Dear IO Interactive
While I appreciate your devotion to making unique games that tend to stand out from the mainstream crowd...
If you make one more game that isn't Hitman 5...
...I. Will. Find. You. All.
I mean seriously, you have made two Kane and Lynch games since Blood money. Are you secretly owned by Valve or something?
Your Devoted Fan,
-Reach
P.S. Also you should release a sequel for Freedom Fighters. The world is ready now.
By: Reach for the Sky
First of all, no, I am not a Stanford graduate, I was there for a summer program. At this summer program our group was given the opportunity to attend a tour of EA as well as a lecture from one of their programmers. I learned much about the process a game goes through from conception to release, the marketing of games, etc. The most important lesson I received began with a question for the man who lectured us. "Have you ever been asked, by someone who didn't understand your field of work, to do something that simply wasn't realistically possible," His answer?
"All the time"
Apparently, it is quite common for designers, marketers, anybody who doesn't know anything about programming to make requests that are absurd or impossible, and it's up to the programmer to talk them down to something more realistic. I noticed this later at class, when we had opportunities to see what other students in other classes had been working on, as well as show off our own creation. I was often asked things like "why didn't you just do X" or "how come Y doesn't do Z" in the context of extremely complicated problems. Imagine someone asking Al Gore, "Why don't we just make more ice to make the planet cooler?" While I initially felt insulted and disgusted with the display of ignorance, I later found this to be irrational. These people had no reason to have any knowledge of computer science, and it's not exactly a subject you can skim the textbooks on and get a general idea. Even so, I found the frustration between the craftsmen and the ignorant quite widespread, and it didn't only apply to programming.
The answer, I learned from an instructor, is not for the worker to expect the client to be an expert in a field that is not his own, nor should an ignorant peer be content to wallow in his lack of knowledge. It is important to attain a basic understanding of all fields you will be working with directly. There is no quicker way to earn respect among peers than to express interest and knowledge of their chosen discipline. Never assume a job to be easy, especially when you don't know anything about it. Ask if a goal is realistically attainable, and if the employee says it isn't, try to understand what is so difficult about it so you don't make the same mistake in the future. It also helps to familiarize yourself with the limitations of a given occupation, so you don't appear foolish when make a request of a peer. And when an employee tells you something is impossible, it's helpful to know whether they are being honest or incompetent.
Long story short, if you work with people whose jobs you don't understand, or work with people who don't understand your job, or both, be prepared to meet them halfway. Displays of ignorance are annoying, but so are displays of snobbery and elitism. Don't presume that someone else's job is easy, and don't expect everyone to have a flawless understanding of what you do for a living.
By: Reach for the Sky
Well see, we're already off to a bad start with the title of the article. What I should have called it was Why "The Old Republic" Can Not Satisfy My Standards. Oh well. You may think it bad form, judging a game before it comes out, but the fact is the situation is stacked against it, at least in my opinion. Let's take a look, shall we. (writing this part after the fact, the following can get nerdariffic at times, be warned)
The first problem is that it's an MMORPG. My personal feelings about MMOs aside, this just doesn't fit with the Knights of the Old Republic feel, and quite frankly a Star Wars MMO is just a bad idea in general. An MMO world is static, there's no plot progression, the world never changes*. Oh, what's that? Cataclysm? Funny you should bring that up, because I have a few things to say about it. Once it's turned on, World of Warcraft will be altered, and then go unchanged again. Congratulations, for the first time in ten years, the Warcraft storyline has advanced. the Star Wars universe tends to move a little faster in general. Planets are destroyed, major characters are killed, various political and military factions rise to power. In single player games this can be easily reproduced, the story can move as the player advances. But when millions of players are in the same world, the plot can't follow any one person. Villains you've just spent an hour or so trying to kill are brought back to life in two minutes for the next guy who comes along. A population of monsters will never be eliminated, or else who would the next hero get his five Wampa Pelts from? Planets can't be conquered by different factions, etc. KOTOR has always been about an epic story that revolves around a main character, and even if some kind of story progression is achieved, it will seem disingenuous when millions of others are experiencing the same things right next to you.
There's also the problem of balance. If a trained Jedi like Luke or Anakin fought a scrappy smuggler like Han Solo, the winner would be obvious. In a single player game, the solution is simple. If the main character is a Jedi, they will win, like they should, maybe even against multiple smugglers to preserve difficulty. If the main character is a smuggler, they won't be pit against a jedi, or maybe they'll just have to escape to survive, or maybe you'll have friends to help you. Either way, you get both difficulty and immersion. But when you have multiple players, a problem arises. One player wants to be Darth Vader, another wants to be Han Solo. Both are understandable, they are both cool characters, but if they met in combat, the outcome would be fairly predictable. In an MMO, however, things have to be balanced. You will inevitably have light saber-toting Jedi fighting bounty-hunters wielding blasters, and either could win. In fact, the bounty-hunter will probably end up taking several light saber strikes with little more than a grunt in response, which would look ridiculous to someone who has seen any Star Wars movie ever.
My final concern is with the gameplay. MMO combat at it's fastest is generally pretty slow compared to most games. It also tends to be repetitive, and detached from player action, reducing your input to a right click and maybe a few keystrokes to cast spells or force powers or whatever. This does not fit well with Star Wars' fast-paced, visceral, action-packed universe. With Star Wars game, we tend to expect something like The Force Unleashed and MMOs tend to deliver Bejeweled. You also have the aforementioned problem with taking multiple light saber/blaster attacks and living. This is actually a problem with the KOTOR series in general, and unlike the others is not totally inescapable. It all depends on how much the developers are willing to stray from the MMO formula.
To be honest, I don't actually think it will be a bad game. In fact, since it's being made by BioWare, it will probably be well-made and fun. I just don't think it will be a good addition to the KOTOR series, and it definitely won't fit well with the Star Wars universe.
