I would of loved to have been given a half a billion dollars and a directive to go "make a star wars mmo". If any game screams "action, fast paced, arcade game", it's Star Wars.
The Elder Scrolls Online
- Thread starter Anomander Rake
- Start date
They basically shoehorned Knights of the Old Republic... into an MMO engine. And ended up with a mediocre MMO and a Mediocre single-player RPG.
I mean, it wasn't completely unexpected, but the lost potential is pretty astounding.
I would still be paying a sub for a massive , persistent "Star Wars Battlefront Online" done well. No PVE or voice acted scenes necessary
For me it was completely unexpected. I always assumed Bioware was similar to Blizzard and had a large base of avid players among their workers. Balder's Gate seemed a labor of love by people who played and liked AD&D, Roleplaying, Immersion, and Story. They were in their element.
It seems like the people who created this MMO had no clue about the genre or how to actually build a persistent world, and certainly weren't long term players like the Blizz crew who came from EQ to build WOW. It appears they had no idea what to do with their MMO, so they merged WOW with KOTOR and figured if they used their single player stories with a simple DIKU mud throwing WOWs talents it'd be easy money. Lightsabers alone sell.
The thing that blows me away is Warhammer Online had many innovative features and at least tried some new things, despite having some awful design decisions. Why in the world didn't the SWTOR team leverage that game, engine, and design to some degree or at least learn from the mistakes Mythic had made? Between their UO team, their DAOC team, their Warhammer Online people, and Bioware it blows my mind so few of the 'good' things were taken from their own frickin properties.
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exactly this. i posted this years ago on the FOH forums when the game was still in beta that a "tie fighter" type star wars MMO would be the greatest thing ever and got crucified for even mentioning it. instead, we got a fucking star wars MMO that didn't even have any ship combat. i mean, holy fuck; a star wars game without ship to ship combat is about as fucking dumb as making a FPS without any weapons.
I played X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter for 3 years in a guild where I'd play at least 8 hours a week. And that game was HORRIBLE compared to Tie Fighter
Bondurant
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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You'd have probably hated Lucas people specifications as well as EA rules on shipping, production and finance. If you didn't care about money you'd have jumped ship during design.
... (fantasy)...
Or maybe you'd be a somewhat ballsed up, skilled guy coming out of nowhere, luring Lucas people to go check lousy artwork / sketchy fan service and tell EA people "everything will be fine". And then you'd keep false past fame people out of payroll at all (Amantangelo, Vogel, Ohlen, etc) like, banning them from even thinking about SWTOR. Then you'd hire junior art design people with senior programmers / netcode / server infrastructure employees. And then you'd NEVER EVER hire a false 35yo brit nerd to CM your product. You'd hire a noname PR team and tell them to release humour-based hype, judge their skills and change them if they're being shit. But enforce them to act as a team. Spend 1/3 budget on Hollywood-IP-Fanservice ? No, you wouldn't want that. You're making the next milestone MMO, you don't care about hiring multiple second rate actors underwhelming game design. Right ?
Fantasy-like, everyone is acting as expected : Jr art /design guysdrawingnice SW stuff with LucasArts reps playing Candy Crush while being fed like lamas, Sr program / netcode / server people making wonders, any game rep is speaking for the team and PR guys are kept on a short leash. What's next ? Then, the usual alpha / beta / Quality Control circus, because you know, some people are actually gonna get paid to play your shit. Oh, you had fun creating it ? Welcome, it's gonna be awful. People want more A, less B, they want to be X, think Y is OP and don't understand Z. Yeah, they're fucking idiots, right ? Well, they're your customers, what they want is your ten commandments and what they feel is your agenda. You don't care about them ? Well you're a franchise employee, you'd want to get paid or you're going full Rambo (Rambo has values and no money, deal with it). You won't make choices on what's good, you'll compromise with money, because promotion, money and shit. Yeah, you're getting paid to make videogames, AKA no fun allowed. Oh and also, you'd release your product on a gridlocked market features wise. It's like selling livebaits where everyone fishing with grenades.
So, you have $500m to make a SW MMO, and you're actually doing nice. But are you ? Your development team is crafting a product where its market is ridden with public failures, most of them tried to reinvent the wheel with the same people. Your PR / CM team is acting wise, being present on every "major" community place, spinning your shit while not being jehova's witnesses ; your beta / alpha / whatever is going along, everything is going as expected. It's fucking cool, it's like you're gonna release a nice F2P/B2P MMO with harcore features, casual content and daily updates. Then you're like "heh, I've read about this shit on rerolled, and I was like being dreaming". And you are. Because you'll never play your first MMO again, and any company trying to sell you your first experience is a glorified casting couch.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Quoted. I have no idea what you said. I cannot stop laughing. You must have been about 65 beers deep when you wrote this, or suffering a stroke.
Cantatus
Lord Nagafen Raider
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MMOs really need to learn how to make animations during combat flow better. The combat in that video looks incredibly jerky. They do an attack, then just stand there for a moment before launching into another one. While I'm sure it makes it much easier, it doesn't matter how good your combat animations are. If your characters have to return back to a neutral position between each attack, the quality is going to suffer as it'll just look stilted and sloppy. It's the same problem ToR's combat suffered from. Every Jedi looked like they were constantly struggling to remember how to fight.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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TESO has nothing to do with the single player games (Thank Christ) and will also NOT use any lore from TESO in the future games. The next SP TES is already in development.
Miele
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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