Glass Houses

The Old Republic, Bioware’s first foray in to the MMO market is now live.  I’d really love to share the launch documentary but I’m struggling to embed it, so go here and enjoy eight minutes of Lucasarts and Bioware folk talking about the making of their epic MMO.

I’ve been playing The Old Republic (TOR) since closed beta a few months back.  It isn’t quite as revolutionary as the ‘pitch’ might make it sound, but that doesn’t stop it being a brilliant MMO.  The decision to focus on story and character pays off.  More than twenty writers are credited on TOR, and Lead Writer Daniel Erickson has calculated the written content at 60 man-years worth of work.  Yikes.  The icing on the cake was to ensure all the dialogue was fully voice-acted, and that the player is given choices in conversation – meaningful choices – so your adventure truly becomes your own.

Bioware are already experienced with the Star Wars universe having developed several critically acclaimed single-player rpgs under the Knights of the Old Republic banner.  Combining this and their broader rpg expertise with the planet’s insatiable appetite for Star Wars suggests that TOR cannot possibly fail.  Initial estimates from Doug Cretuz of Cowen and Company put player numbers at launch at around 1.5 million.  Even if 50% of these fell away after the first (free) month the value of boxed copy sales plus subscriptions should see the company earn back the estimated $80 million development cost.

However the real question is not whether it can break even, but whether it can make a profit, how much profit, and whether it can still be around in 5 or even 10 years time.  Bioware are already promising exciting news on future updates are just round the corner, demonstrating that the launch is very definitely only the beginning.  That means the development and support costs are going to remain high for some time, especially if every update includes the same gold-played production standards of the initial launch product, complete with 100% voiced dialogue.  At a time when the MMO market has taken a massive swing towards the F2P model being the standard, TOR stands defiant as a product that sticks to the older subscription model, confident that it has blended the strengths of single-player style story and choice with the familiar mechanics of the leading MMOs.

A few stories have recently caught my eye in my favourite genre, the mmo.  Firstly it has been announced that NCSoft’s Aion is going free to play from early 2012. Aion is a tad grindy, wearing its eastern design origins proudly on its sleeve, but it also succeeds in begin a quite stunning mmo built on the CryEngine, features a wonderfully deep character customisation system, and includes battles that make full use of 3d space with your ‘Daeva’ character proudly sprouting wings when needed.

As expected there are some limitations with the f2p accounts, but they don’t look overly compromising and you certainly wouldn’t bank against Aion enjoying a resurgent start to 2012.  Full details here.

One of the more famous rifts (not that Rift) in recent mmo times was Richard Garriott and NCSoft falling out over Tabula Rasa, which ultimately bit the dust after around 15 months.  There’s an interesting interview on Eurogamer in which Garriott provides some insight in to how Tabula Rasa reached its release shape after many years in development.  The biggest issue seems to be one of designing a game for a culture and audience different to your own.  A path they ultimately abandoned.

I was a huge fan of Tabula Rasa, having played it since closed beta stage.  Visually it was very nice, the class customisation system worked well, there was some nice depth in having to unlock skills by finding key ‘knowledge’ left behind in the game world, enemy spawns were nicely done with them dropping from trees, beamed in by ship or plummeting to earth from the skies (all much better than simply fading into existence), and it had a number of design systems that encouraged you to wade in to action against multiple enemies rather than avoid it. I played it until the day it died.

Richard Garriott is currently working on Ultimate RPG with current company Portalarium.

And no discussion of The Old Republic.  Yay!