Reiterations…

A startling newsbyte here, which woke me up from my summer gaming punditry torpor:

Ten Ton Hammer: Star Wars: The Old Republic Breaks EA Pre-Order Records

Making the immanent light sabre based high jinks of The Old Republic EA’s most anticipated game ever, if you take a pre-order as a concrete sign of committed intent. It doesn’t even have a release date or confirmed pricing model yet! You people really don’t care what is in that box, do you?

Still, it seems a bit curmudgeonly to be banging on about The Three Month Rule – again – in the face of that, and I really do begin to wonder just how out of touch with the whole computer games thing I’ve become. I don’t really like Star Wars, thought Knights of the Old Republic was “okay, but no Mass Effect,” and didn’t think much of Dragon Age. Despite not really doing a lot of research into promised features and the like, I get the hunch that TOR is probably Not Going To Be For Me, really.

 

Fair enough, ignore and move on, you might think, and I am trying, but I really do get a sense from news, blogs, podcasts and the like, of a kind of tension. There really does seem to be something pivotal about the upcoming release of SW:TOR, some sort of benchmark carved into a milestone. Made of barometers. Almost irrelevant to the game’s content itself, I do think the Future of MMOs 2012 And Beyond will very much turn on how well it does. If it can’t Beat World of Warcraft, is that it for the genre? If Star Wars can’t take the top spot, what can? Bearing in mind we’ve been here before with Galaxies, which did okay, but not brilliantly or nearly as well as we all though it should, and has recently been sacrificed to prevent competition and distractions away from the new Star Wars thing.

Maybe SW:TOR will be the last of the Big MMO Launches, and from here it becomes more of a cottage industry of smaller projects, more tight knit and involved communities (Darkfall, Wurm, Tale in the Desert and many others you won’t have heard of, but whose players really care), and the age of the MMO as Platforms in themselves, for expansion and internal development (DDO, LOTRO, EQ2, pretty much anything that isn’t World of Warcraft these days, etc), smorgasbord worlds build on firmly esablished, and paid-for, foundations.

 

Perhaps all this angst its just my own blinkered view which can’t see anything beyond SW:TOR, Guild Wars 2 and PlanetSide Next? I’m sure more new things will be along after we all see what SW:TOR’s mark on history was.

 

That last, by the way, is the next big thing I’m personally looking forward to. Guild Wars 2 has been hyping along for so long and so consistently that it’s become background noise for me now, but the sheer spectacle of a fully populated continental lock in PlanetSide is not merely a new world or venue, but an event, with a definite time-critical aspect. Hypocritically enough, I shall be breaking my own three month rule and jumping in on day one, mostly because the only PlanetSide worth playing is a busy PlanetSide. I expect I’ll be trying to organise some kind of Static Group Platoon type mayhem in due course. Hemlock’s Heroes will be heading behind enemy lines in search of gold buillion, and need YOU!

 

Anyway, in the spirit of potential pre-emptive I Told You So, here’s what I think will happen with Star Wars: The Old Republic, in true Michael ‘Real Men Crunch 24/7’ Pachter style;

SW:TOR sells over a million units in the first month or two, almost entirely to people who love the idea of KOTOR 3 with Enhanced Multiplayer Option. Within six months, it’ll probably be Doing Okay, sub-wise, but not sparkling, and certainly not Killing Warcraft, what with all that usual tourism effect taking a toll, but also a large number of single-player gamers having their fill of BioWare Story-Heavy Ripping Yarn and moving on contented, without really touching the MMO aspects of it all. I think it’ll suffer the DCUO Problem a fair bit; the difficulty of trying to sell non-MMO gamers on the idea of a regular monthly subscription. I also predict that a whole lot of people who love Star Wars Galaxies will almost certainly not find what they loved about SWG in the new game, (community and sandbox in a Star Wars World) and that’s a shame. I’ll be surprised if Bioware have much hands-on involvement after six months have gone, and probably by then the ongoings with be largely a Mythic run affair, whatever that will mean. TOR will probably beat SWG’s numbers, but not nearly by as much as they hope. I expect I’ll ‘discover it’ three years after it launches and be surprised that it isn’t more popular than it is! I imagine I’ll spend a lot of time patiently explaining basic feature on this here blog, to people who have long since end-gamed and moved on. I do that.

 

I say all this, because this is what usually seems to happen with most MMO launches in the past, and I’m not very imaginative! But regardless of what I think, it will be interesting to see what kind of MMO world we will be living in after the post-launch Old Republic dust settles…