Those trailers are typically exorbitantly expensive to make- and it shows, with how impressive they usually are. But while a company with a well-loved, well-known or long-awaited product could probably get away with blowing that on what can be argued as a pretty effective marketing tool, I don't think Bioware has the resources to do so right now.

 

And even if EA decided to extend their SWTOR budget for the sake of a trailer, I'd be perplexed as to why they couldn't just put that money toward the game itself. It's their prerogative to choose, but personally, I don't need a fancy trailer- the game is obviously pretty underfunded, so if they forewent the trailer entirely in order to produce an actual, sizeable amount of content/updates, I wouldn't be disappointed.

Because marketing = success, look at apple their products are not particularly impressive in fact i would go far as to call them cheap products with a huge markup, well their computers anyways. But because of their marketing they became the largest company in the world with the highest profitability

No offense, but I highly doubt SWTOR is going to become a smash hit like World of Warcraft just because of an expansion trailer.

The customers that Bioware needs to tend to the most are already here. It'd help if they invested in some general ad-based marketing to ensure the rest of the internet is even aware this game still exists, but an expensive trailer isn't going to fix the root of the problem.. Which is that the game hasn't seen a major update in almost two years.

No offense, but I highly doubt SWTOR is going to become a smash hit like World of Warcraft just because of an expansion trailer.

 

The customers that Bioware needs to tend to are already here. It'd help if they invested in some general ad-based marketing to ensure the internet is even aware this game still exists, but a trailer isn't going to fix the root of the problem.

No one cares about world of warcraft.

1999 graphics and "story" without real voice acting. Cutscenes made in free version of Unity. No thanks

No one cares about world of warcraft.

 

1999 graphics and "story" without real voice acting. Cutscenes made in free version of Unity. No thanks

You say that, and yet it's still got millions of subscribers and is churning out tons of new content on a fairly regular basis. Also I don't think you've looked at the graphics recently.. Maybe it's a different style, but there is no denying the inherent quality of the work being produced.

Beside that, I wasn't talking about the quality of either game- I was referring to the popularity, and there's just no feasible way to argue that SWTOR is more popular or profitable than WoW.

While the trailers are really nice. I HOPE they don't spend that kind of money for it and instead used that money for a broader range of marketing. swtor is a dying name and I don't see it anywhere. The brand is fading and it doesn't seem bioware or ea have much in the works to market it enough for more gamers to see.

No mater the video quality, I don't think thats what we need so I hope they don't go that route.

On a personal note. I don't think we will ever get another blur video again. It will all be in game movies like we have been getting for the past while. Easily done and produced with minimum cost. Just like the games content. I don't think the status of swtor is changing anytime soon and until anthem launches, this game is running on fumes.

I really hope not. More important to use that time getting their game in order rather then some meaningless video.

^This.

The trailers are good and are really the only things that generate any semblance of excitement in this game. I'm not trying to bash the game, but the fact is that the content is severely lacking. Anything that will attract more players is good.

Bringing in new players would be good. There's a plethora of things to do as a new player. It's almost overwhelming for newbies. It's vets like us that are crying out for new stuff to do (or keep doing on the end game treadmill).

Bringing in new players would be good. There's a plethora of things to do as a new player. It's almost overwhelming for newbies. It's vets like us that are crying out for new stuff to do (or keep doing on the end game treadmill).

I agree with you, as a new player there would be loads of stuff to do before reaching endgame. Not to say they shouldn't add new stuff though, but usually we veterans burn out and want new things to do more quickly than new players considering we've already done a lot already.

I for one hope they spend 100M on a trailer most of us SWTOR players only watch once or twice

And 20K on messing with conquest and ops

and 100K on CM

and 0 dollars on actual things for us to do ( content)

and 0 dollars on advertising and movie tie-ins

/sarcasm

Business as usual at SWTOR HQ.

"Due to continuing decline in the market, we will be sunsetting SWTOR in Q4 2019, and we will be reassigning the developing staff to other new and exciting projects."

It's going to be this, there's no way TOR makes to 2020.

We're not getting a trailer this year. BWA would have to release something before April or May

If a trailer comes, it will be at next year's E3 and the release towards the end of 2019.

It's going to be this, there's no way TOR makes to 2020.

People are already moving away from Star Forge to Satele Shan for better queue times.

The scorched Earth pattern of leaving servers to die has commenced.

RP servers have always had the lowest population. Even in World of Warcraft, RP servers are known as the "dead RP" servers.

The ship should be able to make it that far, 2020 is only 16 months away.

No one cares about world of warcraft.

 

1999 graphics and "story" without real voice acting. Cutscenes made in free version of Unity. No thanks

You haven't been to World of Warcraft lately because your assessment is out of date. Their newest expansion includes fully voiced, beautiful in-game cinematics and dialogue with speech bubbles between NPCs that accompanies their fully voiced conversations. It's in fact much more engaging than the conversation wheel appearing in the middle of the screen. The two brand new faction zones are beautiful (see Orange's images for more example of what I mean) and filled with the new races that each faction gets to play with more brand new races to come over the next few months. The early game has even had graphical updates to both NPCs and areas with the sole purpose of updating the look of the game.

Plenty of people care about World of Warcraft. That's why it is such a resounding success. They keep giving people reasons to care, and content to play. It's a different world over there than it used to be, and I would say that since the Legion expansion they have been knocking it out of the park. And this is coming from someone who never once went back to Warcraft in almost 7 years straight of non-stop playing SWTOR. But it holds my attention firmly now and gives me the story immersion I desire, without so much need to "head cannon" everything. Yes, please!

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You haven't been to World of Warcraft lately because your assessment is out of date. Their newest expansion includes fully voiced, beautiful in-game cinematics and dialogue with speech bubbles between NPCs that accompanies their fully voiced conversations. It's in fact much more engaging than the conversation wheel appearing in the middle of the screen. The two brand new faction zones are beautiful (see Orange's images for more example of what I mean) and filled with the new races that each faction gets to play with more brand new races to come over the next few months. The early game has even had graphical updates to both NPCs and areas with the sole purpose of updating the look of the game.

 

Plenty of people care about World of Warcraft. That's why it is such a resounding success. They keep giving people reasons to care, and content to play. It's a different world over there than it used to be, and I would say that since the Legion expansion they have been knocking it out of the park. And this is coming from someone who never once went back to Warcraft in almost 7 years straight of non-stop playing SWTOR. But it holds my attention firmly now and gives me the story immersion I desire, without so much need to "head cannon" everything. Yes, please!

 

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The conversation wheel is sort of Bioware's knife and butter though, pretty much every Bioware game for the past decade had it.

No one cares about world of warcraft.

 

1999 graphics and "story" without real voice acting. Cutscenes made in free version of Unity. No thanks

Swtor was basically a wow clone, bioware admit that themselves along with all the problems that wow had such as boring combat, boring side quests, no quest log etc.... If they made Swtor more like Kotor it would've easily be more popular than GW2 and FFXIV. Which by the way may not be to late to fix

The conversation wheel is sort of Bioware's knife and butter though, pretty much every Bioware game for the past decade had it.

Oh I know this is true, and I'm okay with it honestly. For a long time, SWTOR spoiled me for voice acted questing, but WoW is adding more and more of that, and actually doing it better (for my taste), adding speech bubbles of conversation as the NPCs speak that make it really cool. There have been many who have requested speech bubbles in this game for a long time. Now I understand why.

Blizzard didn't do so well with these aspects in the beginning, but every expansion it gets a little better, and BFA has been really great so far, beautiful to look at, and enjoyable to play. I get that there are people who will never enjoy the art style, no matter how high res they make it. That is personal preference that will likely never change. To each their own! But With the transmog system, the effort at making the game look better, and the amount of content that it gets, I'm liking WoW more than I ever have in the past.

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Oh I know this is true, and I'm okay with it honestly. For a long time, SWTOR spoiled me for voice acted questing, but WoW is adding more and more of that, and actually doing it better (for my taste), adding speech bubbles of conversation as the NPCs speak that make it really cool. There have been many who have requested speech bubbles in this game for a long time. Now I understand why.

 

Blizzard didn't do so well with these aspects in the beginning, but every expansion it gets a little better, and BFA has been really great so far, beautiful to look at, and enjoyable to play. I get that there are people who will never enjoy the art style, no matter how high res they make it. That is personal preference that will likely never change. To each their own! But With the transmog system, the effort at making the game look better, and the amount of content that it gets, I'm liking WoW more than I ever have in the past.

 

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I see. I was never too crazy for the speech bubbles. You've put it pretty well, it's a matter of personal preference, I prefer the usual standard cinematic dialogue with subtitles and dialogue wheels on the center of the screen. But to each his own.

RP servers have always had the lowest population. Even in World of Warcraft, RP servers are known as the "dead RP" servers.

You realize that the biggest server that went into Satele Shan was the Harbinger, which was not a roleplay server.

The biggest server that went into Star Forge was the Ebon Hawk.. Which was a thriving RP server (some might argue that it wasn't but the high density of roleplayers present there was enough to give it the honorary title, at least). And it's still going strong.

RP servers might not have gigantic communities like others do, but they're typically incredibly stable, even when there are long lulls of content.. Why? Because in RP communities, players create their own content, and that keeps them busy. All you really have to do to maintain RP communities is give them a world to work with. A lot of the time, they can do the rest.

One thing that we all know is that high productions value trailers are an inaccurate representation of the actual game play and the quality of the game, but they look awesome and bring in new players right?

 

I will be highly optimistic and gonna say we will most likely get a trailer before the year ends

The problem with that is it will reduce the amount of content they can add because they will spend all that money and resources to make a trailer that most people will only watch a few times once the expansion is released.

At this late stage of the game and obvious lack of resources, making an expensive trailer would be a waste and wouldn’t do much to keep people playing after they realise there is hardly any content to go with it because Bioware couldnt afford to add it after blowing all the money on a High Production Value trailer.

I think people need to decide on what’s more important to them when they hope or wish for things like this.

A two min trailer that doesn’t represent game play and they’ll only watch a few times.

Or more playable content??

I know I’d prefer more content and less trailer. Cause you can’t have both

Because marketing = success, look at apple their products are not particularly impressive in fact i would go far as to call them cheap products with a huge markup, well their computers anyways. But because of their marketing they became the largest company in the world with the highest profitability

But if they spend it all on the trailer and have no content to keep people interested, all the best marketing in the world = EPIC FAILURE

Trixxie: Their marketing budget does not affect their development budget. At all. If they do not spend the money making a trailer, it's not like they will use it to make new PvP maps instead. These corporate budgets are decided far in advance and do not mix and mingle. Whether or not they do an expensive trailer or not will make zero difference to the amount of development they do. It can get people hyped up for great game play and then fall flat, and that has happened several times in SWTOR... but the budgets are separate and one does not impact money being spent on the other.

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Imagine if they announced as part of 6.0.........

"We are porting the game to the UE4 engine, to give us more control over, and quicker production of new content."

 

SYKE!

"Due to continuing decline in the market, we will be sunsetting SWTOR in Q4 2019, and we will be reassigning the developing staff to other new and exciting projects."

“And merging all remaining servers into one based on the west coast of America”

(Because they have a spare second hand server sitting in a data for Anthem and they want to save money by closing down the east coast data centre)

Trixxie: Their marketing budget does not affect their development budget. At all. If they do not spend the money making a trailer, it's not like they will use it to make new PvP maps instead. These corporate budgets are decided far in advance and do not mix and mingle. Whether or not they do an expensive trailer or not will make zero difference to the amount of development they do. It can get people hyped up for great game play and then fall flat, and that has happened several times in SWTOR... but the budgets are separate and one does not impact money being spent on the other.

 

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You are assuming that EA look at swtor as 2 seperate entities when they decide how much money to give the title.

When they allocate funds to a game, it is more likely they give the swtor title “$xxxx,xxxx” in total and then another department splits it into marketing and development.

What I am saying is, would you prefer them to give more money to the marketing budget to make a trailer or would you prefer they gave all the money to the development to make more content?

Also, let me add, even if the marketing team is paying for the trailers, there is still a limited development team to make the trailers, which takes them away from making content. And that is what I mean by resources.

If you use those resources to make trailers, you will have less resources (people and time), meaning less time to make the content.

Like I said, there is no point making a great trailer and then not having enough content.

You are assuming that EA look at swtor as 2 seperate entities when they decide how much money to give the title.

 

When they allocate funds to a game, it is more likely they give the swtor title “$xxxx,xxxx” in total and then another department splits it into marketing and development.

 

What I am saying is, would you prefer them to give more money to the marketing budget to make a trailer or would you prefer they gave all the money to the development to make more content?

 

Also, let me add, even if the marketing team is paying for the trailers, there is still a limited development team to make the trailers, which takes them away from making content. And that is what I mean by resources.

If you use those resources to make trailers, you will have less resources (people and time), meaning less time to make the content.

 

Like I said, there is no point making a great trailer and then not having enough content.

I think it's pretty obvious that there is not one single player in this game that would choose a shiny trailer over good, repeatable new content. That's a no-brainer. Everyone agrees with this without even asking.

What I'm saying is that, for many gaming companies, there is not a separate marketing department for each game, but rather there is one marketing department for EA that decides how much money will be spent marketing each game in it's library.

And do you really think that SWTOR, with like.. 3 developers left on staff and such a skeleton crew has a separate marketing department for just that game? I don't think that's likely at all. Even if they might have had one originally, I think it's more likely that someone from EA is assigned to market SWTOR, but works on marketing for other games as well. I still highly doubt that a single dollar of marketing money saved would see more money spent on development here.

Plus, the people who made the recent trailers don't even work for Bioware. They work for Blur, a completely different entity.

But two things are certain:

#1 - We agree, more content would be preferrable to a shiny new trailer and then nothing to play inside the game. I think this is the one area that everyone in the entire game agrees, so again... I don't think it really even needs to be discussed because it is such a given that anyone in their right mind would choose content if it had to be one or the other.

#2 - Neither of us works for Bioware, so we cannot be sure of anything about their spending, structure, work force, or the impact that any one of those has on the other. We're both just making educated guesses at this. But given that I've worked for corporations with multiple holdings (much like a gaming company would have multiple titles), I think it's pretty likely that money from marketing wouldn't be repurposed for something else. But if it was, obviously more content would be great. I just am pretty sure it doesn't work that way.

The question was whether or not we think a trailer will come out before this year ends. My guess at an answer: No.

Even if they do one to advertise 6.0, I don't think 6.0 will happen until the second half of next year, and if one thing has been proven, it's that Bioware never EVER talks about things ahead of time. They won't produce a video this year for content that they are dropping next year, and quite likely haven't even really started working on beyond white board ideas.

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You need both high end marketing and content development.

Most people that once played or could play for the first time in the future arent sifting through patch notes going "ooh they added a PvP stronghold, I'll jump back in for 2 months to see what happened since last year", their head get's turned by the CGI trailer thumbnail.

A game that gives up on marketing and only does "what it can" for the players it still has is a for all intents and purposes a dead game.

So yea, I seriously hope Blur is on the case with another kickas pew pew bonanza of a trailer. Cos that would signal this game still has a modicum of ambition going forward.