Yeah... believe me, you *can* screw up a Star Wars game... big time.

Yeah you can. Ever heard of Lego Star Wars? Best. Game. Ever. Lego Star Wars II was the best. Game. Ever.
Then they bundle them together and update the first game to make it awesome win too, and ONLY RELEASE IT FOR GAME SYSTEMS!
What about us computer people who can't afford a next gen console? Damn you! DAMN YOU!
Now I will never get my Lego Star Wars awesomeness.

Ah well, now I'm just ranting. And it *zziiit* just *ziit* triggered *ziiit* my *ziiit* OW *ziiit* shock collar *ziit*

*ZIIIIT*

I am looking forward to playing and enjoying TOR.   ...  Baaaaaaa

Seriously though...  I am.

Eh.  I have a thing against MMOs in general.  I just don't like monthly fees, I guess.

That aside, here's what I think about TOR:

I agree with the people who said that it can't possibly have a good story because of the nature of an MMO.  Good stories (ALL stories that I can think of, actually) require two things to define it: a beginning and an end.  The stuff in between makes up the story.  MMOs can't have definite ends; that would be self defeating and a really stupid business decision.

And this whole "THE SITH HAVE RANSACKED CORUSCANT!!! O NOEZ!!!!" thing is just downright dumb.  The great thing about the KOTOR games was that it referenced specific goings on that actually either occured or could have occured in that given time frame.  I'm a Star Wars buff, so I'm pretty familiar with the expanded universe stuff (up to a point; I didn't really care for the Yuuzahn Vong stuff and beyond).  In KOTOR, when they mentioned Exar Kun and all that, I knew what was going on.  It made for a more immersive experience.  The premise for this MMO, by comparison, is just rediculous.

Oh well.  This doesn't really affect me, I'm not gonna get it anyways, evern if it was good.

You no like Yuuzhan Vong SennKS? Why?

I'm glad I'm not alone in my love for continuity and stuff in Star Wars fitting together.

So I guess you hated the new Star Trek movie then.... what with the whole continuity thing getting totally FUBARed.   

Then again... maybe you hate Star trek because you like Star Wars.  Personally, I like both and I think that it's ok to recreate a franchise every now and then to keep it fresh.  That being said, I know alot of you are complaining that TOR is just a rehash of what has already been done.  But... ahhh... I don't really care. 

I was SO excited about this game, right until I saw it was an MMO.

I haven't seen the new Star Trek movie, but I think the concept is great. I'm not a fan of Star Trek; I don't hate it, I'm just not interested, but this movie is doing a good thing: breathing life into a dying franchise.

The Old Republic is not revitalizing Star Wars. Star Wars is doing fine, unlike Steve Jobs (who is actually on the upswing), and doesn't need to be revitalized.

Well, maybe Bioware aren't trying to revitalize anything.  They're just trying to make a cool game.

Just a thought...

NOTE: If you're into this sort of stuff, there ARE spoilers for the NJO series, as well as stuff that happens later. You have been warned.

[Rant on]

1. By the end of the series, the Jedi were all like, "Eh, the ends justify the means." Retarted.  That's not how a Jedi is supposed to think.  It goes against almost everything a Jedi is supposed to stand for; separates them from the Sith.

2. They had Jacen Solo, who's a total WUSS, be the hero of the series by reaching "total Force balance." Um, wut? (He later became a Sith named Darth Caedus, and was still a huge wuss; which sort of, y'know, busts the whole "Force balance" thing)

3. (This was my biggest beef BY FAR) They killed Chewie.  FUCKING STUPID!!!!  Yeah, I get it, there's supposed to be losses and stuff, but you can't do that!  Kill off somebody else, like, say, Wedge Antilles; it achieves the same effect without being a huge asshole.  3PO said it best: "Let the Wookie win."

No, I saw the Star Trek movie and rather liked it.  But you see, that is completely different from what Bioware is doing to Star Wars.  The Star Trek movie was a reboot; it set up a completely different timeline from the originals and as such doesn't actually effect what happened in that universe.  It didn't "totally FUBAR" the continuity as you say, it created a whole different continuity.  The events surrounding TOR have been created for the sole purpose of creating this bumfuck MMO, not the other way around.  A good game serves the story it tells, whereas this "story," which is completely asinine, is meant to serve the MMO.  It is this fact that has already doomed the "story-telling" aspect of TOR that they're touting to suck.

[Rant off]

Whew.  I'mma gonna go make me a sammich.

1. Well, for the first part of the war the Jedi sat around with their heads in the sand imitating ostriches while the rest of the galaxy burned. They didn't even go to the rescue of their entire academy class when the praxeum was attacked! Since their method of doing nothing because we're too scared of being wrong got a few trillion killed, there was little else to do but fight back.

But they never thought that the ends justify the means. The entire subplot of Alpha Red raised that question, along with Zonama Sekot. With Alpha Red, they could've annihilated the Vong, but they felt it was wrong. In that situation, they did not choose the ends over the means, no matter the cost. Another example is with Zonama Sekot. They went there only as a last resort, and they didn't even try to pressure Sekot into helping them. They let Sekot decide, because they knew that again, the ends do not justify the means, and that forcing Sekot to end the war might work, it would corrupt Sekot and themselves.

2. Well, Jacen was a massive wuss in the beginning of the Vong War. He was way too critical and self destructive to be of any use. However, Traitor (Matt Stover, best Star Wars author) provided a very intricate and understandable evolution to Jacen's character, and it detailed and showed exactly what happened to Jacen and why it changed him so much, along with his view of the force. (Vergere is NOT a sith. God, why are many people so thick, especially authors!?)

3. Yeah, killing Chewie did suck. I always liked him, but his death did have a purpose. The purpose: Anakin. Without Chewie's death, and the resulting phsycological trauma inflicted on Anakin, he would not have become the hero and protagonist he needed to be. He needed the catalyst of Chewie's death in order to set him on the path to recognizing his own power and responsibility.

Oh and they did kill off others too. Borsk, Ganner, Anakin, almost Jacen, Coruscant, multiple species, you name it.

Rant Warning

And Legacy of the Force (LoTF, or as some fans call it: LOLWTF?) isn't too good of a character reference. Pretty much every single character in that series acted completely unlike themselves. It was like having a dyslexic ADHD child on meth write a fanfiction. Wait, bad example. All of Karen Travesty's books are fanfiction. The Jacen in LoTF is unlike any Jacen from the Swarm War, the Yuuzhan Vong War, the Corellian Trilogy, the Jedi Knights series; well, any other book that had Jacen in it. It's sad too, because he was such a great character who got raped TO DEATH in LoTF.

End Rant Warning

Star Wars really should have ended with NJO, and every other effort after the end of the series should have been devoted to fleshing out other, less touched on parts of Star Wars.

Come on, it's hard not to read the last few pages of Luceno "The Finisher"'s Unifying Force, and not have such a sense of finality and peace.

NJO just didn't do it for me really.  It lacked the Star Wars-ness that was present in the Thrawn books and the X-Wing series.  Don't get me wrong, it had some good parts.  I especially liked when Ganner went down like a huge badass.  It just seems to me that NJO was a turning point in Star Wars continuity; like it sent everything into a spiral.  It's hard to explain.  You're probably right when you said it should have stopped with NJO.  Seems like everything after was just kinda forced (pun intended ).

So yeah.  This MMO is gonna suck.

Hey, but if it does suck from the beginning, maybe there's a hope that the next batch of New Game Enhancements endorsed by Lucasarts will actually improve the title!

My next big hope in MMO genre is actually Mortal Online.

SW:TOR seems too much like a classic "done to death" MMORPG, with an abundance of scripting involved (and in my experience, overuse of scripting makes MMO worlds seem fake and small.

What would be great is a gameplay departure from the "tried and true boring" philosophy, such as complete control over your character (no combat rolls, just twitch fighting with maybe lock on feature). Think Jedi Knight II style combat with unlockable combos and abilities.

Add in a skill system where you can build your character according to *your* vision, not the vision of the developers, and you can limit the story to "It's Star Wars, go play!" as far as I am concerned.

But SW is too big of a cash cow franchize... the "please the uneducated masses" mentality is nigh impossible to get around in such cases.

Star wars TOR will rock!!  baaaaaaaaa

When I first heard about SW:TOR, I was ecstatic about the game, I loved both the kotors and I wanted to see what the post-kotor 2 republic would be like.  Then I looked at the game and found out it was an MMO .

I hope this game flops so bioware will actually make a kotor 3.