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To Reiterate, SW Is Simply Terrible Timing
Dusntmatter
Member Posts: 32
Star Wars as a stand alone game is great. Questing is good, flashpoints are good, even the warzones are pretty well designed. Here is the problem, I would have found all of this amazing.....4 years ago.
I know this has been said before, but I want to reiterate. People aren't leaving WoW because they find the world of Azeroth boring (for the most part). People are leaving because they are sick of logging on, sitting in the capital city, running through the dailies, then waiting for raid.
So for Star Wars to copy that exactly, while may seem like a smart move to them at the time, instantly shortens the lifespan of the game. It's like showing up to a really great party at 3 in the morning when everyone is passed out expecting to have a good time.
Star Wars is actually a good game, just really really really late to the party.
Comments
Im still wondering where all the money went.
Hopefully, the WOW template will die along with this game.
Long live the next game template. Which one it will be still remains to be seen. TSW? Gw2? Archeage....who knows but until these giant milk cow MMO's stop making cash, investors will still force game developers to make them, bad or not.
This is a big problem for this genre in which development times are so long. If you want to mimic what people like, you have to hope they still like it 5+ years down the road. If you want to go original, that is just as big a gamble, if not bigger.
Every one of these dev studios, from Anet and Bioware to (whats a good end-of-alphabet-starting-studio?) make games to make monies. Every game is a gamble and even "safe-bets" don't always pay out.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Actually this is a poor excuse for what EA/Bioware did. Anet and the makers of TSW have both changed their approach multiple times throughout the multiple years of work on their games and it shows. Making the game and keeping the old design from 5 years ago, the design that every game has now that's out was a bad decision on EA/BW's part and make no mistake they could have changed it along the way if at any time they were actually paying attention to their fans, their playerbase. Hell people on their very own forums were posting what they wanted long before they had an alpha, no one listened to them then obviously.
I don't know OP. I wouldn't even say they made a "Star Wars" game, they made a standard fantasy MMO with Star Wars skins and some minigames that could have been anywhere. The game is bad now and would have been bad years ago.
BW took alot of time and money and a great setting and did very little with it. Oh they spent all the money on someone to read me a Bed time story.....so booorrring...so sleeeeppy .
The Game has Star Wars attached to it's name so it would NET more money, nothing more.
I agree with the OP 100%!
2008 when they sat down and said "Let's make a kiss @ss MMO" they were absolutely right. But perhaps where they gambled and fell short is by assuming nothing would change in the time it would take them to make the game.
No wonder people are bored with this game after 1 month, its because they have indirectly being playing it for the past 8 years!
EA's pockets, naturally. They're miserly assholes who only know how to iterate, not develop.
Re: SWTOR
"Remember, remember - Kakk says 'December.'"
No... the problem is not timing. The problem is two fold. First, bad game design. It just copied WoW, which is already a heavily flawed game.
Second, it's a singleplayer game selling itself as an MMO. There was no way that would work. Why would I pay a monthly fee to spend all my time in instances? I might as well just play Diablo. If it was a full blown singleplayer game maybe the combat wouldn't be so awful and your quests would actually impact the world.
I agree. If this came out in 2007 it would be a legit alternative to WoW. But in 2012 it just seems dated. We've already been doing all this stuff for years in WoW.
Can you imagine how old TOR will feel and look when new mmos like Titan and World of Darkness come out? The idea of raiding for purples and queuing for battlegrounds in a heavily instanced world will seem quaint.
WoW was dated when it was released. We'd already been doing that stuff since 1999 in EverQuest. LotRO, AoC, WAR, all dated upon release, because they clone an already boring overused overplayed game style. Yet WoW still worked, why? It appealed to non MMO gamers. That's whats kept it going, non MMO gamers.
So, TOR's failure (relative) has nothing to do with timing really. It's just a bad game all around.
Here's the thing...
Guild Wars 2 began production around TOR, if not a bit before... what ArenaNet designed seems SO FAR beyond what TOR turned out to be, at least in my opinion.
I kind of feel it was simply a matter of chefs.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
+1 just a terrible MMO in every conceivable way .. And will be lucky to have 350K subs by Sept
Pretty much. SWTOR is made by singleplayer game developers, being managed by a publisher that has never turned out a good MMO, and is only interested in copying WoW.
Meanwhile, GW2 is made by fairly original people.
Yea! Thats for sure! They made WoW with Starwars skins. And they made it to where we had to do quests and stuff! And we had buttons to push and use the keyboard to move around! They also used like 3 year old kids to do the voice acting, and made it to where we had to do our different class quests in the same area all with different voice acting and stuff! Bioware should call itself Blizzardware!! I mean, how can you find yourself patting your own back for making such a clone of WoW? Why can we not have a game like real life where we use a virtual reality machine that hooks into our brains? Where we can live it FOR REAL? And when we do PvP we REALLY DIE? We would all have to actually WORK to make cities. Which would include mining, cutting timber, use the mining to make concrete and metals for real? You level by really working your hands to the bone!! Man that would be fun! Then you would have to make a government like in real life. And have wars. Nah I will pass you haters. Sorry I am not particular to any MMO. I just think that MMO's like AOC, LotRO, and this one, people work very long hours. They do it for the love and thier families. They do it to TRY to make us happy. It's just the way it is nowadays. No one is happy with what they get. Sorry for the rant. But DAMN give it a REST!
Finished. I am sure I will get hell for this.
I can appreciate TOR for its strengths but personally, I think there are just too many MMOs with fresh approaches for me to stay playing long term. Im getting my money's worth out of it for now though. But come April, I'll be more than ready for The Secret World.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
That's all well and good, but when the game is run by a publisher who has absolutely no knowledge of MMOs and instructs them to make it as close to WoW as possible, well, all the "good intentions" fall by the wayside. Saying "but they're feeding their families" doesn't exucse game devs from making such boring clones, especially when other MMOs do a lot more with a lot less.
Does not matter what those selfish bastards do. The ones that put all the work into the MMO is what matters. Work 12 hours a day, every single day of the week and see how you feel. For real, most of the people who whine and cry are the folks who have never worked hard enough to get a blister on thier hands. Well, now that is not fair, but it seems to me that those folks that have enough time to chew through level 50 two or more times having nothing better to do then bitch about everything. Anyway, my point is at least give all those that really do all the art, music, design, coding, voice acting and directing ect some respect. Sure give the dudes that crap 100 bills heart ache. But just remember those that work so hard to bring us the entertainment. I will tell you this for sure. Bioware worked hard on this game. You just need to look a bit deeper into the game and all that is the game to see it. As do all the others like STO, Rift, ect. I will let it rest now. I know that what I say does not matter, or will change anyone's mind. But at least I got it of my virtual chest, and made my personal point. Also no disrespect to anyone at all. We all have our own thoughts and opinions.
No... it doesn't. Because the work they're doing is dictated by the selfish bastards, as you call them. They can work as hard as possible and do the best job they can, given the circumstances. But at the end of the day, those circunstances are - they're instructed to make cheap clones. Any ideas that stray from the clone formula get crushed in the corporate setting, as we've seen from ex Mythic employees. It's not their fault the people running the game have no clue what they're doing.
All the hard work Bioware put in amounts to nothing because at the end of the day, this is a horrible MMO.
umm just no dude.. do you have any idea at all about ToR.. they didnt work all that hard.. well i mean they did at running their mouths to increase hype.. they didnt even develop there own game engine, they paid for a half finished pre developed one that the designers themselves said it's mainly for indie devs and is extremely buggy... but they wanted to save time so they used it anyway, and for the record, i've worked very hard in my life.. i work very hard for my money and thats why i'm pissed that i sunk $178 into a CE of the game trying to support a company that inevitibly gave me a beta quality product that is still half broken even with all the current fixes.
but thats my opinion
I attended an entrepreneurial seminar at my University a few weeks ago, and your analogy sums up the point of that seminar quite succinctly.
The innovation curve is something that all companies try to join while the wave of that curve is rising. WoW did this, Zynga did this with its Facebook and browser games, etc. You see it in successful businesses all the time. Once the peak of that innovation curve is reached, the innovators are reaping the rewards and are already researching the next wave so that they can catch it on the upswing again.
The less successful companies enter into the market at the peak of an innovation curve (or at the end of it, thinking the curve will last longer than it really does), and are always playing catch-up.
You're right...SWTOR is a good game, AND it is also on the back end of the innovation curve. My guess is that SWTOR will likely be one of the last games of its design. The time is ripe for a 'guitar-hero' sort of revolution in the MMO industry...and it is probably happening even as I type this. Is it Minecraft? Is it Love? Is it ArcheAge? EQ Next? We don't know for sure.
Funny thing is many of us old vets have been ranting about this for years on these forums, But most people dont like to listen. Dont expect much love for posting this even if its close to the thruth.
If you look at anny game for example, all the once that have droped on Xfire have tanked/failed. They are still alive so they are probably turning a profit. But for me and many others WAR/warhammer onlines 2 servers is not a success. Either is going free to play to keep the game running.. That is my personal Opinion.. And as I said they are probably still turning a profit. But would have made tons of more money if they made something new and exiting instead. SWTOR is now dropping in Xfire users, they have ONE very heavy server in the US as im writing this. All the Euro servers are Light, its 2 am here, but still I remeber 3 months after a succesfull game launched in 2004 and we still had to sit in ques. Dosent change the fact that some people dont like to hear that the game might not be all that good.
Someone wrote on the offical forums "that Blind Fanboism is why things turned out the way they did". He pointed out that every critcal post they made druing closed beta was instantly attacked by Rabbid fanboys. He thinks that it gave the developers a false sense of security. And I think he has a point.
If we stop being critiacal and just Defend, we stop being objective. This is why people often ask how could ordinary men do such things... nazi germany, american soldiers torturing POWs in the vietnam war. Russians sending people to gulags. Its all because of Blind Fanboism... This sadly also relates to games.
Now before you people get all Upset and Shit.. Im not talking about FANS now Im talking about people that are so Blind they can see no fault in anything. Even if good constructive criticism is brought up, The Rabbid fanboy must defend at all cost.. This type of person has gone over the edge and we really should Lable them FANATICS instead...
I think FANATICS had alot to do with how the game looks today. If more constructive crticism would have been heard.. over the clamour of War drums.. we might have gotten a diffrent game..
Its just something to think about...
I agree with most of what you said except... when you mention WoW and innovation in the same sentence. WoW didn't innovate. It just had the great amount of luck to be the first MMO to have a pre established developer and a huge marketing budget. And I also disgree with SWTOR being a good game. It's the worst of singleplayer and the worst of MMO worlds meshed together. People try to defend it by saying the singleplayer stuff is fine, and it is acceptable, not great. But, the game is billed as an MMO, not a singleplayer game, and it should be judged thusly. And as it stands, SWTOR is a horrible MMO.
Sorry, but WoW DID innovate. Look, I hate WoW personally, but to say it didn't create one of the most easily accessible MMOs ever is to ignore the impenatrable state of the genre in the early 2000s. Yeah, I get it..you personally hate these types of games. Doesn't mean they weren't innovative. To ignore that is to ignore the lessons it teaches future developers about the process. Don't let your personal biases spoil your objectivity.
I don't want to turn this into a debate about WoW innovation, or whether SWTOR is good, or whether it is an MMO. These discussion have been done to death. Aren't you tired of them yet?
The take away from the OP's post, which I felt was quite salient, is that SWTOR has come out on the backside of the innovation curve...or as he put it, late to the party. I sincerely believe it will be one of the last of its kind (barring its own expansions).
no matter what time is it morning, noon or night, when you take a shit, your taking a shit. game is fail.
wow, that contributes SO much constructive wisdom to the discussion. Nobody has ever made such a comment before. What keen insight you have.