Old Republic Called ‘As Interesting As A Naboo Trade Blockade’. Not Surprised.

I am a Star Wars nerd. I like MMOs. You’d think the two would mix into some delicious concoction for me. Nope. While I have friends throwing rope and counting the minutes until it comes out, nothing – nothing – I’ve seen about it convinces me it’s anything but another MMO. With a bloated budget, too much voice work, and the monolithic Star Wars hype train pushing it.

Luke Plunkett at Kotaku confirms my anxieties.

Plunkett:

BioWare is going out of its way to tell the world how Old Republic will revolutionise the MMO. That line was thrown out at least twice during my showing.

But this game? What I saw today isn’t doing it for me. It’s telling me that it’s revolutionising the genre, but all I’m seeing is just another MMO.

The screen was cluttered with a sea of icons, buttons and meters that make no sense to the interested bystander. The animation and combat is stilted and artificial, a crude real-time representation of the statistical dice-rolling going on under the hood. Defeating major enemies, like the one my demo concluded with, is time-consuming and reliant on whittling down ridiculously long health meters.

All standard fare for an MMO. And for MMO fans, they’ll be appreciated. But for me, a massive Star Wars fan expecting a revolution, none of what I saw was very interesting, or representative of why I love that universe in the first place. Especially when the game’s famously bombastic cinematic cutscenes (which even opened my demonstration) are so quickly followed by little but clicking, clicking then clicking some more.

All of this sounds about right from the videos I’ve watched, the reports I’ve read on the various geek websites. My antipathy towards the game is only compounded by the fact that there’s going to be nauseating tie-ins to the Prequel Trilogy. Nothing could get my gaming boner flaccid in more of a hurry. It doesn’t matter though, the game is going to sell like a motherfucker.