After watching quite a few wanna-be "WoW
killers" come and go (and having foolishly gotten my hopes up for at least
one of them), I tended to be on the side of the skeptics during the hyping-up
of SW:TOR. I haven't played it, but from the look of things, seems like there
was good cause for skepticism after all.
People said, "give it a chance, after all, it's
BioWare, right?" Wrong. It was Darth EA, the master Sith Lord manipulator
who turns developers to the Dark Side or kills them if they resist. The
alarming changes from DA:O to DA2 were warning enough, if you were paying
attention.
Though, to be honest, nowadays it's hard to tell what is really BioWare and what
is a contemptible attempt by EA to liquidate the former developer's reputation
by breeding it (liquidate: turn an asset into money. So EA are essentially throwing
BioWare's reputation in the dirt to make a quick buck. If you're surprised, you
need to get out more.)
But suppose for a moment that the "EA factor"
was nonexistent. Even then, there was something to be wary of in the idea of
turning KOTOR's fiction into an MMO. To put it simply, Star Wars, and KOTOR in
particular, aren't really cut out to be "massive".
To understand what I mean, think of the original SW
movies, and even the newer ones, reviled though they are. They're essentially
about a handful of people that really matter and a crap load of
"filler" characters that are either cannon fodder or scenery. The
magic of them was in making the viewer identify with the main characters, who
were human and likable, but also had great and tragic destinies.
The novels that tried to introduce a multitude of new
characters and plotlines from (literally) another galaxy failed to be as meaningful
as the movies because they turned the simple, inspiring story into a jumble.
Now, I haven't played
many BioWare games. Only KOTOR (the first) and DA:O, in fact. I aim to fix that
shortly. But from the little I've seen and heard, BioWare's game-making talent fit
almost exactly with the original concept of Star Wars: start with a player
character who is initially a likable Jack Nobody and take him on a journey of
exploration and self-discovery, along with a small but diverse party.
I think it's beyond arguing that KOTOR did that
extremely well. It certainly did a hell of a job portraying the Dark Side,
making it seem less like an unfathomable evil and more like something lurking
in every human's mind. And it did so by the simple expedient of making the
player's own character a fallen Jedi. Not quite original, seeing as episodes I,
II and III do exactly that (except that, of course, Anakin is a future Dark Jedi). Still, amazingly well
done on BioWare's part.
In an MMO, however, this crucial Star Wars-y feeling
of being the most important person in
the story, or at least one of the most important, is hopelessly gone. You're a permanent Jack Nobody, reminded of the
fact by the countless other Jack Nobodies hopping all over the place. You're
constantly struggling to acquire another piece of Epic Underwear of Epicness from
the Epic Glorified Hallway of Epicness - so you can be marginally less of a
nobody.
Now, there is nothing necessarily wrong with a MMO
where you're a Jack Nobody. I had my fun with them and maybe will have again. Perhaps
it would even be possible to have a cool Star Wars MMO where players are cannon fodder or very nearly so. I'd like to play
that very much.
Unfortunately, BioWare (or, again, whatever passes
for BioWare these days) seems to have gone with the Blizzard approach. Instead
of acknowledging the reality of a MMO - that the player is really just another
guy in a sea of guys - they tried to compensate
for it by stroking the player's ego every second of the experience.
You can't blame them for trying, especially since
Blizzard seems to be doing well enough by putting their money in such a
strategy. Still, it ultimately doesn't seem to have served them very well, as the
subscription numbers don't seem all that great and there's talk of going F2P
floating around the web.
Still, the greatest damage, as far as I'm concerned,
is not the forgettable experience of SW:TOR, but the cheapening of KOTOR's
great story. Since I haven't touched the MMO, I don't know enough specifics to
say much, but I feel pretty confident in saying that a great many forgettable
characters have been created and struck down, while some not-so-forgettable
ones were used in forgettable ways.
That's the curse of a MMO that tries to tell a story
- the beast is too complex to allow developers to truly advance the plot. That
is especially true of MMOs where players choose between opposing factions. One
faction can never gain the upper hand because it would be "unfair",
and so what passes for "story" is essentially a perpetual stalemate.
So, to sum it all up, SW:TOR doesn't do justice to
KOTOR's story, and it might end up destroying TOR as we know it, in much the
same way that the post-episode VI Star Wars novels damaged the future of the
traditional SW timeline, by making up a convoluted story that doesn't rime with
the movies.
Maybe it's time to let go of TOR, like I'm trying to
let go of Warcraft (with some success, I am happy to say). I'll try to keep the
original games in mind as fond memories and regard whatever comes after as just
that.
