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Can we get a developer dialogue going on why class stories are not in the cards?

STAR WARS: The Old Republic > English > General Discussion
Can we get a developer dialogue going on why class stories are not in the cards?
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chuixupu's Avatar


chuixupu
09.06.2013 , 12:47 PM | #141
Quote: Originally Posted by tyranusdarec View Post
Not when you take into account who is doing the voice overs. Yes if it was a bunch of no names ok maybe I would agree with you. But you got names like Johnny Yong Bosch, Olivia Hussey. Lacey Chabert, Brian Bloom, Jennifer Hale, Tara Strong, and Tom Kane. All are professional voice over people. The cast list reads like a Whose Who in the voice over community. All they needed was Mark Hamill and the list would be complete.

They have so many of the big names in voice overs, it would be difficult to get them all together again. And it wouldnt be cheap. Do you really think Azura Skye is going to say "Oh sure just buy me lunch at McDs and I will do it"?

So unless they have contracts to make them come back for future voice over work its going to be costly. Since alot of these people are companion voices it could be worse. "Would you come back to do just 3 lines for our next class mission story?"

I really believe, they didnt think this thing through too much. They didnt speculate what would happen after all the content was played out over and over. The whole schtick to this game was replayability. IE playing each of the classes. Well once you have played through one class story it gets progressively faster to go through the next one and the next one. Because of twinking, knowing all the ins and outs of each class. Jedi knight plays identical to Sith Warrior. Plus the boredom of the planet stories means people will find other ways to blast through each planet so they can avoid it. And lastly there are some classes people just arent going to be interested in at all. I have tried the consular and trooper stories but they just are not intriguing to me at all. So that is two classes I aint gonna play.

Its been over a year. The players have played through all the content of the initial release. Plus the hutt expansion wasnt that long either. Once you get started it doesnt take that long to get through it. What did they expect would happen? People would just be happy with the first class story and leave it at that?

That is what I think they felt during development. Because some of these stories end so closed up. How do you go on for a character that has become a member of a council? That council member isnt going to have time to run around adventuring. He has votes to make and speeches to listen too. And you cant let him affect the universe either. Because everyone is pigeon holed into their class.

So again IMO they have painted themselves into a corner. I dont blame them. This is their first MMO. I figured this would happen early on. I even tried to say something about it and got flamed off the boards for it by fanboys.
"Ohlen began his presentation by dispelling some misconceptions about the creation of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Some journalists and fans attributed much of the upfront cost of TOR to its scripting and voice acting. Ohlen explained that this belief is erroneous: "[Voice acting] was a known entity, and cost was quite low in comparison to the cost of the rest of the project." In other words, BioWare had been there and done that with voice acting already in its other games and budgeted accordingly." - http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03...p-saved-swtor/

As far as I recall from earlier interviews, they do in fact have all the main class voice actors under an extended contract.
A lot of the random NPCs were people that just happened to be in the area or working on other projects.
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tyranusdarec's Avatar


tyranusdarec
09.08.2013 , 10:25 AM | #142
Quote: Originally Posted by chuixupu View Post
"Ohlen began his presentation by dispelling some misconceptions about the creation of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Some journalists and fans attributed much of the upfront cost of TOR to its scripting and voice acting. Ohlen explained that this belief is erroneous: "[Voice acting] was a known entity, and cost was quite low in comparison to the cost of the rest of the project." In other words, BioWare had been there and done that with voice acting already in its other games and budgeted accordingly." - http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03...p-saved-swtor/

As far as I recall from earlier interviews, they do in fact have all the main class voice actors under an extended contract.
A lot of the random NPCs were people that just happened to be in the area or working on other projects.
Interesting article. Good as I said "Unless they have them under contract" and according to the article they do have them under contract. Awesome. Still doesnt explain why they wont continue with class story.

So Bioware says most of the cost of this game came from creating the game engine that they bought from Fabrik Plc and from adding choice and consequence to the engine? Wait a minute? Choice and consequence? Hmmm.... I guess they mean alot of cost went to making it appear there is choice and consequence when there really isnt any. Because I have played many classes over, choosing different options and yet the same thing happens which means choices have the same consequence so no choice at all.

I do love that they admitted to the mistake every MMO developer always makes. How long the content will last. I havent seen a developer yet make a game that took as long as they expected to reach max level. You give players content and they will go through it ravenously.

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AshlaBoga's Avatar


AshlaBoga
09.08.2013 , 11:35 AM | #143
Quote: Originally Posted by tyranusdarec View Post
Interesting article. Good as I said "Unless they have them under contract" and according to the article they do have them under contract. Awesome. Still doesnt explain why they wont continue with class story.

So Bioware says most of the cost of this game came from creating the game engine that they bought from Fabrik Plc and from adding choice and consequence to the engine? Wait a minute? Choice and consequence? Hmmm.... I guess they mean alot of cost went to making it appear there is choice and consequence when there really isnt any. Because I have played many classes over, choosing different options and yet the same thing happens which means choices have the same consequence so no choice at all.

I do love that they admitted to the mistake every MMO developer always makes. How long the content will last. I havent seen a developer yet make a game that took as long as they expected to reach max level. You give players content and they will go through it ravenously.
It's not a money issue. It's a time issue. They cut their staff down to nil and so don't have the time to spare.
Heck, they got rid of the German forum team.
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LordArtemis's Avatar


LordArtemis
09.08.2013 , 11:54 AM | #144
I think, if they want to advance the class story and limit the amount of time development involved, make it a companion class story bonus quest line....released at the rate of one class at a time, rewards can be horizontal in progression.

They could even offer new abilities tied to the story advancement, similar to legacy abilities.

ZionHalcyon's Avatar


ZionHalcyon
09.10.2013 , 11:19 AM | #145
Still waiting.

Speaks volumes that the thread is this many pages so far, and the devs and Customer Service reps refuse to comment, let alone have a civil discussion on it.

ZionHalcyon's Avatar


ZionHalcyon
09.10.2013 , 11:30 AM | #146
Quote: Originally Posted by tyranusdarec View Post
Interesting article. Good as I said "Unless they have them under contract" and according to the article they do have them under contract. Awesome. Still doesnt explain why they wont continue with class story.

So Bioware says most of the cost of this game came from creating the game engine that they bought from Fabrik Plc and from adding choice and consequence to the engine? Wait a minute? Choice and consequence? Hmmm.... I guess they mean alot of cost went to making it appear there is choice and consequence when there really isnt any. Because I have played many classes over, choosing different options and yet the same thing happens which means choices have the same consequence so no choice at all.

I do love that they admitted to the mistake every MMO developer always makes. How long the content will last. I havent seen a developer yet make a game that took as long as they expected to reach max level. You give players content and they will go through it ravenously.
If I had to guess - the people they purged from BioWare Austin during the layoffs were all the class story people for the most part - I'd bet a lot of them were advocates of the class story.

Then they went back in and started to tweak things - like changing how you kill Malgus, etc, trying to half-*** closing plot loop holes, and even calling the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior endings a contradiction (from Eric Musco's lips at the Chicago Cantina event) when anyone fluent with Obi Wan know its just "a certain point of view" and the Voice of the Emperor was what the Jedi Knight killed.

Then they just toss in some throwaway lines in Makeb and make everyone do what I call "Elite grunt work" - high level quest story, but the road they take in getting the characters there makes almost little to NO sense when referencing their class stories for at least half if not 3/4 of the classes.


I am willing to bet that its all about the time investment, and they just don't have the balls to level with the players. That EA told them it takes too much time to develop 8 questlines as content for the game and that they want group quests from now on. That the people who had things planned and raised a stink got laid off during the layoff period. And the people who are left are committing to the corporate line, almost blindly and in the face of what the players want, because the orders came from above.

I had wanted to avoid speculating like that. I had wanted to see if the devs would engage in a conversation, and maybe even a little bit of headway made where we could be met halfway (like Item 2 in the original post), but 15 pages and not even an acknowledgement shows me if they don't care enough to comment, then I shouldn't care enough to not speculate as to why they won't continue with class stories even in a limited form.

Its always sad to me when the devs seem so tone deaf. Heard the Seattle Cantina tour where story was brought up AGAIN.

Response was "who likes makeb?"

*crowd cheers*

Dev response "that's why"

*crowd cheers suddenly disappear into a "huh? what just happened?"


Crowd got suckered into a cheer and the Eric and the crew there ignored when the cheer suddenly went dead when the cheer was given as the reason they won't do any more class content.

KagatoTheThird's Avatar


KagatoTheThird
09.10.2013 , 07:12 PM | #147
Really the most likely reason is if they do 8 class stories your looking at about 3 to 4 times the development time and QA time then that of having just 2 world stories. And just throwing more people at it would not make the time shorter. so it comes down to do you want to put out an Xpac every few months or one every few years. given gamers short attention span for things that aren't new not doing class stories is the better option. now if they were really cagey they would have a second development team working in the back ground working on a big class story expansion while the other worked on smaller planet story based ones.

Kendaric's Avatar


Kendaric
09.11.2013 , 04:15 AM | #148
Quote: Originally Posted by KagatoTheThird View Post
Really the most likely reason is if they do 8 class stories your looking at about 3 to 4 times the development time and QA time then that of having just 2 world stories. And just throwing more people at it would not make the time shorter. so it comes down to do you want to put out an Xpac every few months or one every few years. given gamers short attention span for things that aren't new not doing class stories is the better option. now if they were really cagey they would have a second development team working in the back ground working on a big class story expansion while the other worked on smaller planet story based ones.
However, the class stories offered a reason to play through content more than once or twice. Now if you look at Makeb, it's ok to play through twice (once for each side), but afterwards there's no reason to do so again. There's simply no difference aside from the intro cutscene and quite frankly, the way it's set up it doesn't make sense in a lot of cases ("Hey, let's call in a Jedi master since we got this situation a soldier or a hired smuggler can handle well enough.")
Even two actual, class-dependent missions per such story arc would go a long way to make things more interesting. Add to that a couple of class-specific dialogue options to resolve a mission and most people would be happy.
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Prisoner's Avatar


Prisoner
09.11.2013 , 04:50 AM | #149
Quote: Originally Posted by AshlaBoga View Post
It's not a money issue. It's a time issue. They cut their staff down to nil and so don't have the time to spare.
Heck, they got rid of the German forum team.
Yup, this. They laid off almost all of the writers and developers who went into creating the story content. To build that team again to the point where it could create eight long class stories, would take a lot of time and resources. And let's be honest, patience isn't one thing the players of this game have. That's how we ended up with the cartel market and f2p to begin with.

There won't be anymore class stories, people. That died with f2p. And no matter how many threads you make or how much you whine, that's not going to change.

DrowNoble's Avatar


DrowNoble
09.11.2013 , 04:55 AM | #150
I never bought RotHC for one simple reason... no chapter 4 of my story. Yes, I know that on Sept 12th it's going free to all subscribers, which is nice, but still having an "expansion" that is lacking The Major Feature of the game I found to be rather disappointing. It's been said before, both here and on other 3rd party sites, that the Makeb story doesn't even seem to acknowlege the player's status. Think about it, at the end of the Inquisitor story you're promoted to the Dark Council which makes you pretty much 2nd only to the Emperor in the Empire, yet no one on Makeb treats you like you'd expect.

Bioware pushed this game's Story as a primary feature, they need to get chapter 4's going ASAP. I don't buy any of the "they don't have time/money to do it" garbage. EA is a large company with a lot of assets and SWTOR's f2p conversion is turning a profit, so LESS cartel market items that I'm not going to buy and MORE of the story content you are known for.
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