3 Areas of development SwTOR could break WoW and every other MMO

thanks for the tip btw.. i'll bear that in mind.

but oneo f the things i'm looking most forward to when new abilities hit are more acrobatic special moves that defy gravity, using the force off course, and some iconinc spell visiuals where i find sages/sorcs a bit starved for atm.

saying that it's all efforts to make movement more realisitc but not impeding gameplay.. when in melee combat no one ever runs like you do when out of it, so you find the hand work/upper torso aniamitons are great, but the legs don't quite match up, which would make an adjustment necessary.

another thing i was thinking off were auto-animations....for e.g. climb, some places you can jump onto, it is much more realistic if you climb, the animation perhaps can adjust to a climb in certain areas. or have an active climb button when up against a ledge or a box or something and the character will climb up over it, or do a short jump to grab the ledge.

now force jump, agent/smuggler grappling hooks and trooper/merc rocket packs can be employed to reach more troublesome places, but this extra set of movement animations would be excellent i think.. but certainly i would love to see more stylish flips, flicks etc.. nothing beats really cool action combat.style

Why not jawa mounts? One for each foot. And give them both T-staffs and flash grenades. I wonder what that might sound like? smoke a jawa mount "Whodeeny, Kry, Kry......"

You have some excellent ideas OP. I especially love the one about space being a new "end game" progression option. it reminds me allot of how LotRO added their legacy weapon system. once you hit level cap, you have a whole new world of working on, twinking, and leveling your legacy weapon. It was more directly involved in your game of course (it was your weapon you used in the normal game setting), but it was a totally different direction to send the end game process off into. Space could be similar, but it would not be involved in the normal PvE game, so they wouldn't have to balance it against all those variables like boss fights, PvP, etc. it could definitely be fun, and pave the way for many other expansive aspects of the game. out of all your ideas, I like this one the most.

I also love your ideas about increasing immersion through interactive scenes instead of loading pages. They would probably have to expand past your 5-10s clip idea though. otherwise they would be repeating the same clip many times for those machines that have long loading times, and the actual clip scene would be just as repetitive and boring as the load screens we get now. the better option is to have longer cut scenes that could be clipped once the planet loaded. as an example, your elevator scene could instead of being a simple 10 second clip of going up an elevator, it could be going up 10 floors, over 10, down 15, then get dropped into a subway kinda of thing, only to pop back up and repeat the process (if needed). But a single lap of the process could be a few minutes long, so many computers would only have to see the full scene once, or perhaps one and a half times. the "load" time for computers is just too unpredictable to use a short clip scene and expect people to not have to watch it 4-5x per load.

But...in spite of how I like your Ideas, and in spite of how I agree with you that they could revitalize the game and shoot it up above others, I think that realistically they simply wont happen, for one big reason:

resource limitations. we can rant all we want about how "easy" we think it would be...my personal experience in the MMO industry has led me to understand that the processes that many players think should be"easy" are in fact often difficult, and depending on the resources, borderline impossible. that is, impossible without investing a level of resources that the game simply does not have any more.

You have many different levels of management in companies like this, and the upper level ones that make the budget decisions often don't see things from the perspective that individual developers or employees do. so those who see things from our perspective don't' really have a say in how much money or which people they have to DO the job with...they are just handed the budget and staff and are told, "that's what you are getting, do what you can with it."

so...really, when a dev team sits down and decides how much to spend on what, they have to take that into consideration. Now, add to that the issue of baseline materials. and when i say baseline materials, I'm talking about actual game mechanics, things like graphic engines, object engines, etc. many of these things are extremely limited, and shape the possibilities of how the game works, and what can ultimately be done with it. A great example is the engine they got for the graphics. Hero was a very poor choice...they could have gone with something like the CryEngine 2 in it's basic form and had a better platform to work with. but what they have now is what they have....and it limits their potential to do things in the game.

Another example is the VO. amazing idea, but it's implementation resulted in a mandatory increased overhead for every new addition to the game that other companies don't have. each new part of the storyline requires intense insolvent in arcing storylines and companion/player/NPC interactions that multiply the cost compared to what another MMO has for it's continued development. Don't get me wrong...love the VO, but im also realistic of how feasible it is to continue it.

another example of mechanic limitations is the issue with server-client delay and skill usage. just head over to the new daily area on Belsavis and you'll know what I'm talking about. half the time i click a skill it doesn't even register...I literally have to click it mlutiople times or simply wait. oftentimes ill click it and the skill never goes off (server probably didn't get the queue), but it still triggers a global CD of the skill. in most MMO's that behavior is simply intolerable and unacceptable.

a few of my juggernauts skills are useless 40-50% of the time because of this s/c delay issue. a year into the game and it's still there, and a major hurdling block for effective play. you would think that with the available resources they have, they could deal with something as baseline as that.

so in light of that, it can only be one of two things: they are either incompetent (as a company, not as individuals....I've seen great people limited by an incompetent organization or project leadership), or the game engines are the culprits, and the solution is simply not that easy to solve without severely changing the mechanics of the game. and thus many of your ideas that you propose "Should be easy" are indeed NOT...due to many variables and factors that the current dev's had no choice in the matter over. It's like being instructed to build a car to win the Indy 500, then being handed a Yugo and a 10,000$ budget. We're expecting them to win the Indy 500 of game markets (I'm sure the MMO industry is probably one of the hardest markets to compete in) with a yugo and a budget that would barely get a grade school class project off the ground.

So, in short...your ideas are great, but they wont be implemented. and not because of lack of desire, and not because they lack solidity and make sense, and not because players don't want them. It's because the game has flaws inherent in it's design, and the cost to change those is something that EA will NEVER dish out. There's few companies that would. I love the game. I still play it, and I still have 2 active subs. But I'm also realistic about the challenges it faces, and the inherent limitations in it due to poor choices early on in its development.

SWTOR could have done a ton of things. they haven't. The biggest thing they have done was change the payment model. Clearly the payment model was way higher on the list than making the game better. Hope I am wrong, just my take on the situation.

So much this!

Yes but... the companion AI is already bad with one companion only.

Imagine the mess with 2...
And also don't forget the companion UI is bad as we can't move around companions skills even in their own bars.

However if they fix the AI and the UI then well... check my sig

"thanks for the tip btw.. i'll bear that in mind.

but oneo f the things i'm looking most forward to when new abilities hit are more acrobatic special moves that defy gravity, using the force off course, and some iconinc spell visiuals where i find sages/sorcs a bit starved for atm.

saying that it's all efforts to make movement more realisitc but not impeding gameplay.. when in melee combat no one ever runs like you do when out of it, so you find the hand work/upper torso aniamitons are great, but the legs don't quite match up, which would make an adjustment necessary.

another thing i was thinking off were auto-animations....for e.g. climb, some places you can jump onto, it is much more realistic if you climb, the animation perhaps can adjust to a climb in certain areas. or have an active climb button when up against a ledge or a box or something and the character will climb up over it, or do a short jump to grab the ledge.

now force jump, agent/smuggler grappling hooks and trooper/merc rocket packs can be employed to reach more troublesome places, but this extra set of movement animations would be excellent i think.. but certainly i would love to see more stylish flips, flicks etc.. nothing beats really cool action combat.style"

I like your force jump likeness ideas here, and you got a point when it comes to sages, and sorcs. I played the game with a friend that was a sage, needless to say all he did was stand their. The animations were a improvement over swg. Spicing them up wouldn't be a bad idea.

Also I like some of your ideas but in the end run swtor is missing the basic of items in the game. From no custom replicas of the hope trailer armors you see the sith and troopers wearing. In my opinion I still view that is one of the biggest let downs in swtors history. To still being unable to have your hood up with head pieces that make a sith look like a sith. So far I found only three variations that can do this, and none of them even come close to the Hope trailer. I even went to the belsavis x sector to see what was there. What I found was another plain daily area. I was like wth? I do not what they are making, or what they are planning, and quite honestly what I am seeing is making me loose hope. Sorry a little off topic.

As for the mounted comment. I said like a rancor, if you ever viewed swgpets, you will know there is endless amounts of creatures that would make a good mount. From rancors to gigantic spiders. That one questline in swg was creepy as all get out with all those large spiders.

Bumping the topic...

3D movement would be great however pretty sure the producer won't give it green light as they would have to pass through all existing environments otherwise we could bypass some barriers and even get stuck.

However it would totally fit new environments / planets.

Great post OP - BW, hire this person right now!

Space game - is surely coming. At some point.

Really agree with you regarding the cinematics and providing spacial awareness of where you are - the game really behaves like a console game in that regard.

Fantastic post - really well thought out!

I gotta say about point 4. animations, SWTOR already beats every other target based MMO. Every skill has a different animation unless its a cast. WoW and the like recycle the same animation for countless skills.

TERA is the only MMO that manages to beat it, but its not a target based MMO. Both TERA and SWTOR are my favorite MMO's in the market because animations are very important for me.