With World of Warcraft still reigning supreme among the MMORPGs, Star Wars: The Old Republic seems poised to give WoW its first real competition, ever. A lot of games have made strong appearances on the market early on, then failed to claim the coveted top spot. If the hype leading up to this December’s release of The Old Republic (affectionately known as ToR) is any indication, we can all expect great things. All of us, at least, except for Mac gamers. As a Mac owner, I can tell you right now that I’m not about to go out and buy a PC just for ToR. I also appreciate that I can play WoW on my Mac very happily, thank you very much. And yes, I have Wii. I could play it there – but I really want ToR on my Mac. I guess I’ll just have to join the other whiners and cry me a river.
In order to avoid server instability, a problem that generally plagues MMOs whenever there is a massive influx of players and not enough servers to handle the load, EA has announced they will initially limit the number of copies of The Old Republic that are released. This only makes sense, because who wants to unbox a shiny new copy of any game, only to be unable to register or log on because the servers are lagging or crashed? Some people think EA is just trying to build hype by issuing a statement about restrictions in the supply, to puff up the importance of the game, making it seem to be more popular and wished for than it is. Horsefeathers! I’ve been playing a lot of years online, and I can tell you right now that it’s never fun to have to wait for days just to get started on a new game. I say, let them keep the copies under some restriction while the servers get built up to capacity.
Prediction? I don’t think The Old Republic is going to be a World of Warcraft killer by any means; these are really two separate genres in a way. But I think ToR does stand the best chance so far of all those other attempts by other games to compete.
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