f13.net

Front page of the LA Times today:

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2012/01/20/star-wars-the-old-republic-the-story-behind-a-galactic-gamble/#/0

Quote of note:

The Lucas Arts Times?

If this turns into another bitch thread, I'm going get very cranky.

Why not just merge it into an existing thread?   :oh_i_see: :why_so_serious:

Why wouldn't it turn into a "yes, SWTOR has revolutionized the industry" thread?

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/Futurama_Fry_Looking_Squint.jpg)

I think the idea of voice acting as such in these days will revolutionize the industry.

However, I think they also need to not release patches that are so buggy.

In a world where reading comprehension is nearing its lowest point in decades, voice acting should be more popular.   :grin:

The only innovation I see is that of turning a single player game into a single player game shared with others.  Even that's not very innovative.

I foresee MoP having a lot more voice-overs than previous expansions.  Gotta keep up with the Jones.

FIFY.

Which is why EQ2 has millions of subscribers, right?

Lack fully voiced NPCs is going to seem pretty lame in future MMOs.   It'll be tolerable, but it'll just feel like the game was done on the cheap.  I think this game shows that you either need to go full on or just forget it.   AoC's partial-talky was so jarring.

My intention wasn't to start negativity or anything.  I live in Los Angeles, and we can't drive around town without seeing 20+ billboard/bus stop advertisements for SWTOR.  Some take up the entire side of office buildings.  Today I sit down to read the print version of the Los Angeles times and there is the story, on the front page.  The front page!  War stories aren't even on the front page anymore.

Keep in mind that I'm alt tabbed from the game right now.  It's all just interesting to me.  Advertising is weird.  Advertisements in the form of stories on the front page of major newspapers, even more so.

^ This. I said it in another thread but if TOR fails it may kill MMOS for me. I just can't go back to the old way now that I've had a much more interactive experience.

*space bar*
*space bar*
*space bar*

Mmmm. Option 3.

*space bar*
*space bar*

This is me for everything except the class storyline quests and even those I usually prefer the subtitles to the bad acting. 

I like you Nebu.

I just never want to game with you.

 :drill:

Nebu never games with you for long.  :why_so_serious:

EQ2 didn't deliver on being fully voiced. SWTOR has, and people that have actually played the game won't be able to go back to the old fire-and-forget quest text days.

Yes I will.

It will be hard for me to go back. It makes games feel *old*. Even mostly-voiced games like DA:O.

Reading comprehension wasn't necessary in WoW either.  Instead of a voice telling you want to do, you got some markers on a map and objective updates for doing stuff.  Most of the quests could be communicated entirely through symbols in terms of their objectives and rewards, and the text was pure fluff.  That is why people skipped them to begin with, because they were fluff.  Voice or text isn't the issue, but whether or not people care about the fluff.  If SWTOR managed(es) to keep people interested in the story and the fluff, then THAT is the meaningful bit of MMO industry progression, not the fact that it is communicated via audio.

SWTOR is not just voice overs. There is also the branching dialog and cinematics as well. Kind of a big thing.

WILL NOT!  :awesome_for_real:

I played it in beta and since then I've been playing LOTRO and I don't miss the voiceovers or faux branching a bit.

That's exactly where I am, too.  I prefer to read, personally.  As a person, I don't really like listening to people talk either, so maybe that has something to do with it.  I get information from reading much faster and efficiently than I can by talking.

Be fair... that was more because WoW bored me than it had anything to do with you personally.  I enjoyed chatting with you.  I just hated large shoulderpads!

It was kind of a big thing over ten years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander_III:_Heart_of_the_Tiger). TOR is a branching path converation game with a multiplayer game stapled to it. I've kind of enjoyed a few of the story bits, but on the whole, I don't find it particularly immersive or ground breaking.

Vanilla EQ2 was fully voiced. They quit doing it because it cost a lot for minimal benefit, especially after they had to go back and rebuild some stuff most of the game because their first iteration was badly designed and on a mediocre game engine.

Not really the point. I Too can read a book faster than the movie based on it plays out. Some of you may have to face it, you are old gamers. No one but old people play MUDS. SWTOR is the first of many MMO's that will be fully voiced, coming more inline with other game genres. The problem YOU guys are having, is you have been so programed that Ding/loot is all that matters, you see a cinematic not as part of the game, but an impedance to your ding/loot.

No it wasn't. NPCs were voiced. Your character was not.

Even the NPCs were not fully voiced, it was a mix.

More importantly, SWTOR attempts to bring the voices together to form narratives for your class and for each planet. EQ2 NPCs were just rehashing individual trash quests, and those trash quests weren't even at the core of the game, which was still mostly based around finding a group and wailing on endlessly respawning static NPCs.

Hey, we didn't put ding/loot into the game. Bioware did.  :grin:

I cannot go back to being a side character in Metzen's Thrall fanfics, that's all I know.

It's Friday, bro.  Relax.  

Single player RPGs still exist for voiced content. It's not the main reason I'm going to stay subscribed to something, especially when singleplayer RPGs can give you much more impact, branching choices and less padding.

TOR being an MMO means the actual dialogue choices are very thin on the ground. Not that Bioware has ever excelled in this area (compare something like Alpha Protocol).

Even going through Black Talon, apart from the one Big Decision, the conversation mostly consists of choosing between "Yeah!" "So?" and "Ummm...". The occasional super-snark response is nice- but the rest of the time it doesn't feel even slightly meaningful who wins the roll, it just takes forever.

There are other places the seams become apparent. Whenever you use a provocative or insulting response the camera does the patented Bioware close-up on the NPC's angry face and then abruptly cuts back to him politely giving you further instructions. In that moment the illusion parts a little, revealing the animatronic robot underneath.

Well, that is probably true.  But like I said in my previous post, if they brought people caring about the story line to the MMO genre, then great.  But they are going to be tasked with pumping out voiced, acted content at an unprecedented level if they want to compete in a market based on retention.  That is what that article was about - Bioware trying to make a splash in the MMO space.   I'll concede without argument that TOR is a fine RPG, with what probably amounts to more (story) content than any other to date, or at least in recent memory.  I'm willing to concede the story is good, and that the voice acting with cinematics and dialog choices is good.  But whether or not that translates into long term MMO success remains to me seen.  If it does, then great.  But to me it is a separate question from whether or not the game is good.

He has a very good point. Veteran MMO gamers might not get boners over non-stop voiceovers and an illusion of choice with quest dialog, but new gamers seem to find it immersive and a step forward. However, I highly doubt its the 'wave of the future' and that new MMOs will adopt it. Didn't this game cost over 200 million to make?

On the flip side, bad voice acting will be a thousand times worse than lifeless text. Be careful what you wish for. The next WoW expansion could be entirely voiced by the Tyrande actress, for example.

I'm not going to argue that the voice acting in SWTOR isn't innovative, but I'm not sure it's actually a good thing for MMOs as they are now. It's going to lead to additional SWTOR content being far more expensive and time consuming to make, and most MMOs aren't exactly hitting rapid content cycles even without that extra work. The better innovation for developers and us will be in gameplay.

The voiceovers have nothing to do with the ding/loot, and in fact has nothing to do with actually playing of the game. It's merely a layer, a spectacle required because other genres have added that cost to their development too. EQ2 was the first MMO to try and use this as a marketing hook. They were also first to quickly realize how much of a money sink it is. No other genre needs to deal with monthly or quarterly content patches that add new quests, and therefore hundreds or thousands of lines of new dialog in multiple languages.

But at least the IP has an innate advantage. Just make all successive content and expansion packs be about insects, robots and wookiees  :grin:

It's also a little late in the day to be indicting the MMO (and RPG) playerbase for skipping past cutscenes and flavor text ;)


Nobody really knows for sure, but there seems to be a range (http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/ea-spent-only-200m-to-make-star-wars-the-old-republic/) between what the LA Times thinks and about half a billion dollars. Darts at a board as far as I'm concerned. If you account for the multi lingual launch, the combined salaries of everyone who ever worked on it, allt he sub-contractors, any WGA/SAG rates, the tools, systems, relationships, license royalty upfronts, Bioware overhead and then later EA overhead, plus the writedowns from EA having purchased Elevation Partners, it probably could be in the $500mm range. But how much of that is specific to SWTOR versus how much of it will be leveraged across other things, no idea. $200m-500m sounds right, though laughably broad :)

That's not an us problem, that's a problem with the fundamental game design. The choice/voice stuff is very clearly a thin layer on top of the ding/loot core game. They don't even try to hide it, with stuff like an indicator telling you what kind of points you will get for each, equipment tied to those points, etc.

SWTOR is not a story-based MMO, it's a standard MMO with some story bits on top. The game is not designed to be centered around the story and choices. You could completely extract the story layer and the underlying game would be almost unchanged.

If you were going to conceptualize a story-based MMO from the ground up you'd probably end up with a very different game. A game that revolved around choices, conversations and puzzles more than combat.

I had one conversation with Thana, that was getting rather heated (I love that character) but she was just staring off into space like a Real Doll, instead of looking at my character.  :uhrr:

I'd love high quality voice acting, excellent writing and deep dialog branches if it was free, which it is not. If they're spending money the WoW approach of limiting exposition, adding story events into the gameplay and using voiced cut-scenes for pivotal moments is far more sensible. They embroidered the leveling process, at a substantial investment, but that's not the problem holding MMO's back.


It what? It was a really fun sci-fi space opera but that's a bit much.

I realize it must seem cool to downplay it, but can you honestly not acknowledge that Star Wars had a big effect on the film industry?

They use the transition from silent films to films with an audio track. I'm pretty sure Star Wars did not "change film history" in the same way.

It was a fun pop-corn flick, Harrison Ford made the rest of them look like terrible actors, and that was all I got out of it. Oh, maybe it was the first film to make merchandising a massive part of profit?

wait... It branches where?  I think they were all linear..

See what a I mean.   

On the technical side, nearly every movie uses THX sound, and the movies gave rise to Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker Sound, and Lucasfilm.
But most importantly, Star Wars was the first fun pop-corn flick.

I think it's a valid comparison.

It also changed a lot about how actor's fees work, etc.

That article pegs SWOR's development cost at US$200m. I'd be curious about their source, but it isn't out of the question.

What, Ben-Hur doesn't count?  :oh_i_see:

There's certainly a demographic out there of people who will be brought in (or back) by the extra layers of story and voice over. I'm one of them - the only MMO to get an actual purchase out of me since WoW was Conan, and I dropped that within three days of completing Tortage. Personally, I could care less if I ever reach Max level, if I ever PVP, or if I ever get uber at raiding. For me, its about completing the story - that's what keeps me plodding through. I enjoy the ding gratz, but if that's all I needed, I'd have played one of the many other games that came since WoW.

Now is there enough story content there, with enough time to add more, to keep me satisfied at the rate I play? Don't know yet. There are a shit ton of gamers out there that have busy lives and limited time to play. At my current rate, I figure it will take me at least another month if not two to hit 50 on my first guy.

Some of the classes have more branching than others, SW Jaesa is the obvious example, there is a SI thing with the cult. But yeah, most are more 'pick your quest ending for a different VO grats message' or 'do you want to fight this optional guy for extra loot?' than an actual content branch.

I'm quite the opposite.  I am ready to go back to Rift, the things this game lacks like dual (hell, triple quadruple and quintuple) specs and macroing are the ones i can't do without.  The voice acting and cinematics made leveling a lot better, but i play MMOs for the endgame not the leveling.

Fuck endgame.

The one MMO I played for the "endgame" was EQ and even then the concept of an endgame in an MMO seemed asinine.

To each their own, I guess.

RPGs are about progression.  Endgame is just a word for "progression after max level."  It isn't anything special, it just moves progression from levels to items.  Given that levels usually take a lot less time, and the population is eventually majority at max level the "end game" is just the progression that most people end up doing in the long term.   Because a large pool of players ends up there for a long period of time, content repetition is required because it would simply be impossible to create content as fast as players can complete if they are only doing it once.

I know exactly what endgame is. I still think the concept is stupid and the people that race to get there and then bitch about there's no there there amuse me to no end.

Why do you think it is possible to make TV at a rate that you only watch once, but not MMOG quests?

And bear in mind TV is 100% cutscene (or at least 66% if you watch in the US and don't have tivo), SWTOR is much less than 10%.

I appreciate they aren't going to make content fast enough that Sjofn will only see it once, but there is little excuse for a 10 hour/week normal person. Unless you are arguing that EA's scripting and acting is genuinely on a higher level than trash TV?

I wasn't bitching that there wasn't an endgame, i was bitching that it is inferior to Rift and WoW.  Making the leveling more fun got me through the first month, now what's left sucks.

I blame fast leveling and steep power curves.

I'm in a friends guild, and none of us are within grouping range right now. I hate to PUG shit, so I just level solo and hope that everyone hits the cap at roughly the same time. Though we had one friend get in the early program, and he hit 50 in a couple of weeks.  :uhrr:
In any case, at 50 we can't gain anymore levels, and item progression is probably going to require grouping, so I'll finally get to play with my friends, when we're all doing the endgame.  :uhrr: Those that stick it out to the end, anyway.  I think the most likely scenario is that people are going to get burnt out within the next couple of months and disperse to whatever other games they were playing before TOR, and I'll feel like I blew 70 bucks on a shitty single player online game.  :argh:

Hey, I've only finished one storyline so far! I just started act 3 on the trooper. I HAVE PLENTY LEFT.  :why_so_serious:

I don't know how hard it is to animate a cut scene versus stage something, though. Once all the pieces are in place, it really is literally just "write script, film actors" for the mostpart, because people do not complain when their shitty sitcom takes place in the same room every week. Gamers would absolutely be pissed off if they used the same place every patch for the new content.

Game needs sidekicking. Beats me why it is considered acceptable to launch a game without it.

Pvp demonstrates that it is perfectly achievable.

No TV show comes out with 10 hours of content a week; most do 20m or 40m worth.

And they do it months in advance with very long breaks in between seasons.

How many hours of cutscenes do you watch in ten hours of play?

Jaws came out 2 years before Star Wars and is universally considered the first big fun summer blockbuster that changed the movie industry.

The idea that Star Wars was the originator of the pop-corn flick is pure wishful thinking.

Maybe the originator of the Pop-corn space opera then?

It's going to be interesting to see if Blizzard even attempts to fix this.   Most people ignore WoW lore but if they have to start adding "story" and voice acting then that crap isn't going to fly.

 :oh_i_see:

I suspect the cutscenes eat considerably more time. Mind you, this is based only on experience with the cutscenes, but the ratio is something like few hours of work per minute of scene if it's supposed to looks decent in the end.

On the other hand, this can be area where the Kinect may have large impact on productivity -- because it potentially allows to have some (relatively) cheap and fast/easy to use individual mocap "studio" for each animator. Meaning a lot of what's now painfully put together by hand from stock animation pieces could be just acted out, exactly like needed, at the speed approaching the tv/movie production.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBeG4zGhPU4&feature=related  :awesome_for_real:

Harrison Jones as the story focus would be a step up from Thrall at least.

Not many cut scenes in SWTOR are unique. They are all just triggering emotes on the actors to fit the dialog ( Same emotes we can use ). I have only seen a few scenes that would require unique animations. Its a very reusable system. Its the same with response audio, most are reusable. Only a few per conversation are unique to the conversation.

Yeah, your own character mostly repeats the same stock phrases over and over.  Sometimes they don't even fit the situation or the dialog choice you made.

No he wouldn't. The non-sphinx parts of Uldum were shit.

Cut-scenes aren't gameplay, they're "flavor". That quest was a decent example of Blizzards attempt to have the story play out in the game (and evidence it's hard). Of course the problem with that approach is the world becomes just a theme-park of rides rather than anything internally consistent.

We'll see what lessons Blizzard have learnt when Titan comes out.

Thing is, I could actually go back to being a side character without much issue. It's that the WoW lore is so fucking bad. It was never great, but Cataclysm, somehow, was even shittier than my already extremely low expectations. And the fact the story people don't seem to get, at all, why half the people playing their game are pissed off that all they do is lose does not bode well.

That'd be because the story people all play for the winning side. 

Cataclysm's story was weakened when they attempted to mechandise it. So all these "important" characters would be developed in the novels or comics and if you weren't following those it was just mystifying who they were and why you'd care.

... I mean other than it being game quality writing extended to cover all the grind a MMO must contain.

But it really doesn't matter that much. A great story with terrible game-play should have been a movie in the first place.

Given that TV shows release one hour of content a week, for on the outside 15-20 weeks a year, I don't feel like it is a very good comparison.  There is no way they are going to make 10 hours a week of original content.  It isn't just about quality of "scripting and acting" but about bug testing, art asset creation, etc.

You're right it is mostly about swtor being less than 5% cutscenes, cutscene animation being 80% emote scripting and cutscene PC dialog being 70% stock phrases.

Bioware were proudly proclaiming 200 hours content per class. If they can't generate 10 per week with tools they have, the game would have taken several years longer than it actually did to build.

To me the story and listening to my character speak is why I play. The game play is often something I rush through just to get my next story bit. For me to care about the game play they need to get rid of hot key combat and replace it with something more action based.

After a few days to think about it, and after reading this thread, it seems there is a split occurring.  On the other side of SWTOR is Gw2. 

I could care less about a predetermined story and find the constant cutscenes to be an interruption to the action.  Gw2 is offering the real thing I am looking for: flexibility in experiencing content.  As a slow leveler and multiple character player (I don't even call them alts; they're all alts), I'm stuck watching my friends and guild mates do higher level content while I just flounder in quest zones with 4 level 20s.  It's maddening. 

"all level" warzones.....why not "all level" flashpoints? 

couldn't care less

But sure, the rest of your post makes sense, if you are here primarily for exploring the mechanics there are better games - most obviously rift.

On the point about playing with friends, there is no excuse for not having pve as well as pvp sidekicking, but that is a very different thing to not liking the cutscene focus.

But I'm not at my lowest threshhold for caring, so I have some not-caring to spare.  :)

Edit:  I loved rift!  Still had the endless leveling syndrome though.

There's some mildly annoying shortcuts there they've apparently taken, that become evident over time. Like e.g. the companions you acquire later during your individual storyline having no comments about the earlier planets, and zero reaction to the earlier quest choices.

Probably not something that most people are even going to notice, but still a disappointment in the sense it's such a low hanging fruit, am not sure if skipping these things even gave them any considerable savings, given the amount of content that's otherwise produced.

It was also fairly obvious that all companions were meant to have their own quests that got replaced with "don't worry about it i'll handle it myself" conversations instead.

That is the shortcut that makes me saddest, but also the shortcut that surprised me least.

Companion quests just boil down to something only seen by a small fraction of the player base. Any given player of a class is only like to substantially raise affection with 1-2 companions (their romance target and/or the combat useful one that is in most dialogs by default). Crafting aside, a lot of the companions seem superfluous, except that they wanted every class to have a bunch of them. It'd be nice if we could take a full party of 4 (Self + 3 companions) into Heroic areas and Flashpoints to solo them.

Given how easy it is to be swimming in companion gifts, I sort of doubt "most" people only raise their love interest + main partner rep. Even if that were the reasoning, you'd think all the love interests would be the choice for Major Story Quest, then. But no, who do the consulars get? Fucking Qyzen. Who is MY only not-capped companion rep-wise, because he's a huge bitch AND doesn't even have a present he loves. So I haven't actually finished his stupid quest yet.

Hmm, I've never been swimming in companion gifts. I get a few from Underworld Trading but don't really focus too much on it. I've never bought them from vendors, and I don't recall getting any from drops, quest rewards, etc. I guess I could, but I don't see much of a point to it since most of them don't have quests beyond 'Oh hey, stuff happened. Cool.' in the ship or cantina. None of my companions are anywhere near max (my highest is at ~4k).

IMO MMOs are one of those genres that have accumulated of a lot of historical cruft, there's really no reason for modern MMOs to be so hotkey/cooldown centric other than the evolutionary path they've taken.

Fighting games have "global cooldown" on moves when you think about it, it's just expressed so differently that it appears natural rather than clunky.

If I'm just leveling up a mission skill (like UT), I mostly focus on gifts because I view making low level purples a complete waste of time. I'll make blues for my own use, but that's about it. So it's mostly gift gathering for me, to the point where my one dude who doesn't even HAVE a mission skill still has three companions at 6k+, because my investigation chick has so many gifts she wound up sending him a bunch to clear out her vault.

It sounds like a catch-22 with you, though. Don't bother making full quests for all the companions because "no one" is going to level up all those reps, because who would bother leveling up their reps, there aren't even full quests for all the companions.

When the game is relatively laggy with the current combat making it dependent on precise event synchronization and positioning doesn't seem like a great idea. If you want some twitch based action you probably don't want an MMO.

Well I focus on the materials because I like to RE the natural blues into purples (as that's no more difficult than REing the natural greens into blues); the only time I do gifts is when I'm done with that tier's mats but still need a few points to access the next tier.

I'm not a big BW fan anymore (liked NWN and KOTOR but don't like DA or ME) but even in the games I've played I generally only do the quests for the 1-2 companions I like.

At 39, I'm getting sick of new companions. 4 (not counting the ship droid) is getting unwieldy, and I'm supposed to gear up all these yahoos too?

You don't have to gear them up? Unless you want to.

Are you thinking about charge bars here?

Or just delays in how fast you can fire a weapon?

I don't disagree, just curious about what you are thinking of in this statement.

Almost all real time games hide it in animation time which can be varied per ability and looks a damn sight more elegant than standing about waiting for an arbitrary gcd.

Isn't hiding it in animations with varied time the definition of arbitrary?

All game rules are in fact arbitrary.

But trimming the animation to fit the 'cannot make next move for x seconds' cost at least makes it look natural and allows you to tweak it for balance. GCDs look arbitrary, which is worse than actually being arbitrary. I never really understand why wow decided this way had any advantage over the process used in prior games.

One practical thing wow/swtor could do to reduce my irritation with gcds is to stop fading out abilities I only can't use because of the gcd. I need to know which are on real cooldowns so I know which I can queue. I'm aware you can work it out by examining the tiny lines moving down the ability, but frankly I'm too old for that shit.

I don't particularly have a boner for GCD, it's just something that lets me know exactly when I can press my next ability and expect it to go off (something that's not really working in SWTOR) and enables the balance team to do their job. In that vein I don't mind if they do it with animations, as long as all animations are exactly the same duration - a GCD, without the GCD if you will. I just know I'll be incredibly annoyed if it takes a different amount of time for abilities to become active, without some sort of visiual representation (cast/channel bar, gcd).

The way pre-wow games got over that was to allow you to queue up your next ability at any point in the cast of the prior ability. Something action rpgs also often do.

I have no idea why wow and swtor default to no queue. Timing keypresses for the end of a cast or cooldown is also shit I am too old for.

Well, at least SWTOR has a mini queue. You can push it up to 1 second in preferences (whcih helps me a lot, now that I'm getting... old).

Yeah, I found that, aside from grumbling about why it can't be extended right to the start of the prior ability, I'd just like abilities to light up when they are queable and then the whole thing wouldn't be nearly as irritating.

Very much this. I really don't get why it's like this when EQ2 got it right what, 7 years ago? Trion did the same partial queue thing iirc when Rift launched but to their credit patched in a full queue very quickly. It seems even more bizarre when they let you set it in increments up to 1 second and just stop there instead of going to the full GCD time.

I don't know where people are getting the "Crafting is useless for endgame" stuff, especially if they came from WoW where it was useless unless you really liked BiS boots/belts and leggings sometimes.

I mean, if you want to grind it, you can at least reverse engineer yourself to a full set of epics. Soul crushing, but not utterly useless.

You can craft a level 48/49 epic with massive amounts of effort or do four easy daily quests and turn your lvl 10 orange gear into a level 50 epic.  That's why crafting is useless.

I'm getting a good selection or orange gear I can craft though, so I can fine-tune my look.

As for combat, I really wish they had just copied CoH.  It's like some hybrid between WoW and CoH that doesn't feel right.

I would craft more. But i hate the crafting list. Its so huge and unwieldy. They need to break that shit up more in the list. I would not mind if they did it down to sets.

The level 48 Armstech epics are pants-on-head-stupid to create because of the requirement for BoP materials to make an item that's not as good as things you can get easily otherwise. Don't EVER EVER make crafting need a difficult to get BoP ingredient unless what you create is pretty much best-in-slot or at least BiS-equivalent of some drop that's equally hard or frustrating to get. This is about the quickest way you can say to players, "Hey, crafting? It's another operant-conditioning timesink, we're just hoping a few of you are dumb enough to fall for it that you won't bitch about endgame content for a month or two more".

In Street Fighter if I do a low roundhouse that commits me to that move to a certain amount of time, during which time I can't do anything. You can get more complicated with special move cancels and chain combos and such, but generally a move in a fighting game locks out other moves for some length of time. And this figures into the overall strength of the move - a low short kick is weaker than a low roundhouse but is also less of a commitment.

Think about it this way: in a Street Fighter game at any given point I can do any of a few dozen actions, each of which locks out other actions for a different length of time depending on the initial move, and some of which have special rules (can be cancelled or chained out of) all without any bars or visible timers or having to look at anything but my character.

The number of people who play Street Fighter at that level though is pretty small, no?

Most folks are just doing their best to remember down, forward, punch or whatever.

The same can be said of God of War, Smash Brothers, Double Dragon, whatever. Not as complex and not as many rules and exceptions but the basic idea is the same. In Double Dragon if you punch you can't do anything else until your punch ends, not because of some goofy meter but because your punch hasn't ended.

In fact I would say that nearly all video games involving a character who can perform actions works this way. MMOs don't because traditionally the animation is considered a layer of prettiness that just kind of half-conveys what is happening under the hood.

... and the fact that in all those games your character model takes up a huge amount of screen and has relatively few unique abilities. Something generally not true of MMO's, or even the online FPS games.

The odd part is, the mechanics used by MMO which have your character execute the move and not trigger another until the animation of the previous one ends, are pretty much what the beat em up games are doing with their "commit to the move" approach. (that in itself makes the GCD thing rather superfluous nowadays but that's another story) And yet, it's the animation part that makes people scream "yegods so unresponsive, can't cope" while they play beat em ups fine. Go figure.

Because if you're going to do it that way, you need to go all the way and make it like COH: every ability is 'instant', and has a (well-documented) uninterruptable animation time. The combat definitely becomes a bit more 'murky' if you do this (due to usual MMO latency), but it works.

What TOR is doing right now is half-assing this, trying to make a WOW/COH hybrid - which ends up taking the worst of both worlds.

When you say MMOs here, I think you really mean WoW and SWToR. Afaik everything before WoW worked exactly like other genres. You can't punch again right now because your guy on the screen is clearly still punching.

At the very least EQ 1&2, AC, CoX, SWG, I'm pretty sure UO, DAoC, EVE technically (though the combat system in EVE has managed to make all cooldowns irrelevant). People talk as if the WoW system is the only one that could work when most of the rest of this genre, and practically every other genre in gaming works fine without it.

But as above, given how WoW has reduced expectations I'd settle for abilities lighting up when I can queue them, and having the queue extended to the start of the previous ability.

Instant, prior to WoW, meant abilities (often long duration cooldown or one off use) that were in fact used instantly with no follow on GCD.

CoH inspirations, DAoC used the mechanic for extreme oh shit buttons.

TOR has some near instants - the pure interrupt abilities. But once you get back to pre-WoW design you can use true instants as another design option. They are handy for making combat feel snappy, for instance I don't really see why medpacs, or some of the cooldown defensive buffs really truly need a global cooldown.

Is CoH a good example of how non-gcd animation based combat works? I don't particularly remember the game's combat, might go and check it out.

EQ2 solved the problem by giving every ability a cast time; melee could move while using theirs, but there was still a bar that had to fill up before the attack landed and you could use another one. WoW just normalized the length of that bar (and hid it) for melee characters. A GCD system isn't fundamentally different than any other, except that most actions take the same amount of time.

Do you mean off-GCD abilities? WOW has plenty of those (usually 2-3 per class)... interrupts, big ohshit abilities, CC breakers and burst damage/healing cooldowns / trinkets come to mind. There is also at least one ability that can be activated while you're casting a spell (Spiritwalker's Grace).

There are some in SWTOR as well, like the sage cooldown that makes the next 2 spells have +60% crit chance, or the vanguard cooldown that increases crit chance by 25% (I think).

Yes, and also a good example of how queing should work.

It has other issues that wow or swtor do address, overlong casts, excessive grind, and too few abilities especially at low levels.

CoH also has sidekicking ofc which this game and wow desperately need. And I think it was the first aaa title to separate gear from appearance.

I don't think CoH's long casts were unarguably a design fault because they fit the relatively tactical style of play with lots of strongly positional powers and meaningful side effects. Though it probably is too slow for the modern generation of gamers. CoH definitely did have a problem with stamina such that you had a lot of abilities you couldn't really afford to use often, but they've largely fixed that now. The rest of it I'll give you, though it was the time were grinding mobs was considered content.

I'd still like to see a modern MMO where instances scale with the number of players and encourage people to group because it generally ends up being more fun and rewarding for everyone. But that flies in the face of making instances "challenging".

I'd really like to see swtor introduce CoH style scaling as a way to add content accessible across the level range.

All the missing companion quests would be an obvious opportunity, as they need to be playable at any level and ideally any group size.

:heart:
Not just that EQ2 had per-ability cast times, but that there was also a tertiary stat that affected this, and iirc you could also talent some down via AA. So you could sacrifice some power for speed or whatever.

Same for DAoC, COX, EQ etc.

I do find it odd that there is only Endurance and <primary stat> to balance in SWTOR. In games like DAoC debates would rage at great length over whether dex for cast speed or Int for cast power was more effective in a given circumstance (though the dex guy was usually correct).

WoW has this too, it's called haste. Reduces real cast time for casters and GCD for everyone.
We need a "because that's how WoW did it" image macro; the reason is to prevent stupid gear competition and things like Warriors running around in cloth. This is a good thing. Instead the gear balance can center around the secondary stats such as Power, Surge, Crit, Alacrity, etc.

(http://www.deadlyroundhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/wowtor.jpg)

For the record, warriors running around in cloth is fine by me. Missed the memo that said warriors should all be in big shiny armors.

Oh no, am I guilty of "every MMO is WoW" thinking? How embarrassing!

It is a bit odd in MMOs to hear people complain about things like "animation lock", which appears to be a newly invented term that means "how every other game animation system works." But I think some of that is due to the disconnect between what is happening onscreen and the underlying simulation. As someone above said you can't really half-ass it, if the animation and positioning really matters it needs to really matter. In a lot of MMOs it doesn't feel like you swing your sword, hit a guy and they take damage, it feels like they take damage while you play an animation of sword swinging. In that context I can see how stuff like animation lock would be an annoyance.

Which is why I am interested in Tera.

That wasn't the complaint, it was the inequality in access to drops because lighter armor users where mechanically barred from wearing heavier armor.

And people wonder why I start "what went wrong" threads, we've got complaints about nearly the same issues in 4-5 diff threads now?

Drops: SWTOR is almost the opposite of wow, in that anything can be modded and unless you are a tank armor class means fuckall so you can wear what you like...which is awesome.  Being able to customize your look based on preference rather than a specific BIS item is wonderful...unless you're a tank....which I am... :sad:

If you can wear light, medium and heavy armour. Otherwise you're going to spend lot of time drooling over pieces which are apparently too heavy for you to wear, somehow. :heartbreak:

It is sort of funny that the jedi knight robes are just too impossibly heavy for my consular to wear, but what can you do. :P

Some people are silk bathrobe, some people are heshen sack.

That's why they forced down character model resolution, even if you have it on high.  So you can't see the ugly patchwork your knight did to sew all them plassteel armoring plates onto them brown silk robes, with no thought given to how heavy they are or how the weight is distributed.

Oh, I've noticed the silly plating (it's hard to miss when you're duoing with your jedi knight husband and doing all the talky talky scenes together). It still amuses me!