At this point, I think all of my friends who started with Star Wars: The Old Republic have pretty much given up. For what seem like similar reasons to my experience with Rift: that content largely gives out at max level, and that the game doesn’t have great replayability. I’ve heard complaints of WoW-clone and clunky combat, persistent bugs, excessive cutscenes for meaningless quests, and some serious in-character issues that got in the way of immersion. But overall it seems mostly to have run out of content.
Now apparently Bioware is cutting back, (old news) and if I were on the edge of quitting, the idea that content would be coming even more slowly would be the final straw. It seems that Bioware’s planning hasn’t been great.
I never even started with TOR, though. I never had any desire to, which in a way is strange, because I like MMOs in general and I love the Star Wars movies. The original three, at least. But while I have a fair bit of admiration for George Lucas, I don’t have a whole lot of respect for him, and I didn’t trust that a game would do justice to my memories of Star Wars.
For one reason and another, I didn’t see Star Wars when it was released. I always meant to, but didn’t get around to it. Then in 1981 I saw The Empire Strikes Back on the hotel video system in Surabaya, Indonesia. It was pirated, but I didn’t know that at the time. (Shame on you, Hyatt!) I watched it several times, and loved it. Then, when leaving Indonesia I discovered that A New Hope was showing in Singapore, so I watched it (complete with Chinese subtitles).
Having seen a pirate version led to an interesting conversation, because what had been pirated was not the official release. It must have been stolen directly from the studio. I made a comment to Vicki – this is before we were engaged, and we’ve been married for 30 years now – about Luke being Darth Vader’s son. She said, “Well, we don’t know that for certain.” I said, “Of course we do. Obi-wan told him.” And we were both so puzzled about this that we had to go see the movie. The scene where Obi-wan appears to Luke right after he’s had his new hand fitted and says “What I told you is true – from a certain point of view” wasn’t there.
Which left me even more confused, and I was convinced that I’d dreamed the entire sequence, until in Return of the Jedi Obi-wan says exactly the same words and he and Luke have the same argument, but on Dagobah. Then I realized that I must have seen the scene, but that it had been cut from the release, leaving us in a little doubt as to Luke’s relationship to Vader.
Anyway, I enjoyed Return of the Jedi, Ewoks and all. Had the series ended there my view of Lucas would likely be unambiguously positive. But then he started tweaking…
The great thing about Star Wars for me is that it’s fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with escapist fantasy, if you recognize it for what it is. I’d even argue that the movies are closer to true swords-and-sorcery fantasy than science fiction, though that’s heresy to a Star Wars fan. But it was fun. It was never meant to be taken seriously. And George Lucas seems to want nothing more than to convince us that Star Wars is a deadly serious enterprise.
And so we had the revised version, with long, tedious, unfun extensions. More robots. Han arguing with giant-slug Jabba. Han not shooting first! That is so very wrong. (And I have to admit I was pleased to see that Lucas’s sense of irony allowed him to wear a “Han Shot First” tee shirt.) The revised Star Wars took itself too seriously.
And then when the new series (Episodes 1-3) was released, it took itself way too seriously. The effects were great, the story was not believable, and the movies dragged. After The Phantom Menace was released, David Brin wrote a couple of articles in Salon that show how bankrupt the Star Wars philosophy is – if you take it seriously. Which I hadn’t, but which Lucas increasingly was. I didn’t like where the series was going. (The other Brin article – link now broken on Salon – pointed out that Episode 4 was resolved by blowing up the space station’s power core. So was Episode 6. And now Episode 1. Three out of then-four movies ended the same way; rogue pilot blows up power core, station explodes, celebrate.)
I have to admit, though, that part of my mistrust of Lucas is based purely on rumor, and may be completely unfair.
In 2003, Star Wars Galaxies was released. A huge number of my friends and guildmates from EverQuest moved to SWG, leaving EQ feeling quite barren for a time. I didn’t switch, because I felt I had so much to do in EQ. I hosted a guild site for one of my friends in SWG. And although most of them came back to EQ before we all moved to EverQuest II, they told a tale of a game that was extremely immersive, with great in-character interactions and fun classes. Others I met later who stayed with SWG have never found its equal.
But in 2005, Sony Online Entertainment introduced the New Game Enhancements and destroyed the social aspect of the game for the oldtimers. I heard rumors at the time that the changes were imposed by LucasArts, and I don’t believe that Sony has ever denied this. It might be completely false. Sony may have thought they could increase their subscriber base by simplifying the game; by this time they were competing with World of Warcraft and even EverQuest II. But not only was it not a big success, it was a huge blow to the Star Wars fans who populated the game.
And last year, when Star Wars: The Old Republic was getting close to launch, Sony shut down SWG. At a point where it was still a moneymaker (with more subscribers than Vanguard, I believe). I can’t see any reason for that unless Lucas and/or Bioware didn’t want competition with the new game, or to invite comparisons with it. Sony wouldn’t have dropped SWG at Bioware’s request, so if this was the reason, it had to come through Lucas. The timing is too close for it to be a coincidence. Of course, it could be just Sony cutting the cord at the point where Star Wars fans would be least-likely to complain.
But whatever the reasons, the history of Star Wars Galaxies left me with a feeling that Star Wars fans were being used, and I saw no reason for that not to continue with TOR. Whether actively with George Lucas’s support, or passively in that it doesn’t matter how you treat your base, since they’re diehard fans, the game seemed likely to me to be exploitative rather than immersive. So I didn’t want to risk participating.
I have to admit that I’m surprised at the size of the exodus from The Old Republic. I had thought that just the tag “Star Wars” would have kept most subscribers playing. Does the fact that it didn’t mean that players are more discerning when it comes to MMOs? That would probably be good for the genre. Or does it mean we’re levelling-addicted junkies who blow through content and get bored? That would not be good.