Quickie: Dear Bioware, Please Let This Not Be It

There’s an interview with a developer of Bioware’s upcoming MMORPG The Old Republic over at G4, with a live group combat demonstration in part 2. To be quite frank, it looks awful. The healer is simply hitting the game’s equivalent of “Greater Heal” every few seconds while the tank seems to mostly sit still, shooting his gun and eating the enemy droid’s shots. This has nothing to do with how Star Wars works and isn’t very interesting as gameplay to boot. People in Star Wars don’t just take shots to the head and have a Jedi healing them – they dodge shots, they parry shots or they have forcefields to render them harmless. I can see body armor absorbing a shot here or there, but the barrage that the tank is taking in that video? No way. And what is that healer doing? Mending the armor?

From a gameplay point of view… Been there, done that. The video shows roughly the amount of group interaction that you would get in World of Warcraft’s Deadmines or Wailing Caverns. This old system really needs an overhaul and Star Wars would have provided the perfect background for making combat more interactive. Oh well, I guess my hopes have to be that this evolves further in the later stages of the game. I’m afraid though, very afraid.