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

[Viritess]

Ignoring your badly-placed diatribe (TOR's downfall won't be philosopher's stone to returning the MMO genre to the days of no-life-EQ-gaming, despite how you wish it were), the following are the problems of TOR:

1) Crappy engine: one of the things that really cause trouble is how garbage the Hero engine is (not as bad as crystal tools, but its down there). Worst of all is that Bioware built the game on an outdated version of the Hero engine and supposedly declined to receiving updates from the guys who made it.

2) Lacking class balance: In retrospect, all the classes were designed seemingly with a single-player game in mind, and it shows when the jedi consular rose to being the "only" viable healer. Not to account the amount of brokeness in PvP.

3) Lack of endgame content: Much like FFXIV(!), TOR doesn't have much in the way of high level content. Hence why the operations were released in a state some consider premature, flashpoints were not properly tuned and so on.

4) Imbalance of population: In one of the few times aesthetics harm rather than help, Sith outnumbered Republic players considerably since launch because people liked the Sith. That's REALLY bad in a game with a PvP element.

Casual-friendly had nothing to do with TOR's issues. Bioware just made a crapton of bad design decisions and it bit them in the ass.

What I find funny about the OP is that even the WoW crowd looks at TOR and points out these technical issues and bad decisions over saying "0mg w0w clon fa1lz bring bak n0-lifez tr0ll0ll". The Hero engine is a technical issue. The decision of launching the game with barely any PvE content was a bad decisions. Sith Inquisitors and Jedi Consulars making the hop to live OPd like they were in beta was a bad decision. Skimming on a lot of the stuff they wanted to add was a bad decision. Launching without the basic MMO tools was a bad decision.

...in a way, TOR is pretty much FFXIV but without the company behind it willing to pump money into fixing the game. Knowing EA, they'll dump the game soon enough. Not that I didn't see any of it coming, because when I saw that people like the guy behind WAR's Bright Wizard fiasco was on the TOR team, I sensed a great disturbance in the Force. :O

Just wanted to addressone of your points, because point 1 is more of a grey area then the Hero Engine is crap.

Bioware bought an early build of the hero engine, and did not contract the Hero engine designers for updates. They then re-programmed the bejeezus out of it. The Engine Bioware used could be hardly called the Hero engine anymore.

Class balance was pretty lackluster. From 1-50 I enjoyed my Jedi Shadow enough. I found some of the base issues are slightly covered up by the fun of being a Jedi. Weeee. then hit lvl 50. All the money (and lots of it) i spent for crafting, useless.

One of the big issues i think BW found was Faction imbalance. They totally ignored the probability of a large segemnt of people gravitating to the Dark side. And did nothing via effects, cool moves, cool gear or ANYTHING to prevent, nor systems to fix, such an issue. They instead denied the issues, but its not easy to hide the difference.

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All in all, i belive the OP argument is faulty on the grounds that Because SW:tor failed, Casual doesn't work.

Not adding goals to progress over the long term can hurt a game.

But "instant Gratification" is not limited to those with only a few hours to spend. One of the best ways to facilitate quality crafting and stable markets into a game is to make Endgame rewards depend on Crafters to furnish the "phat lootz". But even some the "hardcore" don't want to depends on anyone beside their static group.

The "glory days" of hardcore gaming had a MUCH smaller amount of games on the market too. Companies will go where the money goes.

The only way to make your MMO desires known is to as a gamer, stop paying 100+ dollars for Collectors edition access before we even know what we're buying (The Secret world, i'm eyeballing you!)

I had more rant, but i'll pass since this will likely get buried. My thoughts are not the same as the OP. A solid game with a solid gameplay for all can be done. A single game need not have a single audience. Its the mechanics and systems placed there that decide that.

[Katsumi_Tsukino]

I have to say the only thing that I am sighly worried about and I have a lot of faith in this development team.

Having played other MMOs. FFXI, WoW, Aion... and the like. I am afraid they will make it so its so easy to solo that you wont need to party. I play MMOs to play with other people to meet people and to come together with people to overcome a challange even if that challange is leveling or a end game content challange. I want to play with other people as a natural progression though the game not just a static of people that is formed out of a few friends game hoping. I think that is the biggest problem with MMOs today and Tor had this issue too. they are massively single player games. you never need to group and you never really have a incentive to group up. even WoW anymore till you hit raid content you dont do anything but solo and that was a huge turn off for me with that game.

the game does need to be slightly more solo friendly then FFXI was but still needs to encourage or force players to group up with one another to some degree so that way you can build a community of friends in the game. that is what kept me playing FFXI for 7+ years and my room mate for 8+ years. it was the friends we met and the people that join our journey not easy mode stuff that you can bust through being a casual player in a few weeks.

A good MMO needs, Group content, Goals, Ways for people to meet up and play together, places to build friendships for lasting game play experiences but also allow for enough solo content to not make it feel like you need a Raid worth of people to "wipe your own arse."

that said I am still looking very foward to 2.0 and am sure they will pull it off right. I am sure they have looked at all the other games trappings and steered away from the pitfalls that poor MMO WoW clones have shown to be the real problems the games had.

[Duelle]

Class balance was pretty lackluster. From 1-50 I enjoyed my Jedi Shadow enough. I found some of the base issues are slightly covered up by the fun of being a Jedi. Weeee. then hit lvl 50. All the money (and lots of it) i spent for crafting, useless.

I saw it as more the fact that the developers went out of their way to make non-force users more appealing, because what everyone argued back when TOR was announced was that it would follow that silly tradition where the Jedi steal the show and everyone else would be fodder. Just like it is in the movies. Hence the combat superiority of ranged classes like the Trooper and the Smuggler; to get every tom, dick and harry that saw the movies to actually respect the classes, especially in the case of the Trooper due to how Stormtroopers and Clone Troopers were useless fodder in the movies.

One of the big issues i think BW found was Faction imbalance. They totally ignored the probability of a large segemnt of people gravitating to the Dark side. And did nothing via effects, cool moves, cool gear or ANYTHING to prevent, nor systems to fix, such an issue. They instead denied the issues, but its not easy to hide the difference.

There was no stopping this either way. The sith are just more appealing between their very pragmatic society, the power structure, the cool lightning and so on. That's really where the appeal of being the faction that have historically been bad guys in Star Wars kind of took over.

[XxOstiaxX]

I think is a little premature to call a game with a 1million plus subscribers an utter Failure. Does the game has glaring flaws and problems ? Sure! Does the game lack end game content ? Sure! Does the game lack pvp balance ? Sure! Does the game lacks challenge for hardcore players ? Sure!

Bioware's problem has been what every single MMO developer has missed since wow hit the market, wow dint just take X or Y idea from EQ and improve on it, they had also tripled the amount of content available from the get go, the game released with over 15 istances, all very distinctive from the other, some short, some long, some even raid worthy, and it had end Game. This newer games, have just enough content to get you from 1 to cap and then sit around asking yourself WTF NOW ?

It is the same with Swotor, and it was the same with FFXIV(Tho to a more glaring fault), i dont think SE needs to learn or pay attention from anybody, they have made the same exact mistake bioware did, they need to focus on how to right them with 2.0, not 3.0

[Riv]

TOR was pretty crappy lol. I was max lvl on 2 characters b4 the free trial even ended.

[Gramul]

I think is a little premature to call a game with a 1million plus subscribers an utter Failure.

The game no longer has 1 million plus subscribers, otherwise they're just wasting money on subscriptions they're just sitting on. It had a strong start, strongest in a long time, but now every server seems to be trailing at light population and the game is hurting. The game is plagued with hundreds of issues never addressed, a lack of overall content to keep people there after the story, issues surrounding EA leading to some very bad press, and stupid decisions from EA in general.

[Limonconcon]

This

Taking elements from a game is one thing but pretty much re-skinning one is another
I won't mind if XIV takes elements that work in say WoW, XI, GW2 or even DAOC but if a game is too close to the original game you might as well just play the original game.
I will say one thing that has kept me coming back to the FFMMO series is the "one character" model, I played SWTOR for about 3 months and got 2 characters to 50, whenever I wanted to switch roles (ie we need a tank not a healer) I had to log out and log back with my other character, something I think SE has actually done right.

I think that is one of the keys for MMOs, to have only one do it all character... That means you get attach to the character, you wont do stupid things to ruin the reputation you have build along the journey... no need to have 5-6 diff characters to exp different roles...
I think its genius...

[_pops]

I don't think this was mentioned before, but...

You also got to understand where we are now. Most, if not all, players who used to play Everquest/FFXI/WoW back in the day are now reaching their mid-20s to early 30s. I should say those who still are keeping tabs with the MMO genre have HIGH expectations nowadays. I can assume this is the case because we get those bursts of nostalgia and we want to experience that again.

In this day and age where we're seeing the influx of the newer generation coming into the scene. This generation's "expectations," I should say, wants and HAS to have everything now, now, NOW. So, we have developers who want to cater to that kind of demographic because they know they'll keep that audience interested if they continue to spoon feed them with OOOH SHINY content that takes little to no skill whatsoever to achieve. Kind of like giving them a quick fix of "sense of achievement" in which it starts to wear off over time. So unless they can keep up with that, people will get bored and want to go/do something else.

I guess attention span comes into play here, as well. There are too many "distractions."













I actually have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Denmo]

The forum for the failed MMO FFXIV is hotly debating the failures of other MMOs.

Is it hard irony, or a sign of doom?

[Asiaine]

In this day and age where we're seeing the influx of the newer generation coming into the scene. This generation's "expectations," I should say, wants and HAS to have everything now, now, NOW. So, we have developers who want to cater to that kind of demographic because they know they'll keep that audience interested if they continue to spoon feed them with OOOH SHINY content that takes little to no skill whatsoever to achieve. Kind of like giving them a quick fix of "sense of achievement" in which it starts to wear off over time. So unless they can keep up with that, people will get bored and want to go/do something else.

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.