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

[Denmo]

Although I agree with this, my only statement would be: Surely there is enough room in the world for 99 instant gratification MMORPGs and 1 (FFXIV) that is not.

Unfortunately, if SE wants to attract any new players, they're going to have to gear 2.0 to have at least SOME instant gratification.

[Gramul]

Unfortunately, if SE wants to attract any new players, they're going to have to gear 2.0 to have at least SOME instant gratification.

Card games.

[Hirmu]

Unfortunately, if SE wants to attract any new players, they're going to have to gear 2.0 to have at least SOME instant gratification.

There's a difference between catering to "instant gratification" -group and creating content in the game that can be done when you feel like it. In these kinds of threads the thought always comes up that there's this "casual group" that needs to be addressed or the game will fail and it'll have no players and will wither away and die.

Of course the big money is there in the casual land, but it's also a place packed with competitors and a huge chance of hurting your company's reputation, not to mention the fact that your game will most likely die in 1-2 years. But not everyone has to go there, since there's also an ever growing mass of players who are sick of the spoonfeed-consept and want something different.

Every business needs to differentiate it's product somehow and target a spesific group of customers. They don't need to aim for the maximal profit no matter what and I can very well see a place for FFXIV somewhere in the middle ground. It will never be as big as the casual MMOs and it doesn't have to be, just as long as it's not too hardcore.

There's also the slippery slope of giving in to the whine. You can just look around this forum and see that someone always thinks the game is too unforgiving, the RNG is too dominant, they're upset that getting relic is too frustrating and whatnot. Of course some people have good points, I'm not saying that, but if you were to actually try to please everyone, you'd have another SW:TOR -case on your hands.

I've rambled a bit, but my point is that many people will be pissed about the game no matter what, but the most important thing here is to make the game for someone, not everyone, and then stick to that vision. There's plenty of players out there for pretty much every type of game.

[Ingolf]

Unfortunately, if SE wants to attract any new players, they're going to have to gear 2.0 to have at least SOME instant gratification.

I don't see the issue with some instant gratification. As long as there's content for the hardcore players too.

[Biggs]

Look, ever since Yoshi publically stated that Star Wars's problem was launching the game without enough content (which, while true, it still had more content at launch by far than XIV originally did), and that 2.0 would launch with more content than that, I have taken a few deep breaths and decided to let the man do his job, since he appears to know what he is doing.

[Velhart]

Look, ever since Yoshi publically stated that Star Wars's problem was launching the game without enough content (which, while true, it still had more content at launch by far than XIV originally did), and that 2.0 would launch with more content than that, I have taken a few deep breaths and decided to let the man do his job, since he appears to know what he is doing.

Star Wars all in all is not a bad game by any means. It had an extremely good storyline, the combat abilities were fun (On Bounty Hunter at least.), and the multiple world structure was pretty neat and only makes the possibilities endless for the game. The main problem is as everyone said, the end game is lousy. It is almost like they fully focused on the RPG perspective and not as much on the MMO perspective. It is boring, dull, and overwhelming if you are planning to go full hardcore on it. Dungeons got boring and you didn't care about reading through the storyline dialog you read millions of times. The regular dungeons are not casual friendly also. On a bigger dungeon (not raid), you are looking at a good few hours to finish one.

Star Wars may start to truly shine in the future, but I don't believe it will ever get the numbers it was hoping to make.

[Airget]

Grinding "use" to be part of the charm but now we live in a world of farmville and all those instant gratification games that if people aren't being rewarded right off the bat they'll complain about it. Just look at the complaints towards the relic weapons perhaps the most challenging thing yet not as challenging as obtaining the relic/mythic from XI.

Browser based games and micro-transactions have tainted a good amount of gamers that use to play for fun and enjoy the community of it all and in an MMO a community is everything, without that you only have a shell of a game.

In something like swtor a community wasn't needed til end-game and even then there wasn't enough content to do with said group. Sure they had flashpoints which you could do to lv up and play with 3 others but overall said content wasn't needed to "experience" the game when you could just as easily level solo through the storyline and sidequest which were offered.

While the same could be said for XIV compared to swtor in it's current state XIV's content is somewhat more varied.
-A decent variety of NM(granted not the most challenging but respawns aren't ridiculous)
-dungeons (time based which force you to progress through them fast in order to complete them)
-Primal Fights (Boss instance without the dungeons)
-AF quest (Content which requires help from other to complete at later stages)
-GC quest (content which requires help from other to complete)
-Caravans (content which requires at least 7 others to get a decent payout)
-Relic weapons (content which requires a wide range of skill and luck to obtain as well as a good community)

That's all I can think of atm. When you compare it to SWTOR they have
Flashpoint(4 person event which is repeatable and can be done at own leisure with no penalty for taking your time. So someone with a lot of time on their hands can pretty much clean out the flashpoint before leaving, and since one person can enter a flashpoint by themselves they can just as easily use said instance to farm items for credit)
Story mode(solo adventure)
Side quest(large variety which can be done solo with only a handful that recommend a group rangin from 2-4)
Operations (instance event which can have from 8-16 in it, works in the same way as flashpoints.)
PVP (events usually pitting again on an 8v8 setup however horribly imbalanced)

But ya, SWTOR issue falls from imbalance and lack of a wide variety of large grouped events because of said imbalance. If they were able to balance classes properly as well as offer a wider variety of content for players to do then perhaps it would have faired better.

[Vanguard319]

So, Who thinks the Elder Scrolls Online will fail?

[Eekiki]

So, Who thinks the Elder Scrolls Online will fail?

I do, and I'll tell you why.

Mods.

The main reason why Bethesda RPGs are so popular is because of how easy they make it for people to customize their experience. When you throw online play into the mix, you must put stringent restrictions on how players are allowed to modify their experience in order to keep things balanced. Without the freedom to mod, the game will be a mediocre hack n' slash, and people will grow bored of it quickly.

[NadienKirisame]

I do, and I'll tell you why.

Mods.

The main reason why Bethesda RPGs are so popular is because of how easy they make it for people to customize their experience. When you throw online play into the mix, you must put stringent restrictions on how players are allowed to modify their experience in order to keep things balanced. Without the freedom to mod, the game will be a mediocre hack n' slash, and people will grow bored of it quickly.

Also don't forget the standard way it works for Bethesda games... game comes out then you wait a month for the moders to fix all the bugs in the game so you can actually play it right :P

Though since Bethesda isn't the ones actually making the game... who knows :P it might actually work... hehe

The cat is bemused =-.-=