What happened during development!?

[Mallorik]

I would really like to hear about what happened during this games development, but from the outside it just seems like nobody knew anything about mmos, and they didnt even try to research the market. Or they arrogantly assumed that they could just leave out key mmo components and players would still play their game because the rest of it was so great. Edited May 10, 2012 by Mallorik

[Appolyonhex]

I for one agree, I followed this game from rumor to eventually playing t he game when it first started. Sure, it is a good game, but falls WAY short of what can be in it.

 

For example, Star Wars has RICH worlds, this game does not.

 

Star Wars has big battles and on ongoing huge conflict between sith and Republic, this game even though the time line is SMACK IN THE MIDDLE of such conclicts, there are NO such conflicts in the open world, only in WZ's like wow.

 

I feel like the classes are so stupidly constrained. Let me give an example, has any ever heard of a Jedi or watched one that can not force jump? The whole game does not seem like cannon. I mean come on.... light and dark meant so much more in Star Wars, but in this game it is USELESS, just makes a slight differnce in the gear your toon can use.

 

Ok, this is an MMO RPG..... yeah kinda hard to do things, but they could of and SHOULD OF done more. This game has an empty feeling world that gives a SLIGHT feeling of actually being in the SW universe. I am not drawn, there is no, and I mean NO WOW moment in this game. When I first played the game I was like wow I am having fun... but as I continued with the game I noticed more and more the emptyness feeling. IMO, and this is my own by the way...... they did a horrible job with a SW MMO.... something that should of been EPIC.

[Kalfear]

My guess is Bioware had game designs set, then they were changed by either EA and LA, or both to fit a more modern MMO business model.

 

Here's the problem: There is no "MMO Business Model" EVERY GAME, EVERY SINGLE GAME THAT has tried to recreate WoW, or anything like it has completely BOMBED. So you have to ask yourself which guy said it would work, because clearly it hasn't, for many years.

 

People need to stop developing crap and start understanding why MMO's fail so hard. Look at Tabula Rasa, look at The Matrix Online, find out what happened to them that made them go away and work up from there. Where's Ralph Koster when you need him...

 

LOL, agree with everything you said but the final Ralph Koster.

 

If Kostner the answer, then the question is so befuddled and messed up there is no hope!

 

But yes, at some point these companies need to understand you cant recreate WOW mechanics because WOW success is based on becoming a cultural FAD. NOT on being a well developed MMO.

 

You literally could cut and paste WOW as a new game under a new name and if would fail outright.

 

WOW was a Cultural FAD and as we seen in a bazzilion different aspects and products, Culural FADs are rarely about quality of the product and are impossible to recreate!

 

Its really time for the MMORPG genre to start looking back MORE then 8 years. The last 8 years have been a design disaster to the MMORPG genre. Best to just ignore it and look back before WOW hit the scene and see what worked and why and how can it work in TOR. Or will it work in TOR?

 

Housing

 

UO and SWG ? Nope does not fit or work

EQ2? Yes

DAoC? Yes but was only remotely well received

 

 

PVP

 

DAoC? Yes would work perfect, even with 2 factions rather then 3

UO? Nope open unchecked pvp kills games when forced on people

 

Crafting

 

SWG? The minority that liked SWG LOVES this crafting but it really doesnt fit in TOR (how exactly would you place harvestors on the land when the land not designed to be cluttered up, thus how could you get different percentages on the raw materials?)

 

EQ2? Possible

 

*I actually like TOR crew skills, just think its to easy to get 400 skill and thus it makes the crew skills meaningless sadly.

 

ect ect ect (thats just 3 examples but there is many games and each normally did one thing well)

 

Until these devs finally stop looking at WOW and go farther back, we going to be stuck in the WOW remake cycle sadly.

[Tiaa]

I stopped reading when the OP said SWTOR cost 80 million dollars.

 

That's less than World of Warcraft cost and Rift. And those games didn't have to pay for tons of voice acting.

 

Common sense should kick in by then.

[kurzis]

Something very bad must of happened in beta testing

 

either

 

A) they only accepted testers who had long time experience with Hello kitty online

 

B) the devs completely ignored the beta testers

 

I'm going to guess B happened, along with EA, the only company in the world that can turn gold into faeces

Edited May 10, 2012 by kurzis

[Itukaaj]

Really, that's your "honest" assessment? They just clicked a "Make MMO" button and partied the rest of the time, eh?

 

First off, a tip. Anything involving voiced cut scenes will take a much, much longer time to develop and execute than anything with little boxes of text. Little boxes of text can be fixed and cleaned up with a few strokes on a keyboard, whereas voiced audio lines and animated cutscenes involve a number of people all working together, including the VO talent themselves, the scriptwriters, the producers, the post-production audio crew, the animators that set up the scenes, and the cleanup work.

 

You can't just go around editing VO dialogue unless you're cutting, and then it only works when you can cut dialogue out and still have the scene work. Otherwise, you're back to script, back to approvals, and back to VO and post again just to reimport the new dialogue.

 

To anyone who has ever worked in the video or audio production field, the amount of time involved to create this game doesn't surprise them. To those who've never once set their feet into that world, yeah it might seem like a long time with little to show for it. For a true comparison, let's start comparing SWTOR to other games in the MMORPG market which use fully-voiced cut scenes. Other comparisons will be sorely lacking due to the apples versus oranges problem.

 

But don't take my word for it. Here's an article which explains more of this in depth and in more detail. It isn't just sitting down cramming voice-over dialogue on a napkin and turning that in.

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/26/how-bioware-wrote-star-wars-the-old-republic/

 

 

 

10 hours worth? Please. Where did this number come from? Let's dispense with your "honesty" and try some facts instead, along with some rather simple logic.

 

This game has had over 200,000 lines of dialogue produced for it involving more than 200 voice actors during the production phase, according to media reports. It holds the Guiness World Record for the most amount of voice acting in any media production ever made.

 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/06/star-wars-the-old-republic-scoops-guinness-world-record-for-voice-acting/

http://www.gamebandits.com/news/pc/star-wars-the-old-republic-200000-lines-of-dialogue-is-record-breaking-28921/

 

How many seconds in 10 hours? 10 * 60 * 60 = 36000 seconds.

 

So with some simple math, even rounding the dialogue down to 200,000 lines, means that each line of dialogue would amount to only 0.18 seconds worth to fit your wildly inaccurate number.

 

But if we try to extrapolate our own figures, using some logic rather than emotional outrage, even speedy lines like "I'm on it!" would end up taking 1-2 seconds. And there are many more lines given by the NPCs which are much longer than this. So let's just cut corners and round it off to an average of 3 seconds for every line in the game, just for the sake of argument. I don't believe this is an outlandish figure, and in fact I believe the average is somewhere greater than 3 seconds each. But let's stick to 3 just for some simple math.

 

That's (200,000 lines * 3 seconds) which equals 600,000 seconds, 10,000 minutes, or 166 hours of dialogue. And you said 10 hours. Hmm.... there's a bit of difference there.

 

By comparison, most feature films probably involve somewhere around 500-1,500 lines of dialogue, and those take several weeks to write, if not months with writes and rewrites and so forth. If we go with the high-end number there, 1,500 lines of dialogue in a feature film, now we're talking about the voiced acting equivalent of 133 feature films.

 

Let's not forget that this is all Star Wars, and is all owned by LucasFilm and LucasArts, and that everything is going to have to be double-checked with the IP Masters back at home base, because they've got the final say on what can and cannot be added as parts of the Star Wars IP. So take any normal production schedule that you'd have and double it at least, to account for all of the back and forth between BioWare and LucasArts.

 

I was going to respond to the rest of your post but I think I've pretty much eviscerated your legitimacy as a critic with just focusing on your little "10 hours of dialogue" gaffe. You clearly put ZERO thought into this post beyond your own wish to rant, and since almost EVERYTHING you typed in your post is all subjective and your own opinion only, and often WILDLY askew from the actual facts at hand, I'm not really going to waste any more time on your post.

 

Except for this part, which I LOVE:

 

 

 

You spend all of this time elevating this other game as superior and then let it slip out that you don't even play it because it SUCKED.

 

LOL. Good luck. Go take a break from MMOs for a while, clear your head, and then find a new hobby. Assessing video game development is not a strength in your core skill set.

 

So TLDR EALouse was correct about sound and voice being the bulk of the time--possibly misspent time . Also add in Lucas control over the IP kills creativity. Coding is hard and that the lead time to develop doens't allow you to turn the ship around so if you are launching in 2020 you better be right cause you can't change anything in 2012 becuase your destiny is predetermined.

 

 

In short this game is the malt liquor of MMo's. Some poeple really do like it.

[Darka]

When TOR was announced a few old SWG buddies who i knew from Pre Launch forums gathered around one of the first things said was " I hope that in another ten years we are not saying 'I hope this SW MMO learns from the mistakes of SWG and TOR' "

[JoanneK]

I stopped reading when the OP said SWTOR cost 80 million dollars.

 

That's less than World of Warcraft cost and Rift. And those games didn't have to pay for tons of voice acting.

 

Common sense should kick in by then.

 

Its clear ya stopped reading as you blatantly skimmed it, the line reads that EA invested ~$80million on SWTOR from the point of their involvement as is reported, note that this is seperate from the approx $86million they spent when they purchased Bioware in 2007, all other figures are speculation as we do not know how much LA and Bioware themselves invested prior to EA takeover of Bioware. Oh just to clarify, there are no official final figures for Rift just the initial budget of "over US$50 million" according to Trion Worlds CEO Lars Buttler but perhaps you know something he doesn't?

 

To Kubernetic: You inadvertently helped make my question all the more worthwhile so I must thank you for that, I'm not sure that was you intent however, but you might also wish to re-read my original post as I made it painfully and simply clear as to why I compared SWTOR to Rift and in the 1st line of my post I state rather clearly that these are my opinions, the paragrah re budgets and timelines are fact as best can be found from historical articles on the internet, do you wish to take issue with those? if so then feel free to contact the various outlets that published said info in their articles.

 

Since you lodged such objections regarding the audio aspects of the game, lets take another look at this VO audio then: 200,000 lines 3s avg per line? 166h36m, 4s avg per line 222h13m but I bet a good chunk didnt make it to the final cut, lines recorded does not equal lines used no matter how many Guiness World Records the thing has. So the question remains, all the more potent now: What happened in development with this game as I can asure you they were not ALL working on the audio engine or audio asset organisation (one would hope not anyway).

 

Kubernetic I'll never understand why people get so personal with their arguements in forums, you dont agree and thats fine as thats you prerogative, just as its mine to state what I believe. Most of the people in here whether they agree with me or not understood clearly what I wrote and discussed in the manner of the original post, which was calm considered and unprovocative, you didn't ... oh well, sith happens.

Edited May 10, 2012 by JoanneK

[HumanSheild]

What happened during development!?

 

You ask? Actualy a whole lot of nothing happend. Except alot of talk with no real results as of their first month of release. Think its going to get better? lol.

[kurzis]

QFT.

 

legacy should give you a bonus to class quests too. preferably so much that you can level to 50 on just class quests.

 

so true.

 

went to alderaan lvl 31, completed class quest, left alderaan still lvl 31.

 

the XP i got from class quests was worth about 0.5 bar, and thats with double XP active.

 

I really do not want to do every side quest on every alt, spacebaring through all that pointless voice actor rubbish. i'd rather PVP.

 

but PVP is broken.

 

explain this.

 

win huttball 6 - 0 within 5 - 10 minutes, I get top of the board, rewarded with 4k XP

lose huttball 1 - 5, full game, this time i'm middle of the board, rewarded with 13k XP

 

PVP was supposed to be fixed in 1.2 but its acting exactly the same just the medals have been reworded.

 

So I ask

 

WHAT IS GOING ON IN DEVELOPMENT??

[terminova]

so true.

 

went to alderaan lvl 31, completed class quest, left alderaan still lvl 31.

 

the XP i got from class quests was worth about 0.5 bar, and thats with double XP active.

 

I really do not want to do every side quest on every alt, spacebaring through all that pointless voice actor rubbish. i'd rather PVP.

 

but PVP is broken.

 

explain this.

 

win huttball 6 - 0 within 5 - 10 minutes, I get top of the board, rewarded with 4k XP

lose huttball 1 - 5, full game, this time i'm middle of the board, rewarded with 13k XP

 

PVP was supposed to be fixed in 1.2 but its acting exactly the same just the medals have been reworded.

 

So I ask

 

WHAT IS GOING ON IN DEVELOPMENT??

 

Game development is going on in development.

 

What you want to go on in development is ways to make it so you can level to the level cap in 1/50th the time.

[Gungan]

Something very bad must of happened in beta testing

 

either

 

A) they only accepted testers who had long time experience with Hello kitty online

 

B) the devs completely ignored the beta testers

 

I'm going to guess B happened, along with EA, the only company in the world that can turn gold into faeces

 

What happened is that all of their closed beta testers were friends and family. When is the last time you got an honest criticism of your work from your friends and family? And how many of them actually know what they're talking about?

 

I remember playing closed betas of WarCraft 3 for like a year before it launched, and I was a random invite that applied through the website with no prior committment to the game. The stupid industry has clearly stopped using the beta as an actual test platform, and switched it to an early preview as a pre-order bonus. You know what that gets you? A bunch of stupid fanboys that will praise your lame product until the cows come home just to be able to play it a few weeks early, when it is already too late to make the changes required to make the game good.

Edited May 10, 2012 by Gungan

[Patched]

What happened is that all of their closed beta testers were friends and family. When is the last time you got an honest criticism of your work from your friends and family? And how many of them actually know what they're talking about?

 

I remember playing closed betas of WarCraft 3 for like a year before it launched, and I was a random invite that applied through the website with no prior committment to the game. The stupid industry has clearly stopped using the beta as an actual test platform, and switched it to an early preview as a pre-order bonus. You know what that gets you? A bunch of stupid fanboys that will praise your lame product until the cows come home just to be able to play it a few weeks early, when it is already too late to make the changes required to make the game good.

 

Not true, most of these threads existed in beta too. Only then you had to deal with a half dozen..."It's only Beta." responses.

[Goretzu]

You literally could cut and paste WOW as a new game under a new name and if would fail outright.

 

Blizzard understand this only too well, which is why they are doing anything they possibly can to avoid and/or put off having to make a WoW 2.

[Eibhibac]

I think there we're multiple problems. Bioware wanted this game to be like their successfully titles , such as Dragon Age.However, what they didn't realize is having a linear game only works for single player,In a MMO setting it gets boring really quickly.I think another problem was the suits at EA.Instead of letting creativity run amok,they just took every aspect that they thought would bring them money and smashed it all into this game.Thats why you have Star Wars, a WoW clone, mini games,(I.e. the awful space combat), and whatever other cookie cutter money making scheme from other titles they could throw in there.The only thing that makes his game stand out from the pack is the stellar story and voice acting, that would be more suited for a single player experience since at 50 it tends to be irrelevant.

[Hades-LotD]

Bioware forgot that you need community tools and resources if you want help people organize to play the end game content after level 50!

 

Really, I love the TOR setting but it is like they just thought launching an MMO with the tools/resources of a single player title would just be fine!

Edited May 10, 2012 by Hades-LotD

[Snakeyees]

might want to be careful, you could get a forum warning for complaining about the game. Edited May 10, 2012 by Snakeyees

[Mr_Clark]

older games (WoW, Aion, Rift) .

 

geez I must be really old - I think of EQ, DOaC and AO as older games... Rift is practically brand new. That said, this product is boring and misguided. I don't this it's an EA issue, I think Bioware management has a ho-hum strategic plan and a team which is struggling to effectively execute it. Add those two up and you get the current state of the game.

Edited May 10, 2012 by Mr_Clark

[Senatsu]

When EA gets voted worst company in America, it kinda sends a message. Just look at how ME3 turned out, BF3, Sims, and others. To be fair, SWTOR is probably the last game I will ever buy from anything that has anything to do with EA, either they bring massively bad luck or they are just bad themselves.

[AMKSED]

EA/Bioware already made their money back from this game.

 

Or they would not have given a free month to people.

[Mr_Clark]

Bioware forgot that you need community tools and resources if you want help people organize to play the end game content after level 50!

 

Organizing for SWTOR end game is about as complex as putting on a two car parade... If only I could find 2 cars on my server...

[banecolton]

might want to be careful, you could get a forum warning for complaining about the game.

 

Already happened to me once…need to be very careful with your criticisms…try and put something positive in there or at least a qualifier like “I don’t hate the game”…just be smart about it.

 

In my case it is easy since I really don’t hate the game. <------ Like this, see?

 

[CKNairb]

Personally I'm wondering

 

BioWare was reportedly making it before EA bought them, my theory is EA cut their funding drastically and moved a majority of their team. And Bioware had to finish a game with minimal staff for a couple years ( why current release games are more " finished and featured filled ". EA just pretty much Put the production to a crawl.

 

Part of the Hero Engine sales info states that games with Hero Engine can turn around in an averae of 18 months. FAR from 5 years. The only reasoning is because EA Psudo Ax'd it. Same thing that happened to Duke Nukem Forever. Was worked on by Skelton crew for years enforce being officially canned

[Thannate]

uncharacteristically I'd like to make an excuse for BW on this one... Have you played "Rage"? Took id over 7 years of development . . . how about THAT one!?

[Gungan]

uncharacteristically I'd like to make an excuse for BW on this one... Have you played "Rage"? Took id over 7 years of development . . . how about THAT one!?

 

As far as I heard, Rage was great until the last section of the game... and even then it was really an elaborate tech demo.