After you go through the grind for a few years in one game, players realize how shallow the gameplay actually is when they pick up the next game and realize its exactly the same thing with a different skin but fewer features due to far less time in development.
This is the reason many people who started with EQ, DAOC, AC and others disliked WoW from the beginning and part of why all of the AAA releases from the past several years have fizzled out rather quickly.
Devs seem to think that mmo players want to play the same game for eternity when in reality they should realize that people don't want to replay WoW for the 5th or 6th time.
I find it kind of hard to believe those budget amounts that have been thrown around for SWTOR: WoW cost about 50million euros/60m dollars, AoC and WAR were around I think 40-50 million dollars, TR only had such a big budget bc they had cooperation issues with NCSoft people and rigorously changed the whole direction of the game mid-project, throwing away everything of the past 2-3 years that couldn't be reused, as everyone who followed the TR trajectory and read Gariott's statements is aware of.
Changing your MMO design drastically in the midst of the project making the preceding couple of years for a large part meaningless and invested resources squandered, yes, I can see how that might add a 30-40 million dollar to the budget, if you waste a few years.
However, so far the development budget for AAA MMO's seem to range between 40-60 million dollars. Using that as a baseline, anything above 150 million dollars seems just wild conjecture. But hey, whatever floats someone's boat, I guess >.>
Well considering they payed a CONFRIMED 776million for bioware droping another 200mill on an MMO doesn' t seem so far outside of the realm of reality... i just wonder where it went...
The point of his post was probably the pointlessness of the OP's post. I'm currently playing the game and having fun. So I don't care where the money went or what it went to. When I'm not having fun anymore, I'm going to quit. And guess what? I still don't care where the money went.
People that make post like this are the same type of people who complain about how much money a movie cost to make. I mean, really, I don't care if cost 1 billion to make... still cost me 60 bucks, same as any other game out there.
It's a good point. If it took a billion dollars to make SWTOR or it took 10,000 dollars to make SWTOR why do we really care? We didn't pay for that, the developers and publishers did. As consumers we try our best to "get what we paid for" we don't inherently "get what they paid for".
Again... public game forum. PUBLIC GAME FORUM. Why would you really care about anything posted here?
This is place for discussion...
AGAIN... if you dont wish to discuss the topic there are various buttons on your browser toolbar that will navigate you away from this page
We do wish to discuss it obviously. We're just stating our opinions on a public forum. Please don't get angry just because we do not share your opinion. Ours is just as valid.
I wasn't specifically aiming that post at the previous poster... it was more a general statement
If you are coming here to post about how you dont care about my post... or how you think the thread is pointless.... your not really contributing anything to the discussion.
You dont got to protest just hold up sign that say "I dont care about (insert protest topic here)" its just silly
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Very true, and a staff of writers so they could shove their story down my throat without once taking into consideration that my personal story is always better than some pre-canned linear cutscene treadmill.
Sure, the main class stories (well, a few of them) were a lot of fun for me, the first time through (a week or two of game time at best?). But when all is said and done, I wish for longevities sake they'd devoted less resources to that end and instead invested in crafting an interesting world that's fun to interact with on it's own rather than feeling as if it's merely a set piece in which to play through a slew of kill X space rats tasks and devoted a lot more testing and resources to tuning up UI response time and customization options.
There's way more longevity in that. And after seeing how they have handled every interaction with the game and the community post launch, my expectations for them churning out quality story driven content at any kind of steady rate are extremely low.
I truly wanted this game to do well, and would have loved if it could have been a long term hobby for me, but it's pretty clear I'll get about what I expected: 2-3 months of game time, and most of that at max level.
What amazes me is how bare bones this game is in terms of features, how closely they mimed an already existing game, had pre-existing lore - all of which should shave down development time compared to a game that was starting from scratch, and yet still failed to manufacture a fluid & responsive experience.
I'm also amazed at how many amateur mistakes they've made, it genuinly feels like their only experience with MMOs so far was sort of knowing someone that casually played WoW rather than a development team that had over a decade of MMO history to dissect and learn from.
It'll be interesting to see how the game evolves over the next few years, and hope it's something I can check in on for fun, but at the moment the current game as provided also makes me wonder not only 'where did the money go?' but also 'What were they thinking?'.
Very true, and a staff of writers so they could shove their story down my throat without once taking into consideration that my personal story is always better than some pre-canned linear cutscene treadmill.
Sure, the main class stories (well, a few of them) were a lot of fun for me, the first time through (a week or two of game time at best?). But when all is said and done, I wish for longevities sake they'd devoted less resources to that end and instead invested in crafting an interesting world that's fun to interact with on it's own rather than feeling as if it's merely a set piece in which to play through a slew of kill X space rats tasks and devoted a lot more testing and resources to tuning up UI response time and customization options.
There's way more longevity in that. And after seeing how they have handled every interaction with the game and the community post launch, my expectations for them churning out quality story driven content at any kind of steady rate are extremely low.
I truly wanted this game to do well, and would have loved if it could have been a long term hobby for me, but it's pretty clear I'll get about what I expected: 2-3 months of game time, and most of that at max level.
What amazes me is how bare bones this game is in terms of features, how closely they mimed an already existing game, had pre-existing lore - all of which should shave down development time compared to a game that was starting from scratch, and yet still failed to manufacture a fluid & responsive experience.
I'm also amazed at how many amateur mistakes they've made, it genuinly feels like their only experience with MMOs so far was sort of knowing someone that casually played WoW rather than a development team that had over a decade of MMO history to dissect and learn from.
It'll be interesting to see how the game evolves over the next few years, and hope it's something I can check in on for fun, but at the moment the current game as provided also makes me wonder not only 'where did the money go?' but also 'What were they thinking?'.
I agree with you... its strange though because I know for a fact that voice actors really dont get paid that much.. unless you are a reconized voice... like the guy who did vegita and piccolo's voice in DBZ or Steve Blum. Maybe they have some really top class VA's in the game and i just dont recognize any of the voices but i just dont see it.
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Well considering they payed a CONFRIMED 776million for bioware droping another 200mill on an MMO doesn' t seem so far outside of the realm of reality... i just wonder where it went...
Sure, whenever that kind of money is thrown around a few hundreds of millions more or less don't matter, right? -_-
That means probably since Bioware is earning 1-1.5 billion dollars a year, probably 1-2 billion dollars is the development budget of Titan, the money has to go somewhere, right? And that since Google paid like over a billion dollars to acquire Youtube, that easily 500 million dollars is the development budget to develop further the tool that the former Youtube owners initially developed for a fraction of that money.
The fact that EA spent that kind of money to acquire the company and brand name of Bioware has little to do with the amount of money that TOR or DA:O or ME's development budgets are, those are separate things.
IP costs, voice acting and cinematics can be pretty expensive.
Not THAT expensive, esp seeing how other MMO's like GW2 and TSW are using huge amounts of VO and cinematics too; even if they're not on the amount of TOR, it's still pretty extensive what they'll be implementing. So, that'd mean that GW2 and TSW would have 30-50% the additional cost of VO/cinematics that TOR would be having? From what I recall gtom the IP, the cost of it'll only get activated after the initial costs are recovered, so it doesn't seem to be included in the development budget. Don't know how it was for the Tolkien IP for LotrO btw.
In the case of GW2 it only has one "faction" so that basically cuts voice acting of quests in half or more if you consider that the game has no quests but the dynamic events feature which doesn't seem to require the whole dialogue you'd need for a quest story especially with the much more efficient approach to make players FEEL the situation instead of telling them through voice acting ), but SWTOR got into the Guiness for the "Largest Entertainment Voice Over Project” with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue.
Isn't GW2 using that painting art style for cinematics? It seems to make it considerably cheaper than using the game engine itself for complex cinematics.
Edit - been editing this a bit for clarity, I do know about GW2 but not about TSW
I agree with you... its strange though because I know for a fact that voice actors really dont get paid that much.. unless you are a reconized voice... like the guy who did vegita and piccolo's voice in DBZ or Steve Blum. Maybe they have some really top class VA's in the game and i just dont recognize any of the voices but i just dont see it.
Or it's all just conjecture and a pile of horse manure, VO/cinematics budget is a hell of a lot lower than haters/critics want them to be, and the development budget is far more around sane, reasonable numbers not far from other AAA MMO budgets :-)
If the VO/cinematics really cost that much as some claim/wish it to be, you can add an additional 20-30 million dollars to GW2's and TSW's budget costs as well, with the large amounts of VO/cinematics those games will be using as well. Only TOR trumps them, but both GW2 and TSW far, far exceeds any former MMORPG in the VO/cinematics department.
Before I even start I will state (just like veryone else that does this comparison) that I dont play WoW I played for three years, picked it back up for a month when the Cata xpack hit and havnt played it since
Now thats out of the way
Does anyone know how much it cost to develop WoW?.... 63 million
that was for vanilla... the xpacks cost significantly less than the game development did as all Xpacks do....
What was TOR development cost? No one knows for sure because they have not publicly release that info but industy leader estimate between 125 million and 200 million.... i would say the low end number may have been the cost of the entire WoW product line up to this point.
I know that SWTOR is a new game and new games always have their issues... but cmon.... they cant even get the UI to work smooth... here is an example of how tight WoW's UI is
its clunky, its ackward... and its definatly not worth the money that was spent on it.
Its sad that we will not see another SW mmo for probably at least another decade... which sucks because if there was one universe where you could make the "ultimate MMO" Star Wars is it.
I prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola. But it doens't make Pepsi the greatest drink in the world.
What??? that has nothing to do with my post... its more like if a company said... hey we made a drink that taste JUST like pepsi on way way better and it cost us three times more to make it.... then you drink it and it taste like Sam's Choice Cola... that would be a better comparison
LOL he didn't even read your post at ALL did he OP?
Right over your heads I see...lol
The point of his post was probably the pointlessness of the OP's post. I'm currently playing the game and having fun. So I don't care where the money went or what it went to. When I'm not having fun anymore, I'm going to quit. And guess what? I still don't care where the money went.
People that make post like this are the same type of people who complain about how much money a movie cost to make. I mean, really, I don't care if cost 1 billion to make... still cost me 60 bucks, same as any other game out there.
I hear this same type of stuff when a new 500 million dollar movie comes out and people say "man that sucked, wonder where all the money went" Who cares? Still only cost me $12.50.
Just a quick question: if you don't care where the money went and you're happily gaming why attend to a conversation that is asking where the money went?
Because you can or because you care?
But to that Tabula Rasa -thing. There's been a lot of speculation about the money going to space
In the case of GW2 it only has one "faction" so that basically cuts voice acting of quests in half or more if you consider that the game has no quests but the dynamic events feature which doesn't seem to require the whole dialogue you'd need for a quest story especially with the much more efficient approach to make players FEEL the situation instead of telling them through voice acting ), but SWTOR got into the Guiness for the "Largest Entertainment Voice Over Project with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue.
Isn't GW2 using that painting art style for cinematics? It seems to make it considerably cheaper than using the game engine itself for complex cinematics.
Edit - been editing this a bit for clarity, I do know about GW2 but not about TSW
GW2 uses one faction, but has 10 character choices, 5 races and 3 societies/guilds that each have a significant impact on how the personal story goes. Besides, didn't I read something of the length of 60 feature length movies that was VO? That's a LOT. As for the cinematics, it uses a combination of character animation and semi-animated background to present the story as well as ingame cutscenes. Resources are resources, they still have to get invested for them. My estimation is that, seeing how DCUO, GW2, TOR and TSW are all using VO/cinematics/cutscenes extensively, that while voice actors sure won't be cheap, the overall costs is a lot lower than (some) people make it out to be. Else the budget costs of all those games would rise significantly as well with tens of millions of dollars purely for that part.
Is everyone skipping the fact that WoW had no ability delay from start and part reason of games being less than WoW was because of this ability delay.
My friend told me to tell you guys just try an Jedi Knight or Sith Warrior press 1 and 2 or level and press 4.
That's just melee it was something I noticed in OBT.
Also the whole "smooth and fluid combat" in fact is a contradicting on all reviewers due to ability delays that are glarringly obvious.
As well as riposte and master strike. I forgot that jump and ground smash move were it stuns nearby enemies but have you seen the pre jump on that? It's terrible for melee players.
It makes no sense to put that much money in a game and have that gamebreaking issue and that's just on the melee alone, apparently it's happening with more than one mirrored classes.
Which in fact does make many wonder "Were did all the money go to?" many are at the conclusion that it obviousely went into the story.
Oh yea just remembered overload for BH has a delay as well.
This isn't a factor of which game is better but both EQ and WoW from the very start had no ability delays, an Rift as well. It's hard to get use to actually being wrong but hey it happens, an it's there until fix(1.1 didn't fix it)
May the common sense be with you fellas.
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.
IP costs, voice acting and cinematics can be pretty expensive.
This. Especially seeing what IP its coming from, ( Lucas arts ) can be fairly money grabbing. and considering actors and sports stars demand more and more for that they do im not surprised at the cost and lack of solid specifics in game.
In my opinion when games dont stand apart from others in their content , classes, skills, music, etc then it can become rather old fairly quickly. I do agree partially with what one person said recently that themepark mmos could possibly be phased out over time unless some orginality and content can keep up with the demands of the gaming world.
Tried: EQ2 - AC - EU - HZ - TR - MxO - TTO - WURM - SL - VG:SoH - PotBS - PS - AoC - WAR - DDO - SWTOR Played: UO - EQ1 - AO - DAoC - NC - CoH/CoV - SWG - WoW - EVE - AA - LotRO - DFO - STO - FE - MO - RIFT Playing: Skyrim Following: The Repopulation I want a Virtual World, not just a Game. ITS TOO HARD! - Matt Firor (ZeniMax)
Their total investment in Star Wars is approaching $500 million, according to the last paragraph here.
Keep in mind, that doesn't mean purely on development, and most likely considers licensing, marketing, and other non-direct costs on getting the game out.
Still, EA better hope this thing does well, and that the broker pull-back today is just a knee-jerk reaction.
In the case of GW2 it only has one "faction" so that basically cuts voice acting of quests in half or more if you consider that the game has no quests but the dynamic events feature which doesn't seem to require the whole dialogue you'd need for a quest story especially with the much more efficient approach to make players FEEL the situation instead of telling them through voice acting ), but SWTOR got into the Guiness for the "Largest Entertainment Voice Over Project” with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue.
Isn't GW2 using that painting art style for cinematics? It seems to make it considerably cheaper than using the game engine itself for complex cinematics.
Edit - been editing this a bit for clarity, I do know about GW2 but not about TSW
GW2 uses one faction, but has 10 character choices, 5 races and 3 societies/guilds that each have a significant impact on how the personal story goes. Besides, didn't I read something of the length of 60 feature length movies that was VO? That's a LOT. As for the cinematics, it uses a combination of character animation and semi-animated background to present the story as well as ingame cutscenes. Resources are resources, they still have to get invested for them. My estimation is that, seeing how DCUO, GW2, TOR and TSW are all using VO/cinematics/cutscenes extensively, that while voice actors sure won't be cheap, the overall costs is a lot lower than (some) people make it out to be. Else the budget costs of all those games would rise significantly as well with tens of millions of dollars purely for that part.
I don't think that GW2 is a good example to hold SWTOR against.
Mainly because ANET has come and basically said that NCSoft has given them an almost unlimited budget to work with.
I really don't see how SWTOR's cinematics are that much more expensive.... all they do is zoom in the camera so you can see mouth movements and some mild hand geasturing.... not really high production cost stuff if you ask me... but i could be wrong.
As for whoever said that how much they paid for BW and how much they dropped on the game are not related I call bull.
You don't go out and spend almost a billion dollars for a developer company aquisition and then turn around right afterwords and short change the development funding for the FIRST game the company you just bought put out... especially when its an MMO and you are trying to grab a huge piece of that subscriber pie... so i think that 125 - 200 million is certainly a beliveable figure... besides I didnt pull this figure out of my ass.... this is estimations based on profession industy analysts....
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Development monies are always wasted on leadership. Be it BW, EA, or LA, that is were the money went. What little of it that went into the product service.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
wow didnt cost a lot cause they made everything in house,ea wanted to save time they baught and engine (or so they thaught)
then after all it took more time to fiddle with the engine and in the end if ea had made their own engine with microsoft advice about various solution like donnybrook and all they would have saved lot of time and a lot of money and would have a very strong engine for their futur mmo,now they are stuck with an engine this is barely decent as dx9 standard go forget dx11.
in my book who have it good are xbox player cause pretty much all is optimised with ms approval no supposedly pro that arent more then just regular joe fiddler using linux because graphic are better with wine!
Full VO , cutscenes and alot of marketting. SW license is not cheap either.
Seem like they invested in everything but not in mmorpg parts of game...
Another thing could be that they are very ineffeficiant at spending or that those huge sums of money that are supposedly spent on Swtor are marketting bullshit and in reality they've spent less.
IP costs, voice acting and cinematics can be pretty expensive.
This. Especially seeing what IP its coming from, ( Lucas arts ) can be fairly money grabbing. and considering actors and sports stars demand more and more for that they do im not surprised at the cost and lack of solid specifics in game.
In my opinion when games dont stand apart from others in their content , classes, skills, music, etc then it can become rather old fairly quickly. I do agree partially with what one person said recently that themepark mmos could possibly be phased out over time unless some orginality and content can keep up with the demands of the gaming world.
As if sandboxes proved they could. They had their chance in the sun and blew it. You're stuck with themeparks for the interim. Even your vaunted GW2 is a themepark. Your only hope for some kind of revivication of the sandbox genre will be a direct result of Archeage's popularity and income levels. Yet even Archeage has a lot of themepark elements.
Full VO , cutscenes and alot of marketting. SW license is not cheap either.
Seem like they invested in everything but not in mmorpg parts of game...
Another thing could be that they are very ineffeficiant at spending or that those huge sums of money that are supposedly spent on Swtor are marketting bullshit and in reality they've spent less.
See this why I started this thread... for a educated discussion...
From what I can gather I would now say that they probably spent a whole lot of money for that hero engine... plus the VA's
I would assume that is where the bulk of the money went....
After that its just a series of one bad disicsion after another...
Like hiring a dev team with a track record of failure to do your PvP for you
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
IP costs, voice acting and cinematics can be pretty expensive.
This. Especially seeing what IP its coming from, ( Lucas arts ) can be fairly money grabbing. and considering actors and sports stars demand more and more for that they do im not surprised at the cost and lack of solid specifics in game.
In my opinion when games dont stand apart from others in their content , classes, skills, music, etc then it can become rather old fairly quickly. I do agree partially with what one person said recently that themepark mmos could possibly be phased out over time unless some orginality and content can keep up with the demands of the gaming world.
As if sandboxes proved they could. They had their chance in the sun and blew it. You're stuck with themeparks for the interim. Even your vaunted GW2 is a themepark. Your only hope for some kind of revivication of the sandbox genre will be a direct result of Archeage's popularity and income levels. Yet even Archeage has a lot of themepark elements.
I dont see how sandboxes... blew it as you say...
Back in the days of UO you had two types of gamers... console gamers... and PC gamers.
Console gamers had absolutly NO IDEA what was going on in the world of Computer games and MMO's
That is not the case in this day and age as the lines have blurred and the cost of decent gaming PC has gone down substantially.
When WoW came out is when the rest of the world really started to take notice of the PC gaming world and MMO's in genereal.
So we had a huge influx of console gamers jumping on their PC's and coming to see what all the fuss was about. After all they had heard of Warcraft... it was on the console with every installment.
Developers for some reason took that to mean... oh... its the themepark they are attracted too.... lets make tons of them.
When this was not neccessarily the case... Since wow there has not been a decent Sandbox from a decent company released... with the exception of SWG.... but even I hadn't even heard of that game until well after its prime... when I did finally log in I logged in to a very dated and unkempt game. I knew however... that this game was probably something special in its prime and I had just missed the bus.
So no... i had alot of fun in UO... tons of it. Nor are themepark elements bad in a sandbox MMO IMO
Just because you can build your own cities and make war with each other of resources doesn't mean that you can't go to a major NPC city and do some quests for them....
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Originally posted by EricDanie In the case of GW2 it only has one "faction" so that basically cuts voice acting of quests in half or more if you consider that the game has no quests but the dynamic events feature which doesn't seem to require the whole dialogue you'd need for a quest story especially with the much more efficient approach to make players FEEL the situation instead of telling them through voice acting ), but SWTOR got into the Guiness for the "Largest Entertainment Voice Over Project with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue. Isn't GW2 using that painting art style for cinematics? It seems to make it considerably cheaper than using the game engine itself for complex cinematics. Edit - been editing this a bit for clarity, I do know about GW2 but not about TSW
GW2 uses one faction, but has 10 character choices, 5 races and 3 societies/guilds that each have a significant impact on how the personal story goes. Besides, didn't I read something of the length of 60 feature length movies that was VO? That's a LOT. As for the cinematics, it uses a combination of character animation and semi-animated background to present the story as well as ingame cutscenes. Resources are resources, they still have to get invested for them. My estimation is that, seeing how DCUO, GW2, TOR and TSW are all using VO/cinematics/cutscenes extensively, that while voice actors sure won't be cheap, the overall costs is a lot lower than (some) people make it out to be. Else the budget costs of all those games would rise significantly as well with tens of millions of dollars purely for that part.
I don't think that GW2 is a good example to hold SWTOR against.
Mainly because ANET has come and basically said that NCSoft has given them an almost unlimited budget to work with.
I really don't see how SWTOR's cinematics are that much more expensive.... all they do is zoom in the camera so you can see mouth movements and some mild hand geasturing.... not really high production cost stuff if you ask me... but i could be wrong.
As for whoever said that how much they paid for BW and how much they dropped on the game are not related I call bull.
You don't go out and spend almost a billion dollars for a developer company aquisition and then turn around right afterwords and short change the development funding for the FIRST game the company you just bought put out... especially when its an MMO and you are trying to grab a huge piece of that subscriber pie... so i think that 125 - 200 million is certainly a beliveable figure... besides I didnt pull this figure out of my ass.... this is estimations based on profession industy analysts....
I doubt that unlimited budget is as unlimited as you think it does, and you don't hear people making up 100+ million dollar budgets for GW2. Besides, TSW won't have anywhere near that kind of budget but very likely more around the normal amounts and that is with all the VO/cinematics (every quest) included, and DCUO with all its VO still had a development budget of just 50 million dollars, nothing extraordinary even with quite some famous voice actors and celebs included. Normal, understandable budgets.
As for analists, I see how haters/critics of TOR want to believe that TOR has an investment budget to bankrupt EA however unrealistic that may seem compared to the cost and budget of other MMO's, those with VO included, but the majority of the analists' reports ranged from 80 to 130 million dollars. But hey, believe whatever insane amount you want to believe, it's the kind of thing to bash TOR and EA/BW with while completely ignoring it for other MMO's. Personally, I'll stick to the more sensible and realistic figures >.>
In the case of GW2 it only has one "faction" so that basically cuts voice acting of quests in half or more if you consider that the game has no quests but the dynamic events feature which doesn't seem to require the whole dialogue you'd need for a quest story especially with the much more efficient approach to make players FEEL the situation instead of telling them through voice acting ), but SWTOR got into the Guiness for the "Largest Entertainment Voice Over Project” with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue.
Isn't GW2 using that painting art style for cinematics? It seems to make it considerably cheaper than using the game engine itself for complex cinematics.
Edit - been editing this a bit for clarity, I do know about GW2 but not about TSW
GW2 uses one faction, but has 10 character choices, 5 races and 3 societies/guilds that each have a significant impact on how the personal story goes. Besides, didn't I read something of the length of 60 feature length movies that was VO? That's a LOT. As for the cinematics, it uses a combination of character animation and semi-animated background to present the story as well as ingame cutscenes. Resources are resources, they still have to get invested for them. My estimation is that, seeing how DCUO, GW2, TOR and TSW are all using VO/cinematics/cutscenes extensively, that while voice actors sure won't be cheap, the overall costs is a lot lower than (some) people make it out to be. Else the budget costs of all those games would rise significantly as well with tens of millions of dollars purely for that part.
I don't think that GW2 is a good example to hold SWTOR against.
Mainly because ANET has come and basically said that NCSoft has given them an almost unlimited budget to work with.
I really don't see how SWTOR's cinematics are that much more expensive.... all they do is zoom in the camera so you can see mouth movements and some mild hand geasturing.... not really high production cost stuff if you ask me... but i could be wrong.
As for whoever said that how much they paid for BW and how much they dropped on the game are not related I call bull.
You don't go out and spend almost a billion dollars for a developer company aquisition and then turn around right afterwords and short change the development funding for the FIRST game the company you just bought put out... especially when its an MMO and you are trying to grab a huge piece of that subscriber pie... so i think that 125 - 200 million is certainly a beliveable figure... besides I didnt pull this figure out of my ass.... this is estimations based on profession industy analysts....
I doubt that unlimited budget is as unlimited as you think it does, and you don't hear people making up 100+ million dollar budgets for GW2. Besides, TSW won't have anywhere near that kind of budget but very likely more around the normal amounts and that is with all the VO/cinematics (every quest) included, and DCUO with all its VO still had a development budget of just 50 million dollars, nothing extraordinary even with quite some famous voice actors and celebs included. Normal, understandable budgets.
As for analists, I see how haters/critics of TOR want to believe that TOR has an investment budget to bankrupt EA however unrealistic that may seem compared to the cost and budget of other MMO's, those with VO included, but the majority of the analists' reports ranged from 80 to 130 million dollars. But hey, believe whatever insane amount you want to believe, it's the kind of thing to bash TOR and EA/BW with while completely ignoring it for other MMO's. Personally, I'll stick to the more sensible and realistic figures >.>
I tired to find that 80 - 130 million figure but I can't all i can find are estimates from the business analyst at 125 - 200 million... still far less that the half a billion that some people are claiming but still up there none the less.
Im sure that GW2 does have a some limit to their budget... but I wouldnt hesistate to think they have spent well over 100million on it. I mean they have a huge team of people working on it... hell they have over 100 artist working on it alone...so im sure the actual figure is up there.
63 million was spent to develop Vanilla WoW and that was 7 years ago
Now people expectations are way up there... 125 million is only double the cost... its really not that crazy
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Full VO , cutscenes and alot of marketting. SW license is not cheap either. Seem like they invested in everything but not in mmorpg parts of game... Another thing could be that they are very ineffeficiant at spending or that those huge sums of money that are supposedly spent on Swtor are marketting bullshit and in reality they've spent less.
See this why I started this thread... for a educated discussion...
From what I can gather I would now say that they probably spent a whole lot of money for that hero engine... plus the VA's
I would assume that is where the bulk of the money went....
After that its just a series of one bad disicsion after another...
Like hiring a dev team with a track record of failure to do your PvP for you
Hmm. Sorry, but to me it just sounded like you wanted to hear someone agree with you, imho >.> Apologies if my idea is incorrect.
But ok, let's apply logic to the arguments in the quoted post here, shall we?
No one knows the cost of VO, cutscenes and marketing that TOR used. However, other AAA MMO's use and used lots of VO/cutscenes and had budgets that come fairly close to general AAA MMO budgets.
No one knows what the development budget is for TOR, analists' reports range from 80 million dollars to an absurd 500 million dollars, but most are in the 80-130 million dollar range. Also, as good as all AAA MMO budgets were around the 40-60 million dollars.
As for what'd cost money: people seem to forget that world design and content on it takes up a lot of resources too. The Vanguard developers skipped on fully creating a third continent, bc designing the other 2 continents took up a hell of a lot more time and resources than they'd expected, making them resort to a string of islands due to deadlines. Now, Rift has a tiny world, the size of Outland, which made the Trion guys save some time and resources (and thus money) to create their world. TOR however has a total worldsize that required designing that easily equals and even surpasses WoW and LotrO. That's like 10 times the worldsize of a Rift, and in themepark MMO's that takes a lot more resources and time (and money) than just procedural generation as sometimes seen in non-themepark MMO's.
So, here you go, an opinion that isn't in full alignment with your own, but still a contribution to the discussion you wanted to hold in this thread. Unless this is nothing but a hidden agenda and a camouflaged TOR bashing thread, but that's not an assumption I'm going for :-)
Comments
Themeparks are only good once.
After you go through the grind for a few years in one game, players realize how shallow the gameplay actually is when they pick up the next game and realize its exactly the same thing with a different skin but fewer features due to far less time in development.
This is the reason many people who started with EQ, DAOC, AC and others disliked WoW from the beginning and part of why all of the AAA releases from the past several years have fizzled out rather quickly.
Devs seem to think that mmo players want to play the same game for eternity when in reality they should realize that people don't want to replay WoW for the 5th or 6th time.
Hookers and blow is where it went.
I wasn't specifically aiming that post at the previous poster... it was more a general statement
If you are coming here to post about how you dont care about my post... or how you think the thread is pointless.... your not really contributing anything to the discussion.
You dont got to protest just hold up sign that say "I dont care about (insert protest topic here)" its just silly
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Very true, and a staff of writers so they could shove their story down my throat without once taking into consideration that my personal story is always better than some pre-canned linear cutscene treadmill.
Sure, the main class stories (well, a few of them) were a lot of fun for me, the first time through (a week or two of game time at best?). But when all is said and done, I wish for longevities sake they'd devoted less resources to that end and instead invested in crafting an interesting world that's fun to interact with on it's own rather than feeling as if it's merely a set piece in which to play through a slew of kill X space rats tasks and devoted a lot more testing and resources to tuning up UI response time and customization options.
There's way more longevity in that. And after seeing how they have handled every interaction with the game and the community post launch, my expectations for them churning out quality story driven content at any kind of steady rate are extremely low.
I truly wanted this game to do well, and would have loved if it could have been a long term hobby for me, but it's pretty clear I'll get about what I expected: 2-3 months of game time, and most of that at max level.
What amazes me is how bare bones this game is in terms of features, how closely they mimed an already existing game, had pre-existing lore - all of which should shave down development time compared to a game that was starting from scratch, and yet still failed to manufacture a fluid & responsive experience.
I'm also amazed at how many amateur mistakes they've made, it genuinly feels like their only experience with MMOs so far was sort of knowing someone that casually played WoW rather than a development team that had over a decade of MMO history to dissect and learn from.
It'll be interesting to see how the game evolves over the next few years, and hope it's something I can check in on for fun, but at the moment the current game as provided also makes me wonder not only 'where did the money go?' but also 'What were they thinking?'.
I agree with you... its strange though because I know for a fact that voice actors really dont get paid that much.. unless you are a reconized voice... like the guy who did vegita and piccolo's voice in DBZ or Steve Blum. Maybe they have some really top class VA's in the game and i just dont recognize any of the voices but i just dont see it.
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Sure, whenever that kind of money is thrown around a few hundreds of millions more or less don't matter, right? -_-
That means probably since Bioware is earning 1-1.5 billion dollars a year, probably 1-2 billion dollars is the development budget of Titan, the money has to go somewhere, right? And that since Google paid like over a billion dollars to acquire Youtube, that easily 500 million dollars is the development budget to develop further the tool that the former Youtube owners initially developed for a fraction of that money.
The fact that EA spent that kind of money to acquire the company and brand name of Bioware has little to do with the amount of money that TOR or DA:O or ME's development budgets are, those are separate things.In the case of GW2 it only has one "faction" so that basically cuts voice acting of quests in half or more if you consider that the game has no quests but the dynamic events feature which doesn't seem to require the whole dialogue you'd need for a quest story especially with the much more efficient approach to make players FEEL the situation instead of telling them through voice acting ), but SWTOR got into the Guiness for the "Largest Entertainment Voice Over Project” with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue.
Isn't GW2 using that painting art style for cinematics? It seems to make it considerably cheaper than using the game engine itself for complex cinematics.
Edit - been editing this a bit for clarity, I do know about GW2 but not about TSW
Or it's all just conjecture and a pile of horse manure, VO/cinematics budget is a hell of a lot lower than haters/critics want them to be, and the development budget is far more around sane, reasonable numbers not far from other AAA MMO budgets :-)
If the VO/cinematics really cost that much as some claim/wish it to be, you can add an additional 20-30 million dollars to GW2's and TSW's budget costs as well, with the large amounts of VO/cinematics those games will be using as well. Only TOR trumps them, but both GW2 and TSW far, far exceeds any former MMORPG in the VO/cinematics department.Just a quick question: if you don't care where the money went and you're happily gaming why attend to a conversation that is asking where the money went?
Because you can or because you care?
But to that Tabula Rasa -thing. There's been a lot of speculation about the money going to space
GW2 uses one faction, but has 10 character choices, 5 races and 3 societies/guilds that each have a significant impact on how the personal story goes. Besides, didn't I read something of the length of 60 feature length movies that was VO? That's a LOT. As for the cinematics, it uses a combination of character animation and semi-animated background to present the story as well as ingame cutscenes. Resources are resources, they still have to get invested for them. My estimation is that, seeing how DCUO, GW2, TOR and TSW are all using VO/cinematics/cutscenes extensively, that while voice actors sure won't be cheap, the overall costs is a lot lower than (some) people make it out to be. Else the budget costs of all those games would rise significantly as well with tens of millions of dollars purely for that part.Is everyone skipping the fact that WoW had no ability delay from start and part reason of games being less than WoW was because of this ability delay.
My friend told me to tell you guys just try an Jedi Knight or Sith Warrior press 1 and 2 or level and press 4.
That's just melee it was something I noticed in OBT.
Also the whole "smooth and fluid combat" in fact is a contradicting on all reviewers due to ability delays that are glarringly obvious.
As well as riposte and master strike. I forgot that jump and ground smash move were it stuns nearby enemies but have you seen the pre jump on that? It's terrible for melee players.
It makes no sense to put that much money in a game and have that gamebreaking issue and that's just on the melee alone, apparently it's happening with more than one mirrored classes.
Which in fact does make many wonder "Were did all the money go to?" many are at the conclusion that it obviousely went into the story.
Oh yea just remembered overload for BH has a delay as well.
This isn't a factor of which game is better but both EQ and WoW from the very start had no ability delays, an Rift as well. It's hard to get use to actually being wrong but hey it happens, an it's there until fix(1.1 didn't fix it)
May the common sense be with you fellas.
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.
This. Especially seeing what IP its coming from, ( Lucas arts ) can be fairly money grabbing. and considering actors and sports stars demand more and more for that they do im not surprised at the cost and lack of solid specifics in game.
In my opinion when games dont stand apart from others in their content , classes, skills, music, etc then it can become rather old fairly quickly. I do agree partially with what one person said recently that themepark mmos could possibly be phased out over time unless some orginality and content can keep up with the demands of the gaming world.
Tried: EQ2 - AC - EU - HZ - TR - MxO - TTO - WURM - SL - VG:SoH - PotBS - PS - AoC - WAR - DDO - SWTOR
Played: UO - EQ1 - AO - DAoC - NC - CoH/CoV - SWG - WoW - EVE - AA - LotRO - DFO - STO - FE - MO - RIFT
Playing: Skyrim
Following: The Repopulation
I want a Virtual World, not just a Game.
ITS TOO HARD! - Matt Firor (ZeniMax)
Their total investment in Star Wars is approaching $500 million, according to the last paragraph here.
Keep in mind, that doesn't mean purely on development, and most likely considers licensing, marketing, and other non-direct costs on getting the game out.
Still, EA better hope this thing does well, and that the broker pull-back today is just a knee-jerk reaction.
I don't think that GW2 is a good example to hold SWTOR against.
Mainly because ANET has come and basically said that NCSoft has given them an almost unlimited budget to work with.
I really don't see how SWTOR's cinematics are that much more expensive.... all they do is zoom in the camera so you can see mouth movements and some mild hand geasturing.... not really high production cost stuff if you ask me... but i could be wrong.
As for whoever said that how much they paid for BW and how much they dropped on the game are not related I call bull.
You don't go out and spend almost a billion dollars for a developer company aquisition and then turn around right afterwords and short change the development funding for the FIRST game the company you just bought put out... especially when its an MMO and you are trying to grab a huge piece of that subscriber pie... so i think that 125 - 200 million is certainly a beliveable figure... besides I didnt pull this figure out of my ass.... this is estimations based on profession industy analysts....
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Development monies are always wasted on leadership. Be it BW, EA, or LA, that is were the money went. What little of it that went into the product service.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
wow didnt cost a lot cause they made everything in house,ea wanted to save time they baught and engine (or so they thaught)
then after all it took more time to fiddle with the engine and in the end if ea had made their own engine with microsoft advice about various solution like donnybrook and all they would have saved lot of time and a lot of money and would have a very strong engine for their futur mmo,now they are stuck with an engine this is barely decent as dx9 standard go forget dx11.
in my book who have it good are xbox player cause pretty much all is optimised with ms approval no supposedly pro that arent more then just regular joe fiddler using linux because graphic are better with wine!
Full VO , cutscenes and alot of marketting. SW license is not cheap either.
Seem like they invested in everything but not in mmorpg parts of game...
Another thing could be that they are very ineffeficiant at spending or that those huge sums of money that are supposedly spent on Swtor are marketting bullshit and in reality they've spent less.
As if sandboxes proved they could. They had their chance in the sun and blew it. You're stuck with themeparks for the interim. Even your vaunted GW2 is a themepark. Your only hope for some kind of revivication of the sandbox genre will be a direct result of Archeage's popularity and income levels. Yet even Archeage has a lot of themepark elements.
See this why I started this thread... for a educated discussion...
From what I can gather I would now say that they probably spent a whole lot of money for that hero engine... plus the VA's
I would assume that is where the bulk of the money went....
After that its just a series of one bad disicsion after another...
Like hiring a dev team with a track record of failure to do your PvP for you
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
I dont see how sandboxes... blew it as you say...
Back in the days of UO you had two types of gamers... console gamers... and PC gamers.
Console gamers had absolutly NO IDEA what was going on in the world of Computer games and MMO's
That is not the case in this day and age as the lines have blurred and the cost of decent gaming PC has gone down substantially.
When WoW came out is when the rest of the world really started to take notice of the PC gaming world and MMO's in genereal.
So we had a huge influx of console gamers jumping on their PC's and coming to see what all the fuss was about. After all they had heard of Warcraft... it was on the console with every installment.
Developers for some reason took that to mean... oh... its the themepark they are attracted too.... lets make tons of them.
When this was not neccessarily the case... Since wow there has not been a decent Sandbox from a decent company released... with the exception of SWG.... but even I hadn't even heard of that game until well after its prime... when I did finally log in I logged in to a very dated and unkempt game. I knew however... that this game was probably something special in its prime and I had just missed the bus.
So no... i had alot of fun in UO... tons of it. Nor are themepark elements bad in a sandbox MMO IMO
Just because you can build your own cities and make war with each other of resources doesn't mean that you can't go to a major NPC city and do some quests for them....
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
GW2 uses one faction, but has 10 character choices, 5 races and 3 societies/guilds that each have a significant impact on how the personal story goes. Besides, didn't I read something of the length of 60 feature length movies that was VO? That's a LOT. As for the cinematics, it uses a combination of character animation and semi-animated background to present the story as well as ingame cutscenes. Resources are resources, they still have to get invested for them. My estimation is that, seeing how DCUO, GW2, TOR and TSW are all using VO/cinematics/cutscenes extensively, that while voice actors sure won't be cheap, the overall costs is a lot lower than (some) people make it out to be. Else the budget costs of all those games would rise significantly as well with tens of millions of dollars purely for that part.I don't think that GW2 is a good example to hold SWTOR against.
Mainly because ANET has come and basically said that NCSoft has given them an almost unlimited budget to work with.
I really don't see how SWTOR's cinematics are that much more expensive.... all they do is zoom in the camera so you can see mouth movements and some mild hand geasturing.... not really high production cost stuff if you ask me... but i could be wrong.
As for whoever said that how much they paid for BW and how much they dropped on the game are not related I call bull.
You don't go out and spend almost a billion dollars for a developer company aquisition and then turn around right afterwords and short change the development funding for the FIRST game the company you just bought put out... especially when its an MMO and you are trying to grab a huge piece of that subscriber pie... so i think that 125 - 200 million is certainly a beliveable figure... besides I didnt pull this figure out of my ass.... this is estimations based on profession industy analysts....
I doubt that unlimited budget is as unlimited as you think it does, and you don't hear people making up 100+ million dollar budgets for GW2. Besides, TSW won't have anywhere near that kind of budget but very likely more around the normal amounts and that is with all the VO/cinematics (every quest) included, and DCUO with all its VO still had a development budget of just 50 million dollars, nothing extraordinary even with quite some famous voice actors and celebs included. Normal, understandable budgets.
As for analists, I see how haters/critics of TOR want to believe that TOR has an investment budget to bankrupt EA however unrealistic that may seem compared to the cost and budget of other MMO's, those with VO included, but the majority of the analists' reports ranged from 80 to 130 million dollars. But hey, believe whatever insane amount you want to believe, it's the kind of thing to bash TOR and EA/BW with while completely ignoring it for other MMO's. Personally, I'll stick to the more sensible and realistic figures >.>I tired to find that 80 - 130 million figure but I can't all i can find are estimates from the business analyst at 125 - 200 million... still far less that the half a billion that some people are claiming but still up there none the less.
Im sure that GW2 does have a some limit to their budget... but I wouldnt hesistate to think they have spent well over 100million on it. I mean they have a huge team of people working on it... hell they have over 100 artist working on it alone...so im sure the actual figure is up there.
63 million was spent to develop Vanilla WoW and that was 7 years ago
Now people expectations are way up there... 125 million is only double the cost... its really not that crazy
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
See this why I started this thread... for a educated discussion...
From what I can gather I would now say that they probably spent a whole lot of money for that hero engine... plus the VA's
I would assume that is where the bulk of the money went....
After that its just a series of one bad disicsion after another...
Like hiring a dev team with a track record of failure to do your PvP for you
Hmm. Sorry, but to me it just sounded like you wanted to hear someone agree with you, imho >.> Apologies if my idea is incorrect.But ok, let's apply logic to the arguments in the quoted post here, shall we?
No one knows the cost of VO, cutscenes and marketing that TOR used. However, other AAA MMO's use and used lots of VO/cutscenes and had budgets that come fairly close to general AAA MMO budgets.
No one knows what the development budget is for TOR, analists' reports range from 80 million dollars to an absurd 500 million dollars, but most are in the 80-130 million dollar range. Also, as good as all AAA MMO budgets were around the 40-60 million dollars.As for what'd cost money: people seem to forget that world design and content on it takes up a lot of resources too. The Vanguard developers skipped on fully creating a third continent, bc designing the other 2 continents took up a hell of a lot more time and resources than they'd expected, making them resort to a string of islands due to deadlines. Now, Rift has a tiny world, the size of Outland, which made the Trion guys save some time and resources (and thus money) to create their world. TOR however has a total worldsize that required designing that easily equals and even surpasses WoW and LotrO. That's like 10 times the worldsize of a Rift, and in themepark MMO's that takes a lot more resources and time (and money) than just procedural generation as sometimes seen in non-themepark MMO's.
So, here you go, an opinion that isn't in full alignment with your own, but still a contribution to the discussion you wanted to hold in this thread. Unless this is nothing but a hidden agenda and a camouflaged TOR bashing thread, but that's not an assumption I'm going for :-)
Sure, but AAA MMORPG's like AoC, DCUO and Rift also had merely a 40-50 million dollar budget, and those all came after WoW.