SWTOR is 'highly derivative' clone of WoW, says analyst

NewsPublish Date 15/06/2011 - 10:29am GMT+1

Bioware MMO could miss 2011 launch.

Doug Creutz, analyst for Cowen and Company, has stated that BioWare's upcoming MMORPG is a "highly derivative" clone of World of Warcraft and could miss its 2011 launch date, according to GamesIndustry.biz.

He explained after playing the title at E3, The Old Republic is "competent, but hardly breathtaking."

"We got hands-on time with the game, and were largely unimpressed. Despite promises from EA/BioWare that the title represents a major step forward in MMO design, what we saw was essentially a World of Warcraft clone with Star Wars character skins and the BioWare RPG nice/nasty dialogue tree mechanism bolted on for non-player character conversations."

Creutz went on to say: "Granted, we were playing in a desert area, so other areas may be more impressive-looking... on the other hand we question why EA chose a desert level to showcase the title."

Star Wars: The Old Republic is rumoured to be EA's most expensive game ever made.

VideoGamer.com Analysis

Creutz isn't the only person who has been sceptical about the game. The MMORPG market is a beast to crack, particularly while WoW is still top dog, and many think The Old Republic will fail to find an audience. However it's worth mentioning that the game's Mass Effect-like dialogue trees and morality system create a clear identity that sets it apart from WoW, as detailed in our Star Wars: The Old Republic preview.

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Comments

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User Comments

Endless @ Bloodstorm

Indeed, you have to wonder what they're are actually analysing! I bet they review digital cameras by counting the pixels they can capture as well ;)

Posted 01:58 on 05 July 2011

Chaza_snake

seems like hes a little harsh on the game, i dont think we will know how good it will crack the market or how it is viewed by everyone else until its launch and the several months after will define it

Posted 21:26 on 04 July 2011

Bloodstorm

It's funny because Bioware do that sort of thing to "protect" the games they make.

Posted 21:03 on 04 July 2011

altaranga

The only bit missing from the post was the "Hello, I work at BioWare Austin and when reading this article...".

It is an amusing retort, though.

Posted 20:12 on 04 July 2011

CheekyLee @ ragou

I admired your post. I'd have liked it even more with paragraphs, but I still read it all and then TU'd it.

Posted 19:39 on 04 July 2011

Bloodstorm

"the lowest common denominator of gaming"

Like 99% of all "gaming" analysts?

Posted 19:35 on 04 July 2011

Endless

Sounds to me like a CoD graphics whore if you ask me, the kind of person that plays an RPG for the cgi and the flashing lights. the lowest common denominator of gaming. He does come off as totally uninformed about the genre as a whole; WoW itself is a skin of several MMOs before it, it brought nothing and has brought nothing since, to the genre at all. It made MMOs simple, easy, accessible and attainable for your average gamer.

Gone are the days when MMOs were perceived the ay FPS are today, a very small minority of people have a PC powerful enough to even run the MMOs that have been released since WoW, same goes for the likes of BF3 and Crysis 2. The mass-MMO gamer of today got into the genre at the bottom, they respond to features that everyone already knows about. A new MMO needs to address the features that already exist while adding enough to entice the veterans and those that have been drawn into MMOs because of WoW. If it were so drastically different from WoW, they wouldnt get the market appeal. The WoW gamer needs to be able to move seamlessly to any new game, otherwise the barrier for entry for that game is too high. The investment in time, money and commitment is so great that you need to make it so easy for people to move, otherwise they just wont.

And all this without even considering wha TOR is bringing to the plate that is new.

Posted 19:32 on 04 July 2011

krek @ ragou

lol

Posted 04:43 on 04 July 2011

ragou

Immediately it becomes apparent that this analyst Mr. Creutz has 1) not even superficially researched the game or had in-depth time with gameplay, and 2) his qualification for criticism lacks even the most basic understanding and appreciation for referencing the original Star Wars universe on which the game is based. For the (1)st case, his view of the shallowness of choice and lack of innovative content is itself lacking in information: SWTOR is shaping up to be the biggest RPG developed in the ENTIRE history of gaming, even for a game of the MMO format: there are more than 60 standard Star Wars novels worth of spoken dialogue in the game proper (Google this alongside Daniel Erickson, Lead Writer for TOR, for references), and this does not even include basic text-based information in the form of codices, quest log entries, and active quest- and story-related content. The game takes hundreds of hours to complete, per class, and there are 8 of them. This comes to thousands of hours of potential gameplay, all with unique storylines and quest material. All in all, in purchasing, you would be getting the content of at least 10 other RPG games for the price of one, , and an additional $15 or so a month thereafter for however long you choose to play, set in the iconic Star Wars universe with a ton of interesting backstory delivered in a format no MMO has ever attempted in either type or scope. His opinion of the graphical system used, one of 'stylized realism', as just a WOW clone with SW skins, neglects the reasoning for why that system was chosen in the first place [a few reasons including: a) to ensure compatibility with a wide range of users in a massively multiplayer format, i.e. that the game would run smoothly for millions of potential players simultaneously running it on a wide variety of computer hardware; b) the similarity of the art style and therefore intentional reference to the original Knights of the Old Republic series of games; c) the uniqueness of the format itself in the MMO world (there are other graphical systems for MMOs other than the one WoW employs, used to varying degrees of success or failure, whether designed with higher-end or lower-end machines primarily in mind), &c.]. As regarding his so-called "qualification" for this unfounded opinion, he questions the choice of showing "a desert area for showcasing the title", without considering the fact that even most readers would immediately recognize this as Tatooine, chief backdrop for many of the scenes in 5 out of 6 of the Star Wars movies so far released. Going further, Tatooine itself has been lacking in emphasis so far with regards to release of new information on the game through the 2 years of its development, and as such had Creutz been perusing the video game's website or news released even a little before attending EA, he would have realized this immediately. All it takes is a web browser and a couple of clicks to take in more information about SWTOR than this critic possibly ever will. I implore the reader to judge for his or herself by visiting the game's main webpage, looking through its contents and watching the released videos: http://www.swtor.com .

TLDR: Just go to swtor.com for less than 5 minutes and you will know more about this game than this guy ever could.

Posted 19:51 on 15 June 2011