Ok, I think I am really good at worst case scenarios.

- all character models are simplified with just faces and haircuts to chose like in WOW, because that is more iconic

- the entire game in altogether instanced like GW, you see other players only in few hubs

- the heavy story orientation and dice rolls in conversations make sure NOBODY every invites you to group

- money runs out because they aim for more than they can chew and 25% of story is cut out like in KOTOR 2, making lots of loose ends

- huge hands and huge lightsabers

- PVP is limited to boring arena combat

- the entire game is totally linear and you are held by the hand on every step *BIG GLOWING SIGN FOR SMUGGLERS *HERE COVER POSSIBLE**

- dialogue is all cheesy, stereotypical George Lucas style

- every romantic companion option is equally terrible (Bastla-bitcher, Carth-whiners)

- for some reason all Jedi are stuck with absymally uncool looking plate armour

 - 80% of all play Force Users

- 80% play Empire faction

- despite the story humbug PR blah blah, all quests still boil down to "kill 20 Jedi/Sith"

- hardware demands are like using the NASA computer, and still the world looks crappy, unrealistic and the game is buggy as hell; naturally

- you can't chose your voice, so ever Jedi, BH and whatnot have all the same voices, and everyone is unhappy with it

- there is practically no crafting

- no housing, no social hubs, no social life whatsoever, no other activities than do the quests and follow the story

- the game gets an initial super hype, selling 2 million boxes, but after everyone has played the story 1 or 2 times within 3 months it drops to 100k

I am sure you may think of more, but I tried to stick to halfway possible scenarios.

The worst that could happen?

The game fails for some reason or other. LA licks its wounds and says to itself: '...The reason the game failed was that it still wasn't simple or flashy or pew-pew enough to satisfy the need for instant gratification of a ten year old child or George Lucas! Now who can we get ot build us such a game..?.'.

And a thousand miles away, on a blasted heath in a locked cemetery, the rusted door of a ruined crypt suddenly creaks open. And the nameplate on that crypt?

'John Smedley. DO NEVER OPEN!'.

Funcom comes onboard as Technical Advisors.

 I choose not to participate in negative speculation. And I choose to make sure you all need to know this.

:P

For me, the worst is that the game itself is fun to play BUT there isn't enough of a mmo type community/game building dynamic to make it interesting enough over a long term to make it worth paying for a subscription.

Let me start off by saying that I have high hopes for this game and hope it will be a success. Below you can find my attempt at cynicism.

1. The final look of the game will be more 'My Little Pony' than 'stylized realism'.

2. The tutorial will be narrated by Jar jar Bink's distant ancestor.

3. Bioware will hire people from Funcom, Aventurine and SOE for their customer service team.

4. Bioware will listen to input from Mythic in the way they shape their game.

5. That awful 'placeholder' hairstyle will be the only one available for human males.

6. Bioware attempt to make the game 'like pre-cu SWG was'.

7. Bioware will listen to disgruntled SWG veterans.

8. The Jedi and Sith will be over- or underpowered.

9. The game will be microtransaction based.

10. The game will be a carbon copy of WoW, just with the TOR IP.

11. The voice acting will eventually be done by the development team for most characters, due to the budget running out.

I could probably think of more, but I'm too lazy.

I just found a funny song.

www.youtube.com/watch

The worst that could happen is the game gets negative reviews upon release, I ignore said reviews, buy the game, and end up hating it, thereby losing myself money for absolutely no reason.

Other than that, anything they do to it won't affect me one iota.  But honestly, the trailer was more entertaining than the last three real Star Wars movies, so even if I don't buy the game, they'll always have a place in my heart.

Microtransactions. *Shudders*

Originally posted by eHero

The worst that could happen is the game gets negative reviews upon release or it gets rave reviews that it doesn't really deserve, I ignore said reviews, buy the game, and end up hating it, thereby losing myself money for absolutely no reason.

Other than that, anything they do to it won't affect me one iota.  But honestly, the trailer was more entertaining than the last three real Star Wars movies, so even if I don't buy the game, they'll always have a place in my heart.

 the worst that could hapen is all the trolls on AoC forum coming to this forum and ruining it for anyone who is looking for a serious thread of discussion about the game.

Failure of the Core Concept

Like so many games, TOR has a unique selling point; Story. WAR also had a unique selling point: RvR. So did AoC: Combat + Citybuilding. They promised so much and disappointed us so utterly; what if TOR does the same thing? A fully voiced version of WoW questing where NPCs demand (in a strong "imperial" accent) that you go and kill 10 x gizka?I saw a preview write up of the game and that's basically what they said it was

Originally posted by Sampparound

Microtransactions. *Shudders*

Agreed. Since what is "worst" is subjective, RMT in any form would be the the only thing that will keep me from subscribing.

Originally posted by Karahandras

Failure of the Core Concept

Like so many games, TOR has a unique selling point; Story. WAR also had a unique selling point: RvR. So did AoC: Combat + Citybuilding. They promised so much and disappointed us so utterly; what if TOR does the same thing? A fully voiced version of WoW questing where NPCs demand (in a strong "imperial" accent) that you go and kill 10 x gizka?I saw a preview write up of the game and that's basically what they said it was

 

You won't see many of  the "go kill 10 womp rats and return to me" quests in TOR. No one likes those kinds of quests.

You guys are all missing the big one.

The worst taht could happen is it doesnt come out at all.

I win

 The worst thing that can happen is:

This game succeeds on the same level as WoW has and further proves that expensive, simplistic, unimaginative games are the only way to succeed in the MMO industry.  

This then drives the final nail into the coffin of innovation in this genre and those of us who had been waiting for "the game to change it all" will finally realize that the world simply doesn't want one and that all we're ever going to get are endless variations of the WoW model (WoW in space, WoW with lightsabers, WoW underwater, WoW in the future, WoW on boats, etc.)

That's the worst that can happen.

Please don't take this to say that I "hate" SWTOR.  It looks great and I will definitely play it.  But it looks like another very stale entry in an already very stale genre.  

Originally posted by thexrated

We also have an indication that this game will not have subscriptions. So I think it will be easier to pick up by more traditional gamers.

 

Link please?   I haven't seen anything that suggests this game will be anything other than a subscription to play game.

Originally posted by GreenWidow

Originally posted by thexrated

We also have an indication that this game will not have subscriptions. So I think it will be easier to pick up by more traditional gamers.

 

 

Link please?   I haven't seen anything that suggests this game will be anything other than a subscription to play game.

actually, it could go either way. NO information has been given at all on this subject, and in fact it has been avoided entirely.

 What's the worse that could happen? EA forces it to be pushed out before it's ready and it sucks ass.

Originally posted by smisher

 the worst that could hapen is all the trolls on AoC forum coming to this forum and ruining it for anyone who is looking for a serious thread of discussion about the game.

No, what's even worse than that is the trolls from the SWG forum continuing to stay on this forum and demand the game to be changed to pre cu as poetic justice to their traumatic experience.

Originally posted by ktanner3

Originally posted by smisher

 the worst that could hapen is all the trolls on AoC forum coming to this forum and ruining it for anyone who is looking for a serious thread of discussion about the game.

 

No, what's even worse than that is the trolls from the SWG forum continuing to stay on this forum and demand the game to be changed to pre cu as poetic justice to their traumatic experience.

Right! We certainly don't want to learn from the experience of anyone who has had any experience of dealing with LA , EA or Funcom before! We can rush blindly over cliffs all by ourselves, thank you.

Originally posted by vancha801

Originally posted by OldAgeJunkie

On a side note, will we only be able to create one character in Star Wars The Old Republic or is Bioware allowing more then one character allowed per account?. I hope its only one character per account.

 

i think we will be able to make a phew per server (4 - 8)

bioware wants the player to live the story and seeing we have 8 classes meaning 8 different stories (with each having multiple paths) you will be allowed to make multiple characters

and tbh i think having only 1 char for 1 account is pritty lame (looks at ffxi)

 

well i have 2 fears of for this game

1) after youre main story, what will you do? will there be enough endgame to satisfy the player? or will you need to reroll an alt...

2) will jedi/sith be overpowered? and if so there will probably be 50% of the people who will play either of those classes

What's wrong with 50% of all players being either Jedi or Sith? Sounds very balanced to me actually.

There will only be a problem if it is like 70-80% Jedi/Sith or something like 90% Sith and only 10% Jedi,etc.

It's KOTOR 50% of people being Jedi is a good thing.

I just hope as a Jedi my companion character(s) can also be a Jedi like a Padawan or something. As an uber Jedi awesomesauce I wouldn't want to be stuck hanging around with a lowly trooper or droid.. gimme a Padawan thanks.

At this point in time there are so many points of possible failure that it is impossible to pick the "worst".

I'd say microtransactions and the game being a single-player game are up at the top though.

Originally posted by arieste

 The worst thing that can happen is:

This game succeeds on the same level as WoW has and further proves that expensive, simplistic, unimaginative games are the only way to succeed in the MMO industry.  

This then drives the final nail into the coffin of innovation in this genre and those of us who had been waiting for "the game to change it all" will finally realize that the world simply doesn't want one and that all we're ever going to get are endless variations of the WoW model (WoW in space, WoW with lightsabers, WoW underwater, WoW in the future, WoW on boats, etc.)

That's the worst that can happen.

Please don't take this to say that I "hate" SWTOR.  It looks great and I will definitely play it.  But it looks like another very stale entry in an already very stale genre.  

Do you actually know ANYTHING about SWTOR or....

I mean, I don't know about you but I can't think of a single MMO that has fully voiced everything and such a heavy focus on story and the Bioware decision making dialogue trees and alignment systems...

May not be new to gaming but certainly new to the MMORPG genre. How is that simplistic and unimaginative? How is that not innovation? 

Going back to sandbox style open world no content player created everything is not innovation it's going backwards. And don't blame WoW, blame EQ for why MMOs didn't evolve from the UO model instead.

Originally posted by johnspartan

 

Do you actually know ANYTHING about SWTOR or....

I mean, I don't know about you but I can't think of a single MMO that has fully voiced everything and such a heavy focus on story and the Bioware decision making dialogue trees and alignment systems...

May not be new to gaming but certainly new to the MMORPG genre. How is that simplistic and unimaginative? How is that not innovation? 

Going back to sandbox style open world no content player created everything is not innovation it's going backwards. And don't blame WoW, blame EQ for why MMOs didn't evolve from the UO model instead.

Having a lot of voice-acting (and dialogue trees) doesn't make the game innovative - EQ2 was doing that in 2006. I personally turned the feature off since I could read faster than the clunky speech could be spouted.