Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
The Old Republic versus SWG-pre-NGE
Ihmotepp
Member Posts: 14,495
The Old Republic does not look like it will be a sandbox game. I don't think hte developers have stated otherwise. They are going to give you a great story, and NPC voices, and multiplayer NPC dialog, which ads up to Themepark, not Sandbox.
So, they aren't trying to build SWG pre-NGE or anything like it.
The question is, if you did like SWG pre-NGE are you willing to try TOR, think it will be any fun, or just going to pass and wait for some sort of sandbox game?
What benchmark will show that TOR is much more successful than SWG pre-nge, if indeed it ever is?
Comments
No, they are not trying to make SWG-pre-NGE. They are making a new game, not remaking an old. And any Star Wars fan should be willing to at least try TOR, whoopdy do, it's not your dear, loved pre-NGE. It's new, it's different. If you want to go play SWG pre-NGE look for SWGEmu or something of the sort, it's your best bet.
____________________________
Telthalion Rohircil - Guardian - Elemandir - Lord of The Rings Online
---
== RIP == Torey - Commando - Orion - Tabula Rasa == RIP ==
---
Jordaniel Torey - Navy Megathron, Active Armor Tank - Tranquility - EVE Online
---
Torey Scott - Rifleman - Fallen Earth
____________________________
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein
I´m a Star Wars fan, and i loved preCU SWG, but to be honest, I have played very few Star Wars games. What made me interested in SWG was what you could do, the freedom and options you had. I also liked what I heard about the rule set. The Star Wars setting was a bonus, but not the reason I started to play it. I think I will pass on SW:TOR, as what I heard and seen about this game so far dont really appeal to me. My opinion may change when we got to know more about it.
You're looking in the wrong places. Don't look at the hype and features being plastered all over the news. Look at the previous work done by Bioware. Mass Effect, and Kotor let you develop your character like a true RPG should (never played Bioshock). Expanding the work on these games into an MMO would give you a sandbox game, not a themepark. Although there is some linear progression due to there being a story. If you don't trust Bioware's work that's fine, just don't belittle it to death based on a few features thrown out to entice people. Imagine having missed out on SWG pre-CU based on the previous SW single player games. Based on you're signiture, you are more likely headed to CO than SW:TOR anyways, so why bother hating it? I'm waiting on better news about crafting before I put the game on my hate list (not that I bother to give a damn about games I don't like).
Hopefully you'll be able to cut through all of the "This isn't pre-cu, stop comparing, blah blah (insert useless whining here)" bullcrap to get to answers to the question you actually asked. (Edit: Only 1 post like this so far?! Come on, haters, you're slacking!
)
I'm in the demographic you specified. I played SWG from day 2 after launch to April 2006, 6 months after the NGE was launched. I've played a coupld of free trials since then, but have not given a dime to SOE or LA since April 2006 (and wouldn't have spent anything past November if I hadn't had my best friend with me - she kept me going as long as I did). I started playing SWG because I was, and still am, a HUGE Star Wars fan. Not to the point where I've applied to the 501st or dress up as Yoda for Halloween, but I do love Star Wars immensely. I did notice the distinct lack of Star Wars in the game, and as a Rebel I cheered the Imperial Crackdown as it was supposed to bring more of an oppressed feel to the game if you weren't an Imperial. All that said, I fell in love with the game because of the sheer freedom. And I fell completely out of love with it when they took that freedom away. Not to mention, the devs now have the attitude of cram-as-much-Star-Wars-as-possible-down-your-throat, instead of delivering an intelligent experience. It's like going to a sundae bar, where the bartender just takes too much of everything and piles it on your sundae because he's pandering to you and thinks the idea is sweeter is better - it's confusing to look at, it's even more confusing to experience, and the whole thing leaves you wondering just what the hell WAS that?!
All that said, while TOR screams of themepark, I will absolutely play it, or at least give it a shot. First, the original KOTOR games were basically themeparks, and I loved those. Second, this one shouldn't start one way and end up another, as SWG did. Last, the sandbox wasn't the be-all-end-all of SWG. I know, heresy, but hear me out. The problem was, they didn't trust their players. SWG attracted a more intelligent breed of gamer. At least, it retained that type of player. Of course you still had leet kiddies, and some of them even stuck around, but the average player actually wanted to be there, and not just to "pwn". The experience was what completed it, though. SWG is still, technically, a sandbox. It's a sandbox that they removed most of the toys from, one where there's miles and miles of nothing but... sand. They built a road in that sand, made it look like Mardi Gras, and left the rest of the landscape barren and worthless. They decided they knew better than their players as to what a Star Wars game should be, and instead of providing them with a Star Wars experience, they just nuked parts of it to the ground and put a Six Flags Wookiee Barfland in its place. If Bioware takes a measured approach to the game and designs its assets, mini-games, etc. around a central theme, they'll do fine.
There's a sucker born every minute. - P.T. Barnum
I played SWG before the village and while I do miss that state of the game I will be giving Bioware's SWTOR a try.
Well I'm part of the demographic your asking so I guess I'll answer. Its pretty easy to tell that ToR is gonna be a theme park MMO, everything Bioware has done is Theme Park, its their style, they are awesome Game Developers, but they are a company that want to write a crazy good Starwars MMO, with an amazing story driven background, quests to keep you entertained for days, and progression to keep your character going. I have no doubt they will do this, all of their stuff is amazing, but they do not make Sandbox games, they have no intention of building a seamless Starwars world where you can learn any skills and abilitys you want just by training and gaining experience in that particular area of expertise, where players run the full economy including the markets, hospitals, cantinas, and towns themselves. They want you to love and enjoy THEIR game, the story they put in for your entertainment, the boss battles they strategized, gaining levels so you can get the next rank or low and behold a whole new skill, and then once your done with that, you can waste your time throwing yourselves agianst one another in PvP battles.
So anyways, they make awesome games I will play it untill I beat all the PvE content then quit like I have every other Theme park game, I'm sure it will be fun and enjoyable, Bioware isnt one to let down, but it wont be lasting enjoyment. I'll keep waiting untill a company makes a game they like, make well, and then let lose on the gaming world for the players to enjoy, change, and do with what they will, but untill then its just theme park after theme park.
Sometimes I do wonder if GMs watch Arenas, Battlegrounds, and any other highly PvP spot just so they can watch and laugh that they get people to pay for a game where they get to the end, and then continue playing just to fight each other uselessly, accomplishing nothing. Waiting for Devs to throw them just scraps of a patch that gives them a little new content to ravish and then its back to the pvp.
Mess with the best, Die like the rest
I nearly pissed on myself when i read that part!
The first part of your post is directed to those pre-NGE SWG lovers who insist TOR must be the identical, of which I know of none and think to be a reputed and villified creature of purely mythical existence, so I consider that part irrelevant and have deleted it in this quote accordingly, to get to the meat of your question.
Did I like pre-NGE SWG? Hell yeah. As faulty, broken, and perpetually FUBAR as it was, hell yeah.
Am I willing to try TOR? Hell yeah.
Do I think it will be any fun? I suspect it will, time will tell the truth of it, however. Next dev to go overboard about the "fourth pillar" will be tarred and feathered, however.
Am I going to pass TOR by and instead wait for a sandbox game? No, at least, not unless TOR sucks.
What benchmark will show that TOR is the more successful SW franchise MMO? 500K+ subs will be my benchmark.
SWG Veteran and Refugee, Intrepid server
NGE free as of Nov. 22, 2005
Now Playing: World of Warcrack
Forum Terrorist
Well, after SWG and after the last 3 SW movies and the refusal to sell the original trilogy, unedited in a high quality format, I'm not inclined to give Lucas another penny.
Also I'm aware that TOR has nothing in common with SWG. Tor will be more like WoW than like SWG. However thats not saying it won't be fun to play.
Upshot is I'd try a free trial.
If you liked the Knights of The Old Republic RPG's that Bioware released, then you will like TOR. If you like Star Wars in general, and love a good story and well fleshed out characers, then you'll like TOR. If you are expecting SWG with better graphics you'll be really disappointed.
I think Bioware will make an excellent story driven game myself but I'm not expecting anything revolutionary. I'm hoping it will at least do what WoW intended to do. Take the successful bits and pieces of mmo's released (before and after WoW) and combine them into a well polished fun to play game. Take the best concepts from games like AoC, WAR, LoTRO, and all the others that came before and polish them up into a nice package with a great story and characters you give a shit about. Most importantly something to do once you've finished levelling.
How about when your Character has finished leveling and finished the Storyline it dies? This forces you to start again or leave the game, no more whining about more content or having to do the same end-game raid over and over. You finish the game and your character at the same time. Innovative, hey?
Not really, this is a RPG, no one even thinks of the game immersion that MMO's used to have, now they are merely games for fun and money, its supposed to be about living the life of another character in a mystical land be it fantasy or scifi, you cant just go killing your character because you completed the last PvE content in a THEME PARK MMO. You kno I waited years and years for WoW to be the most amazing MMO, and it was at the start, now if I could take it back I would, it did nothing but ruin the MMO community, WoW did to MMOs what CounterStrike did to FPSs, turned them all into a bunch of tools.
Mess with the best, Die like the rest
I was one of the ones who played the NGE SWG version. It didnt last long.
I will be playing this game because i enjoyed Kotor 1 and 2. Bioware i feel will do a good job.
Played : WOW, LOTRO, COH/COV, EQ2, SWG, and WAR.
Playing EVE Online and AOC.
Wtg for SW:TOR and WOD
ah, yes but Life includes Death - does it not? To die and then rez is unrealistic. I do understand it is a fantasy, and that having your character die after so much work would be frustrating but without character death it will never be truly realistic. My idea was only an idea and I knew it would not be popular but it was an answer to the charge that once you cap out and do the end-game the game becomes boring.
Honestly SWG had a poor engine. Its only saving grace was its class system and craftign system (JTL rates as my best x-pack ever, as it did not hurt the orginal game and provided an entire new game to experience that world in).
I loved SWG tho , but if they do TOR well then of course ill try it.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I don't think there will be a reasonable measure by which to draw a success conclusion between the two games. Ever. The MMO crowd in 2003 was much smaller than the total population now. While the crowd is mush larger, the patience factor in the average MMO player for a quality/polished game has decreased by a factor of 10. That being said, I loved SWG both pre and CU. Honestly, the CU months were my hayday in SWG, thought there were a few things I missed dearly from pre, being mostly doc'ing in medical centers and cantinas, which at least they brought back to the forefront later on (the cantinas, hospitals are dead). The NGE has fixed some things from it's original incarnate, but the fact remains that with *every single patch* they screw yet another player. The game was never balanced, and with the NGE being their god send, they still have yet to bring balance to the game. It seems whatever class they attempt to balance every three months is the class that uber's out until the next patch when they nerf the hell out of them. Check the forums this month for Spy if you are curious. SOE completely screwed the game up more times than can be counted, and this is aside from the CU and NGE fiascos. SOE could never commit to anything when it came to SWG. Quitting for good a little over two years ago, I read the forums and find that nothing has changed.
TOR, I am more than willing to play TOR. I think from a numbers standpoint, yes it will be more successful than SWG. In terms of market share, well that number has grown exponentially, on that one we will see. I think SOE considered SWG a great success until wow blew the doors off expectation. They paniced and never recovered from that one. To this day I wish they had paniced with EQ2, but instead they found a way to make that one work without destroying the player base.
TOR *will* be a success. Will we like it if we expect koster, probably not. I mean he is working on a social networking browser based 2d thing right now, so there is no koster to be seen in MMO game space at the moment. We might even enjoy the bleeping thing if we set our expectations to Biowarez rather than something 4 years lost. I think bw will nail their market and their goals. Whether or not they have something interesting enough to garner multi-year subs is another thing. I think SWG was very good at getting multi-month or annual subs in the early days. So the measure of success between the two could come in forms of measurement. Unit sold, subs kept, player retainment, or new player meeting old player drop-off. You tell me? Personally, I think the sales of month one will be amazing. A year after? We'll see...
Played (more than a month): SWG, Second Life, Tabula Rasa, Lineage 2, Everquest 2, EvE, MxO, Ryzom.
Tried: WoW, Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, Everquest, WWII Online, Planetside
Beta: Lotro, Tabula Rasa, WAR.
ah, yes but Life includes Death - does it not? To die and then rez is unrealistic. I do understand it is a fantasy, and that having your character die after so much work would be frustrating but without character death it will never be truly realistic. My idea was only an idea and I knew it would not be popular but it was an answer to the charge that once you cap out and do the end-game the game becomes boring.
Permadeath, permadeath, permadeath, permadeath, permadeath, permadeath, permadeath.....
You know this was an issue with early Jedi in SWG. Of course they moved away from it quickly. That was the original intention of the jedi alt option.
The problem is, they want to keep subs. They want to keep players subbing away. You know gamers right? I mean, other than yourself of course. To keep subs, you need your market to build, customize, and moreover *relate/connect* to their in game toon. If you kill that toon, most players will die (in game) right along with it. Then, facing re-tooling/grinding/questing that toon they would rathe rmove on the the next game. I would.
Let me clue you in to something concerning your conclusion. It doesn't matter if your toon dies or not, eventually, all games become repetitive and boring. Spare me how this can be circumvented with deathfear
e-rolling as well, sometimes if you have been through it once (see Bioware and Mass Effect). it is still repetitive. Better to keep your players challenged, alive, and logging in, which in an end game means paying.
Played (more than a month): SWG, Second Life, Tabula Rasa, Lineage 2, Everquest 2, EvE, MxO, Ryzom.
Tried: WoW, Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, Everquest, WWII Online, Planetside
Beta: Lotro, Tabula Rasa, WAR.
It's interesting to see that most of the replies here from players of the original SWG pre-nge are willing to give TOR a shot even if it's not going to be a sandbox sort of game. A few posts say that TOR WILL be a sandbox game, but I think that's a minority opinion.
If this post had been done back in Febuary you would have seen much more of the opposite. Most of the ardent SWG cultists have finally figured out (key word FINALLY) that this game isn't going to be the second coming of SWG 2003 and have moved on. The rest who are left have stayed because they want to see more info or at least give the game a shot. To be honest, I was never a huge fan of KOTOR, but that has more to do with the fact that I've never cared for those type of games(find this key to unlock this door etc etc.). KOTOR was a huge success and Bioware is smart in trying to expand on that to the next level.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
ah, yes but Life includes Death - does it not? To die and then rez is unrealistic. I do understand it is a fantasy, and that having your character die after so much work would be frustrating but without character death it will never be truly realistic. My idea was only an idea and I knew it would not be popular but it was an answer to the charge that once you cap out and do the end-game the game becomes boring.
To be honest - once I have gone through the game I get more fun out of starting new toons. I rarely bring them all the way through - just starting out and finding parts of the game I might have missed along the fevered way to the end game first time through is enough. I have found this true with many games, especially LOTRO and EVE. Mine is most probably a minority position, but I'll stand by it. As far as my conclusion as you put it - it was merely an idea - brought on by seeing many posts by players lamenting how boring games get at the end game or level cap portion of the game. Never said that I would play a game with perma-death. I simply offered it as "A" solution. Certainly seems to have evoked a response - and in forums that is good. No repsonse means little since you cannot get much from it. Being praised or flamed - well there is much that can be learned from either. Thank you for responding - I would rather be flamed than ignored.
Note: I unfortunately edited out the part I was responding to - sorry.
If this post had been done back in Febuary you would have seen much more of the opposite. Most of the ardent SWG cultists have finally figured out (key word FINALLY) that this game isn't going to be the second coming of SWG 2003 and have moved on. The rest who are left have stayed because they want to see more info or at least give the game a shot. To be honest, I was never a huge fan of KOTOR, but that has more to do with the fact that I've never cared for those type of games(find this key to unlock this door etc etc.). KOTOR was a huge success and Bioware is smart in trying to expand on that to the next level.
One of the fun featurs of KOTOR was you didn't have to find the key to the door. You could use a droid to pick the lock, or you could just kill the guards.
Most of the "quests" if you want to call them that, had alternate solutions to allow for different play styles. I'm not a puzzle solver, that sort of thing bores me, so I liked the more brute force approach. Other players might want to be more stealthy, and solve more puzzles, etc.
I had fun in the original SWG game, but I think another type of MMO could be fun too. I really just want it to work properly. I'd also like to get accurate information about the game's direction from the company, and I'd like to play the same game I paid for, not have it switched out from under me out of the blue.
Make it work, make it fun, don't say one thing and do the other, don't erase all my progress, don't have a sleazy business model and I think this game will do just fine.
I think if Bioware and LucasArts can hit these benchmarks, they'll get an ever growing player base, and that will be a sign of success in my view.
It's been said a million times but the two games are not comparable at all other than the IP. What drew me to SWG was the idea of actually "living" in the Star Wars universe and carving out my place in it. That actually never really changed all that much with the NGE but the "iconic" class crap really stripped the game of what made it original. I really think ToR is going to be a good RPG and I'll probably play it but unless Bioware really throws in some surprises I just don't see me playing the game long. I don't play MMO's to have my hand held or to be forced into a cookie cutter mold. That shit just bores me. I want to be able to "live" if you will in the world and have some impact on it. That's why SWG and Eve Online are easily my two most favorite MMO's of all time.
I did enjoy SWG, but only until they introduced levels and then hogtied everything else that wasnt nailed down... Kotor, i didnt like, but then the only single player rpg i've ever really enjoyed was oblivion, im not a hardcore starwars nut and i dont dream of glowbats, i am however a fairly hardcore online gamer, if its fun i'll try it, if it bombs its just another fancy coaster to add to my desktop collection, i'll probably try Swtor, but, unless its something more than just a storylined game, then i'll probably end up with another fancy coaster to add to my collection..