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Main reason why SWTOR flopped?
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This is pretty much what I thought would kill it when I first heard what they were trying to do with SWTOR. I still think the concept was flawed from the start, WoW but with lightsabers and voice-overs. They obviously can't make a better WoW then WoW. They absolutely failed to see that. WoW-clone for the lose. Voice-overs are a pretty minor feature to MMO-players, it doesn't replace the features that make a real MMO in the end. I'm sure it's blattantly clear to most by now.
The players... us... That is the main reason. The market have been saturated and is now mostly made up of people who don't look for a long time commitment to their gaming, this is no problem in the normal market but the MMO space suffers a lot form this. Combine this with the fact that the "elite" core of players who do seek long term gaming want their game to give them all they are familiar with but still be new and fresh.
Yeah... The reason it "flopped" is beyond any doubt us.
Not saying it si a bad thing, the MMO space need to go through it's growing phases just like any other market. And a vital part of this is the consumer making demands (as tiresome and annoying as it is) and the market responding to this. For Bioware i think this was all in all a very sucsessful move, they did try something new and it was not what the majority of the market wanted it would seem. Could it have been done better, depends on who you ask and what their particular cup of tea is. Some will say it is the best ever and others will say it is the second comming of the anti-christ, but they are PvPers so who cares.=P
Anyway it will from now on be my subscriptionbased fallback game. Something my fiancee and i can enjoy without feeling like we "have" to find people to interact with. We can enjoy the story and make out own way through the world.
This have been a good conversation
SWTOR had the best pve imo. It was actually cool to watch some of the cinematics. You say everything was mediocre but what are you comparing it to? What MMO has questing like SWTOR with movie scenes? Sounds like you are just bashing to bash. SWTOR had some good points but in the end the serious lack of good PVP killed it for many players. If people wanted to just play the same 4 Warzones over and over they can go back to WoW and do that plus more. They needed to implement a good open pvp system that gave players reasons to keep going back out there to attack or defend positions. Ilum had the most horrendous open pvp I have ever seen. A bunch of people running around in circles, LOL what a joke.
"I'm sorry but your mmo has been diagnosed with EA and only has X number of days to live."
I agree with you to some point. TOR have great PvE but just the soloplaying parts.
It is the multiplayer part with cooperation, group dynamics and PvP it fails at. And most people don't want to pay a monthly fee to solo.
Lord knows Star Wars fans don't have a lot of experience with intelligent, well-written science fiction. But if you can't do that sort of thing well, then you should just push the story into the background and focus on something different. Gameplay. PvP. Action combat. Housing. Player-driven economy. Anything.
First of all I don't like this modern "cutscene every minute" thing even in single player crpg's. For me Mass Effect gameplay is horrid and Swtor is transalting that game design to mmorpg.
I am comparing cutscenes to other game with cutscenes AND what is most important to movies & books. If they REALLY want to make game feel like movie (which imo is not good idea but whatever) then they better provide stories and cutscenes of same quality.
Yet their dialogies writing and overall feel was like from those family movies for 10 year old mixed with some C class, cheesy, champagne comedies or grotesque. It was painfoul to watch. Sorry not interested in that.
Unless game's movie cutscenes can match those of for example Game of Thrones for fantasy or Blade Runner / Ghost in The Shell movie for sc-fi then I am not really interested.
Even then I would propably prefer to watch a movie instead of playing game with VO cutscene every minute.
I don't care if other mmo's do or do not have questing with movie scenes cause I don't care about movie scenes.
Well I could care and it could add to gameplay if it woule be great cutscene that would pop up RARELY and would show something really important. Like it was done in BG - there were few cutscenes there but they showed really important bits.
For me Swtor is like taking linear modern gameplay from single player games that is about linear tunneled gameplay with cutscene at 'every corner' - I don't like that design so.
I am not bashing just to bash. Just really expressing my own feelings.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
I disliked the classes mostly.
First every class is a petclass, which means every class is balanced around being a petclass --> boring abilities.
Ok, they wanted to go for the classical holy trinity themepark MMO. I could have rolled with that. i happen to LIKE well done holy trinity games. The thing is if you do holy trinity themepark your going to get compared to WoW, because they did it very well. They offered real meaningful options, my Warlock played nothing like my firemage. A warrior was incomparible to a Paladin even if both where in dps spec. A druid was nothing like a priest or shaman. Just thinking about how big the difference was between specs ... a frostmage was a totally different beast than a fire or arcane mage. Or my druid ... from feral to balance to restoration, it was like playing a completely different class.
In SWTOR ... what again was the difference between my scoundrel and a commando? Played pretty much the same as far as i can recall: send in pet, nuke, heal pet. Sorc played like that too. How was the gunslinger different? Oh yeah: send pet in, nuke, cry because you can't heal pet.
There just isn't anything in this game as satisfying as: Pyroblast, Fireball, Dragon's Breath, Fireball, Blast Wave --> cackling manically. There was just something so beautiful in that ... being a glascannon that only relies on its damage as protection, no pets, no armor, no heals ...
Edit: What i tried to say is i get bored pretty fast if i only play one class. So if i get tired of a class and log to another and that one plays exactly the same ... i get burned out of the game pretty fast.
It didnt fail as a game for me, it just failed as a mmorpg. I still think it's a nice game and I had fun playing the storylines that I did and never felt like I wasted money.
Why it failed as a mmorpg for me? There's no reason to go back to "cleared" planets. Either the game should not have player levels to avoid this, or they should have max level content on every planet. I'd go with the no levels, since it would potentially have every inch of the game as end-game content more or less (you dont need levels to progress, tons of other ways to progress).
Other reason is that everything in this game is kind of directed, there's no content at all where you just go somewhere and find something to do, if you dont have "officially" something to do you kinda have no purpose to go naywhere untill you add something to your quest log unless you just want to grind materials or rares. This would have been better if only the main storyline was handheld, but other content would have been more like WAR PQ's or the latest incarnation GW2 events, or something similar, but not all of it, there could have been all kinds of exploration carrots too (besides the crons) or reasons to just go out there.
There's so much to say that I really dont even care to go there since it is what it is. It's not a bad game, but it's kinda a bad mmorpg on todays standards (it still beats WoW for me since the group quests and social points, WoW is solo from lvl1-85) It works just fine for me storyline wise, and I will for sure go back when the agent story continues, but there's really no mmorpg/open world features for me to stick with it as a long term commitment.
If this were true then MMO players are a dying breed and there is no hope for MMO's. I assume you ment 30 days instead of months.
It may be a good game, but it's not a good MMO. It's all hung up on story and when the story is over, the game is over. It's basically still the SPG BW has been making for years, but forced into something it's not, an MMO.
Yeah, and even then it is not true. Most Wow players started with Wow and have been playing it for years.
TOR have too little massive content to really be worth the monthly fees, it should have been B2P instead and the game would have been a huge hit. Of course they would had to save some money on the expensive voice acting to pull that off.
Blaming the players for not staying at a game is not really fair, good MMOs have a way of hooking people as much today as they did in the beginning. A MMO must feel like a MMO or people don´t want to pay the monthly fees.
You can't call a came that made profit a flop. Just stating that real quick.
But to run with your premise, it's simple :
The Market (That is..you..and me..and everyone else on this forum.)
We're faaar too picky, and expect way too much of *new* mmos. Until we get over that every game will "flop". Perhaps the lessons of Rift and SWTORwill lower expectations to a realistic level. If they haven't..GW2 will "flop" too, and TSW will..etc..etc
Yes, you can call it a flop. They basically preyed on the hopes and expectations of Star Wars fans (and MMO fans, really), got a load of preorders, etc., and put out a single-player game that did nothing to stray from the KotOR model. They ripped people off, and put out a poor MMO.
When profits need to be brought into the argument when arguing whether a game is good or not, then it's not a good game.
The argument should be that the game has exceptional mechanics, questing, PvE or PvP, etc. and that it grips you and pulls you in and makes you want to keep coming back for more... not that it sold 1 or 2 million copies.
And to the notion that MMO gamers expect too much - that's a load of crap. If you want us to shell out $50 for a game and continue to shell out $15 each month to keep playing, you'd better make certain that you're providing a quality product and not just rushing something out the door, then moving 50% or more of the dev team to a different project.
These companies need to start showing some freaking pride in what they're creating.
Most of modern mmorpg's are not enough mmo's.
They just stand at between co-op / single and / or instanced-lobby gameplay and mmorpg-massive experience.
Devs just have to decide - we do either single player or lobby co-op or mmorpg and then do it.
If they do some kind of half-assed thing that is neither of above - then they will flop and flop and flop. Cause game won't be good single player, won't be good co-op / multiplayer and won't be good massive experience mmorpg either.
In example if EA-BW would do single player Kotor 3 instead - they would have much better success.
Or If they would do Swtor as a co-op instanced lobby like DDO - on B2P model - much better success.
Or alternatively if they would fo full-fledged massive mmorpg experience - isntead of trying to mix single player / co-op cutscene ridden 'something' into it - they would have bigger shot at success.
Instead they tried to merge all 3 of above and here's the result.
Easy. They thought they could turn a single player game into an MMORPG by just running it on central servers. They failed.
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Yeah basically this they forgot to diddle with their MMO parts.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
They made a profit? Says who? They recovered the cost of TOR (with interest) and actually made a profit? When did that happen? Just asking that real quick.
Oh and how much did EA pay to acquire BW, a studio they were never interested in before they announced SWTOR? What's that? $860M? How much of that sum was recovered when they made that neat little profit on SWTOR?
and yet, Rift, Aion, Tera, etc... all use 3rd party engines. I don't disagree at all that the Hero Engine is an issue, but to say only good MMOs use their own engine is simply false.
Of course it has flopped, all one has to do is look at www.torstatus.net. Heck all one has to do is log in and do a head count to verify that the population has dropped on all but a few servers. Honestly just go to the server selection page and take a look. Five months after launch and you have that many empty servers. The populations gotten so low on 90% of the servers. I know that they are supposed to be getting server transfers, and mega servers however that still does not fix what is wrong with the game.
What happened is we got kotor 3, what should have been a single player game with some online co-op was billed as an mmo. However they ea/bioware forgot to fix the mmo part of it. The re-playability part of it got old as the side quests are really boring, and some of the personal stories are really lacking as well. Then they added the legacy part, in hopes that people would grind out that massive money pit to unlock those features, and with 1.3 header our way with nothing but more legacy and possible server merges, how do they hope to keep most folks subscribbed up.
I keep hearing some of the defenders running around saying they made their money, where is the links to those facts, does anybody have a link to an ea financial statement, or is all that just made up, with pure conjecture. I would really love some real data to back those statements up that ea is running in the clear on this game. Honestly I actually challenge ea to give us that information (not that is going to happen) as I expect we will get more damage control and spin on the topic.
All in all the game has flopped, the population shows it. At the end of the day they will still have a player base just like swg had, but it is nowhere the wow killer, and is nowhere the footprint that ea had hoped to carve out of the mmo industry.
At over $200mil and the worlds most recognized and celebrated IP in the world, it's worse than a flop. More more kin to a beached whale.
And, what profit? Please don't give me the new math on box sales and there's no cost of doing business being taking out of that "profit".
The main reason star wars failed in my eyes is a combination of a few things, however to me and to real MMO players not solo artists, they are big issues.
One- Lack of versatility in leveling content. Once you've leveled in the world, you either switch factions or deal with the fact that you have to continually see the same content over and over.
Two- Lack of meaningful grouping. MMO's Inherently are meant for grouping, you are not THE ONE, You are one of a million. The world is supposed to be bigger than you and harsher and you have to make allies and friends to survive. Swtor made it so that you could do anything but Flashpoints and raids by yourself because of your companion. The companion system is the same as a mercenary system in other games, those systems are not meant for games with healthy populations because it takes away the need to group and socialize. Hence the game was set to fail before it even started.
Three- Not enough leveling content causing too short of a leveling time. You could level from 1-50 be raid geared and raiding in less than your free month, some even had the first raid defeated. Most MMO's you needed 3-6 months playing 5 hours or more a day to reach Max level back in the day, and that was if you werent side tracked.(even back then the hardcore levelers pulling 18 hours a day hit max level fast, but in SWTOR any MMO noob could do it that fast as well with 3 or less hours a day of play.) It is not about the destination but the journey. Due to the lack of content and the wasting of money and time in features that were just annoyances(Voice over and choice conversations etc.) They ran out of money to create meaningful, bountiful leveling content, and worlds truly worth exploring.
These Three things destroyed SWTOR before it even started.
Yea, if you had to deal with the actual cost of having the kinds of internet connections that Bioware is using for SWTOR, and the cost of the server boxes, you'd probably pee yourself.
The fact is SWTOR is, in fact, a "Beached Whale" due to the IP & company who developed the title. It proved people aren't looking for Linear Quest-Driven Themeparks anymore. People want depth & freedom, and SWTOR did not provide any of the two.
I'm looking forward to the sandbox titles coming out in the next 5years
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with more time it will surely flop, lol. wether by player base or EA pulling the plug. I didn't like it because it just didn't feel like a starwars game. i'd say they should have used a different engine and maybe ultimately make it into a 3rd person MMOFPS of sorts, because getting shot by 30 lazer blasts and thermal detonators should be overkill, regardless of level. it just didn't feel like star wars, it felt like another gear/stat sensitive RPG.
Tab targeting is the main culprit for me but really I believe is is impossible to beat WoW on WoW's terms. What I mean is, you cant make a game thats really similar to WoW and have it be as good. It's been worked on for 12+ years now and it has so much money behind it that no tab targeting quest based game can ever hope to beat it.
Remember Old School Ultima Online