You’d think after working in PR and marketing for many years, that hyperbolic comments in press releases and interviews would be water off a duck’s back, right? Wrong. If anything, the more I’ve worked in PR and marketing, the more easily I’ve been able to sniff a BS comment from 20 paces.

And that’s what happened in the early days of TOR’s initial announcement with comments like this:

The Old Republic is a massively multiplayer game, but it’s one where we wanted to take story and bring it to the MMO space.

– Bioware’s director of design James Ohlen

Say what? So all these years I’ve been playing MMOs, stretching back into the late 1990s, NONE of them had story? Yep, apparantly so. Why? Because Bioware says so. Please, read on…

We feel that role-playing can be divided into four parts, and at BioWare that’s our philosophy: there’s the exploration filler, the combat filler, the progression filler and the story filler. But we’ve always thought that with MMOs the story filler hasn’t been there.

– Bioware’s director of design James Ohlen

And you know the scary part about all of this? As we sit here in 2010, Bioware fanboi’s and the like TOTALLY BELIEVE THESE COMMENTS. I challenge you to step onto the TOR forums and call these comments for that they are, and a veritible army of fanboi’s will stand up and tell you that YOU’RE wrong. Yep, Bioware has, apparantly, invented the concept of “story” in MMOs. Every MMO you’ve ever played didn’t have a storyline. All those boxes of text you read, didn’t exist. All the voiceovers you heard, never happened. The cutscenes that progressed the story? Yep, you imagined them.

I actually find this worrying in more ways than one. On the one level, I hate it when companies try and pretend they have invented something that already exists. That just sucks, period. Consumers should never be treated like idiots. But on a higher, much more important level, I am also utterly dismayed that there are now young people out there whom can be told something and, so long as they like the person or company telling them that information, they will apply absolutely no critical thought to it and then go blindly spouting the oft-quoted “company line” to anyone who will listen. Do they no longer teach critical thought or independent thinking or similar in schools these days?

Anyway, why am I talking about this now? Isn’t it old news? Yep, it is, but there’s been some talk about it again on the official TOR forums recently and it’s hammered home to me that the more time the kids out there have lived with this comment that Bioware is bringing “story” to MMOs, the more they have come to believe it. One of them even tried to tell me that by “story”, Bioware means an interactive story with multiple endings for characters. What he couldn’t seem to grasp, however, is that a story doesn’t need to be interactive in order to be a story. Thus, MMOs to date have actually been FULL of stories and Bioware is wrong about this. Otherwise, kids, put down that copy of Wuthering Heights, or whatever classic literature you’re reading. There’s no need to read it anymore — it’s non-interactive, you see, therefore can’t have a story. Huh? Yep, that’s what I thought, too…

Can these people not see how ludicrous their comments are?