Voice overs potentially ToRs downfall?

Anyone else for what? To prove you have no idea what you are talking about?

You're doing a fine job of that yourself.

Show us a link that states how much it costs to implement VO in a game.

The way SWTOR implemented VOs costed so much, that they could focus on MMO features that would make this game re-playable for a long time.

I believe that already have voice overs for a lot of future content ready. Just saying... This game doesn't really look like a $200 million game at this stage.

While I'd love to share that belief, I think it's a little unrealistic. BioWare would have busted out story content a lot earlier as subscriptions began to droop if they had the voiceovers sitting around, even if that wouldn't have helped in the long run. It just seems very odd to me that they'd hold back their signature content during what is sure to be the darkest period in the game's history.

After the last event I really worry about how Bioware will play out future missions. It was horrible going through the whole quest chain and not seeing my character or companion speak once, and the excuse that only one end of the transmission was secure just didn't sit right. I really hope we're not going to see more of that in the future.

If you want to know where most of the budget went, most likely to the 800 or so people they hired during it's development phase. That's fricken expensive.

The scale and quality of TOR still isn't justifying the very high budget.

In my opinion, the high budget stems from the game serving two masters - BioWare and EA. I was in beta very early on, and was invited back pretty regularly. Nearly the entire beta stage, as I witnessed it, was a tug-of-war between BioWare implementing (or not implementing) things as they saw fit, swiftly followed by a series of changes that made the game more generic (obviously due to a corporate checklist of what makes an MMO "successful"), followed again by an attempt to come to some sort of happy medium between the two extremes.

If I recall correctly, beta really opened up right in the middle of when this process was going on for the modding system. The system went from having virtually every item moddable, followed by nearly none, and then only a select few. As the game progressed, the system gradually became more and more open and BioWare crept toward the obvious original intent.

The existence of the non-story, one-arbitrary-choice flashpoints also came from this process. BioWare had flashpoints at logical points that filled out the story itself. EA obviously needed flashpoints at every possible level post level 10, and the addition of these flashpoints only served to detract from the overall experience because of the stark difference in quality.

It takes a lot of resources to keep going back and forth between two masters, it takes resources to phone in certain content that was entirely unnecessary, and those processes detract from the overall quality of everything in the game because of the distracting and expensive processes involved.

Exactly, # of employees =/= quality. As they admitted themselves very early on, they hired way too many people and it caused them to be very disjointed and get even less done. They outsourced most of the artwork.

So in reality, even though it sucked that a few key people had to go, the overall downsizing was probably a very good thing. It's unnecessary bloat and budget.

ArenaNet's entire employee roster is like 1/4 of what swtor's development team was at its peak.

What was this vision, and how did EA change it?

Also, if swtor was not rushed, what more could they have added to make it that much more successful?

Ranked team pvp? UI customization?

Nope. The only thing that would have made it better was to release the game with the legacy system at launch, and that is not that much from release till today which has only more OPs, FPs, and 1 more WZ to date... and still a broken illum.

So Im not sure waiting for BW to add one more WZ and a couple of ops, Fps, ranked pvp, ui customization which 3rd parties could have done... would be worth waiting for a 100-200 million dollar investment not to make money.

You have also look at what they released after they launched, and it was not something that was game changing... other than the legacy system to make it better to play alts for example.