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BioWare doing “anything and everything” to keep players logging in to SW:TOR

Sol..

I am Wayne Brady.
The MMO model is so bad these days that they have to struggle to keep people around even before it actually becomes a problem.

They can't stop the decline because it's all in the design. You don't have any reason to dwell around areas longer than the advancement curve requires (which these days is like 4 hours). You almost never have any other meaningful things to do outside of leveling and crafting up until max. There's pretty much never a reason to group so nobody does it. And the loot...It's like everybody who makes MMOs these days have never played an RPG before. Loot is so carefully balanced these days. In SWTOR you got the same stat organization on your shit straight up to the top with little surprises thrown in even on the rarest shit. It's like that in nearly every MMO now. If i see it i'm immediately canceling my subscription. And there's never enough art. Three of the last five MMOs i played didn't even have helms put in properly before I quit. Nobody spends enough time before they put out the game. They always think they can do it after the fact but it never pans out. If you put out unfinished bullshit, then you aren't going to get the bodies to help you make up for it later on.
 

Andiie

Unconfirmed Member
I'm keeping my prediction that nothing post-WoW that banks on traditional raiding as an end game is going to have anything other than niche retention. The raiding boom is over, and making content that people can log in and work on with their own time with their own configurations for groups, etc is the future.

WoW did a pretty good job into repurposing it's content with all their new finder systems and upcoming crap, or rather to say they would have if all their content that isnt traditional raiding wasn't now completely toothless garbage. Scaling, scaling, scaling is what is needed.

End game in general is a thought that should probably be taken down a few notches, though, no matter how well you do it. It's an amazing thing that designers will make these vast, expansive and fucking EXPENSIVE worlds then completely throw them out the airlock in favor of finding methods to keep people grinding a few dungeons at cap.

Well said.
 

Cystm

Member
There is actually a /fart emote in the game. I'm just pointing out that, along with all the other emotes, has no sound effect. Which just goes to show that not only did they half ass the rest of the game, they half assed aspects of the voice work too.

But hey, you're making TOR OT 2, right? Good luck with that. When more people talk about how they dislike the game you can post tampon pics and you and the 3 other people that post there more than they play can relish in the fact that it'll probably have more views than TOR has subscribers.


iqSPRSYekuUvn.gif
 

Tellaerin

Member
And speaking of only needing voice acting at certain times, they spent all that time on money on voice overs...

yet none of the emotes have voice work.

No "I'm out of mana (force, whatever)"
No /attack saying "Attack!"
No /burp burping
No /fart farting
No /joke or /silly saying something humorous

But yeah, like you said looking at the game itself it's impossible to tell where all this money went. We can see where it didn't go though.

Yes, because people standing around burping and farting and cracking bad jokes clearly screams 'Star Wars'.

If I'm playing a Star Wars game, I want to have the experience of visiting the Star Wars universe, not wandering around a convention where people are going around acting stupid while cosplaying as Star Wars characters. You're always going to have that in online games, but going out of your way to deliberately enable players who live for that sort of thing... it's not something I'm looking for in an MMO, let me put it that way.

The 'Attack!' one, I'll give you. Something like that would be nice.
 

-tetsuo-

Unlimited Capacity
I love how the group of friends who wanted me to get this so badly stopped playing after like 2 weeks. Didn't even make it to lvl 30 lol
 

Cystm

Member
Good to see we've gotten beyond words and just use images now.

I do not have the patience for that level of blatant, obvious trolling. These threads, and the mindless, effortless thought put into the posts within are a drain. This isn't the first thread of it's kind, and more likely than not will not be the last.

The image, Thoraxes, amounts to this:

"I can see I have been wasting my time communicating with you. You have no actual opinion with substance, and are simply jumping on the TORtanic bandwagon."

The game is flawed, it is not innovative as much as you might like to see a new venture into the MMO space, and needs improvement but, "There's no accompanying fart sound for the /fart emote, therefor the game is bad" is generally where I stop caring enough to continue communication with you on the matter.

These threads go the same way every time.
 

hamchan

Member
I'm more annoyed at the posts that bring up good points being ignored and these threads being painted by a wide brush as one big troll gathering, when not all of it is.
 

Izayoi

Banned
Ive looked around, but I really need that AAA polish :(

Im talking about some new big thing with fresh ideas that will shake things up.
What kind of fresh ideas? Quests/subscription model? If so, GW2. Combat? TERA. Two games that show high levels of polish and production values, both multi-million dollar titles. There's plenty more on the horizon, and many already out if you're willing to look past lack in other areas (like F2P, less than stellar visuals, etc).
 
As big of a Star Wars and KOTOR fan as I am, there have been just too many lengthy games on my plate to even consider subbing. If it were F2P and I could simply play at my leisure without feeling I had to devote all my gaming time to it to get my subs cost worth I'd buy it in a second.
 

Kem0sabe

Member
I had fun for a month, i played my characters (sorcerer) story to the end, did every flashpoint once (because grinding sucks), tried the first operation (prison planet, forget the name?) and waited on the hutball queue for my pvp dailies.

There´s was nothing left but to reroll, and as there is no alternate leveling paths on empire and i played republic during the beta, i ended up unsubscribing.

Going F2P is not a bad thing, Turbine made more money with the F2P versions of D&D and LotR than with subscription models.

Hopefully Bioware will keep adding enough content to justify another look in a years time, until then... I´ll be having no pressure, no subscription, and hopefully some fun while playing GW2. :)
 

Westlo

Member
I had fun the first month.. got past the starting planet for every class and my main two were about 33 (Operative) and 27 (Marauder).. but just lost the drive to play this game. The voice acting while amazing at first was something that quickly became spacebar mashing, especially for generic quests. I thought maybe I was over MMO's.. but I'm realy enjoying TERA.. so probably not... TOR just didn't feel alive... heck I've never grouped up in TERA but with so many people around it just feels a lot more alive.
 

Derrick01

Banned
Giving out a free month to keep level 50 players playing can't be seen as a good sign really.

It's also completely missing the point too. I stopped playing after 50 because I was bored to death, so your solution is to give me free time as if that changes anything? I don't function on EA/Bioware logic.
 
It's also completely missing the point too. I stopped playing after 50 because I was bored to death, so your solution is to give me free time as if that changes anything? I don't function on EA/Bioware logic.

They did it to get people to try the new 1.2 update that just came out.
 

Westlo

Member
Between Tera, diablo 3 and gw2 they are in serious trouble

Indeed they are... which is why I was highly amused by that one analyst who said subs peaked @ 1.7 million in Feb and that it will more than likely be @ 1.25 million by March 2013... *cue Vince McMahon's theme song*.
 

Hari Seldon

Member
I think this game is still recoverable to maintain about a million subs long term. I wouldn't call that a failure, just not a huge success.

I had enough fun with the game for the two months that I played to be willing to come back for an expansion or a major patch. I"m just not planning on sticking around to raid or collect loot, I don't care about that crap.

The game still has the star wars story, which Diablo and Guild Wars 2 lack. People are underestimating that.
 

Spookie

Member
They did it to get people to try the new 1.2 update that just came out.

That's cool and all but my interest in the game fell away round Christmas. It felt like I had just played Kingdoms of Amalur if it were to have a Star Wars theme. I finished the SP component and had absolutely no motivation to play any more. Now they release a patch on the eve of the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend and right after TERA and Diablo 3 just had one? :/
 

Interfectum

Member
The game still has the star wars story, which Diablo and Guild Wars 2 lack. People are underestimating that.

Star Wars doesn't have near the pull it used to have and you can get your Star Wars fix from many different sources. If you want your Diablo fix, you have only one option.

TOR's only hope for 2013 and beyond is to go free to play. They will never sustain a million paying western subscriptions for the long term. The game has zero staying power after you get through the story.
 
That's cool and all but my interest in the game fell away round Christmas. It felt like I had just played Kingdoms of Amalur if it were to have a Star Wars theme. I finished the SP component and had absolutely no motivation to play any more. Now they release a patch on the eve of the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend and right after TERA and Diablo 3 just had one? :/

Well they shouldn't try to combat player loss due to other games? It's a business, they obviously try to dangle stuff in front of players eyes to get them to come back. Would be worse if they just sat back while other games take their players away.

Players wanted a SP game and played the SP component, are likely not going to come back to the game until an expansion comes out that expands the SP story lines, as the updates to the game are mostly MP focused content.

Star Wars doesn't have near the pull it used to have

And this comes from what exactly? Because nothing is showing this is true. The franchise is massive
 

Spookie

Member
Well they shouldn't try to combat player loss due to other games? It's a business, they obviously try to dangle stuff in front of players eyes to get them to come back. Would be worse if they just sat back while other games take their players away.

Every time WoW does this they do it when there is a lull in releases when people would be considering playing a game where there is some consistency in content giving them something to do. Not the month before some of the biggest PC releases are due to arrive. My point is that ToR is so far in the back of my mind that I can safely say most of the people I know have no interest in returning to it. Giving me less drive to go back my self.
 
I thought it was to keep those subs alive for the quarterly financial statement?

Probably, but it's obvious they have multiple reasons to do it. Person was asking why do it now, but it was part of the new 1.2 update and they are advertising it also as a "come see whats new" type of deal. They got to keep numbers up, got to keep people interested, and combat all the other games coming out.

Every time WoW does this they do it when there is a lull in releases when people would be considering playing a game where there is some consistency in content giving them something to do. Not the month before some of the biggest PC releases are due to arrive. My point is that ToR is so far in the back of my mind that I can safely say most of the people I know have no interest in returning to it. Giving me less drive to go back my self.

WoW has never had to worry about keeping subs when they had 11 million subs. They never had massive dips in subs. Lower sub base and fluctuations are much more damning for a game. WoW usually just had to put out a new update and they instantly got in a ton of resubs without having to really advertise the heck out of it. TOR doesn't have the luxury of sitting back and waiting. They are going to have to always be trying to keep players interested throughout it's entire life. They can't just wait for lulls in releases
 

Kem0sabe

Member
And this comes from what exactly? Because nothing is showing this is true. The franchise is massive

What was the last Star Wars game to be considered a massive sale and critical success?

In the last dozen years... I would single out Republic Commando, the first KotoR, the Rogue Squadron series, Battlefront, Jedi Knight II, Academy, and the first Force Unleashed game, as good games.

But sales wise? unless you add the lego games, i doubt Star Wars is that big of a franchise.
 
Pretty amazing what WoW was able to do. I played a month last summer and the world did feel alive and it was huge! How big is the world in TOR compared to WoW?
 
Pretty amazing what WoW was able to do. I played a month last summer and the world did feel alive and it was huge! How big is the world in TOR compared to WoW?


WoW felt like a larger world to me. Mainly because TOR is so modular in its world design. Everything is behind a load screen. It's like I get to Tatooine and I'm at Anchorhead and not 30 yards out of town I'm getting fatigue because I'm walking too far away....

Just lame.
 

Moaradin

Member
WoW felt like a larger world to me. Mainly because TOR is so modular in its world design. Everything is behind a load screen. It's like I get to Tatooine and I'm at Anchorhead and not 30 yards out of town I'm getting fatigue because I'm walking too far away....

Just lame.

What? Tatooine in SWTOR is bigger than any WoW zone. It's actually probably around 6-7 WoW zones. Tatooine is pretty huge.
 
I'm playing Star Trek Online off and on. I've spent around $40 in real money total, and I dont feel that obligation to play in order to justify the subscription. I can stop playing for a month and sign back in, no worries. Or just quit and not have to worry about canceling.

EDIT: Most importantly, I can download and try the game for free to see if I'll like it, then pay what I want to have the experience I want.


I do this with DC:UO. I play off and on and have bought a few items. I wouldn't ever pay for a sub for it because I switch around games too much. It is fun to come back to though.
 
What was the last Star Wars game to be considered a massive sale and critical success?

In the last dozen years... I would single out Republic Commando, the first KotoR, the Rogue Squadron series, Battlefront, Jedi Knight II, Academy, and the first Force Unleashed game, as good games.

But sales wise? unless you add the lego games, i doubt Star Wars is that big of a franchise.

Star Wars is one of the biggest Franchises in the world, the only thing that rivals it currently is pretty much Harry Potter.

On the video game front SW has been weak because of Lucasarts failure to release anything meaningful in this gen, but doesn't change the fact that the franchise itself is massive.
 

Dysun

Member
TOR zones are vast but you wont find much more content than your average WoW zone as far as quests go

They tried something new with Holocrons placed in unique parts of the map but it's more annoying than fun
 

bill0527

Member
What was the last Star Wars game to be considered a massive sale and critical success?

In the last dozen years... I would single out Republic Commando, the first KotoR, the Rogue Squadron series, Battlefront, Jedi Knight II, Academy, and the first Force Unleashed game, as good games.

But sales wise? unless you add the lego games, i doubt Star Wars is that big of a franchise.

Every game you've singled out has been a big production game. Not some Leapster Learning Pad, educational, flash game, or one of those plug-the-joystick-into the TV type of games.

The big production games combined with the marketing dollars LucasArts puts into it, have all done well, even if they're critical flops. The Force Unleashed sold 8.5 million copies over its shelf life. That's putting it into Halo-CoD territory in terms of sales. Even the shitty Force Unleashed 2 managed to make it to 2 million even though everyone knew it was nothing but a cash grab on the back of the first one and a very short, mediocre game. A lot of big production games would kill to have 2 million in sales.

The problem is that LucasArts doesn't put out very many big budget Star Wars games. They aren't annualized like CoD. You seem to get one every few years and that's all. Every single one of them have been commercial successes. You would probably have to go back to early PS2/Xbox era to find a big budget Star Wars game that was a commercial flop. According to Gamespot in an article from back in February, even the Lego Star Wars franchise has sold over 30 million copies.
 

Tacitus_

Member
What? Tatooine in SWTOR is bigger than any WoW zone. It's actually probably around 6-7 WoW zones. Tatooine is pretty huge.

And it has shit for content for all that space. That's one of TORs problems, it's way too big for the content it has so you have bunch of timesink traveling.
 
TOR zones are vast but you wont find much more content than your average WoW zone as far as quests go

They tried something new with Holocrons placed in unique parts of the map but it's more annoying than fun

A planet in TOR is basically equal to a leveling zone in something like WOW. The problem is that you have stuff like Hoth, which is massive and about the size of 4 zones in WOW. Instead of having peole of specific range in a smaller area doing quests, you have that group spread out in a much larger area. Content is not an issue, but the size of the zones are.

Before the game came out people were worried that the planets were going to be small zones and not feel like planets. But then game comes out and we see that making the planets too large really was not a good idea at all. It's nice that they are big, but gameplay wise for a MMO it was not a good decision.
 

Kem0sabe

Member
Star Wars is one of the biggest Franchises in the world, the only thing that rivals it currently is pretty much Harry Potter.

On the video game front SW has been weak because of Lucasarts failure to release anything meaningful in this gen, but doesn't change the fact that the franchise itself is massive.

It might be huge in other mediums, but we are talking about videogames here. There´s the perception among gamers that SW games are generally shity cash grabs, and as you say... Lucasarts has done nothing to dispel that notion.

So the prospective player base for SW titles has never been even remotely near the most other AAA franchises. You can´t compare SW with the Halo, Mass Effect, Blizzard games, Valve games, Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, EA Sports franchises, it will never sell as well.

I think EA and Lucasarts thought the Old Republic would sell huge numbers and have massive subscription numbers just because it was Star Wars... they grossly misjudged the market.
 
It might be huge in other mediums, but we are talking about videogames here. There´s the perception among gamers that SW games are generally shity cash grabs, and as you say... Lucasarts has done nothing to dispel that notion.

So the prospective player base for SW titles has never been even remotely near the most other AAA franchises. You can´t compare SW with the Halo, Mass Effect, Blizzard games, Valve games, Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, EA Sports franchises, it will never sell as well.

I think EA and Lucasarts thought the Old Republic would sell huge numbers and have massive subscription numbers just because it was Star Wars... they grossly misjudged the market.

Force Unleashed was one of the only games that actually got marketed for the franchise in recent years and it was able to do over 8 mil copies moved. The franchise has power, but no one has put much effort into it. As has been said over and over again, something like a marketed Battlefront title this gen would have bee massive.

And it's really hard to judge the numbers for TOR when before launch they were talking about targetting around 1 mil subs, which they have surpassed. They never stated they were going to be doing 10 mil or anything, and MMO's don't need such numbers to make money. Them being able to keep the numbers up is another issue. They need at least 500k to keep it profitable and if the analyst's predictions of it staying over 1 mil in a year time, then things are not that bad for the game. They spent alot on the game and if it can stay profitable for them for some time then that's good, but if things don't work out, they can go the F2P route which could be very successful venture. Should they have gone F2P from the start? Probably.
 
I think this game is still recoverable to maintain about a million subs long term. I wouldn't call that a failure, just not a huge success.

I had enough fun with the game for the two months that I played to be willing to come back for an expansion or a major patch. I"m just not planning on sticking around to raid or collect loot, I don't care about that crap.

The game still has the star wars story, which Diablo and Guild Wars 2 lack. People are underestimating that.

The problem is, and I posted about this back in like 2008 when they announced it, that story is not "sticky" in the MMO space. It's a shit ton of effort and money and polish for a very few hours of non-repeatable content. That's a terrible model for a subscription service. It makes more sense as a boxed model game with episodic content. They are never going to churn out $15 of worthwhile story every month.

So let's say they put out an amazing story pack- and keep in mind they have to do it once per class. Any non-class story is, paradoxically, not the main storyline of the game for people. So they spend 4 months developing and putting out 5 hours of class story content per class, pad it out to 25 hours of content through travel times and shared generic sidequests, and it still only takes most of their playerbase a few weeks, tops, to complete.
 

vaelic

Banned
Tera is going to just fall flat and not really matter. What really is more competition that will have impact is MoP coming out and it already drew in many with the large scale beta

i'm not going to actively support Tera, but we dont know that yet. It's been out a year in Korea and they have westernized it some for U.S. I DESPISE Korean MMOs but this one peaked my interest.

either way, attention will be diverted for awhile, for many
 

Moaradin

Member
I think Tera looks nice but it doesn't pique my interest after playing the beta. I certainly hope it does well though.

edit: DAMN YOU BALROG
 

Bisnic

Really Really Exciting Member!
It's bigger but it's much more empty, feels like a ghost town.

To be honest, WoW zones feels like ghost towns too, even the higher lvl ones.

Sure, there could be 15 Alliances and 16 Hordes in Twilight Highlands doing quests or farming herbs and ores, but since they're all using their super fast flying mounts, you barely see them.
 
i'm not going to actively support Tera, but we dont know that yet. It's been out a year in Korea and they have westernized it some for U.S. I DESPISE Korean MMOs but this one peaked my interest.

either way, attention will be diverted for awhile, for many

Tera is a niche game that is never going to have huge numbers, nor is it really getting any coverage. All the focus is on other games and it's basically a lower budget effort. The game could succeed in it's own right, but it's still going to be small scale niche MMO when compared to the big games out there. Mist of Pandera beta alone has more players in it than whatever Tera is going to ever achieve. RIFT had for more hype behing it and marketing yet it peaked at 600k months after release (it's much lower than that now obviously) and not even 1 mil in sales. TERA is going to have a hard time reaching that even with how little coverage and hype it has. But it likely only needs a small player base to be profitable anyways.

Point was that it's not going to have much impact, there are bigger fish out there that are going to be taking bites of the pie
 
What? Tatooine in SWTOR is bigger than any WoW zone. It's actually probably around 6-7 WoW zones. Tatooine is pretty huge.

In cubic meters, probably. But it doesn't FEEL that way when you walk out of a spaceport, get on your mount and after 30 seconds of leaving a city...you're fatigued due to the shitty modular design.
 

Effect

Member
It might be huge in other mediums, but we are talking about videogames here. There´s the perception among gamers that SW games are generally shity cash grabs, and as you say... Lucasarts has done nothing to dispel that notion.

So the prospective player base for SW titles has never been even remotely near the most other AAA franchises. You can´t compare SW with the Halo, Mass Effect, Blizzard games, Valve games, Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, EA Sports franchises, it will never sell as well.

I think EA and Lucasarts thought the Old Republic would sell huge numbers and have massive subscription numbers just because it was Star Wars... they grossly misjudged the market.

They also misjudge the type of game someone who would be interested in Star Wars would enjoy. Perhaps I'm wrong but I always thought Star Wars Galaxies was fairly popular until the developers started chasing World of Warcraft after seeing it do incredible numbers (which was a first). SWG was it's own thing. Closer to Ultima Online then Everquest and then eventually WoW. I figured it had solid numbers at least when Jump to Lightspeed came out.

Its selling point was that you could exist in the Star Wars universe. You could hunt things, take part in the civil war, visit locations from the films, books, and comics. You'd encounter iconic characters. In that you had a few quest lines (the themeparks which I think were there before the combat upgrade), mission terminals (ala Anarchy Online) that provided random content for you to deal with either solo or as a group to get better rewards. Bounty Hunters could actually hunt other players via mission terminals I believe. If you want to craft you could. You could even have factories out in the field gathering materials.If you wanted to build a city you could. Have a house in the middle of nowhere where you can be alone you could do that as well. If you wanted to fly in space and dogfight it out with Imperials, Rebels, or pirates you eventually could as well. If you wanted to just hang out in the cities, spaceports, or out in the middle of nowhere you could. You were your characters and you got out of it what you put into it. A "epic" storyline wasn't needed to push you or to make you feel important.

I think this a problem with mmos in general. Many (not all) don't allow you to just exist in the world you are playing in. Don't allow you to really just pretend for a few hours.

Edit: Hmm. I think I finally understand (in words) what my problem with recent mmos are and what I'm really looking for that I'd not finding. Wow.
 
They also misjudge the type of game someone who would be interested in Star Wars would enjoy. Perhaps I'm wrong but I always thought Star Wars Galaxies was fairly popular until the developers started chasing World of Warcraft after seeing it do incredible numbers (which was a first). SWG was it's own thing. Closer to Ultima Online then Everquest and then eventually WoW. I figured it had solid numbers at least when Jump to Lightspeed came out.

SWG was failing long before they attempted to WoW it up.
 
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