Personally I think Bioware is the "other" thing that he is talking about since they appear to not be able to manage and multitask all of their projects that they are responsible for making. It had been reported that not only had Andromeda received limited funding,but lost developers to Anthem. The same thing is currently happening to SWTOR where resources had been diverted to Anthem. So in essence Anthem is a problem not just for Bioware , but to the fans that enjoyed the other games that Bioware has neglected in favor of Anthem.

Well said. Bethesda is good, but they aren't all that. And accurate statement could be that Bethesda games actually requires player made mods. Not only does the gaming community make patches for their games they also create player made content for them as well. And their player made content is usually more creative than what Bethesda brings to the table.

That's why they do it like that because they know you wont be there . Joking of course I don't visit any social media sites as well.

I would say that your interpretation of the situation would be pretty much spot on. There was and article back in March of this year about Drew Karpyshyn leaving Bioare and joining Fogbank Entertainment which is a FoxNext studio. Interestingly enough other ex-BioWare employees work too, like Daniel Erickson and Alex Freed according to the following article. Source: https://www.nerdmuch.com/games/155419/major-bioware-writer-leaves-studio-for-21st-century-fox/

Speaking of nostalgia and why neither Bioware nor the people over at Hero don't speaks about the game engine any more. The Hero Engine website had at one time a long and lengthy blog which was essentially a disclaimer about how Bioware knowingly purchased an Alpha build of that engine and not a fully tested and proven engine. That particular blog which was titled Hero engine meets star wars has long since gone the way of 404 on their website. You can search the web and there are bits and pieces of that blog floating around. The following was taken from a forum post back in jan of 2012 and the conversation was around 2005. http://www.ign.com/boards/t... "We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton. We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor. Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places. He knows games, especially online games. Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package. “I need this,” said Gordon. “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.” Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing. “This is just what I need! I want to license your engine.” We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine. “It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.” He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”

We have been beta testing more than just the features going into the game The Dark vs Light even was nothing more than a 4 month beta event that would help them determine how much content a player could burn through during that time frame. Whoops...Now how often does that happen. Quoted the wrong post . Here is the post I meant to quote by Akeev 6.0 isn't going to happen. It is the carrot on a string to the donkey, to keep folks subscribed. The "features" we're getting are tests for interface ideas and matchmaking methods for Anthem. We are the proverbial guinea pigs. EA is a studio killer, and Bioware is just the latest victim. Enjoy the game while it lasts. See the stuff you wanted to. Get that last datacron. Finish Makeb. Its all decent enough. No need to worry or expect about 6 though. If that's what's keeping you here, its going to be a -very- long wait.

I don't think the games stability would be all that good and simply would not handle the presumed "small" amount of people on one server.

Back when Ben Irving was at the helm of SWTOR he wanted to release monthly installments for the game. Which in and of it self doesn't sound like a bad idea except that they failed in the implementation of it. They simply could not release a quality piece meal monthly content in a timely fashion that wasn't buggy and behind schedule. So what was supposed to be monthly turned out to be anything but monthly. And now we are at the is what it aspect of the game. August 7 SWTOR is Introducing the New Rishi Stronghold. But if that doesn't interest you ( it doesn't me ) then you are in for a rather long wait until next year.

ESO doesn't use the Hero engine. According to the ESO people they only used it during very early development "so while we were prototyping the game on HeroEngine, we were simultaneously developing our own client, server, and messaging layer that were specifically designed with ESO in mind. Think of Hero Engine as a whiteboard for us – a great tool to get some ideas in the game and start looking at them while the production engine was in development." Biowares version of Hero was actually an alpha build for it. It is a totally customized version of the engine which really makes it a non Hero traditional engine. But, to answer your question of if they could I have no idea. I would suspect it would cost more than what they would be willing to pay. Source for ESO : https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/25/why-the-elder-scrolls-online-isn-39-t-using-heroengine.aspx

Alpha/Beta tester here as well. The only class story that was changed from beta to launch was the Smugglers Tatooine quest line where he got the option to get a kiss from Nariel Pridence the female Jedi. And you are correct the game that we have today does not resemble the game we had at launch. Today's game is simply superior to what it was back in 2012.

Well thanks for the info

Just logging into the game and have noticed that both NA servers are offline. Did I miss a maintenance post?

I am going to say no only because you have already started the xpac. Using the abandon button will only allow you to continue the story from that exact point on. KOTFE and KOTET are they only xpacs that do allow you to be able to replay chapters.

The only benefit that the CXP grind has over the old system is that you can get the best gear whilst grinding solo to 300 rank. As you have pointed out it is a long ordeal. As an example I just took an assassin with no CXP boost whom was already at command rank 4 through Makeb, SOR,Oricon, KOTFE and KOTET along with more than a dozen or so Heroics and I am at command rank 51 with 174 points in with an item rating of 230. I was expecting that going through all of those expansions would of at least of gotten me higher than the rank I finished out.

My best guess is that they aren't ready to give up the $15 a month sub fee for this game just yet.

Who really knows what EA was thinking? But if we use their crazy reasoning they probably thought that they could revamp the title that Visceral was making by giving it to another studio within EA and by adding MTX to it to make it even more profitable since that is their business model going forward. They also knew that they were going to release BattleFront II shortly and were counting on making windfall profits on it because it had harden built in MTX mechanisms. But, unfortunately for them the fan backlash was pretty harsh and they had to re-evaluate their MTX model for that game. But I really think that EA was counting on one simple premise in their business dealing with Disney. And that was as long as Disney gets a paycheck from EA do they really care how many games they put out for them? That is about all I can reason from them. And the only way we will know if Disney does is if they take away their exclusive license agreement from EA. And to be honest a IP of this size should not have a single exclusive developer controlling it.

Not to be that guy, but if they haven't fixed bugs that have been around since launch they are not going to. Bioware's approach has been to release content and if it has bugs then they patch up what they can and simply move on and not dwell on it. Why not just humor the OP a bit and hope that he gets an option to what he wants even though you know full well he may not.

Yep, FRAPS does have an issue with windows 10. But you can view the file with the default Windows Media Player or another player like VLC.

Nar Shaddaa Night Life really is one "Event" that really should be live 24/7/365. If Vegas can do it so can SWTOR.

I pretty much agree that Biowares future really does depend upon the success of Anthem. But, if you step back and look at the success and failures of this game you really can't fault anyone but Bioware since they chose the time period, the game design and the engine that the game was going to be built on. And not to mention that it had around a $200 million dollar budget and still had to go ftp within 10 months of release. EA has given them more than enough time to prove that this game needs more resources thrown it's way. What this game needs is a SWTOR 2.0 and since it isn't very likely that it will happen it only gets the dev time and resources that we have grown accustom to.

That article was written about a year to late as far as I am concerned because it has been well documented that Mass Effect Andromeda had resources diverted from that project to Anthem at least a year of more up until the game was released in March 2017. And I suspect that SWTOR has been contributing just as long if not longer to the development of Anthem.

I think SWTOR's lack of popularity has to do with a number of simple basic things. 1. Game engine limitations. 2. The stylized art work was pretty much dated even for the time period when it released in 2011. 3. Too much interactive story telling. While the class stories and planetary stories are really good I personally think that they should of not extended the interactive style of story telling to the side or commonly termed fetch quests. I felt that it really slowed the game pacing down and prevented the player from actually getting into the fight so to speak or being able to really sit down and enjoy the game play. 4. The KOTOR type lore may not be as well known or as popular with the majority of Star Wars fans.This really bothers me since I find the Clone Wars time period to be much more interesting (I used to think I really wanted a post Vader era MMORPG ,but having seen the way Disney is going I am glad it's not.) And I think Bioware would of been better off creating that stand alone KOTOR rpg game while making a different version for their MMORPG. 5. Game changing events such as CXP/RNG game mechanisms that are put into place simply to extend the grind for end game gear . And because it's a way to extend content without creating anything new since the grind for CXP acts as content. And now we have Galactic Command changes which were put into place to extend the grind and in lieu of content.

I've never seen a development studio like this before that simply doesn't understand their own game and purposefully goes out of their way by committing self inflicted acts of stupidity. And people wonder why EA doesn't throw more money their way.

Not only do I not find it Exciting™, it really doesn't provide me with a Sense of Pride and Accomplishment™ either.

Sounds reasonable, but alas we shall never know. I think it would of made for a better story telling experience than what we got. I just think that it was written without all of the vanilla companions because it was simply the easiest option and the most cost efficient one. I'm of the contention that with the help of the "Outlander" they both could of broken the grip of the Emperor in much the same way that with the help of her master Kira found it within herself to break away from the will of Darth Angral.