Those that keep saying SWG was panned for not including space flight/combat at release are only telling half the story. The reason the game was panned was not because the missing content was somehow fundamentally offensive to Star Wars fans. The reason that SOE was criticized for not including space combat at release was because they chose to split the game in half for increased box sales (the ground portion named An Empire Divided, and the space portion named Jump to Lightspeed). The SWG dev team had announced that space combat would be an integral part of the game over two years before it went live. The community knew it existed, and they naturally and reasonably wanted it included with the base price of the boxed game.
So yes, SOE and SWG were panned for not including space combat on release, but for an entirely different reason than has been suggested in this thread. Fans were pissed that they were being nickel and dimed. JTL was ready for prime time at SWG's release, the official reason for the staggered release was to give players a chance to establish their characters before the added layer of space flight was turned on (for addl $$$).
That all said, I think SW:TOR will not suffer if it does not have full space flight/combat. Sure some small percentage of players that want to be pissed, will be pissed, and may not play (or will play, but complain none-the-less). But the vast majority of potential players will probably not be overly disturbed by the lack of content that was never advertised to begin with.
It was a fantastic business decision hell even the social players, dedicated entertainers and crafters bought it just to not wait at starports.
Rant or not it didnt lose SOE players and a very very tiny percentage dint buy it of what was probably a 400-500k playerbase at that time.
As i said in another post i'm all for a staggered release let me grow accustomed to the ground game before adding space. I fully believe it will be with the majority of the JTL team on the Bioware team then it just has to be it would be a no brainer to use the guys who developed what IMO was not only a excellent SW space game but one of the best space flight games to date in JTL.
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It was a fantastic business decision hell even the social players, dedicated entertainers and crafters bought it just to not wait at starports.
Rant or not it didnt lose SOE players and a very very tiny percentage dint buy it of what was probably a 400-500k playerbase at that time.
As i said in another post i'm all for a staggered release let me grow accustomed to the ground game before adding space. I fully believe it will be with the majority of the JTL team on the Bioware team then it just has to be it would be a no brainer to use the guys who developed what IMO was not only a excellent SW space game but one of the best space flight games to date in JTL.