What can SE learn from Bioware's failing Star Wars MMO?

[Laf]

If anyone interested... Current SWTOR peak player counts is around 60-80K. Failure of colossal proportions.

[Velhart]

dont clone games, thats what ya gotta take away

Pretty much this. A Blizzard developer said himself that you will never beat WoW if you just make another clone of WoW.

Actually, Extra Credits from Penny Arcade put a really good perspective into WoW clones.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-future-of-mmos

All I think can be said in the video above. The only games I see succeeding and staying in competition with WoW (not over succeeding it) is Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 and Guild Wars 2. FFXIV 2.0 will definitely caters to a certain group of people (Japanese and JRPG players), and the idea of international servers is one of the reasons that FFXI was a huge success for a long time.

I played SW:TOR and got a Bounty Hunter to 50. I will say beforehand, the story was incredible and it was better than all the three prequels put together. However, that is as far as I can say about it. It not only pretty much used WoW's form of end game style, it also was no where near casual friendly. I remember in end game, I had to do dailies on two planets that had group oriented quests and easily took me 2-3 hours to take care of all of them (assuming you have a party ready to go), not only that, a daily was required of you to finish a dungeon. I don't know if you played dungeons in SW, but they were not short by any means. You were looking at a good two hours to finish a dungeon. So if you wanted to be as progressive as possible in the PvE department, you had to easily sink 5-6 hours of gameplay a day.

Like someone said, WoW caught lightning in a bottle. They found the balance of casual play and hardcore play. Making it so you can gather your Valor Points anytime of the week, you just had a weekly cap instead of the old way of getting 120 a day if you were on everyday. It catered to casuals because instead of feeling forced to be on everyday, you could get whatever you wanted done on the weekend and still make the same progress as a hardcore. Of course, ultimately hardcores succeeded over casuals with hard mode raids.

The concept should always be this way, making a balance between hardcore and casual but ultimately rewarded the hardcore more in the end. Hopefully FFXIV 2.0 and Guild Wars 2 sees this and make sure that balance is set in their game.

I believe FFXIV 2.0 and Guild Wars 2 will be highly successful because they don't clone WoW, simply put.

FFXIV 2.0 at worst will derive concepts mostly from FFXI and use concepts that made WoW successful without cloning it (Like a content finder system, this should be a standard tool in all MMO's.). That is okay though, since I believe FFXIV shouldn't be exactly like FFXI, but it should give us a sense of familiarity. If I am a FFXI vet and getting into FFXIV for the first time, it is good that I have some sense of familiarity to get me hooked in. At the same time, a person who has never played a FF MMO should be comfortable getting into it right away. Looking at everything so far and by interviews, it sounds like this is exactly what SE is doing. So I believe FFXIV 2.0 will be a major success that SW could not.

Guild Wars 2 will most likely succeed because it's main intent is to break away from the generic MMO formula, and by playing the beta, it really shows, and in a good way. Can't wait to play the full retail.

[Sagagemini]

I think SE need only look at its own past mistakes and stay the current course. 2.0 will be the game ffxiv fans and devs should have released and after it does 1.0 will become a vague memory.

1.0 will never be a vague memory.
It left a bitter taste in evertbody's mouth.

[Soukyuu]

-PVE and PVP balance. In their attempts to balance PVP they ended up nerfing PVE builds which pissed off a lot of people since the concept of a sneak attack imperial agent operative was pretty much deemed worthless ONLY because people were moaning for a nerf through PVP not PVE. Rather then just adjust abilities for PVP they just adjusted it to be the same for both PVE and PVP which pretty much made said build worthless.

And SE is going the same way with their justification of spell cast interruption while moving. Separate rulesets for PvE and PvP is the only way to go. Ragnarok Online did it quite well, imho. I hope SE will consider it too, especially since YoshiP stated himself, that they expect only 15% of people to be actually interested in PvP and that it won't be one of their major focusing points in one of the interviews.

And as to MUDs dying off... You do know what killed them right? MMORPGs, why play text only when Everquest has actual characters. What will kill the MMORPG will be it's replacement not some new fad but genuine innovation to the genre, like full immersion VR or some such nonsense

And I can't wait for that to happen

1.0 will never be a vague memory.
It left a bitter taste in evertbody's mouth.

At least everyone who bought the game or pre-ordered the collectors edition.

[Gentaro]

SWTOR was a SinglePlayer game with great story bunched together with boring mmo-elements. You had a boring way between the main story elements, after you reached the max level, there was no reason to continue.

I agree with the OP that focusing on the non-casual players is the key of a successful mmo in the future

[Antipika]

If anyone interested... Current SWTOR peak player counts is around 60-80K. Failure of colossal proportions.

[1]Citation needed.

Also is that EU+NA or NA alone? We all know population dropped, but doubt it dropped that low... Even XI had more than 60K peak concurent users.

Latest "official" number given was 1.3 million in the beginning of May. And 1.3 million is far from being a failure.

oh, we have plenty instead. Just because something have more subscribers than another, don't mean they're doing good.

What determine if you are doing good or not is net profit. It was said (EA statement) that SWTOR would be profitable with ~500K subscriptions. They're just way over that (for now).

I don't see XIV becoming anywhere near profitable soon. If XIV can already make up for all the money lost, that would be a miracle.

[Mishakai]

As someone who looked forward to, and is still currently playing TOR, I have to say I am definitely disappointed in how BioWare has handled it thus far. It's actually funny if you compare it to XIV. I couldn't stand XIV at launch, however SE has gone out of there way to make the game better with each patch. BioWare seems to be doing the opposite with their game. They have, in the opinion of many, made the game worse with just about every patch released. Where SE took action quickly to save their game early on, admiting mistakes, BioWare seems to kinda tip toe around issues and sugar coat things.

So while I agree that part of the games impending doom is due to the fact that it pretty much is WoW in space with light sabers, another huge reason is the comedy of errors that is BioWares management of the game. It came out of the gates strong, and there is no reason they shouldn't have been able to retain a much larger portion of the 2 million or so who purchased the game 6 months ago.

[Payadopa]

1.0 will never be a vague memory.
It left a bitter taste in evertbody's mouth.

For me it already is. I barely remember the times when I had to go back to an aetheryte crystal like every ten minutes because I had no MP anymore. XIV really has come a long way.

[ZakarnRosewood]

I played FFXI quite a bit and it was getting to the yutunga jungle (spelling is probably off) that i finally gave up. i didnt have the patience to sit for three hours shouting for a party, to get a party, kill 5 mobs, have a person drop, then stand there and look for a replacement.

What FFXIV needs to succeed, IMHO, is to have some way of making the journey to endgame worth while. like one of the posters said, "get to level 75" is not incentive to play the other 74 levels. I like there is currently a story to follow every 5 levels, it helps, but it is not enough. aside from that you can do guild leves, get bogged down with 100's of the same reward that you sell to a vendor, or find a party to grind on mobs with. this isnt exciting or immersive.

I think having the instanced cutsceans speak, would help (among other tweaks to the cutsceans, like proper skipping options, dosent wast time in the timed dungeons, get rid of time limits for dungeons, etc. but thats another post.). give a nice long quest line that provides lore and gives you a place in the NPC community that you can be proud of. all they need to do is take a page or two out of their offline RPG and how colorful the stories were, even in the side quests. I know SE has some stellar story tellers in their ranks, pull some of them out and make them work on this.

after all, its not the picture that the art connoisseur falls in love with, its the detail and the heart put into it. Yoshi has already put in his heart and soul to this game, and it shows. Dont stop now!

[Elexia]

I also hated how everything was so linear. You never saw many people out in the world.

And to think this is what people want to happen in FFXIV.