Jump to content

Quarterly Producer Letter for Q2 2024 ×

SWTOR -- What if... [youtube video inside]


Lord_Ravenhurst

Recommended Posts

What if SWTOR had background loading, more Star Wars music, CGI cutscenes and improved travel procedures?

To match the Ebon Hawk ship from KOTOR I just made this little video on my new smuggler character:

 

i've proposed this many times. When you start a class, a cust scene plays while it loads int eh background, it's far more entertaining than just a picture, but my pitch was the disconnect loading screens caused, the breaking of immersion.

 

without a navigatable space environment, there needs or would be really brilliant to have journey scenes during loading. Loading a planet? Show the scene of the shuttle leaving the orbital station and flying into the planet's atmosphere, landing and your character opening the shuttle door and stepping out.

 

You just need to have one for every loading screen you have.. this games biggest asset is the movie like way it palys because of the convo, it is quite a good game too, but the cut scenes really draw you into the game more.

 

The point is the developers allow themselves to be driven too much by the hardcore populace, and theya re the minority, those guys would rather skip any immersion, they'd skip convos, and they'd likely spacebar through the cutscenes too, most of the people the bulk that play and liek the game love the convos, love seeing their ship from a space view enter a planet's orbit or fly off a planet into space etc... it just makes you wanna play more and wanna do more stuff in-game.

 

 

World of Warcraft had a core of gamers that cared nothing about the story and treated an rpg like an arcade fps.. becasue blizzard made the NWN style of turn base feel arcadey enough for them.. but like it's predecessors failed to actually convey a story in an mmo. Since Lotro was released, phasing technology employed in an mmo made it possible to tell a story, and swtor took it one step further with the massive movie like vonversations.

 

The community has been mis-read entirely. The hardcore population which does drive a games momentum forward, love end game content.. they didn't get that in the first 6 weeks of release which had them sitting at 50 for 3 weeks with nothing to do, by the 5th week, the game they had been playign for 3-4 weeks like crazy and could have no faults, now couldn't be tolerated. They generated the negative press and warded off other mmo players from coming to Swtor.

 

however the game stillattracted fans of kotor and other action games who love star wars, and these are the bulk of the players today. Whiles end game content is still highly desired, these bulk of players appreciate the movie like cut-scenes and presenting them far more often to ease the myriad of loading screens would make a huge difference.

 

Love the cut-scenes for entering Makeb or Oricon, if they went back and did the same for every shuttle/ship trip you make and every elevator ride you take, it would be awesome.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've always wondered why SWTOR was never built like this to begin with, I mean, no one likes to stare at a loading screen, especially for certain planets with longer times ( "Cough" Nar Shaddaa, Hoth, Tatooine "Cough" ) and they could do so much during these scenes to convey the type of planet, like with the example when landing on Nar Shaddaa you can see just how busy and alive the planet is, and for people that don't care for it, yea, they can just skip it when it's loaded properly, no loss and a more consistent world for all.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing I never understood is why they didn't put your actual ship instance in the world, instead of having to load onto it. If I want to switch planets I only want to load once, instead of loading onto my ship just to load onto another planet. The ship model is dynamically loaded into the private instance, and they have a lot of stuff in place to change the state of player instances, I don't see why it couldn't be done.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not that I'm trying to be a wet blanket, but I do actually understand why the ship isn't part of the world (they've explained it) and the video --while using enjoyable transitions-- doesn't take any account for the technical limitations involved with ships. It's a nice concept video, but game development is a bit more complex than splicing together video clips. It's not like the developers never even considered doing it the way its shown. It doesn't take much thought at all to come up with that, but it takes quite a bit of thought to figure out how to handle class quests and various other ship interactions with it.

 

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind the style portrayed in the video, but there are loads of things I'd like to see before that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What if SWTOR had background loading, more Star Wars music, CGI cutscenes and improved travel procedures?

To match the Ebon Hawk ship from KOTOR I just made this little video on my new smuggler character:

 

 

Excellent work. Yes I have always wished for more accurate Star Wars music (no offence to the composer of the game tracks) as well as realistic cutscenes. What is shown here is very much like Star Wars, I'd also like to see the classic Star Wars Fade aways during out cutscenes and game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nice work... I would enjoy it.

 

Unfortunately the majority of players would cry "wahh, skip that stuff, I want action !"

 

Im one of those people who dont like to watch things over and over again, but *** else are you supposed to do in load scenes? I always wondered why the only things game companies can come up with to entertain people during loading is trivia and noob advice.

 

Oh and gj op, great vid.

Edited by Mallorik
Link to comment
Share on other sites

What if SWTOR had background loading, more Star Wars music, CGI cutscenes and improved travel procedures?

To match the Ebon Hawk ship from KOTOR I just made this little video on my new smuggler character:

 

 

Great work on the video, but a few points I'd like to adress:

 

1: The game has great music alreday. Yes, It doesn't play aaaaaaaaaaaall the time, nor would I want it to. And the music that is in the game is very much in the theme of Star Wars. (It doesn't have to be from the movies to have the right feel you know).

2: The background loading screens are a neat touch, but they'd have to make a CGI video for every planet and every ship that is as long as the intro cinematics for each class. That's quite a bit of effort for something that most people would spacebar through anyway (don't believe me? just look at how many people spacebar through ALL the dialogue all the time... It's quite a few more than you'd think)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is a great video and I support your ideas to the max.

 

The loading screens are boring and it takes so long sometimes, depending on the planets. With these little video clips, it feels much less of a waste of time. I also like the info "Planet loaded".

 

Also, the people who always click away cutscenes etc. would actually be "forced" to watch some videos. Maybe they would then understand the beauty of these scenes better and start watching the skipable videos, too. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Excellent work. Yes I have always wished for more accurate Star Wars music (no offence to the composer of the game tracks) as well as realistic cutscenes. What is shown here is very much like Star Wars, I'd also like to see the classic Star Wars Fade aways during out cutscenes and game.

 

Yes, the classic Star Wars wipe transition, never seen in this game yet.

 

They really should have spent the trailer budget on ingame cutscenes for the space ships. Or recycle the KOTOR scenes.

 

 

Also thanks to everyone for the positive comments on the video.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I would personally love better loading cutscenes, many of the current ones when you lift off from a planet with a spaceport have your ship fly through a mountain or building or something.

 

I have always hated the orbital stations especially. It would have been so bad to see my Fury landing on one of those outcroppings on Korriban as I was getting ready for my final confrontation with Baras.

 

The only thing that might be a holdback is they tried animated load screen with Mass Effect back in the day, and people were too stupid to understand that the elevator scenes were load screens and complained about them so much that they were abandoned in later games.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What if SWTOR had background loading, more Star Wars music, CGI cutscenes and improved travel procedures?

To match the Ebon Hawk ship from KOTOR I just made this little video on my new smuggler character:

 

 

I watched both this and the speeder video. I really would love the cutscenes. But I'm sad to say that it would indeed draw the ire of some gamers because of their "ZOMG, hurry this up already!" attitudes.

 

ON the speeder video, I laughed pretty hard on the Moon River portion. You're totally right, speeders are so PAINFULLY slow in this game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.