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

Correct!

The BEST part of this game, is the story.

Disclaimer: That's largely because PvP is so pathetically bad, and the Ops are obviously designed to splinter groups of friends unless the perfect classes are available. Gone are the days of playing with people you liked...now you're forced to play with people you NEED.

Your class quest is entirely instanced except for the trash getting to the instance. Flip the Mob difficulties to 50 and be done with it. I'd love to group with other classes and run their story, start to finish, for a week or so.

This is just conjecture but I'd guess that making it a level 50 quest would mean actually creating a whole new quest internally so the game knows which version it's loading. Even if it's copy paste with database changes (which seems too simple to me) that how much work is it? 20(?) or more quests x 8 = a lot of work.

I would hope it would be as simple as:

Detect (player_level) --> Load_mob(player_level)

The instance and "story" and "mechanics" of the story should remain the same.

Detect(player_level) --> If player_level(level CAP) then quest_reward(daily comm).

Also tool it to not give LS or DS points and not give companion affection since it is a replay.

Just some ideas ... I of couse don't know how complex it would be but, that is how I would "story board" the idea.

This makes me sad, now I am sure SWTOR will not not doing too well after going free to play. How do BioWare think that people would stay in the game and buy stuff when there is not enough reason to keep playing the characters for a long time?

Wouldn't they have to go create new 'hardmode' versions of all the mobs / bosses in each of the 8 stories across all the planets as well?

I know nothing about game development, should have said that first but...

each mob's difficulty is tailored to not just your level...but the amount of abilities and talent points you have.

Not sure myself. But, if you look at each of the Mobs you fight ( the name plate) you will see that it is a mob of a certain "type" (e.g. brawler). I suspect that these types have "abilities" and would scale similar to our "companions". So if it was something like:

Mob (type, level ) --> mob_ability_set (type, level).

So I would hope the "scaling" would be "easy"?

Lol. Never a dull day on the TOR forums.

Trooper is where it's at.

To your original post, after sleeping on it I think we are reading too much into a focused comment made by one person and really shouldn't take it as the direction of the game. Surely content has to be always delivered to continue any MMO and new operations and warzones are a part of that.

If his comments were taken at face value we wouldn't have had 2 hard mode flashpoints, a warzone, and 3 new operations added since launch so I'll take it to mean this is what they are focusing on beyond the expected normal content and in that context it's not so bad.


- For my derailment of the thread I support your idea for replay story value. I'm just pointing out the amount of work that would take as a potential reason they might not do it. Given their staffing limitations if nothing else getting to replay them at their original level would suit me. If they can make it level 50 content, that's a bonus. Personally speaking I'd do it for the story rather than the combat anyway.

Atleast the "fail Mythic team" theory has been officially debunked then.