Friday Update for April 2nd, 2010

With the transition away from news about the story pillar of The Old Republic starting to ramp up, this week’s update brings us a Developer Blog from Principal Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert. The blog outlines Bioware’s approach to creating the overall feel of an MMO, either from the “world” philosophy or the “game” philosophy. Both approaches differ greatly, wherein the world approach focuses on an open sandbox and players’ imaginations, and the game approach tightly holds players hands through a fine-tuned experience.

Schubert went on to explain that the Austin development team approaches MMO development with a third philosophy: community. The community-oriented approach allows them to bridge the gap between world and game, providing opportunities for players to both interact and explore the world around them, and also to be engaged in stories surrounding their characters and the galaxy as a whole. From the article:

“To me, as an MMO designer, community is the whole ball of wax. Let’s face it, if you wanted to play just a ‘game’, you’d be off playing a single player roleplaying game. If you wanted a ‘world’, maybe you’d play a life-simulation game. But community – well, that’s the whole ‘massively multiplayer’ part of MMO. When you look at it this way, ‘community’ is at least as important as ‘game’ or ‘world’ in this debate.”

This should at least help to calm the fears of some fellow gamers about the focus thus far on single player content. While he couldn’t give any specifics, Schubert noted that we will be hearing from both him and “other systems designers in the coming months as we talk about the systems and features that are getting locked down inside of the game”. Some of these features include crafting, where he said that they want to allow players to create items in the game that will benefit the community as a whole, rather than just the individual.

The entire entry is a great read and you can expect us to cover in more in depth in episode 17. Read “Community: The Third Element”

What part of TOR are you looking forward to the most?

Unlike any other game, MMOs generally bring a lot of options to the table that other genres don’t. They often include several playing components to the game such as RPG elements, Dungeons and Boss Battles, intense competition (PvP or Guild Firsts), and all of these centered around a social community. The thing about MMOs is we all generally want something different but also enjoy all of the other things that come with it. For example, I love dungeons and Boss fights. There is nothing more thrilling to me than defeating an extremely powerful person through teamwork and practice. While, this is one of the most important things to me when playing an MMO (and the reason I got into MMOs in the first place) there are plenty of things I would have never attempted if it weren’t part of the MMO gaming culture. PvP comes to mind.

A lot of people love PvP, and who can blame them. PvP is fast action, always on your toes, live and die by how well you can manage your abilities kind of fun. It’s really competitive because everyone wants to be that guy (or girl) on the server that everyone else fears. You walk around cities and people go, “Look it’s the Jedi killer, Dweebee” (such a menacing name I know). It’s just another branch of the MMOs tree that I have come to enjoy because it is a part of the game. Which gets me back to my original point: MMOs are truly what the name implies, Massive. We all love MMOs but all for different reasons. Tell us what you are looking forward to the most with the upcoming Star Wars MMO.

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Question of the week

Hey guys. I was thinking about Star Wars and MMOs today and came to the conclusion that it’s probably one of the few combinations that can bring two totally different types of people to the game. Now what I mean by this is Star Wars has not only drawn the interest of many long time and hardcore MMO players but also has caught the attention of many Star Wars fans that have never played an MMO. That got me thinking more and I have forgotten that there are a handful of people who are looking forward to this game that really might not understand all the ins and outs of an MMO. Because of the huge success of many games in the past decade, MMORPGs are now almost in everyday casual conversations so it’s easy to forget this game will have a lot of first time MMO players. So I guess the question I want to ask this week is have you ever played and MMO before? If so how much experience (no pun intended) do you have?

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