Interesting article on SWTOR

[MPagano]

And yet if they waited there'd be the same complaints. There's no win win when people expect games to have Everything that took wow what 5+ years to put into their game? Its unrealistic and a real gamer, a real MMO gamer knows that.

 

Thats not to say it wouldn't of benefited from maybe another month or two or better optimization of course.

 

You're correct that there would have been complaints if they didn't release it, but do you feel that those complaints of wanting the game now instead of later are as valid as the ones that point to the fact that the game was pulled out of the oven 3+ months too soon?

 

It's BW prerogative to make the game ready for release, and it's the community's prerogative to whine until they have their hands on it. Only one of the two failed to deliver in this respect. While I agree that there is no win-win given today's MMO landscape, that doesn't forgive the oversight demonstrated by the developer.

 

Furthermore, the single larget contributing factor to people expecting a game like WoW after 5 years is the fact that games liek Rift and TOR aren't breaking away from the WoW formula. These games are being compared so closely to WoW because they're so similar. TOR is just a theme-park MMO with less features than WoW and a novel approach to quest text via voice acting. The latter can only serve to generate buzz, but certainly isn't a feature which provides longevity to the play experience (if anything, it gets in the way after you've played a while).

 

Should TOR launch with as much as WoW has today? Of course not. But little quality-of-life features and things like better world designs would have gone a long way to making the game feel more rich. If you're going to make an MMO similar to Blizzard's WoW, you better have many of the same features already in place and you better have strong features that differentiate you from WoW.

 

These games are failing to beat WoW because they're trying to replace it. You need to do your own thing. GW2 is an example of a game that is completely reinterpretting the genre in big ways. TOR just fell short in many respects, and it can't be blamed on the redundant fact that MMO players are the way they are. Shame on a developer for ignoring that.

[Meldwyn]

And yet if they waited there'd be the same complaints. There's no win win when people expect games to have Everything that took wow what 5+ years to put into their game? Its unrealistic and a real gamer, a real MMO gamer knows that.

 

Thats not to say it wouldn't of benefited from maybe another month or two or better optimization of course.

 

I dont have a problem with the release, but not including some features other mmo's have today was just a poor decision on their part. It almost seems like they had a bad case of "tunnel vision" with companions and story to the exclusion of what really keeps people actively playing an mmo.

[grandmthethird]

it wouldn't have mattered how long they waited and polished the game, as pointed out in that article. the MMO community had an unrealistic expectation of what this game was going to be. an MMO is an ever developing game/world, that is always worked on. so you would think a bug or two, a few missing features would'nt make much difference, as we all know these can be added and fixed in patches.

 

and this point is going to be made again. when the next big MMO is released.

 

the main problem with MMOs today is "forums"

Edited March 14, 2012 by grandmthethird

[Rolzhard]

Great article and superficially plausible but the writer is missing a key issue. The rage (and bile) from the MMO community is because they were "sold" an MMO and while SWTOR is a great game it is a lousy MMO.

 

Until BW turns SWTOR into a decent MMO with all the contingent elements that are expected of an MMO they can continue to expect bile and derision from the MMO community. And, to be fair, they thoroughly deserve it.

 

They have been arrogant.They have not and did not listen nor seek its advice, or seek out suitable MMO talent in crafting this game.(fairly obvious) They presumed to show the MMO community how its done^^Because, you know they're good at story and VO's and stuff:)

 

Well you can fool some of the people all the time but not all the people all the time.

 

For once I say, haters do your thing, roast their arses until they actually pay attention and turn this game into a viable MMO.

 

In the meantime, I'm going to level my alts^^.

[Trolltar]

And yet if they waited there'd be the same complaints. There's no win win when people expect games to have Everything that took wow what 5+ years to put into their game? Its unrealistic and a real gamer, a real MMO gamer knows that.

 

Thats not to say it wouldn't of benefited from maybe another month or two or better optimization of course.

 

With the exception of content I really tire of that defense.

 

Yes, it took WOW 5 or 6 years to have a LFG tool (for example). But SWTOR isn't competing against WOW of 2005, but WOW of 2012. The features that players have come to expect need to be available, at launch.

 

Content I'm more forgiving of. Its not possible to ever provide enough content for everyone, so I don't get too bent when games can't.

[Cerion]

Great article. I'm quite sure part of the unrealistic expectation lies with former SWG players who either:

 

a). Projected what SWG pre-nge was onto what they thought SWTOR might be despite being told otherwise. Also known as delusion.

 

b). Are still pissed at SOE for ruining SWG, and are further pissed that SWTOR isn't a remake of SWG and so have a vendetta against it.

[DarthRavnos]

300 million is a figure based on one financial analyst's projection that the media picked up and people upset with TOR like to wave as their banner.

 

Numerous other financial analysts have projected a 100 million-200 million range. The most recent report we have for the budget was in Jan of this year,citing a 200 million dollar budget because of the immense amount of story and voice acting.

 

If WoW was fully voice acted and story driven you could expect to see their budget to be at around 200 million as well.

 

I hate this argument from people, it holds no water and most seem to embrace fallacies about the budget and then wave the numbers in people's faces as truth.

 

Auhh, the age old SWTOR Forum Burden of Proof game... I am not going to bite. Though you may wish to review your own sources. I would start by Googling EALouse and by reviewing transcripts from EA's investor site ( http://investor.ea.com/financials.cfm ).

[Frostvein]

I didn't expect the level of content in ToR that WoW has.

 

What I DID expect were common and "Modern MMO features" like they mentioned.

 

It basically went like this for me once I hit the mid to late teens on my toon.

Meh, this interface is kind of teh suck - not a big deal though, I'll just go download some add-ons and fix it. Hold up. Bioware doesn't allow add-ons? Well, ok I guess. I can just reconfigure my UI a bit. Oh. No UI customization? Jeeze, that kinda blows. I mean I suppose its not too too bad, I really only used it for Bartender and recount anyway. I guess I can use the current bars and just macro stuff around it. Wait. No macros? Really? This is getting stupid. Ok, screw it then. I don't need macros, I can just not bind or use some of the weaker hitting abilities and ****, or make my keyboard do it. Just let me go kill some baddies and I'll just check my combat log and see what things hit for. Wait, no. No... Really....? Seriously!? Can't be. Holy ****. They didn't include a combat log?! What is this, 1992? No, cant even be 92, even MUDS had freaking combat logs. What a joke.

Edited March 14, 2012 by Frostvein

[Dezzi]

Lots of people confusing the words "content" and "features" in here...

[Drewser]

I agree. That image gave me a good laugh.

 

The "troll republic" is partially BioWare's blame though. I have personally noticed they don't do a very good job of actually listening to their customers. One example is a very large out cry to "Fix Ilum!!!". The response from BioWare (brought up at the recent Guild Summit) was to deprecate Ilum and promote WarZones usage instead.

 

You see what they did there? A very common trick in magic. "Look over here... *Poof* Ilum has disappeared.". But if you don't give the customer their watch back at the end of the magic trick... people get pissed off. LOL

 

I think customers would have been happy with if the problems in the game had been addressed rather then avoided. This leads to increased anger in the community. BioWare hasn't figured out that the easy road is not necessarily the right one yet.

 

If they don't have an immediate fix for it would you rather it stay live in its current form?

 

I's rather have a company can it than leave it in game not working.

[Drewser]

Auhh, the age old SWTOR Forum Burden of Proof game... I am not going to bite. Though you may wish to review your own sources. I would start by Googling EALouse and by reviewing transcripts from EA's investor site ( http://investor.ea.com/financials.cfm ).

 

LOL! EALouse. Come on man!

[Goretzu]

If they don't have an immediate fix for it would you rather it stay live in its current form?

 

I's rather have a company can it than leave it in game not working.

 

 

 

This is exactly what happened in Warrhammer Online (some of it under Mythic, some of it under Bioware-Mythic and some of it under Bioware).

 

 

Stuff was removed.

 

 

Some of it came back in some form years later (literally) and some of it never did.

 

 

 

 

 

Now hopefully Ilum is going to be fixed........ but just as realistically it could be out of sight, out of mind and it may never be sorted out or at least any time soon.

 

Personally looking at what they are doing in 1.2 with regard to it, I cannot see anything being brought back before late 2012 and probably more likely 2013.

 

RvR seems to have been offically "killed" in SWTOR.

[DarthRavnos]

If they don't have an immediate fix for it would you rather it stay live in its current form?

 

I's rather have a company can it than leave it in game not working.

 

If BioWare took the approach of canning features or content that have bugs in them we would likely not have a game at all. If you catch my meaning here.

[Lignul]

Ignorant review from an ignorant "journalist" aimed to ignorant people.

Enough said.

[Drewser]

If BioWare took the approach of canning features or content that have bugs in them we would likely not have a game at all. If you catch my meaning here.

 

BS. There are bugs and bugs that simply make something unplayable. There are very few of the latter.

 

They are in no win situation with Ilum. If they leave it in as is, people complain. If the take it out and try to revamp it, people complain.

[DarthRavnos]

BS. There are bugs and bugs that simply make something unplayable. There are very few of the latter.

 

They are in no win situation with Ilum. If they leave it in as is, people complain. If the take it out and try to revamp it, people complain.

 

For the first half of your reply I would direct you to visit the following...

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=11

 

...and inform them that there are very few.

 

For the second half of your reply I agree. People will complain either way. It's the nature of the beast. You can have "it" Fast, Cheap, or Good. Pick any two.

[Darne]

Good article, but I think they missed some things and end up giving SWTOR too much credit.

 

I understand it's a new MMO, can we all stop talking about the fact that there are only x warzones, y flashpoints, z operations.... I KNOW ALREADY! It's new, I can't expect there to be tons of content. That's totally fine, reasonable, and expected. Let's move on for ****s sake.

 

My biggest complaint is game design/features related, and I believe most other peoples' are as well. Think for a second. What does this game do that no other game out there has or maybe does better than other games?

 

Companions? Nope. Every BW game has companions. Games like ME and KotOR in fact, do companions better.

Story? Nope. A 9th grader reads better stories in his English class. Out of video games, this is hardly the best work out there either.

Environment? Nope. Corelia = Nar Shaada with lights turned on. Hoth = Tatooine with snow over the sand. Tons (I mean TONS) of areas are copy pasted and reused. Orbital stations are a joke. Fleets are identical. Nothing is unique.

Abilities? Nope. Ridiculous amount of CC, and copy past abilities between classes lead to only 3 real classes: tank, healer, DPS. Everyone is the same give or take.

Racials? Nope. Races mean nothing.

Voice overs? Nope. Not unique to this game and quantity over quality for the most part in here (only story ones were wel done for most part).

Space combat? Nope. Star fox 64.

PvP? Nope. Guild wars, Diablo, every shooter out there.

PvE? Nope. 9/10 bosses are tank and spank. Very boring boss mechanics in general.

Events? Nope. No Christmas, New Years, or Valentines day events anywhere to be seen. Rift did server wide events. It's been done before.

Community? Nope. This game feels like single player game with a chat window. Even Gauntlet has a more social feel to it with 4 players.

Guilds? UI? Character customization? Auction House? etc etc etc etc

Everything I see in this game feels old, done before, and not innovative at all. This game didn't invent anything new to bring to the table.

 

There is NO FEATURE of this game that is unique to this game. They took parts of other games, mashed it all together, and called it "the next MMO" under the umbrella of story and voice acting.

 

To be fair, I guess legacy system is their new "game changing" perk. But for me, a time sink in leveling up alts is a cop out to developing truly fun game play. Story can only keep me interested for so long before I read a book or watch a movie. Bad game play is the reason I unsubbed and probably will never come back when my time expires. To them, this game is playing as intended. To me, there is better gameplay in other games.

[DraonaiMimnov]

"If they add UI Customization and appearance tabs, it'll become too much like SWG. If they add combat logs it'll be just like WOW. If they allow add-ons or patch too fast it'll be too much like RIFT. If they allow ranked warzones it'll be just like warhammer.

 

Just take out /tells, it makes this game too much like WOW in the first place. Improve the graphics or it'll be too much like Ultima Online."

 

You can't please everyone.

Edited March 14, 2012 by DraonaiMimnov

[JohunMorlish]

Haters gonna hate.

[DigitalPrime]

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/bioware-mmo-project/1220572p1.html

 

 

Interesting read, some valid points.....

 

but more importantly, one of my posts is listed on the forums "screenshot" - I feel special.

 

Some valid points??. He hit the nail on the head when speaking about the community which comes from these forums.

[Vyradder]

I find it vastly amusing that the author thought these forums were as toxic as he did. I've seen much worse in other gaming forums. You folks should have stopped by the EvE forums last summer when CCP tried to introduce a play to win micro transaction model into the game, for example. Heck, the players even took that beef into the game and caused massive mayhem. Another situation like that happened in WoW's early days when discontent among a single class caused in in-game riot and brought down an entire server.

 

These forums are blunted by the obvious stupidity of some posters, and the general lack of consensus on any given thing. If you could weed out the fools and get the whole community behind something together, then we might be talking about some toxicity here.

[MPagano]

So you're suggesting that these forums aren't that negative because there are so many different negative posts that no one can agree on which thing they hate more?

[Randen]

Spot-on article. Worth a read. Thanks for sharing!

[Holden_Dissent]

So we're too blame? What a huge relief. If I had continued to fault developers for saying one thing and delivering another I might have saved myself some heartache and cash. But knowing now that I should passively accept mediocrity so someone else' feelings can be spared the trauma of lurking game forums, its almost worth enduring.

 

Awww. Poor guy. Heartache over a video game?

[Holden_Dissent]

I think the paid anti-Swtor propaganda crew showed up in full force on this thread. Like ignoring fish in a barrel it is.