Crushed Hopes and Broken Promises

Today’s post will be all about two clips from E3, Star Wars clips to be exact. One is the new intro cinematic for Star Wars: The Old Republic, the other a demo of the Star Wars game for Kinect. One of them is brilliant, the other quite awful. Let’s start with the awful first.

Whenever a new motion control system is announced, my first thought goes towards something along the lines of “OMG, lightsabers, this will be awesome”. Turns out it never is. Just look at that video above, if that doesn’t scare you away from Kinect I don’t know what will. The whole thing looks like an on-rails action game with little interaction potential and even less precision. See how the on-screen avatar stars somersaulting after the player has already landed? How the gameplay is full of annoying pauses? I wonder why they even dared putting that presentation up on the big screen.

I don’t know if motion control is completely doomed, but it seems more and more like a failed piece of technology to me. Shouldn’t those controls increase immersion instead of killing it?

But enough about that, here’s something awesome:

That is one hell of an intro cinematic, isn’t it? It really feels as if it was taken right out of a Star Wars movie (with a touch of uncanny valley I suppose) and I’d pay to watch this as a feature-length film. So why am I calling “Broken Promises” in the title of this post? Well, as our friends at Kotaku rightly point out, the game can’t possibly deliver on the promises made by the movie. Even if Bioware manages to create a decent MMORPG, it simply won’t be remotely like that cinematic. If we were talking about a classic single player Bioware game, I could buy the intensity shown in the clip. In an MMO though… highly unlikely. Still, that is one awesome piece of 3D animation – I wonder if one could somehow get Lucas to hand over movie rights to Bioware so some real writers can get their hands on making a Star Wars movie. Wouldn’t that be something?