Couple of Updates

There have been a couple of updates over the last week or so; nothing too spectacular. A short news message has come to my attention stating that, apparently, George Lucas is throwing his full weight behind Star Wars: The Old Republic. The general consensus on the forums over this seems to be “great… as long as it is sideline support”. It seems that people don’t want him to get directly involved in the story and gameplay decisions, and I can’t really blame them considering how the prequel movies turned out. BioWare can do this just fine without his involvement.

There has also been some news that LucasArts in optimistic about the game. Not that surprising, but it seems that they are literally aiming to be a WoW killer, which causes me no end of concern. At least it seems Blizzard thinks that it could happen, though to me that sounds like they are just covering their bases (and it gives them stronger grounds to make themselves seem even better when it turns out, yet again, that people just go back to WoW again; which is what they did with WAR).

And of course BioWare released some new concept art and added a couple of new avatars to their forums. The concept art is nice, but personally I’m more interested in seeing ingame graphics as what we’ve seen so far has been decidedly underwhelming. I suspect that they’re not showing more ingame shots precisely because of the negative feedback, having decided to wait until the graphics are more polished. I hope so at least, because judging from the screenshots I’ve seen so far I’m not sure I could stand playing the game. Odd considering how nice the concept art looks.

I also noticed a BioWare Blog entry where Rob Chestney gives us a bit of background on how he came to be a senior writer for BioWare. It is odd how I missed that before and only noticed it as I was gathering the links above. Of particular interest to me is the following quote:

What blew me away more than anything in those first few months was that this whole idea of story coming first… it wasn’t just talk. The storyline and narrative setting were the starting point of every discussion about design and even the conversations about art.

I think there’s an important lesson to learn in that, but I’ll talk about that in another post. For now I’m just happy to file this one under “blog” and leave it at that for now.