Hengist

The Old Republic: Rebooted Blog


Real life always seems to find a way to suck more time than you expect it to, but despite the hiatus, I figured it was time to get busy again with the blog as it is becoming more and more evident that The Old Republic is nearing release. A suggestion was made that instead of talking about features or videos, the best thing to do is talk about what really interests me with The Old Republic, and that maybe it would give someone who has had little more than a passing interest in the game to pay attention.

First of all, lets just say that I fully admit that The Old Republic isn’t going to be a game for everyone, but it is a game for me for a few big reasons, let me share ‘em, and see if/where those are reasons you might share.


Background:

It all starts with Star Wars for me. I’m not going to get deeply into it, but I’ll just say that it was one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater, and it has had a lasting impact in my life. While I was always a sports oriented kid, and my heroes were athletes, I got lost in the Star Wars universe and understood sacrifice, heroism, and evil as concepts that George Lucas put on a big screen. Probably not the best examples, but I would have put Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in my pantheon of heroes along with Walter Payton and Joe Montana. As I grew older I found heroes to admire outside the realms of sports or stories, but qualities that I admired kept some heroes far longer than one would expect.


I’ve never been a tabletop gamer, although I did have a few of the books, and I did give Shadowrun a spin once upon a time. (Don’t start me, but there is a game that really needs to be an MMO.) My entry into multiplayer RPG’s was really Ultima Online, a game that is still in a class of its own in my mind to this day. If I look back at it, and the reasons that I enjoyed it, I’m pretty sure that if I picked it up today, I would not care for the game. Back then my life was different, I was able to sit and play for long stretches, and if I got PK’d, and lost my gear, I shrugged it off and started again. Could I really stand to play that today? I think not.

Thru the years I tried other games, and have found that at heart, I love PvP, and no games have done it better than Dark Age of Camelot and to a lesser degree Warhammer. You see, I found that I loved the RvR style of PvP far more than what I experienced in UO, or even than what I experienced in World of Warcraft. I did the whole 40 man progression raiding, and did it as a guild leader of one of the better raiding guilds on my server during vanilla WoW. Want to know something? While I loved working with 39 other people to see cool content that not everyone got to see, I utterly hated the job of being a guild leader and having to deal with all the different personalities. Where I had my most fun, was with some friends, gathered in Ventrilo either talking or listening to streaming music, and queuing up for PvP. There were instances of us not losing a match for a couple of weeks at a time, and we’d do that two, three, four hours a day.


Like I said though, life sometimes takes more time than you think, and as a husband I’m lucky my wife will play so we can share some time together, but still a real job, a house, a daughter, and suddenly my time isn’t what it used to be, and that’s one of the drivers for what I enjoy. I can’t afford the time to get lost in a sandbox world, or a place where I can lose all my items in a matter of seconds and then build up again. I need something that I can bite off it bits and pieces, and fit it around my life. So to begin with, I guess I’ve finally embraced (I played, just never embraced) the idea that I’m a theme park gamer today. From that point of view, The Old Republic promises to be the ultimate theme park for me. It is an IP that I know and love, and the game is definitely a theme park a la WoW. I can have my game in chunks, as much as I can afford to invest.


Story


What I loved about seeing Star Wars in the theater when I was a kid, is the epic story that was told. I’m a sucker for a good story, and I always have been. I can get sucked in to a story and lose myself for hours. My imagination then takes me to some great places. When it comes to games, I enjoy single player RPG’s that tell a story, or make me the central part in a story.

When it comes to MMO’s, I’ve generally found story to be lacking. Reading a quest text just doesn’t do much to immerse me into a game world. Put it this way, in EQ2, I was the guy who wondered who had lived in Stormhold, (teen level Antonican dungeon) what its significance was, and what happened to turn it into a ruin. In a single player RPG, you’d find quests, clues, and you get that tie to the game world.

This has been a huge focus for Bioware, and I generally love the way they tell a story. Within a real MMO world, a large world just like any other MMO world, I’ve got an actual story. They offer a class arc, and maybe I’m going to share it with everyone else who plays “X-Class”, but having it fully voiced with NPC companions, yeah, it works for me. In a world of many, there is a part that is “special” for me, developing my character within a larger world. That’s just not something I’ve ever had in an MMO, short of imagining it. What is more interesting, is that it appears this decision isn’t unique to Bioware, and teams like Funcom are moving in this direction as well.


PvP


To me world PvP died back in Ultima Online because after that, I found reasons to PvP, it did not just have to be random. RvR introduced me to taking and defending territory, and that gave life to PvP for me. While we don’t know how it will exist in TOR, we do know that they have talked about RvR lakes, and a good part of the Mythic team that brought us Warhammer PvP is working on PvP for The Old Republic. Scenario PvP is just a fact of life in MMO’s these days, and the couple of bits they have shown us do look intriguing.



Group Size

I loved (notice the past tense) doing things with 39 other people, but I cant do it anymore. I love that this games dungeons are currently balanced around a 4 man group. In my time playing a healer at Pax East, I never felt like a healbot, if there was a skill on my hotbar, I was using it, and to me the smaller size allows people to use more skills instead of just a few, and that is fun.

The other benefit, to me, is companions, so if I have less than 4 and at least 1 other person with me, I can give an instance a try. It may not be optimal, but I can at least try. Raids appear to be between 8 (info given) and at around 20 (just a guess based on watching a raid video). Much more suited to small groups.


Star Wars

Geoge Lucas invented a unique universe, and ever since I saw a Star Destroyer chasing a Corellian Corvette towards a dusty planet, it has been a world I wanted to inhabit. Other games have let me see a portion, and SWG gave me a home for a time, but for the first time, it appears I’ve got a universe to explore, and be able to do it on my terms, in my own time.


So I’ve given just a few reasons why I’m interested, and why I like what I see. Where did you come from? Have you found an interest changing based on where you are today? What’s the draw to a game for you? What aspect is going to give you the most enjoyment from an MMORPG?



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