Say it aint so….

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic PC box ...Image via Wikipedia

I just found out that it’s been more or less confirmed at E3 this year that the next installment of Bioware’s awesome game, Knights of the Old Republic is going to be an MMO, developed by Bioware and published by Electronic Arts.

This drives me absolutely nuts.  It seems everywhere I turn now I see EA with their greedy little fingers polluting everything they touch.  As someone who absolutely loved the first two KOTOR installments, I have been eagerly hoping that a third, endcap to the trilogy would be soon forthcoming.  To have it delivered as an MMO just makes me angry.

MMO’s still seem to be all the rage, and of course EA wants a part of it.  While I still play World of Warcraft (albeit, not as frequently as I used to), I absolutely detest MMO’s.  Very few of the multitudes that are currently available are really worth anything, and all of them are simple, mindless exercises with no real depth.

I’m aware that the MMO version of KOTOR was in the works long before EA bought Bioware/Pandemic.  However, EA has a solid reputation for screwing up everything they touch, and rushing products out the door before they are ready.  It would appear that EA is relying on Bioware to put a good face on this move, and weigh in with their strength of this material.  At one time I would have never said an ill word against Bioware, but in my mind they are slipping.  The last two games they released (Jade Empire and Mass Effect) while decent, were not the ground breaking mega-hits we were expecting.  They just weren’t interesting, and I could not bring myself to finish either of them.

I can just imagine the executive thinking at EA:

EA Executive 1:  “Hey, we need to get an MMO out there!  There are other companies making piles of cash off of them.  That should be us!”

EA Executive 2:  “Yeah, you’re probably right.  So what should we put out there that the little gaming bastards will beg their mommies to pay for?”

EA Executive 3:  “Well, lets see how Blizzard did it.  They took a popular game, turned it into an MMO, and started raking in the cash!  We could do that!”

EA Executive 2:  “We don’t have a popular game”

EA Executive 1:  “We can use the SIMS!”

EA Executive 2:  “We tried that.  It sucked.  We hoped no one would notice, but they did…”

EA Executive 3:  “Oh right.  We could buy one…  Hey, lets get that KATER, KITUR, er KOTOR!  yeah thats it!  KOTOR!  lets buy the company  that makes that and use it!”

EA Executive 1:  “Good idea!  Uh, what does KOTOR stand for?”

EA Executive 3:  “How the hell should I know?”

Sorry guys, I won’t work as simply as that.  True, Blizzard did take a very popular setting and MMO-ify it, and currently make a lot of money from it.  I HIGHLY doubt the same thing with happen with KOTOR.  The strength of Knights is the strong storyline that ran through it as a single player game.  You were not so much playing a game as contributing to what could have been a strong movie in the Star Wars universe.

MMO’s are horrible games for telling any kind of an engaging story.  At best you can have a basic premise underlying your direction, but that’s pretty much it.  Even if you did inject heavy story into an MMO it wouldn’t make any difference.  If you give most gamers the choice between following a storyline, or running around and kill/collecting, they are going to do the latter.  All the well crafted story text will get skipped in their haste to move on to the next kill.  For those of us who DO care about the story and would attempt to follow it, we would have to put up with rest of the world getting in our way, ruining the experience.

Any story injected into a KOTOR MMO will get lost in the din of hundreds of thousands of kiddies grinding for loot.

I’m disappointed, and feeling slightly betrayed by Bioware.  KOTOR was the reason I bought my first XBox in the first place.  It’s a game that I still replay now and again, despite knowing how it all ends.  The story was just that good.  Unless they can find a way to allow me to invest myself into a good storyline and isolate my experience from the multitudes of others out there, I won’t even give KOTOR 3 a second look.



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