What happened during development!?

A question for the older gamers: do ya think that SWTOR will become the new Daley Thompson's Decathlon?

As someone said, we'll never know what happened, I am of the opinion that either 2 versions of the game were developed and they went with this version or some point about 18 months ago a decission was made to drastically cut down/ what they had both in terms of complexity and/or size and scope most probably for financial and release schedule reasons ala an accountancy decision. We all know that marketing machines hype the hell out of everything, but if you look back to the dev diaries of the time on what features they were working on, its as if its a completely different game to what we have, yeah things change in the development cycle but does it all change this much? other hints that suggest the above possibilities are some of the datamined items on torhead showing totally diffferent stat terms and numbers indicating a completey different set of underlying mechanics, one of the high end spaceship upgrades has such on it. Of course datamining is somewhat questionable in its accuracy anyway and lord knows what beta build or whatever it is from but it is none-the-less from a later-stage version of the game be it alpha or beta.

Rift is good, but not nearly as good or innovative as the OP claims. You level to 50, run some dungeons, and then raid or run out of content because Trion is 100% dedicated to their raiders.

Prior to having constant crashes, my biggest snapping point with SWTOR was how dead it feels. There was a mission on Coruscant that I was running an alt through - simple stuff go meet Kira Carsen at the Spaceport-- it struck me that as I ran through the space port, I was in a giant dead hallway that was put there for no other reason than to slow me down. It is -really- poor design and just left me feeling disheartened. In fact I think I logged off after completing the mission because I didn't feel like running back through the hallways and the shuttle was disabled there.

Oh... and one more thing- does anyone else find the EALouse to be strangely prophetic in hindsight?

I honestly have to say I cannot space bar through all the cut-scenes fast enough. I try to follow the class story as best I can but adding cut-scenes and voice acting to side quests isn't only unnecessary, it's downright annoying to me and only serves to slow me down. I can read at my own pace and I would prefer that to waiting for some alien spew some sub-titled gibberish to me. It just isn't needed.

Like I said Rift isn't as fresh as I wanted thus I dont play it anymore, the comparison isnt about promoting Rift or demoting SWTOR its simply that Rift is the current measuring stick that most modern MMOs are compared against, its especially apt in the both Rift and SWTOR went into development at roughly the same time and were released sufficently close to each other to provide as near as possible a direct comparison between the 2 and in that context SWTOR comes up woefully short in terms of a quality product. Rift however is/was fairly innovative and much better designed for the reasons listed, but innovation quickly becomes convention especially when hindsight is thrown into the mix.

Rift like WoW and some other MMOs managed to put enough semi-dynamic variety into their games to keep the leveling aspects from becoming stale too quickly they also made sure the leveling process wasn't too quick this atleast allows the boring aspects to fade a bit before you run them again with alts should you be so inclined.

Sadly Rift WoW and SWTOR all suffer from this phenomenon called end-game and that in itself creates the dreaded gear-grind/ rep grind/ currency grind etc that we've come to hate, 8 years ago it was fine but now.. it's just too old. The only game that I can recall that came close to solving the riddle of no end game was SWG pre-CU but players seemed to want something that allowed them to feel better than others and the easiest solution for that is a simple numeric, it also helps the developers with game-mechanics and balance issues but thats another can of worms. However, any modern developer that can solve that no-end-game puzzle and get a reasonable game wrapped around it will be onto a winner I would think and I dont foresee another WoW type behemoth unless a developer solves that puzzle. In my opinion the holy grail of the MMO world for the next few years - how do you make the end-game not the end-game.

I have been thinking along these lines too. Though I think it was more like BW tried to make an mmo and didn't really look into the differences between single player and mmo games, so they made a single player game with multiple player able to chat and other limited interaction. Then EA sent some mmo people over to review the project and they saw how bad it was and so a death march to open tgheir game up some started for about 6 months to 1 year

Really, that's your "honest" assessment? They just clicked a "Make MMO" button and partied the rest of the time, eh?

First off, a tip. Anything involving voiced cut scenes will take a much, much longer time to develop and execute than anything with little boxes of text. Little boxes of text can be fixed and cleaned up with a few strokes on a keyboard, whereas voiced audio lines and animated cutscenes involve a number of people all working together, including the VO talent themselves, the scriptwriters, the producers, the post-production audio crew, the animators that set up the scenes, and the cleanup work.

You can't just go around editing VO dialogue unless you're cutting, and then it only works when you can cut dialogue out and still have the scene work. Otherwise, you're back to script, back to approvals, and back to VO and post again just to reimport the new dialogue.

To anyone who has ever worked in the video or audio production field, the amount of time involved to create this game doesn't surprise them. To those who've never once set their feet into that world, yeah it might seem like a long time with little to show for it. For a true comparison, let's start comparing SWTOR to other games in the MMORPG market which use fully-voiced cut scenes. Other comparisons will be sorely lacking due to the apples versus oranges problem.

But don't take my word for it. Here's an article which explains more of this in depth and in more detail. It isn't just sitting down cramming voice-over dialogue on a napkin and turning that in.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/12/26/ho...-old-republic/

10 hours worth? Please. Where did this number come from? Let's dispense with your "honesty" and try some facts instead, along with some rather simple logic.

This game has had over 200,000 lines of dialogue produced for it involving more than 200 voice actors during the production phase, according to media reports. It holds the Guiness World Record for the most amount of voice acting in any media production ever made.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/01/06/st...-voice-acting/
http://www.gamebandits.com/news/pc/s...reaking-28921/

How many seconds in 10 hours? 10 * 60 * 60 = 36000 seconds.

So with some simple math, even rounding the dialogue down to 200,000 lines, means that each line of dialogue would amount to only 0.18 seconds worth to fit your wildly inaccurate number.

But if we try to extrapolate our own figures, using some logic rather than emotional outrage, even speedy lines like "I'm on it!" would end up taking 1-2 seconds. And there are many more lines given by the NPCs which are much longer than this. So let's just cut corners and round it off to an average of 3 seconds for every line in the game, just for the sake of argument. I don't believe this is an outlandish figure, and in fact I believe the average is somewhere greater than 3 seconds each. But let's stick to 3 just for some simple math.

That's (200,000 lines * 3 seconds) which equals 600,000 seconds, 10,000 minutes, or 166 hours of dialogue. And you said 10 hours. Hmm.... there's a bit of difference there.

By comparison, most feature films probably involve somewhere around 500-1,500 lines of dialogue, and those take several weeks to write, if not months with writes and rewrites and so forth. If we go with the high-end number there, 1,500 lines of dialogue in a feature film, now we're talking about the voiced acting equivalent of 133 feature films.

Let's not forget that this is all Star Wars, and is all owned by LucasFilm and LucasArts, and that everything is going to have to be double-checked with the IP Masters back at home base, because they've got the final say on what can and cannot be added as parts of the Star Wars IP. So take any normal production schedule that you'd have and double it at least, to account for all of the back and forth between BioWare and LucasArts.

I was going to respond to the rest of your post but I think I've pretty much eviscerated your legitimacy as a critic with just focusing on your little "10 hours of dialogue" gaffe. You clearly put ZERO thought into this post beyond your own wish to rant, and since almost EVERYTHING you typed in your post is all subjective and your own opinion only, and often WILDLY askew from the actual facts at hand, I'm not really going to waste any more time on your post.

Except for this part, which I LOVE:

You spend all of this time elevating this other game as superior and then let it slip out that you don't even play it because it SUCKED.

LOL. Good luck. Go take a break from MMOs for a while, clear your head, and then find a new hobby. Assessing video game development is not a strength in your core skill set.

Here is a clue to everybody:

Even if somebody made the best game in the world, those that overhype the game in their head for years (as most did for this game) will never be happy.

When will people learn this? It happens with anything you do (movies, books, tv shows, whatever). If you create SO MUCH hype for yourself saying this will be the best ever, you will never be happy.

I bet you 90% of the people here that were saying GW2 would be the best MMO ever made, will hate it too because of their hype.

I learned this a long time ago. I did not know ANYTHING about this game until 2 weeks before launch, and I find this is the best game FOR ME.

QFT.

legacy should give you a bonus to class quests too. preferably so much that you can level to 50 on just class quests.