The 4th Pillar and Story: Did SWTOR lose direction?

[siegedeluxe]

Well you can do dailies fun too. Take a look at Firelands dailies in wow. Thats dailies and story progression but here we get stupid QUEST-O-BOX erm and nothing else. No story progression at all. And what if i don't like to level alts and don't want to see theirs stories? maybe i want some story progression on my sith sorc. But i agree this game just abomination two kind of games mixed together and thats not very good mix with bad taste for both sides:confused:

 

Dailies are boring grinds.

[Arodin]

Honestly, I think people who are claiming that they are all about the story and that Bioware has failed them by not releasing more story yet are kinda being hypocrites, because I'm sure not a single one of you has played through all 8 class stories already (if you have, please get a job or find a charity to volunteer for or something). If you are really a story-focused player who is in this for the 4th Pillar, you should want to see all 8 story-lines, not just 1 or 2. There's a lot more story available for you, but if you're sticking with just one or two characters you're choosing to ignore a lot of content.

 

I'm sure the problem is that in order to play through another class-story of the same faction, you have to repeat a lot of content. I get that. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes. I think if Bioware could make it a bit less tedious to play a new character through repeated content, all of those class stories wouldn't go to waste. Legacy XP boost unlocks in 1.3 might help, although I'm bothered by the fact that they are only for space combat, flashpoints and PvP. N0o Legacy XP boosts for people who just like to do the quests? Still, if the XP boosts are significant enough, maybe running a FP or a couple space missions will allow us to skip some of those pesky side-quests.

[V-Serp]

Honestly, I think people who are claiming that they are all about the story and that Bioware has failed them by not releasing more story yet are kinda being hypocrites, because I'm sure not a single one of you has played through all 8 class stories already (if you have, please get a job or find a charity to volunteer for or something). If you are really a story-focused player who is in this for the 4th Pillar, you should want to see all 8 story-lines, not just 1 or 2. There's a lot more story available for you, but if you're sticking with just one or two characters you're choosing to ignore a lot of content.

 

I'm sure the problem is that in order to play through another class-story of the same faction, you have to repeat a lot of content. I get that. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes. I think if Bioware could make it a bit less tedious to play a new character through repeated content, all of those class stories wouldn't go to waste. Legacy XP boost unlocks in 1.3 might help, although I'm bothered by the fact that they are only for space combat, flashpoints and PvP. N0o Legacy XP boosts for people who just like to do the quests? Still, if the XP boosts are significant enough, maybe running a FP or a couple space missions will allow us to skip some of those pesky side-quests.

 

I've completed the SI and JC storylines, as well as more than half of JK. I'm maybe a quarter of the way through the SW and Trooper storylines, and have started IA, Smuggler and BH although only a few hours in at most.

 

And honestly it's really not worth going through all of the content repeatedly just for those small parts of the story. Not when you can just read the story somewhere else or watch the videos for it. Right now I'm actually picking up off what I'd done for the JK and will do the SW after that. It'll take about a day to watch probably but it saves a lot more time than playing the game through. Also since the scenes are all organized it helps pacing so much.

 

This game doesn't really stand well as a repeatable solo experience. I'm one of those people that replays solo games a lot, but usually I take breaks between replays that can last months or years, and the games I replay don't feel like they're full of mostly filler but instead feel like the entire game is one story, or focused on that one character or world. SWTOR's planet stories are too redundant and since you're paying a sub it's hard to justify putting it down for months without playing it again.

[Overtone]

I wonder if the cost is keeping them back from releasing more story driven content. I'm sure it isn't quick to do all that voice work either. Edited April 30, 2012 by Overtone

[Kubernetic]

No, we're not, reread the thread title, this is about the shift Bioware is making from story to Dungeon runs and Raids, you're out of topic, which I guess renders the rest of what you wrote pointless.

 

What is your proof that they've shifted from story-based MMORPG to dungeons and raids? So far I haven't seen anything that even remotely qualifies except "They haven't released more story chapters yet."

 

Let me know.

[Kubernetic]

And honestly it's really not worth going through all of the content repeatedly just for those small parts of the story. Not when you can just read the story somewhere else or watch the videos for it. Right now I'm actually picking up off what I'd done for the JK and will do the SW after that. It'll take about a day to watch probably but it saves a lot more time than playing the game through. Also since the scenes are all organized it helps pacing so much.

 

IF this is truly the case, then this game will probably never be what you want it to be. Sounds like you want a new Star Wars TV series, not a massively multiplayer online game.

 

This game doesn't really stand well as a repeatable solo experience. I'm one of those people that replays solo games a lot, but usually I take breaks between replays that can last months or years, and the games I replay don't feel like they're full of mostly filler but instead feel like the entire game is one story, or focused on that one character or world. SWTOR's planet stories are too redundant and since you're paying a sub it's hard to justify putting it down for months without playing it again.

 

I don't really understand this paragraph. It isn't supposed to be a solo game. Numerous missions have been interwoven so that there is a mix of personal stories along with shared sequential stories that allow various players to team up and achieve the same objectives.

 

You haven't had time to take breaks off from this game for several months yet, certainly not years. And you know that when you cancel, they stop charging your subscription rate each month, right? You can still do the same things you do with other games, but you just need to cancel the subscription instead of just leave it lifeless on the computer.

 

But the benefit is that by the time you come back in a couple of months or a year, once you pay that subscription rate to start up again, you're going to have a heck of a download to get through to load all the new stuff that the developers were adding while you were away. It's not exactly the same with a single player game.

[Drakonnen]

Yes, unfortunately it did lose direction.

 

I think that in deciding how to build this game, they looked at Star Wars Galaxies' failures but not its successes.

 

Despite an extreme lack of any real content, no raids, no real missions other than escort or search and destroy the same mini bases over and over, and very little in the way of organized PvP, people stuck around SWG for a surprisingly long time solely because the tools were there to make them feel like they were living in the Star Wars universe. Player housing and cities that you could design yourselves, lots of class choices that they could change and redo on the fly, faction bases you can place and have your own enclaves, etc. , people felt like they actually WERE living in the Star Wars universe.

 

Currently there really are no real tools to support an RP community or make us feel like we are apart of the Star Wars universe. We're all just playing the same 8 linear stories with a finite length and ending everyone else is playing, with nothing beyond that to let us create our own stories, and that really is unfortunate.

 

So, yes, surprisingly, SWTOR actually needs to take a page from SWG.

[GalacticKegger]

IMHO end game's Story Mode is a step in the right direction. The potential issue I see is high-level end gamers disliking having to "stoop" to story mode to get a heavy dose of continued story in operations. If that ever happens I'll simply file it under "options a player has available to them but chooses not to engage." Edited April 30, 2012 by GalacticKegger

[AshenK]

Here's my two cents.

 

First things first most MMO Players I feel believe that story in an MMO is 'bad'. See many of us have been told for years that whatever character you make that character will not be in any shape or form 'special'. You should not and will not be the big hero or villain in the world. You should be nowhere near the level of the 'big' characters that are in the game. Your character is just Joe Schmo, some random person in the world who may have a 'moment' however for the most part you shouldn't feel like you have made any type of impact on the world.

 

Cases in point I can remember around 2002 on Ultima Online they started doing a number of in game events putting a new character in named Dawn who as those events and stories had been told is the one who saved everything and everyone for the most part. Or SWG with the idea of "Your not going to be Princess Leia, you'll be her dress maker."

 

Along with us the players being told in my eyes that we are just random everyday people in the world we've had this whole idea that everything in the game has to be 'massive'. Raids should be 20+ people, PvP is only fun when it's 100+ vs 100+, going out and leveling should have you with tons of people, the word 'Solo' is a dirty evil word and shouldn't be used. Really I think you all get the point everything needs to be vast and huge.

 

And dare I say due to this way of thinking, due to folks like Raph Koster who feel that 'you' are not special and should never feel special. Due to the whole line of thinking that "MMO stands for Massive and we need to make everything massive!" We've lost those other three letters, RPG.

 

Now maybe I am insane or living on a whole other world but my idea of MMORPG was this. It's like a Pen and Paper game of Dungeons and Dragons. A game that has me and four other of my friends playing our own classes, role playing with those classes thanks to things like character alignment with a Dungeon Master telling us what's going on around us. Oh yes D&D has it's plotless Dungeon Crawls (in the video game world that's called a Diablo) however talk to any D&D Player about the games and I'm sure they will tell you about epic games they had been in and what happened with whatever character they played.

 

But something like that in the MMO World? Oh no! That's wrong! We shouldn't have anything like that! The main goal of the MMO should be working your way from level one to the max level then going off and PvPing! Story? If I want that I'll just read something some RPer posted or play a single player RPG.

 

Sadly I think TOR shows what MMO Players want. They could careless in the end about any type of story, they don't care about the world around them or why that NPC is asking them to go get that box they left behind in the ruined town over the hill. Story is bad, feeling like a hero or villain is bad, give us more bigger raids and bigger PvP! That's what the game is really about.

[superpipito]

Reading all this again and come to conclusion this is dead end for swtor. BW unable to deliver story content cos this obviously not possible at all to make missions and stories for 8 classes and companions in 3-4 months. As for hardcore mmo ppl too much talking in game already. Whats really BW can do at this point? I just don't see any easy answer. dead end.

[GutPunch]

Props to the OP for a great thread. One of the few posts in this forum worth commenting on.

 

OP, you are 100% correct. I'm more of an "MMO Player" as you defined them because I believe that the ONLY type of content which can satiate the masses is player made content. The wildfire of content consumption is so fast that a developer cannot produce "story" fast enough. If the developers create a framework of tools and places and then let the players operate within those bounds then the game can continue indefinitely.

 

Now before someone jumps down my throat, yes I was aware of nature of this game before I give my credit card info to BioWare. I really enjoyed the SI, SW, and to a limited extend the BH storyline. However, with each successful alt I've become more disenchanted with continuing because the moments of great story are interrupted too damn frequently with kill x, collect y quests (which are nicely voiced over but I heard on my first go around) you've already done. I've heard my clanmates talking about the IA storyline as also being good but I'm already busy redoing the SI story for my tanksin at the moment. I have to say its been a good think work has been demanding more hours recently because I can't handle spending the time grinding another 50 for long periods.

 

Did I recognize that this was a story driven game and not a sandbox? Yes. I'm however, disappointed that we HAVE to spend so much useless time grinding to find the next great story. That is the #1 problem with the story method and SWTOR - too much of the new content is grind and not enough is allowing for easy access to story.

 

Can BioWare resolve the issue? Yeah I hope so. They have been the #1 developer IMHO since the days of KoTOR 1. But they have to pick a hole now: Either,

 

Continue down the story path and give us easier access to alternate storylines and the tools needed to facilitate that goal

OR

bring out Ranked Warzones and new Flashpoints/Ops for the serious MMO (min-maxers, gear grinders) and let us make our own "content".

 

Failing on both fronts isn't going to help BioWare. The Ranked Warzones were very exciting because it opened up the possibility for player driven content but it was shut down at the last minute. The Legacy system described in the Guild Summit Videos showed a lot of progress to help bring out easier access to the storyline. But what we got was a family tree and some gimmick buffs.

 

Please make up your mind BioWare so we can evaluate our desire to play under the new path. Your current one is simply going to drive people away.

[Riggz]

I hate dailies; I would so much more prefer a greater variety of engaging, deep and extremely long mission chains.

 

Dailies feel like work/chores, it's like the routine for many players is to log on, do dailies, log off.

 

My biggest gripe with dailies however, is that in order to get certain 'end-game' gear (such as earpieces, implants... and now black hole stuff) players have no alternative but to do dailies.

 

Also, I hope we get some epic server event comparable to the scale of the gates of AQ or even grander in scale!

 

A.) you're right bioware should give you the gear for free. No, if you don't like doing dailys for black hole comms do nightmare raids for the black hole comms and get the rakata gear. If you aren't geared enough for that then start at story mode and work your way up to HM then Nightmare. If you don't like raiding and are a "solo" player please quit the game and play Kotor 1 and 2 over and over again

 

B.) I have full augmented rakata gear (2088 cunning) and I only did dailys to get my implants and ear pieces and never did them again.

 

C.) You can also do Lost Island and Kaon for black hole comms but I bet you can't do them, I personally farm Lost Island to help out guildies get their rakata chest

[BJWyler]

I think it's too early to suggest that Bioware has abandoned its Story direction. A half dozen dailies, an instance, and an op are far less resource intensive than 8 classes' worth of well-written, voice-acted story content. Let alone the 40 companions in the game. Let alone adding new same-sex romancable companions.

 

These are the kinds of things I expect to see in the first expansion, not a 3-month update.

 

If the first expansion doesn't deliver on many of these items, then we have cause to be alarmed.

 

Quite right. I don't know why it's so easy to forget that a season-ending cliff-hanger in May doesn't get resolved until the next season's premier in September. Why should we expect any different here. A story-driven MMO is like a Soap Opera, many different little plotlines all going on at the same time - and they just keep advancing and changing over the months and years. We are four months into the game, there's no reason to expect or demand to have season two material released now.

 

BJ

[Dezzi]

That's the drawback of story-intensive, linear games; players will ultimately come to the end and wonder what to do next. This is why, despite some inherent flaws, sandbox games tend to draw in players for a longer period of time (it's easier to sink yourself in and become attached to a world that has no "end").

 

BioWare tried something very risky by focusing so heavily on delivering a compelling and entertaining story-driven game. The good news is that they very much succeeded in what they set out to do, which was to deliver gamers an MMO that made story matter (though we can debate what impact your story really has). The problem, however, is that the very nature of story-driven content is that it's a perishable commodity; stories have an ending. In an MMO, where the game's longevity is measured in terms of years--not days--this is a big problem. The challenge for BioWare is to continuously deliver story-driven content at the same quality as that which came at launch.

 

Can BioWare do this?

 

I'm not sure. I think there is something to be said about the Rakghoul Event, which seamlessly blended itself into the galaxy at large and added a sense of time and place to a game that suffers heavily from a lack of dynamism. Still, the event was only minor content, but I'm sure it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to produce--and therein lies the problem.

 

BioWare is at a point now where it would be extremely easy to abandon the story-telling "fourth pillar" in favor of a more mainstream, casual experience that caters to the largest possible audience, while at the same time alienating the diehard fans looking for story, immersion, and character development.

 

In the absence of any official road-map (or announcements of an expansion), I think the next few major updates will be extremely telling about where they plan to go.

Edited April 30, 2012 by Dezzi

[JediElf]

So....so according to you guys Chapter 3 is all we will get? Because 'MMO gamers' don't like story in games?

 

I hope not.

Edited April 30, 2012 by JediElf

[ChazDoit]

So....so according to you guys Chapter 3 is all we will get? Because 'MMO gamers' don't like story in games?

 

I hope not.

 

I hope they give us a little something, I dont want to wait until 2013 to see what happen to my Imperial Agent, or Inquisitor.

 

The way some of these stories ended, I really want to see what happens next

[Sotof]

Dailies without VA does not bother me. Why? Because you are going to do them 20+ times. It gets old and annoying if you are just out to grab some cash. I'm fine with that.

 

However, if this is the direction they are going to for dungeons, quests and so on in the future... Well. I will do the class quests and stop playing. Simple as a that.

[Rafkin]

When I saw that their first event was just more dailies I pre-ordered another game.

[Shamballa]

As per the discussion on the Flashpoint/Operations and PvP threads, the direction of 1.2 has started to worry me.

 

...

 

We are still in the dark as to the direction of our class stories, as to the future of the war, as to the unfinished cliff-hangers left off by the end of some of our companion quests. Key characters like Malgus and Revan feel like they are almost forgotten to pave the way for raids, progression, and pvp.

 

We have received no updates on same sex relationships and character/companion customization improvements for the RP community.

 

The planets are still bland and arid without any ambience, passive wildlife, or even atmospheric sounds.

So 1.2 comes out and we get a new raid and flashpoint with a difficulty rating so high it bars out the majority of the casual players. Most casual immersion players dont get to see the inside of denova or the story there. The new flashpoint and operation create a gear differential that is so great between casuals and "raiders" that the community has effectively split into a raiding "upper class." The only option that casual players have for keeping up is subjecting themselves to a terrible daily grind in corellia for a limited number of black hole commendations. So while progression players enjoy new content and vistas, the majority of the playerbase spends weeks in a crammed rehash blackhole district made up of corellia zone rebuilds -doing the same quests over and over.

 

The majority of the casual players gated from entering new content stand around bored in fleet or are stuck doing illum/belsavis dailies (which are equally boring). With the advent of corellia now the average players has THREE planet fulls of boring dailies to do just to keep up with the "upper class" raiders.

 

All the while we have had no huge impacts on story, no personal story progression, no companion story progression, no alternate leveling zones and low level story sequences to save people rolling alts for legacy from seeing the SAME story conversations they saw on 3 other toons over again (let's face it, the class stories are great but they only comprise a % of the leveling process. People alting are liable to spacebar everything but the 3-4 class quests on each planet).

 

People are bored. Bored people leave.

 

1.2 has effectively moved SWTOR into a raid progression and gear carrot direction without even touching on the "4th pillar" of story that the game promised. Since launch the amount of "story" content that is relevant to individual players and their companions is little to none.

 

...

 

SWTOR needs to make up its mind. If it doesn't capitalize on this 4th pillar and make people feel like they are apart of starwars and not just chasing some progression carrot, people will just leave.

(Emphasis mine)

 

This post does a good job of summarizing some of the main reasons I feel SW:TOR is in decline. I want this game to succeed. Star Wars is a great setting for an MMO, I want my Collector's Edition's cost to be justified, and in general I want a good sci-fi MMO. But I cannot ignore these glaring problems with the game. Bioware has to solve these problems...the game needs to be more fun!

 

I cannot tell you how annoyed I am that for a game that boasts about having story, most of the planet story quests are incredibly boring excuses for a fetch or kill quest. And let's not mention how many of the companion quests do not let you actually run a mission with them. You just see them fad to black as they go off to do something...without you. And seriously, we need alternative planet choices to level up on. I do not want to run the same planets four times for Republic and another same set four times for Imp. Why push additional character leveling with the legacy system when it is so freaking boring??

Edited May 1, 2012 by Shamballa

[Shamballa]

Honestly, I think people who are claiming that they are all about the story and that Bioware has failed them by not releasing more story yet are kinda being hypocrites, because I'm sure not a single one of you has played through all 8 class stories already (if you have, please get a job or find a charity to volunteer for or something). If you are really a story-focused player who is in this for the 4th Pillar, you should want to see all 8 story-lines, not just 1 or 2. There's a lot more story available for you, but if you're sticking with just one or two characters you're choosing to ignore a lot of content.

 

I'm sure the problem is that in order to play through another class-story of the same faction, you have to repeat a lot of content. I get that. It can be a bit of a chore sometimes. I think if Bioware could make it a bit less tedious to play a new character through repeated content, all of those class stories wouldn't go to waste. Legacy XP boost unlocks in 1.3 might help, although I'm bothered by the fact that they are only for space combat, flashpoints and PvP. N0o Legacy XP boosts for people who just like to do the quests? Still, if the XP boosts are significant enough, maybe running a FP or a couple space missions will allow us to skip some of those pesky side-quests.

 

You rebutted your own attack. It is boring, I can attest. Many can attest, I'm sure. I would love to play all the class stories, just not without all the filler content.

[vincent-]

This.

It's boring. It's not story driven (seriously, who is not using spacebar when taking dailies for the 100th time ?). And it's the only/the most easy way to have some dailies stuff.

You know what's funny they could have made that a good story involving more special quests and player control of the zone in question. Made the armor available upon completion of the whole quests and people would have been happy.

 

In galaxies it would have given a hell of a lot more attention and rewards. I knew players would strictly go into the deathtrooper themepark to just too get the decorations and looting the armor pieces off of the npcs and seeking out special bosses that dropped cool loot.

 

This game offers nothing like galaxies did and I already miss it.

[JediElf]

I just wanted to clarify something here....

 

Not 'all' of us spacebar through speech, and it just bothers me to no end, to hear how we 'all' do this.

 

Yes I may have heard the quest a few times, but I like hearing it again. Some of us, really do love the full voice in this game and don't skip it, even on a repeat.

 

Just clearing that up.

 

Thank you.

[Phrase]

The reality is that story takes time; good story even longer. Look at how long this game was in production with most of that time spent writing the stories and voice-acting them. James Ohlen, et al. have continually let us know that they have plans to develop story and that they are thinking long range (a couple of years out at least). Spending the time to develop long range story arcs is the same development strategy used by the best television shows and blockbuster movies (remember the production time between the Episodes 4-6?).

 

I know it's beating a dead horse to say give them time, but seriously let them iron out their gameplay bugs and fix zones like Ilum (which I don't consider caving), then we can have major story progression. Meanwhile, the mini-events are kinda cool and a step in the right direction.

[Kubernetic]

Here's the problem:

 

BioWare had three options after deciding to build a story-driven MMORPG:

 

A) Focus solely on story, meaning the costs of story development would be so incredibly high that the subscription would be somewhere near $50-60 per month, and might still fail to produce continuous content due to the enormous asymmetries that exist between the time it takes to develop, script, record, code, and design such story content versus the amount of time it takes a player to blow through it in the game.

 

B) Focus on the story, but task a few additional teams to begin working on other aspects of the game so that players have something to do in the "Intermission Times" between story content releases, such as the "unannounced space project", or additional warzones and PVP options, crafting changes and evolution, and so forth, or

 

C) Realize they made a huge mistake, and drop all story development and try to focus solely on warzones and flashpoints and non-story driven elements and hope that they can trick players to hang around long enough to get enough of their money to turn a profit before they realize the jig is up and flee.

 

I think it's pretty obvious they have chosen Option B. The big problem I see is that there are a number of pessimistic or jaded or pick another adjective to your liking who will default to Option C and swear it's the truth.

 

For these people, there's nothing we can do (short of reminding them of the interviews with game designers and their own comments in events like the Guild Summit broadcast) where they have specifically said that the story development is continuing, but just cannot be released at the rate that players blow through it. They will still swear that Option C is what BioWare has chosen. And the only proof they'll accept is when the next chapters of our stories are released.

 

But even then, this won't be over, because another few months after that, the same crew will crop up again, swearing that they've reverted to Option C again, at which point we're locked into a disagreement until BioWare releases yet more chapters.

 

Frankly, this is a merry-go-round I have no interest in remaining on. These people will claim what they will claim and nothing will sway them. So I am unsubscribing from this thread. LOL

 

Good luck to those of you who hang around to try to make a difference and make some of them see what the designers have said. You'll need it.

[Darkhosis]

Well you played Rift and should plainly see SWTOR following a similar path. Just in a bit of a different order...

 

Rift catered to raiders from release to the 8th month mark. Lost their main audience- the casual. Then Trion is like woah we screwed the pooch here- lets go for the PVP crowd! Ruined class balance in PVE making some raids impossible (Hammerknell). Raids were stupidly overtuned from day one and the game can't handle 30 people in one spot without flaking out. World events went from an ambitious disaster to a mind numbing daily grind.

 

Fast forward to SWTOR.

 

They cater to the PVP crowd and start tampering with class balance. *check*

 

Now they cater to the raiders with exclusive content. *check*

 

Completely forgetting their main paycheck and crowd the casual. *check*

 

They'll wake up eventually but it will be too late by then... Constant streaming content such as solo FP's for continued class story were the key. BW is all over the place like Rift- lost and losing focus and subs.