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TOR vs SWG; and what is hype?
BarakIII
Member Posts: 800
What is hype? Hype is simply high expectations. A game may or may not live up to those expectations, when they do not we say that game is over hyped. Hype is not the same thing as popularity or being well known.
Now every game has it's rabid fanbois and Star Wars more than most so the question becomes is TOR over hyped? Aside from those rabid fanbois, no I don't believe it is. Why? Well first off because the game is highly and constantly criticized and has been from the day it was announced. It has been criticized for anything from it's cartoonish art style to linear gameplay. Now most of this criticism comes from embittered MMO players who feel they have been shafted too often. Time and again they've gotten their hopes up only to have those hopes dashed, which btw, I feel is highly unhealthy to have such hopes in any form of entertainment. Add to that the abundant sandbox crowd on the MMORPG.com forums and this game may as well have a target painted on it.
But that criticism does not end here on these forums. If you go to the official forums and go thru youtube vidoes and the like and you'll find the game is highly criticized almost everywhere. Most of the fans, discounting rabid fanbois which exists for every game and is not unique to TOR, know what to expect from the game. More importantly they know what NOT to expect from the game.
So why is it TOR is constantly being accused of being over hyped and why is it so much more well known than SWG was at it's release? Well the answer to the first part of the question is because I think people are confusing popularity with hype. They are not the same thing. Star Wars is a popular and well known IP and Bioware is a popular and well known developer so that makes TOR a popular and well known title.
So if Star Wars is such a popular IP why wasn't SWG more popular and why didn't it have millions of followers. The answer is fairly simple and obvious but not one that most on these forums like to think about. First is the fact that when SWG was released MMOs were still a small and niche community thought to be the province of geeks. Then came World of Warcraft which brought MMOs into the mainstream. Were it not for this fact alone I don't believe TOR would be as well known as it now is.
EA has been accused of having all kinds of marketing schemes and that's why TOR is so popular, but that's not really true. EA hasn't marketed TOR in anyway that might be different from the marketing of other AAA titles. Not to mention that in the early years of development Bioware wasn't even owned by EA and yet the game was fairly well known from the start. Again, the marketing hasn't been anything out of the ordinary for a AAA title from a large company. They've gone to all the shows and whatnot and have done all the things you might expect to market the game so this alone can't account for the games popularity as an MMO. So what it boils down to is that first World of Warcraft brought MMOs into the mainstream, an advantage SWG didn't have; and secondly it's name recognition of not only Star Wars, but of Bioware as well. Those are the reasons SWG did not have the recognition or popularity that TOR now enjoys.
Comments
When WoW was released the game got a large following, not becasue it was a good game, but becasue there was a large amount of people that were Blizzard fans. After Warcraft 1, 2, 3 and Diablo 1, 2 there were a lot of fans who wanted the next big thing from Blizzard, hence WoW.
SWtor is exactly the same. Bioware has had a long series of successes and so it has developed a large fan base, these people are seeking the next big thing from Bioware. It does not matter if the game is good, it is about Bioware fans.
SWG had quite a bit of hype too, if you recall -- probably about as much as TOR does now. Granted, you have to take the size of the MMO world into consideration because the community was much smaller back then, but SWG was hugely popular amongst the MMO community just like TOR is today.
SWG was really successful too, initially, from a subscriber standpoint. What killed it wasn't lack of interest or populariy; it was because the game was unfinished and people were upset that SOE wasn't forthcoming about the original Jedi holocron system. When they found out what you needed to do, they were frustrated and angry. Then when SOE did their NCU and gutted the game, people were livid and left in droves.
So, while TOR has a larger following by sheer numbers, I disagree that SWG didn't have the advantage of hype/popularity because it certainly did. I believe at one time it had a larger population than the other big dogs (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot), so that was not the issue.
In MMO standards for the day SWG may have been popular, but TOR reaches a whole other level. Because of World of Warcraft people who previously would have never played an MMO began to play them. To some extent that will be true for TOR as well, but TOR has the advantage of releasing at a time when MMOs are no longer considered the province of geeks. And yeah maybe SWG had a large subscriber base for the time, what was it, something in the order of 500k at it's peak? TOR at this moment has 3 million people signed up for game testing. The volume of pre-orders also suggests a potentially very large population at release. Would either of those be true if it weren't for WoW? I don't think so. Yeah those could fall after the first month, but that's a topic for another debate and isn't my point here. I'm saying that TOR is reaching a mainstream audience that SWG never could in it's day simply because of how MMOs were veiwed at the time.
Hype = Unrealistic expectations.
~in a nut shell~
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Not really.
I would say hype = artificially generated and / or stimulated anticipation.
I'm hyped to HELL to play SWTOR, but my expectations are also very realistic.
there is no TOR vs SWG, SWG died along time ago, no brain activity, only kept alive on life support.
Let's please move on with SOE mistakes. SWG had a healthy population. The current dev team did a remarkable job fixing the NGE fail.
I have to agree "that" is hype.
There are a lot of people who have tried SWToR and are really psyched to play. Though I'm sure there are a lot of people who are in the "meh, what else do you have" camp.
We will have to wait and see.
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lol bioware has a large following. Who're you kidding ? This game is hyped because of the star wars geeks thats it if they were developing a non iconic IP MMO there would be 0 hype.
Please read my post before you make a comment on it. My thread isn't TOR vs SWG in terms of gameplay or anything like that, but rather it concerns the prerelease hype and/or popularity of both titles.
If that alone were true then SWG would have just as large of a following, but it didn't.
It's kind of hard for a game to be recognized or popular when it puts you to sleep and doesn't work half the time.
I can't speak for everyone else, but my interest in TOR started the very moment that it was announced that there would be another Star Wars MMORPG. I was not happy with the way SOE crapped all over Star Wars lore with SWG and thought the game was a total embarassment for the franchise from day one. So the very fact that the Star Wars franchise was getting another chance to have an MMORPG excited me because I really thought that SWG had killed any possiblity of that happening again.
Next thing of course was when Bioware was announced as the designer. I like many others enjoyed KOTOR and loved the thought of taking that concept to the next level. When it was announced that I would be leveling my character through missions with choice and voiceovers instead of the boring ritual of slaughtering wildlife for XP then naturally my interest went up even more.
Has Bioware been hyping their game? Yes they have. My question is, "So what?" Do you people expect a company to spend lots of money making a game and then not bother promoting it? I don't know what planet some people are living on, but marketing is a fact of life in every single thing you buy in a store. Name a product that isn't promoted in a store and chances are it doesn't sell.
What really gets at some people's goat on this site is the fact that a lot of the buzz for this has come not from Bioware but from people that have actually been playing the game at these events. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising there is and this game has gotten tons of it,mostly positive.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Your first sentence may be true but I was referring to prerelease hype or popularity.
Playing Kotor is also the source of my interest as well. I loved the Kotor series, even the buggy and incomplete second game. I blame LA for that never getting fixed btw. As I understand it Obsidian Entertainment wanted to fix the game but LA wouldn't let them.
It is indeed spreading a great deal through word of mouth. But again I have to give credit for that to World of Warcraft for bringing MMOs into the mainstream. WoW has had a lot of turnover and has brought many more players into the genre than the 11 million they currently have. Many of those players have gone on to play other MMOs and are now established MMO players. For better or wosre WoW has brought a lot of new players into the genre and I think TOR will bring in even more. But if WoW hadn't broken MMOs out of that niche mode I doubt that even TOR would have the popularity that it now enjoys.