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Question to the critics: Would you better receive this game if...
pharazonic
Member Posts: 860
... it were a Buy2Play no-sub MMO like GW/GW2?
Basically, a CORPG (perhaps with some next-gen features for a CORPG), with paid DLCs sold on BioWare's site periodically as well as boxed expansions now and then?
I am a detractor and critic of this game and I would definitely receieve it better if that were the case.
The benefits of this model would include:
- no sub (duh)
- less pressure on developers to attain the same functionality of modern, state-of-the-art themeparks (that SWTOR clearly missing at this point)
- mod support from the talented modder crowd BW games seem to have: would include character customization mods, UI mods, etc
- DLCs that I choose to buy or not buy to improve my own game experience
- have a legitimate reason for things that are otherwise shoddy in an MMO (poor atmosphere for example)
So what do you think, critics?
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
I need to take this advice more.
Comments
Out of the three games yuor only talking about Guild Wars 1.
I'm lost lol.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
Well...not everything you mentioned is characteristic of GW as Rizel mentions...
BUT.
I would have definitely received this game better as a CORPG. If I've ever played an MMORPG that just really wants to be a CORPG, this is it.
It's actually funny because GW1 basically recognized that it would be very difficult to combine a full-fledged MMORPG with an SPRPG-esque story, so they created the CORPG model to accomplish this task. Not an MMORPG. Not an SPRPG. Somewhere in-between. And it worked! This was in 2004 btw...
But now, in 2012, we have MMORPGs that just can't grasp the concept that GW grasped way back then. They just keep pushing closer and closer to the CORPG realm without actually just taking the leap and becoming a CORPG.
SWTOR kind of reminds me of that movie "Twins." The CORPG portion of the movie is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Strong, good looking, exciting. While the MMORPG portion is...Danny Devito.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
you know, in many ways i think of swtor as a single-player game with an mmo tacked on. as a single-player game it lacks the immersion of most singleplay games. especially if you hold it up to skyrim. or oblivion, if you want to go back one step. hell, witcher. you get the point. it doesn't have the depth of experience and world creation for that.
as an mmo, it's cold and lifeless when you're not shooting things. like a flaccid costume draped over a mannequin two sizes too small.
if it were b2p, then maybe i'd be thinking, "yeah, i got my 80 bucks worth." but as an mmo in the current climate, i have to say it's not meeting the benchmark set by wow. and, let's face it, wow is the benchmark for world creation and interaction. it's not our favourite game, but it has by far done what it set out to do - create a MASSIVE MULTI-PLAYER ONLINE ROLEPLAY GAME. it's the attention to sometimes small details which has kept wow chugging along in the face of what SHOULD have been some stiff competition. lotr, aoc, and even sto. these have a massive amount of lore and visuals to draw from, yet (comparatively) they played out like often cheap consumer-oriented games to grab a quick buck than to genuinely create a world.
for me, i'd like to see a little more self-focus and self-respect. you can't try to compete with wow by simply trying to beat ONE of its (many) weakness (ie: quest grinding). for me, swtor saw the flaw in wow's questing system and sought to remedy it with cut-scenes. gorgeous. but it forgot about the rest of the world.
or, dare i say it, did it just release too early?
If they did that it would have more subs then Wow by tommorow and easily beat out LoL for number of people playing. 140 servers would be low number if they did that. B2P is a viable business model, but it does tend to slwo content down as ArenaNET has proven.
I actually support Rift going B2P honestly.
I'd have to say, most definately, no. I just want a game I enjoy, and while I think the B2P model is superior, for a number of reasons, it doesn't effect how much I like a game, or how critical I am of it.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
B2P would have been the only honest way to release this game.
Really? This game sucks and Im not having fun? Im going to unsub right now. Thanks for the tip.
The game, TOR, would be better received if it were priced as a CORPG, since that is what it is at its' most glorious level, and a single-player rpg at its' most shallow.
As others will admit to, other than a paid advertising site, is the reason that these questions are being raised continuously is due to the rapid decline in in-game population due to $15/month in a week, for what esentially amounts to a single-player rpg or corpg.
So yes....I do think that even though TOR will bleed subs profusely, Bioware would have had more credibility by merchandising it, the game, as what it is with content purchases as opposed to whoring the Bioware name and promising a mmorpg, which is something that wasn't delivered. It was fabulously successful with ANet, but with Bioware, they will falter.
well said.
I would have received this game better... if it were less like SWToR and more like SWG.
Let me first say I have no interest in playing GW2, im not really up for yet another fantasy mmo. So hopefully that gives my comments some clarity as they are not from a GW2 Fanboi. That said:
Yes I would probably be more inclined to continue playing SWTOR if it was buy 2 play and supported via frequent (released say monthly or every 2 months) released content updates.
Right now Ive paid for my boxed copy and its been sitting on my desk, still in the shrinkwrap gathering dust since Early Access ended. I might activate my key if I get really bored later on down the track but as an MMO I feel SWTOR feels flat, as a single player CRPG with multiple story paths well I guess its like a KOTOR 3 only with weaker storylines than I normally expect from Bioware.
End result I dont want to pay $15 a month for SWTOR despite being a massive Star Wars Fan and having a great guild to play with.
I would have never of played it if it didn't have a sub. I like the fact that the game will be changing and always adding content. I played GW and just didn't like that it felt so much like a single player game. They added expansions but the game itself never changed. So I am a sucker for games that charge a sub cause I feel like the money is worth it. I am not a player that will play many games at the same time, so $15 for 100's of hours of entertainment is the greatest bargain ever imo.
Lol. Ironic that you say that because that is probably my number 1 complaint with SWTOR and I know I am certainly only one of many people who feels that way.
For all the things people say about GW2 there is one prediction I will make. If GW2 can put out content every 3 months or so and pull off a actual mmo with a B2P model it puts EXTREMELYYYYYYYYY heavy preasure on WOW/TOR/Rift
I would have bought this game if it were B2P. I would buy pretty much any halfway decent MMO coming out with a B2P model. I truly want to support it.
Yes, a subscription is still cheaper than the movies or whatever, but the fact is that we as consumers can demand better. With P2P they only need to give you enough content to keep you subscribing. With B2P, if the developer doesn't put out a quality expansion or DLC that makes you voluntarily want to purchase it, they don't get paid. If you don't think you're getting quality, or expansions are coming so often that they seem like a cash grab, don't buy them. They're not going to cut off your access to the core game. With P2P, you have a financial incentive to not play the game. B2P is just a much better system for the consumer. I'm excited about GW2, but I'm more excited at the idea that other developers might consider taking up the B2P model in the future.
What it comes down to is what you're getting for your dollar. There are good P2P companies and bad ones, just as there could be good B2P companies and bad ones if this model catches on. I can only speak to what happened with B2P with ArenaNet, but hopefully it can address some people's concerns about whether the model is viable.
In terms of support, it's totally viable. The B2P model didn't make GW1's expansion content come out more slowly, they just decided instead to start over with GW2 because their engine was suboptimal. GW1 was very profitable, especially considering it was a non-AAA, non-MMO with no IP. It was also high fantasy and came out 4 months after the also high fantasy AAA MMO established IP'ed WoW. It vastly outearned the P2P City of Heroes. Had they not stopped, they could have continued to put out regular expansions. The problem was with such a small company, everybody but a token force had to start work on GW2. They still manage pretty much weekly updates and fixes for GW1 though, despite that it hasn't put out paid content since 2007.
GW2 might have frequent content in the form of DLCs, we don't know for sure. I wouldn't expect quick expansions though. One of the things they said was that their 6 month expansion schedule meant repeatedly leaving things out of the game they wanted to do. GW1 expansions are not quite the size of the original game, but they are really large with 2 new classes, hundreds of new skills, 20+ dungeons, 30+ zones. What kind of content comes out depends on the developer and whether they're driven or lazy, whether they're putting out what people want, whether they favor DLC or full expansions, and whether players decide to spend the money.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I'm not a critic. However...
I would accept ANY MMO better as a CORPG than as a per month subscription.
The idea that you pay more when, and ONLY when a developer creates more content is very appealing to me, as opposed to how most MMO's work where you get about an hour's new content every quarter.
Not better, worse ...
It looks like I will play this game for 5 hours a day on average for quite some months (single but employed basement dwelling neckbeard here) that is 15 euro / 150 = 10 cents for an hour of entertainment. A small price to pay for big free updates, a HELL of a game so far scope and content wise and a cheap insurance against a godawful p2win, p2slightadvantage or p2lookdifferent system.
My brand new bloggity blog.
Well i guess if they didnt market it as a MMORPG then I migth ahve looked at it in a different light.. but my main issue with this game is that its just another run of the mill Themepark game and has brought nothing special to the table..
Graphics are not very good
Gameplay is not very good
Animations are not very good
but thats just my opinion and what i know about the hero engine as ive been using it myself. For the amount of money they have put into this its a very poor game.
If KOTOR 1 & KOTOR 2 were coops, with say $39.00 expansions every 3-6 months, I probably would still be playing them
Does that answer the question any?
Anyway, I did quit playing this week, dint see it all but I kept running stuck after chapter one, the game became to slow (story wise) and it just was one big go to Y kill X and XY grind. I did every flashpoint up to lvl 40 dozens of times, pvpéd , dne collecting of the codex stuff. but it all came down to a very limeted gameplay that -I- grew bored faster then the story jacked could substain.
Still a good game tho, no regrets of the purchase, game just needs ..more, more then a unfinished ui and kill xx all day long.
and thats why I wont sub to it, The patches for the next -months- will be mostly fixes, some finishing up of the game parts that dint make it due rushing the release and perhaps a same old flashpoint.
i have to say, i'm still looking for the "scope" part.
all i'm getting so far are massive empty cities devoid of personality and character. i mean, you go to the cantina and you can't even buy novelty drinks. you can't click on 99% of the npcs. you can't interact with anything which isn't pretty much directly linked with your quest. i fail to see "scope" in there. for me, scope is about a BIG picture, with depth of world creation.
i don't find scope in a 2d picture. i want to feel immersed in an mmo. it's why i play them over single player rpgs, and it's to the shame of the mmo industry that rpgs are getting more and more immersive while mmos are moving in the opposite direction.
as for the patches, i'm looking for patches which will stop my shadows from looking like leftover offcuts from galaga. patches which will do the game a little justice in the whole "feeling" department rather than playing me like i've come to the star wars ride at disneyland. "look, but don't touch!"
I recieved this game as is. Too many screaming scrubs telling me why this and why that, and then when they realize something is crap, they pretend they saw and proclaimed it as a turd in the first place. This game lacks a lot of cool immersive features, features i don't even need to go over because only blind, simple minded people would miss (as in not notice). Game length is possibly 45 hours at max if you don't count the story quests. Nothing to go out and spend $60 on, and nothing really special enough to devote my time to. My next big failure seems to be GW2, which in total offers 40+ hours of content. Compare this to any of the single player SW games, and you'll find that it can't really compete with them. The problem was, they boasted about the massive cinematic stories, but failed to deliver much else. See it how you want to, but know this: The game is a turd, thx Bioware for screwing up another title.
I struggle not with life, money, emotions, and world, but against old mindsets and selves to be proven obsolete in a age and time of rapid changes. Go create fun, so you can have fun.
Pricing got nothing to do with game quality.
Hence, it wouldn't affect my rating.
However pricing got something to do with game design, and that's where I think SWTOR is lacking. I haven't bought the game for two reasons:
1) I feel like (from reading reviews, listening to podcasts/watching videos) many many quests are designed to steal your time. For example, walk 20 minutes just to talk to A and B with no interruption and content doesn't differ so much from each other (some flashpoints are very similar).
2) The story presentation is nice, but the world presentation is lacking. Also, the game doesn't feel like people working together, but side by side.
I just finished Deus Ex, it got the same problem. The story is great and really immersive, but as soon as you walk around and try to find the rioters, they either seem to be invisible but making noise at specific locations, or are just voices in my (Jensen's head).
BTW: GW1 has a very long history of free content and balance updates. So no, I don't think p2p is worth the money. That's just a note, though.
Simple truth.
See that is my problem, I'm happy to play the game in the future, I just don't think it is worth a monthly sub. People say it's only $15 a month or whatever but it adds up to $180 in the year that I could spend on other things. You also have to take into account that I want to try other MMOs which also cost a montly sub and you get into the territory of which ones are worth subbing too and SWTOR just isn't.
If it was F2P however and I could buy a hat every now and then like in TF2 when I play, then I'd be quite happy to play.