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Bioware announces layoffs
Grand_Nagus
Member UncommonPosts: 335
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Grand_Nagus
Member UncommonPosts: 335
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V_V
My brand new bloggity blog.
Very sad for the people involved, but not really a suprise.
TOR is not a priority now, and wont be ever again.
Hmmm....
Whatever happened to "we'll be keeping the full team together after launch to continue improving the game" ?
Maybe I just have a bad memory, but I could have sworn that BW stated the above on more than one occasion...
Maintenance mod comes soon, exact same things are happening as with WAR. I am glad my prediciton was true, guess many TOR fanboys who flamed me all the time will now realise that TOR is going downhill fast.
This will actually be good for MMORPG genre, devs will realise they cant make lame WoW clones anymore and begin to innovate.
I just hope ppl learened their lesson and wont give money anymore to EA after all its we / you (since i m not buying their games) who keep EA and its crappy games alive.
look at the budget they had
they obviously dont really care.they wanted a quick cash grab and swtor was the way to get it
not to mention george lucas already said i think he wasnt gonna make anymore star wars movies.so the name "star wars"doesnt really hold any weight anymore to get people to play
Maybe TOR will be the last chapter in this book of generic theme-park carrot on a stick game design approach for mmo's. Or maybe not... But I cant see another company rounding up investors to drop this kind of cash on another mmo any time in the near future though, so itll probably be the last one of those any of us will see for a long long time.
meh,bioware wasnt a real good company in terms of making quality games anyway
yeah,they made some good rpgs like mass effect and stuff.but they were always crippled with bugs.but i figured in the long run this game wouldnt of lasted,i doubt its going to effect the future of mmos though.swtor wasnt a very good mmo
not to mention,if you look at how many mmos bioware has made.yeah,they havent made any outside of swtor.so thats one thing investors will probably look at,im fairly certain that investors have a different attitude then the crying masses you see on the swtor general discussion forums(oh and i mean the general discussion forums on swtor.com not here)
Sorry, but Devs havent learned anything
/inc The Elder Scrolls Online
Tried: EQ2 - AC - EU - HZ - TR - MxO - TTO - WURM - SL - VG:SoH - PotBS - PS - AoC - WAR - DDO - SWTOR
Played: UO - EQ1 - AO - DAoC - NC - CoH/CoV - SWG - WoW - EVE - AA - LotRO - DFO - STO - FE - MO - RIFT
Playing: Skyrim
Following: The Repopulation
I want a Virtual World, not just a Game.
ITS TOO HARD! - Matt Firor (ZeniMax)
i wouldnt put 100 percent of the blame of swtors downfall on the devs though
alot of people came in,and probably expected it to have years of content like there previous mmo.and honestly? they would of quit eather way.because they wanted world of starwarscraft,so they would of gotten bored if bioware would of gave them all the stuff anyway
I knew I wasn't imagining things...
This quote from James Ohlsen in an old Gamasutra interview:
"Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content."
Here's the link for those that are interested (be warned, it's a loooong article): http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134940/the_making_of_star_wars_the_old_.php?print=1
Plans change.
Hopefully they can "continue to focus on building content" with the now somewhat reduced team...
I find it disgusting that you are glad people are losing their jobs, especially in this day and age where they can be hard to come by. I also think it's arrogant of you to state that it's a WoW clone when it most certainly is not. Just because it uses tab targeting and hot bars does not a WoW clone make. Who the heck designated you as the spokesperson on what is innovative and what is not. What you find old and stagnant is what we call our favorite style of gameplay. There are a lot more of us out there than you realize who do not want "innovative / revolutionary" action style combat which can be found in the 75% over saturated market of first person shooters already.
I don't have anything personal against EA and I will continue to buy their games if I think I'll like them and I still like SWTOR. My only real gripe about the game is that the world structures are too railish. It works fine for the main storyline, but the rest of the game should be much more open, classes shouldn't be so rigid in design just because of cut scene continuity.
There's nothing wrong with not liking a game, for whatever reason, but there is absolutely no need to put down those who have diffferent tastes in content and play style other than your own. What really ticks me off to boot is that you guys are getting all kinds of "innovative games" releasing now and in the next year or two and yet you act pissy if every single game doesn't comply with your vision of the perfect game.
What his plans were and what EA's plans are must be two different things. Then again anything James Ohlsen said or ever will say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The EA fat cats are calling the shots now, not BW. When you sell to a major company like EA you lose control. What " you" want to do doesnt matter, unless it fits in with their bottom line.
I would love to believe this proves Devs cant make WoW clones but it looks like nothing short of the Mayan DoomsDay Apocalypse will change this. TESO and Copernicus are 2 new AAA titles to go the way of the WoW clone.
Everything you need to know about Elder Scrolls Online
Playing: GW2
Waiting on: TESO
Next Flop: Planetside 2
Best MMO of all time: Asheron's Call - The first company to recreate AC will be the next greatest MMO.
Sorry, but I can't help feeling like that.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Oh, it wasn't just that. It was this:
"While I can't give away exact numbers, I can say that we have plans for super success in the millions of subscribers... and then we have plans for if we have a much smaller subscriber base. While it would be great to get the kind of numbers that World of Warcraft gets, we don't have to come close to those in order to be wildly successful. We could be well below WoW and still be incredibly profitable."
[EA noted in February that the game will bring in a profit with 500,000 subscribers, and analysts expect the title to sell roughly 3 million copies within its first year of sale.]
Ohlen insists his goal isn't to beat WoW which, he says, is very much "a once-in-a-lifetime kind of game. While I'd love to compete with them, I'm fine with us just being successful and having our own niche. I don't think it's healthy for our team to be constantly comparing ourselves against another game. Especially since there's room in the market to have two big MMOs."
Current projections, he says, show enough success that BioWare is investing in the future and keeping the entire team of hundreds of people together.
"Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content."
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134940/the_making_of_star_wars_the_old_.php?page=3
You'll note that EA noted. That was added after the interview. BioWare thought they had a hit on their hands...
Nope. Can't bag on the change concept on things that are four years into development and beat on them for not learning the lesson BioWare just taught....
We're looking at transitional things, four and five years down the road... They'll be more fluid, more open, more engaging worlds... And not shameless cash-grabs.
My Guild Wars 2 First Beta Weekend "reviewette" : http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4944570/thread/349125#4944570
Ah yes, plans change...
Plan A: I can say that we have plans for super success in the millions of subscribers..
Plan B: and then we have plans for if we have a much smaller subscriber base
Looks like Plan B just got activated...
I really didn't follow SWTOR. I got to play on the closed beta through my LOTRO guild-leader's account some, but I didn't get a great feel for the limited nature of the game. A few hours here, a few hours there... I just didn't get how small it was...
But, when I burned out on LOTRO and then heard how much they spent on SWTOR. Plus when I heard them talk about how huge and open the SWTOR universe was supposed to be... With all these planets... I figured if they spent that kind of money there must be a huge amount of content and that there was at least two or three years worth of play in this game. That this would one of the hugest games ever in scope and content.
After all, they spent more money on SWTOR than Blizzard has spent on WoW.
Yet we got, what, 1/10th the game play? And what little we got was a joke. Mobs had little AI and unless you were completely inept, you could faceroll everything. Crafting that was worthless except Biochem and slicing. Kill 10 rats quests with huge dialogs that I had to skip the second, third, fourth times I went through them. A static environment full of graphic bugs, texture bugs, and what did work right was 2005 MMO level, not 2012.
I was off by a factor of 52. I look at the game and I " How could I be so far off? How could I get so little content for so much money?" Then I consider it's completely voice-acted and animated. That's hugely expensive. Even worse they tripled the cost as they completely re-wrote and re-animated the whole MMO into both French and German. VA and animation are brutally expensive. Not only did they do way too much, but they did way too much in THREE LANGUAGES.
That's where the money went. Fully voiced and fully animated dialog in three languages. No wonder there was no content...
So, no, I don't give them a break. They had the biggest MMO budget in the history of MMOs and they blew it. They blew so big it's like losing the Superbowl 56-7 blew it...
This is sad, always sad when people lose their jobs.
But I have to say...I really saw this coming from before SWTOR was even released in December. Back then I said that the game would sell well initially, but really start to fall apart within 6 months. And well...it's been about six months and look where we are.
IMO, this game died on the design table. It just is not designed for long-term appeal. It hung all its hope on "story" and hoped that people would want to play the same stories over and over again for years.
And I'm sorry, that's just a bad idea. Watching what is essentially a "rerun" is not what draws people back to playing video games over and over. Scripted storylines have like 0 replayability. I just found it baffling that they would base their MMORPG heavily around them.
If anything, I think SWTOR teaches us a lesson that we have learned with WAR, Rift, and Aion already...
Copying WoW and over-themeparkizing your game is a BAD idea.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
I hope it was the lead devs and managers at Bioware, and not the regular programmers and staff who get on with the work but don't make decisions.
SWTOR is dead because of the bad decisions of the people at the top. The bosses at Bioware SWTOR do not deserve a paycheck, and yes, they deserve to be fired and never work in the industry again.
Specifically, I hope the following were fired:
Gabe AmantakilleverygameIworkon
Erickson
Zoeller
Ohlen
Reid
Campbell
All their forum mods
SWTOR failed because it sucked. It was a total WoW rippoff and the devs freely admitted it. People are losing jobs because they made a sucky game. That is capitalism. Next time they won't make quite so crappy of a game. I'm glad to see that this pile of crap failed because future developers will take notice and they will stop making WoW clones that nobody wants to play.
Arma 2 is a top seller on steam because of an extremely innovative mod that is like nothing else out there. People want cool new stuff, not boring rehashes.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now!
I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
huh? because gw2 innovate the mmo genre?
gw2 is a warhammer-rift clone
its awesome bashing games we dont like but to do that u need to bash the flaws of ur own game.
gw2 brings nothing new to the table everything is deja vu except the trinity wich seriously the hardcore wont like it.