SWTOR is less than a month old, wow is 7 years old. Why do people compare?

lolumadroflroflroflorfl

Think of it as say a carnival.
Carnival "A" has been around for 7 years. In that 7 years, the owner has learned what rides are popular, what rides people really dont like.
What games people enjoy wasting money on, and what games never get played.

When carnival "B" opens up, the best thing they could do was look at carnival "A" and see what they have and how they run things.
If canival "B" has the rides and the games that do not interest people. People will just go spend money at carnival "A" that has all the rides and games they do like.

SWTOR is being compared to the 7 year old WoW because that 7 year old WoW has features in it that all MMOs need in it to be good to some people.
Features that any company making a MMO should look at and make sure they, or something like it or even better, is in their new MMO.

The problem is that, unlike cars, which are re-released every year, games are accretive in a much more substantial way.

The comparison is therefore understandable ("why shouldn't I compare experiences I can have today for my dollar?"), but is one that any competitor to WoW will always lose. The reason is that no new MMO can afford to be financed to include what has been created by Blizzard over the course of the last six years of post-launch development -- can't be afforded in terms of up front risk capital in a market that is as fundamentally fickle as the MMO market is.

So the comparison is inevitable, and it is also inevitable that the newcomer game will always lose out in the comparison. This leads to a revolving door back to WoW for many players, likely at least until Blizzard's second MMO is released and likely becomes the new WoW. WoW owns the MMO space -- it's everyone's Daddy in the MMO space because it has structural advantages now that are simply to expensive to recreate out of the box for any new game. Blizzard won the war, decisively, it seems.

Luckily Carnival B has rides that Carnival A doesn't have, and they are sweet rides indeed.


Considering the fact that WoW has entered an increasing decline in the last year, looks like the war is far from ended. As of now, it continues to be on top by pure inertia, but inertia runs out after a while. It'll continue to bleed, and honestly I doubt there's anything Blizzard can do about it.

The few that come on the forum to whine that SWTOR doesn't have this or that feature from WoW are inconsequential in the big picture. SWTOR may not dethrone WoW by itself, but there arelots of potentially strong releases coming 2012. Christmas 2012 may indeed be a more lonely one in Azeroth, and if it happens, it will only be good for the market.

^^ Theres your answer ^^

You are giving the game industry too much slack when you say it's ok for them to not release a product on par with today's competitive market when I'm sure you wouldn't cut any other company slack.

I can walk into a cell phone store and see a new brand name I have never heard of on a product and see the features of that product rival that of traditional brands. I guess you would be ok if that phone looked like a Zack Morris brick phone and would rush off to the counter to buy one because you would preach 'cut them some slack. It took Motorola, Nokia, Apple, etc years to produce what they have for sale today'.

Technology and features change over time. Old company or new company I expect to see a phone book, a color screen, and text messaging on a phone for sale today just as I expect to see standard mmo features in a game for sale today.

By this 7 year logic, should we also expect all new models of tvs to be crts, and the latest and greatest pc's have 2gb of memory?

I'm sure you are aware of the fact that you're comparing two completely different markets, with completely different development cycles and completely different feature sets and evolution ratios.

Which causes your comparison to collapse under it's own weight. Comparing apples to oranges has never been a valid argument in any discussion environment.

So many.. weak humans in this thread.

[QUOTE=Twolow;908827You are giving the game industry too much slack when you say it's ok for them to not release a product on par with today's competitive market when I'm sure you wouldn't cut any other company slack.[/quote]

As long as the comparison is a fair one, I'd treat them equally.

But the whiners here want to compare a new product with one with seven years of production behind it. That's not an apples to apples comparison.

The whiners here also want to act like producing software -- and an MMO especially -- is the same as building a car. It isn't. They have no idea what they're talking about.

Still a lousy comparison.

The car analogy the whiners use is just as bad as your celphone analogy here.

Producing software is different than building a car in fundamental ways. Producing software is different than producing phones.

But hey, if you're not persuaded, go back to WoW. I find SWTOR's innovations to be absolutely fantastic, and some UI bugs that will be gone inside 90 days don't bother me much.

Tell that to Spike... Their GOTY had so many holes on release, and STILL DOES, that it's not even funny...

The reality is very simple:
People expect too much. Yes, that is what it is.

EA/Bioware did a magnificent job on this game. The only people complaining are people with zero clue what they're actually doing, expecting this game to run on generic video cards, generic computers, computers built years ago. They're not actually SOLVING anything, they're just complaining to complain.


When it comes to PC gaming, you're ALWAYS going to leave a few out. Sorry kids, but you can't play the game. Get over it, it wasn't built for you. This is a minority, not a majority, however.

Can the game be improved? Oh, absolutely.
Will the game be improved? I have no doubt.
To compare a game which has been out a whopping 9 days now to something that has been out 7 years is just ridiculous. Once the whiners leave, the community will get back to a decent state. Till then, well, we're just stuck with 'em.