Opportunity Cost - an estimated cost incurred when you perform one business decision versus another.

The purpose of this post is to explain to everyone who is hoping for the Fourth Pillar to come back why it is not going to happen. The definition above and economic term is the explanation of not only why several things happened when the game went F2P such as

• The 1-50 experience was called "Elder Game"
  
• Makeb did not have any class story arcs
  
• Companions story progression is in limbo (clarified what I meant, my bad)
  
• New Romances were offered in Makeb instead of continuing the ones you already had.
  
• An entire expansion was dedicated to Space PvP
  
• Every cantina tour that has had the question asked got a dismissive answer
  
• Dailies, Global Events, Operations, and Arenas were the story of 2013
  
• Nearly the entire writing team left or was fired
  

The economics lesson is when you do anything there could have been something else you did instead. These reflections and future estimations form the basis of decision making. EA saw the 1-50 experience that Bioware was in charge of as unsustainable in an economic sense because the opportunity costs of the 8 additional story arcs in addition to the Republic and Empire arcs took resources away from max level PvE content, PvP, and popular request items like Space content.

This might sound like a Tin Foil Hat theory, but I do not believe for a second that the game was losing money every month or that the media stories being released about the "dire future" of TOR were factual. I would hazard a guess that TOR's team pre-Hickman did not want to drop the Fourth Pillar they sold their game on. I am pretty sure that the team was advised repeatedly that what they were focusing their efforts on could be dedicated to areas that would be more popular and less expensive, even though it would make long-time Bioware consumers upset.

In the end, the bad press from those stories and the "financial problems" very quickly changed the business model from the subscriber only to Free to Play, caused a huge transition to what we see now, introduced Cartel Market, and ever since then the focus has been on what EA wanted Bioware to focus on instead of the class stories.

I personally loved the old Bioware for what it was. You knew when you saw their name on a game you'd have a great story to play multiple times and ponder for years afterward. Jade Empire, the original KOTOR, Dragon Age... this was the best storytelling period in video game history.

But they chose to work with EA and everything that comes with. Make peace with it guys, and either find enjoyment in the new TOR franchise's direction or play the old Bioware games, read books, and hope at some point in the future another company comes along to become something like what Bioware was before EA.

Those high quality story arcs are never coming back.

To be fair to EA, I do want to say that GSF and Arenas are a lot of fun and worth investing a subscription for. The PvP class balance is 1000x better than the last game I played, Guild Wars 2, and space combat is a home run that will definitely bring people in once it's all released. You guys did find out what most people wanted and delivered, despite tearing down a company's direction that I loved.

In the end, it's just business. Hopefully one day there won't be greedy shareholders to slave away to please, but until then I am satisfied with where the game is going because it lets me compete in two forms of PvP that I enjoy and the 1-50 story content is still incredible enough to play and replay from different perspectives.

When it comes to the VA, I would like to point out that similar to what happened before, Makeb has your companions making comments, whenever they go across a certain area. However, it is fair to assume they were ALSO recorded way before the game came out, since one of the voice actors died shortly after the game was released and his voice is still there.

The actor I'm referring to is David Anthony Pizzuto. He voiced Tanno Vik.

For me I always find the cost of it a terrible excuse on their part

When they sat down and looked at everything early on I do not believe they never considered the cost of on going voice work. They knew it would be costly, and still went with it.

I find it hard to believe that they also didnt look at the what ifs, ie what if the game doesnt perform as well and turns out like what we have now rather then just bank on the big result and ignore the rest ( despite this being their attitude in development sadly)

It was a big draw card for many people, and many stories and companions feel like this is just the start of something bigger. It was supposed to be the start, the A New Hope and the first step into more, but now its just another grind only voiced.

What made SWTOR great and stand out from other titles on the market is dead as well, then. Even with all the additions this past year (and I agree with you, 2013 was generally good for the game), playing your characters without the stories that got them to 50 is hollow.

If there isn't a way that BW manages to continue some of the story arcs created for the initial release, a lot of people will eventually stop logging in. It has already happened to many, many guilds that were here even through the rough spots of 2012 when there were no new additions into the game.

This may not concern EA, as new folks are just starting out the game all the time now it seems, from anecdotal evidence I see logging in and chatting, and it takes a long time to play through all the stories and class nuances. And, with that, there are plenty of people to sell CM items and packs to. Still, as a BW and KOTOR fan, what brought me here in the first place, it is really sad if the stories we can expect to see are like Makeb once a year.

No new companion lines on Makeb? Did you not play with a companion there? O.o

I think the OP means conversations with your companions...

There was some datamining that had been done that showed a class story arc in a Sleheyron/Bothawui expansion that apparently got axed, but obviously Makeb is what happened.

One thing to point out is how economists and corporate people view profit and the way everyone else does.

Most people see profit nominally, where you pay whatever something costs and then all the dollars you make that exceed those costs are profit. You just try to keep that positive in your business and maintain it with the kind of service/maintenance required to do so.

Economists and corporate types add that opportunity cost I mentioned to the costs and raise the stakes. They add an imaginary, yet estimable, cost to their nominal costs that can be measured to further increase their profits. If you can continue to make profits with this additional "cost" then not only are you going to make nominal profits, but more than you would if you didn't account for it.

So all this "it's too expensive" stuff is talking about meeting this extra requirement they're deliberately placing on themselves to get more out of their operation. I would hazard a guess that Bioware was not doing that before, and figured that they would make profits off of the quality of their product alone, which, of course, they did. They weren't the flashiest, most easily advertisable games but they sold well enough to keep growing over the years because of their reputation.

Every small company starts out like that - they have to create significantly better products than their competitors and grow a reputation of being better until they get big enough to consider joining up with the "big boys." Once that happens, the "lemons effect" starts happening, but that's another economics term.

The point is it's not a question of whether or not class stories profit - they do.

They just don't profit enough to outweigh the financial opportunity of what we saw work in 2013 for EA. They gutted the "small time" mindset and strategy of Bioware and went "big time" and will continue to do so with all their brands.

On a related subject, Mass Effect 3 was an example of what EA wanted to do with their games that is eerily simliar to SWTOR's strategy. ME3 was a big story franchise that sacrificed the quality of it for a multiplayer element that had a little shopping mall in it with the purchaseable packs. Sound famliiar?

The press was awful and I doubt that it was a coincidence that EA was voted "Worst Company" because of it, but they made their money and people enjoyed the multiplayer of ME3 quite a bit. That little shopping mall was a home run, just like Cartel Market is a home run in SWTOR.

Dragon Age 3 is not going to have the kind of epic story people want it to have. It will be very flashy, buggy, and full of explosions, big fights, and people will love it and swear by it.

Like it or not, EA knows its customer base a lot better than people will admit. Only a few people want the Bioware culture and quality storytelling compared to the hordes of boom headshot instant gratification types.

The reason why there won't be anymore story is that the original development team realized two months into launch that 8 single player rpg games shoe-horned into a co-op environment isn't the same thing as an mmo, then promptly abandoned ship.

its an MMORPG, its supposed to have both though, the rp part which is the stories and MMO part which is flashpoints, heroics, ops, warzones, world bosses, and the fact that you can group up with anyone at any time. Besides, they haven't abandoned ship, GSF is proof they did not abandon ship, we have even gotten 2 new companions (before someone starts going "but their not class companions" what would happen if say, only the knight could get HK? The other classes would yell and kick " I want my HK!")

I hate it when people bring up the death of class stories. It makes me really sad.

I quietly acknowledge that, in all probability, we will never see new class stories, any of the QoL improvements i'd really like to see, nor any of the things the community has asked for, it just breaks my heart a little every time i'm reminded of it. It's hard to watch such a great IP fall on such hard times.

I just keep telling myself that things have to improve, and I am just holding onto that one notion because I really, really love SW.

Opportunity Cost is absolutely the reason why we won't see resources devoted to completely separate class stories (with the possible exception if we see a full boxed expansion a couple years down the line, which I doubt is a direction they'll choose to go).

The purpose of this post is to explain to everyone who is hoping for the Fourth Pillar to come back why it is not going to happen.

[...]

Those high quality story arcs are never coming back.

But that only means the Fourth Pillar is gone if you think meaningful story content can only be delivered in the form of fully separate class & companion stories. Faction-specific storylines obviously have less replayability than individual class stories, but I don't see why so many people act as if EA/BW gave up on Story altogether when they moved in that direction.

In my opinion, Makeb had a better world arc than any other planet in the game, and a story on par with the best of the class storylines. It had a much grander and more cinematic feel throughout and better pacing. How much of this was already plotted out before the initial writing team left, I don't pretend to know, but I do know that we got significant "Fourth Pillar" content in RotHC.

Personally, I hope that future leveling planets (once they raise the cap in a future expansion) will include a small number of class-specific missions interspersed with the main faction quest-line, as well having the lead-in conversation strongly contextualize why each individual character is on that faction quest.

There is a balance that can be struck to increase replay value and the "feel" of playing a different class without having to dump in four times the development costs for unique class quest-lines.

Sure, Makeb was a good story but it isn't the kind of deep story that Bioware games have been for years. That's the quality element I was talking about.

Old school Bioware games weren't just great stories on their own - they were great stories that you could experience in totally different ways each time you played through them.

I did post a compromise between the polarities of Elder Game class stories and Makeb that I'll bring here for you guys to look at

I think a compromise that work between full class story arcs and an indifferent one that doesn't mention them more than a few lines would be the following:

 

Overall Story Arc

1

2

3 Communication 1

4

5 Communication 2

6

7 Communication 3

Class Story Mission

 

At 3, 5, and 7, you get communications from your crew or contacts from your class story regarding evolving matters that are of concern to them. You don't go off to take care of them because of your status at this point and your involvement in the Overall Story Arc. There can be LS/DS choices here in how to handle a tricky situation.

 

Once you deal with 7, and complete the Overall Story Arc, you get a mission for your class story that was explained by the communications throughout the Overall Story. This would be more impactful, like how you got summons to Darth Zash's ritual, the Uphrates lead, etc. There you deal with whatever the issue or threat was to your class.

 

It wouldn't be that hard to build intermittent conversations and one mission for the 8 classes, as opposed to designing the entire planet to house several areas for each class to use for their story. The location of the missions could be old or new - I don't think anyone would complain on the Empire side about having to go back to the Dark Council chambers for something huge, or to Tython, etc.

Opportunity Cost is absolutely the reason why we won't see resources devoted to completely separate class stories (with the possible exception if we see a full boxed expansion a couple years down the line, which I doubt is a direction they'll choose to go).

 

But that only means the Fourth Pillar is gone if you think meaningful story content can only be delivered in the form of fully separate class & companion stories. Faction-specific storylines obviously have less replayability than individual class stories, but I don't see why so many people act as if EA/BW gave up on Story altogether when they moved in that direction.

 

In my opinion, Makeb had a better world arc than any other planet in the game, and a story on par with the best of the class storylines. It had a much grander and more cinematic feel throughout and better pacing. How much of this was already plotted out before the initial writing team left, I don't pretend to know, but I do know that we got significant "Fourth Pillar" content in RotHC.

 

Personally, I hope that future leveling planets (once they raise the cap in a future expansion) will include a small number of class-specific missions interspersed with the main faction quest-line, as well having the lead-in conversation strongly contextualize why each individual character is on that faction quest.

 

There is a balance that can be struck to increase replay value and the "feel" of playing a different class without having to dump in four times the development costs for unique class quest-lines.

You must have played a different RotHC. The Republic story was significantly worse with less dialogue than most of the original planets, and the Imperial one was on par, though it didn't make sense for some classes. Both were extremely short for an expansion.

If the entire story were voiced, it may have felt different (the heroics and weekly missions especially, which make up for a significant part of the Makeb arc). But most of the planet was on a terminal.

That said, Makeb looked and still does look amazing. So their trick Cantina tour question isn't entirely without merit - I did enjoy Makeb (once on the Republic side, twice on the Imperial side, leveling every other character with daily missions). It's just a shell of what the other planets felt like playing through, with visuals to try and make up for it.

In my opinion, Makeb had a better world arc than any other planet in the game, and a story on par with the best of the class storylines. It had a much grander and more cinematic feel throughout and better pacing. How much of this was already plotted out before the initial writing team left, I don't pretend to know, but I do know that we got significant "Fourth Pillar" content in RotHC.

And to me it felt like they took what they had written for the Trooper and Imperial Agents Makeb class stories way back when and then forced the other 6 to fit into that and scraped theirs. So while Makeb felt awesome on my Commando and Sniper, it felt like no one else belonged there and was one of the worst story arcs I'd ever done because it FELT rushed, cobbled together, and not designed with those classes in mind. I hope they don't do that again, I know they will...but I can hope. At the very least I hope the story is actually good and well written for ALL eight classes, and not just two of them.

Not trying to say your opinion is invalid btw. Just saying mine as there is always 2 sides.

Even beyond RotHC, Oricon gives me hope that EA/BW is still putting proper effort into "Fourth Pillar" content for the game. Just looking at how they have been constantly tweaking their approach to Story in their Daily Areas:

Ilum: quests that would otherwise be one-time side quests are made into repeatable Dailies, with full voice-over conversations on each and spread out over a relatively large map, the same as one-time world quests.

• Nice the first time you play through, but very tedious after that as you're hearing the same voiced dialogue over, and over, and over again, when after a while you probably just want to get the Dailies done.
  

Black Hole: a voice-over "breadcrumb" quest to get you to the area, most of the Daily Quests are quickly acquired terminal quests, with one voice-over Heroic quest that acts as a finale to the plot to the plot of the area.

• Quicker and less tedious from a "get your Dailies done" perspective, and the voice-over breadcrumb gives a bit of context to the area with the voice-over Heroic wrapping it up alright, but the individual terminal quests don't have any appreciable story to them at all, and after a couple of times you're probably spacebar-ing through the Heroic.
  

Section X & CZ-198: a voice-over breadcrumb quest to get you to the area, all of the Dailies are terminal quests, with either a discrete one-time voiced-over questline (Sec.X's HK-51 quest) separate from the Dailies or a wrap-up conversation after you finish the terminal quests once and a pair of associated Flashpoints (CZ-198).

• Aside from the context the breadcrumb & wrap-up quests give, which kind of give the impression that what you're doing fits into an overall story progression, there is no real story content at all to the Daily quests themselves. The areas themselves are 100% committed to "get your Dailies done quickly" gameplay.
  

Oricon: voice-over breadcrumb quest to get you to the area, then fully voiced over versions of each quest that advance the story up to two Operations with a wrap-up conversation at the end. After all of the solo and Heroic quests are done, they become terminal quests repeatable without the voice-over interactions.

• In my opinion, here is where EA/BW got it right. The area feels like a shorter faction-specific questline, helped by the fact that its the culmination of an ongoing plotline. You get a mini world arc that genuinely feels like a part of the game's overall story throughout the first time you play through it, and afterwards you get a manageable-sized area where you can quickly pick up all your Dailies without rehearing the same voice-overs, and complete them in a reasonable amount of time (only complaint is the mob density).
  

They let the pendulum swing too far away from Story content with Sec.X and CZ-198, and then they corrected it. Oricon actually shows how you can make a Daily area, with all the cost-effective return they're looking for in a replayable grind, that still feels like an integrated part of the game's storyline (without turning any more tedious than dailies always are on subsequent runs).

It's steps like this that makes it seem to me like the Fourth Pillar is still something they're keeping in mind.

I know somoene who went to one of the cantina tours and talked to some of the developers, who said that in the near future we will get some makeeb story arcs but hinted that they already had the voice acting done for future story content and that it would take to long to set up a countionuation. Which means that the voice acting for class continuation is already done it would just take to long to implement it. AND the developers also hinted that its not OUT OF THE QUSTION.! So for the near future we will get makeeb story like planets and exp i only hope they bring back some more kotor planets like manan (the water planet), kashyk, dantoine or telos. i can wait 3-5 years for new class quests, provided the new content in-between is good!

PS: why do people allways have to say we will NEVER GET THIS, WE WILL NEVER GET THAT. Chill bro, nothing worth wile comes that fast

I did post a compromise between the polarities of Elder Game class stories and Makeb that I'll bring here for you guys to look at

Yep, that's the sort of "sweet spot" between reasonable development costs and getting the "feel" of a unique play-through the EA/BW can and should be trying for. Whether it's a variation on the "conversation and final quest" based approach you're talking about or the "integrated but unique" quests I've mentioned elsewhere:

What BioWare really needs is to give the feel of playing a unique character, and there are cost-effective ways to do that without having to create a completely separate quest chain for each class. Honestly, the dialogue in Hutt Cartel did a much better job than I expected it to, but I think adding in a few class-specific quests to an overall faction story arc would go a long way.

 

Say the Empire is gearing up to attack a Republic stronghold, all the quests leading up to this point could have been the same for the faction (secure a landing zone, defeat the locals, kill an enemy commander, etc.) with class-specific dialogue like we saw in RotHC, but when you get to the 5th or 6th mission, the quest-giver tells you there is a concerted effort going on to set up the attack, and your part is:

 

Bounty Hunter: We need you to track down and capture a Republic commander who's deserted his post, his security clearance may still be valid and he will know the security procedures in the base.

Imperial Agent: We need you to infiltrate a nearby Republic outpost that is networked into the main base and slice in a virus that will deactivate their automated turrets.

Sith Warrior: We need you to wipe out a Republic squad patrolling near the base, if they're not eliminated they could reinforce the base once our attack begins and flank our forces.

Sith Inquisitor: Something-Something-Darkside

 

Scatter just a few of these throughout the overall course of a planet's quest chain, especially if one or two involve utilizing or deploying your companions, and BioWare can give the feel of a unique class experience even though 90% of the content is shared between all classes of the faction.

Aside:

Not trying to say your opinion is invalid btw. Just saying mine as there is always 2 sides.

No worries mate, any time someone is talking about whether a story is "good" or "well written" or whatever it's going to be purely subjective. I actually had to go back and edit in the words "In my opinion" into my post since I usually just take that for granted (which can be a dangerous assumption to make on forums like this)

Good Post.

Personally After finishing a class story I'm done with that character. Mekeb CZ, and everything that has been introduced since the launch is just cheep crap you can find just about anywhere else.

Never underestimate EA's "dead horse beating" and "cash cow milking" skills.

snip

Right now you make some claims upon which you then build your conclusions, however your claims are at least partially incorrect.

Makeb offered no new romances. Just some flirt options.

Although there were no new class missions there was a story for Makeb and the story of the Dread Masters was more than just random dailies.

The game didn't go F2P. It added F2P options but if you look at the game it's still a sub game with F2P options that have strong limitations and are geared towards bringing people to a sub.

These are the most important mistakes in your reasoning. Class stories and companion arcs are not in the plans as we know, but there is no saying what will happen in the future. At the same time I am not holding my breath.

What I will say though is this. Next year will be a rather crucial year to the game in my view. The first year was clearly a disaster of almost biblical proportions. You may not believe that they were losing money but the massive reduction in servers was not in our imagination. F2P options were added and a cash shop to bring the game back on the rails. Even Makeb was originally at a cost.

This has changed now. Whereas year 1 was about pure survival (and the signs were all there), this second year has been about repositioning the game and making it financially healthy and giving people more content. Galactic Starfighter is an entirely different type of activity for the game. The new operations were not simply rehashse of previous ones either and were indeed part of a larger story arc.

And that brings us to the conclusion of this year and the beginning of the next. The game has a foundation to build on now, but what will they do with that? Currently there is nothing much on the horizon. Sure, GS will be expanded upon shortly but obviously that can't be it.

The current operations won't last forever and people have been voicing their wishes. A clever Bioware will see these opportunities. We shall see. But the reality at the moment is that we have a solid game at the moment that needs to keep growing and to be honest, we don't really have any idea at all what BW are planning next.

My guess is that another digital expansion should be in the make already and come out by April or so, just like RotHC was this year. We had stuff to look forward to during the summer, we got a continuation of that for the winter but at this stage we don't know. Where is this game headed next year?

A very interesting question indeed if I dare say so myself.

As a non-raider I find Oricon to be very worrisome. I am very afraid that all story content is going to be locked behind raids since those are easily repeatable and it looks like the only content on the plate is repeatable content. If you just look at the solo story on Oricon it is very short, generic and unfinished. (And I think the NPC is hysterically poorly chosen for his role. He looks like a beatnik, not a scary sadistic sith!)

While I agree that class & companion stories are dead, I don't agree that we should just live with it. If those of us that want more individualized stories shut up about it, the devs will claim we never really wanted it and are perfectly happy with daily terminals. Which is what they did with Makeb. They are big on twisting logic. Makeb succeeded DESPITE not having class & companion stories, so they are claiming it succeeded BECAUSE it had no class and companion stories.

As a non-raider I find Oricon to be very worrisome. I am very afraid that all story content is going to be locked behind raids since those are easily repeatable and it looks like the only content on the plate is repeatable content. If you just look at the solo story on Oricon it is very short, generic and unfinished. (And I think the NPC is hysterically poorly chosen for his role. He looks like a beatnik, not a scary sadistic sith!)

 

While I agree that class & companion stories are dead, I don't agree that we should just live with it. If those of us that want more individualized stories shut up about it, the devs will claim we never really wanted it and are perfectly happy with daily terminals. Which is what they did with Makeb. They are big on twisting logic. Makeb succeeded DESPITE not having class & companion stories, so they are claiming it succeeded BECAUSE it had no class and companion stories.

I honestly believe the point behind Lord Hargrev was just to promote one of the new - silly(!) - hairstyles available, plus the Eradicator armor set, sans the body chest, which looks fairly hideous truth be told with that Inquisitor light armor piece.

Also, kind of a disservice to the voice actor himself, having in mind the terrific job he did on other characters, such as Darth Vowrawn or Lord Palladius. Whenever you are supposed to take him seriously, having in mind the fact he got awed by the DM's might, the only thing you can notice is - yet again - the silly hair, plus the poor general appearance of the character.

Talking about opportunity cost without some solid numbers of how much it would cost to make various types of assets is frankly a waste of time.

If we assumed the following would cost about the same to make:

1) a 1, 2 or 3 planet expansion, whichever it actually would be

vs

2) Galactic Starfighter

and we've just seen that 2) did nothing to increase active concurrent users, wheras little old 1 planet expansion of Makeb did at least increase active concurrent users even with a fee to access it, then Bioware did in fact make the wrong expansion content for end of year 2013. However, due to lack of what we actually were asking for in Makeb, that expansion only really brought most players 1 month of happiness.

So Bioware needs to really focus in on what the majority of paying customers are saying. When we say Story, dig deeper and find that most people want stories similar in style to the original class stories, even if they are no longer unique to just your class. But actually acknowledging that your character is a BH as opposed to a Sith would go a long way to making the same story unique enough to pursue 4+ times per faction instead of once per faction. Another example was the mini-games, which I suppose is what the seeker droid/macrobinoculars are called. Those weren't enjoyable and were not the type of mini-games people were asking for. People were asking for card games or racing games, very clearly and honestly those are quite reasonable for the genre.

Based on the data I see today, 12/26/13, I'd have to say the next expansion will be a planet based expansion that extends the PvE solo/group optional game as that was easily the content that netted the most revenue of the 2 expansion ideas so far.

However, sometimes it's better to realize that a full scale expansion with tons of expensive to produce content would actually be able to be sold for a purchase price and drive subscriptions longer than these mini expansions. For evidence, see almost any successful MMO with a revenue base equivalent to 500k or more subscribers (with or without F2P) to see that a large expansion has a predictable and large income associated with it. This runs the gamut from WoW to LOTRO or FFXI.

TLDR - If you build what customers want, they will show up