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Good. Maybe Zenimax will take notice and steer clear of the mines ToR ran into when they make TES online.
I would probably go throw more money at Blizzard if they made servers rolled back to an advanced form of Classic/BC. | |
If it wasn't for the Star Wars brandname, the game would of been lucky to float around around 1mill. Bioware doesn't exactly have as strong a pull name-wise now thanks in large part to the follies of their two recent releases (besides this game), as well as being attached to EA like they are. It wouldn't be dead though, no. They'd of done what everyone else has done and F2P'ed it, though I wouldn't trust EA to make a competent and fair conversion into that. Also, can't wait to see someone in EA tell us that the near half-million dip in numbers is just temporary and its really going to stick at 1.7, or even move up to a cool 2 million. | |
EA has beaten one MMO within an inch of its life rather than F2P it. Look at Warhammer online . Ea has shown they would kill an MMO wholesale than make it F2P in any format. | |
Actually, I think that has more to do with Mythic than EA. They're already re-using art assets and the like to make that other online Warhammer game, Heroes I think? That's going to be F2P. Though that is true, probably because they want to milk out as much subscriber money as they can before jumping into the F2P pool, instead of just refusing to do it. | |
This news is completely unexpected. *trollface* I'll just keep playing Eve. That game is funs. :) | |
This comes as no surprise. Lots of quality games have come out since this game launched. It is a fine game. I'm not going to sit here and badmouth it, it is what it is. In some ways it is better than WoW (for instance, the universe is much better and well established). In some ways it's much worse (the content overall all is much less than the even the vanilla WoW). All of that said, the subscriber base will rise and fall through out the life of the game. Every MMO experiences this. People get through the content and then they do lots of PVP, then they wait for more content. Everytime some big new update comes along in Rift, I pay for another month of Rift. This is standard fare for an MMO. You can't say it's the end of it just because it's making less money now than it was 3 months ago. Use sense people. | |
You know, I could forgive most things about the game, but where they unquestionably screwed the pooch imo is world design. Everything boils down to linearity: Someone really oughtta teach their world designers what an open world means, because they're acting like we just stepped out of the 2,5D age. Most of the other stuff I'm fine with, story's ok, VA/dialogue is great, combat is quite fun for a hotkey MMO (I genuinely enjoyed it, it's not just a "meh, ok for MMO"). The game's fun to play, but doesn't have any lasting appeal because there's no real world to it. Every planet feels like just another tool for leveling and not something you ever want to go back to. Even with stuff like holocron hunting, they don't have the exploration aspect anywhere close to being decent, I've done more exploration in WoW where it was not awarded at all, just for the fact I COULD explore everything I wanted. It also feels like an INCREDIBLY sterile experience. You can see the amazing care that was taken to make sure you can go through your story uninterrupted by things like world events, world bosses and world PvP. Thing is, even though those things can be annoying at times, the fact is they're a part of an MMO. It's like listening to music - you can lie back in your comfy chair, choose your songs, the order they come in, listen to them at production quality and enjoy it on your own. But analogous to gaming, that's a singleplayer experience. The multiplayer experience is doing the same with a few friends and that's pretty much where TOR ends up. Here's the thing though - an MMO is a concert. It's that stand/dance/headbang-for 4 hours, blow-your-eardrums loud, packed full of people so you can barely breathe experience, where the band has to improvise a bit and get it right the first time (which they likely won't always do). It's the place where you're gonna have a dude puke two feet away from you, where a jackass is gonna think it's funny to throw a half full cup across the audience, dousing you with beer and where a group of people is gonna start moshing in the middle of the crowd. But it's all a part of that experience. If you sterilize it completely, it loses all of it's charm and stops being what it is. And that's exactly what BioWare did with TOR. | |
Tanaris? In TOR? I assume you mean Tatooine or some other 'Ta-' planet. Tanaris is a desert zone in southern Kalimdor in Warcraft. Either that or EA is cribbing off Blizzard's paper at the MMO Exams. | |
I'm one of those dropped out subs, not because I'm a 'casual gamer' but because my experience with Bioware's customer support has been shocking to say the least. Living in Australia, I purchased an overseas copy and played on overseas servers. No issues, sure, peak times were like 10am and there were 5 people on when I was playing at night, but I completely understand. In that time I made 3 characters, one of which I deleted. When the option of character transfer to a new server came up I jumped at it, only to find that two of my characters (including the one I had deleted) were eligible for transfer. Contacting customer service, I was told if I wanted the third migrated I would have to pay a fee for it... I outright refused. Not only were they happy to ruin my server 'Legacy' (a feature they touted and encouraged players to use) but in addition to my good faith in purchasing and maintaining an active subscription with an overseas server, they tried to charge me again... I cancelled my subscription, uninstalled the game and have been happier ever since :) | |
Yeah, sorry, it's late, I mean Tattooine obviously. | |
With betas for Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 around, and the fact that TOR hasn't had any major content additions lately, means that of course the playerbase is going to be antsy. It was far too easy to hit the level cap and now I'd assume many players are also reaching gear caps too. If they don't deliver more endgame content, this game is going to fail fast. Padding out a relatively easy early/mid-game grind isn't going to help the problems this game has. | |
why is that a good thing? is NO bioware better than a Bioware that some people dissaprove of? | |
tbh, TOR probably didn't have much of a chance against WoW anyway. Personally, I don't see the point of most MMOs trying to eek out an existence trying to be just like WoW (or have a lot of its elements). Since you have to pay a subscription to play both games, and since it's most likely assured that that person that's playing your MMO has probably also played WoW and has a much better investment in WoW than your game, a game that borrows a lot of basic elements from WoW won't keep them hooked for long, even if it has a great story dynamic, universe, etc. Despite what people say, I see Halo, CoD, and Battlefield as games that fall under the same genres, but play in entirely different ways just enough that they manage to have their own fanbases and still remain in competition despite CoD being the obvious monetary juggernaut. MMOs already seem to have an uphill battle, what with having to compete with the sole proprietary IP that's held the entire genre captive indisputably, but you also have to factor in the expanding costs of subscriptions, which will probably turn off people trying to play it if they've already played WoW. I don't play MMOs that much, if at all, though, so I'm not quite sure EXACTLY how closely TOR emulates WoW, but if it's an experience that you can get fairly similarly in something like WoW, then it's probably doomed for failure. | |
... you're an idiot, you know that? Do you honestly think any of those decisions were Bioware's? Nope, EA had the overinflated expectations, they rushed it out (if you call a 5 year dev cycle 'rushing'), they overdid it with the servers. Hate on EA, currently I fully support that activity, but I'd bet real money that Bioware had no say in what you're insinuating. | |
You're right on the rest of it, but I've gotta say that EA did rush the release of TOR. There was a number of pieces of content that Bioware, by their own admission, wanted in at launch, but couldn't make it in time for the release date they were given. Everything from release until the 1.2 update was pretty much a beta you had to pay a monthly fee to play. They really should have given it another 4 months, but EA was in too much of a hurry to start recouping their investment and rushed it out the door. You can give people a couple of decades to do something, but if you take it and release it before it's done, you've rushed the product. That's all there is to it. Also, while EA should take the blame for the utter failure they are in business practices, Bioware should also be blamed because they're the ones that signed on with EA, knowing full well what was coming. EA has done this exact thing before. As soon as EA bought it, Bioware was doomed to what it is swiftly becoming, and it will share the fate of Maxis et al fairly soon and collapse under the weight of EA's incompetence. | |
Considering that warhammer online still hasn't, I don't think it will, ea seems to want the monthly fee thing which hurts it really bad since it has to compete with wow and not many people want to pay for 2 mmos at once. I'm not particularly surprised to see this, as I said before, it has to compete with wow and 15 a month adds up pretty quick. | |
Guess what hasn't got a monthly sub and is right around the corner?
GG EA, now please just die. | |
This is not surprising to me. As a single-player game with minor multiplayer elements TOR is awesome. As a lasting MMO that keeps players going for months or years, it doesn't have anywhere near enough end-game content to sustain itself. I played it for 2 months before I "finished" everything and was ready to move on. Not havign addons really killed it for me as well. As someone who has been playing and customizing WoW for 8 years now, going back to a boring stock UI with far too little information available on the screen, it's just not the same. | |
keep hyping, reality is gonna hit faster for GW2 than any other MMO to ever come out. | |
Well you can't be certain of that until it actually launches. And from the Beta, we've seen that it's demonstrably better than ToR ever will be before release XD | |
Bioware made a ton of bad decisions when it came to ToR and people can not blame EA for every single one of them. At some point you have to just say the Bioware fucked up their fair share. Think about it. Would the rushed release date still have fixed the ridiculous costs associated with new patches because of their love of story progression, cutscenes, and voice overs? Would the amount of servers they launched with, whether that was an EA or Bioware decision, change the fact that you barely see anyone anyway because of the heavy instancin that went into the game in order to preserve their precious story progression? Also, yes it was a rushed. The game was released before it was ready. I don't care if it takes a decade to make your game. If you release it 4 months before it is actually ready and charge people for that obviously not ready game, you rushed your game. A game should not launch with the kind of technical issues that ToR had and if it had, I'd expect the Devs to own up to that fact and not blame the players, which Bioware did. They vehemently said almost all of the technical issues people had from horrid graphical lag to completely unresponsive controls were not a problem on their end and it was our fault. Then they finally got around to fixin it and what do they say? "So whoops. It really was our fault and we didn't optimize the game correctly." Nope. Silence. They treat us like it was our issue that they had no part in, then quietly fix it and pretend there wasn't an issue in the first place. You want to try and say bullshit like that was all on EA too? | |
GW2 has it's fair share of blunders, but from a PVE and story perspective TOR is superior. EDIT: why do you keep posting the picture? I get it, you're a GW2 fanboy, no need to post it every single time you make a comment. | |
I'm, for the most part, happy with the game. Aside from the fact that I'm in the minority of people who the game runs like shit for despite high end hardware >.> Really wish they would fix that... | |
What are you talking about? I think almost everyone who made the "good ole" Bioware games have already jumped ship. It's not really Bioware if the people who made Bioware -> BIOWARE are gone. So yeah, I'd rather follow the people who made the good Bioware games and see the Bioware today gone rather than the watch the few jokers they have left puppetering it's bones around anymore. | |
but I seriously liked ME3..ending or no ending shock horror...not everyone shares you exact tastes | |
Not everyone. The lead designer for TOR was the same guy behind Baldur's Gate II. | |
The fuck? Did I say anything about ME3's ending? No. Okay then. The only thing I'm saying is that I know the lead writers from Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age (I'm not sure what else they did) no longer work for Bioware. Apparently the composer for ME1 doesn't work for them either but I do have no idea how composers work. I also know quite a few other writers left after Dragon Age 2 and ME3 and I've heard of other people leaving.
See, not everyone left. But what I'm saying is that if most of the people who made Bioware great are gone is it still Bioware (the Bioware we know and love)? Oh and since that's all you quoted me for: Mass Effect 3 sucks, the ending sucks and you have incredibly low standards. -But we still love you. | |
my point is regardless of Dragon age 2..EA or what people think of Mass effect 3 I would still be interested in whatever Bioware comes up with next I assumed when refering to "old" bioare you were talking about baulders gate or KOTOR..or ME1 not sure who has left after ME3...but still | |
TOR essentially tried to copy WoW's model wholesale and then EA and Bioware are surprised that they can't meet expectations and are losing players? Well the reason why is rather obvious: how exactly did you intend to draw people away from WoW by styling your entire game after WoW? All you've done is remind them that they already have a game like this, and thus don't need yours. The key to a lasting MMO is providing a unique experience, which TOR doesn't do.
Unless you can find an objective measurement to prove your point, I'm going to add "in your opinion" to the end of that last statement. Because in MY opinion, GW2 is a far superior game in both design and story. This coming from a Star Wars fan who notes that TOR actually alters and retcons some previous SW canon and Bio didn't seem to care about that. It's pretty hard to argue that a game which actively throws out prior canon is "a superior story experience", in my opinion. But I'm quite open to hearing your objective thoughts on why GW2's story is inferior. But even if we don't end up agreeing, I guess we'll find out for sure when the sales figures for GW2 come out, won't we? The good thing about MMOs is that individual points of view are irrelevant: the market decides. And right now the market is deciding that TOR isn't worth paying for. | |
You are right about people being interested in what Bioware is going to do next. It's just that some (including me) are more "wanting to see the train wreck" and "freaky science experiment gone wrong" gawkers than interested customers. Let's face it, the Bioware that created many classics is gone and something else is trying (and failing) to wear its skin. | |
if that "sotmhing" is whatever created ME3 Ive got no issues I mean steam has screwed me over in the past, is it right of me to seriously want steam and valve to collapse as a result? | |
It's not really a surprise that it's shrinking. There are always a lot of people who try something for a while to see if they like it, and quit when they don't. It happens to all MMOs, and ToR is no exception. | |
The Lead writer for Dragon Age is David Gaider, he was also the lead writer for Dragon Age II. Drew Karpyshyn recently left to work on novels, He was the lead writer on Mass Effect, but left shortly into Mass Effect 2's development cycle to work on the Jedi Knight sotryline for TOR. | |
Steam? It's less about screwing over, more that Bioware is trying to reach wider audiences. That I don't really mind, I'm just not going to buy their games any more. | |
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Eh, I think a few games can still work out the subscription thing. TERA is pretty damn good, and the Secret World has yet to come out.
And of course TOR is losing people. Every single feature of the game except for the interactive cutscenes is subpar. The game currently retails for $50-$60 and costs $15 a month, but isn't even equal in content to Burning Crusade WoW.
If it wasn't for the Star Wars brand, it would already be dead.