Bioware has a history of producing great single-player RPG’s with excellent stories.  For their MMO, they’ve said many times that they are focusing on story.  Sounds good to me, I’m really curious about the details.  There are lots of problems involved with having an impactful story in a multi-player environment.  I’m sure instancing and/or phasing will play some roll, but will they be able balance that against having players play together?  Or will we end up with a massively singe-player online RPG?

One problem occurred to me last night that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere (either by Bioware or other bloggers).  How will they handle end-game content?  All single player games have an ending.  All stories must having endings.  So what happens when you’re Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, Commando, or Jedi/Sith completes their epic story arc?  Having a raiding end-game seems like a big let-down after experiencing however many levels of an epic single-player story arc.  Maybe Bioware is counting on players to re-roll and play though the other class epic arcs to give them time to add expansions.  They could stick to the standard raiding, or maybe open the end-game up to a PvP focus between the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic.  The choices Bioware make for their end-game should be a good indicator of if and how much their game move the genre forward.

End-Game for Star Wars: The Old Republic?
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6 thoughts on “End-Game for Star Wars: The Old Republic?

  • June 11, 2009 at 9:54 am
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    The structure of the game seems to lend itself to some sort of PvP focused endgame. Of course you may be right and they intend for the “endgame” to be rolling new alts.

    The KoTOR games were certainly good enough to play through twice to see the good and evil storylines. They have mentioned that each class will have a unique story line to follow in their MMO. That would be a lot of replayability for someone like me that tends to alt like crazy even in MMOs with static storylines.

  • June 11, 2009 at 1:14 pm
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    Hopefully they will focus on some combination of end-game PvP and replayability (via alts). I guess my main worry is that they try to include raiding somehow.

    Originally I wasn’t thinking too much about this game, but after the E3 coverage I’m starting to develop more interest. At this point, I’m hoping that Bioware’s lack of MMO experience will allow them to introduce some revolutionary changes to the genre instead of all of the evolutionary refinements we’ve been seeing over the last four years.

  • July 25, 2009 at 1:23 am
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    If theres no rading whats so ever this game is totally failed. I mean rolling a new character aint a “end game” feature. I will always make just one toon, and the real game starts when i hit level cap. After that i can explore more,upgrade items go to instances/raids with guildies,craft items,PvP.

  • September 13, 2009 at 11:51 am
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    @override:
    that is the reason WoW turned into what it is now, because so many people share that view of “i don’t care about having fun with the game, i just want to get better items than anyone else”. it completely killed the game for me because there were all these wonderful places for a player to explore as they level, and with all the speed-ups in leveling between both the xp boosts blizz gives players during those old grinding levels (30-60) and addons like questhelper, most of that is missed. when it came out, it took the average person around 8 months or more to reach level cap. now you can do it in 2 because blizz doesn’t care about developing your toons anymore, they just want as many people to get to cap as possible. and at level cap, what is there to do, but the same raids/heroics over and over again to try to get that one specific item. a raiding end-game just seems pointless to me. i must say, i hope bioware gives this game a pvp based end game. that would be phenominal and give the game lasting life imo.

  • December 4, 2009 at 1:13 am
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    I’ll be *highly* disappointed if the endgame is raiding. The last thing the world needs is another MMO where the endgame is focussed on weekly grinding on hopes of increasing your epeen size.

    I really hope that the endgame is large scale pvp, not the same pve experience over and over and over.

  • August 31, 2010 at 1:37 am
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    Raiding gets extremely boring after a bit. I prefer pvp, as stated by Pierre above me. Large scale pvp sounds REALLY good to me =)

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