While Star Wars: The Old Republic is doing quite well for itself, some have said that the game is not innovative, calling it a clone of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft with some small improvements. SWTOR director James Ohlen believes the game is very innovative, when compared to some of the most popular titles in other genres.
"It's been a little bit of an unfair characterization," Ohlen told Eurogamer. "Because if you look at other game genres, if you look at a Battlefield or a Call of Duty or a Gears of War or even a Half-Life - those games use the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true game mechanics of the first-person shooter genre that's been around for 20 years.”
"If you look at real-time strategy games, they kept the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true mechanics that existed for 20 years. Same with adventure games, same with platformers, same with fighting games, sports games.”
Ohlen admits that SWTOR stuck close to certain genre conventions, but doesn’t believe that should reflect badly on the game.
"I don't know why the MMORPG genre is not considered to be a genre," Ohlen said. "It could be that World of Warcraft has dominated for so long that people just think of it as just a single game genre.”
"But it is a genre, and we wanted to appeal to fans of that genre - we don't want to turn them away by making something that's radically different. And we wanted to take the lessons that have been developed in that genre over years and years and years and basically refine them, much like other companies do with other genres.”
"So, I don't know, it's just the way it is, but I don't see us as not being innovative. We're actually a lot more innovative within the MMO space than comparable games in other spaces like the first-person genre, the action genre - games like that."
