Do We Need a Revolution?

Reading through the E3 coverage of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I across a weird common thread in their hands-on articles and descriptions of what people should expect from the game.  It's summed up quite well in this comment:

"Overall, I found SWTOR to be enjoyable, though nothing particularly revolutionary for the MMO genre."
- Massively


I assume that's a fair assessment, given that the author has had actual hands-on experience with the game (though apparently SOMEONE didn't actually play the game, according to the end of the article).  Considering my beta invite is still AWOL, all I have to go on are videos of dev walkthroughs, combat, and mission-running/questing/what-the-hell-ever they're going to try to call it, and what I've seen backs that statement up.

My question is... does TOR really need to be a revolution?

Look familiar?  That's not a bad thing.

Set Hype to "Revolutionary"

The term "revolutionary" gets thrown around a lot in gamer marketing.  It's supposed to mean "we're taking the same old tired systems and overthrowing them with bright, shiny new things that are completely different!  VIVA LA REVOLUTION!"

From a consumer mindset, this is supposed to be a good thing:  out with the old, in with the new, and the gaming market has largely bought into that idea.  Gamers want new experiences, we want bigger and better and flashier, we want to push past the level cap and reach the "It's over 9000!" moment.  If you slap lipstick on Pac-Man and call it Mrs. Pac-Man and then try to sell it to us, we're going to notice.  We'll buy it, but we're still going to notice and flame you for it on the message boards.

The inherent problem with the word "revolution" is that you're always going to be comparing yourself to something, the old regime that you're overthrowing.  In TOR's case that's WoW, and it's always going to be WoW.  From the very first meetings about it, the minds behind TOR had to have followed the same thought process MMO players who were also Star Wars fans followed:  "World of Warcraft is great, so wouldn't it be AWESOME if you set it in the Star Wars universe?"

The game does have one component that should be considered revolutionary:  being a fully-voiced MMO.  PC Gamer did the math in a recent article, calculating that the game had to have 16 different lead performances just to represent every class and gender.  When you add to that the different individual outcomes (Dark Side, Light Side) for each class's storyline, that's a HUGE output by the various voice actors involved.  The effect this will have on the MMO marketplace remains to be seen, and it's very possible that any fully-voiced MMOs later will be called "TOR clones" instead of "WoW clones".

Do You Want An Evolution?


Voice-overs aside, what we're seeing with Star Wars: The Old Republic is not a true MMO revolution.  Heck, World of Warcraft wasn't even a true MMO revolution:  both of them are combinations of lots of great tastes that taste great together.

World of Warcraft took everything Blizzard learned about loot and leveling while making Diablo, all the lore and questing they developed in Warcraft, and built that in a model that matched other "great" MMOs at the time like Everquest.  It was the evolution of what Blizzard did well in their other games, and that's exactly what Bioware is doing with TOR.

Everything Bioware has learned about the companion system, interactive conversations and storytelling in digital spaces, as well as lessons gleaned from playing other MMOs like WoW, all factor into what TOR will become at launch.  Because even that is only one step in the game's development; WoW today is a far cry from WoW at launch, because it evolved and its designers learned what worked and what didn't and how to make it a better game.

I don't see The Old Republic as a revolutionary game, and I also don't think that's a bad thing.  It's the next step in the evolution of the MMO, and it looks like a pretty big step so far.