Darth_Halford Posted July 27, 2012 Share Posted July 27, 2012 The type of story that Bioware did in this game is just not that complex though, at least compared to their single player games. That's mostly due to the limits of the MMO genre. There's some pretty good story moments, but the complete lack of consequence and all of the contrivances involved with every character having to go to every planet at specific points in the story make the overall experience into something that's pretty shallow, when all is said and done. Stories such as the ones that this game has would have little problems being adapted to a more open ended world. The Elder Scrolls series has been doing broad gameplay with a shallow story for years. Elder Scrolls is also largely a case of content driving story, rather than story driving content. I think it would be an absolute tradgedy (as well as piss poor game design) to make a game that has so much story content involved, and than make it completly optional. The rigidness of the plot is not that far of a deviance from the norm in Bioware games, particularly the last one. In ME3, the actual story followed a very rigid series of events with a sprinkling of diversions that helped build up the war effort. In the previous games, you were in control of which order you went in, but you still had to go do all of them sooner or later. The reasoning why TOR doesn't act like those games, or KOTOR for that matter, is that we are dealing with a persistent online environment that multiple people are using at once. They can't change the level of the mobs on a dynamic level like they did with KOTOR or ME without instancing or phasing EVERYTHING like Guild Wars and its sequel do. I also can't think of any game that has told 8 completly different, fully voiced and animated narratives at the same time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pocketthesaurus Posted July 27, 2012 Share Posted July 27, 2012 The problem with sandboxes is that you get covered in sand and then you can't get it out of your shoes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shingara Posted December 7, 2012 Author Share Posted December 7, 2012 With all the news that has come out and the f2p hitting since this topic was 1st created i was just wondering if peeps want to add based on the new information or even new player to the game who may not have seen this topic and wish to give there feelings on these thoughts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Klarick Posted December 7, 2012 Share Posted December 7, 2012 The problem with sandbox MMO's, is that the vast majority of them fail. We, the customer, say we want sandbox but we rarely support them with our money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neocoma Posted December 7, 2012 Share Posted December 7, 2012 (edited) The problem with sandbox MMO's, is that the vast majority of them fail. We, the customer, say we want sandbox but we rarely support them with our money. Not entirely true. Name at least two sandbox games that are worth paying for. I can only think of one which is EVE online although gameplay is boring as hell there the rest of the sandbox is great. What else do we have? Mortal Online? Hell, it is a disaster. Dark Fall? There's coming a sequel. SWG was a great game .... and I also liked the jedi grind. I would love to have something like that again ...but I would also have some more depth like in EVE where you actually can lose all your stuff. Whyis this important? Because the fear of losing everything builds communities ...connects people. Face it guys, sandboxes have more community than a 10 mil subbers game like WoW. Sandbox is so much more MMO and themepark got rid of the massive aspect ...literally. Edited December 7, 2012 by neocoma Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ConradLionhart Posted December 7, 2012 Share Posted December 7, 2012 Yes I think, SW:TOR could benefit from some sandbox. People who are against it should open their minds, because right now SW:TOR is struggling, and sandbox may make it different enough from WoW to attract gamers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AboB Posted December 7, 2012 Share Posted December 7, 2012 I think sandbox MMOs such as SWG came at the wrong time. They were too ambitious, had a huge learning curve and required PCs at that time to have at least Transform & Lighting(T&L) - which was only found on expensive cards despite Nvidia offering a confusing line up of budget cards. Fast forward 2004 and World of Warcraft. Structured in its approach, didnt require a mid range PC to play and offered a clear direction for the gamer in progression. Fast forward 2012 and many gamers have become bored with the themepark MMO. It relies too much on developers to churn out regular updates and this is something most simply cant do. Players rapidly lose interest and unsub. They may/not come back when theres some 'new' updates but even rehashing the same old crap, giving it a different colour doesnt always help. I think had Bioware flexed some creative muscle and offered a mixture of both, then it probably wouldnt have lost 700,000 players in under 5 months. Their decision to use the Hero Engine, was a bad mistake as its simply too demanding and clunky and requires a pretty good spec PC to get some stable FPS. Every step of the way, SWTOR is littered with design flaws as they clearly focused way too much on copying World of Warcraft and thinking that 'Story' would be enough to keep people here. If SWTOR did have some sandbox elements, players could have been free to do what they like until some new content arrives - without the need to be whisked away to some shame hole instance for a pvp fix(for example). I hate it when people bring logic to our emotionally fueled Gen. Discussion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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