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LucasArts, BioWare Confirm MMO ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’
Posted by Patrick Klepek on 10/21/08 at 5:30 pm.

Just a few moments ago, LucasArts president Darrell Rodriguez confirmed their rumored collaboration with BioWare for a “Star Wars” PC MMO.

It’s called “Star Wars: The Old Republic.”

“There’s been some rumors recently in the past few months,” joked BioWare co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka. “We thought about ‘Howard the Duck’ MMO, but maybe that’s a little too crazy, a little too far out there.”

Muzyka described “The Old Republic” as a story-based MMO, and they’ve wanted to make a game like this for over a decade now. He describes “The Old Republic” as the fan-requested “‘Knights of the Old Republic’ 3, 4, 5, 6 and beyond.”

The game is now playable, though we won’t be playing the game at LucasArts’ event today. Right now, they’re focusing on tweaking gameplay at LucasArts, BioWare and Electronic Arts and said we’ll be seeing more of the gameplay “soon.”

The graphics look stylized. But while not realistic, they’re not as extreme as say, the animated “Clone Wars” movie.

BioWare’s emphasis is on story. They described story as the “fourth pillar” that has yet to be explored in online games. “The Old Republic” will tell a “powerful” story set thousands of years before the “Star Wars” movies. It’s the same setting as the popular “Knights of the Old Republic” games.

But they did show a trailer to set the stage for the game. The video was completely story-centric, but gave away few details and showed no in-game footage from “The Old Republic.” The emphasis of the trailer was on the fight between good vs. evil. “Who will you choose?” the teaser asked.

A rep for the game said the developers are only talking about a PC release today, declining to address whether there will be console versions.

We’ll be interviewing LucasArts and BioWare today about “The Old Republic.” Stay tuned for more details.

BioWare Compares ‘Star Wars’ MMO Combat To ‘WoW,’ ‘Age of Conan’ And ‘The Force Unleashed’
Posted by Patrick Klepek on 10/23/08 at 10:00 am.

There is much we don’t know about LucasArts and BioWare’s newly announced, currently PC-only MMO “Star Wars: The Old Republic.”

This week’s announcement didn’t explain many important aspects to the game, including how combat works. It is slow? Fast? Turn-based? Action-centric?

I spent time on Tuesday with BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk, who attempted to explain — as much as he could — what “The Old Republic”’s combat is like, using extreme points of comparison: “World of WarCraft” and “EverQuest” against “Age of Conan” and “The Force Unleashed.”

Here’s what Zeschuck said.

MTV Multiplayer: I really like “The Force Unleashed,” and that’s one end, an action take on “Star Wars.” And then you have traditional MMOs like “World of Warcraft,” “EverQuest” — you’re pressing a button, it’s doing an action. And then you have, more recently, MMOs like “Age of Conan,” which introduced a combo system. You’ve talked about how you want to introduce visceral combat. If we take, on one hand, “EverQuest,” where you press a button and it does something, and a more action-oriented MMO like “Age of Conan,” where would you place “The Old Republic”?

Greg Zeschuk, BioWare co-founder: That’s a good question. At some level, I can’t tell you. Not in the sense that “because I can’” [because it's a secret] but because we don’t know quite yet. What really what it comes down to is the gameplay and the iteration and trying it out. We have a lot of ideas.

MTV Multiplayer: Would you consider it action-oriented? More hands-on?

Zeschuk: That’s a tough one. I mean, I think the main goal, the key thing we’re trying to solve, is that…does it look, from the user’s perspective, that it could be cut from the movie? That’s the very first thing, and then how we got there…to certain degrees, it’s yet to be determined. We have a system that works and ‘hey, it looks like the movie’ but what do you to get there is the key next question. I don’t think we have a good answer for that yet. The way we tend to develop is we hit one goal and then we go, ‘okay, let’s start iterating.’

MTV Multiplayer: How can we take that to the next level?

Zeschuk: Yeah. So I think the interesting thing is…the key thing you want to have is capturing the sense that the player has a really good sense of control and that’s the key thing to solve for us, is that visceral level. If it looks good, now we’re onto the ‘how do they feel like they’ve got the control while it’s looking good?’ That’s kind of where we’re at.

BioWare: Consequence Has Left Gaming, ‘Star Wars’ MMO Will Fix That
Posted by Patrick Klepek on 10/27/08 at 9:00 am.

You had to make some tough decision in “Mass Effect” sometimes. Should a character live or die? The choice was often left in your hands.

But even if you didn’t like your first choice, you could always boot up an old save and pick a different path. That character never really had to die.

BioWare admits that’s a struggle with even their own games. Because “Star Wars: The Old Republic” is a persistent online experience, they see an opportunity to solve that.

“As an attempt to appeal to a broader and broader audience, consequence has left gaming,” said BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk to me after unveiling his MMO this week. “Everything is very low impact and there’s no real negative result that can occur. We’re going to start bringing that back but in a rational way, a way that doesn’t punish the player — but puts them on the spot.”

The issue of inconsequential decision-making isn’t just something limited to offline experiences, however, argued Zeschuk. Online games are guilty of it, too.

“You have some level of choice in who you hang out with and what quests you go on,” said Zeschuk, discussing current MMOs. “But once you go on a quest, you don’t have a sense of a choice. Your job is to get me some of these, get me five of these and bring it back. They’re often very unabashed in their mundane [approach to player choice].”

“In this [game], once you make a choice, you’re done.”

One way games can counter a player from going back on a decision is by auto-saving the moment their choice is made. “Grand Theft Auto IV” did that — though you could turn it off — and resulted in me feeling something powerful.

“Unlike a regular offline game, there’s no save,” said Zeschuk. “When you’re sitting and waiting to make that hard decision, you can’t just save it and retry it. Once you’ve made it, you’re done. You’re going with whatever you did and it can come back to bite you or not. It’s actually a neat concept compared to what typically you see in story-based games where people can explore all the choices. In this one, once you make a choice, you’re done.”

That said, Zeschuk isn’t suggesting that someone playing “The Old Republic” is going to make the “wrong” choice and find themselves stripped of their equipment. Like their approach to combat, they want gamers to feel apart of the action. BioWare seems to be employing lessons learned from single-player experiences and bringing them to MMOs.

But all that said, even he can admit that it’s fun to sit and play “what if?”

“It’s kind of neat to be able to cheat like that, too,” he chuckled.

You won’t be able to do that in “The Old Republic,” though. We haven’t seen how that will actually work in the game, but the implications are certainly exciting.