Reflecting on SWTOR and XIV

[fusional]

publishers generally foot the bill for marketing. so if nintendo pays for marketing saying metroid prime 3 is revolutionary, and it ends up not being revolutionary... yes, you can absolutely blame nintendo for misleading advertising. that's the point. whether or not arenanet themselves tagged their own product using the "r" word, ncsoft had final say in all the marketing and PR.

and anyway, the bottom line is that in that post he rips on SWTOR while using GW2 as a positive counter-example, and i was simply pointing out that GW2 is suffering from many of the same pitfalls *as we speak* (very positive reviews initially followed quickly by boredom and rapidly declining log ins, etc.)- it was just never based on a subscription model, so it won't be considered as much of a disappointment.

while gw2 isn't suffering from exactly the same illness, the symptoms are pretty much the same.

[Elexia]

GW2 was fun for 10 minutes which shouldn't be the case for an MMO. Tera suffered the same as well, it was fun because it was "new" and "revolutionary"...but deep down its the same MMO that we played since the early 90s, especially since WoW launched in 2004.

ARR will also suffer the same fate if they don't do something that will latch onto players, since it will attract people who like the same shit, it won't keep them because...it's the same shit.

[fusional]

somehow I feel like controlling a doll where @ FF14, our player chara feels more alive.

while general boredom with other MMOs certainly factored into things, this was pretty much what kept me playing XIV over the last year. if yoshi can deliver on giving us fluid, lag-free, highly mobile combat with reduced animation lock (a little is totally fine) while keeping the 'solid' feel of the characters and combat... i'll be sold.

[Valmonte]

Similarities =/= Clone.

Seriously guys. I don't think SWTOR was absolutely great, but it's not a clone. It's like saying every game with turn based combat is an FF clone.

your right, its a copy that's actually worse then the game they where coping from.

[indira]

SWTOR = garbage.
its the streamlined WOW clone thats a mmo on rails, its a dead end once you hit cap.
only up side is the game reads the quest log for you with animations after that its horrible. SW galaxy's is many times better yet sony screwed it up then pulled the plug.

hope the big sand boxes coming will revive that kind of mmo, theme parks are played out now NO ONE tries anything different and trys to be wow, then they wonder why no one plays it. gw2 the only one that went away from the themepark norm. im waiting on EQ3 & archeage see how they preform.

[bobbygunz]

SWTOR = garbage.
its the streamlined WOW clone thats a mmo on rails, its a dead end once you hit cap.
only up side is the game reads the quest log for you with animations after that its horrible. SW galaxy's is many times better yet sony screwed it up then pulled the plug.

hope the big sand boxes coming will revive that kind of mmo, theme parks are played out now NO ONE tries anything different and trys to be wow, then they wonder why no one plays it. gw2 the only one that went away from the themepark norm. im waiting on EQ3 & archeage see how they preform.

Sandbox games have always been the future, which is funny because they were also the past as well (ultima online/star wars galaxies). Many MMO developers just don't seem to understand the platform they're working with. And Ive never understood the concept of a single player MMO with no emphasis on community/creativity. Isn't it called "massively multiplayer" for a reason?

Anyway, there's also Black Desert, which is another next gen sandbox. Mabinogi II info was released today also, but it doesn't seem to be very sandboxy like the first game, but still pretty innovative in the combat-department all the same.

[Kallera]

while general boredom with other MMOs certainly factored into things, this was pretty much what kept me playing XIV over the last year. if yoshi can deliver on giving us fluid, lag-free, highly mobile combat with reduced animation lock (a little is totally fine) while keeping the 'solid' feel of the characters and combat... i'll be sold.

I agree with this, from the video of SWTOR that I've seen, the combat looks like a flinch happy slugfest of effects splashing everywhere. Star Wars combat doesn't exactly translate well into MMOs in my opinion. In the movies, characters were one blaster shot or lightsaber swing from serious and permanent injury and death. The SNES-era video games got away with it to a degree. but long extended battles of taking point blank blaster shots and swings from lightsabers curable by "Channeling hate" seemed a bit...off. Like a caricature of a caricature.

[Abriael]

And I guess this is a given that the thread will derail into "No it's not like wow!" fine.. tell me how it's different. What new and uncharted territory did SWTOR take? The controls are exactly the same, the game play is exactly the same, the leveling with class trainers is exactly the same, oh look it's got skill trees like.. umm.. wow. The differences between the two you could write on the back of a business card.

SWTOR has its main feature in the storytelling, branching dialogue, companion interaction and everything that is peculiar of BioWare RPGs.

WoW does not.

It's a radical difference, and one must be completely blind not to notice it since it's slapped in your face at every corner that you turn.

Saying that SWTOR is a clone of WoW is like saying that Battlefield is a clone of Call of Duty because they're the same genre and have similar controls.

It pretty obvious that it doesn't make the slightest sense. Everyone into racing will tell you that a tire doesn't need to be square in order to be different.

[Gramul]

Don't think MMORPGs as a genre should be restricted to one playstyle or another.

I'm interested in how these open sandbox MMO's turn out.

[TomCarroll]

Like many people, I was super excited for SWTOR. I was invited to the closed beta and played for several months before release.

The common misconception about modern MMORPGs is that they all "copy" wow. SWTOR may have been a barebones copy of wow at best. Many of the gameplay elements bioware used had been abandoned by blizzard in vanilla.

People who don't play wow assume that everything is a copy, yet they don't realize that blizzard's greatest strength is their ability to keep reinventing their product. Every time I've played a new expansion in wow, I'm immediately forced to learn new mechanics. To me, this gives the game much more replay value, and it's a skill that no other developer has mastered the way blizzard has.