I’ve not posted anything about Star Wars The Old Republic in a while. There is a reason for that and it’s mostly because it still doesn’t look any better. For a game that has reportedly had several hundred million spent on it, I would have thought Bioware would have been able to hire an animator of reasonable skill. As for the combat, well that still looks incredibly un-star-warsy. The coolest thing about the trailer you ask? It has to be Dallas Dickinson. He shouldn’t be working at Bioware with a name like that! He should be in Las Vegas running casinos or working as a chat show host on channel 900. He is destined for greatness.
Still, the cutscenes I do like and the art direction is growing on me somewhat, but I can’t help but think that if this is an attempt to drum up hype that Bioware are stuck in reverse gear. Am I being too harsh?
Hit the jump for the trailer.
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The Star Wars geek in me wants to give this a go.
The animations are still grating on me though. There just doesn’t seem to be any real connection between the lightsabers and anything else. There’s a couple of moments in that video where guards are struck by lightsabers and just don’t react properly. One bloke wobbles abit before falling over as if he’s been shot. Another later on literally just stands there and carries on reloading. I know the type of game this is dictates stuff like health and damage and whatever, but those animations just look really off to me.
Also, I genuinely laughed out loud when that Emperor dude or whoever he is came on. That’s the worst character design I’ve ever seen. He looks like something they forgot to cast in The Incredibles.
You’re not being harsh. The game is going to fail in quality because Bioware is focused on making a profit. I love Bioware. Mass Effect is genius and one of my favorite game series’ of all time.
But they’re not doing anything fresh. Nothing new. They feel like they have to make all that money back so they take an existing MMO format(World of Warcraft) and use it instead. It won’t be a good game because of this fact.
It’s starting to get to the point where the MMO community is finally trying(I find the MMO community to blame just as much as the developers for the past few years) to up their standards. They’re starting to see games try new things. So now it’s in their mind. Bioware will make their money back. But they didn’t have to copy WoW to do it. Just the fact that Bioware’s name is on it along with Star Wars would be enough. They could have done something incredible. But they’re not. In the long run though, TOR will fail as people will realize the quality isn’t high enough for them.