Nightly Open Thread
Suppose for a moment that BioWare’s The Old Republic MMORPG fails commercially. Will the Star Wars franchise survive?
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Mark Lemmert says: -
Mark Lemmert says:
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“Ultima 7 Revisited”: Spot the New 3D Objects – The Ultima Codex says:
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Happy Anniversary to Ultima IX – Forgotten World says:
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Anthony Salter says:
Yah, if Bioware drops the ball on this, I highly doubt we will see another Star Wars game for a long while. The Force Unlashed was a terriable game, and the second one wasn’t better. Nothing seems to be able to match the days of Dark Forces and X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter.
The Force Unleashed was an awesome game actually – I would argue one of the best Star Wars game ever released 😛 Note that this was also the most commercially successful Star Wars game of all time. It sold millions.
They completly dropped the ball on Force Unleashed II though – boring plot, very few levels which usually repeated the same places over and oever, less combos and possibilities in terme of action, lot of backtracking and a cliffhanger ending that will never be released because LucasArts’ new CEO has cancelled TFU3 because he hates the franchise. Duh! It’s actually the only case I can think of this generation of a license where the second game didn’t improve on its predecessor.
The policy of LucasArts’ new CEO is actually mind numbling – he doesn’t want LucasArts outsourcing game development to outisde companies anymore, which is crazy since this lead to a lot of amazing games!
That being said: of course a failure of the Old Republic wouldn’t kill the Star Wars license anymore than the failure of Star Wars Galaxies did – indeed simply bringing up the possibility is ludicrous. Videogames have always been rather secondary for the Star Wars license as a whole.
A failure of TOR would probably have little consequence even for LucasArts consdering how they’ve washed their hands of the project et decided to let EA handle all the distribution – and thus take all the risks. The worst that could happen if TOR fails… is for Bioware Austin to close doors and EA to stop again doing MMOs and refocus on solo games.
Oh and while no other Star Wars games have been annouced after TOR and Lego Star Wars III… it is of course very likely that LucasArts has other Star Wars games on their plate that they just haven’t annouced yet.
Star Wars as a franshise will be fine if (when) TOR fails. I have actually come to think of the Star Wars franchise as some kind of freak immortal license. No other property could survive so much bad merchandising, three terrible movies released consecutively, and a spew load of awful fiction. Yet Star Wars somehow survives, despite getting exponentially worse with every 3D’d re-release.
Worst case scenario is the value of the license drops and we get a lot more games that are somehow even worse than the Star Wars games already coming out. Yoda Stories 2, perhaps?
More importantly though, TOR failing could have huge implications for the rest of the games industry. EA, and likely other huge publishers, will never touch an MMO again. No more WoW clones, huzzah! Even better, it might get publishers to focus more on developers who have smaller teams, lower budgets, and faster turn arounds on their games. Could this be the return of “garage gaming”? It’d sure be great if it was.
In all fairness – TOR doesn’t look anything like WoW clone.
-Sergorn
I’m still cautiously optimistic about TOR. I really hope it is a good game. It’s Bioware, and their games always have what I look for in a game (characters, story, etc). They have *said* they are putting that into this too. A lot of the info I’ve seen makes me worry, but I’m still giving them the benefit of the doubt… I think they’ve earned it to this point.
The thing that makes me hopeful for TOR… is that the vast majority of usual WoW Players/MMO Powergamers, seems to think it’s crap. If that’s not a sign that it might just be pretty damn good, then what is? 😛
The videos looks interesting too: it basically looks like a regular cinematic Bioware game, with plot, quests and everything except in an online environmement.
Kinda like the Ultima X: Odyssey approach I guess.
There’s lot of potential in that, so I really look forward to see how that goes.
Killing 20 space-rats bookended by story based instances is still killing 20 space-rats.
As for the comparisons to X Odyssey, I dont see it. Odyssey had an innovative combat system, and a virtue system to give the proceedings some depth. Moreover, Odyssey had timing on its side. At the time, there was no WoW to have to out-WoW.
These days, you can’t try to fight WoW on its own ground, not even by putting little twists on the design like instanced story missions. They’ll beat you over the head with six years of polish and fine tuning, and the coup de grace is always the six years of content head start. It happened to WAR, AoC, many others, and it’ll happen to TOR.
If you look at the (subscription) MMO industry you’ll see that the only games that have met with real success so far have been the ones that really carved out a specialty niche for themselves in the market. Eve, for instance, is nothing at all like just about any MMO out there (and believe me when I don’t say that as some kind of Eve fanboy. I respect their success, but damn do I find that game unplayably boring), and they have found great success with their niche market.
EA is hoping that by pumping all that extra money into TOR they will be able to close the content gap. But even if they can manage to close the six year content gap (and it would be miraculous if they did), that money pump is really doing more to sink the poor folks than help them. With every extra dollar that goes in, they *have* to be that much more successful in order to recoup costs. As it stands, even if TOR is modestly successful by average MMO population standards, it’ll still mean a massive financial loss.
Lum der Mad (an industry veteran, with roots in Mythic) did an excellent analysis on his blog a few months back. The numbers (which were unconfirmed at the time, and EA still denies them) were startling.
Oh come on, we both know the quests in TOR won’t just be about “killing X numbers of Y monsters.” Nevermind the fact that it’s the kind of quest that is very commmon in regular RPGs as well. Also I have to point that offering story and context is the thing that can makes such task fun and rewarding… rather than pointless and repetitive.
I completly agree that going toe to toe with WoW is pointless. I just fail to see how TOR looks in any way like another Everquest Clone though.
To me everthing looks like rather that trying to do a “WoW killer”, Bioware is trying to bring new kind of player with The Old Republic. As a matter of fact you just need to at the reaction around this game: the WoW players and usual MMO gamers seems to have little interest in it – they actually complain about the plot approach. But you know who are actually excited about this game ? The people who usually don’t play RPGs, the Bioware crows who loves the cnematic RPG approach taken by Bioware and who feel TOR as a good opportunity to have all this in an online environment.
Now I’m not sure if Bioware’s approach will work out (though between the Star Wars brand and the Bioware name I suspect it will definitly have a strong short term success and good sales – keeping the numbers going being the hard part here) and time will time, but I have to respecfully dissagree about TOR just being yet another EQ/WoW clone.