BioWare - LucasArts Project Speculation @IGN

magerette

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IGN has a feature article up entitled The Future of Bioware and LucasArts, speculating on some of the possibilities of the recently announced collaboration :
So, in the interest of stirring up the hornet's nest, let's speculate on what the LucasArts project could be!

Knights of the Old Republic III

Gamers have been asking for this one for quite some time...
Knights of the Old Republic Online

The release of Star Wars Galaxies was a disappointment. While there were plenty of people playing upon release, it was not, in general, what the Star Wars and/or gaming community was necessarily hoping for. After years of rocky production and gameplay changes, the Galaxies audience has shrunk to a dedicated few. Lucas employees have mentioned in the past that thought of another Star Wars online game had not been abandoned, though no confirmation was given aside from that passing remark...
Indiana Jones RPG

It's also, possible, though highly unlikely given that Lucas has their own Indiana Jones game in production, that BioWare has been given the task of creating a whole new RPG system for the Indiana Jones property. With the new movie releasing next year, it's conceivable that Lucas is looking to capitalize as much as possible on the license while it's still fresh in everyone's mind. Frankly, this announcement would shock the hell out of us....
Completely New IP RPG or MMO

It's also very plausible that Lucas and BioWare have teamed up to do something entirely new. There have been some in this office to suggest that had it been a game in a big existing Lucas license that they would have been more than happy to announce the game and begin beating their chests about how great it's going to be...
More information.
 
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Hasn't Bioware been insisting for years now that they weren't working on licensed properties anymore?
 
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Indiana Jones RPG ? Hm, doesn't sound bad given the fact that a new movie is in the works ...
 
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My take on this is if Bioware & Lucasarts were to make KOTOR online, they would have said so by now. Bioware Austin is making the MMO, and somehow I don't think this is tied into KOTOR or Star Wars at all. As far as I know there is a new Indiana Jones game coming out next year or in 2009 so it could be a Nintendo DS Indiana Jones games or a PS3 game of sorts.

Bioware once said they were done with licensed products, but the earth and the game industry don't stand still, do they ? Stupid question I know, but I also think that both ray&greg have said that they want to use licensed products to get into new markets, to get a foothold in new markets, just as Bioware now are doing eith the Sonic RPG due out during the year 2008. And EA doesn't own Bioware before the end of January 2008 or thereabouts.

It could be that the Bioware Austin development house is making SWG II or something similar. I doubt it though. It's perhaps more likely that Bioware once again surprises us with totally new --- maybe a merger of Mass Effect and Star Wars or something similar :thinking: I mean no one actually saw either the Sonic RPG or the EA merger (or takeover?) before it hit the info & news stands...

It could also be Monkey Island RPG, though O_O
 
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Monkey Island 5 O_O
Or a remake, or a rpg based on the adventures of guybrush and friends/foes.
 
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Only thing I want to hear from LEC and BW is "yes it is true, kotor 3 is in development " and then confirming that its a singleplayer rpg.
 
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Most speculations are quite... strange, to say the least.

For instance, only a totally nuts company would create TWO MMOs at the same time! Making ONE alone is a VERY demanding task, let alone TWO! Only a madman would do that!

As for the "secret" Bioware MMO, it is supposed to be about: If it were a normal Kotor III, this cooperation is about, and if Bioware is "just" making an unknown, new IP, why all this stupid secrecy? Unless its "secret for the sake of secrecy" the Bioware MMO is about SOME known IP. One of the surfaced PDFs from EA indicated the secret MMO is NOT an IP Bioware owns, so its neither Mass Effect nor Jade Empire, and a D&D executive guy said Bioware does not make any D&D MMO. Sure, they may be all lying, but there is little else that is left over other than a KOTOR MMO. If its a new IP... why all the secrecy about a game, no body has a reference to compare anyway?

So if we take all the sources of the last weeks and months, KOTOR Online is the ONLY logical choice if we rule out that companies lie openly.
 
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One of the surfaced PDFs from EA indicated the secret MMO is NOT an IP Bioware owns, so its neither Mass Effect nor Jade Empire, and a D&D executive guy said Bioware does not make any D&D MMO.
...
So if we take all the sources of the last weeks and months, KOTOR Online is the ONLY logical choice if we rule out that companies lie openly.

Very interesting comment, thanks Elikal, any chance you can remember where you read that D&D exec confirmation that it wasn't a D&D MMO?
Because if it's confirmed it's NOT an D&D MMO and NOT a Bioware owned IP then indeed it becomes almost impossible to be anything else but a Star Wars MMO.

If Lucas Arts were to make an(other) MMO, I doubt they'd take the risk to do anything else but a Star Wars MMO. Their other IPs aren't as strong (in terms of sales potential) for an MMO and if it was a new IP why would Bioware bother teaming up with Lucas Arts then, especially a few days after being bought by EA.

Now the Lucas Arts project could be the "New Next Gen Game" (In Development section of Bioware.com), leaving the Lucas Arts IP based MMO out as a possibility... unless Bioware is teaming up with Lucas Arts for TWO different projects? Again I highly doubt it especially since the EA deal.
Ok let's imagine the Lucas Arts project is the "New Next Gen Game", then what would the MMO be ? Not a Bioware owned IP MMO according to the EA PDFs you mentionned and not a D&D MMO either : that doesn't leave much possibilities, an EA owned IP ? That would mean the EA / Bioware collaboration is older than just the purchase by EA announcement and would actually help explain why EA and Bioware decided that deal.

But that possibility is not very plausible considering the choice of words in the Lucas Arts announcement "an interactive entertainment product". What sort of twisted brain would use that denomination for a single player multiplatform game? And since Bioware only does RPGs and RPG-like games, that "interactive entertainment product" can't be a gameboy or an "interactive plastic book that plays music when you press the buttons". No really, the only reason I can see why they'd chose these words is to say they're making an MMORPG without making it too obvious the unanounced MMO is based on a Lucas Arts IP.

I don't know why all that mystery and secrecy, but it definitely got me wondering and hyped up already so if that's what they were hoping for they at least succeeded on me ;-)
 
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It is going to be a Star Trek MMO or they are the ones going the Stargate MMO that has had rumors floating about. That is an example of it not being a Star Wars MMO.
 
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It is going to be a Star Trek MMO or they are the ones going the Stargate MMO that has had rumors floating about. That is an example of it not being a Star Wars MMO.

Anyone correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe that Star Trek or Stargate is part of Lucas. The only "Star" franchise that Lucas owns is Star Wars. There supposedly is Stargate Worlds being made by Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. As for Star Trek the only one that I know of was the one being developed by Perpetual Entertainment.

The gaming industry is a little bit annoying when it comes to announcing games. Either tell us what your making or don't say a word. In any event it really doesn't matter for me. If it's Monkey Island MMO or more likely KOTR MMO or Sonic the Hedgehog meets Baldurs Gate MMO, I still won't be buying it. MMOs are not my thing.
 
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I do not want to see a KOTOR MMO. The storyline in 1 & 2 is brilliant, an online game would just stop them from being able to continue building games like that.
 
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Agreed JemyM, but that's apparently exactly what they want to do with an online game, Bioware think that's what would set them apart from the competition.
Quote taken from an interview by 1Up in November 2006 http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3155486
"And we can talk about the high-level goals: We basically want to bring what BioWare's famous for to the online space, and one of the things BioWare's famous for is storytelling ... and it's something that pretty well doesn't exist in the online space right now. Most "storytelling" in MMORPGs is just FedEx quests -- you know, you have to go get some eggs -- and it's presented in a format that's just a bunch of text thrown at you in paragraph for ... and that's not so exciting. We want to bring a level of storytelling that's equal to the single-player box games that BioWare has done. I think we can do that. One of the big challenges will be making our storytelling work in an environment that has multiple players."

I know that's just the usual vague PR talk meant just to get people hyped, but it does make a lot of sense now why Bioware would want to build KOTOR III as a MMORPG. Kind of like a NWN/NWN2 but where the online component of the game consists of one single persistant world rather than several community made and run mods.

Another interesting quote from the same interview : "Here's the thing -- you can't have a story that involves saving the world from the dark lord Sauron -- not that we're making a Lord of the Rings game, but I'll use LOTR as a good example. You can't stop the world from being destroyed by [Sauron], but you can do a lot of things that are personal to your character. You change how your character evolves over the game, the player's personal story -- and a player's personal story can be quite epic. It can involve parts of the world that, while they're epic, exciting, and interesting, don't change the landscape of the entire world for everyone else. "

Funny that he'd use LOTR as example because that kind of story, storyline and storytelling sounds a lot like LOTRO released a few months after that interview.
Still Kotor's story/storytelling is doubtless much better than LOTRO's so there's still room for improvement in the MMORPG market, if Kotor 3 is going to be online I sure hope it'll be closer to KOTOR than LOTRO story-wise.
 
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I do not want to see a KOTOR MMO. The storyline in 1 & 2 is brilliant, an online game would just stop them from being able to continue building games like that.
The story in the first game was good, but most of the story in the second game was never finished. How do you assess all the dead ends? Do you just fill in the blanks yourself, using your own imagination? I guess so. But they left out too much, IMO. It seemed to me and a lot of other fans that they simply never finished the game.

The way I see it each game had different views about the nature of good and evil. In KOTOR good was definitely good while evil was definitely evil. But that distinction was blurred in KOTOR 2 by way of narrative that was mostly incomplete. It wasn't enough to be satisfying.
 
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