First of all, WoW didnt "steal" any mechanics. I dont believe thats a good term. Games don't steal ideas from other games.
Second of all, you have to watch your spelling. Because of this, my response is going to be shorter because clearly you havent spent all that much time editing your post. So, you dont really care....?
This is really a non debate issue. There are extensive interviews of Blizzard developers talking about the development of Warcraft. Blizz devs went around and surveyed MMO players asking them what they liked about current games, and what they didnt like.
Thus, WoW had alot of the same concepts as previous games - but stripped down. I think WoW had new ideas, but new ideas don't equal innovation. Innovation is exclusive for people who really push the bar, like Twitter. Twitter is innovative. But is Facebook innovative?
Guess what - when I was in high school in the early 2000's, it was all Myspace. Facebook came AFTER Myspace and the rest was history. But Facebook was based off of Myspace's design. Now shall we call Facebook innovative just because its successful?
I think not. The same with WoW.
And half of these things dont make sense. Zone variety? I played WoW vanilla, there was little to none zone variety back then. If you were alliance, half the time you played in a typical foresty fantasy land. If you were horde, you played in "rough" areas like the Barrens.
WoW had a streamlined quests, with excalamation points on top of their heads. But EQ and other games before it had similar quest designs. You call that innovative?
I could go on but alas, your spelling is horrible and I cant. Sorry.
You know the world is a big place.. And English is not my native language. Lucky for you I can still make myself somewhat Understod. You would not if we had this discussion in my language. You went to high school in the early 2000s.. hmm you are still a little kidd..
What you fail to understand about WoW zones is that if you compare Thousand Needles, Barrens ashenvale, dustwallow march, Mulgore and stone talon mountains for example. They are all conected but they Feel diffrently. and look diffrently. Moving from one zone to another you knew you were in a new place. Same goes for if you run all the way from IRON forge down to the wetlands and Menathil harbour your experince changes as you move.. We dident have many fly points back in vanilla WoW... If you look at for example Lineage2 you see a wast diffrence.. and if you compare other older mmos you see the same.
WoW took things from other MMOS that came before it.. But they dident Copy Cat it. They looked at what worked and what dident and then they made their own. But you have to have been there as a grownup to understand this. Little kidd memories cant be Relied on. You see things wastly diffrent as you grow older..
I was 26 when WoW came out I guess you might be around that age now.. 23-24 maybe? Fact of the mather is that you Look on things diffrently and have a broader perspective when you get Older. And Facts are WoW used things from the genre but the Innovated on it. Asked its players what worked and what dident and they made their OWN version of an MMO game. It dident become a success by copying others. But because it changed things made it diffrent and exiting.
On another note Im playing CBT of TERA now.. and its one of the first games in a long time that I feel are trying to Innovate things. It will probably not do so well in the western market but if people gave it a chans we might be looking at a really good game in a few years time. It has all the basics but it tries to bring back those Old school mecanics that have been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for so many years. The mechanics Im talking about is Deeper Better crafting, No fractions, Open world PvP.. Guild vs Guild combat etc. Guilds that Level up.. Guild housing... many of the old things that we used to have in MMOs but we havent seen in a long time. And on top of that they have an Innovating combat system.. Will it be perfect at release NO.. WoW wasent perfect.. But It might become really good if people give it a decent chans..
And NO Tera is not a copy cat game like WAR/AOC/CHAMPIONS ONLINE/SWTOR.. It also felt really good to travel betwen zones and not have to watch a loading screen... I really missed that....Just feel like you can move were you want and not have to sit through loading screen after loading screen...
i blame the beta testers esp the alpha and close beta testers, they should have voiced the problems during these periods. I was in ob and i did gave them negative feedback and why.
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.
I do agree.
However, being too similar to WOW this late in this game does not qualify it as a good game though. If there had been no Wow, then sure. But for them to nearly identically copy a 8 year old game that has been played to death is really a fail on their part.
??? You blame testers for not pointing out that game is bad in it's essence??? And not those who designed and implemented it???
That's like blaming customers for not noticing earlier that new drink tastes like a cat in a blender and not blaming the guy who put a cat in a blender and then bottled it.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
To me the things you had to do in this game just seemed more tedious than in others and what got me to unsub was that those things I did really weren't worth the time it took to do them.
I could go on but alas, your spelling is horrible and I cant. Sorry.
his spelling was terrible because english isn't his first language. what's your excuse for misusing apostrophes and commas? unless you meant to use the word "cant", in which case you're using it wrong. if you're going to pick on someone for basic english "skillz", perhaps you should pick some up yourself.
or roll another alt.
i'd have loved to have read the rest of your post, but your argument was made invalid by you possessing less punctuation skill than myself. oink oink.
??? You blame testers for not pointing out that game is bad in it's essence??? And not those who designed and implemented it???
That's like blaming customers for not noticing earlier that new drink tastes like a cat in a blender and not blaming the guy who put a cat in a blender and then bottled it.
lol someone has to take the blame tho, esp on the amount of $$$ that was spend:p
p/s: maybe i went overboard abit by blaming the testers....
I agree with the OP AND those that say it's bad game design. Now was not the time to WoW clone. But it is also game design. They took WoW and made it "WoW'ier". They took some planets that I was really looking forward too and bogged them down with incessant mind-numbingly boring quest stacking. The same quests for each planet, just insert different NPC's...somebody has always lost something , somebody has always run off/gotten lost, so-and-so has taken this and I/we want it back...blah, blah, blah. I find myself spacing through the convo's because they are all the same. Can you even imagine how independent developers would have LOVED to get heir hands on an IP like this from a creative standpoint? I would have expected this type of a lazy effort from Cryptic or Funcom but not BioWare.
My biggest fear however is that it's eventual failure will mean the end of the IP from an MMO standpoint, which is said because I was really looking for ward to playiing a smuggler that actually smuggled something, or a bounty hunter that actually hunted bounties, or a trooper that actually, well, "trooped" for lack of a better word.
??? You blame testers for not pointing out that game is bad in it's essence??? And not those who designed and implemented it???
That's like blaming customers for not noticing earlier that new drink tastes like a cat in a blender and not blaming the guy who put a cat in a blender and then bottled it.
Great point. I was one of the testers and you can only point out so much before you realize that it's the game design itself. Take your example. You can put the cat in the blender, or the toaster, or the microwave it doesn't matter, the problem is not the pesentation. It's the cat.
I agree with the OP AND those that say it's bad game design. Now was not the time to WoW clone. But it is also game design. They took WoW and made it "WoW'ier". They took some planets that I was really looking forward too and bogged them down with incessant mind-numbingly boring quest stacking. The same quests for each planet, just insert different NPC's...somebody has always lost something , somebody has always run off/gotten lost, so-and-so has taken this and I/we want it back...blah, blah, blah. I find myself spacing through the convo's because they are all the same. Can you even imagine how independent developers would have LOVED to get heir hands on an IP like this from a creative standpoint? I would have expected this type of a lazy effort from Cryptic or Funcom but not BioWare.
My biggest fear however is that it's eventual failure will mean the end of the IP from an MMO standpoint, which is said because I was really looking for ward to playiing a smuggler that actually smuggled something, or a bounty hunter that actually hunted bounties, or a trooper that actually, well, "trooped" for lack of a better word.
You are spot on here man.. With all the things they could have done with an IP like this. When I think of STAR WARS I think of space.. I grew up in the 80s with the first movies... and they Were AWSOME. Sadly the following 3 were as bad as this game...
They could have done so much but instead they did a Ground game copy of World of Warcfat its really really sad...
I mean why not make a space ship RAIDS... Take out a Deathstar etc.. they could have made so much Innovation but instead... I dont have words for the stupidity that is BIOWARE/EA.....
Smuggling.. bounty hunting they could have keept the player base doing things amongst themselves for years.. Instead they made Level to max start the mouse WHEEL.. and instanced BATTLEGROUNDS OMG..
lol someone has to take the blame tho, esp on the amount of $$$ that was spend:p
p/s: maybe i went overboard abit by blaming the testers....
Heheh you did, you did. But I was a beta tester as well and I did point out many times that this game does not feel like an mmo but feels like an online single player game. And many did say that this game will not bring anything new to mmo markets. Yet we were all screamed at by fanbois. I will only spend so much of my energy as a tester before I give up. It is not my money or my company, I did my part by stating my opinion. It ends there. It is up to mmo designers and people who pay the bill to react to feedback.
I'll repeat what I said during testing: I give this game 1 year before it goes f2p. Before fanbois jump all over me I need to write in big fat letters IN MY HUMBLE OPINION.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
I agree. It makes me wonder how WH40K is going to do. Two factions, leveling, gear, and that's like 2014.
Isn't it debatable at this point if WH40K will even get made? Didn't THQ basically put a halt to making it or at least is saying its future has not been determined yet?
Doesn't seem like THQ is long for this world anyways at this point.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Same here. The cutscenes are OKAY, but nothing else is even great. I'm underwhelmed.
People forget that big companies are black holes for money. An indie gaming company can operate with 10% of the cost of a big one and still deliver something excellent. Any big company, not just in gaming, has around 70-80% of their staff doing NOTHING productive. That is ZERO work, NADA, ZILCH. Middle management, HR, upper management, legal department, advisors, reviewers, marketing... And there goes "your" money. No wonder games cost like banking internal projects nowdays. And also look the same.
I know for a fact that EA spends more money on marketing of some games than on making them. Music videos, events, famous or semi-famous actors who do voices, cinematic cutscenes. It all costs money but does not make a game. And in the whole process the games are neglected. No wonder each new game copies an old one. Even WOW was nor original when it came out, there were scores of games doing it all before.
This is why I support indie crews as much as I can. Even when I'm not thrilled by the game I would spend 20$ on supporting them rather than investing 80$ in a big name game.I look at it as an investment in the future.
Back to the point, the money was spent on 80% of people who do nothing productive. This is why game looks like only 20% done (again imho only)
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
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
Now that the "WoW" ride is over, I can't wait to see what AAA developers start ACTUALLY creating!
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity: Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
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
Now that the "WoW" ride is over, I can't wait to see what AAA developers start ACTUALLY creating!
Yeah people hate WoW so much and try and turn every game they play into WoW. This is the same shit you guys tried to pull in Rift and failed there and now the content hogs are trying wreck another game.
I predict most of the complaints that come out of GW2 or Archage are features that WoW has. If you do not think GW2 is going to get rip[ped to shreds in the end game when ArenaNET made the decision not to have instanced raiding. There is no end game content in that game on the pve side.
The "wow ride" works because the themepark crowd out numbers the doom sayers and you guys have yet to realize this. Go find a niche game and stay away from the themeparks.
TOR is good GAME, that could have been a GREAT mmorpg. I think TOR has the best leveling system that has ever been introduced. On the other hand, levels in a mmorpg is old news. TOR just doesn't have anything to do outside of combat. The space mini game, while not bad, just, is what it is and doesn't add anything to the game really, kinda feels tacked on. Personally, i refuse to run dailies and pvp grind for gear. I have already explored every planet, collected all datacrons, and have an almost complete codex, not much left to do.
I posted this already. Since TOR has devs that worked on SWG. They should have emulated the core systems from the SWG pre-cu era and mixed it with the personal story content that Bioware is known for. Had one server type that had everyone in that one cluster, with a free roam space game, and the only VO in the whole game should have been for your personal story.
The game has all these cantina's that are dead. You can't really craft anyhting of worth. I have yet to buy one thing off the GTN. You can't place anything in your ship, and the most simplest, you can't sit down but in one spot, one chair on your ship.
I guess, i could keep going on and on. Bioware should have incorporated as much sandbox as they have thempark and just blurred the lines between the two. I can honestly say, that at this time right before the early access, all i could think about was getting into playing this game. Now that i am in it, i can see that a mmorpg like Archeage, is where mmorpg's should be heading. I will keep buying my time cards and keep waiting for new content to come out for now i guess. Kinda hurts when you're such a huge SW fanatic and had so much hope.
I think TOR has the best leveling system that has ever been introduced..
I don't get this. Not that I have any problems with how leveling goes in this game, but how is it different or better in this game compared to others? Pretty much feels and plays the same to me.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Comments
You know the world is a big place.. And English is not my native language. Lucky for you I can still make myself somewhat Understod. You would not if we had this discussion in my language. You went to high school in the early 2000s.. hmm you are still a little kidd..
What you fail to understand about WoW zones is that if you compare Thousand Needles, Barrens ashenvale, dustwallow march, Mulgore and stone talon mountains for example. They are all conected but they Feel diffrently. and look diffrently. Moving from one zone to another you knew you were in a new place. Same goes for if you run all the way from IRON forge down to the wetlands and Menathil harbour your experince changes as you move.. We dident have many fly points back in vanilla WoW... If you look at for example Lineage2 you see a wast diffrence.. and if you compare other older mmos you see the same.
WoW took things from other MMOS that came before it.. But they dident Copy Cat it. They looked at what worked and what dident and then they made their own. But you have to have been there as a grownup to understand this. Little kidd memories cant be Relied on. You see things wastly diffrent as you grow older..
I was 26 when WoW came out I guess you might be around that age now.. 23-24 maybe? Fact of the mather is that you Look on things diffrently and have a broader perspective when you get Older. And Facts are WoW used things from the genre but the Innovated on it. Asked its players what worked and what dident and they made their OWN version of an MMO game. It dident become a success by copying others. But because it changed things made it diffrent and exiting.
On another note Im playing CBT of TERA now.. and its one of the first games in a long time that I feel are trying to Innovate things. It will probably not do so well in the western market but if people gave it a chans we might be looking at a really good game in a few years time. It has all the basics but it tries to bring back those Old school mecanics that have been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for so many years. The mechanics Im talking about is Deeper Better crafting, No fractions, Open world PvP.. Guild vs Guild combat etc. Guilds that Level up.. Guild housing... many of the old things that we used to have in MMOs but we havent seen in a long time. And on top of that they have an Innovating combat system.. Will it be perfect at release NO.. WoW wasent perfect.. But It might become really good if people give it a decent chans..
And NO Tera is not a copy cat game like WAR/AOC/CHAMPIONS ONLINE/SWTOR.. It also felt really good to travel betwen zones and not have to watch a loading screen... I really missed that....Just feel like you can move were you want and not have to sit through loading screen after loading screen...
i blame the beta testers esp the alpha and close beta testers, they should have voiced the problems during these periods. I was in ob and i did gave them negative feedback and why.
just my 2 cents
I do agree.
However, being too similar to WOW this late in this game does not qualify it as a good game though. If there had been no Wow, then sure. But for them to nearly identically copy a 8 year old game that has been played to death is really a fail on their part.
??? You blame testers for not pointing out that game is bad in it's essence??? And not those who designed and implemented it???
That's like blaming customers for not noticing earlier that new drink tastes like a cat in a blender and not blaming the guy who put a cat in a blender and then bottled it.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
I'm enjoying SWTOR, but agree with the OP. Hopefully they'll move away from the pure gear grind end game, that WoW uses.
To me the things you had to do in this game just seemed more tedious than in others and what got me to unsub was that those things I did really weren't worth the time it took to do them.
his spelling was terrible because english isn't his first language. what's your excuse for misusing apostrophes and commas? unless you meant to use the word "cant", in which case you're using it wrong. if you're going to pick on someone for basic english "skillz", perhaps you should pick some up yourself.
or roll another alt.
i'd have loved to have read the rest of your post, but your argument was made invalid by you possessing less punctuation skill than myself. oink oink.
Great question. I've been asking this since Beta.
lol someone has to take the blame tho, esp on the amount of $$$ that was spend:p
p/s: maybe i went overboard abit by blaming the testers....
I agree with the OP AND those that say it's bad game design. Now was not the time to WoW clone. But it is also game design. They took WoW and made it "WoW'ier". They took some planets that I was really looking forward too and bogged them down with incessant mind-numbingly boring quest stacking. The same quests for each planet, just insert different NPC's...somebody has always lost something , somebody has always run off/gotten lost, so-and-so has taken this and I/we want it back...blah, blah, blah. I find myself spacing through the convo's because they are all the same. Can you even imagine how independent developers would have LOVED to get heir hands on an IP like this from a creative standpoint? I would have expected this type of a lazy effort from Cryptic or Funcom but not BioWare.
My biggest fear however is that it's eventual failure will mean the end of the IP from an MMO standpoint, which is said because I was really looking for ward to playiing a smuggler that actually smuggled something, or a bounty hunter that actually hunted bounties, or a trooper that actually, well, "trooped" for lack of a better word.
Great point. I was one of the testers and you can only point out so much before you realize that it's the game design itself. Take your example. You can put the cat in the blender, or the toaster, or the microwave it doesn't matter, the problem is not the pesentation. It's the cat.
You are spot on here man.. With all the things they could have done with an IP like this. When I think of STAR WARS I think of space.. I grew up in the 80s with the first movies... and they Were AWSOME. Sadly the following 3 were as bad as this game...
They could have done so much but instead they did a Ground game copy of World of Warcfat its really really sad...
I mean why not make a space ship RAIDS... Take out a Deathstar etc.. they could have made so much Innovation but instead... I dont have words for the stupidity that is BIOWARE/EA.....
Smuggling.. bounty hunting they could have keept the player base doing things amongst themselves for years.. Instead they made Level to max start the mouse WHEEL.. and instanced BATTLEGROUNDS OMG..
Heheh you did, you did. But I was a beta tester as well and I did point out many times that this game does not feel like an mmo but feels like an online single player game. And many did say that this game will not bring anything new to mmo markets. Yet we were all screamed at by fanbois. I will only spend so much of my energy as a tester before I give up. It is not my money or my company, I did my part by stating my opinion. It ends there. It is up to mmo designers and people who pay the bill to react to feedback.
I'll repeat what I said during testing: I give this game 1 year before it goes f2p. Before fanbois jump all over me I need to write in big fat letters IN MY HUMBLE OPINION.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
I agree. It makes me wonder how WH40K is going to do. Two factions, leveling, gear, and that's like 2014.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
Same here. The cutscenes are OKAY, but nothing else is even great. I'm underwhelmed.
Isn't it debatable at this point if WH40K will even get made? Didn't THQ basically put a halt to making it or at least is saying its future has not been determined yet?
Doesn't seem like THQ is long for this world anyways at this point.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
People forget that big companies are black holes for money. An indie gaming company can operate with 10% of the cost of a big one and still deliver something excellent. Any big company, not just in gaming, has around 70-80% of their staff doing NOTHING productive. That is ZERO work, NADA, ZILCH. Middle management, HR, upper management, legal department, advisors, reviewers, marketing... And there goes "your" money. No wonder games cost like banking internal projects nowdays. And also look the same.
I know for a fact that EA spends more money on marketing of some games than on making them. Music videos, events, famous or semi-famous actors who do voices, cinematic cutscenes. It all costs money but does not make a game. And in the whole process the games are neglected. No wonder each new game copies an old one. Even WOW was nor original when it came out, there were scores of games doing it all before.
This is why I support indie crews as much as I can. Even when I'm not thrilled by the game I would spend 20$ on supporting them rather than investing 80$ in a big name game.I look at it as an investment in the future.
Back to the point, the money was spent on 80% of people who do nothing productive. This is why game looks like only 20% done (again imho only)
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
THIS
Now that the "WoW" ride is over, I can't wait to see what AAA developers start ACTUALLY creating!
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Yeah people hate WoW so much and try and turn every game they play into WoW. This is the same shit you guys tried to pull in Rift and failed there and now the content hogs are trying wreck another game.
I predict most of the complaints that come out of GW2 or Archage are features that WoW has. If you do not think GW2 is going to get rip[ped to shreds in the end game when ArenaNET made the decision not to have instanced raiding. There is no end game content in that game on the pve side.
The "wow ride" works because the themepark crowd out numbers the doom sayers and you guys have yet to realize this. Go find a niche game and stay away from the themeparks.
TOR is good GAME, that could have been a GREAT mmorpg. I think TOR has the best leveling system that has ever been introduced. On the other hand, levels in a mmorpg is old news. TOR just doesn't have anything to do outside of combat. The space mini game, while not bad, just, is what it is and doesn't add anything to the game really, kinda feels tacked on. Personally, i refuse to run dailies and pvp grind for gear. I have already explored every planet, collected all datacrons, and have an almost complete codex, not much left to do.
I posted this already. Since TOR has devs that worked on SWG. They should have emulated the core systems from the SWG pre-cu era and mixed it with the personal story content that Bioware is known for. Had one server type that had everyone in that one cluster, with a free roam space game, and the only VO in the whole game should have been for your personal story.
The game has all these cantina's that are dead. You can't really craft anyhting of worth. I have yet to buy one thing off the GTN. You can't place anything in your ship, and the most simplest, you can't sit down but in one spot, one chair on your ship.
I guess, i could keep going on and on. Bioware should have incorporated as much sandbox as they have thempark and just blurred the lines between the two. I can honestly say, that at this time right before the early access, all i could think about was getting into playing this game. Now that i am in it, i can see that a mmorpg like Archeage, is where mmorpg's should be heading. I will keep buying my time cards and keep waiting for new content to come out for now i guess. Kinda hurts when you're such a huge SW fanatic and had so much hope.
I don't get this. Not that I have any problems with how leveling goes in this game, but how is it different or better in this game compared to others? Pretty much feels and plays the same to me.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.