Star Wars as a stand alone game is great. Questing is good, flashpoints are good, even the warzones are pretty well designed. Here is the problem, I would have found all of this amazing.....4 years ago. 

I know this has been said before, but I want to reiterate. People aren't leaving WoW because they find the world of Azeroth boring (for the most part). People are leaving because they are sick of logging on, sitting in the capital city, running through the dailies, then waiting for raid. 

So for Star Wars to copy that exactly, while may seem like a smart move to them at the time, instantly shortens the lifespan of the game. It's like showing up to a really great party at 3 in the morning when everyone is passed out expecting to have a good time. 

Star Wars is actually a good game, just really really really late to the party. 

Im still wondering where all the money went.

Hopefully, the WOW template will die along with this game.

Long live the next game template. Which one it will be still remains to be seen. TSW? Gw2? Archeage....who knows but until these giant milk cow MMO's stop making cash, investors will still force game developers to make them, bad or not.

This is a big problem for this genre in which development times are so long. If you want to mimic what people like, you have to hope they still like it 5+ years down the road. If you want to go original, that is just as big a gamble, if not bigger.

Every one of these dev studios, from Anet and Bioware to (whats a good end-of-alphabet-starting-studio?) make games to make monies. Every game is a gamble and even "safe-bets" don't always pay out.

Originally posted by WhiteLantern

This is a big problem for this genre in which development times are so long. If you want to mimic what people like, you have to hope they still like it 5+ years down the road.

Actually this is a poor excuse for what EA/Bioware did. Anet and the makers of TSW have both changed their approach multiple times throughout the multiple years of work on their games and it shows. Making the game and keeping the old design from 5 years ago, the design that every game has now that's out was a bad decision on EA/BW's part and make no mistake they could have changed it along the way if at any time they were actually paying attention to their fans, their playerbase. Hell people on their very own forums were posting what they wanted long before they had an alpha, no one listened to them then obviously.

I don't know OP. I wouldn't even say they made a "Star Wars" game, they made a standard fantasy MMO with Star Wars skins and some minigames that could have been anywhere. The game is bad now and would have been bad years ago.

  BW took alot of time and money and a great setting and did very little with it.  Oh they spent all the money on someone to read me a Bed time story.....so booorrring...so sleeeeppy .

  The Game has Star Wars attached to it's name so it would NET more money, nothing more.

I agree with the OP 100%!

2008 when they sat down and said "Let's make a kiss @ss MMO" they were absolutely right. But perhaps where they gambled and fell short is by assuming nothing would change in the time it would take them to make the game. 

No wonder people are bored with this game after 1 month, its because they have indirectly being playing it for the past 8 years!

Originally posted by Zaltark

Im still wondering where all the money went.

EA's pockets, naturally. They're miserly assholes who only know how to iterate, not develop.

Originally posted by Dusntmatter

Star Wars as a stand alone game is great. Questing is good, flashpoints are good, even the warzones are pretty well designed. Here is the problem, I would have found all of this amazing.....4 years ago.

No... the problem is not timing. The problem is two fold. First, bad game design. It just copied WoW, which is already a heavily flawed game.

Second, it's a singleplayer game selling itself as an MMO. There was no way that would work. Why would I pay a monthly fee to spend all my time in instances? I might as well just play Diablo. If it was a full blown singleplayer game maybe the combat wouldn't be so awful and your quests would actually impact the world.

I agree. If this came out in 2007 it would be a legit alternative to WoW. But in 2012 it just seems dated. We've already been doing all this stuff for years in WoW.

Can you imagine how old TOR will feel and look  when new mmos like Titan and World of Darkness come out? The idea of raiding for purples and queuing for battlegrounds in a heavily instanced world will seem quaint.

Originally posted by Fratman

I agree. If this came out in 2007 it would be a legit alternative to WoW. But in 2012 it just seems dated. We've already been doing all this stuff for years in WoW.

WoW was dated when it was released. We'd already been doing that stuff since 1999 in EverQuest. LotRO, AoC, WAR, all dated upon release, because they clone an already boring overused overplayed game style. Yet WoW still worked, why? It appealed to non MMO gamers. That's whats kept it going, non MMO gamers.

So, TOR's failure (relative) has nothing to do with timing really. It's just a bad game all around.

Here's the thing...

Guild Wars 2 began production around TOR, if not a bit before... what ArenaNet designed seems SO FAR beyond what TOR turned out to be, at least in my opinion.

I kind of feel it was simply a matter of chefs.

Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by Fratman

I agree. If this came out in 2007 it would be a legit alternative to WoW. But in 2012 it just seems dated. We've already been doing all this stuff for years in WoW.

WoW was dated when it was released. We'd already been doing that stuff since 1999 in EverQuest. LotRO, AoC, WAR, all dated upon release, because they clone an already boring overused overplayed game style. Yet WoW still worked, why? It appealed to non MMO gamers. That's whats kept it going, non MMO gamers.

So, TOR's failure (relative) has nothing to do with timing really. It's just a bad game all around.

+1                      just a terrible MMO in every conceivable way .. And will be lucky to have 350K subs by Sept

Originally posted by DeaconX

Here's the thing...

 

Guild Wars 2 began production around TOR, if not a bit before... what ArenaNet designed seems SO FAR beyond what TOR turned out to be, at least in my opinion.

I kind of feel it was simply a matter of chefs.

Pretty much. SWTOR is made by singleplayer game developers, being managed by a publisher that has never turned out a good MMO, and is only interested in copying WoW.

Meanwhile, GW2 is made by fairly original people.

Yea! Thats for sure! They made WoW with Starwars skins. And they made it to where we had to do quests and stuff! And we had buttons to push and use the keyboard to move around! They also used like 3 year old kids to do the voice acting, and made it to where we had to do our different class quests in the same area all with different voice acting and stuff! Bioware should call itself Blizzardware!! I mean, how can you find yourself patting your own  back for making such a clone of WoW? Why can we not have a game like real life where we use a virtual reality machine that hooks into our brains? Where we can live it FOR REAL? And when we do PvP we REALLY DIE? We would all have to actually WORK to make cities. Which would include mining, cutting timber, use the mining to make concrete and metals for real? You level by really working your hands to the bone!! Man that would be fun! Then you would have to make a government like in real life. And have wars. Nah I will pass you haters. Sorry I am not particular to any MMO. I just think that MMO's like AOC, LotRO, and this one, people work very long hours. They do it for the love and thier families. They do it to TRY to make us happy. It's just the way it is nowadays. No one is happy with what they get. Sorry for the rant. But DAMN give it a REST!

Finished. I am sure I will get hell for this.

I can appreciate TOR for its strengths but personally, I think there are just too many MMOs with fresh approaches for me to stay playing long term. Im getting my money's worth out of it for now though. But come April, I'll be more than ready for The Secret World.

Originally posted by Ubel12

 Sorry I am not particular to any MMO. I just think that MMO's like AOC, LotRO, and this one, people work very long hours. They do it for the love and thier families.

 

That's all well and good, but when the game is run by a publisher who has absolutely no knowledge of MMOs and instructs them to make it as close to WoW as possible, well, all the "good intentions" fall by the wayside. Saying "but they're feeding their families" doesn't exucse game devs from making such boring clones, especially when other MMOs do a lot more with a lot less.

Does not matter what those selfish bastards do. The ones that put all the work into the MMO is what matters. Work 12 hours a day, every single day of the week and see how you feel. For real, most of the people who whine and cry are the folks who have never worked hard enough to get a blister on thier hands. Well, now that is not fair, but it seems to me that those folks that have enough time to chew through level 50 two or more times having nothing better to do then bitch about everything. Anyway, my point is at least give all those that really do all the art, music, design, coding, voice acting and directing ect some respect. Sure give the dudes that crap 100 bills heart ache. But just remember those that work so hard to bring us the entertainment. I will tell you this for sure. Bioware worked hard on this game. You just need to look a bit deeper into the game and all that is the game to see it. As do all the others like STO, Rift, ect. I will let it rest now. I know that what I say does not matter, or will change anyone's mind. But at least I got it of my virtual chest, and made my personal point. Also no disrespect to anyone at all. We all have our own thoughts and opinions.

Originally posted by Ubel12

Does not matter what those selfish bastards do. The ones that put all the work into the MMO is what matters.

 

 

 

No... it doesn't. Because the work they're doing is dictated by the selfish bastards, as you call them. They can work as hard as possible and do the best job they can, given the circumstances. But at the end of the day, those circunstances are - they're instructed to make cheap clones. Any ideas that stray from the clone formula get crushed in the corporate setting, as we've seen from ex Mythic employees. It's not their fault the people running the game have no clue what they're doing.

All the hard work Bioware put in amounts to nothing because at the end of the day, this is a horrible MMO.

Originally posted by Ubel12

Does not matter what those selfish bastards do. The ones that put all the work into the MMO is what matters. Work 12 hours a day, every single day of the week and see how you feel. 

umm just no dude.. do you have any idea at all about ToR.. they didnt work all that hard.. well i mean they did at running their mouths to increase hype.. they didnt even develop there own game engine, they paid for a half finished pre developed one that the designers themselves said it's mainly for indie devs and is extremely buggy... but they wanted to save time so they used it anyway, and for the record, i've worked very hard in my life.. i work very hard for my money and thats why i'm pissed that i sunk $178 into a CE of the game trying to support a company that inevitibly gave me a beta quality product that is still half broken even with all the current fixes.

but thats my opinion