SWTOR: Theme-park MMO design. End of the road?

That's horrible.

Agreed. And as far as the lack of a lfg queue you young whippersnappers should have a go at FFXI sometime. Not only is there no lfg queue there weren't the myriad of chat options you're now spoiled with. The longest its taken me to find a group for anything has been about 15 minutes. If you can't find people to play with you're doing something wrong or you need to reroll on a higher pop server. If spamming the general chat channel isn't working do a search for people in your lvl range and start /telling them to see if they'd like to join you... this is an mmo afterall its meant to be social not have you sorted by an autoqueue. In fact I have mixed felings about that feature.... in WoW you were no longer your character... when you were in a dungeon you were refered to by your class. So instead of "hey Radu" it was "hey mage". Kinda takes the social skills out of it.

I completely agree with you OP.
The content level to me is "OK". What I can't get around is how frustrating these bugs are.
Last night we tried SOA HM, and he just kept despawning at 9% or there would be wholes in the platforms or missing ledges in the jump phase.

I'm also looking forward to GW2. They say their end game is their game throughout. 80? levels. A huge world. Tons of open world events. WvWvW Pvp. And they're waiting and debugging and making sure the game is ready at release.

Swtor rushed their release, it probably was a sales call, but nothing hurts your sales worse then over 40%? of your recurring revenue disappearing 3 months after release.


I want to love your game Swtor T_T rescue ussssssss

Whoever thinks sandbox style isn't the future of MMOs is fooling themselves.

Theme parks alone are absolutely a dead end at this point. WAY too repetitive. I thought SWG was very innovative for what they attempted, and I felt it worked. Coupled with some theme park elements that game could have been the best.

The fact that Bioware didn't choose to take a risk and just went for the safe bet without a shred of originality, is being reflected on the feedback for this game and the reason this game will probably fade away very shortly, at least from the spotlight.

Sandbox style, player cities, player created content is the future of MMOs, if there is any future at all.

actually that is a EPIC FAIL for bioware. because its crappy game design....

i would like you to log into a MMO like EVE ONLINE... and try to "max out" a toon in 5 days....

I have played eve for 7 Years and i have not maxed out all the skills in the game.. and you know what due to outstanding game design it is not possable to ever max out every skill in the game. because they take a long time to max each seperate skill and there are 100's of them.

you are just making excuses for Bioware because they didnt have the forsight to see that people with no jobs and are on EI or what ever can play 18 hours a day and max out in 5 days because they have been playing MMO's for 15 years.

P.S. i work full time and i dont have a level 50 yet. but then again i split my time between eve and swtor so i dont have a level 50 toon right now.

My GF who is in school and has more time off then i already has 1 toon at 50 one at 40 and 2 more at who knows what levels.. and she is already board because she knows once her other toons reach 50. there will be next to nothing to do because she does not like to PVP much. And space combat is single player and well is fun for the first time you do it and then is a waste of time.

This is so what I feel, but cant make into words. Thanks for writing it for me

Interesting post.

Yes, there's a definite lack of non-core gameplay elements (that is, crafting as more of a minigame with multiple decision points, as opposed to the tolerable, but shallow, "slot machine" model they've got now. (By this I mean, I get the same kind of feedback from sending my companions on missions that I get from pulling the lever on a slot machine.... the hope of a good reward (purple crafting materials, new schematics), with the odds of it being a mediocre reward. Same model applies to RE: There's an undeniable thrill in the HOPE of a purple or blue schematic, but the odds are, you'll just get back a fragment of the input resources.), some sort of "fishing" mechanism (perhaps not literally, but some kind of "click and hope" timesink, ideally with multiple axis of improvement to your odds), customization of your starship in both external features and internal arrangement (player housing, in other words), etc). It's possible these will be added relatively rapidly once the core systems are more stable, but highest priority in the short term will be a mix of fixing existing issues and adding content using the tools which already exist (i.e, new zones/instances/scenarios), not creating entirely new subsystems from scratch.

I agree with your analysis of the lack of socialization in games as part of the feedback loop caused by a fast leveling curve/fast resource recovery between fights (in EQ, you often needed to wait a minute, or more, between fights if you were drained), but I disagree it can be brought back. The current generation is simply incapable of delaying gratification, and any game which mandated they do so would fail in the marketplace very rapidly. Trying to get today's attention-span-of-a-mayfly youth to slow down and wait is quixotic, at best.

I've contemplated that one model which might be interesting is combining a well-designed, well-structured and content-rich themepark with massive procedurally generated spaces, clearly demarcated so people know they're wandering into areas where no human designer has tweaked, fixed, or populated. The Star Wars galaxy is ideal for this. It should be possible, using some basic terrain templates, to create thousands of worlds to be discovered. For the most part, being procedural, you'll very rapidly see most of the patterns/styles/themes, even if the technical terrain and populations are different; pretty soon, one desert world will look like another. However, this is a base to build on.

First, you hide things on those thousands of random worlds. Whenever the developers get a moment, they toss down something hand crafted -- a spaceship ruin, a unique schematic, a vanity pet, whatever -- on some world. It exists only once per server, and might not be on the same world on each server. Whoever discovers/finds it, by sheer chance, will have an item no one, or perhaps only very few people, will have.

Second, you don't just list all these worlds on a map. You create a hyperspace exploration/discovery minigame. It may take a long time to find a world, but if you're the first to land on it, you are credited with its discovery. Anyone else who finds it will be informed you found it first. There may be a special reward for claiming such worlds for the Republic or the Empire, providing a credit/XP/title incentive.

Third, of course, you use these worlds as a basis for PVP. Any world claimed by one faction could be captured by another, if they can find it. The worlds terrain, control points, etc, will be randomized, so there won't be trivially memorized battleground with mindless, rote, tactics -- with thousands of worlds, even with relatively repetitive patterns, players will need to quickly learn the local terrain, find paths and passages, etc. There should be a space component as well, especially the use of interdiction ships to keep trapped enemy forces from just zoning out when you arrive to reclaim the world.

Of course, guilds can claim worlds as well, with other guilds able to attack them. (Some sort of timing will be needed to prevent the usual 2 AM assault.)

None of this will impede or harm players who want the leveling/PVE/battlefield PVP experience. No one will be forced to wander through boring generated terrain or deal with randomized, flavorless, quests. The "worlds" of procedural content and hand-crafted content will be clearly marked as such; you know what you're getting into if you go into the vast wilds.

Obviously, it could take a year or more to implement this; it's not trivial. It would also, invetiably, require several iterations and revisions, once developed, to get it "right"; I could list a thousand areas of likely imbalance and bugs.

But it, or something like it, might be a way to add sandbox elements without undermining the themepark.

You might want explore Bel a little better since there are two commendation vendors in the first camp where you pick up the heroic 4 dailies.

Your constant promotion of GW2 is getting annoying. This is SWTOR board.

Go to a board about GW2 if you want to post about it all day.

meant to quote the other guy..

gw2 is also a completly different philosophy.. and it's f2p. so your kidding yourself if you think people will leave games for it. oh and all the pvp people are going to rage at the zero pvp rewards they offer... because pvp isn't pvp anymore ya know, its a gear grind.