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KOTOR MMO Confirmed

Jul. 21 9:56 AM by Mandifesto

Last week 1Up received confirmation on a rumor many MMO fans have been following with clenched teeth: Bioware is indeed working on a KOTOR MMO. For those of you not familiar with the Star Wars classic Knights of the Old Replublic, now is the time to pick up the first two games and catch up on what you missed. Many of the action-based RPGs being developed today are measured by the KOTOR stick. Knowing that there will be another Star Wars MMO makes me giddy. Not giddy because I'm a fan girl, I mostly think Lucas is a hack. But he's a brilliant world builder, and now that SWG has completely gone to the dark side, it's high time that the good Star Wars developers move into the MMO market.

Like it or hate it, you've got to admit that the Star Wars universe is a highly detailed one, and I for one am excited to see KOTOR translated into the massive multiplayer format. I would love to get the chance to spend some time living in this world. The question is, will I be able to play a Twilek dancer?

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Given the choice between playing an MMO on a PS3 or 360, and playing on my PC, I'll take my PC. I can't imagine playing an MMO without keyboard support, and while you can attach keyboards to some consoles now, doing so ends up somewhat uncomfortable in use.

This is really interesting news, and makes me wonder if poor mangled Star Wars Galaxies is finally going to get a mercy bullet to the head. I am not a -huge- fan of Star Wars's extended universe stuff, but the basic concepts of KotOR lend themselves amazingly well to MMO mechanics, and an MMO is an even better playground for the famous light/dark play mechanics than a single-player game.

Itt would all come down to whether or not BioWare could pull off an MMO without much prior experience. I'm pretty optimistic on that count; Blizzard's first MMO was certainly good, and god knows genre experience didn't keep SOE from turning Galaxies, and many other games, into huge piles of crap.

 

I'm not overly shocked, but quite pleased in theory. I mean, the KotOR games had their issues. Over-focus on Jedis and so-on, ignoring the massive game-ruining glitches that both titles were inexplicably allowed to ship with, but if you can get past that, Bioware (and Obsidion) were far more capable of using the Star Wars worldsetting then Lucas himself, and certainly outdid 90% of the Extended Universe authors in creating a niche in the universe that didn't include people with lightsaber knees. If someone's making a SWMMORPG to replace Galaxies, I can't really think of a better choice then Bioware to do the worldsetting.

 

I'm not sure you can really over-emphasized Jedi in a video game like this. Most people who sit down to play a game want the biggest, shiniest powers they can get, and in Star Wars that is by default a Jedi. If the setting doesn't allow room for a bunch of new Jedi, then the developer should make room.

I'm not saying they should make Jedi so rad you can't have fun as a mercenary, droid, or smuggler, but the Jedi option should be open to a lot of people, and should be suitably badass.

 

Oh, I completely agree. It was just sort of frustrating that your choice in KotOR1 was "Jedi" or "Nothing." Lightsabers are awesome and all, but it was sort of sad when half your cast was Just Worse because they didn't have The Force. (Admittedly, this is pretty accurate to the Star Wars EU....) Obsideon's KotOR 2 was a bit better about this and I'm sure Bioware will take some cues from that.

 

I've been waiting so long. Long live Bioware.

However, don't spoil the first KotOR by playing the 2nd one. It really took a dive in terms of story and character development. Not surprisingly, it wasn't produced by Bioware.

I suppose I did have fun playing the 2nd one, but I was disappointed it couldn't hold up to the quality of the first.

 

Hmm, I have to disagree as far as character development went. I thought KotOR had a much stronger set of characters and did more with them. The problem was that they... sort of forgot to finish the story.

 

Well, this is their chance to continue the story, yeah? With an MMO there is the opportunity to broaden, deepen, and end previous story arcs while at the same time building new ones.

 

That's actually an interesting question. The basic setup that KotOR 2 put forth is that Darth Reven, good or evil, was actually a semi-heroic dude who was trying to take over the galaxy to prepare it for an invasion from outside of the known galaxy, possibly by the "True Sith." KOTOR 2 ends with your character, the Exile, running off after Darth Reven... so I have to wonder if they'd actually have this MMORPG take place outside of the known Star Wars arena. It would certainly allow Bioware to fool around with some of the popular EU things, such as the extra-galactic Yuuzhan Vong.

 

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