I was on the official TOR forums recently, and a poster was talking about Bioware’s concept of story and making everything heroic and movie-like and he made the comment that this approach misses all the advantages of an online/multiplayer/interactive environment.

I agree with that poster, 110%

The problem is, however, Bioware is convinced of its own genius in SPRPGs (and not without reason as they’re pretty good at them), and wants to shoehorn them into the multiplayer realm “because it’s never been done before” rather than sitting back and thinking, “OK, what makes the multiplayer environment unique and interesting?”

That question would have been, quite honestly, the first thing I wrote on the whiteboard on day one of this project if I was in charge of it, but it seems what was written instead was, “How do we shoehorn our fantastic SPRPG style into the MMO space, so we can say, ‘This is new…’ and people will pay us monthly for it?” And I think TOR could suffer for it, in the long term.

It just slays me on the Bioware forums when I point out — quite fairly, I think — that the storyline will end at some stage and it could be 6-12 months before the next expansion, so we need MEANINGFUL things to do as characters in our own right, not just be pawns in a linear story that has to stop from time to time.

And all the Bioware fans cry, “Oh no! They PROMISED the story will never end!” And I honestly think a lot of these fans come from SPRPGs and have no real experience of MMOs and genuinely believe this will be a seamless thing, ie: they think that no matter how fast they go through the content, there’s always going to be new content, “Because Daniel Erickson said so…”

People… Daniel CANNOT produce content that will keep pace with many gamers. And not just gamers who rush through the game — I can’t stand people like that — I mean a lot of regular, quite ordinary gamers, too. And Bioware will simply tell them to play another class while they wait.

Oh well… a lot of MMO noobs are going to get schooled in this, whether they listen to me now, or not. And it all comes back to tying everything so heavily to the story and being cinematic, rather than mixing in a bit more sandbox, which is really what’s needed for those times in between expansions especially.