Star Wars MMORPG Will Emphasize Consequences in Gameplay

BioWare is definitely a popular developer these days – after the hit RPG (Role Playing Game), Mass Effect, it just revealed that, in a joint venture with LucasArts, the owner of the Star Wars Intellectual Property, it would develop an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online RPG) based on its own Knight Of The Old Republic game.

We have already reported about the rumors leading up to the official announcement of the game and about the goals of the developers regarding the new project. Now, BioWare, through the voice of its co-founder, Greg Zeschuk, is emphasizing the role and consequences the player’s choices will have in this new game. He compared the upcoming MMORPG to other titles on the market which, through the "Save" feature, take out all the impact from the player’s choices. If something goes wrong, the player can always load a previous save and make a different choice.

"As an attempt to appeal to a broader and broader audience, consequence has left gaming. Everything is very low impact and there’s no real negative result that can occur. We’re going to start bringing that back but in a rational way, a way that doesn’t punish the player — but puts them on the spot. Unlike a regular offline game, there’s no save. When you’re sitting and waiting to make that hard decision, you can’t just save it and retry it. Once you’ve made it, you’re done. You’re going with whatever you did and it can come back to bite you or not. It’s actually a neat concept compared to what typically you see in story-based games where people can explore all the choices. In this one, once you make a choice, you’re done."

He does make quite an interesting point, since the save feature has always been somewhat of a "safety line" for players, who constantly resorted to it when asked to make difficult choices like killing an important character. It will definitely be interesting to see how these consequences will play out once the game is released but because it doesn't even have a firm date set, all that's left for us to do is wait and see.