What I would do If I was bioware.

[Vaalix]

First off, I don't mind this game even with all its bugs and issues. To me it is playable and I came from playing mostly buggy sony mmo's and I know its common practice to release unfinished mmo's and patch as you go. Unfortunately the lesson wasn't taught to bioware that you are dealing with very fickle people who have certain expectations.

 

Most of the problem is blizzard. Everyone coming from wow expects brand new mmo's to be as polished and feature complete as wow.. Well, unfortunately for you people, that will never happen. Rift was an exception but that game was very stripped down and small in comparison but extremely well polished and refined. I actually attribute that fact to the developers at trion who are actually mostly ex eq1/2 devs.. but it is no where near the size of this game in land mass or quests. So bioware over did the quests/cut scenes and voice overs and the rest of the game here suffered badly.. With a poor ui, sluggish combat, class imbalances, pvp imbalances, and from what I can gather it seems the devs here all play empire toons. Why would I think that? Its pretty obvious one side has far more polished looking gear, areas, and quest story lines.. Not to mention some of the supposed mirrored classes have slight advantages that lean in favor of the empire. (you can look around for proof).

 

So, what I would do if I was bioware right now.. I would begin to prioritize personal. I would start by phasing out anyone who had anything to do with the failure know as warcraft. Get them away from this game! Replace you lead designers with competent seasoned mmo developers. One name comes to mind right off the bat is Raph Koster.

 

Many of you may not know who Raph is but he is a mmo-social hub genius. He is very creative and anything he can have some creative control over turns into pure gold. Its my personal opinion that as badly instanced as this game is, he would be a great asset and creative problem solver. We need some right brained thinkers, thinking out side of the box here, and although I don't know if he is, he demonstrates such a quality. He would even be a valuable consultant.

 

The next thing bioware needs to do is begin writing and importing this entire game to a new engine that is more Rift like.. open worlds and very few instances except raids/dungeons. This should be a top priority if this current engine can't handle seamless worlds properly you need to rethink the decision to use the hero engine which actually feels more like the Zero engine.. Im sure they know this but other games seem to handle seamless worlds and too many avatars on the screen causing lag by using some fade technique.. which actually fades player characters beyond 20m or so which allows for higher fps and seamless worlds.. I'm not a programmer though and Im sure they know this. It just needs to happen. You need to reduce having to dock at an orbital station, then shuttling down to planet.. That is the biggest instancing problem along with hacing to elevator down.

 

Another thing they need to do is find who from sony/swg programmed jump to light speed. I believe it was 2 guys who made it in 6 months... Im am 100% positive thats all it took.. From reading the credits more than 6-8 people made the rail shooter/space in this game and it is unacceptable. It should have been left out completely but to be honest not even attempted and implemented because you wasted time and money bringing us what I consider and abysmal abomination.

 

Also, for future content I would highly advise against fully voice over'ing every little side quest. What you guys did was great and very cool but I think in the essence of saving time and money, just voice over any extended class stories. I can't even imagine the time and money spent on fully voice over'ing this game not to mention the cut scene 3d work involved.

 

So in short;

 

1: hire Raph koster as creative social engineer

2: find the 2 guys who made JTL and the guys who did the SWG crafting system

3: Create a seamless world with current engine or port to a better one. Ask Trion if you can borrow theirs!? ? they did a great job on that actually..

4: only voice over character class stories not the side quests.. (to save time/money)

5: Stop treating the rebel side like the red headed step child and make them more appealing. I.e fix their armor and perhaps buff them a bit. consider a betrayal option for characters. I'm shocked its not in tbh..

 

Either way I have a sub for 3 months because I am playing this game more like a single player extension to kotor with co op functions. I knew all these problems were having now would be what did this game in. My pre beta/launch forum name was vaalix. Probably the biggest troll pre launch on these forums and I predicted exactly what would happen to this game without even playing. I basically said over a million pre order and 300k subscribers at 6 months.. It looks like it may be sooner than that. I wanted nothing but the best for this game as a hardcore fan of star wars.. but to be honest, pre cu swg face owned this game..

Edited January 19, 2012 by rakkiki

[savagepotato]

As much as I like Raph Koster for his ideas behind SWG none of the suggestions you made are any way close to feasible at this stage.

 

With the exception of maybe JTL style space. And better handling of the Republic.

 

Rift uses gamebryo. It is a very commonly used and available engine, so I am sure Bioware had every opportunity to license it, and probably considered doing so but chose not to for some reason.

 

It was the same engine behind DAOC, and all the Bethesda RPGs, including Skyrim (even though they pretended it was "all new".

Edited January 19, 2012 by savagepotato