
Originally Posted by
Hetros
RIFT is where I'm sticking for a while... GW2 has no interest for me, and SWtOR is, I feel, doomed to failure due to how Bioware is making the game.
Bioware crafts AMAZING stories. But they craft amazing stories for SINGLE PLAYER GAMES.
When you make a single player game, the narrative of the story takes precedence over the setting of a story, because you are trying to hook the player into the mood of the story and make them FEEL for the characters involved.
When you make a MMOG, the setting must take precedence over the narrative because you cannot craft a proper linear narrative for thousands of players all at once. There is no personal involvement with any one character on the same level as you would for a character in a linear narrative, because EVERYONE is involved all at once. You can have a narrative, but it cannot be anywhere near as gripping or in-depth as that of a single player game.
Now, I'll be the first to say that Bioware is the KING of crafting both narratives and settings. But I fear that they are focusing too heavily on the narrative and not on the setting of SWtOR. It means that you run around with a companion NPC, that every player gets their own starship, rather than say, being able to team up with other players and all party out on the same starship like in the Escape from the Death Star scene in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Which, let's face it, would be awesome. One character being the engineer repairing damage, another piloting, two others on the guns. Yeah, we're probably not going to get that in SWtOR.
RIFT, to me, has latched onto something that actually fills out the POTENTIAL of MMO's. Most mmo's, let's face it, are single player games with gimmicks that force players to OCCASIONALLY work together and options that SUPPORT players working together, but by no means make it NECESSARY for them to do so.
You can effectively get to the end game of any other MMO by yourself, soloing the entire way. In RIFT, that option is pretty much cut away. You HAVE to work together to keep a zone functioning against planar invasion events, you aren't necessarily FORCED to do so (as you would be if you went into a dungeon), but it is NECESSARY to work together on a MASSIVE scale to beat invasion events. No other MMO does that really.
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