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Fully Voiced Storylines is NOT Innovative....
Fadedbomb
Member Posts: 2,081
Before you turn your flamethrowers onto THE SURFACE OF THE SUN setting i'd like to first preface my arguement with the point that what I'm about to claim is NOT a flame in any way, shape, or form.
With that being said, I have read time & time again that the newly "Innovative" approach to Fully Voiced Storylines in SWTOR is a step in the right direction for future MMOs to copy. Quite frankly, I'm here to argue that this is ACTUALLY a poisonous approach. I'll try to put this as short & sweet, to the point, settings to stun, and ready to fire as I possibly can since I know how the average reader TL;DR's then posts a reply.
Short Version (long version omitted for my sanity):
A "Fully Voiced Storyline" is ONLY practical in a game that is completely hand-holding in origin similar to SWTOR or WoW's themepark approach. This, primarily, is due in fact that the development costs & developement team to continue to produce content for such a game that is NOT more than 90% handholding & linear couldn't justify themselves for continued use. Meaning, that SWTOR has damned itself to a HIGH content development cost due to having supposed "multiple paths" to choose from for you to affect the outcome of your storyline. EVERY option, path, event, and outcome HAS to be voiced, animated, and carefully planned out. To finish my point, I'll attempt to draw what I'm talking about below with ASCII. Please keep in mind that ALL points, events, and choices MUST voiced, animated, and planned correctly to work at all:
WoW's quest system (compatible for a fully-voiced storyline):
Point A ------------------> Point B --------------------> Point C ----------> Etc
SWTOR's quest system (compatible for fully-voiced multi-choice storyline)
|------> Choice A -----------|------> Point B.1 --------|------> Etc
Point A ----------|------> Choice B ----------|------> Point B.2 --------|------> Etc
|------> Choice C ----------|------> Point B.3 --------|------> Etc
Think of the current costs to produce new "Fully Voiced" content. It is not ONLY poisonous to anything but MASSIVE AAA companies with 100s of millions to spend each year, but it simply isn't a sustainable source of content to maintain after 5years. Take a moment to think, would EQ still be alive if their developers were forced to voice EVERYTHING?
Thank you for considering my point,
/tiphat
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Comments
My only 'counter' to this is that Bioware kept the entire design team for SWTOR on the SWTOR development team. They also extend full access to their six studios to the team for anything they need. Usually after an MMO launches developers go on vacations and start training a maintenance team.
It is sustainable as long as they can keep subscribers. Once their numbers start dipping back below 1M this model will be less sustainable.
Remember that Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas all offered fully voiced DLCs each with 40-50 hours of new content.... so it's not hard to believe that an MMO developer could do the same and be susccessful with it.
Website: http://www.thegameguru.me / YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/users/thetroublmaker
A highly flawed arguement.
Single Player RPGs do NOT have the following costs that MMOs do:
-Server costs...
-Server maintenance team costs...
-Broadband connection costs to host more than 25,000 players at once is a fairly meaty chunk..
-Customer Support for that specific product...
-In-Game GM support...
-Database management costs (seperate from Server costs believe it or not)...
-40-50hous of "content" in a DLC pack is subjective. Most people complete new DLCs within a day or two (maybe 8hrs total play time), but MMO content updates need to have more than 15+hrs of ACTUALY playtime of content in order to keep interests alive.
Oh, and SWTOR IS, in fact, below 1million subscribers as of last week. You can check this by looking @ xfire's numbers and then multiplying by 5 (to account for people not online, and for people not using xfire) as a way to "Generously" guess.
They're sitting around 750k or so. Not good for their expenses!
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
so thats like nearly 12 million $ a month ?
How many server have they got running ?
Even if the servers cost $1000 a month its not gonna even make a dent in that.. Dev team say 20 people on around 40k$ to over 100k$ per year is still not gonna make that much of a dent in 12 million a month.. then a support team, probally gone external for that and they cash per call or somthing still everything put togeather is not going to dent the profits at the moment..
750 thousand subs is massive really..
Bahahahaha SWTOR below 1 million, not even close man sorry. Using Xfire as a referance to any game population = total fail
Also you state that "single player RPGs dont have the cost of...." Well single player games also do not have a 15 dollar monthly charge for EVERY player to feed the company and pay for all those things, thus making your arguement highly flawed
C
Every mission picked up from a quest giver is voiced with cut scenes.
Every class has a single story line from level 1 to level 50, broken up in chapters.
Most planets have a single story line from the time you arrive to the time you leave. The planets that don't have this have a bonus story line.
So, voice overs and cut scenes are not innovative because they've existed before. You could even say having a single story line isn't innovative since games like Half Life have a single story line (stop the bad guys!). BioWare's implementation is innovative because it's never been implemented this way in an mmorpg before. The scale of the story's importance to the game is innovative because it's never been implemented this way in an mmorpg before.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I used to run a server farm in Georgia. $1000 is laughbly cheap for even enough bandwidth for 150 players let alone more than 25,000 online at once. Think more around the lines of $250,000 per month in Server costs, NOT including payroll for their Server Administrator. Developers for SWTOR are also earning more than 60k per year on average across the team, so that's more around 1.2million in payroll for the dev team a year, or 100k a month.
Support, Database costs, Server Costs, Development Costs, not to mention Voice Actor costs, and time per quest to actually create said content. You're looking at around a minimum of 5million per month to run SWTOR with the ideal player range of 25,000 concurrent players across 20 or so servers. However, make note that the development time for content will piss current players off waiting for it (Planning, Voicing, Animating, Programming it all) will make people leave over time more & more.
I'm looking @ SWTOR to start showing death-kneels in about 8months. Make no mistake, it will take some time for SWTOR's success of failure to be known. However, right now it's like they want people to leave from a 3rd person perspective.
ALL of that aside, my point still stands strong. I'm not bagging on SWTOR since it has a MASSIVE AAA company backing them. FULLY Voiced storylines is NOT a practical approach for new MMOs unless they're willing to bankroll 300+million on their product prior to launch.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Again, you're missing the point. The term "innovative" means to "move forward the genre" in terms of MMORPGS.
Back when EQ came out, their take on Raiding in a 3D environment was innovative. Warhammer's Public Quests were "innovative" for themeparks. DAOC was "innovative" for the RVR / PVP spectrum of MMOs. SWG's crafting & skill system were HIGHLY innovative for the MMO genre.
Fully voiced storylines that you MUST follow are NOT innovative, and CANNOT "move the industry forward" due to development costs & gameplay stylage. It is, quite simply, FAR too expensive for a normal MMO company to create fully-voiced storylines. That's the point, what Bioware has done is NOT innovative, and cannot be successfully reproduced to that extent without spending more than 300million for content JUST for launch.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
I'll file this in the "Nothing is ever innovative" bin.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Your premise is not validated by your reasons and your conclusion does not echo the premise. In fact they are different arguments.
Your premise was fully voiced storylines are not innovative.
Your reason was basically it is too expensive to maintain.
Your conclusion was this is not a good way for the industry to go and cannot be maintained.
Those are two very very different arguments.
I agree that it will be very expensive, and maybe entirely impractical to maintain.
However how expensive it is has no bearing on whether it is innovative, and whether it can be maintained as nothing to do with it being innovative.
In fact, it's sort of the same words that the devs of TOR, GW2 and The Secret World stated, how they wanted to make questing less trivial and meaningless as they had become in MMO's. Reason why those games got VO/cutscenes, instead of just keeping it at the fully textbased traditional MMO questing.Flameing? thats all i have read from you. reasons why swtor sucks and here is a new topic....
btw. innovation has nothing to do with money and xfire numbers are BS and we all know that....
Fully voiced storylines & dialogue/player choice IS innovative IN THIS GENRE. Never really been done before, adds a hell of a lot more innovation and immersive nature to the game, and is something that is pretty much going to be required for future MMO's that claim to be "MMORPG's" in order to be taken seriously and not seen as lazy, boring, and outdated. Sorry, OP! It takes nothing away, or harms no part of the MMO genre, as all it does is take the system that already exists, put's voice overs and decisions into the players hands, it eliminates nothing and enhances everything.
Don't believe me?
Guild Wars 2
Copernicus/Amalur project
And several other newly announced MMO's last year that make up the entirety of anything on anyone's radar over the next few years all have these features to varying degrees. Case closed!
It was a waste of money and time. Time they could have spent to actualy test the game and make a better game.
And 9 out of 10 times i just tap the space bar anyways. And my characters would say the exact same thing over and over no matter the choice i made. IA- ill be soaked in blood from head to toe, or sith - thats beneath me.
You guys serious?. Smashing the space bar left and right is not that. And repeat statements from my character? Realy, could afford the other 10 dollars to have them say something new?
I could have done without the voice, and had a better mmo in general. It was a side project that soaked up a lot of money and made areas of TOR slacking (pvp, crafting, quesats, exploits, and so much more).
And the stories had very little to do with Star Wars lore, something many complained and ragged on SWG about. I thought SWG had more of a star wars feel than TOR does.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't really care for quests and spacebar skips them anyway, whether it's textbased or VO, then sure, this feature will leave you cold and indifferent, be prepared to spacebar skip in GW2 and TSW too if you ever feel like playing those games. However, there are a lot of people who like the VO/cutscene/dialogue options questing style that can be found in AoC, TOR, and also GW2 and TSW better than the textwall based quests of other present MMO's. To each their own.Wasnt worth the money involved. There is no replay value. And VO with repeat statements is kinda bad.
The money could have been spent on other more important things. Its not that i dont like the VO idea, but TOR kinda lacks in many aspects of a mmo. The game could ahve used that money to improve those areas. Which in my opinion would have kept me longer and made the game better.
VO is just icing on the cake, not needed. Just there for show. I was hoping the game would have been an epic game, they spent more time on sounds and vo than the actual game mechanics. The same mechanics you see 100 posts flaming TOR for being a bad game, which i wish i never read them.
My point isnt knocking VO, its knocking the idea of that is all that sold this game, and left it incomplete and lacking of important features of most mmo's.
Oh no, another thread about innovation! By far the most over used term on these boards, and with many not knowing exactly what the word means.
Here lets help you out then:
Definition of INNOVATION
1
: the introduction of something new
2
: a new idea, method, or device : novelty
But it can also mean to improve ideas, methods, processes, technology, etc. Like improving this game would be innovating
In my opinion full voice acting works only in single player games and for people who like to see a movie with 3d models rather than playing a game.
MMorpgs is all about freedom of the player.The best vision that can strongly hold the name mmorpg is Archeage,vanguard etc.
All other games are just single player games with multiplayer elements that shouldn't charge for a monthly fee.
When someone logs into a mmorpg all he wants to see his ability to shape the world.If there is no such ability the game is not called an mmorpg but a morpg imo.
For me i play games because i like to play and beeing active not watching movies cinematics etc.
People that like to play games with full cuscenes and voice overs should take a look at movies section they will probably find their heaven there.
Im not trying to say that voice overs are bad but they are not for a long time and can be bored very easily.
When the game starts misssing action and u are jumping from one cuscene to another then there is a problem.
To concude with the main pillar of the games in general is gameplay.If the game plays incredible,smooth and is a tons of fun plus huge replayability then the game is a success.Simply because it's a game and not a movie.
OP isn't the brightest. FLAME ON
Well, that's your idea and opinion, if that works for you, well, good for you. Don't mistake your preference and taste for the taste of every single other MMO gamer around, bc it ain't.
MMORPG's are first and foremost about Fun. What's fun differs from one person to the next. VO/cutscenes/dialogue choices will also be present in other MMO's like GW2 and TSW in abundance, so if that's a thing you despise in your MMO's, I'd steer clear of those games as well. Because the GW2 devs and TSW devs just like the TOR devs clearly disagree with you that VO/cutscenes are only for movies and not for MMO gamers.
They may not be for MMO gamers like you (who maybe prefer textbased quests and mob grinding or dungeon runs?), but then again, there are hordes of MMO gamers who don't have the exact same tastes you have.You aren't sticking anywhere near the point the OP is trying to discuss.
GW had loads of voiceovers in 2005. Sure some of the voice acting was bad and there wasn't as much, but that makes SWTOR just a polish of something innovated by ArenaNet
I dont like full voice, I dont like the money that is spent on it that could be used for more content and I dont like the fact that the cut scenes are the reason I have to buy a super computer, NOT the game play.
If I want to watch a movie I will do just that, watch a movie.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
And plenty of players like their cut scenes. In fact, the huge success of Mass Effect, Knight of the Old Republic and other bioware games has something to do with story and cutscenes.