Where are we going, and how did we get here?

[SentinalMasterWW]

Just recently ESO did their big 10 year anniversary reveal, they announced a massive new expansion as per usual, and showed a roadmap for the rest of the year, they have content planned basically all through next year, and plan to do more in 2025 to celebrate their console Releases. They plan to do stuff similar to what SWTOR did for its 10 year, big story, new gameplay mechanic for classes with essentially spell crafting, and later on a PVP revamp.  

Thing is though, seeing that announcement got me thinking. 

Thinking about how SWTOR is in a really bad shape, that is competitors are innovating and making changes that their fans want. These others MMO's are beating out SWTOR by a margin. WOW is going strong, ESO is going strong, Heck even Fallout 76 after all its controversies is still going pretty strong. 

Don't get me wrong, ESO has its problems and so do the other games, but they at least put in the effort of listening to fans and trying to make good changes to their games and it pays off.

Than we get to SWTOR, what did SWTOR do to celebrate 10 years? 

It released what many and myself consider the worst expansion for SWTOR. It removed content, dumbed down the game to the lowest level with grind systems and repeating old content but with less in it now. 

I don't mind repeating the class stories, I think their great, but when I literally have half if not less than my abilities i used to have back in 6.0 why bother, add onto this the boring process is that levelling alts is now because you get jack for numerous levels kills any replay for me, I would love to create a new character and grind levels; just not a character in 7.0. 

I brought this up in my Stop dumbing down the game post (here) but this is what 7.0 gave us and what our "Anniversary gifts were. 

-Pruning, and the removal of most abilities in the game. 

-Return to Manaan, a forgettable experiance....as in we forgot it but it was that forgettable. 

-R-4, Decent Operation but I imagine that can only entertain players for so long. 

-Ruins of Nuhl, one of the worst flashpoints imo because it still can be a pug killer, to this day I refuse to do ruins of Nuhl after doing it a couple of times. 

-Broken gearing at launch that is now finally somewhat decent, but it only took around two years to fix it. 

-PVP, Removal of Ranked, Separation of the Q's, and allowing Premades to this day to still form up as meta specs to farm Solo Pugs which are round 90% ish of the community for PVP.

One of the things I am curious about is that all this was when the SWTOR team were still a part of Bioware, did the poor launch of Anthem derail SWTOR? Did the Dev's who leave were the last ones actually caring about putting out what the fans want? Was Bioware itself mandating these changes? We'll never know for sure. 

Look at the steam Charts, they tell a pretty good story of how much the population has left, While we don't know the Launcher players #'s we can guess they are roughly the same if not slightly less. Back during 6.0 I could say SWTOR was the underdog game and worth a sub for what it offered, now? I sadly cannot do it, if you are looking for an MMO to invest deeply in than SWTOR sadly isn't it, levelling is boring, and endgame comes down to repeating existing content over and over again without any proper incentive besides gear for alts. 

It wasn't like this though. 

Go back to the glory days of Rise of the hutt cartel and Shadow of revan. There was a great game there, one that slipped off. Lost its identity, and didn't know what it wanted to do. We even got some shine back in the game during 6.0 Days, where we added onto the game rather than removing content. That's what your fans want, They want MORE, they want you to build off existing content and make it even better. Removing content, pruning abilities from the game is not the way to do it, you are only alienating your player base even more. 

This Mandalorian storyline should've been something like ROTHC or SOR, go to one planet or a couple and end the story there. Don't drag it out, let is be a nice cohesive storyline without making it feel like it's lasting for eons. Players want to go back to the Sith vs Republic storyline, their tired of this Detour and generally tired of Mandalorians in general, we are all burned out by the Mandalorian and all this mando stuff. Give us a reprise from it. 

Us as players have gotten overpromised content only for the Dev's to underdeliver, or just fall into mediocrity, the fun stuff like all our abilities, and just general complexity of the game have been removed to try and cater to a crowd that doesn't exist for SWTOR. Which in turn has driven players away to find other games worth their time. A lot of these players have said they would love to come back to SWTOR, but just cannot tolerate the game currently as there is just no fun to be found. The "Content" is Galactic Seasons, where you go to a starter planet and kill 75 of X, or do X number of story missions on X planet. 

So what can we do?

The game can be fixed, but its mainly up to the Dev's if they want to listen to their fans or keep burying SWTOR. 

Here are some of my suggestions (Feel free to leave yours below) 

-New Rarity, Pearls or Cyan, These are rare items that can drop from all sources of content, but have a higher chance to drop in harder endgame content. These can be like the spoils of war sets, where they take old sets and revamp them, or ideally new sets based on all 8 class stories. 

-Nim option for all older raids, Give these raids some oomph so to say, Let players be able to do Nim Eternity vault, etc. That would make some raiders happy and bring them back for a bit. 

-PVP Revamp, An actual one. Give PVP seasons a purpose for vet PVP'ers, there are a ton of great ideas over on the PVP side of the forums. Do a leaderboard like system and reward the top 50-100 players, Hand out more PVP tokens, flairs, etc. Create PVP Armor/Weapons for those who say get in the top 25 or top 10. It gives some purpose for them to contribute. But in general anything to bring some life back to PVP. 

-Undo Pruning, Add abilities back for all classes. 

-Fix levelling and make it feel worthwhile again, don't put key abilities at endgame, and spread out abilities/Passives more evenly to fix deadzones.

-Fix the Combat Style tree, Rework it, or remove it entirely. The tree feels underwhelming currently, put in a tree that feels worthwhile. Make the players feel rewarded when they can put in a point in their trees. 

-Better class balancing, Classes are all over the place, Create a new format of how classes should be balanced and stick with it, that way classes are far more cohesive in how they should perform. 

-Let players be able to get old cross class abilities again! Obviously letting Sin take Phasewalk might be a bit broken, but letting Vanguards be able to pick up full auto, or Commandos being able to use shockstrike again, doesn't seem game breaking and would let players pick more in their toolkit.

There is more that is possible, and again they don't have to do all of this, heck even just one would be great, and again would love to hear from you guys of what the Dev's could do to improve this game. 

I want to state that none of my posts come from a place of malice or contempt for the Dev's. But SWTOR is really struggling to find its place, and I want to see this game make a comeback. The Dev's should take a look back at launch and bring those ideas/content back. Innovate off of them and celebrate what made SWTOR stand out, THAT should've been the 10 year Anniversary. 

If any of the Dev's read this, Please take some time and do some reflecting, look and listen to what your fanbase is saying, Heck do another Player Survey but send it out to Everyone. Get as much of an idea of what your players want. 

I want to say I'm not going to be surprised with what is coming in the February stream, its going to be more of the same. 1-2 Hours of content in same repeatable area, Cartel stuff, and maybe some misc change to the UI again. I'm not holding out hope they are going to fix any of the issues present, I just don't believe they will not until something like 8.0 which won't be until next year more than likely. 

However, If the Dev's make one good change, one that fans want? Than I will come back to this post, and give them credit for listening. 

Until than, SWTOR's future, is uncertain with the current status quo.

 

 

 

 

 

[eabevella]

Well, who will by the level 80 tokens if leveling is fun?

[ExarSun]

The 7.0 expansion so called....because no one in their right mind would call it that and its story are the worst i have ever seen or experienced in any game. Useless, meaningless run around pressing consoles, fighting mobs for absolutely no purpose...boring story with forgettable characters, no character building, no world building - no result whatsoever came from going to maanan. Malgus story isnt going nowhere. Mandalorian story is trash, boring, trash characters, i forgot when it all started - convoluted.

Ruhnuk - badly designed daily area, filled with champion mobs and whole armies of mobs everywhere - run around the whole map fighting mobs nonstop. Lane Vizsla story - very uninteresting. 

Voss - oh my god...this is the worst...again very boring and worthless story - no character or world building or any imortant thing happening whatsoever. You could have brought Sel Makor - Shrine of Silence something connection, but no no....its some czerka nobodies searching for artefacts....its like a side mission in Vanilla Class Story.

Kessan's Landing - a bit better story but so short its not even funny. The datacron - whoever though of that path to get it should be fired.

Why would the Commander/Leader of Task Force/Hand of the Empire....go directly to deal with so lowly opponents and clean a cantina with a mob???????????? Is this a joke?? Run around doing errands like a fkn worker. No immersion of any kinds, no important characters, nothing...Worst story... Its like the Emepror going every time to directly confront some resistance cells on some random planet.

CONSTANT SWITCHING BETWEEN VOICED STORY AND KOTOR-LIKE CUTSCENES is EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING.

And here i thought Mek-sha and Onderon were lack-luster. I hope whoever was in charge of 7.0 debacle was fired. Nice joke of a 10 anniversary. Random fanfictions have better story than SWTOR's 7.0-7.4 story...

Edited January 26 by ExarSun

[Whykara]

The state of the game gets more dire every year, as all other notable MMOs get great updates and expansions, while SWTOR gets nothing but the absolute minimum. And what makes it even more frustrating is that Biosword refuses to acknowledge this fact. They need to address the issues of this game, the complaints of subscribers, apologize for bad design choices and finally give us a roadmap. Other dev teams can do it and I see no reason why this one can't. Respect your customers, Biosword. And if you think that people would leave if you told the truth, then it is really time to look inward and rethink this whole enterprise.

[Kryptonomic]

A long time back I posted some history that some people liked and some people doubted. All of which is fine so I won't recount that here but I'll say this.

This game started life entirely as a single player game. It was KOTOR 3, effectively. As the cost became apparent, it was decided the only way to support the development effort (and meet promised studio projections) was to create an MMO. (Studios always have to provide projections to publishers for cost centers.) So, with the new focus in place, classes were expanded, stories were expanded, and lots of companions were added and then distributed to each class. This had impacts on choices made which could come back later in the game and some story fragmentation.

So you have a game heavy on story and heavy on choices within that story. Built on an engine that, at the time, at best used trigger flags almost exclusively for everything.

The latter of which they never could get right. Consider Hutta. The ambient dialogue repeats way more often there than it should and is supposed to be triggered only once, each time you get close enough to hear the characters. Also consider how two Heroic quest givers (Gedron Hix and Geric) are missing but the secondary heroic character (Bow La is still present for Geric) and how another heroic quest giver (Foreman Rham) is still present.

So you had a story-driven, choice-based game with a compromised trigger mechanic. But then they had to determine their audience. First it was the single player. Satisfy those looking for KOTOR 3. Novels were even planned that would be a tie-in to continue the story from KOTOR 1 and KOTOR 2. But then it became the MMO player. But then it was really the MMO player that liked an in-depth story. And then it would have to be story players who would tolerate a non-persistent world with a story that works better with persistence.

Lot's of history and most of it doesn't matter, I suppose. But what it led to does. Now they have a game that they can't support in that way. Consider, as just one example, how companions may no longer comment on things from early game where it would be obvious for them to do so. Consider how they got where even Scourge, of all people, has no dialogue when it comes to Revan or the Emperor.

They'll tell you they can't spend time on handling all those different possible companion interactions or story branches. But ... that's what the game was designed around and predicated upon initially. That was it's selling point. So now they have to develop in a context that goes against the game design as it was originally intended. And they have to do so with far less budget than they would no doubt like and with the entire original team -- and I'm talking well pre-beta here -- gone. And they have to do that will trying to figure out how to democratize the game across a broader potential platform distribution.

Anyone who has worked in the game industry knows what a lot of this leads to: conflicted visions about game mechanics and presentation, which often from the outside looks like changing things that seemingly worked just fine and no one was really clamoring to have changed, at the expense of long-standing bugs in the backlog. You still, for example, have numerous codex bugs that have never been fixed, some stretching all the way back to 2011. You also see a shortsightedness of design choices, even in simple things. As one example, consider how the character creator was changed -- understandably for the new way of choosing combat styles -- but removing the ability to hear the character's voice as you make changes.

I'm picking on things here that are much less substantive than the list of the original poster just to amplify that if even the relatively simple stuff goes awry, it becomes tricky for the team to build on that for more ambitious endeavors. This isn't to say they can't do anything and it's certainly not to say that whatever they do will be bad, but the sentiment of SWTOR is "struggling to find its place" is extremely accurate. The unfortunate part is that this has always been the case.

[TrixxieTriss]

9 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

The game can be fixed, but its mainly up to the Dev's if they want to listen to their fans or keep burying SWTOR

It’s not just up to them. It’s also up to the bosses who decide what budget they give them. If it’s a shoe string budget, then we’ll be lucky if they can keep the lights on & fix bugs. 

The real question is how much funding are they getting to make content & run the game? 

There have been 4,000 game devs laid off across the US/Canadian  gaming industry this year already (2000 from Activision/Blizzard). So I’m sure there’s plenty of talent out there looking for work (possibly some ex WoW devs?)

So if it’s just a shortage of money & the right talent to make swtor great again, now would be the time to fund the game & hire up to fix the game. But that will depend on how much of a budget swtor is given. 

Edited January 26 by TrixxieTriss

[Char_Ell]

2 hours ago, Kryptonomic said:

A long time back I posted some history that some people liked and some people doubted. All of which is fine so I won't recount that here but I'll say this.

This game started life entirely as a single player game. It was KOTOR 3, effectively. As the cost became apparent, it was decided the only way to support the development effort (and meet promised studio projections) was to create an MMO. (Studios always have to provide projections to publishers for cost centers.) So, with the new focus in place, classes were expanded, stories were expanded, and lots of companions were added and then distributed to each class. This had impacts on choices made which could come back later in the game and some story fragmentation.

Interesting.  When launch of BioWare Austin studio was announced in 2006 March the announcement also mentioned the studio was working on an unannounced MMORPG.  In 2006 August BioWare announced it had licensed Hero Engine from then-owner Simutronics.   So if what you're saying is true then SWTOR development team at the time continued with a single player design and and just made 8 single player design games into one and apparently by the time they recognized the challenges this presented the sunk cost was already too high and they had no other viable choice but to continue on with a design that hampered long term development.

 

12 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

I want to say I'm not going to be surprised with what is coming in the February stream, its going to be more of the same. 1-2 Hours of content in same repeatable area, Cartel stuff, and maybe some misc change to the UI again. I'm not holding out hope they are going to fix any of the issues present, I just don't believe they will not until something like 8.0 which won't be until next year more than likely. 

All I'm expecting from the February livestream is Galactic Seasons 6 info.  Not really expecting anything else even though there may be more to the stream than GS 6.  To be blunt, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your post.  If it made you feel better to express your frustrations with SWTOR's development decisions over the past few years or so and offer your ideas for you to make the game more how you and perhaps others want it to be then that is about all it did and will do.  Yes, 7.0 and 10th anniversary did not go well.  It's so much water under the bridge.  When I consider the changes made to the game with 7.0 to present time I see a pattern of decisions that point to a goal of making SWTOR easier for the dev team to manage.  Ability pruning, elimination of ranked PvP, elimination of 16-player support for future operations (if any) coupled with the transition of the dev team from its original studio to a different studio and reported downsizing of the SWTOR dev team as part of this process.  You apparently want the game to go back to what it was in the past.  I just don't see that as a realistic possibility.  My unsolicited advice to you is to play and pay for SWTOR if you get sufficient enjoyment out of the game.  If SWTOR doesn't provide sufficient value, however you determine that value, then look at your other gaming options, like ESO that you refer to, and try those instead to see if they provide sufficient value for you to play and potentially pay for.  You and others that continually refer to the devs not listening are simply beating the proverbial dead horse.  I think the devs listen but they often can't do what players want them to.

[Pietrastor]

3 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

It’s not just up to them. It’s also up to the bosses who decide what budget they give them. If it’s a shoe string budget, then we’ll be lucky if they can keep the lights on & fix bugs. 

The real question is how much funding are they getting to make content & run the game? 

There have been 4,000 game devs laid off across the US/Canadian  gaming industry this year already (2000 from Activision/Blizzard). So I’m sure there’s plenty of talent out there looking for work (possibly some ex WoW devs?)

So if it’s just a shortage of money & the right talent to make swtor great again, now would be the time to fund the game & hire up to fix the game. But that will depend on how much of a budget swtor is given. 

Sure, when it comes to quantity of content updates..

But what kind of a story they decide to tell is entirely up to them and obviously no EA suit forced them to drag this Malgus/Mando nonsense for years and year without going absolutely anywhere to the point even story players abandoned the game. Within the same budget they could've switched up the main storyline 3 times already but no, it's gonna be another year of the exact same thing since 2018

Edited January 26 by Pietrastor

[arunav]

16 minutes ago, Char_Ell said:

Interesting.  When launch of BioWare Austin studio was announced in 2006 March the announcement also mentioned the studio was working on an unannounced MMORPG.  In 2006 August BioWare announced it had licensed Hero Engine from then-owner Simutronics.   So if what you're saying is true then SWTOR development team at the time continued with a single player design and and just made 8 single player design games into one and apparently by the time they recognized the challenges this presented the sunk cost was already too high and they had no other viable choice but to continue on with a design that hampered long term development.

 

All I'm expecting from the February livestream is Galactic Seasons 6 info.  Not really expecting anything else even though there may be more to the stream than GS 6.  To be blunt, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your post.  If it made you feel better to express your frustrations with SWTOR's development decisions over the past few years or so and offer your ideas for you to make the game more how you and perhaps others want it to be then that is about all it did and will do.  Yes, 7.0 and 10th anniversary did not go well.  It's so much water under the bridge.  When I consider the changes made to the game with 7.0 to present time I see a pattern of decisions that point to a goal of making SWTOR easier for the dev team to manage.  Ability pruning, elimination of ranked PvP, elimination of 16-player support for future operations (if any) coupled with the transition of the dev team from its original studio to a different studio and reported downsizing of the SWTOR dev team as part of this process.  You apparently want the game to go back to what it was in the past.  I just don't see that as a realistic possibility.  My unsolicited advice to you is to play and pay for SWTOR if you get sufficient enjoyment out of the game.  If SWTOR doesn't provide sufficient value, however you determine that value, then look at your other gaming options, like ESO that you refer to, and try those instead to see if they provide sufficient value for you to play and potentially pay for.  You and others that continually refer to the devs not listening are simply beating the proverbial dead horse.  I think the devs listen but they often can't do what players want them to.

I agree with what you've posted, with an exception.

It should be possible to revise the ability/passive/combat revamp of 7.0. For leveling especially, classes/combat styles need more of their previous toolkit available. But it goes beyond how boring leveling combat is now - the game simply is less fun to play for many players, even at level 80. This is the most regular critique I've heard of the combat revamp of 7.0, alongside it being seemingly completed in a hurry, instead of in a way that's best for the game. 

If SWTOR does any single thing aside from a story update or two and the expected galactic and pvp seasons this year, I would hope the developers go back and do a better job with the skill trees. Give players more abilities to use again generally (as the game did from 1.0-6.x), and award them at a lower level.

[Otowi]

It's true enough that the Mando story is really starting to drag now, and even more so when it comes to Malgus and his big plan. The best thing the devs could do now is an expansion pack that can finish both stories in a good way, and then onto new things. 

The entire 2 story updates a year is getting very long in the tooth by now.

Was the pruning needed? Well, some abilities were and still is if you read the class guides, very situational. Before the pruning there were more of those abilities, and some I would wager were almost never used, as they had very little use, if any at all. Some I never had any use for as a PvE player, and did wonder why they were even there in the first place.

Combining some abilities and passives made sense to me, but I'm still stumped as to why they made leveling so boring with long time between new abilities for some most classes.

A roadmap would be very appreciated, but I don't expect to get any, and if we by a miracle get some sort of roadmap, it will be very vague, and leave things open to speculation.

We all know the dev team is small, and we also know that the budget is not that high, which makes us sad, as SWTOR has so much potential...

Edited January 26 by Otowi

[Ominovin]

3 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

It’s not just up to them. It’s also up to the bosses who decide what budget they give them. If it’s a shoe string budget, then we’ll be lucky if they can keep the lights on & fix bugs. 

The real question is how much funding are they getting to make content & run the game? 

There have been 4,000 game devs laid off across the US/Canadian  gaming industry this year already (2000 from Activision/Blizzard). So I’m sure there’s plenty of talent out there looking for work (possibly some ex WoW devs?)

So if it’s just a shortage of money & the right talent to make swtor great again, now would be the time to fund the game & hire up to fix the game. But that will depend on how much of a budget swtor is given. 

The key concept to remember is 'Return on Investment' or RoI:  It should be pretty clear to everyone that EA doesn't think the increased revenue (if any) would justify the necessary investment (or at the very least, there are other projects that promise a better return).

Without even taking any technical questions (like the game engine) into consideration, SWTOR is generally going to have a hard time justifying additional investment because it is a licensed intellectual property:  Lucasfilm gets a slice of every revenue dollar from this game, which makes it that much harder to make an actual 'profit'...

Remember that the managers answer to other managers, who eventually answer to the Board of Directors, who in turn answer to the investors, who demand that EA keeps its share price up, which generally requires EA to not make 'poor' investments (or at least,not too many 'poor' investments)...

 

 

As to the original post, I should also point out that Bioware had some serious issues around the time of this game's 10th anniversary:

• The launch of 7.0 was delayed a couple of months at the last minute, and
• It was still missing promised features when it did launch.

I don't know if the pandemic hit them particularly hard, technical issues were rougher than expected, or they just outright over-promised, but they obviously had serious issues they* still haven't recovered from (and probably never will) and it makes perfect sense to me that the expansion would take priority over an anniversary celebration...

 

Overall, the MMO industry is presumably in a bit of a financial squeeze right now:  Development/Operating costs must be up with inflation, but they can't really justify a price increase (SWTOR certainly can't, and I'd think it would be a hard sell at best for most other games), which means either cutting costs somehow or accepting reduced profits (which could be fatal if the profits weren't strong enough to start with)...

[Kryptonomic]

7 minutes ago, Ominovin said:

It should be pretty clear to everyone that EA doesn't think the increased revenue (if any) would justify the necessary investment (or at the very least, there are other projects that promise a better return).

It's common to blame EA or publishers in general but that's rarely true on games like this and has rarely been true for BioWare. BioWare ran its own cost center, just as many studios do within a publishing umbrella. It's very similar to how movie studios work with production companies. Most things are based on projections. Those projections come from internal teams based on (1) product strategy and (2) assessments from the product team, including developers, on what they can achieve. Key to that is (3) how much it's going to cost which leads to (4) how much do we project to make as a result of all this.

Money is spent not based on revenue or profit but on projections. Meaning, money is spent long before product decisions actually reach the public. That's how movie studios can still function even when they have what seem to be bomb after bomb in the box office. It's not quite the same in the game industry, but it isn't wholly dissimilar either. The main point being: publishers go on (1) what projections are made and (2) the history of making those projections. It's nowhere near as simple as just return-on-investment because "investment" is distributed.

Which isn't to say funding isn't an issue, of course. It's just to say that how funding works can be a bit complicated, particularly when historical performance is part of what dictates that. And that can be amplified or degraded. Once degradation starts, it can be an uphill climb.

14 minutes ago, Ominovin said:

SWTOR is generally going to have a hard time justifying additional investment because it is a licensed intellectual property

It's not just because it's a license intellectual property. After all, if said property is very successful, then it would not be hard to justify investment. (That worked pretty well for the Hogwarts Legacy team, for example.) The question is whether the license holder sees more value than not in what you are doing with the license. SWTOR deals with an era that Disney / LucasArts, at least right now, really doesn't care about at all. It has no significance to their movies and even their latest foray into the High Republic is well after the events in this game. So from that perspective, SWTOR is a bit of a null value. It doesn't really cost them anything but it also doesn't do much to get them anything either and doesn't really help their overall branding. (But also doesn't hurt it.)

Right now, if I put my spin on it, SWTOR suffers from a case of always making a series of decisions that reduce or minimize what came before. Think of how much in the game has often been minimized. For awhile, no missions mattered except purple. In fact, exploration missions were turned off by default for a time. Then heroics were made "grab it and turn in" rather than as necessarily being part of the exploration. Even simple things like training for skills, which was part of the story interaction, were removed. Starfighter was added but largely abandoned. Basically lots of things that used to matter as part of the experience no longer do.

Now, you can argue that's streamlining and that's what the SWTOR team does in fact argue. And that can be valid, for sure. But SWTOR has always had an issue (at least in my opinion) between streamlining and reducing things to irrelevance. And when you do that, your buying public responds extremely variably. And a variably buying public means projections are really hard to get right. Which leads back to what I started with.

 

 

[BulbulusTheGreat]

i agree with most of this but i gotta said i quite liked ruin of nul fp while i hated ROTHC.

[Kryptonomic]

2 hours ago, Char_Ell said:

So if what you're saying is true then SWTOR development team at the time continued with a single player design and and just made 8 single player design games into one

Indeed, yes. At the time Star Wars: Galaxies (released in 2003 and then revamped in 2005) was a thing. Of, course KOTOR 1 was in 2003 and KOTOR 2 was in 2004. That's the broad context.

You can read a little of the history around KOTOR 3 starting and getting canceled here and here. This was in 2005 and there were varying people vying for control of the development, BioWare being one of them. But BioWare did hit on the formula of MMO -- and that was what swayed the decision, hence what you see in 2006 and originally announced for 2009. Hero Engine was largely chosen because there wasn't time to build an in-house engine and, given projected costs, Hero Engine was deemed an investment that would give enough for a game that was essentially a single-player experience in a multi-player context.

Originally -- and by this I mean going back to 2005 -- the idea was two classes: Jedi or Sith. The Jedi Knight and Consular stories were wrapped into one. The Warrior and Inquisitor stories were also wrapped into one.

To support an MMO, however, more were needed. Hence the breakout of those plus the additions of others. Development took some time and some of the story elements from the KOTOR 3 idea were framed and eventually incorporated into some novels, all of which came out in 2011: "Revan", "Deceived", "Fatal Alliance." ("Annihilation" didn't come out until 2013.) What's interesting, of course, is that "Revan" was clearly continuing on from KOTOR 1 and KOTOR 2 and was meant to serve as prologue, as it were.

I don't want to mischaracterize, however. BioWare was committed to the MMO idea pretty early on. In fact, it's what "won" them the ability to go forward since there was a need to consider how to fit into the space that World of Warcraft (which came out in late 2004) was showing could be very profitable. A lot of people think SWTOR and WOW were separated by enough time, given when SWTOR came out. But the development of SWTOR  started as a direct result of (1) wanting a KOTOR 3 and (2) wanting something like WOW.

Edited January 26 by Kryptonomic

[SentinalMasterWW]

8 hours ago, Kryptonomic said:

Anyone who has worked in the game industry knows what a lot of this leads to: conflicted visions about game mechanics and presentation, which often from the outside looks like changing things that seemingly worked just fine and no one was really clamoring to have changed, at the expense of long-standing bugs in the backlog. You still, for example, have numerous codex bugs that have never been fixed, some stretching all the way back to 2011. You also see a shortsightedness of design choices, even in simple things. As one example, consider how the character creator was changed -- understandably for the new way of choosing combat styles -- but removing the ability to hear the character's voice as you make changes.

I feel that has been one of SWTOR's biggest issues is multiple directors pointing where the game should go, 7.0 was basically backpedaling and undoing a lot of what 6.0 put in place and pushing it in a different direction. There really hasn't been a cohesive direction of where to take SWTOR which is why we get in this slump of where are we supposed to go. 

 

8 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

It’s not just up to them. It’s also up to the bosses who decide what budget they give them. If it’s a shoe string budget, then we’ll be lucky if they can keep the lights on & fix bugs. 

The real question is how much funding are they getting to make content & run the game? 

There have been 4,000 game devs laid off across the US/Canadian  gaming industry this year already (2000 from Activision/Blizzard). So I’m sure there’s plenty of talent out there looking for work (possibly some ex WoW devs?)

So if it’s just a shortage of money & the right talent to make swtor great again, now would be the time to fund the game & hire up to fix the game. But that will depend on how much of a budget swtor is given. 

While it is true budget dictates how much they can do, I obviously imagine EA/Disney put more money in pushing Cartel Market sales as those are instant sales, and dictate that whatever star wars show is going on, they have to make CM stuff based off of it. 

Like I stated in the post, I wonder how much of the game's development was messed up because of Anthem and to an extent Mass Effect Andromeda's poor performance before the move to Broadsword.

IMO they need to start looking for ways to get players to subscribe to the game, rather than doing these quick easy CM Grabs. But if they want players to Subscribe they need to make a game that players want to sub for. They could easily get old players to come back and Re-sub as that audience does exist, but they need to go back on a lot of the design choices they did for 7.0. 

To be clear, I don't know the exact sub % of the total players base, but currently, Im going to guess and say 40% or so currently right now are subbed while most are F2P.

4 hours ago, Char_Ell said:

When I consider the changes made to the game with 7.0 to present time I see a pattern of decisions that point to a goal of making SWTOR easier for the dev team to manage.  Ability pruning, elimination of ranked PvP, elimination of 16-player support for future operations (if any) coupled with the transition of the dev team from its original studio to a different studio and reported downsizing of the SWTOR dev team as part of this process.  You apparently want the game to go back to what it was in the past.  I just don't see that as a realistic possibility.  My unsolicited advice to you is to play and pay for SWTOR if you get sufficient enjoyment out of the game.  If SWTOR doesn't provide sufficient value, however you determine that value, then look at your other gaming options, like ESO that you refer to, and try those instead to see if they provide sufficient value for you to play and potentially pay for.  You and others that continually refer to the devs not listening are simply beating the proverbial dead horse.  I think the devs listen but they often can't do what players want them to.

My counter argument to this is that 6.0 had a solid foundation to it and all the Dev's really had to do was build off of it. In reality most of everyone (me included) just wanted 7.0 for the removal of specs being tied to classes removed. The ability to swap to a 2nd combat style should have been something added later after refinement and testing. 7.0 was rushed due to various factors and they had to get something out, the poor launch of 7.0 was caused by this rush. Its why classes didn't get a lot of proper skill trees while ones that were on the PTS and were able to get proper feedback turned out better than others. 

In reality they kind of shot themselves in the foot, they did and still do this unnecessary changes to the game. If they wanted the path of least resistance they should've just continued where 6.0 left of functionality wise, and leave the systems that work (like the GTN) alone. 

 

 

 

Edited January 26 by SentinalMasterWW

[Kryptonomic]

13 hours ago, SentinalMasterWW said:

I feel that has been one of SWTOR's biggest issues is multiple directors pointing where the game should go, 7.0 was basically backpedaling and undoing a lot of what 6.0 put in place and pushing it in a different direction

Agreed. The challenge has been seen in trying to accommodate different audiences but without a clear vision that defined what the SWTOR identity is. For example, they want to streamline certain things for established players. But often that streamlining makes things quite a bit more discordant for new players. (Established players should really try to step back and look at the game from the new player point of view; it's interesting. Imagine it's your first time coming to the game and you know very little about it.) They have changed the aesthetic numerous times but it's often unclear exactly why.

A challenge here is that new players will only be used to the new stuff so won't have a basis to compare. Established players will have trouble looking at it with the eyes of a new player. So much of the discussion around the changes becomes entirely anecdotal. Sometimes the decisions are perceived as good, sometimes bad, sometimes neutral. But in just about all cases, there is often an underlying question of "why do this?" Put another way: given your limited time and budget, why is this the thing you chose to focus on?

The same applies to story and narrative. New players may take awhile to get up to the new content, thus not feel the impact of such a slow cadence of story progression. Established players, on the other hand, feel the slow progression of a Malgus story going since 2019. New players may never have experienced some of the Heroic Quest Giver NPCs so are not aware of how those were previously integrated into the world stories whereas established players are.

This all may seem trivial but what I think it does is put various audiences at odds with each other. I don't mean this is intentional so much but rather that people have extremely different perceptions and thus expectations because SWTOR is radically different things to different audiences. And the SWTOR's team development vision -- whether that be in gameplay mechanics or story -- seems to have no core identity. And that core identity is what I was talking about upstream: the start of a single-player KOTOR 3 to (very quickly) a multi-player MMO with only some of KOTOR 3 being consistently applied.

 

[Pietrastor]

I'll just add stuff to @Kryptonomic amazing summaries, no point repeating the same points he already covered so well:

Another thing that unfortunately didn't help, especially post-launch, was Austin vs Edmonton relations within Bioware and the latter's treatement of SWTOR as a lesser title & team, despite the consistient revenue stream Edmonton hasn't seen since... 2014 Inquisition release. From what we know not only they actively overused the Austin team to help with developement of Anthem, Andromeda and 300 internal iterations of DA4 instead of focusing on SWTOR, but also siphoned SWTOR's constant revenue stream to fund the neverending developement cycles at Edmonton itself.

Now, I ain't saying "poor Austin always had it bad and did nothing wrong". They sure made a TON of bad design decisions themselves. But on top of design issues they also had budget and manpower issues rather uncommon for the genre. Usually, MMOs like this are either shut down OR become a matter of principle to turn things around for the mother company - FFXIV, ESO, Fallout 76 etc. SWTOR was in this bizarre spot of being kept alive seemingly for no reason, especially given EA's cut-throat history of deleting unprofitable games and studios. Bringing in good profit yet seeing little of it reflected in content updates. 

The move to Broadsword is potentially beneficial in that the SWTOR substantial profits (& manpower) will not longer funnel into Edmonton and their projects anymore and perhaps get actually put back into SWTOR itself. In that sense, we COULD even see an increase in content updates. I say all of this hypothetically because at this stage we have no clue what are BroadSword's plans towards the game, and won't know probably till the end of the year when 7.5/7.6, which already entered developement prior to the studio-swap, actually release. BroadSword is a tiny studio made of ex-Mythic emplyees. So far they only delt with basic maintaining of ancient MMOs (Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot). We know that about half of SWTOR team moved to BS, basically making them the majority of BS employees, but we do not know whether BS hired/plans to hire additional local devs to bring the SWTOR team size back to the previous number. We also have no idea and no gurarantee whether BS management actually DOES put the profits back into the game fully or uses it on some other, new project instead just like Edmonton did.

If they're smart they will sieze this oppurtunity and basically use SWTOR as their big break. An extensive, good """relaunch""" expansion could absolutely work out in their and the game's favour in a big way. Comeback stories are nothing new in the video game industry anymore, gamers loves them, even years later. Significant SWTOR profits, no longer burdened by funding Edmonton projects should more than allow a big expansion with good quality and quantity of content, significant systems&features upgrades or a consoles port.

But that is assuming of course that BroadSword is actually interested in DEVELOPING and EXPANDING the game rather than just maintaining it, or keeping it alive Bioware-style by having minimum new content out while claiming majority of the profits for other new pet-projects.

Time will tell but if there was ever a chance for a "big relaunch", even as late as it is, it is now - free of Edmonton management. The last chance. If nothing happens within the next 2 years then it means we're heading into maintenance mode and that's all there is to it

Edited January 29 by Pietrastor

[ExarSun]

Relaunches of MMO or breathing life to them (like with LOTRO) becomes possible with smart, dedicated and able team. Full of competent devs. Who love the game they are developing. Not the people who made years and years worth of bad design choices and not certainly the people who were part of 7.0 joke of an anniversary/update/expansion. I havent seen love and real effort put in this game since 2017. This is what...6 years. I wont hold my breath.

[Whykara]

54 minutes ago, ExarSun said:

Relaunches of MMO or breathing life to them (like with LOTRO) becomes possible with smart, dedicated and able team.

Someone pointed out a while ago that it's maybe not EA, not Bioware, not the limited resources or anything else holding back SWTOR, but that the team itself may just simply be incapable. Personally I still hold the hope that it was indeed Bioware's atrocious management sabotaging this game, but if Broadsword does not deliver this year, we probably have to accept the fact that SWTOR is simply a victim of incompetence.

[fabsus]

47 minutes ago, Whykara said:

Someone pointed out a while ago that it's maybe not EA, not Bioware, not the limited resources or anything else holding back SWTOR, but that the team itself may just simply be incapable. Personally I still hold the hope that it was indeed Bioware's atrocious management sabotaging this game, but if Broadsword does not deliver this year, we probably have to accept the fact that SWTOR is simply a victim of incompetence.

there have been a few comments about talking to swtor devs in their spare time in bars in and around austin, as well as public comments from former employees who are not afraid of having their careers cut if they speak openly. the comments were deleted here, and the people who posted them were warned. 
in the end, no one can judge the truthfulness of the comments. they may be true, a mix with their own distorted perceptions, or simply a dig about leaving the team.

at the end we will find out how much the team gets released and in what quality. i mean the latest update, still made under bioware flags, was just awefull with really ashaming cutscenes, that i would advice writers and creators of cutscenes to do some basic trainings, or maybe watch some tutorials on youtube. in the past these were a blast.

 

[Pietrastor]

3 hours ago, ExarSun said:

Relaunches of MMO or breathing life to them (like with LOTRO) becomes possible with smart, dedicated and able team. Full of competent devs. Who love the game they are developing. Not the people who made years and years worth of bad design choices and not certainly the people who were part of 7.0 joke of an anniversary/update/expansion. I havent seen love and real effort put in this game since 2017. This is what...6 years. I wont hold my breath.

True. But no amount of talent will make up for a limited budget in a themepark, content-focused MMO unfortunately. Adequate budget is simply needed. This is not a sandbox game where 1 stroke-of-genius idea can make the entire game. TOR needs budget = tons of employees with salaries in order to produce alot of new content and execute extensive systems&features changes and additions. 

Allegedly, based on what was said by former devs and in Anthem/Andromeda investigations, they SHOULD have higher budget now simply thanks to extensive profits no longer fueling Edmonton instead of Austin.

But we're yet to witness and verify what will BroadSword do with this presumably increased budget. Maybe alot and THEN the talent will show its value, along with sheer manpower. Or maybe they will squander it and nothing will change.

Edited January 29 by Pietrastor

[xxSHOONYxx]

The game has pretty much everything against it right now, the reason it had any sort of profit is exactly because their story content was lacking and their earnings came from cartel market.

Game to me got here this way.

Kotor but in a mmo setting trying to get both crowds to play the game, making everything voice acted.
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Original vision the game had was very bad for a mmo and had a massive decline of players. Making everything voice acted but no content with staying power was very bad. 
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Had to go f2p because player base was dropping fast and had somewhat of a resurgence on player base.
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2.0 and golden era of the game imo, story wise (which i stopped caring after i did my first playthrough of the vanilla game and started spacebar simulator) was short. VA the way swtor does it is not profitable/easy on time management. 3 ops, culmination of dread master arc and arc to get the dread crest that took you to kill world bosses and special secret bosses in ops, 2 raid lairs, GSF, strongholds and more. Again, peak swtor. Only downside to me was that the arc of the dread master crest did not end on dread palace, having a special encounter/secret boss if everyone had their dread crest or a special drop. 
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3.0 somewhat of a letdown, tos and ravagers full of bugs which some still exist and no nim mode added, more of a story focus.
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Their 2nd largest mistake after releasing the game with no player retention content, the last big push for a revival which was completely botched on their aim with 4.0. They went full story and single player.... on a MMO and making everything so trivial that the hard part of the game is staying awake. The force awakens came out a month after and people flocked to the game because they wanted more star wars. That expansion made most of the pve community quit because it had nothing for them, was unable to retain the people coming from the new star wars movie hype, and the one chapter a month was disastrous to player retention. Game was a ghost town. This was the tipping point that made swtor what it is now.
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Kotet was already in production when 4.0 failed so they cut short the chapters planned... allegedly. And they had to try to actually make content and do something unheard of to me at least for any other mmo, release one boss at a time to do an op. Can't even imagine how bad their player counts had to be to do that to aim to get player retention after they ditched ops in 4.0.
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Their downward spiral into turning this into a mobile game began with "battle passes" and companions on cartel market (it may have been sooner, i quit after the debacle of 4.0 and didnt came back here to do dxun and gods). A LOT of free publicity happened here, two huge streamers shroud and summit started playing the game with 20k viewers on twitch each, content creators like zanny doing a series of swtor videos with 4-2m views each. Covid happening here which spiked the player count too. 6.0 era, through circumstances and not by merit was a life line the game received and all we got with that life line was... 7.0.
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Good ol 10 year celebration of swtor, What else could be said besides what was not already said?
There was some free PR too, mmo reviewers came to the game and made videos of it, nixxion, john strife hayes, bellular among others, most with the feeling of "good start and fun untill you reach end game, endgame none existent. Do not recommend to play this game as a main mmo because endgame and content cadence is awful". Bellular even went one step ahead and made a video taking jabs at EA for letting the game to reach this low and why player retention is none existent (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F24ZXO9-MA).


Where are we going? 
I had a sliver a hope with their poll, until i saw the part of the poll about CM and when i found out the poll did not go to previous players. Current players... idk they are mainly contempt with the low effort the game has done to the point they still pay 15 a month for nothing or just because friends still play. Do they want to grow the game or to stop the player bleeding? Why not ask the millions of past subscribers and see why they quit, what on their game designe was bad enough they lost all of them, what were their mistakes so they can improve upon and potentially bring some back and grow the player base of the game?
Since the beginning of the game when it had millions of subs i thought swtor was not going to be sustainable with how they did VA, and i don't see the game being able to start growing until they dial back a LOT on that department, if npcs were voiced by PC just text the game with the same budget could have so much more content than what it has now.
And hope they take a bit of inspiration of what palworld dev said about creative vision "i don't have a creative vision. I just want to make a game people like".

[Pietrastor]

1 hour ago, xxSHOONYxx said:

Snip

Long story short, it's the same lesson as literally always turns out to be the case for themepark AAA MMOs - all content must be served well keeping all groups of players happy. Casual/story folks, PVEers/raiders, PVPers, cosmetics whales etc.

Unless they increase content production for the entire target audience, nothing will change and the game will just keep slowly dwindling down. If we look at SteamStats, SWTOR is less stable post-pandemic than FFXIV or ESO are. No wonder tho, both keep their players much happeir with far more content of all kind served frequently enough.

[eabevella]

Well, they aimed for a MMO+RPG game, but you need a lot of money and talents to maintain both ends.

As a RPG, you lost all role-playing fun after SoH because the story has become one dimensional, none of your choices matter, none of your characters matter. They even cut more corners by not voice acting all the scenes.

As a MMO, there's little to no contents after SoH. Just the fact that there only 3 operations: Gods, Dxun, and R4 in the past 5 years is enough said. They don't even make NiM and 16men for R4.

Right now SWTOR is a bad RPG and a bad MMO, and nothing will change unless they start to make meaningful contents with whatever little fund they have. But nope, we're making UI changes no one asks, cutting more contents that attract people in the first place (fully voice acted, well animated cut scenes; challenging group contents), and every other choices that make the game boring and empty.

[Kryptonomic]

5 hours ago, eabevella said:

Well, they aimed for a MMO+RPG game, but you need a lot of money and talents to maintain both ends.

Exactly this. That was my point upstream a bit as well. The identity of the game has always been a bit fragmented. You see this most often in particular design decisions.

 

5 hours ago, eabevella said:

As a RPG, you lost all role-playing fun after SoH because the story has become one dimensional, none of your choices matter, none of your characters matter. They even cut more corners by not voice acting all the scenes.

I think there's truth to this for sure. The challenge is they designed a very particular kind of game: extremely story heavy, with a lot of companion interaction, and with the possibility of persistent consequences for choices made at various points. But then they had to -- or at least chose to -- start "streamlining." Rather than focus on what was arguably their core strength, they tried to be many things to many people, which satisfied some, dissatisfied others, and provided what you might argue is a neutral-casual experience for perhaps the vast majority. What this led to is an extremely variable revenue stream and that, of course, means you can't make product level projections. Which means you have to cut costs where and when you can.

I posted some of the history of KOTFE / KOTET before but rather than revisit that I'll just repeat the part that probably mattered: "Now it [KOTFE / KOTET] had to be the entry point for many new players and a continuation point for old players. That's a really key point to realize if you feel disconnects between what SWTOR was (vanilla class stories) and what it become (KOTFE/KOTET)."

The reason for this streamlining was fairly obvious on one hand: it reduced some aspects of the need to keep individuating class stories to a great extent. This was an easy sell for product managers because it promised the ability of coming out with more content. Granted, it would be less customized content per class, but more overall content. Yet, we've seen how that played out. It's worth folks considering why that is. It's also worth keeping in mind some historical context here. In November 2013, Lucasfilm/Disney announced that the next film (The Force Awakens) would be released in December 2015. And when did KOTFE come out? October of 2015.

I'm not pointing all this out to start any battles or try to get people to come down on one side or the other. But the operative context has always been fascinating to me for a variety of reasons.

In many ways, SWTOR was typical BioWare: ambitious. But also ambitious without much of a plan that stretched beyond the immediate. The initial immediate was competing with WoW. The eventual immediate was attempting to latch onto a renewed focus on Star Wars given the Disney acquisition. What this means to me is that SWTOR has always been reactive. Thus that's what contributes to that lack of identity. It always tried to be what it needed to be at the moment -- which usually translated into monetary concerns -- rather than what it could be under a guiding vision. Obviously that's personal opinion and I ask no one to agree but it is informed opinion based on a long history with this game, that reaches back to before it was SWTOR.