So, I was just following the Bioware / EA press conference announcement for this game, which was being live-blogged by 1up.com. The dudes that were talking about it were like "Yeah, this has been the worst kept secret in the industry". Ummm, no shit. It was mentioned way back at E3.
There weren't really any particular suprises that came out of the conference. All the MMORPG stalwarts such as Realm vs Realm, P v P etc were rolled out. There are two factions, naturally, being either the Republic or the Sith. Apparently playing on one side will give you a completely different experience, in terms of story and quests etc, than you would have if you played as part of the other faction. One thing that did interest me was the mention of "Companions", NPC characters who fight alongside you. The example they gave is "You can't have Han Solo without Chewbacca". I find this kind of exciting. It was stressed that companions aren't pets, and are actually characters that you can talk to. This fits in the the whole Star Wars feel, and definitely the KOTOR feel.
Story is being pushed massively by the developers. They kept reiterating this. This makes me happy. They mentioned that story has never been done successfully in an MMORPG before, which I disagree with. Lord Of The Rings Online has a fantastic story, which is very well integrated into the gameplay.
It sounds like combat should be interesting. The blogger mentioned that in some brief gameplay clips it appeared as if there was actual collision detection between lightsabers, which I really hope is the case. That's something that has always bothered me about MMORPGs, the fact that you can just swing away and your sword and your opponent's sword just pass right through each other. Someone asked if there was going to be collision detection, but they asked the art designer and it wasn't really his field of expertise so he didn't know. Fingers crossed.
In terms of quests, it was stressed that you won't be going through typical "Fetch me x number of these", or "Kill x number of these" type of quests, but I'll take that with a grain of salt. Every MMORPG over the last few years has promised something unique in terms of quests, and they haven't really delivered ( apart from Warhammer Online, with its Public Quests ).
Overall, nothing really mind blowing from the conference. It seems like a strange way to announce a game. It kind of feels like they should have waited another few months until they actually had some decent assets and gameplay footage to show to people.
Still, I'm optimistic about the game. I mean, It's Bioware! They're fucking geniuses when it comes to RPGs. Hopefully over the next few months they'll start releasing some screenshots and footage so I can start getting more excited.
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