GDC Online 2012: SWTOR's Damion Schubert dissects story as a mechanic

In my opinion, WoW is the more generic level quest line. You can't ever see any new comments or stories. The game still pushes you from town to town on purpose. If you don't have the reason to wonder off, its directly linear. Now granted this games planet quests are the same, the story quests are different for every character.

Well, this Shubert guy has ZERO idea what makes a successful MMO. END GAME It seems no one does anymore.

lulz

Well, the Focus on Legacy and good Class Stories have kept me playing this game. Normally, I'm not big on Alts, but in SWTOR I actually have more Alts than any other MMO I've played, and some of those I played for years. However, I'm starting to run out of classes to play and both of my Mains are fully geared for PvP.

I think you are right though in the sense that if you are going to focus on Legacy and Story, then Legacy needs to be really good, and the Story needs to continue. Pretty sure the consensus is that Legacy is underwhelming at best and a complete failure at worst.

In regard to story, there is a strong deflating feeling when you hit level cap and your Class Story ends. After I hit 50 on my first toon, I was expecting the class story would continue in future patches, chunk by chunk. When this turned out not to be the case, I was pretty disappointed. I started rolling Alts only to repeat that deflated feeling each time I hit 50. lol

BW misunderstood MMOrs. They failed to identify that Altists are a subset of the MMO population. Most peeps don't have a ton of gameplay time so they tend to focus on one toon and do their best to make that toon as good as it can be. So when the story ended for the majority of players, with no intent on its continuation, these people just stopped playing the game. You can't force people that don't like to roll Alts to be Altists.

His comments about the legacy system are a little confusing as I'm not sure what it has to do with story, the legacy often makes the story crazy where everyone turns a blind eye to the pure blood sith trooper.

The legacy system, is a cash sink that offers very very very little to the game and doesn't require much over Legacy level 15. After 10 months it seems to offer very little to the game and after a few companion unlocks the additional presence wont help with running ops.

I would rather have heard him talk that after 10 months more story and more companion story was coming in. Not that they hoped that people would still be rolling alts in the place of any real end game content.

In my opinion, WoW is the more generic level quest line. You can't ever see any new comments or stories. The game still pushes you from town to town on purpose. If you don't have the reason to wonder off, its directly linear. Now granted this games planet quests are the same, the story quests are different for every character.

Truthfully i would trade a 2 minute quest every once-and-a-while for more questing areas anytime of the day

Based on the feedback in this thread it would look like there is a demand to have your class quests re-playable after you finish it. There could be a legacy unlock to reopen the first story quest for you.

That would actually be kinda cool because you'd smash most of the early content, exactly like you'd imagine a hero should be able to.

Thoughts?

What we have spent the most time on since launch is beefing up the Legacy system, which is designed to get you to play the other really good content. We will probably continue beefing that up because it's our best stuff.