SWTOR: Theme-park MMO design. End of the road?

A lot of the deep seated issues with MMOs these days stem from them trying to be all things to all people. They fail to say 'we're making a car, please take your desire for a flatbed truck to that truck dealership over there'. If any game were perfect, we'd never play anything else. By definition, one person's perfect will not match another's. This yields multiple games, multiple options.

One key thing customers of MMOs should stop doing is latching onto the latest game and go 'oh but it must have X, it must have Y'. No, it doesn't need to. What it needs is a consistent well implemented vision that the developers stick to. Take EVE as a great example. CCP have mostly stuck to their guns in creating a harsh ruthless world. Tacking on features at the last minute to satisfy some group of players at whom your product was never aimed is a great way to end up pulling your product in too many different directions. There is a real balancing act here.

The other significant issue is that innovation is generally received badly. Witness the outcry in various games by a generation that have played WoW and its ilk for so long that they genuinely cannot operate in a different environment. There are real Pavlovian conditions at work here. Game developers ignore that conditioning at their peril, whether we like it or not. That doesn't mean don't innovate, but it means innovate within a space that is going to be accessible to the majority of your target audience, even if that means sacrificing some innovation for familiarity.

As for the whole theme-park vs sandbox thing; it's a moot point in my view. Both ultimately run out of content. The distinction is that one is visible at the end of the current storyline, and the other is when you've achieved total boredom because you've done everything, or managed to bend/break the game's sandbox by doing something the designers did not expect (see The Elder Scrolls and practically any use of money, alchemy, enchanting, and so on - the sandbox becomes dull because you've beaten the system and have become invincible). In both cases, the attraction remains skin-deep.

Sandbox equally does not translate to a simulator (which is what, for example, Minecraft is). Simulators have a very different target audience; they are pure world creation and often have little or no real gameplay. The joy is not in experiencing content, but building it. That is an incredibly subjective & dangerous area for an MMO to go into. For example; I cannot think of a single sandbox MMO where you genuinely create content. The only MMO in fact at all that I can think of is STO 's Foundry. Everything else, the content is still developer-created. The remaining task is about dressing up grind of some form into an acceptable package that people will invest time over (see EVE null-sec, the entire basis of World of Tanks, and pretty much any open-world PvP objective ever written).

The argument that says 'players create the content' has missed that there is no content. The correct phrase is 'players convince themselves it's worth the time to do X'. That's not wrong, but it's important to understand the carrots & sticks in this design; to understand what drives people. In most cases that drive is so varied that you cannot make a game that appeals to all drives.

wow you talk about failing to read your post lol i said "actually that is a EPIC FAIL for bioware. because its crappy game design....

i would like you to log into a MMO like EVE ONLINE... and try to "max out" a toon in 5 days....

I have played eve for 7 Years and i have not maxed out all the skills in the game.. and you know what due to outstanding game design it is not possable to ever max out every skill in the game. because they take a long time to max each seperate skill and there are 100's of them.

you are just making excuses for Bioware because they didnt have the forsight to see that people with no jobs and are on EI or what ever can play 18 hours a day and max out in 5 days because they have been playing MMO's for 15 years.

P.S. i work full time and i dont have a level 50 yet. but then again i split my time between eve and swtor so i dont have a level 50 toon right now.

My GF who is in school and has more time off then i already has 1 toon at 50 one at 40 and 2 more at who knows what levels.. and she is already board because she knows once her other toons reach 50. there will be next to nothing to do because she does not like to PVP much. And space combat is single player and well is fun for the first time you do it and then is a waste of time. "

The main point im trying to make is the game is to easy to get to level 50 as i have watched my girlfriend do it while she is in school full time and is only playing one MMO right now. I'm playing 2..

ANd not only is it to easy... but when you are level 50 there is not much to do.. and this is not only what my GF has observed and i through her... but the voice of many many people i know who all hav 50's and are back to playing eve.. or wow... or what ever other game they like to play..

If Bioware does not want to lose 1,000,000 people in the next 3 months.. they better add more End game content that can not be completed.. or leveled out.

The dinosaur days of sandbox MMOs are gone, nobody played them. Purely grind based game-play just doesn't appeal to enough people. But at the same time the pure theme-park MMOs have an end and that just feels every bit as crappy.

EVE is the big Sandbox these days with 350,000 players (or so they claim, their peak online players is 35k), which is a comparable population to the worst "failures" in theme-park MMOS. The upside for that style of game is that they don't need to churn out an endless flow of content so the maintenance cost is much lower; they simply don't need millions of subs.

I'm fairly certain that Sandbox MMOs are dead and gone and with good reason, but there has to be a better way to manage populations than churning out content to bloat statistics in ever increasing increments. I would love to see The Secret World not be awful with it's very different levelling system, but Funcom tends to have big ideas and a little budget

Hmm, I think this may be the first constructive post i've seen in a year that I can get on board with.

Great, thought-out thread with clear and unbiased ideas. I really do wish there was a lot more sandbox options in TOR.

I will play the devil's advocate for one point though; I don't believe that this will ultimately kill the game, I believe the fan base alone for TOR is always going to be big enough that they will yield a profit. Even if this game rests at a comfortable medium, they will still profit. Which may be where they settle, who knows? It could also very well take off just like wow did... when they start adding more features, like the legacy system and guild ships.

I hope they don't give up, I hope they strive for #1, I hope they take idea's like this and move on them.

I do believe one thing, you should be posting this in the suggestions, where it actually matters. Not General discussion where it will get eaten alive.

Now all that remians is to create an infrastruture capable of adapting to (and staying ahead of) millions of users changing millions of things. Not sure a Hal exists ... at least for consumer applications anyway.

The full loot pvp aside, think of what Mortal Online could have done with a 150 mil budget and 7 years to make it. (Mortal Online is a good example for this because they are still up after 2 years and have more features/dynamic content than Tor does with less than 1/10th the budget and backing.)

The sand box games never get the budget. Mostly that is the reason they fail usually. Lack of money for hardware, manpower, and development. What is the last BIG budget company that tried this? SWG is the only thing that came to mind. It set records, it lasted 8 years.. THROUGH one of the biggest MMO fiascos in history. So the ability to go at least SOME of this route is there and profitable.

Apples & oranges. The skill design in EVE is there for a reason. There are no classes and thus the skills must by definition be unachievable. If they were not, long term players could become wonderful at everything and have no need to enlist the assistance of others. It is in effect mutable classes. It promotes the multiplayer component of the game in the same way. Thus it is perfectly reasonable design to max out a given class when you are artificially limiting what that class can do.

EVE's design is arguably superior, but then one must have the intestinal fortitude to skill train & be patient. It's a tradeoff, and one that puts off players, but CCP accepted a low total subscriber base & factored that into their business plans.

/signed

+1

My two cents.

Most of my experience with MMO's comes from wow. I didn't like leveling in wow at all. The pvp had its ups and downs and pve was where I found most my entertainment. When SWTOR came out I was very excited. It was a new experience from warcraft until I hit 50. At that point it was only a matter of days before I felt like it was the same old mmo with a new format. If your coming to these threads looking for opinions on this game, whether negative or positive, these are mine. They did a great job with character story's and the leveling experience. Even if you are not new to the MMO experience you will enjoy the breath of fresh air there style of questing brings. The end game is more or less the same game play experience of warcraft. There are some issues like lack of looking for group tools, content currently available and so on, but in time I feel all that will be addressed. If years of warcraft or other MMO's have not burned you up on this style of end game then I feel you will enjoy it. I personally am tired of this style end game and wanted something a little different or more dynamic. Looks like I'm not alone on this.

And the average TOR player is playing 4 hours per day, 28 hours a week. Point?