This is a topic that’s been thought about, sometimes half-heartedly suggested and, in a few cases, some people have elected to jump out of step with the majority and call it for what it is. Now it’s my turn. With the release of a new video, I have less enthusiasm for TOR than at any time in its development thus far.
Why? What got up my nose this time? Was it when the guy on the video said, “Everyone wants a lightsaber…”, a comment even more obnoxious than the classic, “Everyone wants to be a hero…” from the TOR launch? Nope. As eye-rolling as that moment was, that wasn’t it. Let me cut to the chase.
All this fourth pillar stuff… all this separate-storyline-for-each-class stuff… it’s all great. OK, let me get that on the table. It’s great. It’s content that will probably be really well-written and have some twists and turns and will tell us a great story, “just like it says on the box”, but with one (rather large) condition:
If you’re playing a single player game.
See, I don’t know about you guys, but I CANNOT get excited about being betrayed by my bounty hunting partner if, for example, it happens to EVERY SINGLE BOUNTY HUNTER ON THE SERVER. That’s why this kind of thing is freaking AWESOME in a single player game, but absolutely rubbish in an MMO.
To be honest, I think modern MMOs have it the wrong way around. The best MMOs have MINIMAL structured storyline. I’m not talking sandbox here — let’s get that clear — but a kind of vague storyline so that 100 people could play the game completely differently, and it still feels “right” and “believable”.
With TOR, meanwhile, the information presented thus far suggests that as a bounty hunter, for example, you will pretty much play the same storyline as every other bounty hunter, with the exception of hitting some “big moments” in the story, where you might go one way or the other. Big deal.
Thus far, with no explanation of how the fourth pillar actually works in an MMO, I’m getting more and more depressed about TOR by the day. Let me say it again: the TOR storyline and overall concept sounds like it will make a great single player game… but it’s not shaping up as an MMO.
I look forward to being proven wrong but, thus far, I think this fourth pillar concept is a mistake in MMO development. It’s just cheesy in the extreme for people to play through, essentially, the same class-based storyline. And sure, you might say that most MMOs have a quest line that “everyone” does, so isn’t that cheesy too? But BioWare is making such a big noise about how this “fourth pillar” is genuinely different, and something to really get excited about. Thus far, however, I just can’t see how I can get genuinely excited about doing exactly what all my friends do.
That’s not how a “personal” story works. Because, without wanting to state the obvious, it’s not “personal”.
