathan Grayson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:17:30 -0500

You’ve waited and waited and waited, and you were prepared to wait even longer. Now, though, you can get an early hit of your next MMO addiction. Just head over to the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website, create an account, and – BOOM – you’ll… probably have to wait a bit longer, actually. But only a bit. And then maybe -- if the stars align in your favor – you’ll nab a spot in the game's testing phase.

Be quick about it, though. In case you hadn’t noticed, this game’s got everyone talking, and they’re mostly spouting one phrase: “I want to play this now.” LucasArts agrees with that assessment.

"Testing will be an ongoing process, and spots are limited, so people need to sign up early to give them the best possible chance of getting selected," wrote LucasArts.

So make like the Millennium Falcon and take a lightspeed leap over to the official sign-up page. Vominos!

The Game Boy: Single-Player and Multiplayer -- Two Tastes That Go Great Together?

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:30:45 -0500

Every gamer has a story. A story assembled from countless in-game experiences, a collage of victory, defeat, heroics, and villainy. There is, however, a schism in the way these stories play out. Ask someone who’s lived out their gaming days in solitude and they’ll tell you of superhuman feats, epic dramas, and non-player characters who may not have been real boys, but were certainly close enough that Geppetto would’ve been hard-pressed to tell the difference. Pose the same question to multiplayer-centric gamers, though, and you’ll get an earful of teamwork, commitment, practice, and good old fashioned competition.

Neither side, of course, is wrong to enjoy games for their respective reasons. It’s merely a case of different strokes for different folks. However, what happens when single-player and multiplayer modes get married and pop out a child? Well, if you ask developers like BioWare and Splash Damage (who are working on fusing multiplayer and single-player with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Brink, respectively), they’ll tell you such all-encompassing modes are just The Next Big Thing. And they may very well be right about that.

Forgive me, then, for objecting to this holy matrimony.

Now, I’m not saying that Brink and Star Wars: TOR are going to be bad games, nor am I claiming that they won’t knock our collective socks off. However, I’m not so sure aspects of both single-player and multiplayer games can dance together without stepping on one another’s toes. Why? Well, let’s break it down.

Central to my fears are the goals that single-player and multiplayer modes seek to achieve. Single-player games – at least, as they are today – strive to guide players through an experience. BioWare games, especially, focus on story and well-developed non-player characters. Meanwhile, multiplayer games revel in competition, chaos, and adversity. Fail in a multiplayer environment and the developer’s certainly not going to kiss your bruised ego and make it feel better. That’d only get in the way of other players’ good times. Suddenly, you’re no longer some big damn hero; you’re just an unskilled rookie. This fact alone makes many multiplayer tropes inhospitable to the types of experiences many single-player games try to carry you through.

The biggest problem, I think, is that single-player games attempt to empower only one player, while their multiplayer counterparts try to treat everyone fairly. Thus, single-player modes lend themselves well to a story in which everything is yours. You’re the main character. You’re the star. The fate of the world rests on your shoulders. Generally, then, people fly solo in order to immerse themselves in an escapist fantasy – to escape from the suffocating realities of our mundane, unfair, unpredictable world and be something more than an average-Joe human being.

By adding multiple human beings into the mix, however, the opposite affect is achieved. Odds are, if you’re throwing down with real people, you’re bound to encounter someone better than you. Or, if you’re part of a team, you have to worry about having teammates’ backs, not letting others down, and – if you’re in a guild or clan – keeping in people’s good graces, or even committing to participate in events at scheduled times. That stuff? It’s work. Plain and simple. Fun sometimes, sure, but tedious at others. Moreover, many of the aforementioned multiplayer game elements unintentionally remind you that you are just a normal, everyday person – mostly because they mirror the mundane things you likely do on a day-to-day basis, except now you’re doing them while wearing midriff-revealing armor and doing the same canned dance animation all the time.

The stories that come from multiplayer-centric games, then, aren’t developer-driven; they’re based on your interactions with the game world and other people. Sure, they tend to skew a bit more toward the ordinary instead of the extraordinary, but in a way, they’re much more personal than single-player stories, even though you’re not the muscle-bound, infallible hero of each tale. As such, an orchestrated, single-player-style story only serves to constrict the environment in which such micro-stories can occur.

Honestly, though, I don’t believe multiplayer to be inferior to single-player. I merely think they’re diametrically opposed experiences – both enjoyable for wholly different reasons. And therein lies the reason I’d rather not see single and multiplayer joined together: In hacking the two apart and then sewing them together into some kind of Frankenstein monster, we risk deemphasizing the things that make each mode of play great.

Perhaps, for once, we should keep chocolate and peanut better separate – lest we soon discover that they’re actually water and oil.

Mythic Lending BioWare a Hand on Star Wars: The Old Republic

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:05:38 -0500

With Star Wars: The Old Republic making such lofty claims as being the Death Star to World of Warcraft’s Alderaan, many people forget that the upcoming MMO is actually BioWare’s first. Fortunately, the renowned RPG factory is no longer orchestrating the colossal space opera all by its lonesome. “Yeeeehaw,” we can only imagine Mythic screaming, shortly after the two developers’ recent merger. “BioWare, let’s blow this thing and go home!”

“Oh yeah, without a doubt,” BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk told Eurogamer when asked if Mythic would be lending some of its considerable MMO know-how to Star Wars: The Old Republic’s development.

Moreover, Zeschuk added that the two merged-but-still-somehow-independent companies have a lot to gain from swapping notes – not just for The Old Republic, but for Mythic’s games as well.

“I think we always have lots of opinions to share, Ray and I,” he said. “We've both played Warhammer, and actually I've still been playing it on and off for a while, so I think for us it's not too much a popularity boost as just the fact that we can probably bring perspectives to the table that will be new and perhaps helpful to the guys from Mythic in the same way from an online perspective they can certainly share with us.”

And so, the two companies lived happily ever after, developing games about endless slaughter in pursuit of loot and power. *Sniff* Brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it?

BioWare Enlists HeroEngine to Speed Up Old Republic's Development

Nathan Grayson — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:26:21 -0600

It may not be able to brag about escaping from the labs of Valve or Crytek, but that's no reason to discount Simutronics' HeroEngine. After all, BioWare, in its never-ending quest to unite as many seemingly made-up words as possible (Simutronics?), is using it for its Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. And, no offense, but we think they know better than you. Probably.

“Our goal was to partner with a platform developer that knows online gaming and virtual world development, and the team at Simutronics has an excellent track record in that respect,” said Gordon Walton, Co-Studio Director at BioWare. “Their HeroEngine was specifically created for building MMOGs and it allows for a great amount of flexibility in the way our entire team collaborates.”

The HeroEngine allows developers to construct a game while playing on a server, meaning that a swing of the nerf bat will no longer take a couple weeks. Additionally, the engine eliminates "the need for nightly builds and code crunching, which significantly reduces the notoriously long MMOG development cycle." In short, this means that The Old Republic may actually escape from BioWare's tractor beam before the LHC comes back online and destroys us all.

Yeah, we're pretty determined to see this game end the world. What of it?

Hate Subscription Fees? EA Says Star Wars MMO Will Use Microtransactions Instead

Nathan Grayson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:34:09 -0600

Update: *Waves hand in front of your face* This is apparently just a big misunderstanding. EA told Shacknews that "no statements have been made about the Star Wars business model," and that Ricitiello's statement was misunderstood. Thus, we can't really know how EA will sink its hooks into your wallet until February rolls around. So yeah, these droids? Totally not the one's you've been searching for.

Subscription fees, as we've discussed at length, are the beginning of a slippery slope down ~~Blizzard's~~ single, mega-games' throats, but microtransactions might be a different a story. Most titles that take up the little big label offer their services for free (or a small nominal fee), hoping that you'll drop a few coins into their cup at some point in the future. And if EA has its way, Star Wars: The Old Republic will be one such game.

"We are continuing to stick to the plan relative to building out our direct-to-consumer models which include microtransactions and subscriptions," said EA CEO John Riccitiello in a recent conference call. "The recent launch of Warhammer [Online] is a great example of that."

"Other initiatives we've announced, for example [the] Star Wars online MMO, are mid-session games which are microtransaction-based," he continued. "You'll be hearing more about those in the February [conference] call."

This announcement certainly seems to suggest that BioWare's galaxy far, far away won't take subscription fees as a viable method of payment, though Riccitiello didn't go so far as to completely rule them out.

Regardless, the potential accessibility of a "free" MMO combined with the production values and gameplay of a Scrooge McDuck-level big-budget game could very well melt the Lich King right off his frozen (and likely very uncomfortable) throne -- probably ending all productivity as we know it.

tl;dr: Looks like the Mayan Apocalypse might be coming early this existence. Neat!

Star Wars: The Old Republic Gunning For WoW's Throne

Nathan Grayson — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:43:05 -0500

Well, kinda. Make no mistake, BioWare, EA, and LucasArts hope to four-legged race right past WoW's 11 million subscriber record, but even if WoW's legions commit to Blizzard's ludicrously popular MMO, marry the game, have adorable children, and then sell them to buy more WoW gold, the Old Republic team won't lose any sleep over the lost customers.

“Just look at the base of Star Wars fans, plus what BioWare can do," EA Games president Frank Gibeau told Videogaming247. "Trust me: we want to win. EA’s reputation is for wanting to win."

“This is going to be a powerful category and there’s lots of ways to compete in this category. [Blizzard] created a much larger opportunity for everybody else, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way.”

LucasArts online boss Tom Nichols elaborated, and also downplayed Blizzard's userbase as the be-all, end-all of the MMO market.

“When World of Warcraft came out, everybody thought, ‘No, the market is only this big, because that’s as big as EverQuest was.’ Blizzard showed that it could be much larger,” he said.

“Our goal is to show that by bringing storytelling to the genre that we can attract an even wider audience. Plus, we have the benefit of this huge brand, which has done very, very well for nearly 30 years.”

We think The Old Republic has a better chance of seizing WoW's spot on the winner's podium than any other MMO. How about you?

Star Wars Galaxies Unaffected by Star Wars: The Old Republic, Will Run "Indefinitely"

Nathan Grayson — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 00:44:21 -0500

We don't claim to be businessmen, but even we have to say LucasArts' rationale behind Star Wars Galaxies' continued existence seems a little off. When asked whether the troubled Star Wars MMO would step down gracefully or take a lightsaber to the gut, LucasArts senior online exec Tom Nichols replied:

“We’re still committed to Star Wars Galaxies. A couple of things: a demonstration of that commitment includes a recent trading card game that we launched in August. It’s doing very well for us and we have a new expansion pack being planned for that."

“I think the market will definitely support [both Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars Galaxies]."

He also noted that the two games feature different mechanics, which he believes will attract different audiences.

But if you've never played either game, what can Galaxies throw your way to entice you to its shriveled up side of the force?

“Shortly we’re going to release a new Hoth encounter that recreates that classic battle in the Empire Strikes Back, and that’s exciting content for our Galaxies community, so we’re definitely committed to the product.”

A Hoth level. Added to one of the few Star Wars games in history that didn't already have one.

Galaxies fans, feel free to tell us why we're wrong/why we should die in a fire.