SWTOR: Theme-park MMO design. End of the road?

[ocping]

Perhaps you should start your own thread and not hijack this one?

 

Perhaps? I don't care.

[ForceCowboy]

Although sandbox games can be nice at times, I don't have problems with games on rails (themeparks). One does not exclude the other for me and a change of pace is always nice. It would become really boring if every game was the same. The storylines in SWTOR are a change of pace and in that respect I don't care if this game is linear or not.

 

I never engage in endgames anyway, because I think they are silly gear grinds and because there are so many games released each year, that when I'm bored I just look up a new game. Most MMO's I play for 3 months to a year max, most single player games between 2 weeks and 3 months max.

 

I think diversity is what makes games interesting.

 

Games on rails can be very fun. In fact, I'm having fun in SWTOR. The problem, however, is that once the train reaches the station, the options are get on another train and ride it to another station or go home.

 

So far I've taken one train to the station and I'm working on two more, but when the ride is over, I'll be right back in EVE where we make our own train tracks wherever we went to put them.

[riedeas]

Leveling pace vs end game..

theme park vs sandbox--

 

What i miss most in both WoW and SWTOR from SWG(pre cu/nge) is the social aspect, everything from the buffing lines() and crowded cantinas on the main mission hubs to the Tent farming(forgot the name of the skill) where people would come and sit down and have a chat randomly..

To me the Social aspect of the game feels even more lacking than it did in WoW, especially as a pvper since there is no dueling area on the fleets where dueling freaks can gather and have fun :/

[Goretzu]

I'm pretty sure the future is between themepark and sandbox.

 

Or probably themepark AND sandbox.

 

 

An MMO that is just one or the other is well shooting an arrow in it's OWN knee.

[Ghaiana]

Games on rails can be very fun. In fact, I'm having fun in SWTOR. The problem, however, is that once the train reaches the station, the options are get on another train and ride it to another station or go home.

 

So far I've taken one train to the station and I'm working on two more, but when the ride is over, I'll be right back in EVE where we make our own train tracks wherever we went to put them.

 

I also played EvE on and off over the years, but even that game wears old, despite it being a sandbox. And also there is a point where you say I've seen it all (and yes I played it till I was in one of the major 0-sec corps). At some point also a sandbox is the same thing over and over. It's been one of my favorite MMO's though, but easily next to a themepark MMO like WoW.

Edited February 7, 2012 by Ghaiana

[DarthKhaos]

The millions of dollars they have didn't fall from the sky in the great Money Rain of '02.

 

Get the idea out of your head. Write up the specification documents, in detail. Get mock-ups of the interface created. Get artists to create concept art. Perform market analysis. Figure out what customers aren't served by current games and how you'll serve them. Perform cost estimates -- how many developers, how many years? Etc.

 

If you think you've got a billion dollar idea, convince investors to back you. (If the game costs 300-500 million to make, you need to convince people it will earn back at least a billion or so, over time, to make it remotely worth the risk.)

 

An "idea" isn't worth ****. Ideas are free. Prove to people with money that you can turn an idea into a reality, and that you can earn them more money than they could earn putting it somewhere else... and you'll have your game.

Can someone call the police!!! This poster did a drive by on the guy's point and it's now dead.

[Hoodlumpriest]

I used to say that the TOR community the worst community in MMO history before launch. I have since retracted that statement not just because it was confrontational and inflammatory of me, but because I started to run into the GW2 crowd.

 

People are going to need a powerful constitution to read chat in that game when it releases, methinks.

 

I expect most people who know anything about gw2 will tell you they wont really need to read chat all day to have fun

[DarthKhaos]

I'm not sure about this theme-park vs sandbox argument but the comment about death by a thousand paper cuts is so true.

 

I'm gonna spend the next 10 minutes listing every single small detail I hate or have no idea why it got implemented

 

~SNIP~

 

Feel free to add to the list all the small things you don't like.

All the things you've mentioned are so minor even combined I am really not bothered. Also if ALL these things you mentioned are SOOOO much that you are dying a little inside while playing then...

 

...

 

... Wait for it ...

 

...

 

STOP PLAYING!

Edited February 7, 2012 by DarthKhaos

[Doamy]

-Post content removed- Edited May 6, 2012 by Doamy

[GalacticKegger]

All excellent points OP, just not sure how feasible expecting all of it at a product's release would be though. At least not a product whose scale addresses an entire galaxy that is well defined in both literature and cinema. The perfect Star Wars MMO would combine unlimited persistence and pervasiveness in both space and on land. The two would be one giant room. Everything would be seamless and all in the same instance. Quests would be on-the-fly dynamic and end game would combine the best of everything (epic PvP & PvE space and land battles, Operations ... the works.) I'm not sure the rendering farms of Digital Domain, Pixar, IL&M and Dreamworks combined would have the ability or capacity to keep up. And that's just projecting the set design.

 

With your advanced education in project design and layout, I am sure scope becomes a pandora's box for you. As the saying goes, there comes a point in every project where it's time to shoot the engineers and get on with production. Building the models that populate the scenes, then building the scenes and stitching them together is the simplest aspect of creating an MMO. The complicated part is populating its "hows and whys" then breathing life into it; making that life not only user interaction friendly, but scripting it so as to feel unscripted to the end user.

 

Something as immense as the masses want would take a decade to build and stabilize, and require more than every graphics, animation, film and sound resource at Lucas Valley Ranch. By the time it was ready for release, newer technologies would have emerged and made the initial design's infrastructure obsolete. So there has to be compromise or a project will forever remain a project.

 

I'm with you on two points: leveling and end game. Players who make MMOs a favorite pastime will always advance through content faster than those who play maybe 10 or 20 hours a week. Every MMO at release has a problem balancing that. I think sandboxing for recipes and maybe even community-designed quests ala STO (probably the only redeeming feature of that game outside of the character generator) would be great, though anything beyond crafting is probably too advanced to consider at this stage. I also like your idea of building or acquiring residences like SWG or LotRO. But that gets back to the immense challenges of making an entire galaxy pervasive and sculptable. There are plenty of barren map areas in the game where something like this might work, but those could already be reserved as placeholders for future leveling/expansion content.

 

End game is tricky to pull off, a real moving target. It needs to stay within the game's theme and storyboards, else it feels out of place and merely "plugged in." Yet in the same breath it also has to be climactic and at least as engrossing as the story that led to it. Essentially end game has to reside within the box while operating outside of the box. Transitioning to it from leveling should be seamless but obvious, and culminate in advanced applications of everything a character learns during the adventures that got it there ... x an MMO's millions. It requires alternate endings and a reusability factor that doesn't feel like a retread. In essence - dynamic content.

 

The argument that "every other MMO has robust end game content so it should have been there at launch for SWTOR" doesn't fly with anyone who's ever toiled on the back end of one of these. The two most compared MMOs are SWG and WoW. Technologies newer than theirs will never replace the time and resource requirements to draft, model, program, test and implement them. That is unless SOE and Blizz feel compelled to share their source code and programmers with BioWare. Then I could see having more of their stuff in place and working right away. Otherwise those expectations are pipe-dream unrealistic.

 

I totally agree with you that BioWare needs to provide guidance for navigating end game. But I think they have to finish it first - and they are working on it. How much of their advanced player base gets impatient and leaves is the genuine concern and remains to be seen.

Edited February 7, 2012 by GalacticKegger

[Nighthawked]

People need to stop requesting that the leveling experience will take MONTHS. As a casual player that can only play 7 hours A WEEK MAXIMUM now, I do not want it to take YEARS to get one level 50.

 

So it might take 5 days /played. But I will have that in a couple of months at least. ON ONE CHARACTER.

[Jederix]

Thankfully things are changing. Games are coming out that have quite different systems to work with. TERA/GW2/Secret world, all of which are quite open ended, and those are just the top ones that are well known.

 

Check out GW2 if you love pvp and fantasy pve. Secret world is modern but has a sub. Tera is more asian themed fantasy with super skimpy armor (Not my thing), and you have to actually guide your attacks into a mob, where as in GW2 you actively evade.

 

Check em out, you might like em.

 

Well, I've read enough to know I will probably not play any of these games. Thanks for the info.

 

There aren't as many people looking to ditch traditional MMO combat mechanics as you might think.

[Jederix]

Arena net is taking those risks. Check it.

 

Most likely to only suffer the same fate as others who attempt to innovate. Time will tell, I guess.

[BigBadEdward]

When I see posts like this I remember something my old game designer buddy Jeff Freeman said about some game (I think it was Morrowwind) I was complaining about. He said, "It's probably the coolest game I've ever seen that just isn't very much fun."

 

That's the problem with SWToR, fun was a secondary goal. It's like the most beautiful painting in the world, people stop, admire it for a few minutes then walk away. If you make a game where the scenery is the most important design goal, people will look at it for a few minutes then expect something fun to do.

 

SWToR is fun but not for long. I believe they just forgot to put fun first and spent all their resources on the other stuff.

[Jederix]

Whoever thinks sandbox style isn't the future of MMOs is fooling themselves.

 

Theme parks alone are absolutely a dead end at this point. WAY too repetitive. I thought SWG was very innovative for what they attempted, and I felt it worked. Coupled with some theme park elements that game could have been the best.

 

The fact that Bioware didn't choose to take a risk and just went for the safe bet without a shred of originality, is being reflected on the feedback for this game and the reason this game will probably fade away very shortly, at least from the spotlight.

 

Sandbox style, player cities, player created content is the future of MMOs, if there is any future at all.

 

Wishing it were so does not make it so. Player created content fails in almost every way imaginable, breeding only people who despise the game developers because they didn't provide the playerbase with enough to do.

 

Sandbox games will never be more than a niche market, if anyone ever attempts to make any more ever again.

[DarthKhaos]

All excellent points OP, just not sure how feasible expecting all of it at a product's release would be though. At least not a product whose scale addresses an entire galaxy that is well defined in both literature and cinema. The perfect Star Wars MMO would combine unlimited persistence and pervasiveness in both space and on land. The two would be one giant room. Everything would be seamless and all in the same instance. Quests would be on-the-fly dynamic and end game would combine the best of everything (epic PvP & PvE space and land battles, Operations ... the works.) I'm not sure the rendering farms of Digital Domain, Pixar, IL&M and Dreamworks combined would have the ability or capacity to keep up. And that's just projecting the set design.

 

~SNIP~

 

I totally agree with you that BioWare needs to provide guidance for navigating end game. But I think they have to finish it first - and they are working on it. How much of their advanced player base gets impatient and leaves is the genuine concern and remains to be seen.

WAY too long to quote but a great read.

Even though I disagree with the OP I agree with most of your post and I believe 1/2 the problem is people expect every game their interested in to cater to them. There's way too much "trying to convince people that the game sucks" going on the forums. Hey if you don't like it just go. If you're sticking it out make SUGGESTIONS in a constructive way and then WAIT.

 

I knew this game was designed more for the story driven people and the Altoholics. One guy said he hit level 50 and ONLY played something like 104 hrs and did it in 17 days. That's over 6hrs a day playing on average including Christmas Day. ~smh~ Yea, ONLY.

 

To be honest the end game is pretty much the same as WoW. Raids, Heroics, PvP & Dailies. Then there's nothing to do in WoW also. More stuff in WoW? People hardly run the old content so it can't be considered "end game" stuff.

 

Bottom line the OP should of known that if he isn't interested in alts, the story of the game and the usual new MMO dealings he should of either waited or not bothered.

Edited February 7, 2012 by DarthKhaos

[ActionJim]

actually that is a EPIC FAIL for bioware. because its crappy game design....

 

i would like you to log into a MMO like EVE ONLINE... and try to "max out" a toon in 5 days....

 

I have played eve for 7 Years and i have not maxed out all the skills in the game.. and you know what due to outstanding game design it is not possable to ever max out every skill in the game. because they take a long time to max each seperate skill and there are 100's of them.

 

you are just making excuses for Bioware because they didnt have the forsight to see that people with no jobs and are on EI or what ever can play 18 hours a day and max out in 5 days because they have been playing MMO's for 15 years.

 

I see you failed to read my entire post. Bioware shouldn't have to plan for people with no jobs spending every second of their time playing. My point was there is other things to do besides playing the same game non-stop til you've finished it then **** on the dev because it's too short. I'm so glad that you've never maxed your EVE char out. I don't want to play that game however, and don't care about it. If you can put 18 hours a day into gaming alone, then you need to re-evaluate your life decisions. Get a job, join a club of some sort, maybe be useful and contribute to charity. Something other than blaze through a game then cry about how it's not long enough after you rushed through it.

[MithurElb]

Anyone who claims that sandbox games are dead has zero clue what they are talking about.

 

EVE Online and Perpetuum Online have had steady growth rates for long time. In fact, year after year they grow while dozens of themeparks dwindle down to FTP status due to lack of interest.

 

Then you take into account the fact that Minecraft, which isn't technically an MMO, has sold more than twice the copies of SWTOR. It's a sandbox in its purest form and millions of people play it daily.

 

Minecraft Users and Sales Statistics

 

Just the opposite is true. Sandbox is the future. Themeparks are going the way of the dodo and SWTOR may be the last final gasp before they die.

 

Yes and no. Sandbox is the future, mainly because the tech advance. Physics, more pontent CPUs, etc... will allow real sanboxes, with unlimited options.

 

But themepark is not dead. It'll take a long time to die, because of WoW. That game created an horde of players that will parasite every MMORPG ************ to make that MMORPG a copy of the old game.

 

That's exactly what is happening to this game.

 

I like this game, but the crappy community is a big setback.

[jinxsters]

Thankfully things are changing. Games are coming out that have quite different systems to work with. TERA/GW2/Secret world, all of which are quite open ended, and those are just the top ones that are well known.

 

Check out GW2 if you love pvp and fantasy pve. Secret world is modern but has a sub. Tera is more asian themed fantasy with super skimpy armor (Not my thing), and you have to actually guide your attacks into a mob, where as in GW2 you actively evade.

 

Check em out, you might like em.

 

tera is failing hard in asia

secret world way to soon to see and besides they failed at AoC i will never buy a game from that company till i see the goods.

GW2 we will wait and see personally i was not impressed with the 1st 1 so dunno bout the 2nd

[Karraway]

Must admit the whole theme park idea doesn't really appeal to me anymore. it worked ok in wow and I did still feel like returning to certain zones with it (not that I'm a huge wow fan,the game in its current form sucks to be honest) but with swtor I have just hit 50 and I have no desire to re visit any of the old zones,there is just no good reason. Edited February 7, 2012 by Karraway

[Grammarye]

A lot of the deep seated issues with MMOs these days stem from them trying to be all things to all people. They fail to say 'we're making a car, please take your desire for a flatbed truck to that truck dealership over there'. If any game were perfect, we'd never play anything else. By definition, one person's perfect will not match another's. This yields multiple games, multiple options.

 

One key thing customers of MMOs should stop doing is latching onto the latest game and go 'oh but it must have X, it must have Y'. No, it doesn't need to. What it needs is a consistent well implemented vision that the developers stick to. Take EVE as a great example. CCP have mostly stuck to their guns in creating a harsh ruthless world. Tacking on features at the last minute to satisfy some group of players at whom your product was never aimed is a great way to end up pulling your product in too many different directions. There is a real balancing act here.

 

The other significant issue is that innovation is generally received badly. Witness the outcry in various games by a generation that have played WoW and its ilk for so long that they genuinely cannot operate in a different environment. There are real Pavlovian conditions at work here. Game developers ignore that conditioning at their peril, whether we like it or not. That doesn't mean don't innovate, but it means innovate within a space that is going to be accessible to the majority of your target audience, even if that means sacrificing some innovation for familiarity.

 

As for the whole theme-park vs sandbox thing; it's a moot point in my view. Both ultimately run out of content. The distinction is that one is visible at the end of the current storyline, and the other is when you've achieved total boredom because you've done everything, or managed to bend/break the game's sandbox by doing something the designers did not expect (see The Elder Scrolls and practically any use of money, alchemy, enchanting, and so on - the sandbox becomes dull because you've beaten the system and have become invincible). In both cases, the attraction remains skin-deep.

 

Sandbox equally does not translate to a simulator (which is what, for example, Minecraft is). Simulators have a very different target audience; they are pure world creation and often have little or no real gameplay. The joy is not in experiencing content, but building it. That is an incredibly subjective & dangerous area for an MMO to go into. For example; I cannot think of a single sandbox MMO where you genuinely create content. The only MMO in fact at all that I can think of is STO 's Foundry. Everything else, the content is still developer-created. The remaining task is about dressing up grind of some form into an acceptable package that people will invest time over (see EVE null-sec, the entire basis of World of Tanks, and pretty much any open-world PvP objective ever written).

 

The argument that says 'players create the content' has missed that there is no content. The correct phrase is 'players convince themselves it's worth the time to do X'. That's not wrong, but it's important to understand the carrots & sticks in this design; to understand what drives people. In most cases that drive is so varied that you cannot make a game that appeals to all drives.

Edited February 7, 2012 by Grammarye

[DARKLORDMAXIMUS]

I see you failed to read my entire post. Bioware shouldn't have to plan for people with no jobs spending every second of their time playing. My point was there is other things to do besides playing the same game non-stop til you've finished it then **** on the dev because it's too short. I'm so glad that you've never maxed your EVE char out. I don't want to play that game however, and don't care about it. If you can put 18 hours a day into gaming alone, then you need to re-evaluate your life decisions. Get a job, join a club of some sort, maybe be useful and contribute to charity. Something other than blaze through a game then cry about how it's not long enough after you rushed through it.

 

wow you talk about failing to read your post lol i said "actually that is a EPIC FAIL for bioware. because its crappy game design....

 

i would like you to log into a MMO like EVE ONLINE... and try to "max out" a toon in 5 days....

 

I have played eve for 7 Years and i have not maxed out all the skills in the game.. and you know what due to outstanding game design it is not possable to ever max out every skill in the game. because they take a long time to max each seperate skill and there are 100's of them.

 

you are just making excuses for Bioware because they didnt have the forsight to see that people with no jobs and are on EI or what ever can play 18 hours a day and max out in 5 days because they have been playing MMO's for 15 years.

 

P.S. i work full time and i dont have a level 50 yet. but then again i split my time between eve and swtor so i dont have a level 50 toon right now.

 

My GF who is in school and has more time off then i already has 1 toon at 50 one at 40 and 2 more at who knows what levels.. and she is already board because she knows once her other toons reach 50. there will be next to nothing to do because she does not like to PVP much. And space combat is single player and well is fun for the first time you do it and then is a waste of time. "

 

The main point im trying to make is the game is to easy to get to level 50 as i have watched my girlfriend do it while she is in school full time and is only playing one MMO right now. I'm playing 2..

 

ANd not only is it to easy... but when you are level 50 there is not much to do.. and this is not only what my GF has observed and i through her... but the voice of many many people i know who all hav 50's and are back to playing eve.. or wow... or what ever other game they like to play..

 

If Bioware does not want to lose 1,000,000 people in the next 3 months.. they better add more End game content that can not be completed.. or leveled out.

Edited February 7, 2012 by DARKLORDMAXIMUS

[Quip]

The dinosaur days of sandbox MMOs are gone, nobody played them. Purely grind based game-play just doesn't appeal to enough people. But at the same time the pure theme-park MMOs have an end and that just feels every bit as crappy.

 

EVE is the big Sandbox these days with 350,000 players (or so they claim, their peak online players is 35k), which is a comparable population to the worst "failures" in theme-park MMOS. The upside for that style of game is that they don't need to churn out an endless flow of content so the maintenance cost is much lower; they simply don't need millions of subs.

 

I'm fairly certain that Sandbox MMOs are dead and gone and with good reason, but there has to be a better way to manage populations than churning out content to bloat statistics in ever increasing increments. I would love to see The Secret World not be awful with it's very different levelling system, but Funcom tends to have big ideas and a little budget

[djsmileey]

Yes, another feedback post, but seeing as I'm a Compsci major, and my forte is project design and layout, I think it will be worthwhile to read...

 

Bioware has developed a very compelling game world. Many of the locations exhibit not only great beauty, but also are technically very challenging to design. Take a look at the sky/mountains on Alderaan, or the sky above Ilum, etc. And places like Nar Shadaa (And presumably Coruscant) are technically very challenging to accomplish without load screens at acceptable FPS, etc. The use of musical direction in setting the mood for areas, worlds, or quests is excellent. It's the only MMO I feel I can't play with the radio in the background or I won't get the proper effect.

 

SWTOR right now however, is suffering a "death by a thousand paper cuts" as it were, with regards to quality-of-life design issues, and the unguided state of post-50 content. There are myriad little design annoyances with the game that when compounded, have a sizable affect on peoples' perceptions of the game. Combine that with the sink-or-swim nature of content once you reach L50, and it's no wonder server populations are already dwindling.

 

Theme-park MMO designs have reached an untenable situation of exponential costs + ever-shorter leveling curves. The theme-park style of MMO has reached a point of oversaturation -- people burn through the leveling content in 5 days /played and expect more within weeks. IMHO the only way forward from here is to mix together elements of the Theme Park, with the Sandbox. Sandbox MMOs alone are too niche to be economically feasible or popular on a large scale. But having sandbox elements in a theme park design, would help subscribers weather the periods between content updates, and give them a reason to keep logging in. It would be the social hub that MMOs have been missing for quite some time.

 

MMOs in the past featured an extensive grind with few quests. My first character in EQ1 took 50 days /played to hit L50, for example. (18-20 days for WoW) But what current MMOs are missing is the social aspect of MMO gaming from the past -- sure you were grinding, but chatting with groupmates and those in the zone was just as important or moreso than leveling your character. This is one of the largest reasons the Korean market still prefers heavier grinds -- it's for the socializing. I think they need to lengthen out the leveling once more and tap more into the social aspects of MMOs. Social networking is so huge now -- why is it that Massively MULTIPLAYER games are such insular solo content these days?

 

If Bioware really wants SWTOR to succeed they need to first and foremost, provide more cohesive guidance on how to proceed at L50, but then also add in sandbox elements to give players ways to spend their time between patches. Player housing, a total revamp of the crafting system for a more meaningful meta-game, etc. Heck I think an amazing thing would be an EVE-like space part of the game that you could explore and carve out your own little niche, except far less ruthless than EVE, of course.

(Quality of life and Guidance issues I'll address in a separate thread)

 

Hmm, I think this may be the first constructive post i've seen in a year that I can get on board with.

 

Great, thought-out thread with clear and unbiased ideas. I really do wish there was a lot more sandbox options in TOR.

 

I will play the devil's advocate for one point though; I don't believe that this will ultimately kill the game, I believe the fan base alone for TOR is always going to be big enough that they will yield a profit. Even if this game rests at a comfortable medium, they will still profit. Which may be where they settle, who knows? It could also very well take off just like wow did... when they start adding more features, like the legacy system and guild ships.

 

I hope they don't give up, I hope they strive for #1, I hope they take idea's like this and move on them.

 

I do believe one thing, you should be posting this in the suggestions, where it actually matters. Not General discussion where it will get eaten alive.

[GalacticKegger]

Yes and no. Sandbox is the future, mainly because the tech advance. Physics, more pontent CPUs, etc... will allow real sanboxes, with unlimited options.

Now all that remians is to create an infrastruture capable of adapting to (and staying ahead of) millions of users changing millions of things. Not sure a Hal exists ... at least for consumer applications anyway. Edited February 7, 2012 by GalacticKegger