BioWare - BioDoc Rumours

If they condensed all the story content and increased XP gain significantly - the game would be pretty cool as a KotOR game.

The reason it doesn't work as a KotOR game - primarily - is the time it takes to level and you spend AGES doing nothing but boring travelling and samey sidequests. The main story - which is really the meat of the quality - is scattered around the grind too sparsely. This results in a game that's not exciting and doesn't have the strong drive needed for an engaging singleplayer RPG. The combat is also quite "MMO-ish" and I prefer the D20 system of the KotORs - but it would still work OK if they fixed the pacing.

Naturally, that would result in a completely different game that could never work as an MMO - so obviously it will never happen.

It would also be just a mediocre singleplayer game, because they don't have the set pieces and truly cinematic locations of the KotOR games. That kind of thing is hard to pull off in an MMO that's supposed to last for hundreds and hundreds of hours. You can't make that many unique/cool locations. Maybe if they cut up all the planets and re-arranged everything in a linear pattern, etc.

Nah, would never happen. Too bad.

I'd absolutely LOVE a proper KotOR 3 (and 4, 5, 6, etc.). But Bioware is dead.
 
I had only the highest respect for the good doctors when BG1 was released. Ray occasionally posted to the usenet csipg.rpg group at a time when that was never done at least as far as I was aware.

I remember that time! Back when BG was still in the making, Bioware was a no-name, but a lot of people bought into the hype because the docs were so nice and willing to communicate.

Boy, have things come a long way since then!

What comes to SWTOR, I don't think F2P is going to work out. They are giving away free all the good stuff, and expect people to pay for the lackluster stuff. They'd need to add a lot of endgame content to keep people paying, and I don't think they are willing to drop that money into developing it further. I think SWTOR will fizzle out after a while.
 
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Oct 5, 2010
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Yeah those are largely my thoughts for why it wouldn't be a great pure SP experience as well. Additionally storytelling in MMOs is severely limited by the fact that there is very little you can do to permanently effect the world. Blow up the factory, kill the evil general, help retake the city, and everything just reverts back to the way it was for the next person to do it. SWTOR does have private instances which help, and the cut scenes/back story are good to enough to make you feel like the world is really changing, even though the actual outside areas are exactly the same as you when you started. But that can only go so far. I don't believe it uses any form of phasing either, which limits it's ability to really tell a story.

If they condensed all the story content and increased XP gain significantly - the game would be pretty cool as a KotOR game.

The reason it doesn't work as a KotOR game - primarily - is the time it takes to level and you spend AGES doing nothing but boring travelling and samey sidequests. The main story - which is really the meat of the quality - is scattered around the grind too sparsely. This results in a game that's not exciting and doesn't have the strong drive needed for an engaging singleplayer RPG. The combat is also quite "MMO-ish" and I prefer the D20 system of the KotORs - but it would still work OK if they fixed the pacing.

Naturally, that would result in a completely different game that could never work as an MMO - so obviously it will never happen.

It would also be just a mediocre singleplayer game, because they don't have the set pieces and truly cinematic locations of the KotOR games. That kind of thing is hard to pull off in an MMO that's supposed to last for hundreds and hundreds of hours. You can't make that many unique/cool locations. Maybe if they cut up all the planets and re-arranged everything in a linear pattern, etc.

Nah, would never happen. Too bad.

I'd absolutely LOVE a proper KotOR 3 (and 4, 5, 6, etc.). But Bioware is dead.
 
Joined
Apr 14, 2011
Messages
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Couldn't the game instance everything relevant to player choices, and then when populating the instances merge other players into a common instance for the same place in the story based on taking the same choices? Of course, diverging timelines based on player choices would be a nightmare to implement… and the world could get sparse, but could always populate with NPCs if needed. Probably way to much work for the moneygrabbers. ;)
 
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Aug 18, 2008
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Studio City, CA
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