The focus on story and cutscenes was what differentiated this game from other "MMOs" and what could have been its key to success. What Bioware underestimated was the vehement dislike standard MMO players had for anything that was slightly different and this was definitely a different "MMO".

 

that, and people, (all of us) devours any and all story content they give us, it's only natural that they can't keep up with demand which in turn made EA think the game wasn't worth investing in, imo. I think, SWTOR, even back in the day, was so easy quick to level up, because we had an actual storyline that distracted us from the grind.

well if you compare SWTOR to wow then its safe to assume you are trolling anyways. Its like comparing Windows to Macintosh

 

I can assure you I'm not trolling. I loathe trolls. My question was based on a genuine feeling I experienced when I logged into WoW and interest in knowing if others feel the same regardless of personal opinions about either game.

I don't know whether it bottlenecked SWTOR's longterm development. I do think what they released at launch set the benchmark pretty damn high and was almost immediately near impossible to follow up on.

 

Just looking at the class companions and the class VA's, you're dealing with a cast of at least 56 (give or take since some only bleep bleep or oink oink) voice actors and that's not counting all the additional NPCs and quest givers. Add in the writers for the 8 different stories with their various outcomes, the companion stories, planetary story, alternating cutscenes depending on your choices and yeah... quite a lot of work no doubt. I don't think it was ever feasible to keep that up in the expansions that followed.

 

In fact, I believe that is why, during RotHC, our companions are muted meatbags--it would have been too much to bring that entire cast back in. Same with SoR, save for tiny snippets of spoken lines that randomly appear in your chat when you explore Yavin with say, Quinn at your side. But not in cut-scene form. In fact, your companions don't even appear alongside you in (some of) the cutscenes even if you have them out and coming with you (and why you get away with flirting with Theron without Corso stomping his feet).

 

It's also why I believe they took such a backseat in KOTFE/KOTET and perhaps, originally weren't supposed to all come back at all. Why, aside from the initial reunions, we still don't see much of them and the main cast is still centered around your PC, Lana, Theron and the occasional guest appearance of others such as Koth, Senya, Arcann, Valkorion etc.

 

 

It's an entirely different situation with Warcraft. First of all, I absolutely believe Blizzard has far, far more funds for Warcraft than Bioware/EA assigns to the SWTOR team.

 

Warcraft does have a deep and rich lore history but much of it is in the old games and the books. It's scattered throughout the expansions as well and, while their method of delivery is different than SWTOR's, there is plenty story to enjoy in Warcraft too. For instance, the entire Illidan story throughout Legion has been wonderful. The death of Ysera when you quest through Val'sharah I found extremely powerful and sad. Same with the injury and following death of Vol'jin at the launch of Legion which reduced me to tears. Go on Youtube and check out Nobel's Lore videos, you'll see just how vast Warcraft lore really is and just how many cinematics, how much story, the game actually offers.

 

But as I said, their delivery is different. You don't get interactive cutscenes, nor do you receive one at every single quest pick-up and turn-in. It isn't one of their core features but it does play a significant role, just simply alongside so many other things. They also only follow their own main story, there are no side branches based on class and such, not much of it. Little bit nowadays with obtaining your weapon and class hall. But I head canon stuff. My Mage is absolutely in a relationship with her bodyguard/companion Aethas Sunreaver.

 

Speaking of Warcraft Draenor and Legion, I am still baffled that the voice of Gul'dan is the same dude as Theron Shan, I never would have guessed. <3 Troy.

Edited April 1, 2018 by JennyFlynn

Thank you all for your thoughts on this topic. I appreciate the insight and was not aware Bioware's budget was never adversely affected by the voice talent or cutscenes.

 

My nostalgia trip didn't last long...

 

I canceled my WoW sub in 2012, shortly after Mists of Pandara was released in September that year. I couldn't stomach the idea of playing any video game - no matter the genre - that features Pandas as a playable species. I've been leveling my new Night Elf with Blizzard's free starter plan. I figured if I could enjoy my Druid enough that I wouldn't really mind so much seeing Pandas in the game. I was wrong. I just can't do it. So, I deleted him and removed the game for the last time. It's a real shame, too, because part of WoW's appeal for me was that its graphical style always made me feel like I was in a living, breathing storybook and I miss playing in that world.

 

Bioware, it's all on you now. I'm 46 and SWTOR is the only MMO I've played since October 2012. I've lost count of the number of times I've canceled my sub over the years but you're obviously doing something right because I keep finding reasons to convince myself to return. Incidentally, two of them are the voice acting and cutscenes. SWTOR is the only MMO I've ever played that made me feel like I'm in the starring role of my own movie.

 

Good work. Keep it up.

Edited April 1, 2018 by Nyghtfal

Nah.

Maybe... maybe, at a stretch 1mil but I seriously doubt it ever had that many even. Hundreds of thousands is still an amazing number for an mmo. Easy to forget just how rare WoWs numbers actually are and were.

 

https://kotaku.com/5908338/star-wars-the-old-republic-loses-400000-subscribers

 

 

Numbers began falling below 1 million in summer of 2012 causing them to adopt f2p in fall of that year. Subscriber population was in the 500k to 600k range for a long time afterwards, I haven't got any info about the last couple years though.

Edited April 1, 2018 by Vandicus

The developers have previously stated that the voice acting was not all that expensive or difficult. I don't remember whether they ever said anything about animations.

The developers have previously stated that the voice acting was not all that expensive or difficult.

 

^^ they have indeed stated this.

 

My sense is it is the actual cut-scene integration and rendering that is where the work is. I say this because to this day.... cut-scenes are still buggy at certain points for most classes. I bet the code for this and the way it is wired in to the engine is probably quite the ball of snakes. The Hero engine probably exacerbates this some as I bet on of the reasons they went with this engine as their starting point many years ago was it made it appear easy for them to integrate and test story arcs and the animations that go with them.

Edited April 1, 2018 by Andryah

WoW millions of players.

SWTOR a few hundred thousand at the start.

 

You really can't compare the two. WoW has always had a much larger funding pool to draw from for new content then SWTOR.

 

Star Wars itself caters to a very specific fan group and although Warcraft also has a fan base games like WoW still appeal to fantasy fans overall in terms of MMOs.

 

Also Blizzard puts the profit of one game back into that game for the most part. EA puts the profits from a game into another game. Their standards for what they consider a successful profit from a game is much, much higher then most. They pull the funding if a game doesnt meet their insanely high standards for profit. Could they have done better by swtor? Of course they could have but they were never going to when it didnt live upto their insanely high profit margins. It was never going to have the numbers WoW did and that wasnt good enough for EA. They are the ones who bottlenecked and still bottleneck what goes back into the game.

 

Blizzard advertises it's games heavily. That's something I've never seen any other MMO I've played do.

Blizzard advertises it's games heavily. That's something I've never seen any other MMO I've played do.

 

For a game to be advertised its best that it actually offers something good...like a lot of content...unlike this game, WoW offers that. They should have advertised SWTOR when TFA hit and KOTFE hit...instead - nothing. Now advertising would be laughable...but oh wait...they do. They advertise the CM sales and crap every day on Twitter and FB. So there's that.

Maybe it did, but I'd rather keep having cutscenes than quicker content release. It's what makes this game unique, and I want to keep seeing my characters do and say cool stuff. (Although any cutscenes after vanilla were somewhat disappointing in that regard, but they still had very enjoyable parts.)