SWTOR Vs. WoW: Is It Really A Rivalry?

One is a highly anticipated MMO, the other is undeniably the current king of the genre. One is based on a franchise that has literally been around for decades and made millions upon millions of dollars through films, games, books and more. The other boasts over 11 million subscriptions and is a common name even amongst nongamers, a feat shared primarily with games that have defined gaming as an artform through its progression, such as Doom or Super Mario Brothers. One is a newcomer with a proven win record in marketability, the other...well, you get the idea.

At a cursory glance, it would appear that Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of WarCraft were made to butt heads, just as Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings and so on did before them. What do these latter names all have in common? All came out of the gate looking pretty, all came out riding a large wave of hype (anyone familiar with the WoW forums has heard the phrase 'WoW killer' enough times in the past few years) and ALL of them failed to achieve the success that World of WarCraft has generated. Why?

The primary reason is simple: an incomplete product was pushed up against a complete one. For whatever reason, each of these games, in some manner or another, found itself positioned as a rival of WoW, either through their own marketing or through fans or both. Each of these games on paper should have no problem achieving a large audience. Conan is a name most people are familiar with, whether they've read the stories or not. Warhammer is a massive franchise that like Star Wars, spans multiple merchandising outlets. As for Lord of the Rings, the $3 billion dollar gross the film trilogy alone made worldwide speaks plainly. And what were they stacked up against? WarCraft, a franchise that a demonstratively lower amount of people are even familiar with, let alone a fan of. When looked at from this perspective, it's amazing WoW achieved even moderate success, in terms of brand recognition.

But World of WarCraft had an advantage that none of these rivals did: it was given the time to grow into a game that could become as enormously successful as it is. Any person who was around for the WoW beta will tell you that it was a drastically different game than the one that became a household name. Buggy, wildly unbalanced, graphically benign at best. But the potential was there: the interface was streamlined and completely intuitive, interface mods were made incredibly easy to manage and use, the quest system utilized a now standard exclamation point/question mark information system, and once you played it a little while, those cartoony graphics that seemed initially a little underwhelming became charming in their own way. And far more importantly, this style has allowed them to make a game that never looks dated and can run on even modestly powered computers, making their potential reachable audience much larger than any previous MMO had endeavored to touch. Here was an easy game to learn, that eased you into each aspect of the game, rather than dumping everything or even an overwhelming amount of information on you at once. World of WarCraft is a game a nongamer can play. And since it was given the time to grow into this, the design achieved an audience Blizzard couldn't possibly have fathomed.

Fast forward in time to the launch date of any of the aforementioned MMOs. Every single one of them was not only expected to run great, be perfectly balanced, and look prettier than WoW, but to beat WoW at a genre it redefined. And is it any wonder this has not yet happened? While none of these games was truly a flash in the pan, all of them failed to achieve something that a little-known franchise did so perfectly. So how do you compete? What does that spell out for Star Wars: The Old Republic?

The picture is not grim if one looks at it from the proper perspective. This is not a rivalry in the same way that Warhammer Online or Conan was. Consider for a moment another MMO, one that has achieved giant success in the same market as WoW - EVE Online. And why, unlike the aforementioned, has EVE never been pressured to be a WoW killer? Because although it is technically a massively multiplayer online RPG, it is not competing with WoW to give you the same experience. Anyone who has played EVE can tell you this within five minutes of making a character, or rather, five minutes after the hour they spent making their character. The experience EVE presents is something entirely different, and for this reason, it can encapsulate an enormous audience and still thrive in a common market, as overlap, rather than competition, occurs between the two. A WoW player can also be an EVE player, with no stigma attached, something the other competition doesn't have the benefit of, and in the end truly marginalized the relevance of brand recognition.

SWTOR is in the same boat. While it is also technically an MMORPG, it, like EVE, is not offering a competing experience. While WarCraft does have a story, no one in their right mind would call WoW a story driven game. The game is focused on delivery two experiences: epic boss fights and epic PVP. While the events in game are occasionally interesting and the writing of WoW is certainly not poor, there are few if any players who seriously play the game for the story. On the other hand, look at Bioware. Their games are giant, critically acclaimed, and highly anticipated not because they deliver epic boss fights and epic PVP. This is their first foray even into this genre. Bioware games are huge because the writing, story arcs, and characters put most of the market to shame in terms of quality and memorability. People fell in love with Knights of the Old Republic because the characters were fleshed out and real, the story was intricate and well-delivered, and the experience as a whole brought more respect to the Star Wars universe. Bioware has always been a master of intellectually superior games that are still approachable. KOTOR was an engrossing drama that anyone could find themselves mesmerized by.

SWTOR looks to deliver that same experience on a massive scale. If Bioware's goal is realized to its full potential, this could be a view into Star Wars that no series of books or games or even films could rival, a true to the franchise, living, breathing depiction of a fictional universe, driven entirely by the stories and experiences of the individual player. SWTOR aims to be the approachable gap between WoW and EVE Online: it offers a fun, entertaining play experience, but will not fall prey to the "kill this, get gear to be able to kill this" formula that WoW has at its core and continually needs to distract from. It offers an intellectually stimulating story full of characters and won't require an encyclopedia of knowledge and an infinite amount of patience as EVE does. And since it offers a unique experience that neither game puts forth, it will be able to coexist with them in a marketspace, and have time to breathe and grow. It will offer a compelling reason for the subscribers of both games to give it a shot, something Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, and Warhammer Online did not have the advantage of and had to fight against from day one, and furthermore, it won't suffer from the same cultural stigma those previous games faced. People who bragged about moving over to Conan for example found themselves ridiculed and in some extreme cases, ostracized from guilds for announcing their intent and prematurely touting the game. SWTOR draws from a universe that has literally masses of fans worldwide, and Bioware is not positioning the game as a "WoW killer." This means that the brand recognition that Star Wars has will not go to waste, will not fall prey to the cultural nuances that its predecessors faced. In time, Bioware might find itself ironically as a hand in WoW's eventual, inevitable fall from the top, just as CCP Games will. As with the Roman Empire, it's going to be a variety of factors, and not one big rival, that is going to eventually topple the current king of the genre.