Very much agree, best description I've heard is the world feels plastic. It's very hard to pinpoint why it has this feeling. I think it just comes down to a lots and lots of little things that we've gotten used to in other games that just didn't make it into this one. No day/night cycle NPC's don't have daily routine, and in a lot of cases are stuck in some frozen pose. Nonsensical structures. ( why is this military base a long windy hallway, who the hell would build a house like this ) Star port on a planet with a capital city that is in the middle of the jungle with no paved roads to it. Cantina on tat where the first floor is all red green quest areas and the bar is in the basement. In general, even for the Star wars universe a lot of the design just doesn't make any sense.

LOL, couldn't have said it better. Some people really do like that planet though. Don't understand why, but they have every right to like it.

I think the 500m number comes from wall street guesstimates that are on the high side and include marketing and other costs not included in other estimates.

PR machine brought their metacritic score up from 5.something to 8.5. Id' say they are doing a great job of mostly containing the mess to these forums.

It does seem like we got a $5m MMO with $195m worth of VO work.

I'm guessing they borrow the worst feature from SWG and make it a holo grind to unlock a new race.

The engine has a lot of features on paper that make it real nice for developers. It's basically like a source control system for 3D worlds. Which for a developer, that's over the top cool. 100% Speculating now... Where I think things went south is the engine appears to be incredibly slow and inefficient when it comes to retrieving resources from the system and loading them onto the video card. One of the amazing things about WoW when it came out was the ability to run from one end of the continent to the other without a loading screen. Still not sure how they did this because loading resources onto the video card is a pretty big bottle neck, but they somehow managed a way of streaming data to the video card to allow this. This appears to be a lot more common place now so I assume a lot of engines can now handle this. But this engine appears to work like a typical FPS, load the map, play the map, stop playing, unload the map, load the next one. It wasn't designed to stream resources in on the fly while the engine was drawing. And things got messed up when they tried to add this ability.

Probably related to IO / Memory / Performance issues for certain machines. AA, high quality textures, armor customization, all things that greatly impact performance. I really think they ran smack dead into a wall with the game engine and performance on certain machines.

LoL this story, Were not talking Shakespeare here. Wire, Dexter, BSG, or anything with believable character, plot, or character motivations. It's more phantom menace, which I think came from a random ludicrous plot generator. To the devs credit, having to come up with this much content that has to explain why the MMO universe operates the way it does was probably impossible to pull off.

noticed that as well, Models aren't water tight. Very big "No No" with a lot of game engines, but this one doesn't seem to care.

Bad! Very bad!! Very very bad!!! Now you need to apologize to everyone.

Damn, and that's on a road as well. Pretty obvious someone cracked the whip and told them to ship before they were even close to ready.

The one situation where this is acceptable, if your obviously on the same mission with someone and both waiting on the same respawn. I'll just blind invite the person. Usually they accept, we get the objective and we both say thanks and go our own way.

Which was rare and very expensive. Which is why they spent the money up front to properly test the game. Now it's cheaper to offshore QA and get it kind of playable, launch then fix what bothers people the most. Bad quality is decision companies make to save money. Not some sort of unavoidable state of being.

Back in the day, before it was common for everyone to have an internet connection, when games were burned onto roms, before consoles could patch games... games shipped in a polished state. Bring in the internet and the ability to fix things post sales.... Sell now, fix later. And some publishers don't even bother with the fix later part. Point is, It can be done. It costs money to fully polish something. So they ship with bugs because we put up with it and it saves money. Why spend the money to fix everything when you can ship a turd and just fix what really really bothers people.