I think GW2 looks really good. On top of all that it's going to be F2P after purchase. Looking forward to seeing what kind of mmorpg this is after release.

TSW - I am not sure, the facial expressions look very uncanny valley to me. If they polish it up I may be more interested. It looks like it has potential but I'm not too interested in conspiracy games.

Tera - Not interested. I'm not big on click to swing MMO's, especially when I'm probably close to obtaining arthritis as it is <_<...

ArchAge - Looks really fun from what I've seen with ship travel, and the open world theme. But I am concerned whether or not it will appeal to the current market. It probably won't fair much better than games like darkfall, however I'm still following it.

Originally posted by echolynfan

Originally posted by Zzad

I agree OP but............

After playing SWTOR,  did you expect an amazingly deep & balanced PvP?

I didn´t.

It is Bioware´s first MMO... And You can tell.

Even TRION did A LOT better in their first try with RIFT.

A shame.... :(

I found PVP in Rift to be pretty unbalanced and quite frankly - boring. I've had the most fun in PVP ever in SWTOR - and there's much room for additional PVP Warzones and content.

I know many of you think of PVP as a full corpse loot - noob gank fest but SWTOR's PVP is pretty balanced cpmpared to Rift's and especially Wow's - which is horrible atm.

 

WoW had (Good PVP) at least open world PVP, during vanilla. The only thing SWTOR is competing against WoW with in terms of PVP is with the Warzones, which I am enjoying more than WoW's, due to the higher emphasis of objective points that requires more team coordination over superior gear.

Still, WZ is not complete PVP for me. The full package includes open world, which I've gotten to play around with a bit. While somewhat "rare" still, it can be a blast  if you are in a PVP guild that loves brining backup in numbers.

Originally posted by Dredphyre

Originally posted by NMStudio

Originally posted by Dredphyre

It certainly is impressive.  If total sales are 3 million so far (including digital...just an estimate), then from box sales alone, they've garnered 180 million.  

If the estimates of their 300 million dollar investment are correct, then you're looking at 120 million more before profits are realized.  Further, if they only have a 30% retention...say 1 million subs, then by this time next year BioWare will be turning a profit (minus operating costs of course, which we have no figures for).

 

That's pretty good no matter how you look at it.

those estimates have loooooong ago been debunked.  80-150 million is more accurate.

well, even better for BioWare then.  They'll be in the black easily within a few months...if box sales haven't cleared that mark already.

I believe the 500,000 to make even, was out of sales.

Originally posted by Tarwater

Originally posted by denshing

Originally posted by Shivam

Digital sales are not counted so i would say above 2 million easily which is very very impressive for a MMORPG. Congrats Bioware.

If true that is very impressive. It seemed like a majority of the player base was going to come from the pre-orders tbh.

 

I'm thinking they probably made enough to cover the costs of development?

 

I'm sure they're very happy.  And good for them!

 

Like I said, I think they'll probably end up with 500K subs in a year's time.  What they said they needed all along to turn a profit.  But I do think many people feel like they got burned, so the Bioware name will mean less the next time one of their titles comes out.  Especially after both DA2 and SWTOR, which are sub-par games.  My opinion, of course.

 

They made their money, but I imagine the Bioware brand took a major hit.  In a way, it reminds me a bit of Funcom and AoC.  Lots of people bought that title only to leave the game in droves.  I suspect that's going to happen here.

 

That being said, I'm sure I'll get ME3.  (I still say KOTOR 3 is how SWTOR should've gone, instead of some co-op mess.)  Regardless, I've been waiting for ME3 for a long time.  I hope some of my faith in Bioware can be restored. 

 

But the bottom line is that I'm glad an MMO title made some good money.  That bodes well when some company finally gets it right again.

I'd definitely disagree then. The sales figure alone would place this within the mmorpg market, as the second highest grossing retail in the industries entire history, and the fastest growing.

Imo, it's too early to say how well it will "retain", or whether it is sub par, (beyond personal taste), as it just launched a couple weeks ago. I get what you are saying about KOTOR 3 Vs SWTOR though, I was very confused when I first heard the announcement.

It probably  will probably begin to fall in subscriptions around the second month or so once many of the casuals begin hitting 50, although this is as true as blood when it comes to content oriented theme-parks.

Originally posted by Shivam

Digital sales are not counted so i would say above 2 million easily which is very very impressive for a MMORPG. Congrats Bioware.

If true that is very impressive. It seemed like a majority of the player base was going to come from the pre-orders tbh.

Wheres the forum guy who always cites WoW having 11 million subscriptions, despite the figure having changed, and at least half of that figure being in the Chinese market.

Originally posted by Puremallace

The reason why is because idiot Beta testers kept telling Bioware ZOMG IT IS SO PERFECT release now, so Bioware went ZOMG IT IS PERFECT lets release now. Pretty sure EA had some say so in that release date, since they had no problem reporting TOR's profits on their Q4 earnings report.

And you took the fanboys claiming perfection seriously? This is why we can't have anything nice, when people let hype get to them by being too open minded.

My wishlist is filled with bug stuff. I want all of this cleared up before anything else.

UI locking up randomly, disabling ability to hit hotbars in combat.

Guild interface is still broken! No more magically disappearing guild list PLEASE, and keep the window scrollable with mousewheel when your member list is long enough.

NPC's with broken lips during conversations. Broken animations during conversations, and broken clothing during conversations.

Odd world bugs like bloom effects causing large skewed texture to shoot through world.

Flight pathing errors such as flying through terrain, buildings and giant trees.

Ability activation delay.

Lightsaber not being deactivated properly. (Where Saber remains in hand, activated whe supposedly away)

Unlootable NPC's caused by looting one NPC using "all loot" just before another NPC has spawned loot, thus disabling the loot function for the newly loot spawned NPC.

Bugged OPS leader issue where red dialogue spam ruins the entire screen and also spams personal chat.

Pre-CU vet reporting in. It's not a sandbox, but I don't care. It's good fun, and if you haven't moved on from SWG by now, you have some serious issues.

Originally posted by Redcor

Whats next FOX news game of the year. If they give me  100k i will say its game of the year to.

Well we know FOX news wouldn't give the winner to SWTOR. It has too much sex, violence, evil people attempting to corrupt youths, and waaaay too many aliens taking peoples jobs.

I think simon says would win.

It requires a litle bit of imagination. Other wise yes, you click the button to run the process. Big deal?

Originally posted by sanosukex

its going to get bad soon as people start getting more spread out.. i was playing my shadow trying to get a group for the first flashpoint me and a friend spammed chat for an hour till we got a full group.. UNBELIEVABLE considering the game just got released,  I really don't see how in hell this is better than a dungeon finder...

People get more "spread out" in mmo's without a care because they HAVE the "easy group finder" to begin with. Encourage is the simple yet effective word here. If people want to run so and so, they can go to X location to look for people also looking rather than inviting JOE from halfway across the galaxy.

All this pampering gives you the illusion that without it their would be chaos, because people can't simply "organize things themselves". No, not true at all. Only scrubs aren't able to make it to the space port to find a group in /1

 If people have to have their hand held THAT much, than all the people calling WoW clones for every major release, because games always "hold your hand", will be right.

Originally posted by Creslin321

Hahaha :).

It's good that you'll get a chance to try the game.  I think it's a a decent enough game, the story is fun, very similar to a SPRPG.  That said, I also think it's not going to have much longevity.  It doesn't really offer anything that new in terms of highly repeatable content.

In this category, it just offers what WoW does (raids, dungeons, BGs, open PvP zone), but less of it.

Also, if you're tired of the quest-node model, you'll probably get sick of the game pretty fast.  I'm tired of that model, and I'm already losing interest after less than a week.

Might I inform you that SWTOR has more end-game content than WoW currently has, when considering that 80% of WoW's raid content is useless since all of the expansions and levels that have made them nearly irrelevent for anything but title grinding.

I'm thinking that is SWTOR Has better PVP than WoW, and the devs do make good on the promise to provide fast quality content, then the longevity shuldn't be too much in issue. My concern of longevity begins when I see how quickly obsessive nerds reach the level cap :/

As far as "Open PVP Zones". The question is considering, will open PVP actually "WORK" in swtor? Because I know that open world PVP has been incredibly broken in WoW ever since vanilla days ended.

Originally posted by Teala

I am sitting here with a brand new copy of Star Wars:TOR in my little paws.  Why?  Because my friend Jake just had to go and by me a copy!

I cannot escape this.   He said he was coming over to play some Skyward Sword...but noooo...he brought me a copy of SW:TOR because he and my guildies from WoW want me to play SW:TOR with them. 

I'll let you know what happens.   LMAO!  I cannot belive this.  Why couldn't he have just gotten me a fruit cake.  :(

It's not as though the game is the plague. It's a good game, just enjoy your free time and all the content while it's fresh.

I have a lvl 34 Assassin (Deception), and a lvl 20 Operative (Healing tree)

Operative is more of a support role on PVP. They get some pretty impressive stab abilities like shiv and backstab, and can also shoot at decent distance. The issue I take with operative is DPS, and your effectiveness in general, suffers greatly when attemping to fight, and also heal yourself and others.

Operatives burn through energy so quickly and even when you have cool off abilities to regain it fast, it is difficult to manage. The bottom line is, even if you solely concentrate on DPS (Which is a bad idea in terms of team work), operative is not going to lay the smack down on other players like the Assassin can.

Assassin owns. If played well it's great at stunning other players and also plays decent support when helping players carry the huttball, or in another aspect, they also make amazing forward runners in huttball where if they have the ball and an opportunity they can be at the goal line before you know it. They also do great DPS depending on your spec, and at the end of the day, they are great at burning players down and especially good at finishing them.

IMO, fighting feels more personal when playing an assassin, because we concrentrate on only one or two players when fighting in a fray, whilst the agent tends to range out to a larger spectrum and supports as many allies as possible.

It really comes down to if you want to play more of a support hybrid (Operative), or a DPS Maniac with good offensive capabilities, and fewer but useful support abilities (Assassin)

Both classes require a LOT of efficient /quick skill management in order to be effective, and both are classes that if played well, can easily end up at the very top of Warzone rankings.

That's a good list OP. It's true, great games really make you teach yourself by making you interested [Tangential learning]. How many times playing DAO have I had to go to wikipedia and look up the termonology, and history on words like blight, harrow, and others after spending hours upon hours just reading lore achievements.

It was a slow, and incredibly enjoyable adventure.

Originally posted by returnintor

Originally posted by jpnole

Originally posted by Uronksur

Nice, but a bit premature. The more telling statistic will be the number of subscriptions at the 1-month mark when people start to get billed.

By then it will be 2 million. This is a game changer and will revolutioninze the MMO genre.

Within two months, SWTOR's paids subscriptions will be less than 250,000.  A month after that, 150,000.

So in ONE month, SWTOR subscriptions will be lower than  AOC, WAR, and LOTRO, which are all mmorpg's quite older, that did not do nearly as well initially as SWTOR, and also suffered inevitable decline... You are telling us that SWTOR, within one month, will have less subs than these?

Care you show me your math, or at least show me the drugs you are taking.

Originally posted by rutaq

Hurray SWTOR !!!

 

It managed to do something that almost every major MMO launch in the last 3 years did. ( WoW, Age of Conan, Rift and maybe even Aion)   The thing to watch is how many subscription actually hang on past the first 30 days and the critical 60 day mark.

Age of Conan never hit 1 ,000,000  subscriptions... It's big merit is that it sold 1,000,000 boxes, and that figure took longer than a week to make.

1,000,000 subscriptions is significant, all considering they only released in two major regions.

What an intelligent discussion going on in here. Carry on.

Originally posted by waynejr2

Originally posted by denshing

Originally posted by EduardoASG

nice post. but.

in terms of bugs, or gameplay imparing bugs, swtor is probably the mmo ever released with the least amount of bugs.

regarding the poll.. it is clearly a game for people to get addicted to for a few months if not years. there is a strong connection between the toons and the players in this game.. in terms of roleplay thats very powerful.

Yeah, most definitely a very polished mmorpg. I mention the bugs as they are, because some of them are quite noticeable, and I can see that distracting some.

So you are only counting the bugs that players can see/experience. OMG.

That's a joke right?