BioWare: WoW is the "touchstone" for The Old Republic

@Fusjon

Then how would you design a game differently?

@Fusjon When you spend north of $100 million, you're generally not going to take a lot of risks, and "innovate" just for the sake of it.

I've seen may studios go wrong simply by digging their heels in the ground and do something different than WoW just because.

Blizzard created an amazing game... it's nice to see BioWare seems it the same way.

@Fusjon

It's a question of hitting a sweet spot.

If you want to lure players away from WOW then you need a game that is similar enough that it's enjoyable to them, but different enough that there's some motivation for them to leave behind characters that they've spent so much time and effort developing.

Rift has probably done well in that respect.

SWTOR is probably further away from WOW - with sci-fi, all the VO, the completely different combat system (very few cooldowns).

@Utakata

You'd decide features and content based on whether they make the game more or less fun to play, not whether they break from the tradition of WoW.

@Utakata

3 words; Guild Wars 2.

@Mystal

So in a convoluted way you're saying when it isn't broken why re-invent it? But this is precisly the way that will lead many to complain it's a "WoW clone." And "inovating it" has the huge danger of not making it user friendly. How about evolve what WoW has done instead and start doing inovated things on top of that?

Already incorporating story making decisions and cut scenes into their game, BioWare is moving leaps and bounds away from WoW model. But this is also concerning because I'm not sure how they can pull this off in a MMO environment. I personally think PuG'ing is going to be a real bitch SWTOR because they're doing this.

@Dirame

Sorry to say, but I suspect many are already arguing that GW2 is too much of a WoW clone. /shrug

@DancingCow

You hit the nail on the head my friend.

@Fusjon
I disagree.
I feel that cars conceptually should all have 4 wheels.
Why? Because a base of 4 wheels that turns in the front is the safest way to carry the load the car must bear. Both for balance and stability.
These are the sorts of ideas he's talking about.

Biofuel, Hydrogen cell etc - still MAJOR innovations on the 4 wheeled car standard.

- Customizable UI elements
- Robust chat systems etc.
- Easy grouping

little things that should be standard in any MMO

I don't necessarily think he's talking combat, raiding or any other major gameplay elements - just standards.

@Utakata: "how would you design a game differently?" - well, for a start I wouldn't have tanks and healers in a Star Wars game. There are no tanks and healers in Star Wars. If they want to copy a successful Blizzard title they should be cribbing ideas from the Diablo games, where combat is all about avoiding getting hit, not tanking and healing.

I have to say massively did a lousy job in this news, like you don't like SWTOR. Check the vg247 one, it's alot better.

@Ohhlaawd

Totally agree. The fans can reference the other game, but I'm always concerned when a company does the same.

Are you building WoW 2 in space or are you building your own game? I'm tired of the talk and branding. That's what I hate most about the big publishers. Build a good game and let the game talk for you.

This isn't 1985, a good game, word of mouth and a little publicity will doe the trick. If you want an example. Nintendo's Wii was basically sold out for 6 months and they didn't run an advertisement in the US until 4 months after the console was released.

@Minofan Most likely he's talking about user experience issues primarily, like responsiveness of menus, general conventions for displaying information on tooltips, speed of getting into the game from the moment you launch, etc. Not having the same features, but rather for those features you do share, not making them work in an unfamiliar way for no other reason than to be different (or because you didn't bother to research how other people do it).

@ErikC

I had the same thought, maybe he meant the way things run and not the actually game features. I went to the source to read the transcript but unfortunately it is pretty much the same excerpt. If there is a full transcript out there it would be nice to see.

@Minofan

This is why I'm waiting on GW2. If I want to play WoW, I'll play WoW... give it a different skin, its still WoW... the only thing that would make me switch is which skin I liked more (and frankly... I'm not a huge SW fan, so I have no reason to like it). GW2 is going to rock the foundations of what an MMO is (IF everything they say works as its intended... IF