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?
I think Bioware will be one of the first MMO teams to bring Very good story and I believe they will be trying to get away from the norm of ok go here kill this many boars and then bring the skins back to me, now go talk to this guy over here and kill 20 ravens.
It has felt like through out the 3 MMO’s ive played (WOW (for a bit) and SWG for 3yrs) except Eve (which is VERY sandboxy) they all had similar go here kill this and report back for your exp and money, after the first play through the story line (ill go with SWG since Ive played it longer) it dumped you at lvl 60 with 30 more lvls to go and you have to really just grind to 90. After the first play through of the “Legacy” story line it was boring and uninteresting, It was the same story regardless of your class, there was a couple deferences if you went imperial or rebel in the story line but it wasn’t that big of a diff, just who you turned your quests into. The “meat” of the quest was the same and at the same places. Regardless of all the flaws it was still “story” no matter how bad it sucked it was still there :/, so no Bioware wont be the first MMO team to bring story into MMO’s but Im hoping they will be the first ones to bring very good story with play again value that doesn’t bore the people playing.
I will also be looking forward to a ongoing story line with many updates and progression of the big picture once end game is hit, keep giving us story line quests that progress the advancement of our character and also the galaxy as a whole. Don’t make the mistake of sitting in a static universe with no progression or ongoings with the war that the players cant see or be involved in.
Cough… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1-SlWhwtpI
What was the link? it says it was removed by user.:(