What if swtor had...

[Mormolyce]

Titan anyone?

Nobody knows anything about Titan. We're only guessing that it even has action/FPS elements.

[link4117]

For the combat, I don't find the basic style of it bad. I don't mind it, it's a classic and works. I have played Tera and don't mind the combat system at all, but I certainly don't want all mmo's suddenly switching to a more fps style; variety is good. That said the actual combat of SWToR was terrible at launch. The ability delay, the still present global cd bug, and some abilities just not working.

For all the beta feedback they got via closed, open, and stress testing they took very little advice. Many of the bugs at launch were consistently present in the beta builds. If they had focused on fixing bugs and listening to some advice on tuning, pacing, and the still present disparages between the faction classes (Death from Above vs Mortar Volley, heat vs ammo) I feel the game wouldn't have lost so much popularity. However they instead decided to focus on media campaigning and hyping the game up while seemingly ignoring any problems. It's an attitude that continues today and blows my mind. For all the reasonable suggestions, arguments, and data posted on the forums, very few things actually get changed. Instead we get more cartel packs.

Just so much was wrong with the game, but I don't think combat style was a huge factor.

But I do broadly agree that SWTOR cleaved way too close to WoW's gameplay system. You can't be revolutionary while playing follow the leader. And yeah, like most people I see the future of MMOs like most games being more action oriented. An MMORPG/FPS fusion with a cover mechanic would've been quite interesting, and would allow Bioware to dispense with the Holy Trinity. Because by god, healers make no sense in the Star Wars universe... especially not when they can be any class!

I don't think the holy trinity is a problem either. That works just fine imo. Like I said before though, variety is good so if someone can make a good system not using it then kudos to them. I don't see a reason for all new mmo's to be looking for a way to rid themselves of it though. Certainly the trinity could be better than it is in WoW, but getting rid of it like GW2 did isn't the right way to go about it. More thought should have gone into it than what GW2 did with the downed state.

[Edge-]

This is the biggest offender and the primary reason the game failed.

Please, list me out the specific issues that the Hero Engine itself had. I'm not saying it's not to blame, but there's a lot of talk about how terrible the Hero Engine is, without any specifics to back it up.

BW was working on an early beta version of the engine that they finished in house: Could it have been poor internal teams that destroyed the engine?

Do you know that the engine has poor tools for rapid content deployment and testing, for a fact? Or is it maybe that BioWares development pipeline is backed up through redundancies and inefficient use of time?

I'm just curious, because there seems to be a lot of certainty coming from people about the quality of the Hero Engine (again, they aren't using the actual Hero Engine, but an early beta version they finished in-house. We haven't seen a finished Hero Engine running in a game yet. Faxxion Online was a total joke run by incompetent devs who were similarly using an unfinished version of the engine) without any indication as to what the specific issues with it were.

I'm getting sick of this argument. SWTOR didn't fail because people don't like traditional MMORPGs anymore, it failed because it was build on a terrible engine. If SWTOR was on an engine as fluid as WoW it would almost certainly have millions of players today.

Again, how would this fix many of the complaints surrounding gameplay elements such as a lack of endgame content, both raids and non-raiding? How would this have fixed Ilum 1.0 or 2.0 and the issues that were caused there? How would it have fixed the emphasis on people playing alts as a central gameplay element that BioWare pushed?

A great engine is important, but the problems SWTOR faced can hardly all be directed back towards the Hero Engine.

[Valeron]

The hero engine being the issue is a myth or at the very least, greatly exaggerated. Now what Bioware did to the engine could be a factor but certainly not the engine itself.

[Psychlon]

A great engine is important, but the problems SWTOR faced can hardly all be directed back towards the Hero Engine.

Well said even though everytime my Alienware with a 30MB/s connection drops down to 6fps @low settings making me wish to punsh something (preferable the guy who is responsible for it).

[Kelimbror]

Please, list me out the specific issues that the Hero Engine itself had. I'm not saying it's not to blame, but there's a lot of talk about how terrible the Hero Engine is, without any specifics to back it up.

BW was working on an early beta version of the engine that they finished in house: Could it have been poor internal teams that destroyed the engine?

I think this is what people really mean when they say the hero engine is a major flaw of the game. I don't know if it's because they don't know it happened, or because they just don't reiterate it, but it's definitely not a fault of the people who created the engine. When approached about licensing the engine back by Austin's old Manager, they told him:

It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”
He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.

So to infer a little bit about 'what went wrong', it does seem that a lot of blame does have to rest with Bioware and not EA like we all want. People wonder why an unknown, but certainly largest MMO budget we've ever seen turned into a game with less features and performance than arguably any other game at the time of launch. It seems they were either supremely overconfident and couldn't match their own expectations, or really took far too many risks from even the conceptual stages of the development.

So many things would have had to go wrong to get to where we were at launch that I'm surprised the game survived at all. Truth be told, we don't like their communication, false promises, 'indian giving', and decisions, but they corrected a ship that was certainly headed for the bottom of the ocean. We might not agree with it, but at least we all have SWTOR to play still.

[Itisamuh]

Personally I would have loved if SWTOR had the world of an MMO, but the combat mechanics of an action game. Having played WoW for all these years, I no longer get excited by that kind of combat. I want something more direct, where I have to aim, where my reflexes matter. I doubt it would have helped the game success wise, but it would have certainly made it more fun for me. I also would have preferred if there was an option to play the game solo, as in having a server to yourself, or to just you and online friends. Getting rid of the XP grind would have helped too.

[Deleted]

I never thought of that before, but it's pretty brilliant. The sheer number of dailies you could choose from in a day would allow you to do something fresh every day for at least a week. As long as it wasn't implemented in the same way it was in MoP, I would have been impressed.

And the feeling of evolving/progressing world & galaxy would be much better with some time between leaving the planets for the first time and returning for bonus series passing. And lvl 50s would be "distributed" to low-level plants, there would always be some lvl 50s around to help newbies and low-levels with bosses/heroics etc, perhaps it wouldn't be necessary at all to spend development time to add Section X/Black Hole daily areas instead of developing brand new game systems because there would be so much daily areas already there. Maybe I'm not seeing some big issue in the idea, but I think it would've been a really good move design-wise.

[Snorkle]

Then you should probably quit preaching on everyone else's lack of knowledge when you clearly have none of your own. Your entire post reeked of contradiction, hypocrisy, and avoiding a meaningful discussion. Your responses were much of the same. I think the only one who needs to do some research is yourself. I suggest using a good amount of time away from these forums to do such.

Well reasoned, rational individuals will be waiting for you when you return...should you wish to have an actual conversation instead of pelting down veiled insults from the clouds. Please don't mistake the eloquence of detailing your behavior as flaming you. I wish you no ill will, but your arrogance and lack of discussing what was presented was poor form. Insulting the poster, claiming the poster has no facts so their whole post should be dismissed, and then using the same method for stating why we should take your questioning on good faith is beyond absurd.

I'm sorry, that is not how you communicate here.

Now that is simply not fair.

First, concerning action RPGs, if wikipedia is to be trusted, my instincts were right... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game

If it is incorrect, then I am as well, but otherwise, I stand by my point. GW2 gives more observation to the combat mechanics and less to the actual party class specialization, but that doesn't make it more leaning towards an action RPG. Firefall is a more of a multiplayer FPS than a mmorpg...

I'm sorry but the facts seem to agree with me. "current trends" seem to show only one more global game that is a mmorpg with heavy action RPG elements (Tera, which even though is asian was more broadcast worldwide). On the contrary, most mmorpgs that were launched recently were traditional. What you see in the trends, as can be seen in several lists online is online RPGs absorbing some mmo characteristics. Path of exile is a good example of that. Vindictus is a good example, although quite different.

For a list of MMO related games launched in the past 13 months, see
http://www.mmofront.com/mmorpg-releases-in-january-2012
http://www.mmofront.com/mmorpg-relea...-february-2012
http://www.mmofront.com/mmorpg-releases-in-march-2012
http://www.mmofront.com/mmorpg-releases-in-april-2012
http://www.mmofront.com/mmorpg-releases-in-may-2012
http://www.mmofront.com/mmorpg-releases-in-june-2012
http://www.mmofront.com/new-mmorpg

Now, is this sufficient knowledge now?

What else do you need?

[Edge-]

First, concerning action RPGs, if wikipedia is to be trusted, my instincts were right... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game

ARPG =|= MMO with active combat (action). That list from MMOfront is both inaccurate, and includes a lot of Korean imports, excluding many upcoming MMO's that are part of the trend that Kitty is mentioning (WildStar, Defiance, supposedly ESO, ect.)

[Deleted]

PvP Space Combat in open space, where teams pilot a craft, where you had a pilot, 2 gunners, 1 short range defensive gunner and an engineer. Four teams of five v's Four teams of five.

PvP scenarios like assault on a transport ship, with 4 teams of 5 attacking a larger craft with extra defenses that you have to breach & board... so much potential that could have been accomplished with this. Pursuits, blockade running, assaults you name it. Rankings opening up new craft/armaments etc.

Could even have had a PvE aspect to this - Imaging a raid with 20 TIE fighters, 5 TIE Bombers, TIE interceptors etc etc

Sorry my imagination is running riot now... If SWTOR had this, I would still have be playing it!

Not the stupid SNES Starfox gameplay.

[Kelimbror]

ARPG =|= MMO with active combat (action). That list from MMOfront is both inaccurate, and includes a lot of Korean imports, excluding many upcoming MMO's that are part of the trend that Kitty is mentioning (WildStar, Defiance, supposedly ESO, ect.)

Bungie even announced they are throwing their name in the hat with a new MMOFPS. First glance seems very pretty, but whether it will have an even deeper and more meaningful MMO play beyond what Firefall is doing remains to be seen.

I'm sure a large part of this evolution is trying to capture both sides of the market, or take the margins in between MMO and FPS games. It seems a lot of them are starting to go 1/3rd person toggle where you decide how you want to view the game. It's a good choice imo. I don't ever want to go back to oldschool 1st person Ultima like fighting, but that's just me. Action combat done right however, is incredibly fun in 3rd person.

[Razael]

And the feeling of evolving/progressing world & galaxy would be much better with some time between leaving the planets for the first time and returning for bonus series passing. And lvl 50s would be "distributed" to low-level plants, there would always be some lvl 50s around to help newbies and low-levels with bosses/heroics etc, perhaps it wouldn't be necessary at all to spend development time to add Section X/Black Hole daily areas instead of developing brand new game systems because there would be so much daily areas already there. Maybe I'm not seeing some big issue in the idea, but I think it would've been a really good move design-wise.

This idea is brilliant. With the now added "Galactic Reputation" it would even had made sense. With 20 dailies cap or something around that number. People could focus on one planets faction, then move on to the next, or have planets that heavily feature Empire vs Republic (Hoth, Balmorra, Taris, Corellia etc) , sharing the reputation while Voss had a reputation tied to the Voss planet, Nar Shadda having one tied to the Hutts, the Gree on Ilum etc. Would have been very engaging and like you guys said, would help feel you're making a name for yourself in the galaxy, at the same time offering variety as to where to go about to cap your dailies.

On topic: I agree it could have been a bit more engaging, action wise sort of like how WildStar and Neverwinter are doing.
But this system isn't all bad in itself and also has good things about it (to me).

[lordbaldric]

These guys couldn't even pull of including chat bubbles in the game.

[Daffy101]

The game engine for Swtor caused a lot more headaches than people know, I swear looking at the hero engine website when the news was first released ToR was using it looked a lot like a console port engine for multiplatform games. The second problem was a lot of the bugs we originally reported way back when in the beta are still present in the game now - lots of silly little things but they did indeed spoil the overall quality of the game. The planet PvP system never worked mainly due to the inability of the engine to handle that much information and in the beginning Even on a top spec PC the FPS would drop to single figures, then the fun with the PvP cheat where you could reach PvP cap in one day that was fixed but the cheaters never stripped of their ranks, all silly things that drove players away. Best thing that could have been done is replace the game engine (Highly unlikely probably impossible now with all the coding work around in the combat coding).

[btf]

if they had launched swtor with what they have now in the game, and launched it on only 3-4 servers each for english,german and french speaking then it probably would have a big following of around 100k-200k subscribers(europe only), but its what they launched with that ultimately caused it to fail

[Edge-]

I swear looking at the hero engine website when the news was first released ToR was using it looked a lot like a console port engine for multiplatform games.

Graphical capabilities of an engine are only a small portion of what it is capable of. There is far more to an engine than the kind of lighting effects, physics, and level of graphical fidelity it can output.

The second problem was a lot of the bugs we originally reported way back when in the beta are still present in the game now - lots of silly little things but they did indeed spoil the overall quality of the game.

That likely has far more to do with their coding team than the engine. I'm not going to say the engine isn't at all at fault for this, but more often than not that's an issue with the people making the game rather than the engine itself.

The planet PvP system never worked mainly due to the inability of the engine to handle that much information and in the beginning Even on a top spec PC the FPS would drop to single figures, then the fun with the PvP cheat where you could reach PvP cap in one day that was fixed but the cheaters never stripped of their ranks, all silly things that drove players away.

Again, we don't know how much of this is due to BioWares engineers/coders finishing the engine in-house. They were working with an early beta version of the engine, so it's very likely that this is their fault and not the fault of the engine they received.

Best thing that could have been done is replace the game engine (Highly unlikely probably impossible now with all the coding work around in the combat coding).

I agree that they should have gone with another engine, preferably a finished one with a track record of success. Unfortunately they didn't.

[Snorkle]

Bungie even announced they are throwing their name in the hat with a new MMOFPS. First glance seems very pretty, but whether it will have an even deeper and more meaningful MMO play beyond what Firefall is doing remains to be seen.

I'm sure a large part of this evolution is trying to capture both sides of the market, or take the margins in between MMO and FPS games. It seems a lot of them are starting to go 1/3rd person toggle where you decide how you want to view the game. It's a good choice imo. I don't ever want to go back to oldschool 1st person Ultima like fighting, but that's just me. Action combat done right however, is incredibly fun in 3rd person.

Being 1st or 3rd person doesn't really matter to see if a game is an action RPG or not... Wouldn't the distinction be between focusing on the combat and activities versus focusing on the story and interactions ?

[RoninaThorstone]

Bungie even announced they are throwing their name in the hat with a new MMOFPS. First glance seems very pretty, but whether it will have an even deeper and more meaningful MMO play beyond what Firefall is doing remains to be seen.

Defiance seems to be drawing on more classical (EQ) mmo elements (destroy 4 sniper towers: 0/4 completed) whereas firefall had more of a lotro/swtor feel due to the great VAing and better writing (also, the quests feel less... Kill X. More, explore Y and then find Z). I really wish firefall would get less hung up on balance and focus on content. Combat wise, I felt like defiance was firefall without jet packs and fallout 3 graphics, more realistic and less cartoony, and from what I played the guns felt less "fun". If i get into the third wave I am going to dedicate a whole weekend to exploring defiance more. It's B2P so I might actually get it when it comes out.

edit: forgot to type the other part,
Its too early to tell how destiny is going to differentiate itself from planetside 2, defiance, firefall, ect. One thing that hasn't been tapped is expanding roles/skill sets. The closest thing we've seen in that department has been tera, vindictus, and gw2 (with combat mode).

[Kelimbror]

Being 1st or 3rd person doesn't really matter to see if a game is an action RPG or not... Wouldn't the distinction be between focusing on the combat and activities versus focusing on the story and interactions ?

When did I say 1st or 3rd person was what distinguished it as being action combat? I didn't say that.

Also, 1st and 3rd person views have nothing to do with the story and 'interactions' (whatever you are meaning with that) and everything to do with combat and movement. So...I'm starting to really, really believe you are very confused about this subject.

I'm not sure what or how you want things explained to you at this point, sorry.