What happened during development!?

My guess is Bioware had game designs set, then they were changed by either EA and LA, or both to fit a more modern MMO business model.

Here's the problem: There is no "MMO Business Model" EVERY GAME, EVERY SINGLE GAME THAT has tried to recreate WoW, or anything like it has completely BOMBED. So you have to ask yourself which guy said it would work, because clearly it hasn't, for many years.

People need to stop developing crap and start understanding why MMO's fail so hard. Look at Tabula Rasa, look at The Matrix Online, find out what happened to them that made them go away and work up from there. Where's Ralph Koster when you need him...

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.

I stopped reading when the OP said SWTOR cost 80 million dollars.

That's less than World of Warcraft cost and Rift. And those games didn't have to pay for tons of voice acting.

Common sense should kick in by then.

QFT.

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