You are not the only one, but they are rumoured to have sunk $100 million into this in development costs. Triple that (over time) for marketing, manufacturing and distribution, and they need quite a lot of you to be successful.

I'm not saying it can't happen (I really hope it is successful). I am just saying that I think investors who are sceptical are taking a rational financial decision.

Sure the investors are being rational. But Star Wars fans are irrationally devoted. That irrational devotion will translate into metric tons of raw cash for Bioware and EA. Star Wars can never lose.

Famous last words. I have an issue of PC Gamer magazine at home with a preview of Star War Galaxies. There's a big quote saying "This is a game that cannot fail".



Well, guess what.

Star War Galaxies did very well until Sony hacked to death. Bioware won't make the same mistake.

Yes. We all remember that Star Wars Galaxies was a huge success in the MMO market. I like Nicholas hope it is successful, but I remain very skeptical until I see it happen.

Blame that on Sony not the Star Wars name. That was a huge case of mismanagement. I really do not see Bioware and EA making the same mistakes.

I do not blame it on the Star Wars name. It just proves that the Star Wars IP alone is not sufficient to ensure a game's success. And history also shows that EA, indeed any publisher is very capable of huge mismanagement, especially when it comes to online.



Good luck and best success to my friends working at Bioware.

Gamasutra and IGN confirmed a while back that this is EA's most expensive game to date (100,000,000 sounds right).



Still think it's going to do well.

Well, they are giving every player a ship from the get go. Intergalactic space travel seems a great start. That and the fact that one does have to "earn" being a Jedi or Sith. Add on top of that being a virtual Han Solo or Boba Fett and I see cash money.

If we're going to turn this into a a discussion of MMOs rather than investing strategies then so be it.



Here's my 2 cents:



WoW, with it's near 5.5 years of development and content addition has probably spoiled the market for new games. I feel gamers have come to expect that level of polish and content with every new game; likewise some investors still except every MMO to have at least 1 million subscribers or be considered an absolute failure.



I think it is prudent to say though that MMOs that do not have a holistic view of the mechanics (Warhammer didn't have a player economy for example) are going to fail though. I honestly don't know if Bioware and EA are building an MMO or an elaborately multiplayer RPG though.



Who knows? Perhaps, in the end, the best MMO Bioware will have ever created is NeverWinter Nights?

WoW has the broad appeal... now. But Warcraft wasn't exactly a massive franchise outside of RTS players in 2004.



That said, SWTOR has great potential to succeed, but it's all a crapshoot, strong IP or not.

I agree... but I basically mean that the over the top blood and gore of Conan and the sort of obscure gritty/realistic fantasy setting of Warhammer do not have as broad appeal as the cartoony fantasy setting of WoW.



You cannot underestimate the genius of Blizzard's use of stylized cartoony graphics.

"As far as SWTOR is concerned, they have gushed and gushed about the story, which leads me to believe this will be kotor and mass effect in space."



That was my biggest complaint about KotOR and Mass Effect; they just weren't in space enough for my taste. ;-)

"I don't think they expanded Star Wars fandom, rather the opposite"



I'll have to disagree with you here. Anyone who like Star Wars before the prequels still likes Star Wars now (they just choose to disregard those movies) but anyone (especially the younger generation) who thought that the original trilogy were "old and boring" were given something else to pull them in.



I personally don't like the prequels but a LOT of kids that I know do.

Why? The idea of playing KOTOR with other people seems to me to be a wonderful idea.

Why not a multiplayer KOTOR?



The MMO thing seems thrown in. MMOs should be about PEOPLE, not thousands of NPCs, dialogue lines and AI companions.

Is there a place that definitively explains your criticism/argument?

I'd like to better understand this idea that wanting a single player RPG experience from an MMO is ridiculous. (seriously).



* I tried galaxies for a few months, but didn't get into it.

Couldn't find times to meet up with friends. strangers just transferred coordinates of where to find things, so there was no exploring with them. Friends ultimately just gave me items and told me they were the best, so there was no learning. Strangers walked around spamming their chat windows with strange slang about items they wanted, or repeatedly offering a specific service, so there was no immersion.



* I was just reading something similar to your comment over at Giant Bomb. In a forum, someone noted that "you can play DC Universe Online solo if you want, to reach the level cap." The idea of doing this, plus the ability to learn a little more about DC Universe details I don't already know, has suddenly gotten me very interested in the game.



Someone came into that forum thread and pointed out this was a ridiculous thing to say about any MMO. That people play MMOs basically to chat with strangers, not to enjoy the combat or the story or the quality of cut scene animations/writing. This baffles me.



* I think of myself as a huge L4D addict. I LOVE the idea of collaborating with strangers to survive a level. I just enjoy observing how other human animals choose to tackle the experience. I assume it's similar to the enjoyment some people get out of playing paintball. it's a fast paced strategy thing, with some amount of human chit chat.



But I also dig that it's a brief disposable experience.



I totally fear the idea of giving up all my weeknights to try and maintain a relationship with a gang of MMO strangers. I fear the idea of doing repetitive tasks I don't actually enjoy. And I find the idea clicking a simple button repeatedly, to kill a creature, to be ridiculous.



And I fear the idea of spending any money on a "game" which requires hundreds of hours to fully justify purchase.



For a long time I've dismissed MMOs as something that must appeal to a certain slice of humanity. Those who also play farmville. who just want to burn up their time.



* So, I'm clearly excited about SWTOR for the wrong reasons. ? Because I DIG the idea of playing solo. Because I want to play each character class through separately, to see how their storylines play out.

I hope a couple close friends might join me to see how that tweaks things. I hope the combat actually allows for some strategy/complexity, each and every time. I have very little interest in sharing the world with a wide variety of strangers, who'll probably ruin it. But I don't mind dipping into that from time to time, just to see if anyone's being cool/funny.



... and i'm writing too much. just that kind of day.

Again, not meant as an attack or anything. I'd just like figure this out.

Good point Warren. Each MMO should take into account solo players. At the same time, each MMO should usher solo players to multiplayer, at least from time to time (dungeons, raids, pvp, trade, etc).



About the way you use the word "strangers", i think there's a moment when many of those strangers you encounter and talk regularly to are not strangers anymore. That's what makes a great deal of players recurrently come back to play MMOs they quit playing some time ago: not only the gear frenzy but the human factor (i'm not saying anything new).

The solo players will usually quit once they've burned through the single player content (it's called churn).



People playing in groups are repeat customers (social forces keeping them in).



You don't get 12 million active players by solo content alone...

Warren, I think you're definitely onto something here. I come from a perspective quite different from yours here, since I am a solo but also an MMO player, but contrary to your assumption, I do not enjoy Farmville(s) and the likes. I'd like to throw in some ideas, while responding to your takes on gaming.



*About SWG, "I feel ya". What you're describing is the typical too-geeky-and-even-more-obscure environment one finds himself literally lost in while entering a MMOG's virtual world. The learning curve is steep (EVE might be the very paramount of that trend, I doubt we'll ever go beyond that level of complexity for a game). It's imho the #1 problem MMOs have in reaching a global audience. More on that below.



* This baffles me too. Now, I wonder: since high quality story-driven games are indeed quite successful (so many triple-A titles tend to prove that on a regular basis ever since games became capable of telling a story), are we observing different breeds of gamers? Are some "story-driven" (guys like you) while some others are socially-driven or, to a safer degree, interaction-driven? Are some others action-oriented? I very much believe so. I mean, some people enjoy their free time in a movie theater/watching TV, others prefer pubs. Most will actually balance many types of activities, assessing each with different sets of values and priorities.



The main problem is that since MMO are so expensive to create, a studio has to make choices within budget, and more story (actually more of anything) means less polishing on other things, which can become a problem if you don't make sure you reach "thresholds" in key-areas: playability, fun, accessibility, to name some. That's often the primary con against fancy cinematics in MMO for they're just too expensive (at the same time people complain that there's not enough content in MMO, or that it is too shallow, which highlights how delicate, not to say, tricky the whole balance is).



Many people also state that WoW somehow piped the dices on top of that. The market is rigged for MMO developers because of a social phenomenon that's impossible to fight fairly (that is, in sole terms of game quality and marketing intelligence). Quite frankly I agree, seeing how people receive new titles ever since 2005. WoW is an icon of the pop culture and the next greatest game can't change that, ironically it can not even learn so much from it (everyone wants to be the King but few end up being just famous and most are nobodies). Other MMO can only deal with WoW, and that should remain true for some years to come.



* In your MMO experience (what you describe of it), also in L4D, and in what you can observe of Farmville, I believe that, perhaps, you don't see the whole picture, to put it bluntly. The one thing that defines MMO gaming and that feels quite absent in your experience is "continuity". Time. Casuals and hardcores alike experience one thing: playing some time each week, pretty much every week, with the same people or so, over he course of months or even years. That spells team, club, association, social activities. Hence relationships.



What happens when you play an MMO is not a "disposable experience" on a social, personal level: since most MMO require you to team up more than regularly with others, people tend to cluster into guilds or clans. Those bonds often stay within the internet, but may spread to other games and activities. "Online friends" is quite an accurate description of that relationship--and no it doesn't have anything to do with Facebook's devious take on the philosophical value of frienship, I'm talking about the real, inevitable bond existing between two people that spend between 20 and 200 hours together each month. You do that with people at your local sports club, at work, when hanging out: that's the perfect opposite of "strangers" in your life. And that is what I enjoy in MMO gaming: I play with people I 'know' on a regular basis.



You say that you "find the idea clicking a simple button repeatedly, to kill a creature, to be ridiculous." That, I assume, is intended at MMORPG, since this is what we do in FPS and many arcade games. And indeed, it feels pretty dumb to spam a key. That's where I go back to your first point: in the end, are MMORPG too complex or too dumbed-down? : ) I believe they are both, and not in the right way: could it be that they over-compensate in their systems for their lack of immediate interest (from key spamming to mob farming passing by quest grinding)? That would be selling a theoretical framework, a mental representation of an actual experience, a great GM book... but the RPG's somehow boring to play. Most AAA-MMORPG do feel a lot like that to me since the market expanded to a mainstream audience.



* Someone mentionned that good MMORPG do take the holistic approach (global player economy and so on), and it's true. But that's also why systems get pretty complex, that's where the math will ultimately factor in so that the game becomes too complex for some players. And you get replies like "this is the best item for you, period." From someone who might not even know either.

Players do face that kind of theoretical adversity by teaming up, sharing knowledge and putting their efforts in synergy. Hence guilds exist. Collective effort: that's the answer to complexity. If there's no complexity, no "obscure" things, no secrets to know, if the MMO is too blunt, too shallow, then there's no need for all the cooperation. No social activities come into play. People tend to dismiss those games as not being "real" MMOs. They're often dead empty shells.



On the other end of the spectrum, the success of some games like WoW (or to a lesser degree a few dozen titles on the market), is that they managed to integrate into that holistic setting a solid individual experience (enjoyable, reliable, and most importantly within the player's grasp). You may be constantly sucked into a high (sometimes overwhelming) degree of complexity and human interaction, but nevertheless your personal experience has to be fun *most of the time*. This makes me believe that however complex and/or "huge" a game might be, if it's as fun to play as Mario or CoD, then it is viable. I think we too often judge games on the paper, mentally, and not for what they are, like sports, and cards: activities that we enjoy doing pretty much regardless of the result (the opposite of a chore). It has to do with muscles and emotions, too. Just look at the raging battle for human interfaces these days on consoles. Achievers and competitive profiles will factor in a good deal of their result in their final appreciation of anything, but should they not like the activity in the first place, they wouldn't be there to compete and desire a victory: the game would not matter if were no fun.



All of this makes me bet on TOR's success, not for its blueprints or even the name, but because Bioware games are most often "fun" to play and feature state-of-the art polishing, just like Blizzard. Just what a good game needs in my opinion, MMO or not. Well especially MMO these days.



Again, no offense intended, just thinking out loud.

Right. And how else would ANY company/corporation be able to actually afford to run the necessary systems needed to make a MMO happen without the revenues collected by subscriptions from the customers? Please do explain this one to me because really I would love to hear it.

Uh, when was Elder Scrolls V announced to be a MMO? How would they do a PS3, 360, AND a PC version of it if it was? O.o Unless you are saying it is NOT going to be one and I am just not clearly understanding.....