What the Old Republic wasn't...

At the same time as we discovered how much The Old Republic cost to make, we also learnt that it could have been a very different game based on a very different IP. Every game goes through an “ideas” phase, in which crazy things are imagined that the developers hope never make it out to the press because, frankly, some things from the ideas phase can sound so awesome in theory but are so impractical that they’re not yet possible to do.

We’ve recently learnt that Naughty Dog’s Last of Us could have been a Jak and Daxter reboot and that Hideo Kojima had wanted Solid Snake to die. Molyneux famously told the press that you would be able to plant a seed in Fable and come back later in the game to see it had grown into a tree, an idea that people latched onto and were downright offended when it was a no-show.

World of Warcraft clones

MMOs, for reasons of finance and practicality, rarely stray from the beaten path. We can tell from the sheer barrage of World of Warcraft clones that these games are relatively easy to make, recognisable (and so easy to market) and, most importantly, are profitable, but that doesn’t mean that the developers always go out of their way to create a World of Warcraft clone, it’s just that when they look at their budget and their overall project goals, it makes more sense to go with what’s familiar than attempting to sell an idea that may be unusual. In the case of The Old Republic, that was just one IP that Bioware tried to acquire for their massively multiplayer adventure and, for whatever reason, these projects fell through and we’re left to imagine how they could work and how much fun they’d be to play.

Star Wars Galaxies and LotRO

Considering that The Old Republic had a knock-on effect on another huge MMO, Star Wars Galaxies, the fact that Bioware had their eyes on The Lord of the Rings isn’t too much of a shock. After having written an article about the original Star Wars MMO’s demise, it really struck me when I saw there had been plans to replace another hugely famous game. If things had turned out slightly differently, we might have still been playing Galaxies but not Lord of the Rings Online, which considering the fact there are new expansions coming out and things seem pretty rosy for the company, is almost unthinkable now. This would have been some time back, before EA lost the rights to the series in 2008, which is likely why Lord of the Rings: Bioware never got out of the ideas phase.

LotRO with voice acting

Lord of the Rings stuck out for me because it’s an indication of just how the industry works. Is your rapidly aging project old and now only mildly exciting? Well that’s fine, we’ll replace it with something not a million miles different, give it a load of marketing pizazz and hope for the best. I’d love to have seen a Lord of the Rings MMO with voice acting – all of those terrible English accents would have been too hard to resist – but as it stands I’m glad we’ll see Lord of the Rings Online continue to evolve and thrive under its free-to-play banner.

MMOs based on books.

Then there were plans to base the game around the Song of Fire and Ice series by George R. R. Martin. The geek world went mad about this idea when they heard there could have been an MMO based upon the world of A Game of Thrones and its sequels, not surprising since Martin was named by Time as one of the most influential people of 2011. In hindsight, a game based upon the Song of Fire and Ice would have been fairly successful, HBO are currently running a TV series based upon the novels and with that would come a wider audience, had things played out the same way. At the time though, this would have only appealed to fans of the books, a relatively wide group of fans, but still tiny compared to other IPs. Also, considering the author’s attitude towards fan fiction, the fact that the game would have to have a ton of non-canon missions and ideas probably put him off completely.

While these were fairly big revelations, the biggest – and the one that made all the headlines – was that The Old Republic could have been a Spiderman MMO. Other Marvel characters would have been involved as well, but the idea seems to have been based around Spidey and his locations and enemies. There are instant problems in this, just how would powers work? Would everybody be bitten by radioactive spiders and spend their time web swinging from building to building or would a wider array of powers be available?

Difficult to imagine a Spiderman MMO

It’s difficult to imagine a Spiderman MMO, or even a Marvel MMO, and not think of it in the same way as DC Universe Online, where you must create a character, pick a side and get only minimal access to the characters you know and love. This certainly would give off that epic vibe that The Old Republic has, with multiple planets and species to come across and perhaps the combination of DC Universe Online and Star Wars having more variety put a stop to this idea. We don’t know and we’ll never know for sure how exactly things could have played out, although it wouldn’t surprise me to see a big Marvel MMO in the future – it’s just something that will definitely happen eventually.

Spiderman image from: http://marvel.wikia.com

They settled with Star Wars, although settled is perhaps the wrong way of wording that. Lucas Arts, having worked with Bioware on what is perhaps the highest rated Star Wars game ever, already knew what they were getting into when they agreed to make The Old Republic, they knew how things were going to work and, likely having seen Mass Effect, knew that the company hadn’t lost their ability to be Sci-Fi special. Considering the other options, only Lord of the Rings would have been as safe a bet as Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings crowd were fairly infamous not too long ago for being pretty tight with their copyright (the BBC radio series hasn’t been heard of since 2002).

Bioware's future with MMO GAMES

Whether Bioware will ever work on an MMO again is yet to be seen, although it’s fair to say that The Old Republic isn’t too far from being profitable, if it isn’t already (we did the maths a couple of weeks ago, remember?). Will these ideas come back onto the table when they’re looking into other projects? It’s possible although, with the framework in place for the Old Republic, it wouldn’t be all too surprising to see a Mass Effect MMO based around the same, modified engine. That’d be pretty interesting but, as the third title in the series isn’t too far away, perhaps that’s something we’ll look at in the coming weeks…