Very much agree, best description I've heard is the world feels plastic. It's very hard to pinpoint why it has this feeling. I think it just comes down to a lots and lots of little things that we've gotten used to in other games that just didn't make it into this one. No day/night cycle NPC's don't have daily routine, and in a lot of cases are stuck in some frozen pose. Nonsensical structures. ( why is this military base a long windy hallway, who the hell would build a house like this ) Star port on a planet with a capital city that is in the middle of the jungle with no paved roads to it. Cantina on tat where the first floor is all red green quest areas and the bar is in the basement. In general, even for the Star wars universe a lot of the design just doesn't make any sense.

LOL, couldn't have said it better. Some people really do like that planet though. Don't understand why, but they have every right to like it.

I think the 500m number comes from wall street guesstimates that are on the high side and include marketing and other costs not included in other estimates.

PR machine brought their metacritic score up from 5.something to 8.5. Id' say they are doing a great job of mostly containing the mess to these forums.

It does seem like we got a $5m MMO with $195m worth of VO work.

I'm guessing they borrow the worst feature from SWG and make it a holo grind to unlock a new race.

The engine has a lot of features on paper that make it real nice for developers. It's basically like a source control system for 3D worlds. Which for a developer, that's over the top cool. 100% Speculating now... Where I think things went south is the engine appears to be incredibly slow and inefficient when it comes to retrieving resources from the system and loading them onto the video card. One of the amazing things about WoW when it came out was the ability to run from one end of the continent to the other without a loading screen. Still not sure how they did this because loading resources onto the video card is a pretty big bottle neck, but they somehow managed a way of streaming data to the video card to allow this. This appears to be a lot more common place now so I assume a lot of engines can now handle this. But this engine appears to work like a typical FPS, load the map, play the map, stop playing, unload the map, load the next one. It wasn't designed to stream resources in on the fly while the engine was drawing. And things got messed up when they tried to add this ability.

Probably related to IO / Memory / Performance issues for certain machines. AA, high quality textures, armor customization, all things that greatly impact performance. I really think they ran smack dead into a wall with the game engine and performance on certain machines.

LoL this story, Were not talking Shakespeare here. Wire, Dexter, BSG, or anything with believable character, plot, or character motivations. It's more phantom menace, which I think came from a random ludicrous plot generator. To the devs credit, having to come up with this much content that has to explain why the MMO universe operates the way it does was probably impossible to pull off.

noticed that as well, Models aren't water tight. Very big "No No" with a lot of game engines, but this one doesn't seem to care.

Bad! Very bad!! Very very bad!!! Now you need to apologize to everyone.

Damn, and that's on a road as well. Pretty obvious someone cracked the whip and told them to ship before they were even close to ready.

The one situation where this is acceptable, if your obviously on the same mission with someone and both waiting on the same respawn. I'll just blind invite the person. Usually they accept, we get the objective and we both say thanks and go our own way.

Which was rare and very expensive. Which is why they spent the money up front to properly test the game. Now it's cheaper to offshore QA and get it kind of playable, launch then fix what bothers people the most. Bad quality is decision companies make to save money. Not some sort of unavoidable state of being.

Back in the day, before it was common for everyone to have an internet connection, when games were burned onto roms, before consoles could patch games... games shipped in a polished state. Bring in the internet and the ability to fix things post sales.... Sell now, fix later. And some publishers don't even bother with the fix later part. Point is, It can be done. It costs money to fully polish something. So they ship with bugs because we put up with it and it saves money. Why spend the money to fix everything when you can ship a turd and just fix what really really bothers people.

I made it to 30 without using the space bar. I had to start space baring everything or quit. The stories are just that bad. Idiotic NPC that wants you to go sabotage enemy equipment instead of killing them. What? That's a dumb idea, we're at war and it's easier to kill them! Why the hell would anyone waste time and effort sabotaging equipment to kill them instead of just killing them. Then you don't have an option to tell the NPC they're an idiot, lets just kill them. Then you have to listen to your toon enthusiastically agree with this dumb idea which is immersion killing because I'm sitting there watching my toon say things I don't agree with. And then, after all is said and done, you have to go kill them all anyways to sabotage the equipment.

If they can keep a million for a year that would be great for them. But if they lost half their potential customers before they even began the 30 day trail period that doesn't bode well. BW gets $30 a box at most, at 2.1m units that's $60m. They've also stated they spent around $200m on the game, EA-Louse ( disgruntled insider ) claimed they spent 300m. $30 a box is high and $200m could be low, but we'll use those numbers, and that leaves BW $140m in the hole. Industry guesstimates I've read put the magic break even number at 300k - 500k subs. That's what it takes to maintain servers, bandwidth, CS and billing. This is after Lucas takes their share which from my understanding is 1/3 of the revenue from subs. Well say they break even at 300k. And lets say they maintain 500k subs over the long run. 200k subs goes to profit and after LA takes it's third that gives BW $2m a month profit. At that rate it will take them 70 months to pay off the initial investment. Almost 6 years.

Well They sold 2.1 million boxes. Only announced 1 million subs ( as far as I know ) You need a sub to play past the early game access and the grace period. Taken at face value that could mean a million people didn't re-sub at the end of early access, or, they lost half their customers in two weeks.

In that case your old hardware was probably causing a CPU or GPU bottleneck. I've also seen reports that some system have a hardware issue with CPU throttling kicking in when the game needs it not to.

300m figure came from this guys rant. http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/ea-artist-soon-to-be-laid-off-burns-ea-management-2803 Another article on this rant, read the responses, all from industry people. http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/10/ea-louse-you-are-no-ea-spouse-your-pettiness-is-shocking/ EA/Bioware recently acknowledged they spent more than 200m on the game and I wouldn't be surprised if they are trying to hide true costs to make things look better for investors. ( Like putting some costs in general R&D which wouldn't get counted as a cost for the project. ) My understanding of the contract with LA is, LA's cut is 1/3 of the mothly subs. If this is the case going F2P isn't a possibility with out a re-negotiating the contract with LA. So the question becomes at what point do the subs support the operational cost, the estimates I've read are 300-500k subs. Considering that they only get $30 per box that means with 2.1m boxes they've recouped about $60m. That leaves a $140m loss if you're working with the consertive $200m startup, $240M if they really did spend $300m on the game. If it takes 300k subs to support operations ( servers / CS / billing ) and they have 500k subs, that is roughly 2m a month profit after LA's share. With $140m left to go they are talking about 70 months to recoup the inital investment. And that's not even taken the costs of ongoing development into consideration. So my guess, they fall under 500k subs things get real dicey and shutting the thing down is an option on the table.

I find it amazing that this issue exists... Fairly common MMO issue...

$300m figure mostly came from this ex employee's rant. http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/ea-artist-soon-to-be-laid-off-burns-ea-management-2803 And an industry blog talking about it. The discussion after the post is the most interesting thing here. http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/10/ea-louse-you-are-no-ea-spouse-your-pettiness-is-shocking/

What did they promise then? Same Ole, Same Ole? Don't remember them stating they were aiming for a bland WoW clone with VO.

As level 40 sith inquisitor I must sadly report that this video is the most entertained I've been by the story line so far.

I don't know if we're really that picky. I think the industry is stuck. The WoW'esque fantasy hot key MMO has been done to death and people are just sick of it. Since WoW came out the industry has corporatized and the only people that can decide to spend 100m on a game wont take risks and are generally uninspired hacks that do the math on what Blizzard is making and say make a wow clone.