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

[cjmarsh]

It's always been about the setting and story for SWTOR but there's only so many times the typical player will go through the story content before they move on. As a result the game is on life support and considered a niche title unlike the major MMOs that are still earning quite a bit in revenue. I'm not sure there's any chance of a revival for the game but maintenance mode is fine with me as the story is fun to revisit every so often.

[xxSHOONYxx]

On 1/31/2024 at 4:58 PM, Pietrastor said:

It's the bigger team size(s) working much longer = tenfold more salaries to pay for many more years. C'mon, ain't that obvious?

...

We will have to agree to disagree.
Some of that does goes into new tech and all that, but i find it way too hard that's why the difference is huge, even compared to contemporary mmos like ff14 with an estimated development cost of 130m. 
Not particularly mmos (and they take more time ik) but not even games like cyberpunk and years after and all the eye candy that game has and all the new technologies and nvida using the game as a benchmark for their new technology does not reach swtor development cost.
Only a person with the detailed budget will have the complete answer, but even without it you can see what others have done, what some try to limit and what others completely avoid. FF14 at the beginning was fully written story, they began adding VA later and even with the huge earnings they have compared to swtor they still barely dable on it. And the writing is on the wall (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/98119-largest-voice-over-project-in-the-entertainment-industry)
Copy paste from a website about the VA of swtor "to put that into context, that's as many lines of dialogue as 125 or more feature-length motion picture"
 

And with expansions included reaches 370k apparently.

Edited February 3 by xxSHOONYxx

[Arsq]

Where are we going? Honestly, away. Unless they introduce new endgame PvE, the next achievement I get will be the end for now.

[ExarSun]

8 hours ago, Pietrastor said:

The bloated stretching and comical padding is the main issue here. We all have our story preferences but before the whole Malgus/Mando era started, even if you didn't like a particular story being told you were never stuck with it for too long in SWTOR.

 

Didn't like the Hutts? That story was one and done within the same expansion.

Hated Dread Masters? Over after 2 years post-launch.

Didn't like Revan? His entire saga was done within 1 year.

Hated KOTFEET? Done after 2,5 years.

 

But the Malgus & Mando stuff been going on since fall 2018 with NO end even on the horizon..........

Those stories you mentioned have a coherent plot, have good pacing...a purpose for doing this and that, a bigger picture, good interactions...romance, competent decisions, having a main role in the events....the actions you take actually make a difference to the world building and move the story forward. There is some end goal in sight...you deal with serious threats ,there is a clear motives behind each faction actions and the leaders of the factions are shown to do this and that... Those stories and characters have a build up - building up character, events.....something which 7.0 severely lacks.

In all the expacs you mentioned there is this feeling of threat, of dread, fear of failure, being on the back foot. Do i need to even mention that this too...is lacking.

This Mando and Malgus storyline feels the opposite. There is NO meaningful threat, no faction leadership actions, everyone does random things without end goal or motives. You just...go somewhere and do some meaningless stuff without affecting the plot, which we dont even know what it is...what TF does Heta try to achieve, what was/is Malgus plan....no...just random meaningless actions. Berating the PC both power-wise and intelligence-wise.

Edited February 3 by ExarSun

[Pietrastor]

14 hours ago, xxSHOONYxx said:

We will have to agree to disagree.
Some of that does goes into new tech and all that, but i find it way too hard that's why the difference is huge, even compared to contemporary mmos like ff14 with an estimated development cost of 130m. 
Not particularly mmos (and they take more time ik) but not even games like cyberpunk and years after and all the eye candy that game has and all the new technologies and nvida using the game as a benchmark for their new technology does not reach swtor development cost.
Only a person with the detailed budget will have the complete answer, but even without it you can see what others have done, what some try to limit and what others completely avoid. FF14 at the beginning was fully written story, they began adding VA later and even with the huge earnings they have compared to swtor they still barely dable on it. And the writing is on the wall (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/98119-largest-voice-over-project-in-the-entertainment-industry)
Copy paste from a website about the VA of swtor "to put that into context, that's as many lines of dialogue as 125 or more feature-length motion picture"
 

And with expansions included reaches 370k apparently.

This is hardly a matter of subjective opinions that we can "agree to disagree on" tho, but facts. Look no further than direct comparsion of equally extensive voiced games. KOTOR 1, 2, Witcher 1 or Fallout New Vegas contain just as much voice acting if not more than Mass Effect series or Witcher 3, Fallout 4. Yet the latter ones were multiple times more expensive to develop and had multiple times larger teams. The huge differene you find hard to believe lays precisely in complexity of cinematic presentation, graphics, animation, 3d detail, special effects etc etc.

 

8 hours ago, ExarSun said:

Those stories you mentioned have a coherent plot, have good pacing...a purpose for doing this and that, a bigger picture, good interactions...romance, competent decisions, having a main role in the events....the actions you take actually make a difference to the world building and move the story forward. There is some end goal in sight...you deal with serious threats ,there is a clear motives behind each faction actions and the leaders of the factions are shown to do this and that... Those stories and characters have a build up - building up character, events.....something which 7.0 severely lacks.

In all the expacs you mentioned there is this feeling of threat, of dread, fear of failure, being on the back foot. Do i need to even mention that this too...is lacking.

This Mando and Malgus storyline feels the opposite. There is NO meaningful threat, no faction leadership actions, everyone does random things without end goal or motives. You just...go somewhere and do some meaningless stuff without affecting the plot, which we dont even know what it is...what TF does Heta try to achieve, what was/is Malgus plan....no...just random meaningless actions. Berating the PC both power-wise and intelligence-wise.

Not saying you're wrong, I share alot of the same opinions on the current arc, but my point was that EVEN IF you still hated all of the previous stories for whatever reasons,we're talking subjective feelings in big part afterall, you were never stuck with them forever and the next arc that could suit you more was already lurking right around the corner. 

Even the biggest Malgus & Mando fans been ready to move on from the current arc years ago.

Edited February 3 by Pietrastor

[Kryptonomic]

All the talk of voice actors and costs can actually be mitigated if you've worked in the industry. The cost of voice acting is one of the lowest costs you have. In the case of SWTOR, this was already stated directly many years ago. (You can read that here.)

The main cost comes into studio and editing time and even then it often factors around line variations. Lower-end voice acting engagements have the actors reading lines with two variations. Sometimes this can get as high as three or five variations, depending on context. Voice acting is rarely, if ever, a major factor in overall development. The cost to support even a slew of voice actors for a large scale game compared to just the salary of one or two senior game developers is next to nothing.

Also, upthread I saw folks talking about GTA 6 and the "$2 billion" cost. You have to keep in mind this is not the cost to make the game. This is about the projections I talked about and the cost to support the game over its putative usable lifetime. So that $2 billion is all of that. If the studio has planned out the game for, say, having ten years of viable life, then the studio is saying that it will cost $2 billion in total to support the game over that lifetime, which includes, of course, initial development.

The same applies, by the way, to SWTOR. Its "price tag" in its early days was for that entire putative lifetime and, for an MMO, that can be kind of interesting. (In a non-MMO context, it certainly proved so for GTA 5 with GTA Online.) But this is also where the projections can get really wonky. How do you allocate budget for a game that constantly changes? And thus can have constant turnover of audience?

Edited February 3 by Kryptonomic

[xxSHOONYxx]

4 hours ago, Pietrastor said:

This is hardly a matter of subjective opinions that we can "agree to disagree on" tho,

So because you believe to be so it's facts?
https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2020InteractiveRateSheetFinal.pdf
Outdated from 4 years ago but still, a single word a PC says and each mini expansion if the PC does a one word monologue (so no npc talking) and it's already a base of almost 23k dollars. There are some well known and established names as well so the rates for those are higher too, plus producers/sound engineers.
Usual record time is 75 words per minute and on average 3-4 takes are taken by each phrase it's said and then even more if the VA has ideas on how to change it (something that is common as well as tweaking the dialogue by VA performance).
Then price increases by number of sessions too.
And it goes on and on. VA is a luxury, one that swtor barely could keep holding on to at it's best times, because it was clear from the start they were unable to do both story with VA and mmo content at the same time. 2.0 good on mmo content but light on story, 4.0 good on story nothing on mmo content. Having this many PCVA is a has been weighting the game down.

[JakRoanin]

I can't believe this fight is still going on. Without the Story and the VA this game is completely useless. They sold the entire point of it on that. If they get rid of it then its not SWTOR anymore, it's just an ordinary MMO with lightsabers.

[Kryptonomic]

36 minutes ago, xxSHOONYxx said:

So because you believe to be so it's facts?
https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2020InteractiveRateSheetFinal.pdf

But that doesn't apply as directly as you might think it does. For example, you're not referencing the other documents that show how payments are based on unit sales and/or subscriber milestones (when the latter are applicable).

You have to start with base first and then work off scale. Let's just be real simple about this for illustrative purposes. So, for SWTOR, we know that each class has two voice actors (male, female). Let's just say (unscaled) that each voice actor is paid $50 per hour. Let's assume each class had 200,000 lines of dialogue. 

Let's also say the voice actors doing ten sessions take forty hours. Let's say they can get through one hundred lines per hour. Given that, we calculate how many sessions it will take for one actor to do 200,000 lines and it would take fifty sessions. Thus total earnings for a voice actor after completing those sessions given a pay rate of $50 per hour would be $100,000. Now let's keep in mind that we have sixteen voice actors and each do the same fifty sessions at $50 an hour for a total of $100,000. Well, obviously you get $1,600,000 as your cost outlay there.

But now let's factor in a rate of $500 per hour.

That now jumps up to $16,000,000.

GADZOOKS! That sounds like a lot. And it is! But if you factor in a budget of $200 million, it's practically nothing. It's 8%. Again, that sounds like a lot but when you factor in projections, it's really not.

Now, given my first number ($1,600,000) and given that the average salary of a senior game developer is $150,000, how many senior game developers would I have to have on staff before their salaries combined were greater than the $1,600,000 for the voice acting? The answer: about eleven. And there were many more then eleven senior developers on the project. And you also have to factor in the costs of product and project managers.

Okay, but how about the second number of $16,000,000? That's approximately 107. And in the very early days, SWTOR had budgeted over close to 300 total staff, with the vast majority of that being developers.

But, on the other hand, we do also have to account for the fact that it's not just English voice actors. They had voice actors for other languages as well. But, as is said in the article I linked to:

Quote

Some journalists and fans attributed much of the upfront cost of TOR to its scripting and voice acting. Ohlen explained that this belief is erroneous: "[Voice acting] was a known entity, and cost was quite low in comparison to the cost of the rest of the project." 

This article, while brief, did contain some good details as well.

With the above, you also have to factor in that 200,000 was the estimated total number of lines in the game, not those of the main voice actors. You also have to factor in that obviously the cost varies based on the particular voice actor, some of whom might demand greater or lesser hourly rates. (Union factors come into play here, too, of course since you have to factor in their multiplicative pay scale, if it applies. Not all voice actors are part of SAG-AFTRA. Many of the non primary voices in SWTOR were freelancers.) You also have to factor in that this was a big bang cost for ALL dialogue at the time. Obviously smaller, incremental content will have lower overall costs. Whereas your developer costs will not change from base salary (although can go up due to merit increases, bonuses, cost-of-living updates) ... unless, of course, you reduce the size of the team.

This article, also brief but a bit more substantive, does a fairly good job of showing the range, which I tried to do above (moving between $50 and $500 an hour, for example).

Having worked in this context for a long time, I find voice acting is probably one of the more misunderstood things but that's also because it is nuanced quite a bit.

[Kryptonomic]

55 minutes ago, JakRoanin said:

Without the Story and the VA this game is completely useless. They sold the entire point of it on that

Indeed, the basis of the game was established around the idea of a story-driven narrative that was fully voice-acted.

Now, I'll refer to something else I said before: keep in mind how the identity of the game switched (early on) from KOTOR 3 to SWTOR. Keep in mind that the KOTOR 3 story was originally just two: Jedi and Sith. (And the "Knight" and "Consular" stories were wrapped into one, as was the "Inquisitor" and "Warrior".) So far, so good. A story-driven, voice-acted game would match KOTOR 1 and KOTOR 2 and be a direct continuation.

But then you get an MMO focus. And an MMO can't really just have "Sith" and "Jedi." You need options and choices for characters to play and you need PvP. So bare minimum you have to break those two out into four. But even that's not really enough. Consider what World of Warcraft had at the time (nine), which SWTOR was in part responding to.

One of the most common questions circulating at the time this was first announced -- and we're going back here to 2006/7 - was "Why does this have to be an MMO?" A lot of people thought KOTOR 3 was going to be the defining Star Wars experience and there was a lot of concern about creating a so-called "WoW-killer."

So one possible interpretation of history is that they shifted a game idea (SD-RPG) to another (MMO-RPG), the latter of which should not have been subject to the same vision. But -- 💲💲💲, right? Everyone was hankering for a piece of that WoW-action.

 

[JakRoanin]

Yeah well, I still haven't forgiven the 300 yr time jump and the Revan is Male Exile is Female fiasco. However, if this game ditches the VA and Story I have no reason to play it. Unlike STO it can't sustain me on pretty cool spaceships.

[xxSHOONYxx]

5 hours ago, Kryptonomic said:

Now let's keep in mind that we have sixteen voice actors and each do the same fifty sessions at $50 an hour for a total of $100,000

But its not 16, is 48 main protagonist VA like you said below. Yeah doubt the French and German VA are as known or famous as Jennifer Hale, Troy Baker, Nolan North among others, but they also had to record a lot and they did not use third country VA to make it cheaper like some companies do hire third party developer companies to make development cost cheaper. So the price of VA may very well be on the 1/4 of the total budget of the game. They still paying for french VA when if there are 100 French subscribers i would be surprised by how dead that server is every time i had to go in there.

I know of the article you linked for years, but honestly i do not believe it at all. Game aimed big with publicity "the mmo with 200.000  lines and over 1000 voice actors" and it simply did not pay off the way they wanted it, whether you like VA or not there is no denying that. Article was made when the game went f2p, so he was probably trying to do some damage control on what they tried to differentiate from other mmos (and aimed big) and did not work, and if it is not that "expensive" as he said people would expect lengthy story on next expansion. 2.0 while good on mmo content the story part was short, just makeb and a bit of oricon being part of the mmo content. If VA wasn't that expensive why they didn't keep with lengthy story content on 2.0 alongside the mmo content? They have always been unable to make it an mmo and a "single player rpg", not because of lack of trying, they just cant have the budget for both. Launch was good on story yet made millions quit because the mmo side was lacking, 2.0 made mmo better but was low on story making story players leave, 3.0... i don't really know what 3.0 was to be honest other than mediocre, and 4.0 heavy on story and nothing of mmo making mmo players leave. They never had the budget to appeal both sides, not even with the initial 200m budget. 
I simply don't trust anything any of the devs of this game say, because time and time they have shown they overhype content that ends on disappointment, lie and when catch on the lie ban people and try to keep it hush, overpromise and then disappoint. Since the beginning of the game I learnt to believe what I see, not what they say. 

Edited February 4 by xxSHOONYxx

[Kryptonomic]

5 hours ago, xxSHOONYxx said:

I know of the article you linked for years, but honestly i do not believe it at all.

But that's like anything, right? We can all doubt. But you have to do so knowing that you are (1) doubting people who were actually there and know more than you about it and (2) doubting people like me who have worked in the industry for many years and who also know about it.

Now, granted, point (2) is entirely anecdotal to you and you are absolutely right to question it. That's why I try to be as data-focused and evidence-focused as I can. You're certainly right to doubt anything and be skeptical. But there are also tons of other references out there that back up what I'm saying for other game studios. So it's not like there's some lack of evidence for you to investigate. Now you can doubt all of that, of course, but you then have to realize this doubt probably stems from a pre-conceived belief rather than anything based on actual evidence. Which means you likely wouldn't be convinced by anything.

And, in the end, it really doesn't matter because of this point you mention: "and it simply did not pay off the way they wanted it, whether you like VA or not there is no denying that."

Yes, the game, in some ways, did not pay off as desired. No doubt. The game not paying off had nothing to do with the voice acting. It had everything to do with expectations of a core audience (who wanted a non-MMO KOTOR 3) and the intense focus on trying to be a "WoW-killer" combined with a focus on being a part of Star Wars history that had no relevance to Star Wars that the casual fan was aware of.

You mention: "I simply don't trust anything any of the devs of this game say."

Most times you are not hearing from "the devs." You are hearing from product managers and community managers. If you could hear from the developers at most studios -- and sometimes you do after their NDAs expire or they get laid off -- you would hear a very different side to many stories of how things work. Not all of it bad, but certainly not all of it rosy. (Even here many developers have non-disparagement clauses so they have to be careful even without an NDA and even after lay offs.)

This isn't me disagreeing with your point, rather just saying that you have to realize the people doing the actual grunt work are often not the people you are hearing from. And when you are truly hearing from those people, it's a calibrated response that has been vetted by a community team. (Witness what happens when that is not held to, such as many of the developer tweets we see out there about games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Starfield.)

One more point if I may ...

No one (I hope) seriously doubts that voice acting is expensive. And obviously we don't have actual budget figures for the current development team.

But consider in SWTOR we've seen some of the KOTOR-style conversations. You could take any non-voiced dialogue and do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, including taking the current size of the dev team (as determined on LinkedIn), and factor in what the extra budget would have been to voice all of the stuff that was unvoiced, given the data we've all been talking about and making some assumptions. Obviously there's a crap-ton of wiggle room here but you can get a reasonable feel for the scale of what costs are being mitigated and, from that, you can start to form some ideas of what budget likely is.

(Investors, like myself, often do this kind of "scenario analysis" when you lack internal information. It's a kind of black box "reverse engineering" that's done as part of financial modeling. It's how you get beyond the earnings reports and try to make decisions about likelihoods.)

[Chronoire]

At this point the devs should take some pages out of other MMOs.

I play ESO at times & that MMO has some great PVE content

[Traceguy]

On 2/2/2024 at 5:26 PM, Pietrastor said:

But the Malgus & Mando stuff been going on since fall 2018 with NO end even on the horizon..........

Are we can't even skip any of it. All our alts have to start on Ossus

Edited February 4 by Traceguy

[DeannaVoyager]

Most of my characters have actually done Ossus, but I quit doing the story with more than 2 alts at Echoes of Oblivion, which I don't ever want to see again. I'm sorry, but that's a hard limit for me. Never again. 

By not allowing us to skip any of the story a lot of daily areas are locked for alts, which is bad game design. Continuing the current story feels shorter and pieces further apart because they can't be replayed with alts. I didn't have any problem doing Ossus with so many alts 5 (or something) years ago. Replaying it several times kept me busy for a long time. Now whenever we get new story I'm done with it in 30-90 minutes and I can't do it again because my alts are stuck behind Echoes of Oblivion. That's why I don' really have a clue on what's happening with the story anymore. It's easy to forget it when you can't replay it. And on top of that forcing people to do story to access new daily areas is a massive waste of resources.

Edited February 5 by DeannaVoyager

[xxSHOONYxx]

On 2/4/2024 at 4:21 AM, Kryptonomic said:

(1) doubting people who were actually there and know more than you about it

 

On 2/4/2024 at 4:21 AM, Kryptonomic said:

Most times you are not hearing from "the devs." You are hearing from product managers and community managers. If you could hear from the developers at most studios -- and sometimes you do after their NDAs expire or they get laid off -- you would hear a very different side to many stories of how things work. Not all of it bad, but certainly not all of it rosy. (Even here many developers have non-disparagement clauses so they have to be careful even without an NDA and even after lay offs.)

That's very contradictory isn't it? Leaving my way of thinking aside, why trust anything they say if they have those clauses in place, especially when that article was pretty much a promotion for the game? Or even something you did not name but think it applies since i would not hire someone that does it, who would hire someone that openly talks about bad decisions the company could do?
 

On 2/4/2024 at 4:21 AM, Kryptonomic said:

It had everything to do with expectations of a core audience (who wanted a non-MMO KOTOR 3)

This doesn't seem to be the entire truth though, some people wanted a kotor 3 and others a SW mmo, game tried to be a mix of mmo with "kotor-like" game, those people were not happy, but at the beginning most people/as much as kotor 3 people quit the game because it was not a "wow killer" or because as a mmo it sucked and had no content. Many wow guilds moved to swtor at the beginning only to come back to wow when they reached end game, others came from SW galaxies and many other mmo "lovers" when mmo was what fortnite was 5 years ago, that end up leaving because it was not a good mmo . They focused HEAVY on story on vanilla and 4.0, when even the most successful single player games have a steep decline of population after 1-2 week, it's not sustainable for the way mmo with subscription works.
 

On 2/4/2024 at 4:21 AM, Kryptonomic said:

rather just saying that you have to realize the people doing the actual grunt work are often not the people you are hearing from

I probably expressed myself wrong, i do not really mean the regular devs because we barely hear from them if we do at all. I mean the people that communicate all the lies to us on this game. It's a matter of trust and they broke it long ago. 

 

On 2/4/2024 at 4:21 AM, Kryptonomic said:

Which means you likely wouldn't be convinced by anything.

Not really, i'm happy to be proved wrong because it means i learnt something. I simply just haven't yet about this subject mainly for this 4 points.

1) VA is often seen as a "luxury", game devs without an outstanding budget tend to not place any VA on their games or be conservative about it. 

2) When a game does something right other companies try to capitalize on it and "borrow" the idea wanting some of that money, and no one tried to "borrow" this idea of extensive VA. To me that means two possible issues as to why not, just a bad idea money wise, or a good idea that people like but not money worth it because that money invested in other areas of the game can pay off better.

3) Other big budget games don't go as crazy as having 48 main player VA. Even rockstar a company that does not "hold punches" when it comes to their game development, with RDR2 that had a good amount of VA, only decided to make the VA in English and the rest of the languages it's english VA and subtitles for whichever the player chose as language.
 
4) As i said before specifically to this game, they showed they never had the budget to do what it needed to do to, not even be successful but hold a good player base count, have both story and mmo content at any point in time, they always had to chose one or the other. 
 

Edited February 5 by xxSHOONYxx

[Kryptonomic]

5 hours ago, xxSHOONYxx said:

I mean the people that communicate all the lies to us on this game. It's a matter of trust and they broke it long ago

We probably won't agree on all details (which is fine of course!) so I just picked out this statement. I know it's one you're not alone in having. But then the question comes up: if people truly feel this way -- that they're being lied to and trust is being broken -- and further that this has been happening for years, why are those people still here?

You could argue many aren't and that may be true. But for the people who are here and seem to feel this way: what's the draw for sticking around?

As far your salient points, I agree with most of what you say. I said much earlier upthread SWTOR always had an identity problem. It still does. That problem has led to decisions that have drastically impacted the ability to perform projectable revenue. That shows most obviously in content or lack thereof. Equally true that voice acting is a luxury. That said, it's now become a luxury that's an expectation of something that sets the game apart.

My only point was that if you do some analysis, you see voice was absolutely not what led to the original issues with the game not meeting monetary expectations. (Case in point: the game made its profit, but it missed its projections. And as I said upthread, just as in Hollywood, projections are everything.) And, for the most part (actor strikes notwithstanding), voice hasn't been massively impactful overall compared to other mitigating factors. It has been impactful, without doubt. But it's not the primary impactor. The fact that some parts have reverted to KOTOR style conversation menus is a parallax effect for the wider issues, one of which was bloated staff.

[xxSHOONYxx]

1 hour ago, Kryptonomic said:

what's the draw for sticking around?

Can't speak for others but i can answer that personally.
Friends.
What kept me on the game for a long time and what made me come back previously for some time is friends. As a game this game has had nothing to keep me around for ages. My two main groups decided to finally move as a group one to ff and one to wow, so the last reason i had to keep logging is probably about to end.

[Traceguy]

On 2/3/2024 at 1:23 AM, ExarSun said:

what TF does Heta try to achieve, what was/is Malgus plan....

To be honest, I don't even thing BioBroadSword even knows what Malgus wants. They're just stretching it out until it blossoms into something. As for Heta, I'm sure it's more or less power with a side of "Make Mandalore Great Again"

Edited February 6 by Traceguy

[Traceguy]

On 2/5/2024 at 1:04 AM, DeannaVoyager said:

Most of my characters have actually done Ossus, but I quit doing the story with more than 2 alts at Echoes of Oblivion, which I don't ever want to see again. I'm sorry, but that's a hard limit for me. Never again. 

By not allowing us to skip any of the story a lot of daily areas are locked for alts, which is bad game design. Continuing the current story feels shorter and pieces further apart because they can't be replayed with alts. I didn't have any problem doing Ossus with so many alts 5 (or something) years ago. Replaying it several times kept me busy for a long time. Now whenever we get new story I'm done with it in 30-90 minutes and I can't do it again because my alts are stuck behind Echoes of Oblivion. That's why I don' really have a clue on what's happening with the story anymore. It's easy to forget it when you can't replay it. And on top of that forcing people to do story to access new daily areas is a massive waste of resources.

This is my problem. I got 35 toons, 32 are level 80. And only 4 have made it to to Kessan's landing. Why in bloody hell did they take away the option to skip story and jump into the newest content?

Edited February 6 by Traceguy

[DarthNillard]

On 1/31/2024 at 11:53 PM, eabevella said:

I mean, just read all the posts of the new players who get into SWTOR in recent years, all of them praise the class stories and the voice actors, none of them say how good the MMO bit is. To think the higher up decided that cutting corners with their biggest sell point is the right direction... lmao

I agree. That doesn't have anything to do with the discussion you quoted me on.  VA isn't necessarily crazy expensive and Biosword has never admitted that it has limited their ability to create new content.  Person I was debating just has it in their head that this is the case....

[Pirana]

If you were here at launch, you know exactly how we got here. It started with almost no end game content, no group finder, another SW MMO launches without space, the list goes on and on and on. Game goes FTP in under a year. The fact this game is still going after twelve years says a little something I suppose. lol  

Regarding ESO, 14, WoW, GW2 and many of the other bigger titles out there, this game will never match what those games offer other than a scifi perspective, pointless to compare. This game is still good and has a lot to offer new players, enjoy it. 

[OlBuzzard]

On 2/3/2024 at 2:56 PM, JakRoanin said:

I can't believe this fight is still going on. Without the Story and the VA this game is completely useless. They sold the entire point of it on that. If they get rid of it then its not SWTOR anymore, it's just an ordinary MMO with lightsabers.

On this we agree 100%.

Additionally:  IMO SWTOR has been following a downward spiral even in their story telling.  I have my own personal thoughts on how and why ...  but since I can only speculate as to the answers to both of those ... it's not worth posting (and I won't).

Also: IMO, even the GS series is totally lackluster both in objectives and rewards.  

For these two primary reasons I have un-subbed.  I'm not suggesting that this will be my last post ... but (unless there is a total turnaround in SWTOR) ... I'm done.  There is not hate, no bitterness ...  only disappointment that it has come to this and I find it necessary to part company.

Sooo much of what SWTOR could have and SHOULD have been will now only be a sad reminder of what actually happened.  The events just prior to the 10th anniversary debacle and everything since is a reflection of a greater issue at the heart of this game.  It is not my place to try to fix it.  But I do feel that at least some sort of commentary on the matter is at least appropriate (Although I'm VERY certain it will go on the "ignore that" list like most everything else we've said.)

To that end:  Best of luck to those that remain here.  To those in the development team that might actually care (even though you may not be able to speak out publicly) ... take care.

May the force be with you .... always!

[Pietrastor]

On 2/6/2024 at 5:01 PM, Pirana said:

If you were here at launch, you know exactly how we got here. It started with almost no end game content, no group finder, another SW MMO launches without space, the list goes on and on and on. Game goes FTP in under a year. The fact this game is still going after twelve years says a little something I suppose. lol  

Regarding ESO, 14, WoW, GW2 and many of the other bigger titles out there, this game will never match what those games offer other than a scifi perspective, pointless to compare. This game is still good and has a lot to offer new players, enjoy it. 

That's the thing though, and the question of "how did we get here" - FFXIV and ESO launched around the same time as TOR having the same problems. FFXIV in particular being in worse state than TOR and ESO combined.  

Yet a decade later, the other 2 games are significantly more popular and turned around their reputations far greater than SWTOR ever did. And both have a far better outlook on the future than TOR

Edited February 8 by Pietrastor