Design decisions and why the game engine hurts TOR

Hell no the guys calling the shots are getting the sales in one qrtr . they only get a percentage of the subs over the long haul that really dont effect the next qrtr in a large scale. the wanna hype a game rush it to release and collect the 60$ x 2.1 million in sales. Plus merchandise liscensing.
as long as corperations dictate what content we get we are gonna get sub par products. rift is a prime example that game was polished and indepth at release , it had very little corperate involment. it was all financed privately and had some of the best minds of the genre making it. What it didnt have was a massive I.P.

When the third SW MMO fails as the 2 others before it people will finally understand LA had its take on it.


That being said the OP summerize pretty well the status of the game but for one major omission:

The world setting is lacking.

Not only the world feels lifeless, but you don't feel like evolving in a SW setting that much either. The areas are too divided in zones with loading times killing the immersion factor and so the fun.

This might be a MMO but you feel like playing a single player game because of this.
At no time you have the feeling to be on a remote or huge planet. You are just moving from one zone to the other. Even the map UI does not allows you to browse seamlessly a whole planet nor remote planets.

That's a sad experience for a SW and a MMO fan.

There's no need to be insulting.

/flagged.

they didnt bought a half baked project, they bought a Unfinished project. even the designers of the Hero engine told bioware up front that the engine was not ready for big main stream projects like MMO's like ToR.

They decided to buy it anyway as there own engineers woudl work on it. But the fact remains that the fundamentals of the hero engine were not ready for a big release just yet.

Yes it is, otherwise they wouldn't be working on the tools that the "famous MMO community" is asking for.

If Bioware was content with the unimportant MMO crowd (the people that don't contribute to the actual MMO genre), then they would continue keeping to their stance of not incorporating the various features they were vocal about NOT adding to the game prior to launch.

Trying to appeal to a "new" crowd with a MMO is a stupid business decision. You appeal to the mass MMO consumer and nothing else.

I don't believe that.

All it would take is a developer with enough intelligence to realize that they are NOT a special snowflake in this genre. Your level of uniqueness can only be limited to the setting/story. You absolutely cannot skip the plethora of tools that WoW has pioneered through the years and expect any level of success in the long term.

You need to come right out of the gate with a strong and well polished foundation on which to build your game on.

A lot of WoW players are looking for something better/different to play. All it takes is a polished product with the "mandatory" feature-set, a unique setting and bam you have a viable alternative to WoW.

Instead, we get these developers trying to be special making games that aren't even complete at a launch leaving people with the overwhelming feeling of being screwed with their subscription fees when they can simply pay the same amount and have all of the features and polish in another game.

Tell that to Blizzard.

You do realize they focussed on what people didn't like about EQ in an attempt to get more players interested?

I think that BW are doing the same thing, only utilizing their particular area of expertise (story, VO, dialogue). People don't generally like MMOs much, compared to the mass of gamers, even hardcore gamers. Even 11m players is a drop in the ocean of games players in general.

i.e., instead of asking the wrong, the stupid question (why do people like WoW?), BW have asked themselves the correct, the clever question: why DON'T people like WoW? Same as Blizz asked why don't people like EQ.

In this context, the opinion of a bunch of bored MMO bittervets is really quite irrelevant.

I agree with the OP, my playtime has taken a nose dive the past few weeks for many of the same reasons.

Tor just feels like a F2P mmo with its engine.

in all fairness

I love tor and the engine.

why would your own personal opinion on something trump mine?

That's how I see it too.