I've been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for a few days now, and I've been browsing through the comments on Facebook and various forums. Beneath the inevitable noise level of big launch angst over wait queues and imperfect systems, there is an interesting difference of opinion between the hard-core World of Warcraft damage counters and those players looking for a multiplayer roleplaying game.
To establish my bias, I started roleplaying with pencil and paper and dice, then joined Everquest shortly after its release in 1999. I have pretty much been sending subscription fees to one or more MMO's ever since. However, I have never kicked anyone from a group because their damage wasn't high enough or they didn't have the choreography of a boss battle memorized ahead of time.
Somewhere in the few years between Everquest and release of World of Warcraft in 2004, the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) lost its roleplaying and became just an MMO. Roleplaying came to mean choosing one of a predetermined set of player classes and learning to play them well (in a mechanical sense), whereas it once meant imbuing your character with some personality. Online roleplaying sessions went from occasional combat bridged with witty banter and repeated character schticks to monotone technical commands from raid leaders directing the equivalent of complicated football plays designed by the uber-guilds that preceded us in battle.
When I look at the recent comments about SWTOR, it seems the polarization of the play styles is complete. I see complaints from the serious WoW defectors about how bad the Imperial Agent class is, with it's resistance to a clean rotation of damage abilities and consequently lower damage per second. Yet my friends who have tried many classes tend to agree that the Imperial Agent storyline is one of the most interesting, and fun. Bioware really thinks that matters - like it did in the Knights of the Old Republic games that led to SWTOR.
But I know this is a losing battle. Old-school roleplaying requires creativity, and a lot of energy, on the part of the players. And to be fair, it often just doesn't work. The death knell of roleplaying for me was the release of Dungeons and Dragons version 4.0, the successor to the paper and pencil game that started all of this. Coming full circle and recognizing the orders of magnitude revenue difference between it and its computerized descendants, the new Dungeons and Dragons rules take many ideas from World of Warcraft. Its designers have turned a roleplaying game into a tabletop combat game with most opportunities for out-of-combat roleplaying removed. Oh well.
My character in SWTOR? He's Xulee - a Jedi Consular with Asian features, a bad haircut, and a naive goody-goody attitude that will gradually sicken all of his friends. Oh, and he's fat. Quite fat and proud of it. I haven't measured his DPS, but it probably sucks.
Fat Jedi!
