They are already discussing milking the subscribers

A quote from F2P FAQ:
Subscribers will continue to have unlimited access to The Old Republic, including new, more frequent content updates that Free-to-Play members will have to buy. Subscribers also receive rewards in the form of monthly Cartel Coin grants, which can be spent at the Cartel Market on new gear styles, consumables, and specialty items.

I think what he means is development is slow with fully voiced quests.

You can already see this in that some Flashpoints being very story driven, and some being basically what you'd find in a dungeon in WoW (or even EQ1) - i.e. normal dungeons with no or little story of voice acting.

You can also see it where they've had to add in terminal quests, probably because they've seen a levelling hold and didn't have time or resources for fully voiced quests to be added.



It's inecapable that fully voiced and animated quest dialogue is going to take longer and cost more, as LOTRO showed with it's book quests.

They also said they have voice actors tied to long-term contracts... but whatever.

No, I won't change my mind. Even if it shuts down: I played a game that I could enjoy. If this was just another "click on questgiver, slaughter 10 rats, click on questgiver to turn it in" MMO, I wouldn't care. This at least tries to pretend it's an RPG. Taking away dialogue and dialogue choices would be the end of it, for me.

Of course, I'd welcome the idea of old-school text-based branching dialogue, like Fallout and well, any RPG in the '80s and '90s. But MMO players could not handle that, they basically want a shooter with gear progression. Sad. And dumb.

Yeah, hopefully, however:

[Andrea]Past performance is no guarantee of future results[/andrea]

It's inevitable that it's going to be slow, that's why at this point there is no class story advancement on the horizon (Makeb will have planet story only apparently), which is understandable as it's 8x the work or already development heavy voiced and animated quests.

The other down side is that it is unlikely SWTOR will ever see new classes, as the amount of work to get a new class from L1 to L50 class story development-wise would be monsterous.



I think it is inevitably that SWTOR is going to have to move away from it, and we'll see more terminal type quests and old school type FPs, the remaining Devs seem to be already hinting at this.

If it's more or less an industry standard (which means it makes money for those other games), and most execs who are in the industry have analyzed each others' f2p conversions then I'm pretty sure they're going to follow it. These guys have MBAs too, you know.

Even with contracts, VO work is very expensive and time consuming. TOR was the big innovator in the MMO market here, with mocap cutscenes. Perfect World is still trying to work out the VO process every time they add a new set of STO Feature Episodes, which they have trouble sticking to a 12-week cycle for, and we're only talking about a talking head for them. If the TOR team has been gutted by EA then it's going to be incredibly difficult to see any amount of significant VO-necessary content. As it is, even before launch, BW noted that we wouldn't see any non-Basic speaking player characters (wookiees, etc.), precisely because the VO was considered such a core part of the experience.

New content isn't free to make, why should you believe it should be free to play?

All major content updates...and I'm not talking major as in 1.4, I'm talking MAJOR as in new zones, artwork, story arc's and the like...take resources that cost money. It is only fitting that a business make money off of their efforts. To snivel about buying an expansion is ludicrous.

If you think 5 levels and one new zone isn't worth buying I'd like to point you towards Mists of Pandaria which give you...5 more levels and one new zone. And 8 million people payed for that (give or take, not really sure what the WoW sub numbers are any more).

EA/Bioware isn't in the MMO business to give you something to do in your free time, they are in the business of earning a profit. If they have to expend resources in order to create new content they have to profit from those expenditures. Otherwise, that may very well be the last new content this game sees as the Board of Directors tries to figure out why they are sinking money into something that isn't returning revenue.

Paying for expansions isn't "milking the subscribers", it is just business doing what a business does. If you don't want it, don't buy it. Good luck finding an MMO that will give you everything for nothing since they don't exist anywhere in real life.

BW/EA will never admit it was a mistake because they marketed the VO as one of the core parts of the TOR player experience (and I am willing to bet that they convinced LucasArts to renew their Old Republic license for MMO development instead of singleplayer KOTOR3 precisely because they promised the VO-based immersion would remain).

I think MMO's use the word 'expansion' incorrectly. When you just add more to the end, its and extention, not an expansion. An expansion would make the game bigger over-all, like say adding an entirely different way to level from 1 to cap. A second pathway through the planets. That will never happen because this is WOW cloned and the only game is end game. So we get extentions disguised as expansions. But yes, they will charge us for them either way.