Having Voice overs for every line of text in the game undoubtedly made adding content to the game more expensive than doing the same in past MMORPGs,I can't see how that can be argued against it's jsut common sense,that was only part of the problem with the game.
The game lack end game content and what cotnent they did add was very short in time taken to complete and for the most part lacked challenge.Now having to do VO for all lines of speech may of contributed to the aenemic nature of the raids and Daily Quests added it doesn't accoutn for the other major problems IMO which I think were their total failure in their Open PvP zones and the game engine itself.
Their failure with Illum and Tatooine PvP zones and subsequent complete abandoning of said zones.
The buggy,badly performing andeasily broken Hero engine(Which I hope we will never see in a game again)
The pulling and subsequently massive delay in implementing ranked Warzones(and the low number of said Warzones)
Their constant changing of the token systems and escalating costs of customizing your gear to create in game money sinks was also a turn for me.
The broken resolve system compounding the over abundance of CC in PvP
Those were the major reasons aside from short and unchallenging end game PvE cotnent were the major reasons for my giving up ont he game and msot had nothing to do with the cost of Voiceovers or tiem taken to do them.Everything else int he gaem was mostly fine and normal.
On this forum, people just think of an idea and throw it out there to...DISCUSS. Hence, DISCUSSION FORUM.
If opinion isn't backed up, there is nothing to discuss.
A: SWTOR FAILS! B: NO, IT DOESN'T! A: YES, IT DOES!
...
The opinions here are backed up...with arguments taken from easily available information that is basically common knowledge. Your problem is that you are never satisfied...you ask for information that would only be present in scholarly articles, and many times, flat out isn't available to the public at all.
This is silly because you could level this kind of argument against ANY post.
If someone argues that SWTOR was a massive failure, I could say:
"Where are EA's financials to prove it?!?!"
If someone argues that SWTOR was a massive success, I could say:
"Where are EA's financials to prove it?!?!"
But BOTH of these arguments are just a cop out. I am ignoring whatever argument the OP put forth, and just falling back on a boilerplate argument asking for more proof that I know the OP can never get.
Game development is a business and you need business people to make it successful.
Oh wow...
It's hard to know what to even say to this.
You do realize, that at the end of the day...game development is essentially an art form. Just like cinema. It is an industry as well, but the only thing that makes that industry work is that games, like other forms of art, are enjoyed by many people who are willing to spend money on them.
I can't believe that you seem to think that the money side of game development is more important than the creative side. I mean, if that were true, everyone would credit "David" to the Medicis and not Michelangelo.
Originally posted by Crazy_Stick As if there are not enough examples of the mismanagement of funds from big business lead game development.
Those two are not comparable.
Even experienced professional will make mistakes(way less frequently) but those are of very different nature, and mostly just "bet on the wrong horse".
What Warballoon did tho is a fail on something as basic as calculating their direct costs.
It is no cheap shot, it is spot on.
This is so much BS. So Waterballon miscalculated and now has recovered from it and is nearing completion of their game. They had a hitch and not a FAIL. On the otherhand EA botched their calculations for SWTOR and are now up for sale perhaps even to Providence (Bethesda Ownership.)
Waterballoon's issue? Pffft... Solved. Now how is that likely to make me not support Kickstarter projects? Really, I am thinking you are paid by a big business interest now myself or are just too caught up in an argument.
Originally posted by Creslin321 The opinions here are backed up...
I am not sure what opinions you speak of but your claims that voice-acting was expensive and as such prohibitive in regards of future development are not backed at all...
You cannot tell me that I am not satisfied with backing when you provide none.
If you choose to believe that TOR was meant to operate as intended at current subscription levels -- as many remaining players still try to claim -- then one has to acknowledge that continual content creation that upheld the quality of the original work was an infeasible long-term design plan.
To me though, the plan was built around the assumption that the game would be way more successful than it was. That is not to say that BIoWare sold out for mass market appeal, but rather that, like a huge number of their fans, they thought the type of game they are good at making combined with Star Wars would be a massive hit.
Had it been, one could certainly argue that what the game could have become is much different than what it is now capable of becoming. Fully voiced new content, regular content rollouts, 3D space gameplay, pazaak and swoop racing, new races, improved weather, etc. -- all the things the people who thought they knew the game better than the rest of us assured us would happen -- might have been possible from a financial standpoint if the game had been a huge success.
In that respect it was a horrible miscalculation on BioWare's part.
In any case I had always just assumed that new content would see an increasing number of alien characters so they could use preexisting generic alien voiceovers and subtitle everything.
Originally posted by Creslin321 The opinions here are backed up...
I am not sure what opinions you speak of but your claims that voice-acting was expensive and as such prohibitive in regards of future development are not backed at all...
You cannot tell me that I am not satisfied with backing when you provide none.
Uh...you've read this thread right?
I didn't provide arguments about why VO and cinematic cut scenes were expensive in my OP because I assumed that it's basically common knowledge that they are. But then you started asking for more proof, and other posters gave arguments of why that stuff is expensive, to which replied with your standard "You have to back that up with financial statements."
No matter what arguments you are given, you will just ignore them and ask for more proof that you know none of us can ever get. Like I said before, if you disagree with our arguments fine...then make a counter-argument. But don't waste your time asking us for "proof" taht either doesn't exist or is completely inaccessible. And if you don't want to participate in a thread that tries to discuss something with incomplete information, then don't.
But you should realize that in reality, you have to make decisions with incomplete information ALL THE TIME. So I really don't think discussing something like this is that off-base.
Originally posted by Creslin321But then you started asking for more proof, and other posters gave arguments of why that stuff is expensive, to which replied with your standard "You have to back that up with financial statements."
I happen to respond to conclusions that are invalid but I do ignore those that are not relevant...not particularly weird practice.
One can make counter argument only if you make one yourself - like providing back up for your claim. Once you do it, I can and I will make a counter argument.
EDIT:
Here is a tip and what I did:
Gather all data you can about the voice-overs. Look around how much the voice-over recording session cost.
Run the numbers, make conclusion based on your findings.
Post it on forums.
Yes, it takes more effort than running your mouth but it has a merit and provides content for discussion.
Originally posted by Crazy_Stick This is so much BS.
Not at all.
The point is, those 38k USD could be much better spent in hands of someone who knows how to run the business.
There is no point supporting business with slim chance to deliver, which is a problem of Kickstarter - the business part is left out from the process when pledging.
It only supports business failures and unsuccessful products because of no liability.
While I admit that I am not particularly fond to crowdfunding, current state and Kickstarter as platform are big no-no. There needs to be established better ways to make crowdfunding fledged, viable investment option.
I agree to some extent with Creslin's initial point in regards to upper management, but I think there was also an element of certain members of the dev team honestly thinking they had made a great game as some others mentioned previously. Daniel Erickson and Georg Zoeller come to mind. And who knew it would be so entertaining to see John Riccitiello's mom troll this thread all day?
___________________________ Have flask; will travel.
Game development is a business and you need business people to make it successful.
OK, it's becoming obvious that this guy is either a marketer or a foolish zealot.
Same schtick, every thread: Game does not suck it makes money ---> prove to me with a chart that it sucks!
Now he is attacking the movement that is threatening AAA developers and their schism with users. You should go find a church Gdemami, or do some meditating. Maybe even find a beneficial organization to join so that you can find your humanity again. Shame on you. BTW, I don't have a chart to prove that you are nuts, so don't ask.
THANK YOU. I was wondering how long would it take til someone say it.
First, a definition. Escalation of commitment occurs when a group is working on a project, and at some point in the project it becomes clear that things aren't going well or maybe even the project's original direction is fundamentally flawed, but instead of stepping back and rethinking things, the group just throws more resources at the project in the hope that things will just "work out." This may sound stupid, but it's a relatively common problem. When a group has worked on a project for a long time and invested a lot of resources, sometimes it's tough to admit that mistakes were made early on and rethink things...it can be much easier in the short term to just try to "power through" your difficulties by escalating your commitment to the project.
Now onto SWTOR....
The more I look at SWTOR, the problems it's having, and the solutions that its devs are proposing...the more I think that it was a victim of escalation of commitment. For example, myself, and many others brought up the concern that BW"s strategy of making "fully voiced" a flagship feature of the game was problematic in the long-term because it would make creating additional content very cost prohibitive...and in a subscription themepark MMORPG that lives and breathes on content additions...this is not a good thing. And now we hear that (surprise surprise) SWTOR's additional content won't be fully voiced.
I really think that at some point during SWTOR's development, its management had to realize at least on some level that this was a big potential problem. But instead of stepping back and rethinking things, they just threw more and more resources at the game and plowed forward.
The same can really be said for many of SWTOR's shortcomings such as the single player space combat, the gameplay that apes WoW just a bit too much, and the really half-assed open world PvP. I really feel like at some point in the middle of the project, the devs probably realized that these ideas were all not as good as they seemed at the onset of the project, but basically just chose to plow forward with a flawed concept instead of stepping back and rethinking things.
In the end, I really think SWTOR would have been better off with a more iterative development process. All of these systems and ideas should have been prototyped and thoroughly tested, with the knowledge that if it doesn't work, it will be scrapped. And I think this is important...devs really need to be willing to scrap their ideas if they turn out to not work once you see them "in game." But I feel like with SWTOR, the developer just plowed forward with their original ideas regardless of if they "worked" or not.
Thoughts?
As usual, I mostly agree with what you're saying. Maybe this "escalation of commitment" had a spalsh of "bad ideas" on the top though.
Moving forward, even though I don't play SWTOR (only the beta) I feel like they are betraying their current player base by not having additional content being voiced. Mind you, I, like many others, spacebared through almost all side quests. However, the main quest line was ear worthy, sorta.
I can't really speak on anything else, other than reminding everyone that Bioware was essentially.. Canadian.
The point is, those 38k USD could be much better spent in hands of someone who knows how to run the business.
There is no point supporting business with slim chance to deliver, which is a problem of Kickstarter - the business part is left out from the process when pledging.
It only supports business failures and unsuccessful products because of no liability.
While I admit that I am not particularly fond to crowdfunding, current state and Kickstarter as platform are big no-no. There needs to be established better ways to make crowdfunding fledged, viable investment option.
What a way to quote people out of context to falsify a point.
But then you started asking for more proof, and other posters gave arguments of why that stuff is expensive, to which replied with your standard "You have to back that up with financial statements."
I happen to respond to conclusions that are invalid but I do ignore those that are not relevant...not particularly weird practice.
One can make counter argument only if you make one yourself - like providing back up for your claim. Once you do it, I can and I will make a counter argument.
EDIT:
Here is a tip and what I did:
Gather all data you can about the voice-overs. Look around how much the voice-over recording session cost.
Run the numbers, make conclusion based on your findings.
Post it on forums.
Yes, it takes more effort than running your mouth but it has a merit and provides content for discussion.
You did this? I'm pretty sure that in this thread, you just kept telling people that they need data to prove their point and then provided no data on your own. Maybe you did this in another thread...and if you did, I would like to see it.
Also, I hate to disappoint you, but there is no way I'm doing that research. This is not my job, I post here because I enjoy expressing my views and getting other peoples' input on them. I do not find doing school-paper-esque reserach for a forum post "fun." If you will notice, I even ended my own post with the word "Thoughts?" Meaning that...hey, this is what I think...do you agree? If you don't agree, then why?
And if you responded to my post with your own research proving that my arguments were invalid, I would submit to your superior argument. But you didn't do this. All you did was ask people to back up their claims without providing any evidence to your points. You can't have your cake and eat it to. If you want to demand that people do research to back up their claims, then you better come forward with some of your own research. Because if you aren't motivated enough to research anything for your argument, then I sure as hell am not motivated enough to do research for mine.
As usual, I mostly agree with what you're saying. Maybe this "escalation of commitment" had a spalsh of "bad ideas" on the top though.
Moving forward, even though I don't play SWTOR (only the beta) I feel like they are betraying their current player base by not having additional content being voiced. Mind you, I, like many others, spacebared through almost all side quests. However, the main quest line was ear worthy, sorta.
I can't really speak on anything else, other than reminding everyone that Bioware was essentially.. Canadian.
Completely agree.
I really think that the many people who stuck it out this far with SWTOR did so largely because they really enjoyed the cinematic, fully-voiced aspect of questing (and sorry Gdemami, I do not have a chart to back this up).
So by cutting out the fully voiced stuff...they are really abandoning one of the core ideals of the game. As such, they are likely to alienate their only remaining loyal consumers.
As usual, I mostly agree with what you're saying. Maybe this "escalation of commitment" had a spalsh of "bad ideas" on the top though.
Moving forward, even though I don't play SWTOR (only the beta) I feel like they are betraying their current player base by not having additional content being voiced. Mind you, I, like many others, spacebared through almost all side quests. However, the main quest line was ear worthy, sorta.
I can't really speak on anything else, other than reminding everyone that Bioware was essentially.. Canadian.
Completely agree.
I really think that the many people who stuck it out this far with SWTOR did so largely because they really enjoyed the cinematic, fully-voiced aspect of questing (and sorry Gdemami, I do not have a chart to back this up).
So by cutting out the fully voiced stuff...they are really abandoning one of the core ideals of the game. As such, they are likely to alienate their only remaining loyal consumers.
I don't think they have a choice I watched that German guy interview the bioware guy and watched him dance around the issue. The main reason they are not doing voice over imho is the fact they don't have the cash now, they are more than likely operating on a very tight budget.
Yes it kind of destroys the premise of the game of he look were fully voiced over, not any more. So all those that go its all about the story will soon have just give me the quest.
Nothing makes me want to resub, nor go back to the game when it does go free to play.
result of market competition that all games released in recent years have high release numbers that diminish over time?
I think EA's biggest blunder was confusing the MMO market for still being year 2004. There is simply too much competition out there to carve out the same niche WoW currently has. In not understanding this, EA set Bioware up to fail.
Simply, there were trying to reach an unattainable goal. Maybe Bioware knew that, maybe not. But the game was universally praised by all major critics upon launch. User reviews for the first few months were generally positive (true for most MMOs), so I don't think it was a question of quality in the product. I think in the end, they should have gone with a different model and subsequently invested less money in the project since the returns wouldnt be as high.
i agree with Creslin that SWTOR suffered from an escalation of commitment. I think the initial idea of WoW a la Star Wars with a voiced over cut-scene twist snowballed into what SWTOR became. WoW seemed easy to clone. Bioware (initially Gordon Walton) leased the Hero engine in hopes to get a leg up on the competition getting what the Hero engine promised to be. It took SImtronics till about now, but the Hero engine is today a tool set to easily create and edit a MMO world.
Using the incomplete Hero engine, the development team began working on what they could while the enginering team attempted to optimize (essentially reverse enginer) the Hero Engine. While optimizing an engine, and creating and modifying game play systems and mechanics is a black art, a clip board with a checklist of cutscenes is immediately quantifiable. While the game's core was bogged down by the limitations of the Alpha Hero engine, the lead developers and hundreds of employees were plowing through cut-scene after cut-scene. As the game core continued to be mired with problems, Bioware kept pouring money into the expensive, (subjectively, adding little to gameplay) cutscenes. After a few years of this, the game found itself as stated, caught in a crisis of escalation. The game itself suffered from faulty mechanics and game systems, was ill optimized, and far from complete. By then so much money had alread been spent on the cut scenes, Bioware was forced to plow forward despite the game's shortcomings.
Of course nothing exsists in a bubble. On top of the developmental difficulties SWTOR presented Bioware, there were corporate mechanisms pushing this snowball down the mountain. Once Bioware sold LucasArts on their concept of a WoW-clone with cutscenes, they were committed to the game's release. A LucasArts license is anything but cheap. Once Bioware signed the license agreement on the line that was dotted, momentum began to propel the game to what SWTOR became. Remember, one of the key reasons EA decided to purchase Bioware was its license agreement with LA, and the potential wow-killer Bioware was developing. (Call it conjecture if you want, that seems to be the general concensus.) Now the owners of Bioware personal fourtunes were involved in the game's development being further pushed forward. Once EA spent $860 million in acquiring Bioware/Pandemic, the game became "Too Big To Fail" and development presses forward despite the problems presented by the Hero Engine. In the meantime, as the engineers continued struggling with Hero, the developers kept pushing forward with the cut-scenes. The fact that the game was taking longer then anticipated and burning through funds on what many today would categorize as "fluff", the lead developers and the hundreds of contractors were more then happy to keep getting paid from day to day. Better to get paid while the game is in development then hope to be retained post launch.
The only reason the game was release in 2011, and not 2012, 2013, or later, is EA eventually said enough. EA picked the 2011 x-mas launch to capitalize on the holiday and avoid the competition of D3, Terra, GW2, and MoP; and to enforce a deadline for Bioware to meet. That is why SWTOR was the way it was at launch, missing a whole lot of "stuff". Althought the developers thought the game would be more sucesful then it was, I don't think even they thought they could ever create that much cut-scenes to begin with. I think if th egame was succesful there would have class stories continued, but all the side quest cutscene coice over work would probably have trailed off. The huge effort expended in creating the "Fourth Pillar" was expended because the developers couldn't really do anything else while the engine was bonked and they needed to show EA and LA that they were making progress.
JR, CEO of EA, said that SWTOR needed 1M subscribers to "make a profit but nothing to write home about". The context being "long term" subs (Source EA, JR, Feb)
So far EA have not announced 1M subs. The peak number was 1.7M (EA Feb results) but of these only "just about half" (source JR, March presentation) were "monthly subscribers".
Subsequently EA announced lower peak numbers
So based on what EA have said SWTOR will not make a profit.
EA also said that the game needed 500k subs to be profitable on a day-to-day basic. So initially the game has been covering its costs - except for free 30 day stuff, free weekends and so on - and putting something in the coffers. EA also reduced their profit expectations for the year though so clearly SWTOR has not and is not performing as expected.
So there have been staff cuts and now we know that future voice overs and class stories etc. are shelved.
The number of subs that SWTOR needs to stay afloat will diminish - remains to be seen whether they hit the numbers they want.
1M long term subs though to "make a profit but nothing to write home about". Clearly not happening.
Idk about escalation of commitment, it's a nice concept and an interesting thing to think about, but the trouble is - as others have pointed out - it wasn't the VO that did SWTOR in, it was the lack of other things that players nowadays want in an MMO.
The "branching" storylines that BioWare has defined in SPGs only work in an SPG environment, in an MMO if the "branching" doesn't include things like alternate levelling paths (by this I do not mean levelling in WZs or space minigames, I mean playing through the main storyline myriad ways and having a measurably different experience on each character). Sure, the class storylines are different but the planetary arcs are the same for each character in a particular faction. Past your starter world the class-unique story decreases and the "haven't I been here before?" feeling increases.
Playing one character on each side works in a limited way to defeat that feeling, but Taris is Taris and has Rakghouls whichever way you spin it. (Sorry, I really cannot stand Taris). Because of the main storyline you can't skip an entire planet, and there are limited opportunities to do them "out of sequence" (if you do this, you have one challenging planet, immediately followed by a cakewalk) - you feel funnelled and not free at all. Hit 50, step on the gear treadmill and wish there was something else to do to besides WZs and OPs because this stuff (at its core) is crushingly familiar. Space isn't done well enough to make it a worthwhile distraction, Datacron hunting is fun...once. Crafted gear gets rendered useless once you start endgame gear progression. Their events are fun, but there have only been 2 since launch and the latest one is a zerg-battle of speedclicking due to lack of instancing and seems to be pissing people off more than anything else.
I think SWTOR will be remembered as the title that hit at the same time as everyone realized that themeparks are not what players are looking for, and that there are so many of them on the market that it's pretty much at saturation and headed for a decline. If I was Xenimax I would be watching nervously, since they're about to take a big gamble with a themepark subs-model MMO based on a beloved sandparky IP when all signs point to players being burnt out on that. FunCom release a solid game in TSW and can't meet even their lower end predictions on sales and subs... more and more players are looking for B2P or F2P options because we've all been there and done that so many times that even if a game is fun and polished, we'll steam through it in a couple of months and forget about it because there's a new shiny on the horizon.
Not that this is in any way the fault of the players, it's just that if you started developing one of these games back in 2006, would you have even dreamed that the market would be where it is now in 2012? It looks like the AAA houses were blithely unaware that the taste of the subs-paying MMO masses could change so dramatically over time. The skinner box model is transparent to anyone who has ever played any themepark MMO for an extended period of time, trouble is players are primed to recognise it now, and get that cold feeling in the pit of their stomachs when the gear treadmill is all there is. Dailes and Warzones and Operations, oh darn it...
ITT the reason you see so many players here asking for sandboxes is because they want something other than that treadmill, because capping a game with that design means all you're gonna get is more of the same, and we all KNOW this. A game that has an element of sandbox to it will allow and even encourage you to do more than grind for gear. It will have systems in place that players can use to make their own fun, to build their own communities, crafting systems that reward effort put into them, player markets that are of benefit to the game economy and a landscape that isn't populated by a clone army in Superl33t armor set #12 twiddling their thumbs as they wait for their next queue to pop.
The model is broken...I don't think it's the VO that's the issue, I think it's the themepark with a skinner-box endgame that is, and that is affecting more than just SWTOR - even if it does end up being the poster child for it.
Comments
Having Voice overs for every line of text in the game undoubtedly made adding content to the game more expensive than doing the same in past MMORPGs,I can't see how that can be argued against it's jsut common sense,that was only part of the problem with the game.
The game lack end game content and what cotnent they did add was very short in time taken to complete and for the most part lacked challenge.Now having to do VO for all lines of speech may of contributed to the aenemic nature of the raids and Daily Quests added it doesn't accoutn for the other major problems IMO which I think were their total failure in their Open PvP zones and the game engine itself.
Their failure with Illum and Tatooine PvP zones and subsequent complete abandoning of said zones.
The buggy,badly performing andeasily broken Hero engine(Which I hope we will never see in a game again)
The pulling and subsequently massive delay in implementing ranked Warzones(and the low number of said Warzones)
Their constant changing of the token systems and escalating costs of customizing your gear to create in game money sinks was also a turn for me.
The broken resolve system compounding the over abundance of CC in PvP
Those were the major reasons aside from short and unchallenging end game PvE cotnent were the major reasons for my giving up ont he game and msot had nothing to do with the cost of Voiceovers or tiem taken to do them.Everything else int he gaem was mostly fine and normal.
If opinion isn't backed up, there is nothing to discuss.
A: SWTOR FAILS!
B: NO, IT DOESN'T!
A: YES, IT DOES!
...
Notice that Term B (which is actually a statement) has the same value as A. So the form here is actually: ABABAB......
It's not technically a circular argument, it's just an argument that relies on subjective opinion.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
The opinions here are backed up...with arguments taken from easily available information that is basically common knowledge. Your problem is that you are never satisfied...you ask for information that would only be present in scholarly articles, and many times, flat out isn't available to the public at all.
This is silly because you could level this kind of argument against ANY post.
If someone argues that SWTOR was a massive failure, I could say:
"Where are EA's financials to prove it?!?!"
If someone argues that SWTOR was a massive success, I could say:
"Where are EA's financials to prove it?!?!"
But BOTH of these arguments are just a cop out. I am ignoring whatever argument the OP put forth, and just falling back on a boilerplate argument asking for more proof that I know the OP can never get.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
That is exactly what he said.
Look what happens when gaming people start dabbing into things they have no clue of and are encouraged by other gaming folk:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star-command-sci-fi-meets-gamedev-story-for-ios-an/posts/208395
Say NO! to Kickstarter!
Game development is a business and you need business people to make it successful.
Oh wow...
It's hard to know what to even say to this.
You do realize, that at the end of the day...game development is essentially an art form. Just like cinema. It is an industry as well, but the only thing that makes that industry work is that games, like other forms of art, are enjoyed by many people who are willing to spend money on them.
I can't believe that you seem to think that the money side of game development is more important than the creative side. I mean, if that were true, everyone would credit "David" to the Medicis and not Michelangelo.Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Those two are not comparable.
Even experienced professional will make mistakes(way less frequently) but those are of very different nature, and mostly just "bet on the wrong horse".
What Warballoon did tho is a fail on something as basic as calculating their direct costs.
It is no cheap shot, it is spot on.
This is so much BS. So Waterballon miscalculated and now has recovered from it and is nearing completion of their game. They had a hitch and not a FAIL. On the otherhand EA botched their calculations for SWTOR and are now up for sale perhaps even to Providence (Bethesda Ownership.)Waterballoon's issue? Pffft... Solved. Now how is that likely to make me not support Kickstarter projects? Really, I am thinking you are paid by a big business interest now myself or are just too caught up in an argument.
I am not sure what opinions you speak of but your claims that voice-acting was expensive and as such prohibitive in regards of future development are not backed at all...
You cannot tell me that I am not satisfied with backing when you provide none.
If you choose to believe that TOR was meant to operate as intended at current subscription levels -- as many remaining players still try to claim -- then one has to acknowledge that continual content creation that upheld the quality of the original work was an infeasible long-term design plan.
To me though, the plan was built around the assumption that the game would be way more successful than it was. That is not to say that BIoWare sold out for mass market appeal, but rather that, like a huge number of their fans, they thought the type of game they are good at making combined with Star Wars would be a massive hit.
Had it been, one could certainly argue that what the game could have become is much different than what it is now capable of becoming. Fully voiced new content, regular content rollouts, 3D space gameplay, pazaak and swoop racing, new races, improved weather, etc. -- all the things the people who thought they knew the game better than the rest of us assured us would happen -- might have been possible from a financial standpoint if the game had been a huge success.
In that respect it was a horrible miscalculation on BioWare's part.
In any case I had always just assumed that new content would see an increasing number of alien characters so they could use preexisting generic alien voiceovers and subtitle everything.
I am not sure what opinions you speak of but your claims that voice-acting was expensive and as such prohibitive in regards of future development are not backed at all...
You cannot tell me that I am not satisfied with backing when you provide none.
Uh...you've read this thread right?
I didn't provide arguments about why VO and cinematic cut scenes were expensive in my OP because I assumed that it's basically common knowledge that they are. But then you started asking for more proof, and other posters gave arguments of why that stuff is expensive, to which replied with your standard "You have to back that up with financial statements."
No matter what arguments you are given, you will just ignore them and ask for more proof that you know none of us can ever get. Like I said before, if you disagree with our arguments fine...then make a counter-argument. But don't waste your time asking us for "proof" taht either doesn't exist or is completely inaccessible. And if you don't want to participate in a thread that tries to discuss something with incomplete information, then don't.
But you should realize that in reality, you have to make decisions with incomplete information ALL THE TIME. So I really don't think discussing something like this is that off-base.Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
I happen to respond to conclusions that are invalid but I do ignore those that are not relevant...not particularly weird practice.
One can make counter argument only if you make one yourself - like providing back up for your claim. Once you do it, I can and I will make a counter argument.
EDIT:
Here is a tip and what I did:
Gather all data you can about the voice-overs.
Look around how much the voice-over recording session cost.
Run the numbers, make conclusion based on your findings.
Post it on forums.
Yes, it takes more effort than running your mouth but it has a merit and provides content for discussion.
Not at all.
The point is, those 38k USD could be much better spent in hands of someone who knows how to run the business.
There is no point supporting business with slim chance to deliver, which is a problem of Kickstarter - the business part is left out from the process when pledging.
It only supports business failures and unsuccessful products because of no liability.
While I admit that I am not particularly fond to crowdfunding, current state and Kickstarter as platform are big no-no. There needs to be established better ways to make crowdfunding fledged, viable investment option.
___________________________
Have flask; will travel.
That is exactly what he said.
Look what happens when gaming people start dabbing into things they have no clue of and are encouraged by other gaming folk:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star-command-sci-fi-meets-gamedev-story-for-ios-an/posts/208395
Say NO! to Kickstarter!
Game development is a business and you need business people to make it successful.
OK, it's becoming obvious that this guy is either a marketer or a foolish zealot.
Same schtick, every thread: Game does not suck it makes money ---> prove to me with a chart that it sucks!
Now he is attacking the movement that is threatening AAA developers and their schism with users. You should go find a church Gdemami, or do some meditating. Maybe even find a beneficial organization to join so that you can find your humanity again. Shame on you. BTW, I don't have a chart to prove that you are nuts, so don't ask.
THANK YOU. I was wondering how long would it take til someone say it.As usual, I mostly agree with what you're saying. Maybe this "escalation of commitment" had a spalsh of "bad ideas" on the top though.
Moving forward, even though I don't play SWTOR (only the beta) I feel like they are betraying their current player base by not having additional content being voiced. Mind you, I, like many others, spacebared through almost all side quests. However, the main quest line was ear worthy, sorta.
I can't really speak on anything else, other than reminding everyone that Bioware was essentially.. Canadian.
What a way to quote people out of context to falsify a point.
You made no point, you just stated what I have just said is BS and went on with your EA rant.
Whether Warballoon recovered aka took another loan or not, isn't changing anything about failure in elementary ability to run the business.
I answered your "Now how is that likely to make me not support Kickstarter projects?" question so I I reply in very context of what you said.
You did this? I'm pretty sure that in this thread, you just kept telling people that they need data to prove their point and then provided no data on your own. Maybe you did this in another thread...and if you did, I would like to see it.
Also, I hate to disappoint you, but there is no way I'm doing that research. This is not my job, I post here because I enjoy expressing my views and getting other peoples' input on them. I do not find doing school-paper-esque reserach for a forum post "fun." If you will notice, I even ended my own post with the word "Thoughts?" Meaning that...hey, this is what I think...do you agree? If you don't agree, then why?
And if you responded to my post with your own research proving that my arguments were invalid, I would submit to your superior argument. But you didn't do this. All you did was ask people to back up their claims without providing any evidence to your points. You can't have your cake and eat it to. If you want to demand that people do research to back up their claims, then you better come forward with some of your own research. Because if you aren't motivated enough to research anything for your argument, then I sure as hell am not motivated enough to do research for mine.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Completely agree.
I really think that the many people who stuck it out this far with SWTOR did so largely because they really enjoyed the cinematic, fully-voiced aspect of questing (and sorry Gdemami, I do not have a chart to back this up).
So by cutting out the fully voiced stuff...they are really abandoning one of the core ideals of the game. As such, they are likely to alienate their only remaining loyal consumers.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
I don't think they have a choice I watched that German guy interview the bioware guy and watched him dance around the issue. The main reason they are not doing voice over imho is the fact they don't have the cash now, they are more than likely operating on a very tight budget.
Yes it kind of destroys the premise of the game of he look were fully voiced over, not any more. So all those that go its all about the story will soon have just give me the quest.
Nothing makes me want to resub, nor go back to the game when it does go free to play.
Yeah it's annoying when someone ignores everything you wrote except for one tiny part and then responds to that completely out of context huh?
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
I think EA's biggest blunder was confusing the MMO market for still being year 2004. There is simply too much competition out there to carve out the same niche WoW currently has. In not understanding this, EA set Bioware up to fail.
Simply, there were trying to reach an unattainable goal. Maybe Bioware knew that, maybe not. But the game was universally praised by all major critics upon launch. User reviews for the first few months were generally positive (true for most MMOs), so I don't think it was a question of quality in the product. I think in the end, they should have gone with a different model and subsequently invested less money in the project since the returns wouldnt be as high.
i agree with Creslin that SWTOR suffered from an escalation of commitment. I think the initial idea of WoW a la Star Wars with a voiced over cut-scene twist snowballed into what SWTOR became. WoW seemed easy to clone. Bioware (initially Gordon Walton) leased the Hero engine in hopes to get a leg up on the competition getting what the Hero engine promised to be. It took SImtronics till about now, but the Hero engine is today a tool set to easily create and edit a MMO world.
Using the incomplete Hero engine, the development team began working on what they could while the enginering team attempted to optimize (essentially reverse enginer) the Hero Engine. While optimizing an engine, and creating and modifying game play systems and mechanics is a black art, a clip board with a checklist of cutscenes is immediately quantifiable. While the game's core was bogged down by the limitations of the Alpha Hero engine, the lead developers and hundreds of employees were plowing through cut-scene after cut-scene. As the game core continued to be mired with problems, Bioware kept pouring money into the expensive, (subjectively, adding little to gameplay) cutscenes. After a few years of this, the game found itself as stated, caught in a crisis of escalation. The game itself suffered from faulty mechanics and game systems, was ill optimized, and far from complete. By then so much money had alread been spent on the cut scenes, Bioware was forced to plow forward despite the game's shortcomings.
Of course nothing exsists in a bubble. On top of the developmental difficulties SWTOR presented Bioware, there were corporate mechanisms pushing this snowball down the mountain. Once Bioware sold LucasArts on their concept of a WoW-clone with cutscenes, they were committed to the game's release. A LucasArts license is anything but cheap. Once Bioware signed the license agreement on the line that was dotted, momentum began to propel the game to what SWTOR became. Remember, one of the key reasons EA decided to purchase Bioware was its license agreement with LA, and the potential wow-killer Bioware was developing. (Call it conjecture if you want, that seems to be the general concensus.) Now the owners of Bioware personal fourtunes were involved in the game's development being further pushed forward. Once EA spent $860 million in acquiring Bioware/Pandemic, the game became "Too Big To Fail" and development presses forward despite the problems presented by the Hero Engine. In the meantime, as the engineers continued struggling with Hero, the developers kept pushing forward with the cut-scenes. The fact that the game was taking longer then anticipated and burning through funds on what many today would categorize as "fluff", the lead developers and the hundreds of contractors were more then happy to keep getting paid from day to day. Better to get paid while the game is in development then hope to be retained post launch.
The only reason the game was release in 2011, and not 2012, 2013, or later, is EA eventually said enough. EA picked the 2011 x-mas launch to capitalize on the holiday and avoid the competition of D3, Terra, GW2, and MoP; and to enforce a deadline for Bioware to meet. That is why SWTOR was the way it was at launch, missing a whole lot of "stuff". Althought the developers thought the game would be more sucesful then it was, I don't think even they thought they could ever create that much cut-scenes to begin with. I think if th egame was succesful there would have class stories continued, but all the side quest cutscene coice over work would probably have trailed off. The huge effort expended in creating the "Fourth Pillar" was expended because the developers couldn't really do anything else while the engine was bonked and they needed to show EA and LA that they were making progress.
Proof?
JR, CEO of EA, said that SWTOR needed 1M subscribers to "make a profit but nothing to write home about". The context being "long term" subs (Source EA, JR, Feb)
So far EA have not announced 1M subs. The peak number was 1.7M (EA Feb results) but of these only "just about half" (source JR, March presentation) were "monthly subscribers".
Subsequently EA announced lower peak numbers
So based on what EA have said SWTOR will not make a profit.
EA also said that the game needed 500k subs to be profitable on a day-to-day basic. So initially the game has been covering its costs - except for free 30 day stuff, free weekends and so on - and putting something in the coffers. EA also reduced their profit expectations for the year though so clearly SWTOR has not and is not performing as expected.
So there have been staff cuts and now we know that future voice overs and class stories etc. are shelved.
The number of subs that SWTOR needs to stay afloat will diminish - remains to be seen whether they hit the numbers they want.
1M long term subs though to "make a profit but nothing to write home about". Clearly not happening.
Idk about escalation of commitment, it's a nice concept and an interesting thing to think about, but the trouble is - as others have pointed out - it wasn't the VO that did SWTOR in, it was the lack of other things that players nowadays want in an MMO.
The "branching" storylines that BioWare has defined in SPGs only work in an SPG environment, in an MMO if the "branching" doesn't include things like alternate levelling paths (by this I do not mean levelling in WZs or space minigames, I mean playing through the main storyline myriad ways and having a measurably different experience on each character). Sure, the class storylines are different but the planetary arcs are the same for each character in a particular faction. Past your starter world the class-unique story decreases and the "haven't I been here before?" feeling increases.
Playing one character on each side works in a limited way to defeat that feeling, but Taris is Taris and has Rakghouls whichever way you spin it. (Sorry, I really cannot stand Taris). Because of the main storyline you can't skip an entire planet, and there are limited opportunities to do them "out of sequence" (if you do this, you have one challenging planet, immediately followed by a cakewalk) - you feel funnelled and not free at all. Hit 50, step on the gear treadmill and wish there was something else to do to besides WZs and OPs because this stuff (at its core) is crushingly familiar. Space isn't done well enough to make it a worthwhile distraction, Datacron hunting is fun...once. Crafted gear gets rendered useless once you start endgame gear progression. Their events are fun, but there have only been 2 since launch and the latest one is a zerg-battle of speedclicking due to lack of instancing and seems to be pissing people off more than anything else.
I think SWTOR will be remembered as the title that hit at the same time as everyone realized that themeparks are not what players are looking for, and that there are so many of them on the market that it's pretty much at saturation and headed for a decline. If I was Xenimax I would be watching nervously, since they're about to take a big gamble with a themepark subs-model MMO based on a beloved sandparky IP when all signs point to players being burnt out on that. FunCom release a solid game in TSW and can't meet even their lower end predictions on sales and subs... more and more players are looking for B2P or F2P options because we've all been there and done that so many times that even if a game is fun and polished, we'll steam through it in a couple of months and forget about it because there's a new shiny on the horizon.
Not that this is in any way the fault of the players, it's just that if you started developing one of these games back in 2006, would you have even dreamed that the market would be where it is now in 2012? It looks like the AAA houses were blithely unaware that the taste of the subs-paying MMO masses could change so dramatically over time. The skinner box model is transparent to anyone who has ever played any themepark MMO for an extended period of time, trouble is players are primed to recognise it now, and get that cold feeling in the pit of their stomachs when the gear treadmill is all there is. Dailes and Warzones and Operations, oh darn it...
ITT the reason you see so many players here asking for sandboxes is because they want something other than that treadmill, because capping a game with that design means all you're gonna get is more of the same, and we all KNOW this. A game that has an element of sandbox to it will allow and even encourage you to do more than grind for gear. It will have systems in place that players can use to make their own fun, to build their own communities, crafting systems that reward effort put into them, player markets that are of benefit to the game economy and a landscape that isn't populated by a clone army in Superl33t armor set #12 twiddling their thumbs as they wait for their next queue to pop.
The model is broken...I don't think it's the VO that's the issue, I think it's the themepark with a skinner-box endgame that is, and that is affecting more than just SWTOR - even if it does end up being the poster child for it.
(eta - jeebus, this is long, I'm sorry!)