Clarification on SWTOR's Development

[Pirana]

15 minutes ago, TonyTricicolo said:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!" 

Just once I'd like the devs here at SWTOR to acknowledge the death of SWG and how this is eerily similar.

Oh and Sunrunner FTW!

I'm not sure I should laugh or not... lol But still a great quote. 

[xordevoreaux]

Contrarian here to the other posters.

Big picture, we have a Star Wars MMO, it's still in development, not in maintenance, and personal flavors of play aside (I saw a swipe at PvP development in this thread)... BIG PICTURE it's still here for us to play.

 

EA could've sunset the game instead of jettisoning the title to another company, but they did not. Yay, I can still play my game.

Big picture.

[felleto]

1 minute ago, xordevoreaux said:

Contrarian here to the other posters.

Big picture, we have a Star Wars MMO, it's still in development, not in maintenance, and personal flavors of play aside (I saw a swipe at PvP development in this thread)... BIG PICTURE it's still here for us to play.

 

EA could've sunset the game instead of jettisoning the title to another company, but they did not. Yay, I can still play my game.

Big picture.

Thank you. I can breathe now. Big picture, happy thoughts. 

[DakhathKilrathi]

8 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

EA could've sunset the game instead of jettisoning the title to another company, but they did not. Yay, I can still play my game.

I agree that it's a step up from maintenance mode, if nothing else. 

Still disappointing to see that they're bad at communicating things or managing player expectations. 

[supertimtaf]

3 hours ago, Darthjantom said:

I agree with @supertimtaf, the black bars take up a lot of screen space, and just don't look very appealing. Maybe there's a way to make these cutscene styles a bit nicer? Maybe by reducing the text boxes or something, or even elimnating them completely? Anything to maybe make those kotor style cutscenes feel a bit more appealing/modern.

To bounce back on this, it takes litteraly 30sec to open a google image search and look for other games with that kind of dialogue options to see how they present themselves if you guys are looking for inspiration.

Funny enough, one of these games that pops up when doing that image search is another MMO, very well known and successfull, with their version of the Kotor style dialogue. Now look at this, and then please do something about the look of your dialogue interface.



No black bars on top and bottom, a simple shading on the lower bar, something more centered too to stay in line with the dialogue wheel of vanilla swtor which is still centered btw. Overall a fuller look at your character, which allows you guys to animate him more using the rather solid panel of in-game emotes to give more life to the scene.

Hope that you guys on the UI team find this helpful

[RainEbon]

Allow me to put this as eloquently as I can...LOL, LMAO even.

Childish response aside it is really sad to have a confirmation that this games future is not bright, I was rather attached to it. (not to say that SWTOR is going to die anytime soon but like I mentioned in one of my previous posts the state and the developers treatment of it is not something I want to be a part of or enjoy.)

Que sera sera I guess.

[felleto]

Why not send surveys for the playerbase to answer? Or post a survey for us to answer on the website from time to time. You need to start asking the right questions to the right people (your players). Get the data from your subscribers and create your game like that. 

[supertimtaf]

4 minutes ago, felleto said:

Why not send surveys for the playerbase to answer?

I will remember what happened when WoW sent a survey to players asking if they were okay to pay 100$ for an expansion. The majority of players indeed answered no, as is expected, and yet with that single answer the data/marketting team interpreted this as "80$ is okay" rather than "Maybe increasing the price from 50$ isn't a good idea".

Data is good only if you can interpret it correctly and in a non-biased way. It is the same as with the R4 operation. Saying "we will not make NiM because players obviously don't want it, we have the numbers that show that R4 is not played" is missing the point as well. If no one is playing R4 then it's probably that there is something wrong with R4, not that players don't want NiM raiding. :')

So yeah I will be wary of any surveys that they send out so far, because we don't know how they'll interpret said data.

I do however agree with you on one point, this game has a dev team smaller than some indie game, maybe engaging more with the community should be the way to go for future development, as it has proven to be effective in the past, be it with MMOs or any kind of games in general.

Edited June 21 by supertimtaf

[RainEbon]

This is something I can agree with. Sending surveys to your players asking for feedback is a great idea. Maybe they could even take it a step further and make a site where people can post their ideas/feedback/criticism of the game and call it a forum.(or something like that)

In all honesty the idea is not bad but it ultimately falls flat if devs do nothing with that feedback.

(my apologies but I'm enjoying being negative about this whole situation a bit too much  )

[felleto]

2 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:

I will remember what happened when WoW sent a survey to players asking if they were okay to pay 100$ for an expansion. The majority of players indeed answered no, as is expected, and yet with that single answer the data/marketting team interpreted this as "80$ is okay" rather than "Maybe increasing the price from 50$ isn't a good idea".

Data is good only if you can interpret it correctly and in a non-biased way. It is the same as with the R4 operation. Saying "we will not make NiM because players obviously don't want it, we have the numbers that show that R4 is not played" is missing the point as well. If no one is playing R4 then it's probably that there is something wrong with R4, not that players don't want NiM raiding. :')

So yeah I will be wary of any surveys that they send out so far, because we don't know how they'll interpret said data.

I do however agree with you on one point, this game has a dev team smaller than some indie game, maybe engaging more with the community should be the way to go for future development, as it has proven to be effective in the past, be it with MMOs or any kind of games in general.

At this point (cutting narrative content) I think we are past the point that the team has any money to invest anywhere except CM Items and Galactic Seasons. 

They need to sit down and study their data thoroughly. What worked and works with players? And focus on that area since we clearly don't have money for anything else. 

Tibia does it. They get it wrong from time to time but players most likely know your game better than you ever will. Pair it up with your own data (player count, players engaging with each activity, players that never engaged with an activity etc.) and you will have a better grasp of the situation and how to proceed. 

For instance (put it together in a couple of minutes)

PVP Problems:

1. Pugs getting ganked by premades; premades came from the discontinued ranked system

Solution1: remake ranked (how feasible?) // Downside: Toxicity and high skill ceiling for enjoyable gameplay.

Solution2: Have premades join different queues with other premades. // Downside: Increased queue times.
Follow ups to Solution2: Solve increased queue times with cross realm queues (how feasible?)
What premades find enjoyable in PVP? Crush pugs or challenging games with other premade groups?

Solution3: Groups can't join PVP queue. You can only queue for PVP solo // Downside: Co-op players will dislike this change.
Follow ups to Solution3: How many players play PVP in groups and how many solo? What is the likelihood of a solo player to stop playing the game vs a group player to leave if they can't queue Pvp with their friends? How invested in the game are group players?

Follow up questions: What do players find enjoyable in a PvP match? Playing as a team? Having challenging gameplay? Overwhelming their oponents? Are we successful in offering this experience to the MAJORITY of our playerbase?

2. PVP is highly unbalanced?

Solution1: "fix" it // Downside: Do we even know how?
Follow up question to Solution1: Hire someone? Ask the player base? What do players think is balanced? Do you think ______ is overpowered? Why?

 

[LtGeneralGezlin]

10 minutes ago, felleto said:

Why not send surveys for the playerbase to answer? Or post a survey for us to answer on the website from time to time. You need to start asking the right questions to the right people (your players). Get the data from your subscribers and create your game like that. 

I remember them sending out surveys last November. But, I agree, sending our surveys, especially on a more consistent basis, would be great.

[Toraak]

1 hour ago, felleto said:

You got GSF... Oh wait... when was the last update we got for that? 

2017 was the last big update to that. Otherwise a slight nerf to slicing, and conquest changes to it recently.

[supertimtaf]

Just now, Toraak said:

2017 was the last big update to that. Otherwise a slight nerf to slicing, and conquest changes to it recently.

At that point I think that if you go to a swtor dev and whisper "GSF" in their ear, they'll roll on the ground and start crying. I'm almost certain that the reason why they don't change it is that they don't have anyone who knows what to do with it, and that must be *scary* to have that situation going on since 6 years at least.

[DakhathKilrathi]

39 minutes ago, supertimtaf said:

At that point I think that if you go to a swtor dev and whisper "GSF" in their ear, they'll roll on the ground and start crying. I'm almost certain that the reason why they don't change it is that they don't have anyone who knows what to do with it, and that must be *scary* to have that situation going on since 6 years at least.

Oh yeah, no way are they going to do anything with it. Broadsword has spoken not a word about it. The last time it got mentioned by devs at all they were still Bioware, and it was consideration for inclusion as a bonus objective in PVP seasons. 

They decided not to do that after they didn't like the answers they got about a good target for participation/medals. Oops. 

[Sonicphoto]

8 hours ago, AshleyRuhl said:

Hi there,

To reiterate what Keith said, the team working on SWTOR at Broadsword is largely the same team that was at BioWare. Same folks, different banner. This includes the narrative team, who have been authors in this story arc since the beginning.

Shortening the quote, but just wanted to firstly say thank you for addressing the concerns of players regarding the approach of scenes KOTOR or non KOTOR style. It was one of my main feedbacks during 7.5 launch to hear more on the team on why this approach in the story. so players can understand and also have the space to comment on it. I'm very happy it happened, always appreciate your communication as a team.

I see the approach was made starting with 7.3, I think on that specific update it was handled quite well. The KOTOR style was used for the "planet/location quests" like we done so in the past with the mini stories in the daily areas, so I feel the use of them in Voss made sense and didn't impact too much players because its more of a side story you are doing to progress the main story. The issue started to rise more in 7.4 where some big moments like finding the cooling rods in the story where presented with these kotor black bar scenes. Now, my personal issue with these scenes, has others have commented above, is how they are presented. The bars themselves cover a whole lot of the screen, and it really shrinks you out of the scene. I though in 7.4 for example they were used in cutscenes that I felt looked good, just that my character didn't have voice. I think just lowering the intensity of those black bars, rearranging that UI and/or give players a toggle option to maybe toggle those bars transparency would help. That way if a player prefers them how they are, they still can but others can lower their visibility if they wish to.

In 7.5 the most notable one is the republic/imperial meeting, as it feels like an important meeting players expected not to have the KOTOR style as the cutscene before it, also sets us up on how important this meeting is. I think the quests themselves on Hutta is fine to be KOTOR style because like I mentioned on the Voss ones, is like a mini quest apart from the main plot. And only Sahar plot scenes be the ones fully cinematic but I think the republic/empire meeting scenes is what really shocked players the most in that update to be KOTOR style.  Also, I very much appreciate maintaining the romance date nights in its normal cinematic style as they mean a lot for long time players.

I think the other notable thing I see from players here and I agree with them is asking how more can we help support the game, as we wouldn't mind paying for expansions if it helps a lot things overall to optimize the budget to retain the approach of previous updates. I think an idea could be to make a new expansion cost a price, and after a certain time period it can be obtained from just subbing like we traditionally do, so those that want to support and experience new content from the start can give the the money. In the end, the reaction comes from a lot of love for this game for its very unique style of storytelling and how long we been invested for it and we really appreciate how the team has kept things going for so many years, so we just want to help in the best way we can as we know its not easy or cheap. So all my feedback is all out of love and hope that it can help in some way, but I understand it's not as simple as I make it sound.  Cheers again for having the conversation and communication with us on this! 😊

[Elvarania]

Thanks for the update!

I for one am of the belief that some content > no content.

Sure, I would like to see a new Operation, a Warzone or GSF map, a few new flashpoints etc, but I am just happy that my favourite game keeps online. You're always going to get the vocal minority of haters in posts like this. They are either badly trolling, or delusional. As long as SWTOR is online, I am happy. 

Lets remember that the devs are gamers and lovers of Star Wars as well, and that we all replying are not game developers. Lets take what they say with some faith, continue to enjoy the game we all love and hope we get to fight Malgus in an epic final Operation with a multi-tier, multi-phase fight like Revan to finally do his character justice!

Thanks again guys. Keep up the good work (and keep those servers running!)

[DAWUSS]

33 minutes ago, Sonicphoto said:

I think the other notable thing I see from players here and I agree with them is asking how more can we help support the game, as we wouldn't mind paying for expansions if it helps a lot things overall to optimize the budget to retain the approach of previous updates. I think an idea could be to make a new expansion cost a price, and after a certain time period it can be obtained from just subbing like we traditionally do, so those that want to support and experience new content from the start can give the the money. In the end, the reaction comes from a lot of love for this game for its very unique style of storytelling and how long we been invested for it and we really appreciate how the team has kept things going for so many years, so we just want to help in the best way we can as we know its not easy or cheap. So all my feedback is all out of love and hope that it can help in some way, but I understand it's not as simple as I make it sound.  Cheers again for having the conversation and communication with us on this! 😊

They could try the crowdfunding option - raise this much by this date we get this.

[wwefarming]

Le 20/06/2024 à 18:50, AshleyRuhl a dit :

Our second scene type is "KOTOR" style. These scenes have voiced lines for the NPCs, but player lines are unvoiced and only appear as dialogue choices. The dialogue choices in these scenes are expanded beyond the 3 choices in a Standard scene, giving the player more response options. The staging and cameras are simplified, which puts less pressure on our cinematic team, and means scenes can potentially be longer/more branchy since they reuse much of the staging setup. This means KOTOR scenes can have MORE conversational depth than if they were built as Standard scenes. We use KOTOR scenes when we have conversational interactions, and we leverage this design to include additional player lines specific to the player's class, romance, and previous choices.

The mix of Standard and KOTOR scenes ensures that we can produce enough story content for the scale of each update, while also not overloading our current narrative team. It's extremely important to me, and the rest of the leadership team, that our content plans fit within our team's scope, and maintain a healthy work/life balance. While I know this is a different style than previous game updates, we are still enthusiastic about building a story that feels emotionally impactful, dynamic, and personal to as many player stories as possible.

I 100% understand you don't want the narrative team to be prisoner of their work, y'all are humans just like us players, so I can't blame you for that reason but I'm gonna be honest here, the KOTOR cutscenes just make me want to not continue the story everytimes there's one, it's just a chore to go through these cutscenes when you're used to hear your character talking for years and now you see them half-voiced half-mute within the same chapter, not to forget these horrendous black borders taking more than half the screen. You can include all the conversational depth and every existing branching choices you want but all these reasons mentioned above just makes it impossible to be invested in it and defeat the purpose of creating impactful and emotional moments. 

Plus, correct me if I'm wrong but, some of the old SWTOR's cutscenes from back in 2011 were very static, almost like the KOTOR's ones, compared to the ones we get nowaday. So, if the VAs budget isn't an issue as there's no clear mention of it being an issue in both of your statements, couldn't it be a good compromise to use these old staging, animations etc. while still getting voiced cutscenes? I'm sure some here would agree that it would be far less jarring to have SWTOR's 2011 style voiced cutscenes among the very complex ones made for defining moments than having non-voiced cutscenes with black borders sneaking among the amazing cutscenes made for important moments. 

And well, if it isn't possible, then I think I'd rather have less cutscenes but still fully voiced and that go straight to the point than the current jarring style of going back and forth between SWTOR's voiced/KOTOR's non-voiced scenes. 

Thank you for the clarifications tho.

Edited Tuesday at 03:33 PM by wwefarming

[wwefarming]

Il y a 7 heures, RikuvonDrake a dit :

need to start using new tech, for example, why dont swtor just use ai generated voice instead of kotor style dialogue, more and more games are utilising ai and other similar tools to make big things with small budgets. bioware used to be a pioneer when it came to coming up with new ways to create much with less, i hope broadsword continues that

Stop with that AI nonsense, like, seriously. Maybe ask some VAs their opinion about their voice being replicated without their consent and see how negative their answer is.

[supertimtaf]

1 hour ago, DAWUSS said:

They could try the crowdfunding option - raise this much by this date we get this.

That's called selling a Darth Malgus lightsaber for 50€
Or selling an expansion.
The main issue with crowdfunding is that it's already in the game, sort of. Asking for more money *on top* for just promises would not help. If they want money, sell us a decent expansion like RotHC or SoR. This was absolutely worth the money at the time and a lot of us would pay again for content updates like these.

[DAWUSS]

1 hour ago, wwefarming said:

Stop with that AI nonsense, like, seriously. Maybe ask some VAs their opinion about their voice being replicated without their consent and see how negative their answer is.

Why not original voices for new characters? It could work especially well for bit characters or background NPCs.

[eabevella]

8 hours ago, supertimtaf said:

Coming from someone who tried to use this in my own game for placeholders, it's not that great. Requires a lot of attempts to get something *clean* while a VA can do the work in two tries if they're good enough. It wouldn't replace some of the issues like needing to animate cutscenes, to setup cameras correctly, adding the right VFX and moving props at the right time... VA is one thing, but that's sadly not all you need for a cutscene. If they're cutting corners with the Kotor cutscenes, I'd say that it's probably not just because of VA costs.

Not to mention "AI" need PEOPLE to train, to give input, to put the generated stuffs in the correct places. "AI" isn't some magic that operates on thin air and makes things out of thin air.

And even all that, you still can't ask "AI" to act. People recognize and love good voice acting. Several voice actors who voiced Baldur's Gate 3 characters are stage actors who don't usually do voice acting jobs, much like a lot of SWTOR voice actors, and they are surprised by how many people appreciate their work and their characters because of their voice acting - because it IS an art of performance. The game don't even have a fully voiced acted protagonist, only a few reaction lines when you walk/click/attack stuffs, and people are still swooned by one of the default character voice and his actor because of one (1) scene where he gives a monologue throughout the whole game, not to mention the praise and recognition the voice actors who voiced the companions, and how people love the game because of it (on top of other good contents).

SWTOR was like that, and even more, it has fully voice acted protagonists who are played by talented voice actors where the stories allow the players to role play their characters to an extend within the story limit. Just open reddit and check all the "wow I play SWTOR now and I'm hooked" posts, all of them are about how intriguing the vanilla stories, cutscenes, and role play potential are. But now the developers are throwing away their biggest selling point and making bad excuses about "KOTOR styled" cutscene.

No, it's not "KOTOR styled", it's "No Cutscene". Let's get the terminology right and don't hide behind the facade of nostalgia.

I bout 3 copies (1 digital deluxe, 2 physical deluxe) of BG3 because I think this single player game worth more than its selling price and this is the only way I can give the studio more money. So yes, if SWTOR is able to release quality expansion that's worthy of its definition (actual expansion, not 40min of non-consequential fetch jobs for 10th year anniversary), I'd be more than happy to pay for it.

[wwefarming]

il y a 55 minutes, DAWUSS a dit :

Why not original voices for new characters? It could work especially well for bit characters or background NPCs.

No? Again, ask some VAs their opinion about using AI voices as a whole, even for new and/or background NPCs with 2-3 lines and their answer will still be as negative.

I mean right now VAs in France, with some of them working on SWTOR, have been very vocal to fight and have their voices protected against AI because it'd means they loose their job if we let this kind of things happening. 

[Yeebo]

5 hours ago, supertimtaf said:

To bounce back on this, it takes litteraly 30sec to open a google image search and look for other games with that kind of dialogue options to see how they present themselves if you guys are looking for inspiration.

Funny enough, one of these games that pops up when doing that image search is another MMO, very well known and successfull, with their version of the Kotor style dialogue. Now look at this, and then please do something about the look of your dialogue interface.



No black bars on top and bottom, a simple shading on the lower bar, something more centered too to stay in line with the dialogue wheel of vanilla swtor which is still centered btw. Overall a fuller look at your character, which allows you guys to animate him more using the rather solid panel of in-game emotes to give more life to the scene.

Hope that you guys on the UI team find this helpful

That does look about 100x better than what we have gotten.  I am perfectly ok with them going with "voiced NPCs, silent protagonist" to save money.  Hell TSW does their entire game that way, and the narratives on offer there are incredibly compelling.  But if you have to double down on this new style, do the best that you can with it. 

Looking around and what other games are doing, and adapting the best ideas is pretty much common sense.

[supertimtaf]

12 minutes ago, Yeebo said:

That does look about 100x better than what we have gotten.  I am perfectly ok with them going with "voiced NPCs, silent protagonist" to save money.  Hell TSW does their entire game that way, and the narratives on offer there are incredibly compelling.  But if you have to double down on this new style, do the best that you can with it. 

Looking around and what other games are doing, and adapting the best ideas is pretty much common sense.

The Kotor style cutscenes are how XIV does most of its narration. Some important cutscenes are way more detailed but 80% of the game is either Kotor style or even simpler where your character doesn't react by anything else than using in-game emotes.

And still, this offered more meaningfull moments because they managed to make the UI pretty enough for it to not ruin player immersion. Fixing that issue on swtor would alleviate 50% of the concerns of the playerbase regarding cutscenes. Make it look good, don't make it look like Kotor because the Kotor design is outdated by twenty years now. Don't be WoW, don't use the same thing that's twenty years old. :')