could SWTOR pull a FF14 and re-launch as SWTHR

[Amaterasus]

SWTOR literally dead PVE wise, if you think that 7 months break in WoW is long, how do you like doing same raids for 2 years sounds. SWTOR now is just milking fanboys with rl currency market that is all, PVP is dead, PVE = 4 guilds just mixing players between them.

[Mojo03]

I'd like to see it. I enjoyed SWTOR while it lasted. It's too bad it didn't get the proper support.

Maybe if Respawn did it. They've proven themselves to be great with the Star Wars license.

Bioware is pretty much woketopia and super medicore now days and messed up SWTOR after launch.

[Darththeo]

The Steam launch brought in a ton of players, as has the monetization on the Mandalorian gear tie-ins and stuff.

EA just decided not to re-invest despite those spikes in popularity so instead you get 2 flashpoints a year.

edit: this is a chicken and the egg problem. It doesn't get more devs because it didn't have more players, and it can't get more players because it doesn't have enough development resources.

You are technically correct. It is hard to pin down what is the biggest issue currently between those two. But, because they chose to develop just a story heavy game, that took a lot of development to focus on. Which meant that at max level there wasn't much to do and limited what they could expand into. Literally if I level a character, I just skip Makeb (the first expansion) all together and just go into Shadow of Revan.

So like the chicken and the egg, development choices lead to a dwindling player base that reduced development resources ... and we got into that cycle.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE SWtOR's story. I love the game, but the fact they were so heavy on the story for eight classes (with two flavors each) limits their ability to add new classes to the game (it isn't required for MMOs, but it is something MMOs do) and because the majority of the game is 100% voice acted, limits what races can be made playable. These are things that could sell an expansion and renew interests. SWtOR doesn't really have those two things as options. A new questing hub is only so appealing and a new instance comes only so often. So they are limited on what they can give to players in the first place.

I constantly think "How would I do SWtOR if I were to do it myself from launch?" But, honestly, my best idea is to stripe SWtOR of what makes it SWtOR.

[Edge-]

edit: this is a chicken and the egg problem. It doesn't get more devs because it didn't have more players, and it can't get more players because it doesn't have enough development resources.

Not really. More devs =|= more players. Bringing back players, and bringing in new players, for older games is expensive and time consuming, and at a point it's simply not worth the spend for an older MMO. It sucks, but it's a shitty reality.

The unfortunate reality for SWTOR is that by design, content is expensive as hell since it all comes with story, cutscenes, and voicework. It's a big reason why they went from eight different class-based storylines down to two, Republic/Empire storylines (in the first expansion at least) and then whittled it largely down to a single storyline with two slightly different flavors depending on what faction you are and with the occasional class nod.

SWTOR was never well thought-out as a longterm MMO, and banked too much on being a massive success right out of the gate to continue being able to afford all this expensive content.

Edit: Most of this is the fault of BW hubris and a lack of experienced MMO developers working on the game with decision making power. Hence why we ended up with the snarky, "Who wants to play an episode of Han and Chewie dicking around in space?" to which everyone wanted that, or the GDC talk a few years back where they revealed that they thought it would take between 3-5 months to hit level 50 on a SINGLE character after launch and had absolutely no idea what to do other than suggest alts when they found that people were powering through a class story in a matter of a day or two.

[Neodawn]

A new Star Wars MMORPG with new engine or whatever it needs sounds great just keep anything related to that High Republic garbage away from it.

[Edge-]

A new Star Wars MMORPG with new engine

Star Wars Galaxies 2, go! I just want something not narrative focused that opens a lot more opportunities for gameplay, especially if it breaks out of the second generation MMO mousewheel. And while it'd piss everyone off, keep space magic the fuck outta it. Space magic ruins everything, even if it's not a narratively heavy game where we're supposed to totes believe that some of the most powerful jedi/sith around are getting punked by non-force users in a stand-up fight that they should be winning every day of the week.

I will never stop being salty about that one mission in SWTOR (think it's in the Revan expansion) where my sage, an immensely powerful and badass force user, needs to pick up a boring-ass rocket launcher to blow through a door I should be able to turn into a twisted heap to metal scrap. Or just open it with space magic.

[quras]

I used to play this game when it first launched and didn't realize the engine was such an issue. Why exactly is the engine so bad? Just curious.

The engine was a very early alpha version of the Hero engine and then on top of that it was heavily modified by bioware and made to work for swtor in their license.

It was limited to DX9 and 32 bit with very little GPU use in performance and while I'm not sure now, it used TWO cores that created I/O overhead so in the end you lost FPS.

Given what bioware did to the engine as they made their own changes, I highly doubt it can be update much if at all. So no DX11, no real GPU use or 64 bit. It's just stuck where it's at with little to no improvements so the overall game suffers.

Over all, swtor has had engine problems since day one from the dreaded ability delay debacle to pretty poor performance as player count increased. Itd been an issue for many since day one.

[Tyris Flare]

Not really. More devs =|= more players. Bringing back players, and bringing in new players, for older games is expensive and time consuming, and at a point it's simply not worth the spend for an older MMO. It sucks, but it's a shitty reality.

God this is so pedantic. The point is that you can't attract people without content. That's it. You don't need to "well, ACTUALLY" some obvious point just to increase your post count.

Bioware decided not to invest in content, which makes it impossible to keep or gain players in the long term. This isn't even a remotely controversial point; it is a fact. SWtoR has had essentially one year of MMO content in like 5. Cutting back may have been the correct business decision, but that was also not the point of what was being discussed, which was "the engine isn't the biggest problem with the game." I completely stand by that. It could have the greatest engine in the world and the lack of content would still doom it.

I don't think we need a weird lecture on the "harsh realities of the game industry" or whatever you were trying to do, jesus.

[Darththeo]

I would want this so very much. Just the basic concepts of original SWG updated with modern tech.

As long as they don't allow playable Jedi if they set it during the Rebellion, I am down with it.

[Swnem]

I don't know about rated PvP, since I don't do that, but I do know that with the launch of Galactic Seasons random Warzone's pop pretty darned quickly now. But that's because everyone is being incentivized into them. That said, Warzones and Starfighter have been fun since the Season started.

That person it lying. Warzone queues are shorter in SWTOR than they are in WoW.

What they might mean is ranked pvp, which has a solo queue.
It is extremely toxic, it flames new players and the hardcores just get their rating and stop to not lose it. I believe the queue gets depopulated as the season goes on, but i heard this, cause there is no way i'm stepping on that cesspool of elitist jerks.

- - - Updated - - -

No, the appeal of SWTOR is its legacy content. Its engine sucks, it's like the only game that uses the hero engine.

ESO uses it as well.

[Sagenod]

SWTOR is great ff14 is just not good i get people wanting it to be a good mmorpg to fight wow but it really isnt a good mmo SWTOR is way better.

As someone who played SWTOR up until nightmare mode flashpoints I can tell you this statement is false. That may be your opinion, but the only thing SWTOR has going for it is the OG class storylines, an aspect which FFXIV is competitive with, and the awesome outfit system which FFXIV has none of. So at best SWTOR wins out on character customization. That's it

[Echo of Soul]

Anything's possible but that doesn't sound like a re-launch, it sounds like developing a completely different game.

[enigma77]

SWTOR could have been the wow killer if they had actually supported it properly. It had a great start and enormous potential, but the devs decided to kill the game instead by providing very little endgame content.

[Lochton]

First I think the game is great, and have been playing it over anything else lately.


But i wonder if with the coming high republic era of stories/movies if they could end SWTOR and re-launch as SWTHR with a new engine and modern features like account-wide chat, mounts, etc... (honestly the engine hurts it the most...)

I hold my doubts that it would be able to have the same path as FF. If they were to, they would need to update their rights and permits again, this time, from Disney. Even further so, the game is deemed non-canon now (If I recall, when Disney took over) and limits really what value further development would have unless it is a complete rebirth to make it canon.

After that, there would be development cost higher than the game developer for it seem to have budgeted for now.

- - - Updated - - -

SWTOR could have been the wow killer if they had actually supported it properly. It had a great start and enormous potential, but the devs decided to kill the game instead by providing very little endgame content.

Eh. Never felt like a WoW killer, honestly. Always saw them in their own part of the chart as being a Sci-fi/Fantasy MMORPG.

[Edge-]

SWTOR could have been the wow killer if they had actually supported it properly. It had a great start and enormous potential, but the devs decided to kill the game instead by providing very little endgame content.

First off..."WoW killer" is a silly term. Always has been, always will be.

The game launched with very little endgame content because BW fucked up, hard. They rushed developing a tiny amount of endgame content near the end of development, and IIRC it was broken as hell come launch anyways and filled with huge issues (some classes straight up couldn't tank some boss fights due to their toolkits, for example).

BW literally thought it would take players 3-5 months to hit level 50...on a single character. They were not in any way, shape, or form prepared for launch or post-launch. Their own hubris cut their knees out from under them, and while the game did have pretty good support for a bit all the way through the F2P relaunch it simply never took off in a huge way. It started strong with 2M sales (good, but not "great"), but their sub numbers were falling fast and they were on the way to going below the 500K subscribers needed to make the game profitable.

F2P bumped their revenue up in a big way, but BW weren't able to keep the momentum up as things kinda lost steam until KotFE gave them a huge bump, then it quickly went back down as folks finished that storyline (since it was pretty much a near 100% solo experience without a lot of replay value).

BW ate massive shit sammiches for thinking they were the hottest shit to come to MMO's and with comments like, "Nobody wants to see an episode of Han and Chewie dicking around in space." to explain why there was no real space flight in the MMO (to which the collective response from players was, "Uh, that sounds fuckin rad. Can we have it!?").

But really, the fact that they thought it would take folks a quarter of a year to reach level 50 and weren't prepared for MMO gamers hitting max level within 48 hours of launch speaks volumes about why things didn't go well : /

[Greevir]

ESO uses it as well.

Not true. Zenimax used the Hero engine for concept only. ESO uses it's own engine that Zenimax built from scratch. https://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...eroengine.aspx

[Edge-]

Not true. Zenimax used the Hero engine for concept only. ESO uses it's own engine that Zenimax built from scratch. https://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...eroengine.aspx

They say that, but the game still has a massive Hero Engine splash page at bootup (or did, I haven't logged in recently) which is...odd if it's not still being used in at least some capacity. I doubt that's the core tech powering the game, but they've got a lot of middleware (Havoc, Bink, RAD etc.) so it's very likely they're still using some of the tech from the engine.

It's kinda weird to me they don't ever appear to have talked about their in-house engine at all though. Just references to it during development promising not to use HE for full production but that's it.

There are a handful of other games that have been built on it and sadly none have really seemed to go anywhere. I don't even know what's going on with it, it's been licensed for a handful of smaller games that are still in development or released and tanked, Idea Fabrik is slowly rehabbing The Repopulation (been working on it for years after the original creator abandoned it and IF bought it out) but I haven't seen squat about HE proper.

That being said, SWTOR seems to have unfucked most of its technical nonsense over the years. I haven't been back since KotET, but it seemed that they'd largely gotten a handle on most of the bigger technical issues (the client chugging with more than a dozen players on screen etc.) and it's a pretty "fine" user experience. It's a shame BW doesn't seem to invest in their engineers on any project. I get it, their whole thing is story/narrative games, but technology matters and gives them to tools to help tell those stories in a more engaging manner.

[Littleraven]

I don't think we will ever see another rebirth on the level of FFXIV. It's just not feasible for most MMOs. The reason it worked for FFXIV is because Square knew they couldn't afford to just cut their losses. And even then it was a HUGE gamble because imagine if it still didn't catch on? They would have invested all that time, energy and money into it for nothing. I just don't think any other developer or publisher would be willing to put in that much work to relaunch their game. Especially if it isn't that broken.

[rhorle]

I wonder if Bioware/EA could even do a rebirth. Disney seems intent on branching out and I wouldn't be surprised if Ubisoft was eventually given a MMO licensee. I remember reading that Disney was impressed by an Avatar game pitch that they shifted into making Star Wars games. Though Ubisoft would likely be more of a FPS Division style then the standard RPG style.

[ONCHEhap]

Honestly the FF14 relaunch is something that's really one of a kind. Even putting aside the fact that EA is very unlikely to risk so much money by doing something like that,it's not common to see a studio actually willing to just straight up start over with a game that already launched and already failed