Cool Story

 Bear with me, I've been drinking a flask of dashed hopes and smoking a pipe of broken dreams like a sad, sad, old man on creaky bed of bad metaphors.

There's a post on the Old Republic forum asking "What if"?

What if the story that BioWare is banking so much on ...sucks?

What if the companion interaction that's supposed to add so much depth is actually ...completely shallow and unrewarding?

These thoughts appear to be based on some supposed tester grumblings. Perhaps it's overreaction, perhaps it's horseshit, perhaps it's dead on. Regardless, it's a good question. What if the "4th Pillar" they're building their foundation on has cracks in it?

What happens?

• The hardcore Star Wars nerds would probably be torn; some would just fanboy it up, some would nitpick to the point of rage-quitting.

• The hardcore raider dorks would race to brag about world 1sts and quit. Until there were more world 1sts to 1st.

• The hardcore PvPers would race to get the Full Darkside PvP Set and then quit.

• The roleplayers would have quit before they even realized the stories sucked. (OMG THERE's NO SWIMMING.) Well, okay, they wouldn't quit. But they would write strongly worded message board posts.

• Basically, It would become Rift. But with more Star Wars nerds and less Fantasy RP enthusiasts.

All things that are probably going to happen anyways. The thing is, even with all the time & money being spent, BioWare made a huge gamble. "Story" is not a priority to MMO gamers. I wouldn't even know where to rank it, it might be top 20 if I was going to make a list. Most MMO'ers have learned to just skip past story. You don't even have to skim quest text anymore, games are designed so you don't have to read anything - just follow the blobs and arrows on your map.

BioWare's gamble is that they can make stories so enthralling that MMOers will shrug off their old habits and give a shit about what's going on to their characters and the game world around them.

Note that I say "stories" and not "story". They had to write 8 completely different class stories. With different writers. All it takes is for one writer to fuck up a class and now an eighth of your playerbase is crying all over their Jedi beards.

It's hard to find even one half-decent writer to write sci-fantasy blather that anyone would want to follow. BioWare is banking on a having room full of great writers. It's not a gamble I would've taken. It's a tremendous longshot to think that you can put out 200 hours of story in 8 different, high-quality volumes all at once.

Just thinking about the law of averages, if you read 8 novels by 8 different Star Wars writers... how many would suck? How many would be amazing? How many would be worth reading month after month?


The one fallback the game will have is the IP and the attachment players will have to their characters. Players won't play the game because the Jedi Knight story is so compelling. They'll be playing only because it's their Jedi Knight. And that only takes you so far.