SW:TOR was in development too long.

[bcbully]

I think as a result of what the gaming community has seen with sw:tor, development cycles will be much shorter on upcoming titles. They have to be much shorter or run the risk of releasing with old ideas.

I think it's fair to say the majority of us left the other game looking for some new fresh game play (like it or hate it RIFT did give us new game play). I've asked myself many times should we commend or condemn BioWare for releasing a game that is on par with the current mmos.

[Bodaway]

I'd gladly commend them if they had released a game that is on par with the current games, but sadly it was far below them.

[Vallin]

I don't think the game was in development long enough in my opinion. The amount of bugs that were present at the level 50 content at the start of the game was somewhat staggering. But that comes with the fact that BW didn't beta test their end game content which is something I am sure they have learned from now. They also need to let people character copy of to the PTR servers so that new end game content can be tested to make sure there are no bugs. The bugs at launch were not gamebreaking, and i know "new game omg bugs" stuff, but there should not have been that many.

[Deleted]

Shorter cycles, less complete games, or niche games with a small audience. Long cycles, the competitors catch up to you and you release a product with used mechanics.

There is no good choice. You want to appeal to a large audience you usually have to have at least decent polish (and SWTOR does compared to many other AAA titles out there) and a complete game (does not necessarily apply to sandboxy games, but those are another matter). You can't really do that in a short (1-3 year) development cycle, no matter what funds you have.

IF you plan to be innovative and you launch a game based on 3-4 new ideas you run the risk of those ideas not being liked enough by the community to keep a large enough subscriber base to allow you to continue to improve your game - the list of games that tried that is looooooooong. Sure some of them are still kicking, but they are not "successful" as determined by a large subscriber base and a healthy bank account.

There are exceptions, but investors are usually not swayed by exceptions but by the general trend.

[Hankscorpio]

Too much time spent on voice acting imo

[Lord Bale]

It should have been in development longer if you ask me. The amount of problems the game shipped with was insane. But we all know EA, pushing that December deadline.

And maybe if several millions of dollars didn't go into voice acting, we would see less game-breaking things.

[Deleted]

I'd gladly commend them if they had released a game that is on par with the current games, but sadly it was far below them.

It's a matter of opinion. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I enjoyed WoW post Cataclysm (and even pre Cata I stopped liking WoW when they released Icecrown), more than Rift and other titles out there. I also played the beta a bit and knew exactly what the game was and what it wasn't. For now it is enough for me and if they keep updating it regularly (a big patch every 2-3 months) I can see myself playing it for quite a long time.

But then again I also get my sandbox fix out of EVE, where I keep a couple of accounts and regularly log.

[mystik]

some of you seriously have such unrealistic expectatiions. I doubt some of you would have lasted very long in pre-WOTLK WoW, especially vanilla.

[Deleted]

Too much time spent on voice acting imo

Nail on the head right here. Simply put, when you make one of your main selling points a feature that the majority of players demand the ability to skip, you're doing it oh so very wrong.

[Asmodian]

Awful game design, not development time. Take wow, cut it in half and add popular setting. Nothing new, nothing fresh.
Look at gw2 for example - only WvWvW looks more interesting then other wow clone game. Its even have voice acting lol.

[Oholyknight]

some of you seriously have such unrealistic expectatiions. I doubt some of you would have lasted very long in pre-WOTLK WoW, especially vanilla.

Games like World of Warcraft released bug free patches in the beginning of the game. Bioware screwed up and gave people the best gear in the game with the Ilum bug and said that they weren't going to fix the fact that these players got this gear. If this happened in World of Warcraft, they would've did a rollback.

[bcbully]

some of you seriously have such unrealistic expectatiions. I doubt some of you would have lasted very long in pre-WOTLK WoW, especially vanilla.

I didn't get that from these post. Could you explain what you are talking about further?

[Lord Bale]

some of you seriously have such unrealistic expectatiions. I doubt some of you would have lasted very long in pre-WOTLK WoW, especially vanilla.

Vanilla / TBC WoW was much better than SWTOR's current state. Though this is just my opinion, of course.

The thing about Vanilla, was that even though it was very similar to EQ, it all still felt very original at the same time. I also think that Vanilla 1 - 60 had much more content to offer.

But this isn't Vanilla, this is post-Cataclysm, and the standards are much higher.

[Vallin]

Games like World of Warcraft released bug free patches in the beginning of the game. Bioware screwed up and gave people the best gear in the game with the Ilum bug and said that they weren't going to fix the fact that these players got this gear. If this happened in World of Warcraft, they would've did a rollback.

Incorrect, back in TBC, almost every major content patch would break the dungeons and raids so you couldn't zone in. And they also broke the mailboxes leading to massive maint days because the servers would be down close to 12 hours. The elephant in the room also puts out buggy patches.

[bcbully]

Games like World of Warcraft released bug free patches in the beginning of the game. Bioware screwed up and gave people the best gear in the game with the Ilum bug and said that they weren't going to fix the fact that these players got this gear. If this happened in World of Warcraft, they would've did a rollback.

off-topic - In my 5 years of WoW I do not recall a roll back.

OT- As far as that Ilum thing, I did not take part. I grineded (ground?) to battle master last month in War Zones. I'm not saying that a roll back shouldn't not have been done, but I didn't feel the effects of what the exploiters did. I almost think that for those who gained 30 valor ranks in a day not having anymore progression available is a just punishment.

[Ap0calypse]

some of you seriously have such unrealistic expectatiions. I doubt some of you would have lasted very long in pre-WOTLK WoW, especially vanilla.

Considering I've played WoW from Vanilla till last year and 100% agree with the people above you saying it wasnt in development long enough, I think your argument is invalid.

[Otaka]

more like too short in development...

linear leveling...you cant choose planets, you must do them in an order. Only 3 BGs. Broken world pvp zone. Cant tell much about raids.
Dungeons are very long and mostly filled with same trash.
Bonus quests are all boring, kill 30 or kill 60 or collect this many objects, yet you should do them for extra exp.

[Svifnymr]

Incorrect, back in TBC, almost every major content patch would break the dungeons and raids so you couldn't zone in. And they also broke the mailboxes leading to massive maint days because the servers would be down close to 12 hours. The elephant in the room also puts out buggy patches.

Forget TBC, I only stopped playing Oct of 2010, and nearly every content patch made the game unplayable for a day or two. This aside from the Expansion patchs which fundamentally alter the gameplay and "balance around max level" for a max level you can't work for until later when the expansion actually hits.

TOR has a lot of little bugs, and has/had some major bugs, but I think most of them come down to the wide variety of PC's in use. I'm not blaming peoples problems on "low end machines", but it's always been the PC quandary that even top end stuff has 1001 slight differences that might crop up in some new and innovative game-breaking manner.

That's why consoles exist, really, so that you don't need to worry about catering to all the possible combinations of whatever PC hardware/software you might encounter in the wild.

And heck, even then you have major 360 titles that ship with bugs and need to be patched.

---------- Post added 2012-03-04 at 10:45 AM ----------

Considering I've played WoW from Vanilla till last year and 100% agree with the people above you saying it wasnt in development long enough, I think your argument is invalid.

At some point you have to ship. There's a ton of features that they might still do, others that they might not, but they could have probably shipped a complete game 6 months earlier and gotten the core of the experience without an issue. If they had said "no raids at launch" or "no pvp at launch", folks would have cried just as much as they cry now. If they had waited 6 months and added the full legacy system and some other stuff, folks would cry about something else.

The bugs they can't really account for until it hits the wild. Design choices are another matter. Maybe if they'd released 6 months earlier without Ilum, they'd have had fewer complaints.

[Zeek Daniels]

Guild wars 2 has been in development for 5 years and its looking pretty good using already used game mechanics.

Rift (Event system)
Dark Age of Camelot (Realm vs Realm with siege weapons castles and keeps)
Warhammer Online (Public Quests)
Star Wars the Old Republic (Personal Story)

When you take another games idea what you have to do is see where that game failed and improve upon it.
Making the events that run constantly diverse with tweaks so that they dont seem so similar.
Making public quests where there is no mob tagging, Events scale to the number of players actively participating
I cant comment on Realm vs Realm because their hasnt been enough testing of it yet also cant comment on personal story.

Guild wars also has somthing WoW wish it had, Challenging content no matter what level your at, even a level 80 can go to a level 30 zone and have to pay attention to whats going on and cant 1 shot things. Dungeons scale you down to their level so they are always a challenge. My favorite raid in WoW was Ulduar and now its so stupidly easy at 85 i dont wanna go back. If WoW scaled you down to a raids level so it was still challenging and provided some nice rewards maybe alot of the people that quit would have stayed because if you look at how big WoW is in terms of how many dungeons and raids it has and then look at how many of those are actually viable at max level, youll see that WoW is wasting alot of space on unused dungeons.

[Dreary]

This is what happens when you outsource your development to foreign countries where the developers care first and foremost about a paycheck rather than caring about the product itself. If you've ever played WoW you'll notice right away the lack of detail and effort put into SWToR. Bioware outsourced so many different parts of the project (art went to China, code to Russia and India, customer service to India) and the lack of cohesion and effort is clearly visible.

Just take a look at these videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Rrk6lgi24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_hqGsnpp8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUdZn5v5sEU


Look at this one where they copy/paste the same exact NPC over 20 times in like a 40 foot radius.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJIsdl4BL2Q


All the environments are completely linear, every 'planet' is a hallway. Mobs just stand or sit there lifelessly waiting for you to kill them. There are barely any critters and the few there are don't even move but just sit there painted into the landscape. There's no swimming, no sitting in chairs, no chat bubbles, barely any emotes, no combat log, raids are completely bugged and some bosses don't even drop loot, PvP is broken and wins in some warzones don't even count, the UI has ability delay where you can continuously press to use a spell and it doesn't respond at all, every race uses the same exact body and most of the same facial features, I mean the problems just go on and on...

This game needed smarter development, not more or less development. It needed developers who actually cared about their product, not devs who tried to implement everything as quickly and cheaply as possible, working solely for a paycheck.