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

This isnt a theme park MMO, its one ride.

You get on the ride at level one and ride along the rail through all those planets and after 50 levels the ride ends and you can either go back on the same ride in a different colored car or do nothing.

A themepark has kiddie rides and big boy rides and other things to do if you dont like rides. SWTOR just has one ride and nothing else.

ok lets meet in the middle .. ok i agree playing 18 hours a day is not really healthy.. but over all thats not my main point..

Even for someone like me who does not even play EVE for more then 1-2h a day if im lucky.. im still playing the game after 7 years because i cant beat it.. and i know i cant... i can get rich and more powerful and more skilled... but in the end i know i cant "win"

But and here is the big BUT.. when i get to level 50 in SWTOR i "win" and i can see it before im even there.. and also if others were to say "well your not there yet how do you know??" answer i know many people who have incl my girlfriend who sits beside me and says.. baby i think im going to go back to wow when the next patch comes out becuase im board of this game.. because i almost have 2 level 50's now.. and after being to the same planets and doing almost the same thing 2 times.. doing it 3 or 4 times is not end game.

Who are you to say how much time someone should do something. You just like riding on your tea cup go round and think everyone else should because those big roller coasters are dangerous and that cotton candy is bad for your health so they should only have your tea cup go round ride because its safe for all ages and screw what anyone else wants to do because they aint you.

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Sometimes wonder if D&D and the other PnP games were like what we now have in this genre, would this genre have ever taken flight to begin with..

Great post

23. Multiple windows open.

Nice to have your perspective on SWTOR. Any other comments on what Bioware's done so far? I wanted to cut down on the wordiness of the initial post, so I didn't embellish fully on certain things of my argument.

Yes, I know that budgets, and suits, and other constraints will affect a product release. That's why I was picking at things that came down to UI design, and all the myriad little quality of life "bugs" that feel unfinished. Most recently for example -- how they can't seem to settle on an adequate GCD visual despite another revision. (The GCD effect now dramatically whites out all keys equally, which makes it very hard to tell what's in/out of range, what's on CD vs merely locked out by GCD, etc)

And I'm also a realist instead of an optimist -- I look at how people are actually using/going to use a system instead of the ideal. I try to sit down and go "if I was a new player, would I have any clue on how this mechanic works? How would navigating this menu system appear?" Etc.

When one actually thinks about that, and using 10 hours per day as a model: 5 days @ 10 hrs/day = 50 hours. So those players would be on pace to level up every 60 minutes ... faster if they played fewer than 10 hrs/day, and slower if they played more than 10 hrs/day. Beyond the first 13 levels, I find that truly remarkable.

This I find fascinating. Genuinely. Why go back to WoW? It's the exact same experience. Do scripted content. Reach max level. Do more scripted content. Done everything? Nothing left to do that isn't repetition. The only distinction at all to be made at a game design level is that WoW has overall lots more to do (as it bloody well should after seven years) and fewer bugs (ditto). That's it. It's the same treadmill design.

Is the issue only that the treadmill is too short in TOR? Again, why go back to WoW? Is it familiarity? That warm Pavlovian feel of the familiar repetition because after years, well, it's all the brain knows? I'm not being critical; I just find it interesting that one grind of theme-park content is so much more favourable than another. What stops WoW from being boring?

I'm not going to disagree that in EVE there is this exponential curve instead of a straight line. The big factor that changes in EVE is that other players can make such a difference that your own game experience changes, whether it's prices on the market or someone blowing up half your POSes. That's a major distinction because it has a sandbox; the actual activities remain the same, but you can end up reprioritising them based upon others' actions. That I feel TOR is definitely lacking in some way, even abstract.

Note I'm not saying that in any of these cases that treadmill is a bad thing. If a day on the treadmill is an enjoyable experience and you come out of it feeling that your expenditure of time & money on the game was worth it, then that's all that matters - but I guess what I'm saying is that it seems all too easy to miss that the same repetition of activities, the same grind, is just being dressed up in different ways. I could describe the same about, say, World of Tanks progression.

Intriguing game discussions.