14 DAY TRIAL // BioWare and LucasArts have been pitching their upcoming Star Wars based MMO, The Old Republic, as a different kind of multiplayer experience. At the official unveiling, they said that the game would try to take the entire MMO experience to a whole new level, while eliminating the issues they are currently facing.
One of those issues is mindless combat where weapons go through character models and spells make it all the way through the players. After all, because the games are based on stats and statistics, it does not matter whether the game lands on the right arm of the character model or on its face. The Old Republic aims to only put on “choreographed” fights which will look like they have been taken out of a Star Wars movie.
Greg Zeschuk, the boss of BioWare, told videogaming247 that “Star Wars is choreographed, it’s elegant; it’s big, powerful moves and lightning bolts flashing, but in a way that makes sense visually and aesthetically. One of the goals we have is to create this choreographed type of combat that looks as though it could be taking place in a Star Wars movie”.
This probably means that the MMO will also feature a complex physics engine which can execute collision detection. This will allow the player to target specific body parts with his lightsaber and we might even get to see some arms get separated from bodies. If this is implemented, it could be a big step forward for MMOs and would mean that The Old Republic would need a serious system on which to run. But the “choreographed” element to the fights could also mean that BioWare is implementing a wide variety of combat moves in order to limit the repetition factor. We will probably not know until the game launches in 2010.