Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Been there, done that

From another SWTOR SDCC Q+A:

"How often do you guys get to play the game and what would you say your best memory is of it so far?"

Stephen Reid: And my favorite moment actually I think was quite early on when I was playing the Jedi Knight on Tython. And there's a quest pretty early on where you come across two padawans who are obviously involved in a romantic relationship and you basically get the choice of essentially turning them in to the Jedi Council or leaving them be to go about their romantic business. And Jedi Code would suggest that you should go and inform the Council cause this is not something that's allowed. And I think the minute that I found that quest and had my first moment of what do I want to do, because it was a genuine moral choice. And also for me, it was a point of which it said, you know what, you can roleplay your character here. So in my case, as I recall, I chose to let them go and told them I wasn't going to tell the Council, and then I went and told the Council anyway. So that was the kind of Jedi I was playing.

See, that is a great moment - a character defining moment... a moment that stops you dead in your tracks as you're playing and makes you think -- what do I really value here? What do I want this character's story to be -- is he someone that thinks love conquers all? Or is he someone that believes in rules and laws you follow? Is he a dirty rat snitch? Is he someone who believes in the Jedi code?

It's this sort of forked road type of questing that BioWare is famous for.

It's also the same quest you do when starting out as a mage in Dragon Age: Origins.

Now, I love me some moral dilemma quests. I do. But I really hope TOR's best moments aren't all just the same reworked quests from RPG games we've already played.

It's almost impossible to be completely original when coming up with story concepts (SIMPSONS DID IT!),  and it's probably 1 quest out of thousands they wrote, but I mean, come on ... how do people not think that they just turned the word 'magi' into 'Jedi' for that quest and ran with it?

This also isn't the first time I've heard that the Jedi Knight story was hackneyed and recycled quests -- a tester infamously leaked that there was a certain plot line re-used and hammered into the ground.  Is it just the Knight class? Or is BioWare going to borrow too much from itself to fill up those 200 hour story lines?

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