Hengist

Since I put up my first blog in the SWTOR series, the question that has really cropped up, is: “So how close to World of Warcraft is The Old Republic anyhow?” It is inevitable that The Old Republic is going to be compared to World of Warcraft. WoW is simply the benchmark game in the genre that most people have played, and just about everyone knows at least something about.

Detractors are going to look at a game like The Old Republic, and call it “WoW in space.” And one of the co-founders of Bioware, Dr. Greg Zeschuk made a recent comment: “Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that’s pretty dumb,” at the DICE Summit earlier this year. That comment alone made detractors start complaining about “lightsabers in space”, and might have made some fans cringe a little bit. What Dr. Zeschuk did not say, is what those WoW rules might be. I think those rules are worthy of a little bit of discussion, because they may not be quite what you think they are.

In 2007, then co-studio director Gordon Walton gave a speech at GDC-Austin that outlined twelve lessons of making an MMO in a post WoW environment. Note that 2007 was one year before Bioware announced that they were even in production of The Old Republic. It is my belief that several of those “lessons” are a great basis for this discussion, and a glimpse at what those WoW rules might be. I’m just going to pull four of them for this discussion, but please read the entire article, because there are eight additional lessons that make good points as well. (I’m going to pull the lessons, and the commentary from the Gamsutra article directly)

Originally Posted by Gamastura Article on 2007 GDC Speech by then Bioware-Austin Co-Studio Director Gordon Walton

Lesson One
His first point was that although Blizzard were not experts in the genre -- in fact, the company had never shipped an MMO before -- Blizzard learned well from the genre's past. Essentially, Walton posited that taking a critical look at your genre rather than being a fan or having experience developing it is of utmost importance.


Lesson Two

According to Walton, another success of WOW was Blizzard's insistence on keeping system specs low. He railed against developers' addiction to high-powered gaming PCs -- asking the crowd how many replace their rigs every year, every two years, every three. He noted that regular people simply don't replace their boxes that often, and that "there's a lot more real humans than there are us."

As he'd asked for questions during the speech rather than after, someone piped up to ask if the fact that reviewers don't have time to fully appreciate an MMO means that concentrating on graphics -- implying that good press would result -- is the answer. Walton didn't think so.

"This is not about getting some more customers -- this is the opportunity to get lots more. Like 4-10x more. There is maybe one game a year that drives hardware sales... they get a lot of hype, but look at their numbers. How much do they sell?" He also expressed surprise that Blizzard did a Mac version of the game, seeming unsure if the ROI was there. On that front, no conclusions were drawn.

Lesson Three

"Quality counts." This one was interesting because it sounds so obvious, but as Walton pointed out, in the MMO world... it's not quite the case. "What was consistent about every MMO pre-WoW is that they were buggy as sh*t. They were rough. Even if they were fun, they were rough. They all launched with hundreds, if not thousands, of known bugs. Everyone basically ran out of money and launched their games."

He continued, "I think that quality was a true innovation on Blizzard's part. Nobody had done that before at that level of play. Because they did that, their game stood out night and day above everybody else's games. What's the biggest mistake? What everybody did without exception -- shoving it out the door." He admitted that he was guilty of doing the same thing in the past (we can thus infer that BioWare will not in the future.)

A audience member asked if publishers or venture capitalists new to MMOs would recognize the quality factor. Musing on the question, he talked about human nature: "We fool ourselves into doing things that we know are not right because of the current circumstances... human beings tend to think short-term... the future value of the MMO is immense if you don't blow the launch. [If you launch a bad game] you can look at something and go 'I flushed hundreds of millions.'

With "one chance to make a first impression", he posited, "the brand value of an MMO is created within the first week of launch. End of story. You're done the first week... I say a week, but it might even be a day." The implication was clear: get the moneymen on board with the quality equation or suffer. He offered this simple warning: "It's a post-World Of Warcraft world. You better do that."

Lesson Four

One thing that WoW is frequently recognized for is its solo play. Walton's fourth lesson was: support this, because gamers want it. According to Walton, older games that forced players into groups missed the point: "[the] truth is that people soloed every game to the best they could and when they couldn't anymore, they quit. Embracing solo play that was a true innovation for WoW."

It was pointed out that players who hit the level cap are pretty much forced to group in WOW; Walton still felt like the game "feels like it's a level playing field for all people at that level" and thus isn't quite as sinful as it could be. He offered a Blizzard quote on the solo issue -- "We look at soloing as our casual game." Given the weight of the phrase "casual game" in 2007, you can bet the audience was scribbling that one down.

Again, please read the complete article from Gamasutra for the remaining lessons that Walton talked about.


When I take a hard look at those four lessons, I don’t actually see anything all that bad. What I do see is a critical look at what seems to be important in the genre. As simplistic as the “quality” lesson seems to be, and the addendum that “you only have one chance to make a first impression”, we still have developers release games like Age of Conan and Final Fantasy IV. While Funcom has cleaned up AoC, and Square Enix is in the process of re-working FFIV, do you think both of those companies would like to have a do over with those products? If that’s a lesson from WoW, I think I’ll take it each and every day of the week.


My personal belief is that these are some pretty solid lessons that have been learned, and if that is what Zeschuk was referring to, then we are already starting with a pretty solid foundation. If we take those lessons and build, does it make this game a WoW clone? Absolutely not, it makes Bioware a pretty smart developer who is building a game that should sell an awful lot of boxes out of the gate. (Magic eight ball is broken so I wont guess at retention, although I think it should be fairly solid.)

Supporters and detractors all have their “special causes” like quest presentation, no auto-attack during combat, similar UI, some instanced PvP and focus on loot. To me, many of those are actually moot, because just about all MMO’s share similar features, and if you find something that people like, it would be silly to try to re-invent the wheel. People are going to slip into TOR, and feel very comfortable, and very quickly.

The Old Republic isn’t presenting itself as something it isn’t. It isn’t revolutionizing the genre, it isn’t going to be an MMOFPS, it isn’t going to break ground with a new combat system (like AoC set out to do), but it is taking the absolute best it could find from the current generation, adding its own twist, and making the end result its very own. Look at how they infuse story (a direction Funcom shares with a high focus on story in their upcoming MMO The Secret World, have a look at Creative Director Ragnar Tornquist's Blog) Expect a polished, interesting, and highly addictive experience that very likely will do one other thing that World of Warcraft did in spades: Bring fans to the genre from outside. With an IP this large, and a dedicated following of single player RPG’s, Bioware has the potential for a massive infusion of players into the market, and for everyone who enjoys MMO’s, that’s a good thing.

So how is The Old Republic going to deal with that 800lb gorilla? From where it looks today, pretty darn well.


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