Back in 2011, during the run up to the release of SWTOR, Bioware were being as unlikeable as possible. They were still riding high on the back of Mass Effect 2, and the triple disasters of Mass Effect 3, Andromeda and Anthem were all far in the future. Bioware could do no wrong, it seemed, and no one believed that more than Bioware themselves.
The interviews and presentations that they gave went beyond any reasonable fuelling of the hype machine for SWTOR. It wasn't enough for them to talk about why their MMO was good, they had to talk about why other MMOs were bad.
"You remember that part where Han Solo and Chewbacca are in the
Millennium Falcon? Han's like, 'Hey, Chewie, let's go into space, and
let's just **** around. Let's go off in that direction and see if there
is anything interesting'? Remember how they went off and there was this
asteroid, and they mined the asteroid? Yeah, we couldn't find that
either."
- Daniel Erickson, lead dev, explaining why space travel/combat in SWTOR was entirely on rails.
Take that, EVE Online...
This was pretty big talk coming from the developers of a game which - as was already clear from the first gameplay trailers - was a shameless clone of World of Warcraft with the addition of Mass Effect style conversation sequences, but Bioware's complete lack of originality, or of experience in the MMO genre, did not shut them up, and indeed led to them talking up something that SWTOR would have that other MMO's did not.
The Fourth Pillar. A story driven experience.
It's been almost a decade, and it's now a matter of record that SWTOR did not live up the hype, but did the game at least deliver on story?
Kind of.
The idea that SWTOR brought story to MMOs, or made it relevant again, is demonstrably false. All MMOs have stories - whether it's LOTRO expanding upon the world created by Tolkien, or the fantasy soap opera of World of Warcraft - so SWTOR was not breaking new ground there, and it was absurd to claim that it was.
The story was more personalised - no question of that. Was that a good thing though? MMOs always require some degree of suspension of disbelief due to their 'You Are The Chosen One And So Is Everyone Else' narratives, and SWTOR takes that to extremes because it leans into it more heavily than any other MMO I can think of. It's one thing to look around a crowded city and know that the other characters you see have probably also killed the local Big Bad. It's quite another thing to look around and see an exact clone of 'your' companion standing next to every other character.
So by bringing such heavily personalised stories to MMOs what Bioware really accomplished was to show why doing so doesn't work in the context of an MMO. A lot of the time SWTOR feels like a single player game with optional multiplayer added on as an afterthought.
What SWTOR did deliver on was presentation. The cutscenes, with their voice acting and good, sometimes great, dialogue, were superior to anything else the genre could offer at that point... at least up until the middle of 2012 when The Secret World launched and did it all better.
In a way though, Bioware were right to put so much emphasis on the story. It's not unique to SWTOR, nor is it necessarily the best in the genre, but it is perhaps the best thing about this game. That's a backhanded compliment - that the best part of the game is the part with no gameplay - but it's a compliment nonetheless. There's a reason why the cutscenes feature so prominently in my choice of screenshots - they are so much the signature feature of SWTOR that I doubt the game would survive without them.
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