Star Wars Online: The Old Republic or How to Lose Friends in One Blog Post

Star Wars Online is shaping up to be the next big MMO release this year.  Looking at the concepts planned Bioware is piping out very interesting concepts.  One of the big ones includes your own posse of NPCs, not unlike one of the single player games that they are known for.

The game has many things going for it:
- One of the most recognized IPs (Intellectual Properties) around
- Sci-Fi is a relatively untapped market with only Star Wars Galaxies (defunct), Star Trek Online and EvE Online as major contenders.
- The game is chronologically in a timeframe where there would be numerous Jedi... unlike Galaxies.
- It is being created by Bioware.  The company that has created many classic games based in Forgotten Realms (Neverwinter Nights) and Star Wars (Knights of the Old Republic).
- There are a variety of new concepts in the game to make the playability new and interesting.

Also, if you really like the game and are anticipating it here's a video.

All of these seem so wonderful it must be bound to succeed right?


Well, if that's what you want to hear then here's a picture to laugh at.

Now go away.

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Still here...

Ok, well now to go over why Star Wars Online: The Old Republic will be a tragic failure.

Electronic Arts
EA, who notoriously releases unfinished products (Warhammer Online, The Orange Box for PS3), is the current owner of Bioware.  So unless they let Bioware do what they need to release a good finished product, EA will cause another failure to occur.

George Lucas
A major micromanager of his IP, George himself can completely wreak this game by forcing his will on it.  He could force Gungans as a playable race for example.

Lore vs. Balance
Jedi and Sith are, by rule of canon, way overpowered in comparison to non-Jedi.  Yes there are a few Jedi hunters in canon that could take out Jedi, but it's usually a force adept that takes the Jedi by surprise.

So, Bioware has to cater to balance and alienate fans or cater to lore and alienate MMO-players.

Bioware will Break Lore
Blizzard Entertainment is railed against regularly by fans when they accidentally break lore.  It happens, usually by an oversight.  Keeping track of an IPs established lore set can be very complicated the larger it gets.

Warcraft is a collection of a handful of books and four total released games.

Star Wars contains six movies, many games (2 made by Bioware), hundreds of books and notes in a ranch house owned by a megalomaniac in California.

They will break lore and anger fans.


AI is Stupid
In every game, AI will generally do the dumbest things.  In games that you can micromanage them (Knights of the Old Republic, for example), you can offset this by ordering them to do things directly, but in an MMO you can't pause to micromanage.  So, your only hope is to manage them using common MMO pet management systems.

But this brings another issue... remember those "huntards" from WoW that wouldn't manage their pets right and wipe parties?  Imagine an entire game of them with three pets each...

Star Wars is a Collection of Single Biome Planets
In Warcraft, each zone is unique with usually very different landscapes.  Star Wars worlds are plants filled with a lot of the same stuff all over Kashikk-Forest, Hoth-Ice, etc.


So overall you get the same zone types, but the difference is how you traverse them.  In WoW it's just moving from one place to another.  In SWOTOR, it will require a transport.  Also, the zones you can go on a planet will only be about as big as one or two zones in any other MMO, so you can only see a small portion of the planet.

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Don't get me wrong, SWOTOR failing would be a huge disappointment.  The IP is very compelling with tons of fans.  Unfortunately, it seems doomed to fail.  The IP is just not built to support itself in an MMO environment and the lore is so unwieldy that even George Lucas hired someone to manage it so he can try to keep things straight for himself.