Why rise of the Hutt Cartel is a failure

They tried that. There's an option in the game for one of the classes where you could kill one of your companions off... and people complained so they removed that option in beta. So, instead of comparing to KOTOR are we now comparing to GW2? Sure, there's lots of things every game could improve on from every other game... that's true about EVERYTHING that has competing products.

So, what you want is a questing system more like GW2 - fantastic! Now you're comparing an MMO to an MMO. Go put that in the suggestion box!

/thread

okay??? I fail to see what you mean to achieve by this post. I want swtor to be as good as it can be, and I am just offering ways it can improve, because lets face it, there is no such thing as perfect and this game can always get better

Wrong... you just stated that there's only one such mass market that exists. And if you're not looking at the billions on this world, then you're not talking about marketing masses. That's a false statement and trying to get your version of "mass market" as the sole definition to support your argument. That's wrong, which makes your argument also wrong. The person that this "mass market" argument started from, is correct to say that MMO's are catering to the mass market... as it is implied they are talking about the mass market of MMO players.

We done here yet?

Totally agree. Totally support the idea of flowing out a more interesting quest line in this game that's more dynamic. You do have to realize the VA for that might be super-bloated. If there's a hundred different paths, then that's a hundred different entire scripts the VA would have to go over. That may not be possible. Are you willing to give up VA for more dynamic questing? I'm not sure I am as VA was the only thing that got me to level 6 toons.

Oh, I understand, this may take a lot of time, and my idea probably isn't the best way of doing it, I am sure the game devs have better ways of achieving it, I was just throwing out the idea, I waited quite literally years for this game, I would be willing to wait a bit longer for better content. That is just my opinion.

Unfortunately, leveling and questing content takes a back-burner at some point as you spend more time endgame than you do leveling. No matter how much leveling content you churn out, consumers will plow through it faster than you can make it.

This is an interesting point.

The voice work in TOR is a two-edged sword. Even if the cost of the said voice work were irrelevant, there is still a lot of time involved in doing it. I believe this is going to limit where the story can go, as the story is told through the dialog itself.

I was reading a bit about the Wasteland 2 kickstarter project, and they've chosen not to have voiced dialog. On one hand, this is perhaps going to bother people who have grown accustomed to voiced dialog and aren't interested in reading it. On the other hand, this allows them to add in not only more story, but more variety, more branching paths, and (most importantly) to be able to adjust things as development continues.

In fact, hearkening back to the ancient says of Ultima IV, in addition to the standard bits of conversation options, Wasteland has a box in the dialog system where you can type what you want. Theoretically this would be used for hidden conversation options, something that hasn't been in an RPG for years.

I don't get this. For those who say "Game X is better," why aren't they playing Game X?

Actually, that's not true. City of Heroes did it in the Going Rogue expansion for characters starting in Praetoria; depending on the choices you made, you made lasting changes in how you saw the zones. For example, one of the Resistance contacts was a Dr. Steffard, who would give you missions to help him free Seers from the Praetoria Police Department, and then passed you on to your next Resistance contact when you'd completed his missions. Interrogator Kang was a Loyalist contact who would give you missions to uncover 'Cutter Cain', the code name for a criminal who was kidnapping Seers and cutting out their implants. 'Cutter Cain' is, of course, Dr. Steffard, and if you complete Interrogator Kang's arc, Dr. Steffard is captured and -- for you -- disappears from the zone; if you were a Resistance mole in Powers Division and hadn't completed Steffard's arc, you would no longer be able to complete it, or get introduced to the contact Steffard would have sent you to on completion of his arc.

Now, this only affected you; if you ran through Kang's arc, ending with Steffard's arrest, you could team up with another player who was doing Steffard's arc, and while you were doing their missions, you experienced the world as their choices made it, so Steffard would be there for them, but when doing your missions, or after the team broke up, Steffard wouldn't be there.

It requires a greater amount of effort on the part of the devs to implement the flagging in each character record to track the lasting effect choices that the character made, plus add all the long-term effects; it would be a significant effort that would have to be spread across the entire range of leveling, and it would all have to be checked carefully to ensure that it didn't introduce any balance breakers. It's possible to do, but I'm not sure Bioware's interested in throwing the effort into it that doing it would entail.

Do us all a favor, stop using titles just to get peoples' attention. Calling it a failure 48 hours into launch is just ridiculous. No one wants to read drama or hyperbole.

But we might stop to read a well-thought out post that is unbiased and uses facts.