SWTOR: A sign that MMOs have reached their peak?

I came across a Wired.com article today entitled "Star Wars: The Old Republic The MMO You're Looking For", and it got me thinking again about a question that I've literally been asking myself for years now.

Will there ever be a genuine "WoW killer"?

Many years have passed since World of Warcraft's launch, but it has consistently remained at the top of the MMO food chain even with a heap of MMO titles that have released since then to combat Blizzard's juggernaut. I have seen countless news articles posted for new and upcoming MMOs with eager players heralding them in the comments as the "WoW killer" that is going to finally bring Blizzard to their knees. And yet, only a few months later the MMO in question has been long forgotten and gone free-to-play already. After seeing what feels like an endless sea of lazy, repetitive, and forgotten MMOs continually being crushed under World of Warcraft's feet, I've really started to become jaded toward the genre as a whole.

SWTOR Box Art

Then I heard about BioWare's announcement for Star Wars: The Old Republic, and a glimmer of hope began to emerge in the back of my mind. Having previously played their critically acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect RPGs and thoroughly enjoying them as some of my new favorite games in my library, I was sure that this time would be different. If there's anyone that can beat Blizzard, it's BioWare.

Darth Malgus

The game was ambitious. When I heard that TOR was going to be fully voice acted with all NPCs and even players, I thought BioWare was really going to bring storytelling to a whole new level for the genre. Finally, an MMO that pushes the boundaries of what people think the genre can accomplish, and doesn't suffer from the same major pitfall of all MMOs; that they must necessarily sacrifice significant quality in favor of quantity. Indeed, in addition to full voice over support, you would be able to eventually acquire your own space ship, do battle in space missions, acquire a crew which you can use from anything to doing trade skill grunt work to assisting you in combat, and even build relationships with your crew members--in some cases romantic. But most importantly, you would get to play as a lightsaber-wielding Jedi in a fully-fleshed out story-driven MMO setting.

A saber duel from one of TOR's cinematics.

I eagerly jumped into the game as soon as it was released, and admittedly I was having a blast for the first week of its launch just like Nicole Wakelin who had written that Wired.com article above. There was certainly a lot that BioWare got right. You have many options for customizing your character that make the experience feel very personally tailored to you; each class and faction combination has its own backstory and unique crew members to acquire. Combat is fast-paced and your abilities have a real sense of impact that makes you feel like you really are a powerful Jedi. NPCs are lively and enrich the story thanks to the full voice over support, and the ability to make decisions for your character on what to say during conversations is satisfying.

Then I hit the mid-game content, and the frustrations began to slowly unravel into an ever-increasing game-breaking abyss, and thus TOR's damning flaws were exposed. Despite that the game was off to such a strong start, BioWare failed to avoid the same pitfalls of so many other MMOs. Now having gained at least 20 levels on my Sith Marauder at this point, I had been venturing into neutral territory for quite some time but had yet to run into a single enemy Republic player to do battle with. Playing on a supposedly "high population" PVP (player versus player) server, I was sure that I should have run into someone to fight by now, but I continued to explore, and continued to find emptiness with an occasional Sith player sparsely walking about here and there. Due to the game's overdone instancing system that even instances off open terrain regions of the game world within a server, I would rarely run into other players if at all for long periods of time. Enemies were becoming increasingly unsatisfying to fight as elite mobs were far too frequently strewn about the landscape, so you would accidentally stumble across one and take a hefty beating around seemingly every corner you turn.

A sith warrior and his crew companion.

Still, I figured every game has its low points; there's plenty of TOR that I have yet to experience. Maybe it will get better again if I just keep playing. 40 levels into the game however, and the problems only continued to worsen. For the few times that I actually found myself engaging in PVP, imbalances were immediately apparent as ranged caster classes always had an advantage over my melee marauder even with relatively equal gear and level range. Any missions aside from my increasingly rare class-specific quests had gotten extremely dull and repetitive, and it was quite apparent that all the voiced dialogue had been quickly reduced to a mere gimmick to set you up for another meaningless grind exercise rather than actually tell you a story and engross you in the characters. Indeed, TOR had inevitably fallen prey to the number one flaw of all MMOs after all: quantity over quality. Like most MMOs, TOR is loaded with filler quests that only serve to arbitrarily inflate your game time so that you'll keep paying for your subscription.

Republic players engaging in battle.

With this damning realization in mind, I quickly unsubscribed from the game without even bothering to hit the level cap, and my opinion of the MMO genre as a whole has sunk to an all-time low ever since. How is this possible? Not even the experienced and reliable RPG giant BioWare could produce an MMO that successfully competes on the level of WoW. I shouldn't be surprised really, but I was. After all, the game tried to cram hundreds upon hundreds of hours of content just like so many other MMOs. It should be no surprise that inevitably as a result of that, the quality of content would suffer from its own ambition. But my excitement and faith in BioWare fooled me to believe otherwise.

This finally raises the question: has the MMO genre reached its peak after all? With so many problematic MMOs even from blockbuster developers, it seems like the genre is doomed to always be a victim of too much ambition. Perhaps the majority of MMOs may never evolve beyond being glorified level grinds, but I would think even with the limitations in networking technology that prevent developers from experimenting with more gameplay styles in MMOs today, there has got to be something they can do to solve the quality problem and stop trying to emulate the EverQuest / World of Warcraft model. For the time being though, it's hard for me to see any developers rising to meet that challenge after everything that I've experienced. One thing is certain, if MMO developers want to make a true WoW killer, they're going to need more than just another shameless cash grab that emulates rather than innovates. Blizzard has the level grind model down to a science, and anyone who tries to challenge them on that battlefield has a long, long uphill battle ahead of them.