Over the last few days there has been a twitter thread going around the interwebs asking folks to Quote Retweet with a list of all of the MMOs that they have played even for a single day. There are a few of us old farts who have been joking about needing way more than one tweet. I tried to cram everything into a single tweet and failed, and even failed at trying to do two tweets. It was around this point that I thought I should probably just turn this into a blog post. I’ve talked about the games I have played in the past but never quite in this manner. So were we go… an attempt to rattle off all of the MMOs over the years that I have played for any significant amount of time. I am revising that up a bit from the original mission because I have probably technically touched almost every MMO at least once.
Phantasy Star Online
While this is technically a screenshot from Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst on the PC, my first foray into this game was on the Dreamcast. I was super hooked on it and I consider this to be the very first MMO I ever played. I even had a 50 ft ethernet cable run from my game loft back into my office so I could play using the broadband adapter. Great game that I am still ridiculously nostalgic about.
Everquest
The Juggernaut that made the Genre. Everquest is a game that I avoided in part because of the monthly price tag associated with it. However all it took was my wife being out of town and my friend asking me to come over and play one of his characters during a dragon raid and I was completely hooked. Before the end of the weekend I had gone out and picked up the base game, Kunark and the brand new Velious expansion and was memming spells and meditating with the best of them. I played a Dwarven Cleric shown above… that we jokingly referred to as Tiny Elvis since the Rygor mail I wore for a really long time was a bit bedazzled.
Dark Age of Camelot
This game represents the origins of Belghast as a character, given that it was the name of my Celt Champion. I remember testing this game during beta and then playing it at launch. Originally I was a Lurikeen Nightshade… which seemed super cool but was not the most soloable thing in the world. I was never really into the PVP aspect of the game, but when Gaheris the Co-Op server opened we all re-rolled there and it represents the golden age of the game for me. This coincided with the release of the Shrouded Isles expansion, which still goes down in history as one of my favorite game expansions. We played until shortly after the release of Trials of Atlantis.
PlaneShift
I originally started playing PlaneShift during alpha, and I have to admit at first I was simply enamored with the fact that a completely free and open source MMORPG existed in the first place. I was screwing around with Linux quite a bit at the time and spent some time playing around with the game client on that platform. I’ve not touched this in years, but I have fond memories of just how “very alpha” the game was.
Anarchy Online
This is absolutely not my screenshot, because I never made it terribly far in this game. I didn’t so much play the game as “tried to play” the game. It had a notoriously awful launch and I poked around at the game for about a month before giving up and moving on with my life. I am absolutely certain that I never paid for a subscription, so I never made it that far into the game as to use up the free month. The bad taste in my mouth left by it kept me from ever poking my head back in to see if it improved.
Earth and Beyond
This is another game that I have a soft spot for. This is not my screenshot because any that I might have are long lost to the ghosts of hard drives past. This was the last game I believe developed by famed Westwood Studios and it was an attempt to bring the MMO genre to the stars. There was so much creativity in the early era these games that more or less died out once World of Warcraft became the game that everyone was chasing. I remember extensively testing this in both Alpha and Beta phases… and then I was part of the problem and never actually purchased the retail game. This is from the era where I could not pay more than one monthly subscription cost at a time and I am pretty sure I was actively playing Dark Age of Camelot with a guild so that won out. Still wonder what could have been had this game gained traction.
Eve Online
It was shortly after Earth and Beyond that I stumbled onto another alpha testing opportunity to play a little game called Eve Online. Since once again my hang up with Earth and Beyond was the subscription fee… I absolutely jumped at the chance to play something similar for free and over the course of several months played it off and on. I mostly lived the life of an asteroid miner and I had zero clue that this game would become the absolutely massive phenomena that I eventually did. I just thought it was a super chill space game with gorgeous star system rendering. I’ve attempted to play it a few times in production and never really get very far. I am pretty sure every single time I have played I have played Gallente.
Horizon: Empire of Istaria
Yes I realize that this game was renamed at some point to Istaria Chronicles of the Gifted, but I played it back before it devolved into a game for dragon fetishists. This is one of those super pivotal games in my chronology because through it I met so many people who would continue to be important to me and my gaming habits of years to come. The guy who was ultimately my raid leader in World of Warcraft was someone that I met through the community events in Horizons. I think more than anything that was what was so phenomenal about this game was the community making its own fun… and in truth they sort of had to given that the game launched it a woefully incomplete state. The level cap was 80 and there was a single mob in the game over about level 45. The crafting is what made this game special as well as the multiclassing system allowing you to effectively build your own class. I will always wonder what might have been had this game launched in a completed state.
The Sims Online
This is a game that I only actually played during alpha and beta testing, however I was engaged with the game a bit longer as I had a coworker that was super into it. The internet as a whole was still in its wild west phase and Ebay was not quite the respectable institution that it is today. In fact there was a very real possibility that had things gone differently we would be talking about Yahoo Auctions instead of Ebay. My coworker ended up engaged in the real money trade for Sims Online and selling things in game for real world currency. I don’t remember what it was that he was selling but he spent all of his effort in game to create a factory to turn them out and then in turn lined his pockets with cash as a result. Thoroughly weird game that was probably ahead of its time.
Lineage II
There was a pretty constant theme among a lot of my early MMORPG experiences, and that was: could I play it for free and or without paying for a subscription fee? As a result I ended up getting in this cycle of alpha and beta testing gigs for various games. Once your name gets on the mailing list for one game it seems like you end up getting invited to a ton of them. This was the case with the localization of Lineage II and I played this off and on for the better course of a year through various tests. I remember almost always playing an Orc, which looked nothing like an Orc but more a greenish grey skinned anime character. The game was aggressively mediocre and I think you had to be super into PVP before it started to make sense.
A Tale in the Desert
I have to admit that I really don’t remember an awful lot about this game other than the fact that there was no combat and it was entirely crafting based. The group we hung out with in Horizons was very crafting focused and I remember that a few of them when that game ultimately came crashing down and turned into dragon fetish porn bounced to go play A Tale in the Desert. I remember firing up to hang out with a few of them there and trying to get the hang out this game. The deal breaker was the non-combat focus because at the end of the day… I want to smash things.
Star Wars Galaxies
Sidenote I realize this is a screenshot from the SWG Emulator client… but it is what I had handy and I want to use my own screenshots whenever possible here. This is another in a long line of games that I tested thoroughly but never actually played when it released. The truth is this game was way the hell too Everquest for my tastes at the time and felt like somewhat of a throw back to earlier times. I was playing City of Heroes beta at the time and that was a massive leap forward in MMORPGs and this felt like a step backwards. I know this is going to frustrate some of my SWG diehard readers, but whatever it was about the game never really clicked. I wanted to be a Jedi not a Dancer, and the game just wasn’t heroic enough for my tastes.
Everquest II
I have so much love for Everquest II, but it is also sort of the game that might have been had it released a year earlier. When it released I was fully on board with the World of Warcraft bandwagon given that these games launched a few weeks apart. I did not follow my EQ diehard friends into it until much later when the Desert of Flames expansion released. I had reached a lull in World of Warcraft and wanted something different and ventured into this game for awhile. I’ve returned several times over the years but probably my golden age was when I was in Tipa’s guild with their phenomenal guild hall. That was the period I was the most active and even managed to finish with their help my Shadowknight Epic weapon. The core problem with EQ2 however will always be its combat system because it feels clunky compared to more modern action oriented offerings. I still have so much love for the game, but it is so hard to get back into. I would love to see a modern game set in Norrath, but I feel like that is never going to happen.
Ryzom
This is another in a long time of tested it thoroughly but never bought games. I don’t remember an awful lot about it apart from the combat reminded me of Horizons. The thing I miss the most from this era of MMORPGs is there were a lot of chances taken. Ryzom was a thoroughly weird game that did not rely on the common fantasy tropes. This was more John Carter of Mars than it was Tolkien., and as I result I think it had a harder time resonating. Beau Hindman tells these wonderful stories about being a sort of war correspondent and hanging out when folks were having big PVP battles, interviewing both sides. I never stuck around that long and when the game went legit and started charging money, I parted ways.
World of Warcraft
What is there to really say about World of Warcraft. It was both savior and destroyer of the MMORPG genre and nothing would ever quite be the same in its wake. World of Warcraft was the first big success in the genre and as a result the suits with the money started demanding projects be a little bit more WoWlike often to the detriment of creativity. With World of Warcraft, Blizzard did what they do best and took an ugly and awkward genre and polished it to a mirror sheen. This polishing improved a lot of things but also ground off some of the interesting but quirky bumps along the way, and those are things that we have never really recovered. I don’t want it to sound like I necessarily think that the game was bad, because I have consistently replayed it over and over throughout the years. It is a comfortable place to return to and level some alts. Why it continues to have the gravitas that has however I think is in part because of the sheer critical mass of players that it still has. People play World of Warcraft because people play World of Warcraft. This romp through games of the past has made me a bit nostalgic about the what might have beens… so I am writing a much different intro to WoW than I probably would have otherwise.
To Be Continued
Well friends… at this point we are somewhere around the quarter mark on the list. This is precisely why I needed more than a single tweet to talk about all of the MMORPGs that I have played in the past. Chances are by the time I get to the end of the list I will have remembered a few things that should have been on the list but aren’t currently. I figure over the next few days I will keep plugging away at this collection of games.
The post MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 1 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Over the last few days there has been a twitter thread going around the interwebs asking folks to Quote Retweet with a list of all of the MMOs that they have played even for a single day. There are a few of us old farts who have been joking about needing way more than one tweet. I tried to cram everything into a single tweet and failed, and even failed at trying to do two tweets. It was around this point that I thought I should probably just turn this into a blog post. I’ve talked about the games I have played in the past but never quite in this manner. So were we go… an attempt to rattle off all of the MMOs over the years that I have played for any significant amount of time. I am revising that up a bit from the original mission because I have probably technically touched almost every MMO at least once.
Phantasy Star Online
While this is technically a screenshot from Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst on the PC, my first foray into this game was on the Dreamcast. I was super hooked on it and I consider this to be the very first MMO I ever played. I even had a 50 ft ethernet cable run from my game loft back into my office so I could play using the broadband adapter. Great game that I am still ridiculously nostalgic about.
Everquest
The Juggernaut that made the Genre. Everquest is a game that I avoided in part because of the monthly price tag associated with it. However all it took was my wife being out of town and my friend asking me to come over and play one of his characters during a dragon raid and I was completely hooked. Before the end of the weekend I had gone out and picked up the base game, Kunark and the brand new Velious expansion and was memming spells and meditating with the best of them. I played a Dwarven Cleric shown above… that we jokingly referred to as Tiny Elvis since the Rygor mail I wore for a really long time was a bit bedazzled.
Dark Age of Camelot
This game represents the origins of Belghast as a character, given that it was the name of my Celt Champion. I remember testing this game during beta and then playing it at launch. Originally I was a Lurikeen Nightshade… which seemed super cool but was not the most soloable thing in the world. I was never really into the PVP aspect of the game, but when Gaheris the Co-Op server opened we all re-rolled there and it represents the golden age of the game for me. This coincided with the release of the Shrouded Isles expansion, which still goes down in history as one of my favorite game expansions. We played until shortly after the release of Trials of Atlantis.
PlaneShift
I originally started playing PlaneShift during alpha, and I have to admit at first I was simply enamored with the fact that a completely free and open source MMORPG existed in the first place. I was screwing around with Linux quite a bit at the time and spent some time playing around with the game client on that platform. I’ve not touched this in years, but I have fond memories of just how “very alpha” the game was.
Anarchy Online
This is absolutely not my screenshot, because I never made it terribly far in this game. I didn’t so much play the game as “tried to play” the game. It had a notoriously awful launch and I poked around at the game for about a month before giving up and moving on with my life. I am absolutely certain that I never paid for a subscription, so I never made it that far into the game as to use up the free month. The bad taste in my mouth left by it kept me from ever poking my head back in to see if it improved.
Earth and Beyond
This is another game that I have a soft spot for. This is not my screenshot because any that I might have are long lost to the ghosts of hard drives past. This was the last game I believe developed by famed Westwood Studios and it was an attempt to bring the MMO genre to the stars. There was so much creativity in the early era these games that more or less died out once World of Warcraft became the game that everyone was chasing. I remember extensively testing this in both Alpha and Beta phases… and then I was part of the problem and never actually purchased the retail game. This is from the era where I could not pay more than one monthly subscription cost at a time and I am pretty sure I was actively playing Dark Age of Camelot with a guild so that won out. Still wonder what could have been had this game gained traction.
Eve Online
It was shortly after Earth and Beyond that I stumbled onto another alpha testing opportunity to play a little game called Eve Online. Since once again my hang up with Earth and Beyond was the subscription fee… I absolutely jumped at the chance to play something similar for free and over the course of several months played it off and on. I mostly lived the life of an asteroid miner and I had zero clue that this game would become the absolutely massive phenomena that I eventually did. I just thought it was a super chill space game with gorgeous star system rendering. I’ve attempted to play it a few times in production and never really get very far. I am pretty sure every single time I have played I have played Gallente.
Horizon: Empire of Istaria
Yes I realize that this game was renamed at some point to Istaria Chronicles of the Gifted, but I played it back before it devolved into a game for dragon fetishists. This is one of those super pivotal games in my chronology because through it I met so many people who would continue to be important to me and my gaming habits of years to come. The guy who was ultimately my raid leader in World of Warcraft was someone that I met through the community events in Horizons. I think more than anything that was what was so phenomenal about this game was the community making its own fun… and in truth they sort of had to given that the game launched it a woefully incomplete state. The level cap was 80 and there was a single mob in the game over about level 45. The crafting is what made this game special as well as the multiclassing system allowing you to effectively build your own class. I will always wonder what might have been had this game launched in a completed state.
The Sims Online
This is a game that I only actually played during alpha and beta testing, however I was engaged with the game a bit longer as I had a coworker that was super into it. The internet as a whole was still in its wild west phase and Ebay was not quite the respectable institution that it is today. In fact there was a very real possibility that had things gone differently we would be talking about Yahoo Auctions instead of Ebay. My coworker ended up engaged in the real money trade for Sims Online and selling things in game for real world currency. I don’t remember what it was that he was selling but he spent all of his effort in game to create a factory to turn them out and then in turn lined his pockets with cash as a result. Thoroughly weird game that was probably ahead of its time.
Lineage II
There was a pretty constant theme among a lot of my early MMORPG experiences, and that was: could I play it for free and or without paying for a subscription fee? As a result I ended up getting in this cycle of alpha and beta testing gigs for various games. Once your name gets on the mailing list for one game it seems like you end up getting invited to a ton of them. This was the case with the localization of Lineage II and I played this off and on for the better course of a year through various tests. I remember almost always playing an Orc, which looked nothing like an Orc but more a greenish grey skinned anime character. The game was aggressively mediocre and I think you had to be super into PVP before it started to make sense.
A Tale in the Desert
I have to admit that I really don’t remember an awful lot about this game other than the fact that there was no combat and it was entirely crafting based. The group we hung out with in Horizons was very crafting focused and I remember that a few of them when that game ultimately came crashing down and turned into dragon fetish porn bounced to go play A Tale in the Desert. I remember firing up to hang out with a few of them there and trying to get the hang out this game. The deal breaker was the non-combat focus because at the end of the day… I want to smash things.
Star Wars Galaxies
Sidenote I realize this is a screenshot from the SWG Emulator client… but it is what I had handy and I want to use my own screenshots whenever possible here. This is another in a long line of games that I tested thoroughly but never actually played when it released. The truth is this game was way the hell too Everquest for my tastes at the time and felt like somewhat of a throw back to earlier times. I was playing City of Heroes beta at the time and that was a massive leap forward in MMORPGs and this felt like a step backwards. I know this is going to frustrate some of my SWG diehard readers, but whatever it was about the game never really clicked. I wanted to be a Jedi not a Dancer, and the game just wasn’t heroic enough for my tastes.
Everquest II
I have so much love for Everquest II, but it is also sort of the game that might have been had it released a year earlier. When it released I was fully on board with the World of Warcraft bandwagon given that these games launched a few weeks apart. I did not follow my EQ diehard friends into it until much later when the Desert of Flames expansion released. I had reached a lull in World of Warcraft and wanted something different and ventured into this game for awhile. I’ve returned several times over the years but probably my golden age was when I was in Tipa’s guild with their phenomenal guild hall. That was the period I was the most active and even managed to finish with their help my Shadowknight Epic weapon. The core problem with EQ2 however will always be its combat system because it feels clunky compared to more modern action oriented offerings. I still have so much love for the game, but it is so hard to get back into. I would love to see a modern game set in Norrath, but I feel like that is never going to happen.
Ryzom
This is another in a long time of tested it thoroughly but never bought games. I don’t remember an awful lot about it apart from the combat reminded me of Horizons. The thing I miss the most from this era of MMORPGs is there were a lot of chances taken. Ryzom was a thoroughly weird game that did not rely on the common fantasy tropes. This was more John Carter of Mars than it was Tolkien., and as I result I think it had a harder time resonating. Beau Hindman tells these wonderful stories about being a sort of war correspondent and hanging out when folks were having big PVP battles, interviewing both sides. I never stuck around that long and when the game went legit and started charging money, I parted ways.
World of Warcraft
What is there to really say about World of Warcraft. It was both savior and destroyer of the MMORPG genre and nothing would ever quite be the same in its wake. World of Warcraft was the first big success in the genre and as a result the suits with the money started demanding projects be a little bit more WoWlike often to the detriment of creativity. With World of Warcraft, Blizzard did what they do best and took an ugly and awkward genre and polished it to a mirror sheen. This polishing improved a lot of things but also ground off some of the interesting but quirky bumps along the way, and those are things that we have never really recovered. I don’t want it to sound like I necessarily think that the game was bad, because I have consistently replayed it over and over throughout the years. It is a comfortable place to return to and level some alts. Why it continues to have the gravitas that has however I think is in part because of the sheer critical mass of players that it still has. People play World of Warcraft because people play World of Warcraft. This romp through games of the past has made me a bit nostalgic about the what might have beens… so I am writing a much different intro to WoW than I probably would have otherwise.
To Be Continued
Well friends… at this point we are somewhere around the quarter mark on the list. This is precisely why I needed more than a single tweet to talk about all of the MMORPGs that I have played in the past. Chances are by the time I get to the end of the list I will have remembered a few things that should have been on the list but aren’t currently. I figure over the next few days I will keep plugging away at this collection of games.
The post MMOs Nostalgia Thread – Part 1 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends. This morning I didn’t really have a big topic to talk about but instead a bunch of smaller topics so as such you are getting a bit of a grab bag post. Right now I have found myself between games and as such I spent pretty much all last night playing around in Minecraft. However this morning I am realizing there were things I potentially should have been doing.
Resident Evil x The Division 2
Two weeks ago it was announced that there was going to be a cross over between Resident Evil and The Division, and the problem with announcing something that far ahead of time… is I forget about it. This morning I found out that this event apparently started on the 2nd of February and runs until the 15th. During that time you can earn five different iconic outfits from the Resident Evil franchise. You can see that I have on the Leon Kennedy outfit from Resident Evil 2. Also available during the event are:
There are also a number of arm patches and back trophies available as well as a Nemesis mask pending you collect all of the nonsense. There is an official post with a run down of the information over on the Ubisoft website. It sounds like every four SHD levels you gain during the event you pick up a key that unlocks an item from the event. You can also directly purchase keys for 100 premium currency which equates to $0.76 per key when buying the $49.99 packs of currency or $0.99 per key when purchasing the cheapest $4.99 pack. There are 21 key unlocks in total available and if you want to “catch em all” you will need to either grind out 84 SHD levels before the 15th or spend the equivalent of $15.96 to $20.79 to buy enough keys to unlock everything. You need 2100 currency to buy all the keys and I feel like this is a strategic number because there is a $19.99 pack that gives you 2250.
No Diablo 4 in 2021
Yesterday I read a PC Gamer article giving a rundown of the ActiBlizz investors call for Q4 2020. During that call it was apparently clarified that neither Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 were planned to release during the calendar year 2021. The specific quote is as follows:
“We expect Blizzard’s net booking to grow, given the momentum in World of Warcraft and the other growth initiatives we have in the business,” Activision chief financial officer Dennis Durkin said during the call. “Our outlook does not include Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 launching in 2021.”Andy Chalk via PC Gamer
I have to admit that this largely craters my expectations and excitement for BlizzConline. I mean sure it is completely free this year since it is an online version of the show that would have happened in 2020 were that not such a dumpster fire of a year. It isn’t honestly like 2021 has been that much better so far. I am still going to tune in and watch but I have bottomed out my expectations, given that I legitimately thought we would get a release date and maybe demo announcement for Diablo 4. The truth however is that they are nowhere near as far along in the development process as I would have thought.
What I do think however is that we are probably going to get a same day shadow drop of Diablo Immortal on mobile storefronts. This statement in an Investors call is a pretty safe way of getting the information out there without making a big deal about it. I think this is some adept expectation setting so that there is not a repeat of the 2018 “Don’t You Have Phones?” incident. I am going to be honest, I am looking forward to Diablo Immortal because I have gotten to the point where I play a fair amount of mobile games before bedtime. If it gives me effectively Diablo 3 on my phone, I am more than happy to oblige with a download.
Uncanniest Valley
Lastly and I tweeted about this yesterday, but this “FemShep” model is freaking me the hell out. This looks almost exactly like someone that I work with. Her name is Michelle and she is a project manager, and super nice. I had said that I was going to go with playing the stock Female Shepard during my play through of Legendary Edition in May, but now I am not so certain how exactly I feel about this. I will have to see what the other options are for both Male and Female Shepard before I ultimately make a decision. I am just not sure if I am comfortable playing as the doppelganger of someone that I actually know.
I realize there is zero connection between this person that I know and the actual game and it is just a quirk of trying to make the in game model skew a little closer to the Iconic artwork. However it still weirds me the hell out.
The post Topical Grab Bag appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Over the last several days there has been quite a bit of information coming out about the potential of a game set in the Knights of the Old Republic currently in the works. The curious thing about these rumors is the fact that according to Jason Schreier the Dev Whisperer… it is supposedly being worked on outside of the greater EA/Bioware hegemony. Which leaves a whole bunch of questions about who and where and what. I almost tacked this bit of conversation onto yesterdays blog post but I also did not want to make that one span thirty pages of rambling. So this morning I am going to talk a bit about where we have been and where we are going.
While Darth Malak is the big baddie of Knights of the Old Republic, really for me it is the story of Darth Revan and his redemption arc. I say “his” because thanks to Star Wars the Old Republic we have a Canon Male Revan right or wrong. The first game legitimately changed so many things I thought a game like this could be and will likely always have a special place in my top games of all time. This represented the transition from Neverwinter Nights style top down isometric roleplaying games that I so regularly consumed and the later Mass Effect/Dragon Age style of third person environmental narrative driven experience. As I have been back playing KOTOR2 I have realized just how much of a period of transition these games truly were and as such were the heralds of so many things to come.
While I have not completed the game and there is a new big baddie in a cool mask, I would very much say that Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is STILL the story of Revan. The entirety of the game so far is effectively an epilogue to the first experience. You see the damage wrought by Revan on the galaxy and the fact that it isn’t doing too well on its own. The power vacuum of Revan going off into deep space to find his destiny left the Republic and Jedi Order without a charismatic leader to guide them into a new era. Generally speaking when a vacuum is formed someone else steps in to take the place but between the Mandalorian crusades and the Jedi Civil War… all larger forces that COULD step in were wiped out meaning what happens instead is a slow inevitable collapse of the galaxy.
There is some heavy debate about whether or not Star Wars the Old Republic the MMORPG counts as being part of the cycle of Knights of the Old Republic tales. I personally believe so and that is largely because it sets the ground work for the conflict to come and also reveals to us where exactly Revan went and what he was doing. Revan sensed something and went out to find it, and his struggle against that presence ultimately dominates much of the back story of Star Wars the Old Republic whether or not it is apparent and clear from the start. For me at least the true continuation of the KOTOR storyline would be the Jedi Knight story arc because it seems to deal the most directly with the Evil that Revan was trying to guard us from.
So ultimately the question is where do we go from here? As I stated before, I still firmly believe that Knights of the Old Republic is the story arc of Revan, and I think were they to continue the story it would need to take place after the events that have already played out in Star Wars the Old Republic. This causes a bit of a problem of bookending the story of a live service… but also it isn’t as though a lot of content is being delivered. There is also the option of setting the story in that time between the end of the Shadow of Revan expansion and the beginning of Knights of the Fallen Empire. There is a high likelihood of KOTFE and KOTET being washed away by the giant eraser of “Legends” as well.
Who Will Build It?
The first candidate that my friend Storm threw out there was Larian Studios. I absolutely think that they would do an amazing job with the franchise. However I also think this is a bit of a long shot given that they are already currently in active development of Baldur’s Gate III which expects to still have another year or so of incubation before release. Then after release I fully expect to see expansion content and more games in the D&D realm from this studio. Basically I think they are overcommitted at the moment given the size of the studio.
We already know that there is a deal in the works for the Massive division of UbiSoft to create an open world Star Wars game. However Massive is the studio behind The Division 1 and 2 and given the way that UbiSoft loves to make formulaic games I am fully expecting the Star Wars adventure to be in that model. I’ve said this before but I am expecting a single city setting like Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant where the entirety of the game takes place but also gives the player plenty of room to explore different environments. Hell I might be wrong here but I am expecting this one to also be off the table.
I personally would love to see what Spiders could do with the franchise given how phenomenal of a game Greedfall was. The problem with Spiders is that they have come really close to greatness a number of times but never quite pushed across the finish line. I think maybe with a high profile franchise like KOTOR, they might have the attention needed to make sure the final product was perfectly fine tuned. Again however this is a pipe dream because they were recently purchased by Nacon and duringa reveal show announced the next game they are working on. Steelrising looks awesome but is this baroque automata French revolution game that seems to be nothing like Knights of the Old Republic. They are a small studio and as such I think fairly single threaded so we can push them off the list.
Right now at this very moment I am playing a Knights of the Old Republic game built by Obsidian Entertainment. While they are now owned by Microsoft they have also been shown to not necessarily be building exclusive content. It would not be outside of the realm of reality for them to take over the franchise. To add fuel to the fire, Casey Hudson just left Bioware to join Microsoft Studios as Creative Director. He was the director on Knights of the Old Republic so maybe the cards are aligning in such a way as to have the franchise return to its Microsoft roots. If you remember KOTOR was originally an Xbox exclusive that later got a Windows release.
So in a bit of a dark horse pick, I want to throw out ArcheType Entertainment. This studio is backed by Wizards of the Coast and seems to be made up of a bunch of Ex-Bioware folks. One very key player would be Drew Karpyshyn the writer of KOTOR and some of the SWTOR content. Additionally James Ohlen and Chad Roberston were both in leadership roles over Star Wars the Old Republic and represent the Head of the Studio and General Manager respectively. The only thing that does not align is that when the studio was spun up in February of 2020 it was announced that they would be working on a brand new Science Fiction IP. Maybe fates shifted and the break up of the EA Star Wars license opened up other opportunities to pivot what they were working on into the Old Republic setting.
Another studio that I would not rule out either is InXile entertainment. These are the folks the modern Wasteland and Bards Tale games as well as Torment: Tides of Numenera. As a studio their jam seems to be really good isometric roleplaying games. However they would also have the same Microsoft connection that Obsidian has. I think this is a really long shot however because the wealth of their experience is in modernizing the isometric genre and creating games that feel like we remember the classic PC RPG era feeling. It is because of this nostalgia based approach that I am not really certain they would be screwing with the formula just yet, that is unless they themselves are feeling like the isometric thing is getting a bit stale.
It’s All Rumors
The problem with all of this is the fact that right now none of it is tangible. For all we know it could be Aspyr working on remastering and modernizing Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Excitement is getting the better of games media and myself included. I would love to see a new Knights of the Old Republic game, but also I know it is probably two or three years out there if it even ends up happening. So friends, what are your thoughts? Who do you think might be developing this game and what sort of game are you expecting it to be? Do you think it will be a continuation of the KOTOR lineage or just something new set in the same Old Republic era setting? Drop me a line below, because I am curious about your thoughts.
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