Fun fact: You have no freedom of speech on private property, which is essentially what corporate owned forums are.

Which is what I did in my previous post. WoW 5 years ago was roughly the tail end of Vanilla & the release of Burning Crusade. The leveling process back then was very different than it is now, and it took a lot longer.

Which is a false comparison, because Blizzard's design goals have shifted dramatically over the years. They intentionally made the leveling process as fast as possible, because they're designing around end game content. They want players with as many max level toons as possible, as quickly as possible. Essentially, Blizzard took to heart what the players had been saying for years: "The game begins at 60/70/80/85." The level of difficulty is no longer there. But even now, with long soloable quest chains in each zone giving players blue drops, you can still gear up faster and more efficiently by grouping than by soloing. Even with all that, there's more balanced design around soloing and grouping in WoW, at any stage of its development, than there is in SWTOR right now.

They do?! Where? I missed this competely

Nobody seems to remember WoW from 5+ years ago, but back then the game was designed to reward you for grouping up. The gear you got from group content was significantly better than from solo play. On top of that, it had a unique skin more often than not. The world was a little more dangerous too. Not only did you have elite mobs wandering around, but you had quests that took you to areas packed with elites. The only way to complete those quests was to group with people in the area, or get help from players on your friends list or your guild. SWTOR tried to duplicate some of that with the mini HEROIC+2 and HEROIC 4 instances, but the difference is the incentive and the difficulty. If I can already get very good gear from planet based commendations and I already out-level the most mobs, why would I group? The original WoW had a level of difficulty and incentives that encouraged grouping. SWTOR has neither, and coupled with the heavy focus on cutscenes and class quests, it feels more like a single player game than an MMO.

They separated the leveling experience from flashpoints. My trooper is level 22 right now on Taris. If I want to run Hammer Station, I have to leave a zone filled with level appropriate players & spend 10 minutes traveling to the fleet. Then I have to hope there's enough people there willing to run that particular instance. This is assuming that I even know that Hammer Station exists. As Republic, once you finish Corcuscant, you can go to Taris or Nar Shadaa. The only time, afaik, that the game tells you about Hammer & gives you quests for it, is if you happen to go back to return to Fleet at the right level. If they wanted to give level 20s flashpoint experience, why not build the thing right into Taris or Nar Shadaa?

Heh. The immersion argument I just don't get. I'm on Coruscant, in a dangerous, gang controlled area, in closed off rooms, and yet somehow a "shuttle" can find me & drop me back at the Senate plaza? Duplicating hearthstones in this universe was silly; it just makes zero sense. @OP - I was thinking about Kotor's quick travel as I was running around Taris last night. I's love it, but just like Kotor there should probably be areas or situations where you couldn't use it. Either that, or it needs a cooldown or a very long (30 seconds) cast time.

Not gonna happen. Aside from liability issues, I suspect the entire industry took note of Blizzard's "bus shock" incident and the later public flogging (and subsequent withdrawal) of Ghostcrawler. Gamers on the Internet tend to be an angry, vicious bunch. There's little to no upside in trying to engage in 1:1 dialogues.

OP, I agree wholeartedly with you. At least, well, in spirit. Earlier today I came across this thread, which contains a link to a video of producer Dave Jaffe giving a presentation at the DICE conference. In it, he talks a lot about the effect of heavy story lines and cinematics in games. It's worth watching: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=309189 The obvious counter argument to your post is --- well, this is also a Bioware game. Bioware games have gotten progressively narrower, more focused, and more restrictive over the last decade or so. What began in Baldur's Gate as open maps, sandboxy questing and humorously chatty party members has become linear, rails driven gameplay and hardcoded romances. If you had no idea who they were & came to SWTOR completely clueless as to their background & the kind of titles they developed, well, fair enough. But if not ... I'm not sure what you're complaining about. As a Bioware title, SWTOR has exactly the kind of elements and gameplay I'd expect from them. Whether those elements will make a good, long lasting MMO is another topic, but if you knew anything about Bioware, I'm not sure how you can complain. Sure, you can complain that this isn't the Star Wars MMO you were looking for -- I think that is perfectly valid. But to complain that Bioware delivered a very "Bioware-ish" title makes less sense to me.

Sorta. You're right that voice acting doesn't scale, at all. Which means extra costs upfront (for future expansions) or heavy costs down the road (if they ever need to redo dialogue, for any reason). I don't see translations as a big issue, because the bulk of SWTOR's revenue will probably come from English speaking countries, or at least where English is a prominent second language.

So that your graphics card has a chance on handling it. That's the reason MMO's have similar looking gear, especially at endgame. All those textures need to be loaded into memory every time you come into a zone. The more textures, the higher the requirements on the box (and ultimately, the fewer sales).

Pros - Class stories - Voice acting (Jennifer Hale!) - Combat abilities/ play style. Hitting mobs in the face with the butt of my rifle never gets old. - Environment designs. As a big fan of Kotor, running around Taris was pretty jaw dropping. - Crafting. The one area where they tried something a little bit different. It's not perfect, but it's also not tedious. - Great single player game. Cons - Dead worlds. No flaura, no fauna, no critters. - NPCs are mostly slightly animated background art. - Severely rigid leveling. An obvious drawback for alts, but outside the cutscenes it's repetitive as hell. Becomes a much bigger issue after my first two points; if the world are dead & the mobs are dull, you start living for the next cutscene. Not sure that's enough. - Lack of diversity in mobs -- it's mostly human, droid, and planet-based monster. - It's waaaay too easy, even for a Bioware game. I'm not a great gamer but already at level 22 I feel like I'm running god mode on Taris. - Great single player game. This is supposed to be an MMO.

His argument seems to be that gameplay is entirely the point, and if you're telling a straight story via a series of cutscenes then videogames might not be the right medium. As to your second point ... It's that kind if thinking that brings the world a continuous stream of Adam Sandler movies. There isn't anything wrong with pure entertinment value -- but saying, "hey, it's all good as long as the customer is happy" is a really freakin' low bar to set for yourself. Keep in mind this is a well known developer who was speaking at a gaming conference, and his primary concerns with this talk is defining the medium & pushing it forward.

Republic side, one of the title cards or quest texts said they'd only been there for 10 years. So basically, this is a post-war effort. I was surprised they let it rot for that long.

Watch the video. He's not saying "games cannot contain any story elements at all." One of the examples he uses of a good game is Arkham City, which obviously contains story elements & the heavy use of IP (he then brings up a specific example from it to illustrate his larger point). On one level, he's making an argument that the best games play to the medium's strengths, and that would be stuff like Modern Warfare, Civilization, and Madden. Basically, pure gameplay that leave enough room for player driven stories. I'd imagine Twisted Metal fits into this scheme too. On another level, he's making the argument that producers need to stop borrowing so heavily from the language of film, because that's the language of a completely different medium & games are strong enough to stand up as their own form.

You guys gotta watch the embedded video of the actual talk. The article text goes off on tangents and isn't nearly as detailed. He's primarily taking about games like Heavy Rain, LA Noire, and ... everything Bioware has ever made. I'm a huge fan of RPGs, and especially Bioware, but I think he's got a valid point. Games aren't movies and shouldn't try to shoe-horn cinematic elements into their content. Bioware is very good at top down storytelling, but they're even better at masking what they're doing (at least, they used to be). Games like KOTOR and DA:O are pretty damn clever at hiding just how rigid and linear they really are. Thanks for the link, OP. That was a great watch & read.

Can't tell if serious. One of the smarter things BW did was sidestepping all the balance issues around racials. Do we really need dozens of threads beefing about how OP the Star Wars version of Will of the Forsaken is?

Pretty sure lubing up a droid violates one of Asimov's three laws --- and as we all know, you can't break the law. (ie: No possibility for romance? Not a possibility as a PC).

Your "out of the box" idea was done ~15 years ago. It was called Quake Live. What the OP is describing sounds like Team Fortress 2 (now with more hats!). Not really sure why you'd need a persistent world for that though.

Because balancing freak specs that you didn't intend or anticipate is a development nightmare, and can easily throw balance completely out of whack (eg: SL/SL Warlocks). On top of that it's a major p-i-t-a to fix, because you not only have to redesign the tree you need to reimpement the underlying code. And on top of that, say you want to make changes to a tree for other reasons. Except the change you make inadvertantly breaks a freak spec. GG. You just alienated a chunk of your player base -- see ya on the forums!

I know for a fact that my trooper would rather be dead than wear that dirty Mando armor. But for Bounty Hunters? Those people will pull just about anything out of a Hutta trash compactor & put it on. They have no standards, so Mando armor should be juuuuuust fine.

Can it involve tokens? Because fom what I understand, online gamers jst loooooooooove to collect tokens. *ducks and runs*

In spirit, I agree with you. I felt that way during TBC. I think the "aspirational" nature of tiers is a great draw, one that can easily keep players involved fr an entire expansion. Unfortunately, this is also impossible to quantify; it just doesn't show up on a Power Point slide or an Excel spreadsheet. So, I can easily see why a game developer wouldn't want to do this, especially if they ultimately have to answer to a monolithic corporation run by bean counters like EA or Activision. My guess is that the "trickle down" doesn't trickle quite fast enough, and least not enough for Blizzard to justify the return on investment for this sort of content.

We're in a thread about a guy willing to throw down 200 bucks to create fake space for people and objects that don't exist in the real world. And you're saying a proposed solution is too expensive? Okay.

Because it costs them money. Why would you spend developer time designing & implementing fights that only 3% of your player base actually sees? Much more cost effective to streamline the hell out of everything.