Not for all players like him. Some, like me, are too casual players who after level up 1 character see no reasons to level alts of both factions just for the storyline as soon as we realized that is a grind through the same planets and quest 16 times (or 8 tiems if we only count classes). The game fails the inmemsion badly since relies too much on voicing and cinematics for that, and in my case I feel no attachment to my own characters, and combat doesn't make me feel heroic because my chances to beat a mob or an area depends too much on my gear.

SW Battlefront. Already proposed long ago.

I would agree with those tips if the engine were not so bad. I checked my CPU and GPU loads in fleet with my processor clocked at 3.3 GHz (an AMD Phenom II X4 925), with game affinity set for cores 0 and 1 (tip already mention to increase performance) and loads were: Core 0: 65 to 75 % Core 1: 55 to 70 % GPU (Sapphire HD 6850 1GB GDDR5): 35% FPS in fleet during test (average): 17. Then tested with CPU at stock speed: 2,8GHz, and results were exactly the same. Clearly the engine is CPU dependant however those results tells me one things, the engine has got multiple bottlenecks both at CPU and GPU levels since it is incapable to use the cores and the GPU to their max potential.

What you are asking is not going to happens. Not in years. They've got to rebuild the whole space and there's no way to do it on top of rails. A free flight combat is way more complex, even just for a single player, than an outdated rail shooter.

I played 2 BWEs and did both PVE and PVP. I agree with your opinion about PVP, but I disagree about PVE. Two Reasons: 1st) I found PVE really fun and inspired (personal opinion of course), at least what I had chance to test (my highest level in BWEs was 17). Combat is very fast and dinamic, with dodges and combos, and there is no GDC. 2nd) Combat mechacnics is exactly the same for both PVE and PVP. If it's fun at PVP it is also fun at PVE. Said that..., it's GW2 going to kill WOW? Certainly not becasue GW2 allows players keep their WoW subs. It's GW2 going to kill SWTOR? Certainly not because of the same reasons it won't kill WoW.

You are mismatching genre with mechanics, and I'm sure you are smart enough to see the difference.

When one game mimics the basics and mechanics of another game is a clone of that game.

Sorry but I can't agree to that. It makes no sense mimic a known successfull game if your goal is a specific market target. The only reason to adopt a known "winning" formula is target a wider market than just a specific group, specially when it was poved that that group is pretty small (between 500K-250K, numbers made by SWG)

That's true and I didn't say the contrary, just spoke of AION that was published by NCSoft too but developed by a korean company (I don't know which one), as an example of huge hype low budget MMO of the same publisher. Publisher that also had epic fails like Tabula Rasa that was over 100 million usd budget and was p2p like AION.

My stimation of GW2 cost is bassed on AION development budget, another NCSoft game, that, as far as I know, was 18 million usd (source: http://www.whatmmorpg.com/cost-to-make-a-quality-mmorpg.php) and took 2 years less than GW2 in development. But I admit that my numbers are a guess (I think a reasonable one since GW2 uses lot stuff already made for GW1, like soundtrack, as I said) and I could be wrong, though I don't think by far.

Guild Wars 2 is developed by a small (compare to BW, EA, or any other known MMO developer company) team that works on their own engine (they don't have to pay royalties for use or modify a thrid party engine), already developed for GW1 but modified for the new game concept, using their own servers technology (which is pretty amzing since they don't have server's downtime for maintenance), and developed with PCs as old as 4-5 years (just read all the devs blogs and interviews). So practically the game's development costs are just programmers and art designers. If they spent more than 30 million in development I want to be ANet employee, sure the salary is awesome.

Are you saying BW/EA made a huge budget game to loose money?

GW2 doesn't rely in subs to be profitable. Arenanet proved that a game can be profitable without subs: GW1. ANet is like any other games developer, they look for profit with their games. GW1 woudn't last 8 years if it's running costs where higher than it's overal income. And I guess we can agree GW1 was not the number 1 in the market, not even the number 10. GW2 is not a big budget game, I'll be surprised if its bugget is over 30 million usd. ANet needs sell only 500K copies of the game to break even, but with all hype in the community probably they will hit 1 million which means a net profit of 30 million usd (last time I checkd GW2 price in amazon was 59.99$). Even if after 1 year they have to close the game because nobody plays it, I'm sure GW2 running cost for 1 year won't eat 30 million.

Too bad idea because GW2 pre-ordered players will start play the game on august 22nd. To be effective 1.4 should be in PTS within a week to generate enough hype in forums to try to stop a new drop in subs. Though there's no reason to cancel SWTOR's sub because of GW2, lot people won't see a reason to keep paying their subs for a game that has nothing new to offer when they can play a whole new game for free.

A roadmap requires release dates in terms of quarters, minimum. I didn't see that. What they said in E3 was that we will see it along the year. That's not a roadmap, that's a vague promised that for many people is clearly insufficent. and if HK-51 is the exciting new content that's coming soon (how soon?) things are worse than they seems to be.

Sorry mate but that's old news with no timeline what doesn't encourage people that feels the game lacks content to continue paying a subscription for a vague promise.

in my server we had 2 full instances at merge, we even had queues. Yesterday at 9 pm we had 1 full instance and only 56 players in teh second. I know it not because I'm checking how many players are in the game, but because happened that I logged directely in that second instance and I was shocked by that low number in fleet at a peak hour until I realized I was in the second instance.

That's the point of the thread. But it turned into a GW2=awesome SWTOR=crap and viceversa. Sigh! Many SWTOR players will play both GW2 and SWTOR because GW2 don't ask for a monthly fee so, like someone already said, is a win/win game for them. But many, like you, will cancel their subs and stop play SWTOR because is hard for them keep paying a monthly fee when they don't see reasons to do so. That is bad for SWTOR not only financially but in terms of community that becomes smaller. And a decaying community leads to dead of that game, no matter if it is p2p b2p or f2p. A game that only a handful of people plays is simply dead; example, Black Prophecy: f2p, only 1 server with light population.

I don't think GW2 is a MMO killer, but is something new in terms of gameplay and concept (lore appart that is the same fantasy lore we all know already). Said that the point of this thread is B2P (not f2p), GW2's business model, vs P2P, SWTOR's business model, and if B2P could be a good for SWTOR.

[quote=anstalt;4917037 Imagine playing SW:TOR. You join the game as a jedi, level through tython and corusant, learning the basics of the game, learning your "class" etc. but, imagine that after corusant the game simply opened up and let you do your own thing. Imagine quests that scaled to your level and group size. Imagine dynamic quests so if you found somewhere you really liked, you could just keep generating quests and leveling up over and over. Imagine a crafting system with more freedom to choose stats on items when crafted, but that needed replacing rather than just repairing. Make 90% of all hubs and bases neutral to encourage full planetary exploration and crossover between factions. Bioware could even keep their story in there, linear quest routes are not the only way to tell a story, in fact it is the least imaginative way to do so as it removes all control from the player. You've just described Guild Wars 2, with the difference that there's not heavily scripted starting areas, except the introductory minitutorial instance that consist basically in teach how to move and use your skillbar through a minquest: 5 minutes long. Even players can come back to lowbie areas because the game downlevels them to the level of the area to ensure nobody overlevels it, so you are free to go anywhere in the world and still have fun. Edit: Since I quoted you before finish read your analisys, I must say that I agree with all of it Anstalt. However, no game made me feel part of the world in my screen like SWG did 'till NGE. But it is true that a pure sandbox game like SWG requires a huge effort from the players to Role Play, and by role play I mean create your own background story (I read too few good background stories in SWG live while I played it) and act accordingly to it. However, my experience in SWG live was never boring because when I get bored of something I had something else completely different to do. Form my point of view, what made fail SWG as sandbox was the hologinding. As soon as everybody knew how to unlock jedi through hologring the "civil war ended", there were no more imperial raids on anchorhead, no more assaults on opposite faction strongholds, no more player dirven event like theater performances at cities theatre buildg (we had a troupe of players that play SW stories at theatre and they did awesomely), there were no more troupes of musicians and dancers..., the RP element in SWG simply died. And the worse was that in a wolrd were the lore was Jedi's (good and evil) are virtually extinct (only 2 dark jedi's: the Emperor, and Darth Vader, and only 2 light: Luke and Leia) suddenly we had thousands of jedis... ***!!! SWG was mismanaged from the beggining, pushed live unfinished and with broken professions like smuggler (never fixed), and is an example of what not to do, not because of its sandbox model,but because of very losy and wrong management.

This is the way the community has been since I play MMORPGS (started with SWG) and surely before that. That's nothing new in MMORPG world, unfortunately.

If happens that that info is accurate, then this game is in a stale state which is very very very bad

Be sure we will have to pay for the famous new planet with +5 levels if it comes as an expansion, what is what you call "adventure packs" for GW1 (change the name doesn't make them another thing but an expansion).

Indeed you barely palyed the game, and certainly you didn't understand the game mechanics. You don't need visit every part of the map. You can level up to level 80 in the same place, because the game prevents you to overlevel any zone in the game downleveling you to +2 the level of that zone, so you always gets XP. You can do eternally the same world event or the same world boss and still get XP because your efective level is that zone level, despite what's your real level.

Somthing you can perfectly do in Guild Wars 2. You are not obligue to do your storyline (except the part of the creation of the character that is heavily scripted). You are free to do whatever you want. Even the economy (except gems store that is vanity and a few utility items) is players driven. Guild Wars 2 is clearly built around a sandbox model. You are free to go wherever you want and do whatever you want. I don't know how you call that, but I call it sandbox.