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SWTOR - A victim of escalation of commitment?
Creslin321
Member Posts: 5,359
First, a definition. Escalation of commitment occurs when a group is working on a project, and at some point in the project it becomes clear that things aren't going well or maybe even the project's original direction is fundamentally flawed, but instead of stepping back and rethinking things, the group just throws more resources at the project in the hope that things will just "work out." This may sound stupid, but it's a relatively common problem. When a group has worked on a project for a long time and invested a lot of resources, sometimes it's tough to admit that mistakes were made early on and rethink things...it can be much easier in the short term to just try to "power through" your difficulties by escalating your commitment to the project.
Now onto SWTOR....
The more I look at SWTOR, the problems it's having, and the solutions that its devs are proposing...the more I think that it was a victim of escalation of commitment. For example, myself, and many others brought up the concern that BW"s strategy of making "fully voiced" a flagship feature of the game was problematic in the long-term because it would make creating additional content very cost prohibitive...and in a subscription themepark MMORPG that lives and breathes on content additions...this is not a good thing. And now we hear that (surprise surprise) SWTOR's additional content won't be fully voiced.
I really think that at some point during SWTOR's development, its management had to realize at least on some level that this was a big potential problem. But instead of stepping back and rethinking things, they just threw more and more resources at the game and plowed forward.
The same can really be said for many of SWTOR's shortcomings such as the single player space combat, the gameplay that apes WoW just a bit too much, and the really half-assed open world PvP. I really feel like at some point in the middle of the project, the devs probably realized that these ideas were all not as good as they seemed at the onset of the project, but basically just chose to plow forward with a flawed concept instead of stepping back and rethinking things.
In the end, I really think SWTOR would have been better off with a more iterative development process. All of these systems and ideas should have been prototyped and thoroughly tested, with the knowledge that if it doesn't work, it will be scrapped. And I think this is important...devs really need to be willing to scrap their ideas if they turn out to not work once you see them "in game." But I feel like with SWTOR, the developer just plowed forward with their original ideas regardless of if they "worked" or not.
Thoughts?
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Comments
Good points. Totally agree. I am just blown away that the developers did not see the rising importance of the space bar in playing, and therefore re-evaluated their "one trick". People want to play the game, not be played by the game.
Imagine what could have been if they had saved 70% of the cost of the voice-overs and spent that on game systems to truely make a Star Wars universe instead of a reskinned Wow (minus).
While I can see where you're coming from with this, I just don't think Bioware had the server/game engine structure that would allow them to be iterative in a quick cost-effective manner.
Totally agree. Voice was never a big draw for me, of course I got into MMO's very early after being into MUD's, so I can easily have fun with none in a game. Too many gamers nowadays are so obsessed with the eye candy and gimmicky features, when they should be asking for deep gameplay and advanced AI. It's like we've stepped backwards in quality and very few seem to realize anymore how an MMO is supposed to play.
I agree, I am a monster KOTOR fan and a violently retarded Star Wars fan, so ya, I'm a huge fan, and I got months of play out of the stories.
Having played out all of the stories, I wound up a victim of the almost over zelous focus on "story telling", albeit much later than the space bar comandos, I still after 6 months got there.
Then you are faced with the pvp mini games, raids or dailies, I like my pvp open world and not in mini game format. I like checking out the group content, who didn't like seeing Revans cheesey beard, but I dont like forming up and running them over and over for the chest piece of destruction every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
There in lies the problem with the escalation of commitment, they put all their proverbial eggs in one very heavily financed basket, now no one wants to keep paying for it.
I feel bad for the folks at Bioware Austin, because after seeing that interview the new GM, he is clearly focused on adding raids and more BG's because he can't continue by spending even more millions for voice acting and game-wide cinimatic cut scenes.
The cheap content aka cost effective, is just to do the BG's and Raids and maybe another space mission mini game, but that's the very thing killing off the hopes of ever growing out of this rutt they are in.
The endless list of gripes is almost trivial and petty compared to the very stark reality that the game they created is to expensive to maintane. They have no way to do anything but linger, they will scale back and do ok with 500 thousand active, but they will never get back to 2.5 million plus people, and several hundred servers with ques.
The big picture was what got missed by the development team, people got fired because other people lost several hundred million dollars, not because it was time to move on to greener pastures. YOU CAN NOT MAKE AN MMORPG WITH AN ENDING.
I disagree. First off, your idea is flawed in my opinion because all the way till launch the developers where very confident that story and voice would be unique and would be so great that they would have time to add the staples of mmo gameplay in at a later date(i.e worthwhile minigames, good space, world pvp, shifting objectives, dynamic events, customization, guild functions and on and on).
I don't think at any point pre launch Daniel Erickson was ever saying "man, we may be screwed". I really believe they believed in their innovation to the very end. So instead of escalation of commitment, I think it was more a case of self deception lol(like when you make a decision, and then you see your decision is not going to work, but somehow you convince yourself you where right all along until you fail)
In fact, I did it the other day. I loaned my ladder out, and didn't know my brother brought it back, so when my old lady told me the lights in the garage where dead, I grabbed paint buckets from the side of the house to stack up and stand on lol. When my old lady said I was going to fall and that I should use the ladder(that was back lol), I told her I was fine, and to go cook me some dinner(I didn't really say that, as I'm housebroke), but I was already convinced my plan to stack 5, 5 gallon paint cans on eachother would be stable. I'm not going to finish the story, as obviously I was effing dumb.
I think bioware was truly shocked when 3 months in, everyone was wondering where the other three pillars where at, and why so much emphasis was put on their "fourth pillar, story"
Just my opinion, I guess we won't know, until 10 years down the road and we get an interview from one of the head developers where they can be open about all of it.
Ahnog
Hokey religions are no replacement for a good blaster at your side.
Good points. I too think the fully voiced everything made this game impossible to keep fresh. It took them so much money and so much time to deliver this type of questing experience in an mmo. Then they tell us that they are going to keep all the staff after launch and deliver this same level of content every six weeks. As much as I wanted to believe them, deep down I knew this was an unrealistic goal.
Its a shame. The questing in this game is very well done. But at the expense of sacrificing other crucial game systems and trying to maintain an impossible content delivery schedule. I don't think ultimately it was worth the effort.
Maybe f2p will save the day. At least if its viewed as a f2p lobby game, the expectations may come in line with the product.
Oh really? Do you even have an idea how much the voice-overs actually cost?
[mod edit]
meh, not worthy...
No it's not the fact is they made a horrible attempt at a mmo and 90% agree , unless you got another reason why most players left . ?
It sounds to me like a management failure of bringing all the parts together into a final package that met the design goals. That might fit with the OPs premise, or possibly it was just fumbled late in the game, too late to be saved before release.
I have doubts that the technology framework was up to speed. Zone capacities of hundreds of players seems extremely low. Even Indies can match that.
edit: kant spel
I really like fully voiced game. This was never the problem in my opinion. Voice adds a lot to the immersion. However, the problem was how it was implemented:
Too many side quests had very long and rather dull cut scenes. If I had been designing the quests, I would have kept the interactive cut scenes for the main quests, the class quests, and perhaps for some key events on the planets you visit. However, I would have used short voice overs without cut scenes for most of the side quests. This would mean that you get an unique, short voice message from NPCs handing out these quests, you would get a simple popup on your screen while listening that would allow you to accept or decline the quest. This works very well in many games.
I also would have implement a sort of Galactic Mission terminal, that would give you an endless supply of randomly generated side quests without any need for voice overs or cut scenes, these could have been very similar to the ones you can send your companions off to and reward you with resources, recipes, alignment and XP.
The thing I did not like was how similar the planets were. They all followed exactly the same formula where you had the main quest chain for the planet, your class quests and a number of side quests. You followed the path littered with quest hubs until you got to the end...only to be offered another boring series of bonus quests. The structure how these planets and zones were build felt artificial, set pieces and why so many also complained that the game world felt lifeless. There were very few things in the planets that did not have a predefined purpose.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
Sorry but SW:TOR just did not feel like an mmo for me.
I was way to linear with nothing to do beside the story/quests.... the game world was to instanced and did not feel like an online world to play in.
The fact they gave you nothing to do in the game beside the quests/chase the carrot for gear/pvp on a few maps just killed it.
If SW:TOR had just some form of this it would not be dying now and in such poor shape.
Played: MCO - EQ/EQ2 - WoW - VG - WAR - AoC - LoTRO - DDO - GW/GW2 - Eve - Rift - FE - TSW - TSO - WS - ESO - AA - BD
Playing: Sims 3 & 4, Diablo3 and PoE
Waiting on: Lost Ark
Who's going to make a Cyberpunk MMO?
Because it is just normal and result of market competition that all games released in recent years have high release numbers that diminish over time? And because you would unlikely find a game with +50% retention rate?
Thanks for proving my point but it is really not worthy....
I don't think it's important how much exactly it costs, but do you? Can you definitively say that the additional cost is negligible? We're not only talking about paying voice actors here. There's also additional development involved to implement these voices into cutscenes.
But with regards to escalation of commitment, EA funded the project and maybe they're the ones who are unwilling to give Bioware the needed time to go back into the drawing board.
The burden of proof is on your shoulders, you are making the claim.
And yes, I have an idea how much voice-over costs because I did make an effort to get at least some, not saying correct, picture.
So, basically... SWG?
Something like this is what I thought they originally had in mind for the crafting/grathering missions which would have been really neat. Instead it was select a mission and a NPC to do it and wait around until a behind the scenes dice roll determines if you get stuff back or not.
The Enlightened take things Lightly
Lol diminish over time you must be on about another game swtor barely got outta the gate and fell flat on it's face .
Despite what you think, my point still stands...so, um...yeah...w/e...