Why not a SWG 2 instead of a similar Kotor 3?

[DarthKhaos]

There is really no reason that BioWare couldn't just add a separate planet for players to colonize with player cites and placeable buildings to decorate if they felt it would be good for the game. I personally think it would make a good expansion that those who aren't into such features could easily skip while pulling in a alot new and formers players to the game.

This is an idea I can get behind. See people CAN make constructive suggestions instead of what normally goes on here in the forums.

[jarjarloves]

Thats interesting, given the fact that SOE never released even a hint of actual sub numbers. Did the population go down after the CU? Yes, absolutely. Did it go down even further after the NGE? Ya. SWG did not fail. For the last 3 months of the game, there were enough people left to keep the game going, but it didn't work out. Tabula Rasa FAILED, HellGate London FAILED, Lego Universe FAILED and well STO was just junk and still is. SWG ran for eight years, most companies dream of a MMO that could last that long.

 

Bioware only knows how to do linear games, with clear cut objectives etc. But, why are you are questioning things like this after seeing numerous videos showing exactly how the gameplay is? We all knew how the game was waaaay before it was released.

 

But, it looks like a few have linear thinking as well. TOR has a lot of potential and it really isn't fair judging the entire games future on the first two months. If six months down the road, there hasn't been major changes (new content features etc), then yes it would be justified.

 

 

yeah no SWG failed. It was a pretty big flop.

 

the fact that after CU they actually REFUNDED the money people payed for the Trials of Obi wan expansion, yeah it failed.

 

 

SOE doesn't close games. Vanguard which maybe has a population of 100 people is still running. they do this so they can justify the Station Pass. SOE has the money to keep MMOs going even if they aren't making any money.

[TheTurniipKing]

I assume that is what Lucasarts always wanted Galaxies, post Combat Upgrade, to be like. Edited February 15, 2012 by TheTurniipKing

[vincent-]

You can like SWG, but from a commercial point of view, it was at least deceiving. And we have to remember that every MMO seeks to make money and anything else.

 

So make a seconds part of a game that was mostly a failure dont have much sense.

 

SWG lasted 8-9 years? They made their profit and exceeded it too. They could have at least let the players have it for free in the end and not kill it. I know a lot of people who made they're own content in that game and the devs in the end made sure there was enough things to be had for those players I was on of them.

 

Everyone has their own opinion to love and hate something but to rob them of that much time put in. That was wrong I left swg a year before they announced the shutdown.

 

In the end there was room for tor and swg they just wanted to cut a contract because they can.

[DarthKhaos]

Thing is though that structure is almost exactly the same for any alt you may play (I could live with it from my 1st alt, by my 4th frankly it's mind numbing ) and at L50 you go from structured progress to just a very limited number of choices to do anything.

The main reason why I disagree with you on this is because I'm currently leveling multiple alts. Even if you say you can ONLY handle doing a repeat once then that's still 4 characters you're making 2 on Empire 2 on Republic.

 

For me I have found a lot of ways to level alts. One does more flashpoints than the rest, one does more warzones than the rest one does a bit more questing but I still leave out a lot of quests so that the alts would have quests I haven't seen before. There's 2 planets I haven't seen outside of class quests when I did my first character. That's a lot of content still to experience not to mentioned the zones with big undiscovered patches.

 

I just thought it was better not to grind out every single quest a planet has to offer on my first character I made.

[Jeia]

SWG lasted 8-9 years? They made their profit and exceeded it too. They could have at least let the players have it for free in the end and not kill it. I know a lot of people who made they're own content in that game and the devs in the end made sure there was enough things to be had for those players I was on of them.

 

Everyone has their own opinion to love and hate something but to rob them of that much time put in. That was wrong I left swg a year before they announced the shutdown.

 

In the end there was room for tor and swg they just wanted to cut a contract because they can.

 

It was said at the time that SWG closed because EA had an exclusivity clause, how accurate that is, I don't know.

 

It was stated on the SWG forums that SOE had hoped the two games would run side by side. Perhaps LA/EA were asking more for the license renewal than SOE were prepared to pay.

 

I don't suppose we'll ever know the truth, but I would have played both games.

[Goretzu]

The main reason why I disagree with you on this is because I'm currently leveling multiple alts. Even if you say you can ONLY handle doing a repeat once then that's still 4 characters you're making 2 on Empire 2 on Republic.

 

For me I have found a lot of ways to level alts. One does more flashpoints than the rest, one does more warzones than the rest one does a bit more questing but I still leave out a lot of quests so that the alts would have quests I haven't seen before. There's 2 planets I haven't seen outside of class quests when I did my first character. That's a lot of content still to experience not to mentioned the zones with big undiscovered patches.

 

I just thought it was better not to grind out every single quest a planet has to offer on my first character I made.

 

 

Yeah I'm talking about 4 on the same faction, where literally you go through everything but the story quest the same way.

 

I had no problem my first time back through it, the 2nd was much worse, but by the 3rd (my 4th character) it was/is plain horrible.

 

 

 

 

 

Now for the other faction it's slightly better (cross-faction-wise) because you won't be doing exactly, precisely, the same stuff, but still in things like space combat you pretty much will be.

 

In most MMORPGs you can level 2 or 3 alts by completely different path (per faction that is), in SWTOR there is only 1 path.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edit- yes I supposed you can just miss out content, but that's not really the same thing as different content path as found in other MMORPGs.

Edited February 15, 2012 by Goretzu

[TheTurniipKing]

yeah no SWG failed. It was a pretty big flop.

 

the fact that after CU they actually REFUNDED the money people payed for the Trials of Obi wan expansion, yeah it failed.

 

 

SOE doesn't close games. Vanguard which maybe has a population of 100 people is still running. they do this so they can justify the Station Pass. SOE has the money to keep MMOs going even if they aren't making any money.

 

Interestingly, I don't think it "flopped", per-se. The problem with the combat upgrade is that it changed the core nature of the game quite dramatically right underneath many of the player base: The people who'd preordered Trials of Obi-wan where thus able to argue that they had been given a false impression of the game.

 

In Galaxies case, the reason SOE ended it was probably licencing agreements with Lucasarts. It's no coincidence that Galaxies ended at the same time as SWTOR was launching. They didn't want Galaxies leeching players from SWTOR.

Edited February 15, 2012 by TheTurniipKing

[Goretzu]

Interestingly, I don't think it "flopped", per-se. The problem with the combat upgrade is that it changed the core nature of the game quite dramatically right underneath many of the player base: The people who'd preordered Trials of Obi-wan where thus able to argue that they had been given a false impression of the game.

 

In Galaxies case, the reason SOE ended it was probably licencing agreements with Lucasarts. It's no coincidence that Galaxies ended at the same time as SWTOR was launching. They didn't want Galaxies leeching players from SWTOR.

 

 

Yeah, the way they usually sell licences, I'm pretty sure SWG had to die for SWTOR to live.

 

Otherwise SWG would still be trucking along.

[TheTurniipKing]

It's a shame they shut it. It would be fascinating to observe the ebb and flow of the player base from one Star Wars MMO to another.

[gurugeorge]

SWG was failing from the very beginning. The game simply couldn't retain subscribers. The NGE was not what killed the game. It was a misguided attempt to save an MMO that had been on life support for a long time already and simply ended up being the final nail in its coffin.

 

This is not true, the real history is this:-

 

SWG was a huge success in its day, when it first came out. It started bleeding subscribers because it was buggy (as a result of being released too early), but it was still considered relatively successful (i.e. relative to MMOs before it and contemporary with it), and some hard work by the developers saw the subs starting to climb again.

 

Then WoW came out, and about a year or so into WoW, when it was becoming apparent that Blizzard's formula was a huge moneymaker, SoE/LucasArts (depending on who you believe) misguidedly and/or greedily (depending on who you believe) tried to make SWG more like WoW.

 

This alienated the existing loyal players and caused a mass exodus of vets; and meanwhile, the attempted WoW-ification of the game didn't bring in the hoped-for new blood to replace them.

 

That's the sad story of a great sandbox MMORPG that was mishandled by its publishers/IP holders.

Edited February 15, 2012 by gurugeorge

[Quraswren]

The question is all on the title. Why didn't they make a new game like galaxies that offered more freedom , with nearly a billion of features that swtor will never have.

Why this "prison" small story park?

 

You need to let it go.

 

SWG is dead and is not coming back plus what the game evolved to was not good at all.

 

Let it go and move on.

[Halvos]

SWG was a huge success in its day, when it first came out. It started bleeding subscribers because it was buggy (as a result of being released too early), but it was still considered relatively successful (i.e. relative to MMOs before it and contemporary with it), and some hard work by the developers saw the subs starting to climb again.

 

This sounds eerily familiar to something that just released but I can't place my finger on it...

[DarthKhaos]

Edit- yes I supposed you can just miss out content, but that's not really the same thing as different content path as found in other MMORPGs.

To each their own. To me most of the "different content paths" most didn't bother with. Take World of Warcraft for instance. When BC came out with the Blood Elves zone players would get to level 5 and head over there and level there. Then when STV rolled around they were there. Sure they could go to Desolace but leveling there sucked more than going back to STV so they did. Do people even go to Hillsbread anymore?

 

Fast forward up to Outlands you pretty much go to through the same zones on all your characters. got like one point where you could branch out and go here or there but players pretty much quested in the exact same zones.

 

Wrath you picked an end and work your way to the middle then north. Again most people picked one end and stuck with it for all their alts. some didn't. Ever tried asking someone on their 3rd character about a quest and they said they never been there?

 

It's an illusion of choice. But this is just my opinion.

[Zixxer]

For me and a lot of my gaming friends that played SWG, the social aspect of SWTOR is seriously lacking. Without going into a huge comparison of SWG and SWTOR, I will only say this...

 

In SWG, the player cities and housing made for some amazing times in the game. Some ideas that BW could do for this aspect of the game area:

 

1. Player Housing

Create a planet that allows for player houses. These houses could only be unlocked with faction points or Valor, or some form of making the player earn his/her house. People are scattered all over the place and have no place to hang out besides fleet.

 

2. Guild Hall and Guild banks.

We need a place to have our guild functions. A meeting place to gather for runs, set up PvP raids. Talk smack and just have a fun.

 

3. Neutral Factions

Make a neutral faction. Allow players to be part of the Hutt faction or similar and play as a neutral. If you get to many Republic points, your faction swings to Republic and you lose the neutral ranking.

 

4. Open the classes that are not specific to each faction. Smugglers and BH shoudl be open, they are up for hire.

 

5. Crafting

The cummunity needs to have item decay. If you do not have decay, you really have no need for crafting and will kill the crafting in the game.

 

Just my opinion on some things I would like to see.

 

Flame away.

[Emeda]

Impossible to play a game for 8 years when it came out in 2003 and died in 2005. NGE is not and never will be SWG.

 

True SWG was only until the CU Then you played SWGCU or SWGNGE

 

SWG the only real thing they added was JTL

 

The other 2 SWGC and SWGNGE dont care about and dont want because the worse part about them was you had to level to do anything

[anstalt]

The arguement really boils down to theme park mmo versus sandbox mmo.

 

Once you've broken it down to that overarching design philisophy it is easy to see why they went for a theme park:

 

• History has shown theme park MMOs to be more profitable
  
• The biggest MMO in the world is a themepark
  
• Sandbox MMOs are extremely difficult to design
  
• Sandbox MMOs have traditionally been too complex for the average gamer
  
• Themeparks are easier to design content for and to extend
  
• Investors are wary of risks, so even if BW wanted to build a sandbox they probably wouldn't have gotten funding
  
• Developers seem to lack imagination when it comes to sandbox MMOs
  

 

I'm sure we could add tons and tons to this list.

 

As a pure philosophy, sandbox beats theme park every single time. Allowing the community to "create" their own content gives a game infinitely more longevity than a game that relies entirely on developers releasing content to the community.

 

 

On the other hand, it is possible to take the best elements of both philosophies and merge them in to a mega-mmo that kills the market. The ultimate MMO needs:

 

1. Simple interface
   
2. Gentle introduction to the game
   
3. Good story elements
   
4. Steady player progression
   
5. Content for solo players and group players
   
6. Balanced combat at "endgame"
   
7. Player driven PvP
   
8. Player driven economy
   
9. Roleplaying features
   
10. Strong Community Features
    
11. Significant player challenges at endgame
    

 

I'm sure you can all think of more things to add.

 

Whilst SWG had the amazing player driven features (pvp, roleplaying, crafter-driven economy, player cities) it was overly complicated for the average gamer, massively imbalanced and if you prefered pve activities then there wasn't much to do once you'd completed your template (Geo caves and DWB could only entertain for so long).

 

A crossover of the two philosophies would be pure win, but the ability to create such an mmo seems beyond most, if not all, development companies.

[Cordarn]

The question is all on the title. Why didn't they make a new game like galaxies that offered more freedom , with nearly a billion of features that swtor will never have.

Why this "prison" small story park?

 

They said this wasn't gonna be a SWG 2. Atleast thats what ive heard.

[Jmannseelo]

The question is all on the title. Why didn't they make a new game like galaxies that offered more freedom , with nearly a billion of features that swtor will never have.

Why this "prison" small story park?

 

Because SWG was pretty crap, and Bioware knows better than to replicate a crap game.

 

I mean seriously, for everyone complaining about having actual content, and longing for the SWG's "We players made our own content" approach, nothing is stopping you from doing so now. Just find somebody of a different class than you and pay them to buff you, then go to some remote part of the planet and kill random mobs while rationalizing a reason to do so. There you have it...instant SWG.

[Goretzu]

To each their own. To me most of the "different content paths" most didn't bother with. Take World of Warcraft for instance. When BC came out with the Blood Elves zone players would get to level 5 and head over there and level there. Then when STV rolled around they were there. Sure they could go to Desolace but leveling there sucked more than going back to STV so they did. Do people even go to Hillsbread anymore?

 

Fast forward up to Outlands you pretty much go to through the same zones on all your characters. got like one point where you could branch out and go here or there but players pretty much quested in the exact same zones.

 

Wrath you picked an end and work your way to the middle then north. Again most people picked one end and stuck with it for all their alts. some didn't. Ever tried asking someone on their 3rd character about a quest and they said they never been there?

 

It's an illusion of choice. But this is just my opinion.

 

 

 

 

No there was choice, if people didn't take it that was still in fact a choice.

 

 

 

In SWTOR there is no choice at all (apart from to miss out content you can still do at a level appropriate time).

 

WoW is just one example however.

 

In all the MMORPGs I've played since 1998, SWTOR is the first that didn't offer at least 2 paths per faction (paths that may have crossed repeatedly admittedly) and many of them offered more.

 

If by the 4th time you've been back through the same content you can still find fun in it, then good for you. Myself, I can't stand it.

Edited February 15, 2012 by Goretzu

[Cordarn]

This sounds eerily familiar to something that just released but I can't place my finger on it...

 

SWTOR is far better than WoW.

[Tkara]

The question is all on the title. Why didn't they make a new game like galaxies that offered more freedom , with nearly a billion of features that swtor will never have.

Why this "prison" small story park?

 

They stated a long time ago that the game would not be sandbox since that would allow exploiting.....

[Cordarn]

3. Neutral Factions

Make a neutral faction. Allow players to be part of the Hutt faction or similar and play as a neutral. If you get to many Republic points, your faction swings to Republic and you lose the neutral ranking.

 

 

I don't wanna play a panda.

[Goretzu]

They stated a long time ago that the game would not be sandbox since that would allow exploiting.....

 

Huh?

 

There's been a fair bit of that in SWTOR already, but I've no idea why sandbox/theme park (as ridiculous a set of terminology as they are) have anything to do with potential game exploits.

[Limedust]

while SWG let poepel do waht tehy wanted there really no direction or reason to do anyhting. in SWTOR you have a reason why you doing things, kill guy X, save X, you have a long term goal in mind.

 

i was in SWG when it came out and i roamed aorund fun a good place to vll and stared my grind to get a jedi. after that i likely been ok did it..now what? would been bored once i was done. really no reason long term to do anyhting beside just for kicks.

 

And after 50 here, what will you do? Hell, after 30? YOu have no possessions, no reasons to craft, there are no social points (that people use for anything other than looking for groups), there is nothing to explore, you don't have anything to do with your guild (no guild city, guild war, invasions) and you can't do anything to make your character different.

 

It seems to me (seriously) that there are far fewer kicks come end game in this than there were through all of SWG. Not to say I'm not having a decent time, but I don't really see a "reasons" behind any of the stuff you're assigned to do in SWTOR. What's the long term goal--to finish, oddly enough. Not my idea of a great MMO.