Fun comparison

[Ivanblood]

What are you saying ? Bioware in the same span of time but with a triple budget and with a forhead knowledge of its main competitor developped a game that is relatively equal to WoW of 2004 ?

[Azumio]

What are you saying ? Bioware in the same span of time but with a triple budget and with a forhead knowledge of its main competitor developped a game that is relatively equal to WoW of 2004 ?

 

Ouch.

[DigitalDreamz]

What are you saying ? Bioware in the same span of time but with a triple budget and with a forhead knowledge of its main competitor developped a game that is relatively equal to WoW of 2004 ?

 

That's exactly what the apologists, Bioware and EA are saying. Blizzard and ArenaNet are too busy laughing to comment.

[gurugeorge]

What are you saying ? Bioware in the same span of time but with a triple budget and with a forhead knowledge of its main competitor developped a game that is relatively equal to WoW of 2004 ?

 

WoW took roughly 4-5 years development, so did SWTOR.

 

In that roughly equivalent development period, BW managed to make more content ready for launch, as the OP shows.

 

Not only more standard content, but on top of that, an absolute ****ton of VO'd content (and that's not just the voices, but the whole puppet show).

 

What's the problem?

 

SWTOR is a much better game, at launch, than WoW was.

 

But it's not good enough for stupid people who don't understand that it took a further 7 years of development to bring WoW to the stage it's at today.

 

Making games is not a magical process. Things take time, and they don't take all that much less time today than they did 7 years ago.

Edited February 21, 2012 by gurugeorge

[Blotter]

What are you saying ? Bioware in the same span of time but with a triple budget and with a forhead knowledge of its main competitor developped a game that is relatively equal to WoW of 2004 ?

 

Sooooo, the answer was to try to keep developing the project so that instead of it taking 7 years, BW would also have to incorporate all additional developments made by Blizz while BW was still trying to develop the core game itself, such that it woul maybe take an additiona; 3 years of development time rather than release the core game and continue to add to it while people enjoyed it? Right. Continued delay in order to keep up with the continuing developments of the joneses. You clearly have a superb mind for business and a bang-up understanding of how running a business and pleasing investors works.

 

I vote that we travel back in time and nominate you to be the guy who explains to all of BW's investors that the reason they will be delaying the games' release is so that all the additional superfluous crap done by Blizz while developing its game in real time...stuff that isn't really part of the core game for WoW and won't be part of the core game for SWTOR even when it is added...that it's gonna be another 3 years until they see the first inkling of what the returns on their investments are going to be because all that stuff that was added in real time to WoW simply has to be part of SWTOR as part of the launch release.

 

And I'll just point out that you are, whether you see it and recognize it or not, given that you're wearing the can't please me no matter what pessimism goggles...you are in a tiny tiny minority that feels the way you do about whether all the bells and whistles WoW added over 7 years of real time additions to its game had to be part of this game in the box from the get-go. The vast majority of players are way more concerned with enjoying themselves as opposed to comparing epeens on damage meters or being able to write addons that let you funkify your UI.

Edited February 21, 2012 by Blotter

[Dumpiduke]

 

I can't imagine in ANY market where you release a product and it's o.k to compete with products seven years prior: TVs, Cars, Radios, Cell Phones, Games, Computers,

 

Imagine if Apple released a new iPhone. This 'new' phone was in development for six years and Apple spent 200+ million dollars on it. When it was released there was a delay for each number you push when trying to dial, no touch screen, no app support, no high res screen and no access to iTunes.

 

You think it'd be a good idea for Apple to say "Well if you look at phones ten years ago they didn't have this stuff so we kinda have more than those phones back then!" Same thing you SWTOR apologists are doing. It's ridiculous for that scenario and it's ridiculous here.

 

This is such a ridiculous analogy. You don't purchase those products knowing full well that they will improve over time like you do an MMO. When you purchase TOR, you aren't buying a finished product simply because IT'S NEVER FINISHED. The game is going to change, it's only going to get better. If you're unsatisfied with the current product, you can come back in the future and give it a whirl for a small fee.

 

To be honest, I think it was a good move by Bioware to offer a bare bone product straight out the gate. This allows the product to be tailored to what customers actually want while still being 100% playable. It wouldn't be smart to implement something that would be a detriment to the game play as a whole (*cough* WoW's arena system *cough*) without first consulting the majority of the active player base.

 

It was fun reading the OP, btw. It's amazing how much the genre has changed since UO and EQ really brought it to life back in the 90's. The genre has really evolved, and along with it came a slew of snot-nosed, impatient gamers that expect the best of everything handed to them on a silver platter.

 

I CANNOT wait until GW2 comes out to watch all of the QQ that surrounds that game. I plan on picking it up so I can have a front row seat to what has really became a game in-and-of itself--I call it "Xtreme MMO launch rage watching."

[Fencik]

Best feature (for me) of SWTOR is that it is set in the Star Wars universe.

 

I've played WoW for years (so sick of it) mainly because all my gaming buddies started playing it; but I never identified with WoW (was never a big D&D player). ...as a kid of the '70s, the Star Wars universe is so much more "me".

 

I can deal with the growing pains, the random bugs, etc.. I just enjoy playing in this world so much more than the WoW universe.

 

Besides, the graphics are much better, and the voice acting is SO much better. ...there are a bunch of little details in TOR that I like (emails from folks you've helped out was a nice touch). The story line is much stronger as well.

 

Probably my two biggest complaints would be:

 

1. There simply aren't enough action bars available (I hate using my controller for most attacks, but having to click all over the screen for 3-4 others that don't fit on an action bar)

 

2. Shutting the server down at midnight (west coast) SUCKS! ...we like to game at night; shut them down at 3am ...we'll sleep in or go to work vs. playing in the morning!!!

 

Very nice comparison by the OP!

[Kubernetic]

So the software industry is exceptional and cannot be compared to other industries?

 

There must be some comparisons we can draw; I am not invalidating your points as they all make sense on their own.

 

Oh it's not at all invulnerable or anything like that. But it is much different than most other comparisons.

 

Comparing SWTOR to a piece of art, for instance, is shaky. The artwork isn't going to change. It was designed, produced, and basically locked in before being hung in a gallery or shipped to the recipient. It isn't going to be updated. Complaints about the painting or sculpture or music will not result in fixes being applied in most instances, unless you've personally hired the artist(s).

 

The best comparisons of this game software will be to other examples of game software that receive routine and regular updates, are still being designed, improved, and added to, and will significantly change over their lifespan.

 

The original post was comparing SWTOR to WOW, once again. But even this comparison is slightly off because WOW has a set of content that I'm just not interested in playing... orcs and goblins and magic horses and whatever.

 

Hence my addition back there... one shipped with science-fiction fantasy content and the other shipped with Tolkienesque fantasy content. I am incredibly interested in the former, and not at all interested in the latter.

 

So the closest and most meaningful comparisons will also be to other game software with similar content and themes. If you're comparing game mechanics, that's one thing. But the overall game is a different beast.

 

My ultimate point was that the farther you get away from the core essence of what this game is and how it was produced and how it will change over time, the sillier the comparisons.

 

If you really want to get abstract, for instance, describe SWTOR using only fruits and vegetables.

 

Or, if SWTOR were a color... it would be...

Edited February 21, 2012 by Kubernetic

[Eysaathe]

An intuitive tab-targeting sytem?

WoW: So natural, it's never even been tweaked--it was that good to begin with!

SWTOR: How about if I gave you a target 40 yards behind you? Is that something you would be interested in?

 

I have to agree with that. And it made me laugh.

[RabidPopcorn]

Oh it's not at all invulnerable or anything like that. But it is much different than most other comparisons.

 

Comparing SWTOR to a piece of art, for instance, is shaky. The artwork isn't going to change. It was designed, produced, and basically locked in before being hung in a gallery or shipped to the recipient. It isn't going to be updated. Complaints about the painting or sculpture or music will not result in fixes being applied in most instances, unless you've personally hired the artist(s).

 

The best comparisons of this game software will be to other examples of game software that receive routine and regular updates, are still being designed, improved, and added to, and will significantly change over their lifespan.

 

The original post was comparing SWTOR to WOW, once again. But even this comparison is slightly off because WOW has a set of content that I'm just not interested in playing... orcs and goblins and magic horses and whatever.

 

Hence my addition back there... one shipped with science-fiction fantasy content and the other shipped with Tolkienesque fantasy content. I am incredibly interested in the former, and not at all interested in the latter.

 

So the closest and most meaningful comparisons will also be to other game software with similar content and themes. If you're comparing game mechanics, that's one thing. But the overall game is a different beast.

 

My ultimate point was that the farther you get away from the core essence of what this game is and how it was produced and how it will change over time, the sillier the comparisons.

 

If you really want to get abstract, for instance, describe SWTOR using only fruits and vegetables.

 

Or, if SWTOR were a color... it would be...

 

Point taken, but a truly great game would be fun for everyone, not just sw/sci-fi/fantasy fans. Not saying that WoW was 'greater' than SWTOR.

[Deewe]

What are you saying ? Bioware in the same span of time but with a triple budget and with a forhead knowledge of its main competitor developped a game that is relatively equal to WoW of 2004 ?

There's a reason to that: here's the story of it

[Uruare]

My biggest complaint in this direction is not so much specific to a point in time as it is to points of reference available.

 

Older games, WoW included, had less of a history lesson to work from in what they were building. What Blizzard had to take notes and lessons from in its development process was absolutely less and less refined for what there was than what has existed for Bioware to reference.

 

 

Blizzard made World of Warcraft in what could probably be equated into the industrial revolution of MMO design. They blatantly swiped a lot of good ideas from Everquest, asked a lot of the right questions (right because they were right for the target audience of that time) in making their design decisions and -STILL- had nothing but an uphill battle in keeping up with pleasing most of the players at least some of the time as the industry's evolved and expectations have practically mutated.

 

Bioware's had the examples, the lessons, the successes and the failures of literally hundreds upon hundreds of other MMO's, from the tiny and bizarre to the AAA and successful (and all in between) to take lessons from.

 

They have chosen to ignore a great deal of history, to selectively interpret certain parts of that history through a lens that, if the product itself is commentative, has been obsolete for years, and did a fantastic job of hyping SWTOR to a point that -even if they had done everything perfectly-, they could not have lived up to the level of where they pushed the bar of expectations.

 

 

--

 

 

If the droves of angry people on this forum are to be held at fault for anything, it is that they believed the hype.

 

Bioware, on the other hand, has yet to demonstrate that they can do anything other than providing a genuinely praise-worthy back end of network and server infrastructure more intelligently and comprehensively than Blizzard did in the MMO equivalent of the age of steam.

 

The hype said a great deal about innovation; where is this innovation? All I see are relatively cheap gimmicks tacked onto a selectively copied Burning Crusade with lightsabers and a story delivery model that is done better by scores of single player games -including Bioware's own offerings in that segment-.

 

Are the gimmicks bad? No. Things like space combat and datacrons as easter egg hunts and that like aren't bad at all, but they're not a load-bearing support for the game's value.

 

Is all the blatant copying of Burning Crusade era WoW's mechanics and talent trees and combat scalings bad? Guess it depends on if you liked Burning Crusade specifically for those things or not, but what it isn't and what nobody can posture a single valid argument rebutting is innovative in even the smallest way. It isn't. Not even slightly. Not even a little.

 

Is the story delivery model bad? Dear me no. But they might have tried a little harder to look at their own game library at the least to see better and more compellingly rendered...-EVERYTHING- to do with it. We know Bioware can tell a fantastic, emotionally gripping story with elaborate characterization of their NPC's.

 

What the hell happened here? Why are our companions so comparatively stagnant and shallow that they feel, to interact with, like little more than cardboard cut-outs when compared to the cast of either currently released Mass Effect games?

 

Seems to me that the plodding pace of an MMO and the equally generic methods of gaining opportunities to interact with any NPC's, companions or otherwise, ripped a whole dimension off their characterizations.

 

 

--

 

 

 

So, in closing; the bugs and issues with graphics and the engine and all that technical fluff will get worked out in time. Absolutely will on the great majority of those things.

 

But we're never, unless miracles really do happen, going to see the infrastructure itself change very quickly or very radically in any direction, and that infrastructure, despite all the references available that could have been learned from, fails to not only do anything new, but doesn't even do that which is tired, old and timeworn as well as those that did their infrastructural game designing in the MMO age of steam.

 

 

There's no excuse for it. It's tantamount unto what it would be like if a couple of doctors of psychology, enamored of Sigmund Freud, tried to make slight revisions to his theories, hype them as mystic wisdom and sell them in booklets at checkout counters of supermarkets to neo-pagans and self-diagnosing hypochondriacs while simultaneously trying to get university graduate programs to include them in their departmental curriculum as serious, ground-breaking and innovative advancements of the field.

 

Bloody embarassing, if that needs to be said.

Edited February 22, 2012 by Uruare

[MillionsKNives]

My biggest complaint in this direction is not so much specific to a point in time as it is to points of reference available.

 

Older games, WoW included, had less of a history lesson to work from in what they were building. What Blizzard had to take notes and lessons from in its development process was absolutely less and less refined for what there was than what has existed for Bioware to reference.

 

 

Blizzard made World of Warcraft in what could probably be equated into the industrial revolution of MMO design. They blatantly swiped a lot of good ideas from Everquest, asked a lot of the right questions (right because they were right for the target audience of that time) in making their design decisions and -STILL- had nothing but an uphill battle in keeping up with pleasing most of the players at least some of the time as the industry's evolved and expectations have practically mutated.

 

Bioware's had the examples, the lessons, the successes and the failures of literally hundreds upon hundreds of other MMO's, from the tiny and bizarre to the AAA and successful (and all in between) to take lessons from.

 

They have chosen to ignore a great deal of history, to selectively interpret certain parts of that history through a lens that, if the product itself is commentative, has been obsolete for years, and did a fantastic job of hyping SWTOR to a point that -even if they had done everything perfectly-, they could not have lived up to the level of where they pushed the bar of expectations.

 

What did WoW bring to the table that was so incredibly innovative? You say yourself that it stole a ton of stuff from existing games. It also didn't have much competition, a large number of their subscribers were people playing MMOs for the first time. You don't have to be all that innovative to appease newcomers, you just have to make it appeal to them by making it more casual friendly or just make it appeal to them.

 

 

--

 

 

If the droves of angry people on this forum are to be held at fault for anything, it is that they believed the hype.

 

Bioware, on the other hand, has yet to demonstrate that they can do anything other than providing a genuinely praise-worthy back end of network and server infrastructure more intelligently and comprehensively than Blizzard did in the MMO equivalent of the age of steam.

 

The hype said a great deal about innovation; where is this innovation? All I see are relatively cheap gimmicks tacked onto a selectively copied Burning Crusade with lightsabers and a story delivery model that is done better by scores of single player games -including Bioware's own offerings in that segment-.

 

Are the gimmicks bad? No. Things like space combat and datacrons as easter egg hunts and that like aren't bad at all, but they're not a load-bearing support for the game's value.

 

Is all the blatant copying of Burning Crusade era WoW's mechanics and talent trees and combat scalings bad? Guess it depends on if you liked Burning Crusade specifically for those things or not, but what it isn't and what nobody can posture a single valid argument rebutting is innovative in even the smallest way. It isn't. Not even slightly. Not even a little.

 

So bringing interactive story to a genre that was completely devoid of it isn't innovative in any way? Not even slightly? Not even a little?

 

You seem to praise WoW for taking many aspects of previous games before it but then condemn SWTOR for doing the same.

 

Is the story delivery model bad? Dear me no. But they might have tried a little harder to look at their own game library at the least to see better and more compellingly rendered...-EVERYTHING- to do with it. We know Bioware can tell a fantastic, emotionally gripping story with elaborate characterization of their NPC's.

 

What the hell happened here? Why are our companions so comparatively stagnant and shallow that they feel, to interact with, like little more than cardboard cut-outs when compared to the cast of either currently released Mass Effect games?

 

Seems to me that the plodding pace of an MMO and the equally generic methods of gaining opportunities to interact with any NPC's, companions or otherwise, ripped a whole dimension off their characterizations.

 

Even though this game is trying to give you a good story it is at its heart an MMO. It has to support having your friends in the party and having your companions swapped out or missing entirely. Single player games are a lot more controlled, so you can flesh out your companions a lot more easily. In SWTOR you have to account for many different scenarios and it restricts the amount of scripted events that would normally be used to give your companions more personality

--

 

 

 

So, in closing; the bugs and issues with graphics and the engine and all that technical fluff will get worked out in time. Absolutely will on the great majority of those things.

 

But we're never, unless miracles really do happen, going to see the infrastructure itself change very quickly or very radically in any direction, and that infrastructure, despite all the references available that could have been learned from, fails to not only do anything new, but doesn't even do that which is tired, old and timeworn as well as those that did their infrastructural game designing in the MMO age of steam.

 

No MMO comes out fully polished in every aspect. There's always room for improvement, which is why they've been working on the areas they feel are the most lacking. They're adding the new UI, guild banks, etc.

 

If this game is exactly the same (or worse, in your eyes) than WoW why did I have no interest in playing it, but love SWTOR? Why did my friend quickly stop playing WoW shortly after starting, but loves SWTOR?

 

 

There's no excuse for it. It's tantamount unto what it would be like if a couple of doctors of psychology, enamored of Sigmund Freud, tried to make slight revisions to his theories, hype them as mystic wisdom and sell them in booklets at checkout counters of supermarkets to neo-pagans and self-diagnosing hypochondriacs while simultaneously trying to get university graduate programs to include them in their departmental curriculum as serious, ground-breaking and innovative advancements of the field.

 

Bloody embarassing, if that needs to be said.

 

Whether this game got hyped by players as the best thing since sliced bread, and whether or not it lives up to that doesn't change the fact that it's a very good game. Does Call of Duty borrowing most of its features from other existing FPS games invalidate its popularity, or WoW borrowing from other games invalidate its popularity as well?

Edited February 22, 2012 by MillionsKNives

[Coldsmoke-SS]

So much buttrage because people can't just accept that this game is just a wow reskin / new UI at the moment. Hopefully they will improve upon it instead of pushing out status-quo updates.

[Icebaron]

And here is the list what customers should compare instead and majority does.

 

Instanced PvP

SW:ToR: 3 for 8 man teams, no rated options

WoW: 8 normal mode BGs of different sizes, 5 rated BGs for 10 man teams, 5 arenas of different sizes

 

Queue Anywhere for PvP

SW:Tor Yes

WoW: Yes

 

Raid Encounters:

SW:ToR: 2

WoW: 27 10-40 mans

 

Dungeons:

SW:ToR: 16

WoW: 75

 

Outdoor PvP objectives:

SW:ToR 1area

WoW: 2 areas

 

Full Voice Acting:

SW:ToR: Yes

WoW: No

 

Class Specific Quests:

SW:ToR Yes

WoW: No

 

Quest/Map Locations:

SW:ToR: Yes

WoW: Yes

 

User Customization HUD:

SW:ToR - No

WoW: Yes, with mods

 

End Game Mounts:

SW:ToR: Lots

WoW: Lot more

 

Level 85 Gear:

SW:ToR: 3 Tiers of PvP gear, and 3 Teirs of Raid gear

WoW: Lots of different tier gear in PvP and Pve

 

Flipping DPS Meter:

SW:ToR No and not needed atm cause all endgame fights are very low in terms of difficulty

WoW: Yes

 

Achievements:

SW:ToR: No

WoW: Yes

 

Classes/Races:

SW:ToR: 4 archetypes, 8 classes, 8 races

WoW: 10 classes, 19 main role specs, 10 races

 

Player Housing:

SW:ToR: No.

WoW: No

 

Crafting:

SW:ToR: 6 crafting 8 gathering

WoW: 8 crafting 4 gathering 4 secondary professions

 

Dual Spec'ing:

SW:ToR: No

WoW: Yes

 

Looking For Group Tool:

SW:ToR: no

WoW: Yes

 

Leveling to Max (AVERAGE):

SW:ToR: Level 50 6 ingame days about

WoW: Level 85 8 ingame days about

 

Well played, but you have one small error there. WoW DOES have class quests, just not that many. Some of them require a group to do. Or has this changed since I left WoW?

 

And you should also add columns for;

Day/Night Cycles

Flying Mounts

Sitting

Swimming

Arena

Travel Time

Underwater Combat

Holidays

Beer (we even have a holiday for it)

Rare Spawns

Barbershop

Macros (mouseover macros are ftw)

Class weapon variety (advanced classes only use one type of weapon ever)

Race variation (Tauren vs Gnome, let the hilarity ensue)

Humor

 

....well, that is all I can think of off the top of my head in game. Outside the game they have amory, forum icons matching avatars that links to armory, mobile phone aution house apps, mobile phone armory apps and an item shop, faction transfers, server transfers, name changes and race changes

Edited February 22, 2012 by Icebaron

[Dawginole]

This is such a ridiculous analogy.

 

Actually what was ridiculous about the analogy is that is exactly what Apple has done. They reinvented the wheel of cell phones and have now been selling the same product for 5 years with a slight tweak every year while other handset makers are making leaps forward. So you actually are sold a phone that is either worse or on par with the phones around it and told it's the best thing ever because it's an iPhone. And I own and iPhone and love it, I just recognize the bullcrap that's sold with it.

 

 

I CANNOT wait until GW2 comes out to watch all of the QQ that surrounds that game. I plan on picking it up so I can have a front row seat to what has really became a game in-and-of itself--I call it "Xtreme MMO launch rage watching."

 

I remarked on this at launch because I have now experienced it with the launch of FFXIV (which actually did have a load of issues) and SWTOR. But it appears the trend is to jump on the bandwagon of the next MMO, proclaim that it will "show this game" how to launch a real MMO, and rage quit. Then the player goes to that new game, plays it for half a month and does the same thing, proclaims the next MMO that's six months off and king, and rage quits.

 

It's actually humorous that these people can't see what they're doing.

[Uruare]

What did WoW bring to the table that was so incredibly innovative? You say yourself that it stole a ton of stuff from existing games. It also didn't have much competition, a large number of their subscribers were people playing MMOs for the first time. You don't have to be all that innovative to appease newcomers, you just have to make it appeal to them by making it more casual friendly or just make it appeal to them.

 

WoW wasn't facing 500+ forms of competition; the standard for innovation was drastically lower back then. What WoW did in redelivering much that'd already been seen in a fashion that only had some fairly small twists to it and the gimmick-become-mainstay of abundant quests?

 

It worked in its time. They pulled a Thomas Edison in a time when there really wasn't better to be seen (and who knows how many Nicholai Teslas they beat to the punch to do it) and nobody was doing it better as history went on to prove fiscally and numerically.

 

 

 

So bringing interactive story to a genre that was completely devoid of it isn't innovative in any way? Not even slightly? Not even a little?

 

You've clearly failed to play many other MMO's. Many of them have robust story and lore; some of them have very involved storylines that are delivered in variably saturating fashions.

 

What SWTOR brings to the table on that front is voice acting and rendering most points of interaction as cut scenes. But that's an old hat to the RPG genre that Bioware themselves helped pioneer into the mainstream and helped popularize the format to such extent as that other genres of game altogether took to utilizing it extensively.

 

In short, they invested more effort into doing what many MMO's don't try as hard to do, but do, in varying degrees, also try to do; deliver story. The format isn't innovative; see a list of games out of most of the genres for literally thousands of examples of this format being used.

 

They're not even being as innovative as the guy that taped a penlight to a screwdriver so he could see what he was doing better; they just invested more in the quality of the penlight.

 

 

 

 

 

You seem to praise WoW for taking many aspects of previous games before it but then condemn SWTOR for doing the same.

 

I praise WoW for equivocally being the guy that went bigtime with his crappy penlight glued to a screwdriver on the market.

 

Several effective ages later, Bioware comes along and improves the quality of the penlight, but doesn't actually redesign anything. In fact, many of the designs utilized virtual ages ago that were deemed outmoded and abandoned by WoW, they very closely patterned on to such extent as that they got all the design flaws right along with it.

 

And none of the work-arounds and ad-hoc 'fixes' for most of them. Their much higher quality penlight is taped to a shoddier screwdriver.

 

 

 

Even though this game is trying to give you a good story it is at its heart an MMO. It has to support having your friends in the party and having your companions swapped out or missing entirely. Single player games are a lot more controlled, so you can flesh out your companions a lot more easily. In SWTOR you have to account for many different scenarios and it restricts the amount of scripted events that would normally be used to give your companions more personality

 

I'm well aware of the different needs and concerns of a single player game versus an MMO. No expert on the subject, mind you, but I do a lot of reading and inquiring upon topics that interest me, and this one hasn't been all that hard to get a lot of information on.

 

Its still a single player experience stretched out over an MMO's framework. Kind've awkward. The pacing feels very plodding between main story bits, and there's a lot of sideshow quests that utilize the same formula as that's been common to MMO bulk quests since WoW went hogwild on them.

 

Is it bad? Not in my opinion; just kind've awkward and a bit disappointing per my experience. They might wrangle innovation out of this yet, of course, but just yet?

 

No. They do not, in my opinion, deserve that praise just yet. We'll see what they do with this as time goes by of course, but for now, we've got a single player game's story awkwardly stretched out over time-dillating factors and MMO-geared mechanisms that makes the whole thing feel like one of the lousiest single player RPG games I've played in a while.

 

The story they're trying to tell winds up conflicting, in my experience, with the telemetries of an MMO. They take single player experiences and stretch them out like too little butter over too much bread to make it all work with those MMO telemetries and dillute their own story's experience with MMO bulk quests that have nothing to do with anything anybody is even supposed to care about per the class stories, and half the time per even the planet storylines.

 

The telemetries of an MMO wind up conflicting in kind for too closely patterning off of things that have been done to death before, which encourage a race-to-endgame and gear-grind mentality courtesy of all the years many have had in other games.

 

The game doesn't seem to know what it's trying to ask its players to focus on is the problem created there. Whether anybody likes it or not, the standard set by WoW has taught people that in an MMO, you do this and this and this, you care about that and that and that, and all else is fluff and probably irrelevant.

 

Specifically, you care about leveling efficiently, mastering your class-playing skills and gearing up to raid. This is what the WoW MMO model, heavily patterned on by SWTOR, asks of you.

 

The story delivery model asks you to care about what's going on and, for the LS/DS morality system, why. But the LS/DS morality system is tied to gear on several fronts, and the predominant WoW MMO model's standard frequently winds up overtaking the story's purpose altogether.

 

Thus, LS/DS choices will be made based on what will, in a players mind, help them level efficiently, somehow do better at playing their class and ultimately preparing to hit dungeons and raid for yet better gear still.

 

It becomes part of, even if indirectly, the WoW-styled MMO gear progression.

 

That's just one example of where the story model and the WoW MMO model do not synergize well.

 

 

And that will be where they might get innovative if they do at all; synergizing those things.

 

I don't see a lot of synergy yet; just a lot of people trying to shove story delivery out of the way with the spacebar once the novelty's gone and picking LS or DS options with little to no care about what's going on because they want to wear certain relics or get cool looking DS corruption or use certain LS or DS gear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

No MMO comes out fully polished in every aspect. There's always room for improvement, which is why they've been working on the areas they feel are the most lacking. They're adding the new UI, guild banks, etc.

 

If this game is exactly the same (or worse, in your eyes) than WoW why did I have no interest in playing it, but love SWTOR? Why did my friend quickly stop playing WoW shortly after starting, but loves SWTOR?

 

Agreed on the first part. As for why your friend felt and thinks what he does, I haven't the foggiest clue. Preference, I'd limit myself to guessing?

 

 

 

Whether this game got hyped by players as the best thing since sliced bread, and whether or not it lives up to that doesn't change the fact that it's a very good game. Does Call of Duty borrowing most of its features from other existing FPS games invalidate its popularity, or WoW borrowing from other games invalidate its popularity as well?

 

 

This game got hyped by Bioware/EA's marketing campaign as being a bastion of innovation.

 

As said before, if a great many angry players can be blamed for anything, it's that they believed the hype and were encouraged by that marketing in tandem with the typical absence of very many details on what anything would actually work like and play like before beta's started to dream up all sorts of awesome to expect.

 

They're still not doing anything I, for one, would call innovative. If they'd in some way changed the structure of gameplay to synergize with the stories they're trying to tell, I'd be all over calling them innovative.

 

Innovation is hard. Its a lot easier to stick an expensive penlight on a shoddy screwdriver and call it innovative because the penlight is very light-y, even though the screwdriver is a sub-par as screwdrivers go.

 

Consequently, many that wanted an awesome penlight will be stuck with an uncared for or outright unwanted screwdriver taped to it as baggage. Many that wanted a better screwdriver than what the other guys are selling will be getting an inferior product with a very nice light they will probably wish they could rip off and throw away before too terribly long.

 

The synergy just isn't there yet.

 

Will be interesting to see if they can work that in though.

 

I await the innovation I paid to see still, in the meantime.

Edited February 23, 2012 by Uruare