An entire month free is 15$ they will never see from every single player. It's a pretty big move to make.
No doubt. I imagine they're trying to get as many subs as possible before Tera, The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 hit.
An entire month free is 15$ they will never see from every single player. It's a pretty big move to make.
No doubt. I imagine they're trying to get as many subs as possible before Tera, The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 hit.
You can get excited about it, but I'm willing to bet the player base won't like this. It's still just running through the same dungeons over and over again. Won't matter if it scales or not.
Bottom line is, MMO players are weak sauce pansies now. When the MMO genre was new and exciting, their was a great variety of things to do. Now, players are stuck in a WoW-like comfort zone, but claim they want something to be a game breaker. I believe that's bullshit.
Essentially, it's bitching to bitch.You want something different, but you really don't. MMO players just enjoy talking and thinking about it. Take them out of their comfort zone and they scream at the top of their lungs.
Here is a perfectly logical reason to give away a free month that doesn't involve doom and gloom.
1.2 basically just came out, it adds a lot of features. Many people quit because of not enough end game content, bugs, UI customization etc... This free month is to hook the subs that they lost because of missing content.
Now they simply could not give a free month to people who quit because it would alienate people who were there the entire time. So they gave a free month to everybody.
That is a ton of money just to be giving out for free. So I doubt that it is somehow a sign of despair.
I would imagine that if they were truly hurting for subs then they would offer a discounted monthly fee.
They also had to pull a major feature from the 1.2 patch that alot of people were looking forward to. Such a major thing pulled usually means compensation of some form
I imagine ranked PVP just wasn't done. They probably learned their lesson from Ilum.
You can get excited about it, but I'm willing to bet the player base won't like this. It's still just running through the same dungeons over and over again. Won't matter if it scales or not.
Bottom line is, MMO players are weak sauce pansies now. When the MMO genre was new and exciting, their was a great variety of things to do. Now, players are stuck in a WoW-like comfort zone, but claim they want something to be a game breaker. I believe that's bullshit.
Essentially, it's bitching to bitch.You want something different, but you really don't. MMO players just enjoy talking and thinking about it. Take them out of their comfort zone and they scream at the top of their lungs.
That's not something you do out of the kindness of your heart. I highly doubt that was their motivation.
The fact that you have to RESUB and pay to get the free month is immediately going to turn many ex-players off, it's not the same as offering them a free month in hopes of getting them to return after.
If they take their free month and quit again, Bioware literally needs to double their subs to break even on this deal since they gave it out to everyone else as well. If they get a 10% increase from what they have now, they need to retain a 10% margin over their current for 10 friggin months in order to break even from this deal.
That's not shit you do haphazardly. If they weren't worried about LOSING current customers as well as trying to re-kindle old accounts, they wouldn't do it, period.
The issue was that they didn't tell anyone they were pulling it until a few hours before the servers went down for the patch. There was a lot of backlash about how they handled it.
The most popular online game at the moment is probably League of Legends, which surpassed WoW concurrency over a year ago. It's a F2P game built from the ground up as a F2P game, and it doesn't really penalize players for not paying. It's also still wildly profitable.
I made it to level 7 on the free trial. Wanted to kill myself playing it
Here is a perfectly logical reason to give away a free month that doesn't involve doom and gloom.
1.2 basically just came out, it adds a lot of features. Many people quit because of not enough end game content, bugs, UI customization etc... This free month is to hook the subs that they lost because of missing content.
Now they simply could not give a free month to people who quit because it would alienate people who were there the entire time. So they gave a free month to everybody.
That is a ton of money just to be giving out for free. So I doubt that it is somehow a sign of despair.
I would imagine that if they were truly hurting for subs then they would offer a discounted monthly fee.
The original free month offer required a paying sub as of April 12th, the day of the offer. So returning players couldn't take advantage of it at all.
Unless you're saying their plan to extend the offer was there all along, and the "we listened to the fans!!" was all play acting.
Why do companies try so hard to make games completely voice acted? You can create so much more RPG content quicker when you don't have to rely on voice actors. Are gamers unwilling to read anymore? Because those same gamers that skip text are the same ones that will speed click through the voice dialog.
Two big expansions were done to Morrowind while only one was done for Oblivion. Guarantee that if voice acting wasnt there, we would have seen more.
Also it lowers the amount of total dialog. Text based games could provide much more backstory.
Why do companies try so hard to make games completely voice acted? You can create so much more RPG content quicker when you don't have to rely on voice actors. Are gamers unwilling to read anymore? Because those same gamers that skip text are the same ones that will speed click through the voice dialog.
Two big expansions were done to Morrowind while only one was done for Oblivion. Guarantee that if voice acting wasnt there, we would have seen more.
Also it lowers the amount of total dialog. Text based games could provide much more backstory.
I actually played the maximum amount they let you, all the way up through Coruscant up until a cutscene played and it told me I couldn't go anywhere else. Played smuggler and actually really enjoyed it.I made it to level 7 on the free trial. Wanted to kill myself playing it
They should have only voiced the class quests/dungeons. The planet (non-class) quests were by and large worthless, tedious, and boring. I would think that would cut out at least half or more of the dialogue they needed to record
I guess they wouldn't have been able to advertise a "fully voiced MMO" though in that case
It's funny that people think voice acting in itself is that expensive.
It's funny that people think voice acting, in itself, is that expensive in the context of a AAA game budget.
I think people just can't figure out where else all that money went.
Quick, add another 100 hours of spoken dialog!
It's funny that people think voice acting, in itself, is that expensive in the context of a AAA game budget.
how're we running through the same dungeon? It's not. Content is scaled and there is the piggyback system. Sure you have lvl 1-60 areas for your own race but that is for EACH race. Once you finish your own race area, you can experience entirely NEW content for other races. This is hardly going to get old. In WoW and other MMOs, you can go back and do the lower quest stuff but it's boring because you're so high level and the quests feel irrelevent. Not in GW2.
True but it's easier to believe that than thinking they wasted $200+ million on any of the other terrible aspects of the game.
Really, where did all that money go? Paying off reviewers, advertising, and viral marketers I'm sure was a nice chunk. Voice acting was another chunk. But combined they stil don't add up to $200+ million.
Such a waste.
Sounds like APB all over again.
This is something that should be addressed. When one looks at the lack of variety of locations, size of areas, and the lack of systems that should have been in the game the one thing that does look like it got a LOT attention above and beyond everything else is the voice work. Which is sad because that's the least important part of a MMO. If you want to have it you only need at certain times to really show case a situation that is important.
I think ME3 will be fine in the end. Dragon Age 2 had a fairly large drop-off compared to the original though. Far from a failure but enough to be alarmed about its future as a franchise.
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.
They should have just made a single player game.
Really? This is a troll post, right?.
There is no "Fart" emote in the game therefore where did all the money go?
they did.....
Really? This is a troll post, right?.
There is no "Fart" emote in the game therefore where did all the money go?
These fucking threads.
"Bioware thread guise!"
"Let's get to work."
Skyrim feels more like an MMO to me because it's in an interconnected world. I can walk between locations. Or I can ride my mount. Or I can just quicktravel.
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