It has been almost a year since those words were first spoke to us by Ray Muzyka, the CEO and general manager of Bioware. But many people weren’t actually listening to what was being said. Instead, many of us (myself included) went about the past 12 months imagining vast innovations, new features to the MMO genre and a game which may well revolutionize what we come to expect from an MMO for years to come. What fools we were.

In a recent interview with Blaine Christine, he was asked of his reply to many fans referring to the game as a Massively Single-Player Online RPG. To which he said:

“To me, right now, it’s something that I want to try to avoid. I don’t know if people perceive that as a positive or a negative, but I want to make sure that people know this is a true MMO. Yes, there are elements… but it’s up to you as a player, right?”

Now reading through that interview you have to admit that Blaine seemed almost insulted that people are referring to their game as a single player experience and not a true MMO. But for the longest of times we have been continually told that The Old Republic has everything you’d expect from your typical MMO but with added focus on storyline and storytelling. So why was it a surprise when we finally had the announcement of the last two classes, only to see that they were just like Mages and Wizards from most fantasy MMOs? But the similarities go deeper.

If you keep up to date on interviews and information then you can start to piece together how each class works. The Trooper is said to be the ‘highest DPS class the Republic has' while also being described as a ‘ranged tank’ in a more recent interview. You then hear that the Smuggler is a ‘ ’jack-of-all-trades' class while the master of melee known as the Jedi Knight was explained in full over at Gamespot where the developers explained their role in combat.

“He excels in getting into the fight very quickly by charging into a group of enemies and then has a number of strong single and double lightsaber attacks to damage his enemies and keep them from damaging him.

In group combat, the Jedi knight excels at staying at the forefront of the fight and has a number of ways to keep the battle focused on him, letting his allies concentrate on what they do best and also keeping any Sith lightsabers away from unarmored targets. Even if the Jedi knight isn't leading the group, the character is still a valuable asset to his comrades by virtue of his wide range of melee abilities and his ability to augment the party's strength with Force abilities and auras.“

So by all accounts, the Jedi Knight appears to function as a tanker with support skills. Finally we come to the Jedi Consular who has been outright described as a support class with a speciality in healing powers, but weaker at melee combat than a Jedi Knight. Is this the RPG Trinity? Kind of. It's actually the same four classes used by the Pen-N-Paper RPG known as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. The Jedi Knight is the Warrior class, the Smuggler is the Rogue, the Trooper is a Wizard and the Jedi Consular is the Priest.

Millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Why Bioware?! Why?

But I'll tell you why.

Consider for a moment that this is the first MMO Bioware has ever made. Also consider that the previous attempt to create a Starwars MMO fell flat on it's face, largely due to poor design and an attempt to innovate by having an open skill based structure. Finally consider what are the biggest MMOs on the western market at the moment. World of Warcraft springs to mind, and they too started off with a basic Dungeons and Dragons class structure. Given all of these facts we can see why Bioware didn't innovate and try to reinvent the genre. Does this make the game a completely epic failure? Not at all. The AD&D formula for class development has been a tried and tested recipe for success for years and many successful RPGs have used it as a basis for their class systems. So why try to fix something which isn't broken to begin with? If it works, then I say Bioware should roll with it and we should all be happy that by the time the game launches it'll be quite well balanced. Now admittedly each class is actually a hybrid with a specialisation in one AD&D style class with a secondary set of skills similar to another. The Jedi Knight for example has Buffing skills much like a Paladin, but a Paladin itself is basically a mixture of a Warrior and a Priest. But it would be quite difficult to allow for the game to be soloed from start to end if the majority of your powers where all buffs, healing and defenses. So hybrid classes are needed to allow for any class to be able to produce enough damage while being self-sufficent enough to deal with almost any situation found in the game.

One of the greatest benefits of keeping to tried-and-tested methods is that it allows the developers a greater amount of freedom to really polish the game and avoids issues with needing to continually nerf players as unfamilar systems interact with each other. When you create something totally new there is always unexpected issues which arise resulting in more playtesting being needed compared to using something which has been used by other games for years. It helps you to direct your attention towards where the existing system is most prone to problems developing and therefore cut down on time needed to get it right. Another plus is this all provides a really solid foundation for the game to grow over time because Bioware does not need to spend much time trying to get the basic features working smoothly. When you look at Starwars Galaxies it was really doomed from the start, it tried innovate a ton of things at once. The crafting system was amazing but completely new. The skill based abilities with free-form character creation was also impressive but riddled with problems. The game basically spent much of its time being continually fixed for issues relating to these completely new and experimental systems before the developers decided to admit defeat and change it to a classical class based structure. At the end of the day, I would have preferred not to have to put up with a broken game for 2 years due to innovation.

But what does all this mean for the future of the game? Well it means we have no real surprises around the corner because as they said right from day 1: "What we’re doing is taking some of the ‘best of breed’ features from other MMOs,"

It also improves the chances of fan favourite features making an appearance such as player housing, guild owned buildings, furniture and decorative craftable items, mounts and classical PvP systems like RvR and open world. Unfortunately that same lack of innovation means we will probably see the return of 'kill X number of enemy Y' to complete a quest and 'take item A to NPC contact B' courier missions. But I would say just about every feature the game will have can probably be seen lifted from popular MMOs on the market. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing as many people will be frustrated that TOR isn't a totally new gameplay experience and will be accused of being Everquest-in-Space or WOW-with-Lightsabres.

However it looks to me like Bioware has taken a leaf out of Blizzard's big book of game development. And copying one of the worlds biggest MMOs is not really that bad of an idea. Good for them!

There is an open discussion topic on the TORO forums at this link.

- Chris 'Tal-N' Blane