Plus a couple of beta tests, I've been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic quite a bit since mid-December. I'm not that into MMORPG's since they never quite end unless someone turns off the servers, but after an on-again off-again relationship with Star Wars Galaxies a few years back, I've eagerly awaited the release of this title. I proceeded with a fair amount of caution--you'd temper your emotions too if you'd spent any length of time with the extreme disappointment that was Star Trek Online--but now that I've reached level 25 and experienced, in part, the caliber of the story arcs for both a Republic Smuggler and a Sith Officer, I will officially announce that I'm not disappointed at all! I'm very please with Bioware for taking such great care to craft an exceptional Star Wars experience.
There are so many things about this game that make it wonderful, but that's not exactly what I wanted to talk about in this post. You can read reviews like this one for that. What I wanted to touch on was my perspective as someone who writes code. The sheer magnitude of this project as a coded structure is unbelievable, and the quickness with which we have been able to arrive at this level of depth from our more binary days is breathtaking for me. I tend to think of technology as an evolving organism that we have made. We started with circuits and transistors and really managed to develop the concept of "on" and "off" into a workable paradigm. From there, we've added layer upon layer of new knowledge to improve our technological bones, and now we're walking upright. This level is something one man cannot achieve alone. Each adds his own efforts and collectively we've written more and more advanced coding languages without which we as individuals a) could not know the things that we know, and b) could not build the things that we build.
I with my crude language and my little blog am hard-pressed to really be able to express the breadth and impressiveness of the concepts I'm pondering--there's an ineffable, tacit quality to these things--but I can say we're a far cry from Pong and in such a short amount of time. Imagine what will be when the same amount of time has passed again.
Also, the music. Just... wow.
I know what you mean. It is nothing short of amazing to think about how far we have come just in our lifetime. To see things go from the NES days to the high powered machines we have now is insane. Games today are the product of several different types of languages and paradigms of programming. It is an exciting industry to be in, and is only going to advance further and faster.
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