SWTOR Goes F2P in the Fall

[trias_e]

I actually did rush through content to get done with my character's story arc before a credit charge hit.  Then I quit at 49 and didn't even care to look up the ending.  Apathy so immense it blended into disdain was all I could feel for the game by the end.

Mechanics weren't why SWTOR failed for me.  I'm honestly surprised that Margalis is trying to push that angle so hard.  The mechanics weren't worse than WoW, and ToR clearly was going for the added pillar to give it the upper hand.  I actually really enjoyed playing my Marauder on a mechanics level, although I'm kind of a sucker for having lots of abilities that require keyboard dexterity (I play SC2 religiously), and I like fast past characters with lots of movement abilities.  Way better than Rift in this regard for instance.  I would honestly say the mechanics of TOR might have been the best part of the game for me in the end.  I even liked the PvP too.  Perhaps I am not usual in this regard.  

I don't think TOR failed primarily because it's a diku.  It's that it's a timid and unimaginative one.  It failed because it's a soulless clone of WoW at its core, and because the story pillar which covered up this fact eventually stops working to do so.  That I believe is why the game failed for the general population.

Personally, I disliked ToR in the end because of it's fundamental design. The attempt to shove a modern bioware game into WoW and all of the problems that causes.  It's not that story and writing can't necessarily work in an MMO.  I think it possibly can.  It works well in TSW, and I think TSW has a far more sustainable model for producing it in the future as well.  Although I still do doubt the long-term value of TSW, it is at least very effective in the short-term, and moreso than ToR.  The problem here was that Bioware's specific modern single-player RPG formula was haphazardly slapped into a WoW-clone model without a good reason for doing so.  The story elements were still somewhat effective, but by the end the good parts had been spread out so thin that I had lost all investment in it.  The class quests were basically like the first quarter of a single player RPG spread out over 5 days of playtime while you do often boring/tedious planet quests.  The class story was cool, especially at first, and the characters here at least were memorable.  But the pacing is absolutely terrible due to how much filler there is, which really killed it for me.  Combined with the how banal the bulk of the quests you get on the planets are, and the game just slowly sucked away my enjoyment of the better stuff (that came far too rarely).  TSW just crushes ToR in the story pillar for me.  I'll be able to remember almost every character I've encountered in TSW for a long while.  ToR, I can only remember the class mission characters and a select few for planet missions.  That basically sums it up.

But even if you loved the story aspect of ToR, eventually it comes to an end.  And when it does, there's nothing to save it from being exposed as the bland game that it is.  Terrible talent trees.  Boring itemization.  Just...soulless.  Soulless is the only word I can use to describe it.

[Merusk]

There's no reason to switch until someone comes along and does it better.  That hasn't happened yet because they're cloning directly.  They're not ripping-in to the systems, finding the flaws of Blizzards model and improving there in the same way Blizzard did with EQ and DAOC. Eventually someone will and we will see another shift. 

This is Rift. Arguably a better DIKU game than WoW, it certainly felt like a big step forward for the genre with dynamic content, leader-free grouping, lots of mechanical improvements, and fast updates to justify a subscription fee. It didn't trounce WoW because no subscription DIKU game can at this point. If you wanted to play a DIKU game, most people will ultimately play WoW where all of your friends/guild/progress are. Because both games have a subscription you're inclined to only play one long-term.

See, Rift never had any stickiness for me, nor for a bunch of people I've talked to.  I also don't think it pushed *enough* when it came to the innovation.  Whether that was budget or timidity on the devs part I can't say.  Some of the things, like the dynamic grouping, public events and multi-specs were huge quality of life improvements, but they still relied on the same endgame.   Once you got past those bits, who cares it was just the same as WoW.  

So many people forget what a damn big deal instances, per-player raid bosses and solo leveling were now that it's 8 years on.   Then the even bigger deal of saying, with their first expansion,  "No.  This is meant for everyone, so we're not going to force you to run old content just to see new content."  That alone was a HUGE shift in marketplace thinking.  

There's a whole generation who don't remember those scars, and the ones who did were only in that game for 3-4 years.  We're further removed from the "people with lives need not apply" debacle of EQ's endgame than it lasted as a mainstream game and the gold standard of MMO-dom.  Think on that.

It's THAT level of innovation that it will take to really knock WOW a blow, and there will only be limited windows to do so.  As others have pointed out, Blizzard keeps reinventing the game.  EQ stayed the same old game for its entire career, only changing after threats began to arise, but still maintaining the same paradigm.  You must go a to b to c.. maybe when we release "D" you can go b-c-d but we'd 'trivialize' our customers experiences otherwise!  WOW's paradigm is still to reset gear and throw-open the doors to everyone and anyone who wants to get involved in the next cycle of content.

The big shift it will take to outshine that is to do what Sky's been begging for so long that he's given up on it.   Let players solo dungeons. Stop giving a damn about rewarding loot to the segment who wants to raid.  Make the games - essentially - more like D2 where any mob can drop awesome shit.. only the raid bosses are guaranteed drops and drop in greater quantities.

Another part of the problem with modern MMOs is you don't give a rats-ass about the world so you don't follow what's going on.  I dug EQ because it was traditional fantasy and easily accessible.  DAOC, familiar lore we know the stories. AC? Fuck that game I didn't care and couldn't get in to it.   COH; superheroes are easy to bang out and not all that high-level.    WOW; over a decade of background on that game.   Rift; I didn't give a fuck and still don't.  It was some overly-generic good vs bad thing with technology and demons thrown-in.   (I played the good side in beta.)  It couldn't make me care, but perhaps a SP game could have.  

Had 38 studios not been such a shittily run company we'd have seen how well that last scenario might have worked out.

Back on TOR; they failed to account for the innovation and iteration thing.  Yes, your competition will always be evolving.  You need to watch that and plan for what they're doing.  Not as simple as I make it sound, I know, but when they announce major features a year before an X-pac is released you've got some lead time to at least figure out how it's going to be integrated into yours.   Decide what the core features are and focus on those.

LFG was such a hit in WOW that it's inexcusable that TOR didn't have it on their budget. Anyone with an ear to the ground in the marketplace should have known what a hit that would be and been planning for it.  It worked well enough in GW1 and WOW polished it, but TOR said.. "Mmm.. nah. We've got it for PVP why do we need it for PVE."  Whoops.

[Ingmar]

The problem with Rift for me stickiness-wise was entirely that it was completely soulless. The factions, characters, world, monsters, none of it had any resonance. I may as well have been using an ability called 'ability 1' to kill a monster called 'monster'. Mechanically it was as sound as anything but the entire world was basically built out of cardboard cutouts, I've never played a game with less character, except maybe Champions Online.

And I think Merusk is right, WoW is 90% of the problem for every game like this. Think about this - 2/3 of my guild never even tried SWTOR, not because they thought it was going to be bad or they had no interest, but because they were happy playing WoW so why change?

SWTOR's innovation was all in areas that matter to a relatively small group of players, people like me who always wanted their MMOs to have more RPG aspects to them. I love me some NPC companions (this is why GW2 makes me so irritated, because they did it first and their second try at it, the heroes in GW1, are such a great system). I can't even start to say how great I find the dialogue system and how much more it makes me give a shit about what I'm actually doing in the game. I probably met more memorable characters in the first 20 levels of SWTOR than I did in 8 years of WoW. WoW for me often devolves into a 'make number go up by 2 every week' grinding process. To their credit, most of the time they made the process fun enough to hide it just enough for me to stay involved, but not always. And I suspect that for the 1/3 of my group that did make the jump to SWTOR, they feel roughly similarly to me. I like the gameplay of WoW in general, always have, but putting a Bioware RPG on top, even one with some structural/pacing problems, is just infinitely preferable. SWTOR still ends up with the same endgame, but it is still dressed up better story-wise IMO. And I still have 4 more class quests to finish before I'm really staring that in the face anyway.

The thing is, most of the WoW players I know are the opposite. They want the endgame carrot grind and find the questing/story stuff just gets in the way. Not enough to be like, hardcore endgame raiders, but as soon as the LFR system went in those people were absolutely a total lost cause for me to *ever* get them away from WoW. Blizzard has finally found the ultimate carrot for that type of player and they will be there *for life*.

[Lantyssa]

The big shift it will take to outshine that is to do what Sky's been begging for so long that he's given up on it.   Let players solo dungeons. Stop giving a damn about rewarding loot to the segment who wants to raid.  Make the games - essentially - more like D2 where any mob can drop awesome shit.. only the raid bosses are guaranteed drops and drop in greater quantities.

I'd perform an unholy sacrifice of a few dev teams to get these two things added.  I really don't understand why no one gets it.

[Nevermore]

What was CoX if not nothing but personal 'dungeons' that would scale depending on how many people were with you?

Of course, the big problem with that game was the game engine itself was way too narrowly focused.  It did get on the things it was designed to do, but it had no flexibility at all which made the content way too repetitive.  Even so, I'll always have positive feelings about that game.

[ghost]

The big shift it will take to outshine that is to do what Sky's been begging for so long that he's given up on it.   Let players solo dungeons. Stop giving a damn about rewarding loot to the segment who wants to raid.  Make the games - essentially - more like D2 where any mob can drop awesome shit.. only the raid bosses are guaranteed drops and drop in greater quantities.

WOW used to have a little bit of this with the random world purple drops (I even got a couple of them ), but it just seemed to go away with all the updates.  I thought that concept was completely cool, that you could get a badass ring from some random little mob if you were lucky. 

[Ingmar]

If I could make one change to the design, it would be making companions relevant to group content. Instead of having them take a group slot, just balance 4 person content for 4 people + their 4 companions. I really don't like how the companion is crucial for the whole leveling process and then just gets ditched at max level for anything but dailies. Would also be nice if there was some way to use more than one at a time for certain types of content or whatever.

[Rasix]

Ideally I would have wanted any content in the game, save raids (I guess), be doable by you and your companions.  People grouping with other people get the benefit of social points and not having to babysit bad AI, while the solo guy gets to use available tools to do a vast majority of the available content. WIN-WIN.

edit: 

Still, even being able to do the raids would be spiffy as well.  Just call them something completely insulting and drop no loot.  I'm totally fine with that.

[Amaron]

The companion situation really irked me as well.  I agree with some of the earlier comments to the effect that it was a mistake to not go whole hog on the story.  Having multiple companions AND for the love of god BANTER would of been far better than all the trash quest voice overs.

It really makes no sense.  Bioware built it's glory on companions.  They represented the single feature of this game which let it stand out and they went totally chicken shit with them.  They barely even talk outside of their own personal story bits.

[Rokal]

Ideally I would have wanted any content in the game, save raids (I guess), be doable by you and your companions.  

Isn't this how it works (outside of PVP)? The highest level character I had was 32, but me and a friend were able to duo all the Flashpoints up to that point with our companions.

[Ingmar]

Ideally I would have wanted any content in the game, save raids (I guess), be doable by you and your companions.  

Isn't this how it works (outside of PVP)? The highest level character I had was 32, but me and a friend were able to duo all the Flashpoints up to that point with our companions.

You can't go in alone with 3 of your own companions and do stuff, which is what was being advocated here.

Also later flashpoints become unduoable, you need 4 real characters without massive overleveling/gearing. Colicoid War Game even if you overgear it won't work since you have to have real people sitting in turrets pew pewing things.

[proudft]

People grouping with other people get the benefit of social points and not having to babysit bad AI, while the solo guy gets to use available tools to do a vast majority of the available content. WIN-WIN.

I'm fairly certain the companion AI is better than about 60% of the people I grouped with in WoW LFD.

[Rasix]

Ideally I would have wanted any content in the game, save raids (I guess), be doable by you and your companions. 

Isn't this how it works (outside of PVP)? The highest level character I had was 32, but me and a friend were able to duo all the Flashpoints up to that point with our companions.

When I said you, I didn't mean YOU.  I meant me.  Solo.   I play at 10pm, I'm lucky if I get someone in chat to bounce snarky one liners off.

[Ingmar]

I can only assume he read 'doable' as 'duoable'.

[Amaron]

I play at 10pm, I'm lucky if I get someone in chat to bounce snarky one liners off.

Thankfully this is one of the things that got fixed by the mergers.

[Rokal]

When I said you, I didn't mean YOU.  I meant me.  Solo.   I play at 10pm, I'm lucky if I get someone in chat to bounce snarky one liners off.

My mistake, I didn't realize you were requesting the ability to bring more than 1 companion. I thought you were suggesting that some of the non-raid content didn't allow you to use companions, or was balanced in such a way that they were impossible without real players.

Edit: Apparently the second is also the case. Good to know.

[Rasix]

People grouping with other people get the benefit of social points and not having to babysit bad AI, while the solo guy gets to use available tools to do a vast majority of the available content. WIN-WIN.

I'm fairly certain the companion AI is better than about 60% of the people I grouped with in WoW LFD.

Funny, while looking for my "disapproving Chipper" gif, I ran across:

When I said you, I didn't mean YOU.  I meant me.  Solo.   I play at 10pm, I'm lucky if I get someone in chat to bounce snarky one liners off.

My mistake, I didn't realize you were requesting the ability to bring more than 1 companion. I thought you were suggesting that some of the non-raid content didn't allow you to use companions, or was balanced in such a way that they were impossible without real players.

Edit: Apparently the second is also the case. Good to know.

Yah, I was building on Ingmar's previous comment of:

Would also be nice if there was some way to use more than one at a time for certain types of content or whatever.

Companions were great, but they were mainly just a prereq for the leveling content while adding flavor.  It didn't really allow soloers a way around the inevitable group content sitting among the solo progression.

Tangentially, why are group quests still around?  Do people that level together or in are in active guilds really get excited for them?  Every guild I've been in has had the same negative opinion of them that I have.  Hell, the only people that ever want will agree to do these quests more than once tend to be real life friends. TSW's approach to this seems to be somewhat of a help (almost every quest is essentially a daily), but even then it's not like people really ever want to redo this content.

[Mosesandstick]

Why not try and have the best of both worlds? Scale the quest so it can be solo-able if only one person is in it?

[Sjofn]

If you have someone with silly-high presence (like, say ... Ingmar. Or me.), the companions start to be pretty good in the high level flashpoints, except for when they have to not stand in fire (I REALLY wish they would teach companions not to stand in fire). Hell, Risha handled the "you have to fight by yourself for a little bit" thing in The False Emperor better than Ingmar's smuggler did.  

As for group quests, Ingmar and I will do them as we're ... you know. A group. But I skip the fuck out of them solo and don't give them a second thought. I can only assume they exist because of the loud minority that spazzes about MMOs being too solo-friendly. What I find weird are the people who act like they MUST do the group quests and complain that they can't find people to do them with. Skip 'em, people! Skip them as hard as you can!

[Ingmar]

Tangentially, why are group quests still around?  Do people that level together or in are in active guilds really get excited for them?  Every guild I've been in has had the same negative opinion of them that I have.  Hell, the only people that ever want will agree to do these quests more than once tend to be real life friends. TSW's approach to this seems to be somewhat of a help (almost every quest is essentially a daily), but even then it's not like people really ever want to redo this content.

I actually kind of like the heroics in SWTOR, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if they were gone. One nice thing about them is if we do them all it puts us ahead of the XP curve and then we can skip content on other planets, which has a nice effect of making leveling up multiple characters a much more varied experience. Pretty much only helps if you're duoing (or more than that.)

It's another part of what has made SWTOR by far the best MMO I've ever played to duo in (beating out previous champion CoX by a good margin). For whatever reason, they just 'get' it in ways that nobody else does. All the clickies and mission objectives advance together (they even have two-stage graphics for glowies which is a nice little touch - I loot something, it opens the lid, Sjofn then loots the same thing and a box sitting inside the container disappears, etc), we never get shut out of each other's story instances, we don't get locked into the one healer companion all the time, etc.

[Rasix]

As for group quests, Ingmar and I will do them as we're ... you know. A group. But I skip the fuck out of them solo and don't give them a second thought. I can only assume they exist because of the loud minority that spazzes about MMOs being too solo-friendly. What I find weird are the people who act like they MUST do the group quests and complain that they can't find people to do them with. Skip 'em, people! Skip them as hard as you can!

The bad part for me in SWTOR was that I'd listen to some guy's heartened speech about why I needed to save the force sensitive Tauntauns of the eastern plains.   I'd get a little psyched internally and then it'd just show up as [Heroic 4] on my quest tracker.  I really wanted to save those Tauntauns.  It made me a little sad.

Every planet, I'd end up with enough quests that I'd have to drop the now grey group quests that I never did from 1-2 planets ago.   

[Ingmar]

Yeah there's no doubt they need to mark the heroics with a different quest symbol so you don't listen to the whole spiel first.

[Phred]

However, with SWTOR it's not the mechanics, it's the execution.  You don't wind-up feeling stronger as you level.  You suffer extreme ability bloat.  Talents are - as mentioned - pretty dull and uninspired. Even the ones they ripped-off from WOW lack the panache of that game's abilities.

Did anyone save a link to the post from the moron who bitched about the lack of a feeling of character growth while saying he was one of the ones in beta who advocated making the game harder? I kick myself for not saving that gem.

[Mosesandstick]

My attitude to group quests that I couldn't do was to out-level them and go back for the story once it was trivial. Bit of a band-aid.

[Phred]

Every planet, I'd end up with enough quests that I'd have to drop the now grey group quests that I never did from 1-2 planets ago.   

Ya I picked them up just so I didn't get distracted by their quest markers and regularly purged them after I left a planet. A few times I'd join a pickup group and do them and it usually went well but I never could be bothered going out of my way to do them.

[Rokal]

Tangentially, why are group quests still around?  Do people that level together or in are in active guilds really get excited for them?

I get excited for them, but I only ever play SWTOR in dedicated groups. The co-op experience is just too good to ignore, and the solo experience too stale to bother with. Since I'm always playing in a group, heroic quests are welcome because they're tuned for the way I'm playing. They're a nice break from steam-rolling regular quests, and they ask you to use tactics or abilities that you would otherwise ignore outside of flashpoints. The group 2 quests are fun to solo for the same reason.

If you have someone with silly-high presence (like, say ... Ingmar. Or me.), the companions start to be pretty good in the high level flashpoints, except for when they have to not stand in fire (I REALLY wish they would teach companions not to stand in fire).

My sith warrior/inquis duo was considering letting a companion fill the role of tank but decided against it after watching Khem Val stand in fire at every possible opportunity. I'd love a "move to" ability that gave you a targeting reticule to position your companions.

[Sjofn]

The bad part for me in SWTOR was that I'd listen to some guy's heartened speech about why I needed to save the force sensitive Tauntauns of the eastern plains.   I'd get a little psyched internally and then it'd just show up as [Heroic 4] on my quest tracker.  I really wanted to save those Tauntauns.  It made me a little sad.

Every planet, I'd end up with enough quests that I'd have to drop the now grey group quests that I never did from 1-2 planets ago.  

Yeah, I totally understand that. Like Ingmar said, they really need to mark them differently so you know to ignore them. I'd also like a filter to have grey quests not show up on my damn mini-map.


fake edit: Yeah, Rokal, even just a "move to" command would go a long way for the companions, instead of fiddling with passive/attack and shit.

[Ingmar]

My sith warrior/inquis duo was considering letting a companion fill the role of tank but decided against it after watching Khem Val stand in fire at every possible opportunity. I'd love a "move to" ability that gave you a targeting reticule to position your companions.

4X and Vik tanked just fine for our commando/gunslinger duo, but we never tried to have one of them tank a flashpoint. Companion shield/defense chance is just too low for that.

[Phred]

That's probably the admission I am looking for. Not the "you were right, I didn't have fun. I lied to myself". Please. More like "you were right, all in all this product was sub-par on so many levels that it was doomed to fail (relatively, given the investment and the producer's expectations)". How can we still be dancing around that?

You are seriously expecting people who think they are having fun playing a game to admit that shit? What fucking planet are you from again?
I think you need to look for your validation elsewhere.

[Phred]

In other news, Bioware insider learns that listening to fans is probably a retarded way to design games. http://blogs.bettor.com/Anonymous-Bioware-Insider-blames-fans-for-SWTOR-Video-Games-Update-a173317

[Rokal]

Fans have called him out and claim that Bioware is just pointing fingers for their own failure as they opened the official forums on September 12, 2011 where as the game came out three months later on December 20, 2011. It is hard to believe that three months worth of fan feedback could influence the game that was in development since 2006.

[Sjofn]

 

That dude are dum.

[Lantyssa]

I'm failing to see how it was more like KotOR than WoW in any way, shape, or form.

[Sjofn]

That's my favorite part! The parts that ARE like KotOR (you know, the story shit) are the parts that most people seem to think were good (if a bit crazy to think was sustainable sub-wise for non-me players once they finish a storyline or two without major content releases in a timely manner).

[eldaec]

“EA blames us and to some extent they’re right to. But it was fan feedback from the day we opened the forums that encouraged us to design it for the fans the way it is and that included making it more like Kotor then an MMO like Wow,” he stated mentioning that gamers actually wanted SWTOR to be more like Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), a single player role playing game by Bioware before it was acquired by EA, rather than World of Warcraft (WoW).

Umm, am I thinking of the same SWTOR? Because the one I played did everything it could to be more and more like WoW, *espeicially* with regard to post launch stuff.