I want to be there when The Old Republic blows up. Or when it doesn’t. More to the point, I want to document it. What the The Old Republic looks like at launch, and how quickly it adapts to perception may be the most important aspect of the game, and that’s not normally the kind of things that game critics cover. We usually focus on discrete products, which makes the most sense for a story-based single-player (or co-op) game with a distinct ending. Massively multiplayer RPGs, on the other hand, are vague, formless things, which are generally done a disservice by only dropping in for the release and expansion packs for review.
The Old Republic is specifically interesting because it’s the first game since World Of Warcraft that I think actually has a chance to dethrone the king of the genre. There are three important reasons for this. First, Star Wars is an immediately appealing concept, even bigger than Warcraft to the general population. This isn’t enough on its own – witness the failure of Star Wars Galaxies – but it’s a great start.
Second, and relevant to the Galaxies experience, World Of Warcraft is old by now. It’s gone through its main story, the Lich King saga that drove its source material, and its expansions are getting weirder. Its technology is showing its age. Its subscribers are more fickle. For the first time, it’s vulnerable. It’s possible that The Old Republic won’t pass it, or it might co-exist in some way. But it’s also possible that The Old Republic will supplant WOW, or even surpass it.
One of the main reasons for that is that it’s being made by BioWare. There are two developers with reputations that come anywhere near Blizzard’s as being the best in PC gaming. Valve is one. BioWare is the other. All of these companies have histories of consistently releasing wildly popular, critically acclaimed games. If anyone theoretically can do it, yes, it’s BioWare with EA’s marketing behind them.
I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to previews and such. I didn’t even know what class I wanted to be until I started downloading the game (the answer: all of them). What I have seen indicates that BioWare has been trying to directly address flaws in how other MMRPGs are done, which is promising. Wanting to improve narrative and create ethical choices in online worlds? Yes, I can get into that. Doing massive open betas and granting early access for pre-orders and reviews? That’ll smooth out the launch, which is traditionally the worst part of an MMRPG. I was there in the first week of Ultima Online, when the dynamic economy made buying and selling utterly useless, and occasionally every character on-screen would suddenly shout lines of code. Things have improved, of course, but a good launch – like WOW had – can go a long way.
Thus I want to be present at the rise – or perhaps at the fall. I want to document what The Old Republic feels like to play, because it may be around for a decade, but there will only be one launch. Sure, discussion will be around in forums and tweets and emails and chats, but as a historian, I know there’s value in the diary of an intelligent writer.
Welcome to my Old Republic diary. I’m aiming for a kind of anthropological examination of how a new game builds its community, as well as my personal story, so it examines both what it’s like and what it seems to be like. I’m sure there will also be criticism, more and more mixed in as I examine the game in-depth, but I’m also going to be writing a separate review elsewhere. What I’d like most of all is to tell stories about the start of The Old Republic, in a way that’s interesting now and possibly helpful for the future. I hope it works. Against my better judgment, I’m getting pretty damn excited for this thing.
So somehow, despite requesting early access only on that first day, I ended up in the game by midnight, and was forced to choose my class and character look. After having essentially decided that each class and most of the sub-classes looked interesting enough to play, my indecision was only broken by my partner saying “Why would you not play as a Jedi? Sith would be okay too.†So I made a Sith Warrior, to potentially turn into a tank via the Juggernaut sub-class (note for non-MMRPG readers: tanks are characters who take enemy attention and absorb damage while others safely fight it).
My character showed up on the Sith homeworld of Korriban, late at night, on a normal PvE (Player versus Environment, as opposed to Player versus Player) server. And it was quiet. Boring, even. There were other players there, but all they wanted to talk about was who might join their group to do more difficult quests. This continued even into the next day. That this was one of the most anticipated games of the year, unmentioned. Perhaps these were mostly people who were used to the beta test, mechanically building up their characters as quickly as they could. Perhaps they were just boring.
Regardless, my impressions were that The Old Republic was barely an evolution of the World Of Warcraft form. It looks and acts the same, with a few slight differences. Most notably, there are cutscenes and dialogue choices, with full voices, just like other recent BioWare games, which gives much more of the impression of a story. More subtly, combat seems less automatic and more intense, although not imposingly so. And two things became clear as I pushed on: first, if the game had anything to offer beyond WOW, it wouldn’t be found in the first 10 levels, and second, Korriban itself was really boring.
I was introduced to World Of Warcraft in the Night Elf starting zone, Teldrassil, which was beautiful, exotic, and mesmerizing. It was partially familiar, since I’d seen areas like that in Warcraft III, but it was also new, because of the perspective shift and because I was sharing it with other players, reveling in its novelty. Korriban, on the other hand, is silent, ugly, and old – it felt exactly like it did in previous Star Wars games, specifically both Knights Of The Old Republic games which had sequences on Korriban. The story was also dull, the political machinations of the Sith illustrating the narrative problems of a violently libertarian ethos running an empire, but doing it poorly.
I switched to a role-playing server, and decided to try out the Han Solo-style class, the Smuggler on the Republic side. This was an instant improvement – a civil war-torn world causing your selfish character to pick a side. The non-player characters even had personality, one of whom made me laugh! And the people there actually talked to one another. Sure, I made fun of a few of the of more self-important types, but I also helped others. What community was growing was one where people were trying to see what worked – a few “experts†who had played the beta gave advice, but it was not set in stone. People were learning together, and I was becoming more excited to move deeper into the game.
It’s time to venture out into the galaxy – and it’s also time for more and more new players to join The Old Republic. Things are going to get interesting.
