Because Star Wars MMOs Have Such A Great History

Posted on October 22, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 45 Comments

Rumor: Bioware Austin’s secret project revealed to be KOTOR Online

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  • Ibn

    Hmmm… high likelihood of being true, I think. I’ve been hearing rumors of a possible KOTOR MMO for a while since Lucasarts is supposedly so unhappy with what’s happened to SWG. Bioware Austin would seem to be a good fit.

    I’ve also heard rumors that Lucasarts has investigated taking SWG away from SOE and giving it to a different developer. I’d like to think no developer would be suicidal enough to take that deal.

  • Cosmik

    The “Writer” job posting on the “Careers at BioWare Austin” page still throws up enough of a red flag, however small, for me not dry hump the rumor.

    From the job posting:

    “Familiarity with the fantasy genre and role-playing games is a must.”

    Fantasy…

    Of course, maybe I’m just being nit-picky with the definitions of Fantasy and Sci-Fi.

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    In fairness, if that’s a job for the MMO project they can’t exactly say “Familiarity with Star Wars EU and KotOR mythology a plus” without peple putting 2+2 together and coming out with HOLY FRICKING JEBUS!

    I said this during beta – KotOR “online” is what SWG should have been in the first place. This is an easy rumor to spread though, how many people wouldn’t want to play in a world where the force (and things that can counter it) are vibrant and active parts of daily life? The Bioware sensibility, maybe a little Kosterian depth and a world where being an ass-kicker is status-quo? Given that it’s just a rumor it’s too soon to say “WoW Killer”, right?

  • Njal

    “WoW Killer”

    Heh, the KOTOR era is a much better fit for a SW MMO. If it kills WoW it will be a combination of excellent product and WoW fatigue. Who knows maybe Bioware are sufficiently immune from the current standard to not make a diku clone. OK I’ll stop dreaming now.

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ antipwn

    It’s a bit unfair to single out SWG as an example of a crappy Star Wars game. Practically every Star Wars game has sucked pretty hard. KOTOR was one of the very few to buck that trend.

  • maskedfencer

    Indeed. Masters of Teras Kasi wins the “worst Star Wars Game EVER” award.

    But how can you honestly say that the Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games sucked?

    Or the TIE fighter games?

  • Steve

    I’d be surprised if this is true. A lot of the people at Bioware Austin are ex-SWG developers, and I wouldn’t think they’d want to do another Star Wars project. Then again, maybe they want the chance to “do it right”.

  • Freakazoid

    A tie fighter online is fine too.

    Whatever it is, bioware was sorta bought by EA, so my expectations are down a notch.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Oh well, try to play interference and look what it gets you. :P

  • Pat

    Madness! Why would anyone want to role-play in the Star Wars universe in that time period? I want to be a nobody doing nothing significant during the second movie, and only the second movie! And have no force powers!

  • http://www.w00tstudios.net DJJester

    Actually the Job Posting is a good red flag. If it were a Star Wars game they were working on that posting would read:

    “Familiarity with Sci-Fi genre and role-playing games”

    I seriously doubt the validity of the rumor.

  • ubvman

    IF TRUE:
    An interesting point I have read is that Lucasarts now appears to couldn’t care less what happens to SWG’s subs figures (hint: it won’t be going up…) when another Star Wars MMOG is released. Very telling that.

    As for SOE, cry me a river – more NGE chickens are coming home to roost.

  • Todd Ogrin

    Since this is Bioware, the odds on a major boss wearing a creepy mask are automatically 99-1.

  • Scott(Not Lum)

    If this is real, and done right, it will fill the internets with win.

    I hope they support macs, or I’ll be buying another damn pc in two years.

  • http://jamesewelch.wordpress.com Jim

    This has been a rumor for years. I seriously doubt LucasArts will give them the MMO license and pull it back from SOE. Even though, SOE has done an awful job with SWG, it will be hard for LucasArts to have two MMOs especially when KOTOR would drain the few remaining SWG players. I’m still hoping for a Mass Effect MMO from them, so Bioware will have the flexibility to create their own world and environment.

  • Mist

    “Practically every Star Wars game has sucked pretty hard”

    Take it back. Please.

    Theres at LEAST 20 really good-amazing Star Wars games.

    Dark Forces/Jedi Knight 1, 2 and 3.
    KOTOR 1 and 2.
    Super Empire Strikes Back/Super Return of the Jedi for SNES.
    Xwing plus expansion
    Tie Fighter plus expansion
    Xwing Versus Tie Fighter
    Xwing Alliance
    Battlefront 1 and 2
    Rogue Squadron 1 and 2

    Thats 15 without even having to think about it, plus there were at least 3 really good arcade games (the two really old ones were amazing in their day.)

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    The genius of KOTOR is that Bioware’s writers said, hey, let’s not have all the Luke and Leia baggage, let’s just take it back before any of that mattered and find new stories to tell about what the universe was once like. So, what most people think of as “Star Wars” and KOTOR are effectively separate IPs.

  • harl

    @Cosmik

    So swordsmen running around shooting lighting isn’t fantasy?

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Oh yeah, and Lucas ripped off Kurosawa. Even the genre of Japanese epic swordplay stories, jidai, well, guess what that sounds like out loud.

  • IanB

    Uh. Star Wars *is* fantasy. It has magic, sword-fighting, and armor.

    You know the easiest way you can tell it isn’t science fiction, though? There’s no *science*.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Midichlorians.

  • Scott(Not Lum)

    I’ll Midichlorian you in a minute.

  • http://randomrel.wordpress.com/ Virgilius Sade

    [quote]Oh yeah, and Lucas ripped off Kurosawa. Even the genre of Japanese epic swordplay stories, jidai, well, guess what that sounds like out loud.[endquote] And oh yeah, the Wachowski Brothers ripped off William Gibson and Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell to create the Matrix. Get a grip, nothing these days are truly original, not even a thing like religion.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Who didn’t the Wachowski Bros. rip off? It’s well known they had copies of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles lying around set, and Grant eventually interviewed that they should have kept ripping him off instead of going into boring Catholic iconography for the last two movies.

    I seem to recall reading about university philosophy departments having to put a ban on Matrix just to stop the discussions, because they didn’t have anything to say but a really future-dystopic version of Plato’s Cave Allegory.

    I’m not done busting on Lucas. The best stories about Star Wars have been written by someone other than him, be it in books, comics or short films.

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    I have no knowledge of the EU, but is there sufficient stuff that’s applicable to the KotOR era? If Bioware had access to that level of prefab set pieces in addition to their own stuff the possibilities would be pretty substantial.

    Regardless, it’s a fanboi wet-dream and I can think of worse things than starting with a premise that causes a (presumably) large portion of the fanbase to become aroused in the pants area.

  • Vaal

    What, no Lego Star Wars listed thus far? Beyond the Space Sims (Tie Fighter et al) the Lego series has rocked hardest :)

    The one thing SWG got mostly right in the endgame is the space fighting…mostly.

  • http://www.cykelguide.se cyklar

    so maybe bioware are sufficiently immune from the current standard to not make a diku clone… errr :)

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Hellfire – pre-existing? No, not really. This helps. The creative space to do cool things rather than match an exhaustive list of “this is where things are” which plagued SWG…

    Also, XWing Alliance sucked. Hard. Mostly because it was a buggy POS where the controls simply didn’t work for me :/

  • http://hgamer.blgospot.com heartless_

    Dark Forces/Jedi Knight 1, 2 and 3.

    -Dark forces was cool for it’s time. JK 1 & 2 were great. Never touched 3, but it didn’t get great reviews.

    KOTOR 1 and 2.

    -KotOR 2 had tons of unfinished content, a clunky control system, and no where near matched the first game. Unfortunately, most of what Bioware pushes off to Obsidian comes out like a turd *cough* NWN2 *cough*

    Super Empire Strikes Back/Super Return of the Jedi for SNES.

    -I don’t remember either being awesome, as all I remember is that they were side scrollers. However, Shadow of the Empire (title?) for the Nintendo 64 was awesome.

    Xwing plus expansion

    -Blah…

    Tie Fighter plus expansion

    -Double blah…

    Xwing Versus Tie Fighter

    -Seriously awesome game.

    Xwing Alliance

    Battlefront 1 and 2

    -WTF!? Battlefront 1 was and still is barely playable. Completely broken game. BF2 got good reviews, but I refused to touch it.

    Rogue Squadron 1 and 2

    - Every Rogue Squadron game has been fun, but none of them were massive hits IMHO.

    There are some great Star Wars games out there, but the bad ones are equally apparent. The key, good developers make good games regardless of the IP :P

  • blachawk

    I’m guessing heartless_ missed the glory days of DOS gaming. There really is no question that X-Wing and TIE Fighter were the premier space-flight/combat sims of the early 1990′s.

    Wing Commander and Privateer? Naga please.

  • simond

    KOTOR2′s main problem was that Obsidian’s publisher suddenly brought the release date months forward to hit the Xmas market – the game was originally scheduled for late spring the following year, iirc.

    Said publisher being EA, natch…who just bought out Bioware.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    LucasArts was the publisher of KOTOR and KOTOR2. And while Obsidian was supposed to be the best and brightest of the old Black Isle Studios partners with Bioware, their track record with KOTOR2 and NWN2 has been checkered to say the least. But that’s what you get when you have to start over from scratch as an all-design studio with inadequate in-house testing and not enough designers able to match the genius of Chris Avellone, I guess.

    But if you really like KOTOR2, you might check out Team Gizka, which is trying to flesh all the half-finished bits left in the data files and make a more well-rounded game out of them.

  • http://www.fiercekitten.com/blog/ Georgia

    I drool. I drool everywhere :P ~

  • Boanerges

    If this is real, and done right, it will fill the internets with win.

    This could describe just about any game anywhere, tho.

    KOTOR nearly got me to buy an XBox. Very much a killer app. The Jedi lore thing draws people like moths to a flame, provided Lucas doesn’t go off the deep end and screw it up royally (see J’s comment). So a KOTOR MMO with lots of Jedi backstory and no real encumbrances trying to avoid Lucas’… uhm… more colorful moments in the prequels, could indeed be teh win. Problem is KOTOR2 looks like typical Lucas: this worked and made money so I want MY fingerprints all over it.

  • IanB

    I think KOTOR2 with a real ending and the extra time to finish the missing content would have been as good or better a game as the first one.

    I *really* don’t understand the complaints about NWN2. The original NWN never managed to come up with a decent single player campaign until the 2nd expansion. NWN2 now has 2 that are its equal if not better. I plead ignorance to the power/accessibility of the design tools though, maybe they screwed those up and that’s what gets people upset?

  • Aufero

    NWN2? It was buggy as heck for months, the camera was wonky, the henchman AI was brain damaged no matter what settings you used, the sound effects were reruns or garbage, and the last third of the plot was written and balanced by retarded monkeys. I guess the first part of the campaign was okay if you ignored the gameplay issues and some of the bad genre cliches. (“Our hapless young orphaned protagonist has had his/her village attacked by the forces of darkness and must now be sent off on a quest to retrieve the magical macguffin that relates to his/her mysterious past!”)

    I forgave Obsidian for Kotor2 since the issues with it were clearly beyond their control, (and what was left of it after it was rushed out the door was pretty good) but NWN2 was a hack job.

    I have my doubts about a KOTOR MMO – If that’s what they’re really doing, I doubt EA can keep their fingers out of the pie long enough to give Bioware much creative freedom on it.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    If the choice would be between EA in charge and SOE in charge, right now I’d pick EA.

  • ubvman

    Last I heard, SOE’s SWG is stuck at around 49K or less (according to MMOGDATA.com). This from the game touted to be “the first million subscription” online game. And once your past the peak and trending down, there is ZERO chance of regaining market share or even any form of growth. Stockholders and money-men want GROWTH for their money.

    I don’t see Lucasarts having a problem shutting down a horribly underperforming game with no hope of growth. No need to maintain an internal competitor for its own IP. A big plus of course, is if they pull the plug, they’ll get to blame SOE and regain all the subbers who WILL play an Star Wars game NOT put out by SOE.

  • Tem

    “I don’t see Lucasarts having a problem shutting down a horribly underperforming game with no hope of growth. No need to maintain an internal competitor for its own IP. A big plus of course, is if they pull the plug, they’ll get to blame SOE and regain all the subbers who WILL play an Star Wars game NOT put out by SOE.”

    Good point.

    Regardless of who publishes/designs, i’d try another SW MMO that follows the sandbox design philosophy. SWG pre-CU was very fun, but I was so deep into the Everquest raid scene that by the time I could pull myself away SWG had been ruined. So sad.

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

    NWN2 may have a good campaign, but the game was horribly buggy at launch and it’s multi-player component, the series strength, is absolutely horrid even until this day. Not until NWN2′s expansion did they fix the CAMERA or party AI.

    Face it, Obsidian does nothing but hack jobs with Bioware’s stuff. I can’t believe Bioware even pushed off NWN2 on them. NWN could and should have been a genre defining game. It was close and NWN2 should have fixed the problems. Instead, NWN 2 was pushed off to Obsidian and absolutely destroyed.

    KotOR2 is also Obsidian’s fault and can not be played off as “out of their control”. They flat out did not finish the damn game and mucked up enough with it to practically stop the series in it’s tracks.

  • Ob

    “KotOR2 is also Obsidian’s fault and can not be played off as “out of their control”. They flat out did not finish the damn game and mucked up enough with it to practically stop the series in it’s tracks.”

    Yeah right on, those idiots at Obsidian, letting LucasArts cut four months from the dev time and telling them to ship!

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    “Face it, Obsidian does nothing but hack jobs with Bioware’s stuff. I can’t believe Bioware even pushed off NWN2 on them.”

    Again, if you knew who Obsidian was, you’d know why Bioware would deign to work with them. This is an ignorant statement.

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ antipwn

    Just as a FYI, the other rumoured property for Bioware’s new MMO has been comprehensively scotched.

    Scott Rouse, the D&D brand manager for WotC flatly denied here that Bioware was working on a Forgotten Realms (or any D&D setting) MMO.

  • Mist

    Is there 0 chance of it being a Mass Effect MMO?

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ antipwn

    The thot plickens….