Departing BW lead James Ohlen interviewed about BW's future & SWTOR

[DarthDymond]

Game Informer posted an interview article with James Ohlen yesterday.

 

A lot of fluff, but some interesting bits on BioWare's future and looking back on SWTOR's development (obviously these are his own opinions / takes on things, not any sort of official policy):

 

Q: Speaking of conspiracy theories, one of the things that you see float around on the internet right now is that [...] BioWare will be shuttered if Anthem isn't a hit. Is there any sense internally among the staff that this is the level of pressure on the studio at this point?

A: No. The more success that a studio has, the more freedom and resources that it has, so obviously BioWare wants to have success with Anthem because that will be good for the studio as a whole. However, I think EA is looking for BioWare to be a long-term part of the company. I think EA really respects what BioWare brings to it. BioWare is a lot different than all the other aspects of its business, so, even if Anthem doesn't do as well – and I think it’s going to be great – but if it doesn't do gangbusters I don't think that's the end of BioWare. I think it will simply be a chance for BioWare to learn some lessons and apply it to the next game that comes out.

 

Q: What are the things you are most proud of during your BioWare career?

A: [One] thing I’m proud of is the BioWare Austin studio and Star Wars: The Old Republic. That was such an enormous project and we had to go from having no studio at all to at our peak we had 500 people working on the game. I think I had 100 designers on the game, and so ramping all that up, training all those designers, and getting that game out the door ... I’m very proud of that.

 

Q: [D]o you have any regrets? Anything you wish you were able to push through while you were [at BioWare]?

With Star Wars: The Old Republic I wish that I pushed a little bit more toward making it kind of Knights of The Republic online rather than “Star Wars World of Warcraft.” A lot of the feedback that we got when Star Wars: The Old Republic got when it came out was, "Hey, we wanted Knights of the Old Republic Online," something that was more similar to that than a game that was more traditional in the World of Warcraft sense. I can see where that was coming from, but I am still proud of where Star Wars: The Old Republic got to.

Edited July 24, 2018 by DarthDymond

[TUXs]

HAHAHA!!! Don't let the door hit ya James.

 

The answers are complete garbage, just they typical junk answers...but even talking about Anthem failing, is interesting.

 

(and it was closer to 800 people they previously claimed)

Edited July 24, 2018 by TUXs

[Andryah]

Q: [D]o you have any regrets? Anything you wish you were able to push through while you were [at BioWare]?

With Star Wars: The Old Republic I wish that I pushed a little bit more toward making it kind of Knights of The Republic online rather than “Star Wars World of Warcraft.” A lot of the feedback that we got when Star Wars: The Old Republic got when it came out was, "Hey, we wanted Knights of the Old Republic Online," something that was more similar to that than a game that was more traditional in the World of Warcraft sense. I can see where that was coming from, but I am still proud of where Star Wars: The Old Republic got to.

 

Lucid analysis by James here, in my view.

 

This was a real double edged sword for them to grapple with. They were famous for the KoTOR franchise and could have leveraged that more strongly for sure. But in addition, they were moving into the MMO space with SWTOR.. so the theme of KoTOR might still have worked, but the entire approach to game mechanics and play would not.. not in an MMO. Which leaves them boxed into a genre where WoW continued to define the primary success model of MMOs (and still does to a more limited extent even today). I actually think this was a no win scenario for them... but given they were acquired by a large game holding company... that pretty well forced them to follow the WoW-ification of MMOs. Setting aside the Asian grinder pay to play market.....No MMO in the western market that has emerged since WoW has been able to knock it off the top, or even remotely compete on the scale of WoW....largely because it set the pace and theme of how MMOs are done from that point more than 14 years ago and actually brought a lot of non MMO players into MMOs.... but not for the long haul.

 

Got to give credit to Blizzard though.. they do a far better job farming their former subscriber base for periodic "re-ups" than any other MMO, and much better than EA does with SWTOR. EA sucks at this part of the business model. WoW has proven that all you need is to keep about 5% of your former subscribers in active rotation at any given time and you have a perpetual hit. SWTOR has more than 21 million to draw from... and that means the sustainable persistent player base should run around 1M on a recurring basis.. with the usual short cycle peaks around an expac as gravy on top of that.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Andryah

[Jdast]

Lucid analysis by James here, in my view.

 

This was a real double edged sword for them to grapple with. They were famous for the KoTOR franchise and could have leveraged that more strongly for sure. But in addition, they were moving into the MMO space with SWTOR.. so the theme of KoTOR might still have worked, but the entire approach to game mechanics and play would not.. not in an MMO.

 

I was going to start a thread about this when I read this last night. I didn't because I was going to end up saying that his answer on this point didn't make sense in an MMO context, but was worried about stirring the pot. Now that you have started the ball rolling, though --

 

I have no idea what he means when he says KOTOR but online. I know what those words mean, but I don't know what he means in terms of implementation, practice or operationalization (I said that last word just to be pretentious).

 

Would there be some limited group activity? Would it primarily be solo stories but yet running around and seeing other people online occasionally?

 

Bottom line -- if it is just a solo game while seeing other people sometimes then I don't think that model is sustainable at the rate at which they could have conceivably churned out content. People would chew through it too quickly.

 

When all is said and done, this game has suffered an identity crisis as to what type of player they wanted to cater to and has lurched between extremes. Obviously, I still enjoy playing it (hence the reason I'm back) and like the current trajectory, if not the pace. I'm glad I also like ESO and WoW too, though.

 

I actually thought the first year of SWTOR found a right balance between solo and group activities, but I don't think that model was sustainable given how difficult it is to develop content for 8 classes, 5 companions each, light v. dark, etc. My guildmates and I found the final straw to be the nightmare of Ilum PvP where you couldn't move.

 

Ohlen is obviously creative and I wish him well, but his vision of what he wanted SWTOR to be would run into the same inherent dilemmas discussed ad nauseum on this forum. Sounds like he wanted to put a square peg in a round hole.

 

Dasty

Edited July 24, 2018 by Jdast

[Andryah]

I was going to start a thread about this when I read this last night. I didn't because I was going to end up saying that his answer on this point didn't make sense in an MMO context, but was worried about stirring the pot. Now that you have started the ball rolling, though --

 

I have no idea what he means when he says KOTOR but online. I know what those words mean, but I don't what he means in terms of implementation, practice or operationalization (I said that last word just to be pretentious).

 

Would there be some limited group activity? Would it primarily be solo stories but yet running around and seeing other people online occasionally?

 

Bottom line -- if it is just a solo game while seeing other people sometimes then I don't think that model is sustainable at the rate at which they could have conceivably churned out content. People would chew through it too quickly.

 

When all is said and done, this game has suffered an identity crisis as to what type of player they wanted to cater to and has lurched between extremes. Obviously, I still enjoy playing it and like the current trajectory, if not the pace.

 

I actually thought the first year of SWTOR found a right balance between solo and group activities, but I don't think that model was sustainable given how difficult it is to develop content for 8 classes, 5 companions each, light v. dark, etc.

 

Ohlen is obviously creative and I wish him well, but his vision of what he wanted SWTOR to be would run into the same inherent dilemmas discussed ad nauseum on this forum. Sounds like he wanted to put a square peg in a round hole.

 

Dasty

 

I agree that they could not really shoe horn KoTOR approach (other then general theme.. which we already kind of have) into an MMO format. And the core of SWTOR... the 8 unique class story arcs was clearly not sustainable.. even if they had been so successful that they knocked WoW off of the top slot in the genre. It simply is not a sustainable approach for future content in an MMO.. so they really failed in not realizing this ahead of time and not realizing that MMO players are consummate locusts who can and will chew through content faster then any studio can produce it. They naively believed the launch content (which they tagged as 1600 hours of unique play time) would keep players busy for many months... and they clearly did not understand the true nature of the MMO player base.

 

Had the newer game format that things like Anthem appear to be trying to tap more deeply been real in the market when they started development of SWTOR.. I think they could have pulled that off fairly well with a strong KoTOR flavor.... but clearly at the time.. there was no such genre in the market. And anything KoTOR focused, if they did develop it, would simply cannibalize their other SW themed games, including SWTOR.

Edited July 24, 2018 by Andryah

[Nyla]

Even though his answers aren't super interesting, it really shows how EA, and probably other big gaming companies like Ubisoft, is doing wrong its job.

Huge teams are a mistake and don't translate into better, more successfull games.

It increases production cost, it wastes time and money because of all the traininng/coordinating/communicating overhead. It blurs the original focus of games, ending with a compromise that no one is really happy with. Making changes becomes very complicating and long because you have a lot of different people that must go in the same direction. It creates tension between teams/team members….

The creative guys that are put in charge end up doing administrative/management stuff instead of being the creative backbone of the project. They become unhappy and leave.

 

All this really sounds like the movie or even the music business, when companies are desperately trying to make something that sells well instead of trying to make something good, which will sell well.

I understand making games, movies, music are risky businesses and thus trying to sell to more people somewhat reduce the risks but by including new directions it dilutes the original focus and by adding new people it weakens the decision making…

 

All this still saddens me somewhat, I'm sure EA made a lot of money with SWTOR, way more than they spent but I still see it as a failure, for all the wrong decisions, bad choices, missed opportunities and what it could have become…

[aerockyul]

Even though his answers aren't super interesting, it really shows how EA, and probably other big gaming companies like Ubisoft, is doing wrong its job.

Huge teams are a mistake and don't translate into better, more successfull games.

It increases production cost, it wastes time and money because of all the traininng/coordinating/communicating overhead. It blurs the original focus of games, ending with a compromise that no one is really happy with. Making changes becomes very complicating and long because you have a lot of different people that must go in the same direction. It creates tension between teams/team members….

The creative guys that are put in charge end up doing administrative/management stuff instead of being the creative backbone of the project. They become unhappy and leave.

 

All this really sounds like the movie or even the music business, when companies are desperately trying to make something that sells well instead of trying to make something good, which will sell well.

I understand making games, movies, music are risky businesses and thus trying to sell to more people somewhat reduce the risks but by including new directions it dilutes the original focus and by adding new people it weakens the decision making…

 

All this still saddens me somewhat, I'm sure EA made a lot of money with SWTOR, way more than they spent but I still see it as a failure, for all the wrong decisions, bad choices, missed opportunities and what it could have become…

 

This is an interesting point you bring up. I have a strong feeling the rush jobs that were DA2 and ME3 (both released fairly shortly after EA took over Bioware) could be something where EA assigned all these new staff members to the games and assumed that since there were MORE staff members, the games must be finished FASTER, and the deadlines became unrealistic, but EA pushed them out anyway. What might have looked like "cost-cutting" measures were simply programming shortcuts to meet EA's unrealistic deadlines.

 

It's a pity to imagine what could have been if EA had valued what Bioware could cook and allowed them time to do so, rather than putting them into the drive-thru window at their fast food chain.

[DarthDymond]

I have no idea what he means when he says KOTOR but online. I know what those words mean, but I don't know what he means in terms of implementation, practice or operationalization (I said that last word just to be pretentious).

 

Would there be some limited group activity? Would it primarily be solo stories but yet running around and seeing other people online occasionally?

 

Bottom line -- if it is just a solo game while seeing other people sometimes then I don't think that model is sustainable at the rate at which they could have conceivably churned out content. People would chew through it too quickly.

Yeah, I was wondering as well just what, in practical terms, he was actually trying to convey there -- I kind of got the impression that it was just generally wishing the development hadn't entailed trying to carbon-copy so many elements of the WoW framework (certain classes hewing so close to WoW classes; Flashpoints, Operations, and Warzones being direct transplants of Dungeons, Raids, and Battlegrounds; etc.), and that they had instead approached it with a different mentality. I can sympathize with that, but I'm not sure what difference it would have made to the success of the game other than possibly adjusting consumer expectations (and to be fair, Ohlen was likely speaking about his "regrets" from a creative standpoint, not necessarily from a commercial point of view).

 

The core issue is that at some level they apparently didn't do enough market research (or didn't internalize the findings) to understand what they'd need to have ready to go on launch day to sustain more of the initial rush of interest in an MMO product. As Andryah and others have said, the reality of MMO players was very different from their expectations. And to be fair the reality is pretty baffling -- in a 2013 presentation, Ohlen mentioned some specific numbers:

• "We had expected our playerbase to play through the game and get to the endgame, on average, in about three to four months, maybe five months. It was 170-180 hours of content. But our metrics were showing us that, on average, for the millions of people playing our game, they were going through the game at a rate of 40 hours a week. [That] was the average! We actually had people doing 80 to 100 to 120 hours a week, which I can't even comprehend."
  

 

I can sympathize with someone having trouble comprehending the idea of millions of gamers averaging 40 hours a week and some hitting 120 hours (heck, that all sounds outright disturbing to me). But this was the market space they were deliberately trying to get into and, particularly when producing what might have been the most expensive game to date, they probably should have wrapped their heads around it beforehand.

Edited July 25, 2018 by DarthDymond

[Rion_Starkiller]

 

Got to give credit to Blizzard though.. they do a far better job farming their former subscriber base for periodic "re-ups" than any other MMO, and much better than EA does with SWTOR. EA sucks at this part of the business model. WoW has proven that all you need is to keep about 5% of your former subscribers in active rotation at any given time and you have a perpetual hit. SWTOR has more than 21 million to draw from... and that means the sustainable persistent player base should run around 1M on a recurring basis.. with the usual short cycle peaks around an expac as gravy on top of that.

 

This.

I still can't figure out what SWTOR's business model is.... Make EA money with the bare minimum amount of resources? If SWTOR is a WoW-clone, it's failing in the business model part of it.

Edited July 26, 2018 by Rion_Starkiller

[AlrikFassbauer]

With Star Wars: The Old Republic I wish that I pushed a little bit more toward making it kind of Knights of The Republic online rather than “Star Wars World of Warcraft.”

 

The WOW-crowd must have been really pressing here,

so much that they got their thing done,

in the end.

[Andryah]

The core issue is that at some level they apparently didn't do enough market research (or didn't internalize the findings) to understand what they'd need to have ready to go on launch day to sustain more of the initial rush of interest in an MMO product. As Andryah and others have said, the reality of MMO players was very different from their expectations. And to be fair the reality is pretty baffling -- in a 2013 presentation, Ohlen mentioned some specific numbers:

• "We had expected our playerbase to play through the game and get to the endgame, on average, in about three to four months, maybe five months. It was 170-180 hours of content. But our metrics were showing us that, on average, for the millions of people playing our game, they were going through the game at a rate of 40 hours a week. [That] was the average! We actually had people doing 80 to 100 to 120 hours a week, which I can't even comprehend."
  

 

I can sympathize with someone having trouble comprehending the idea of millions of gamers averaging 40 hours a week and some hitting 120 hours (heck, that all sounds outright disturbing to me). But this was the market space they were deliberately trying to get into and, particularly when producing what might have been the most expensive game to date, they probably should have wrapped their heads around it beforehand.

 

Yeah.. this really was the mother of all mistakes on the part of the studio in their development plan.

 

The thing is.. this may have been this studios first attempt at an MMO... but EA already had multiple MMOs in their book of business, and as such.. DID have the data to show what players do and do not do with a new MMO. But I would bet money that the issue behind this is that Mythic was still a studio entity at the time of SWTOR development, and was competing for control of the MMO business group within EA and probably did everything they could to keep Bioware in the dark about the realities of MMO player dynamics. Such a waste, because EA had clearly soured on Mythic and ended up folding it in under Bioware as they reorganized their MMO business.

Edited July 25, 2018 by Andryah

[Vember]

The WOW-crowd must have been really pressing here,

so much that they got their thing done,

in the end.

 

There's a thread about this on Reddit. Some of the alpha/beta testers for SWTOR talk about how wildly different the game was back then. It's pretty interesting stuff.

[Anzel]

LOL, this thread made me sick to my stomach. Guess why...

[Anzel]

There's a thread about this on Reddit. Some of the alpha/beta testers for SWTOR talk about how wildly different the game was back then. It's pretty interesting stuff.

 

I was in beta from August 2011. The original class stories are pretty much the same. I mean... not the SAME but the same. The game itself though is different.

[Bakgrind]

I was in beta from August 2011. The original class stories are pretty much the same. I mean... not the SAME but the same. The game itself though is different.

 

Alpha/Beta tester here as well. The only class story that was changed from beta to launch was the Smugglers Tatooine quest line where he got the option to get a kiss from Nariel Pridence the female Jedi. And you are correct the game that we have today does not resemble the game we had at launch. Today's game is simply superior to what it was back in 2012.

Edited July 25, 2018 by Bakgrind

[TUXs]

Alpha/Beta tester here as well. The only class story that was changed from beta to launch was the Smugglers Tatooine quest line where he got the option to get a kiss from Nariel Pridence the female Jedi. And you are correct the game that we have today does not resemble the game we had at launch. Today's game is simply superior to what it was back in 2012.

The only thing I miss from launch, is Ilum PvP. I know it was a lag fest and I know it crashed people left and right, but our server was semi balanced and it was a helluva lot of fun imo.

[Hebruixe]

HAHAHA!!! Don't let the door hit ya James.

 

The answers are complete garbage, just they typical junk answers...but even talking about Anthem failing, is interesting.

 

(and it was closer to 800 people they previously claimed)

 

Just curious. Do you blame Ohlen for many of SWTOR's problems? Do you think his departure is good for the game?

[RikuvonDrake]

Just curious. Do you blame Ohlen for many of SWTOR's problems? Do you think his departure is good for the game?

 

I think it's next to impossible for us bystanders to judge that without any knowledge of Bioware inner workings, their relationship with EA in terms of the development of SWTOR and the general strategy in which this game was developed and how much influence Ohlen had on that strategy. That said, it's a well-known fact that certain developers are prefered during the "design and development" of a game while others are preferred at the post-launch of the game, WoW, GW2 and loads of other games had quite a turnover of leading staff during their first year.

 

If Ohlen would have been able to "save" SWTOR I doubt that EA/Bioware would have swapped him away from that position, however much more likely is that the game was not doing that well and the direction Ohlen wanted the game to continue in wasn't the same as the direction EA/Bioware wanted.

[DarthDymond]

Today's game is simply superior to what it was back in 2012.

On balance, yeah -- but I will say I still miss starting with a base class, having full skill trees instead of the more linear discipline paths, and the less generic companion abilities we used to have.

[TUXs]

Just curious. Do you blame Ohlen for many of SWTOR's problems? Do you think his departure is good for the game?

Yes. Someone has been mismanaging the hell out of this game and him being at the top makes him a key person to replace. It may have been EA pushing it, but someone was agreeing to the stupidity of 4.0 and 5.0...