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  1. #81
    Quote Originally Posted by Darththeo View Post
    Just because something looks different doesnt make it different.
    In games there are a limited number of roles that a character can be. And in any MMO you can compare to a similar WoW spec.

    So the complaint of "these feel like lifted WoW" specs makes no sense to me because it all frosting on a cake.
    Ah, I get you.
    You are of course right to an extent there are only so many ways to skin a cat within any given gameplay style.

    That said it is still possible to make classes that feel (don't underestimate the importance of 'feel') and play entirely different from WoW. The Disciple of Khaine in Age of reckoning is kind of a debuffing fistweaver (but still sort of different), which is something wow wouldn't have for five years after that game launched and wow just straight up doesn't have support classes like the debuffing aspect of DoK or FFXIV Bard or Dancer.

    My complaint wasn't the vague similarities of hotbar combat, my point was and annihilation marauder was a straight lift from a feral druid for example.
    Tonight for me is a special day. I want to go outside of the house of the girl I like with a gasoline barrel and write her name on the road and set it on fire and tell her to get out too see it (is this illegal)?

  2. #82
    Quote Originally Posted by xenogear3 View Post
    I don't think so.
    It was very high budget. No way EA will invest more money on it.

    Japanese (such as SquareSoft) has high honor.
    It wants to redeem itself. I doubt EA cares.
    Japanese companies and honor? XDD

  3. #83
    Quote Originally Posted by Low Hanging Fruit View Post
    You would be surprised how many hundreds of millions have been burned on things over the years. Things that nobody probably wanted. Also when a fad fades it doesn't mean it is totally dead. It just means it is no longer the mainstream. I mean even star wars itself kind of proves that by dumping out a ton of shooter games, phone games, and a single player game around the IP.

    I always find it odd when people are extremely black and white with these things. MMOs are not dead. They just aren't the center pillar of gaming they were in the early 2000s. Really all I was saying. But for some reason it gets taken to the nuclear war stage.
    I have no idea what got taken to nuclear war stage or what that even means in this context. What I'm saying is that as someone who has played mmo's in different forms for roughly 17 years and whose interest in them had dropped off significantly in the last 6-7 years while seeing hardly any new mmo's come on the scene that I thought were really worth trying is that there are a bunch of new ones which likely got delayed during 2020 and which should all be coming out later this year which is a promising sign for people who play them and that there's also quite a few new gaming studios out there run by people with lots of experience making games which are planning to make more. That's all. The genre could very well get reinvigorated or not but regardless of whether it does having new games being made is a good sign. I think the ones being made now may also actually be trying to do their own thing rather than be wow clones as well.
    Last edited by Berndorf; 2021-06-22 at 01:02 PM.

  4. #84
    EA isn't going to spend money on something that is long in the tooth and doesn't have an absolute guarantee to make serious bank after. Just have to take a look at Anthem to see that.

    Also, time to let the meme of Japanese companies being honorable organizations die. The only people who truly believe that never been to or at least worked in Japan.

  5. #85
    Quote Originally Posted by cuafpr View Post
    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...)
    It's not a matter of could, it's a matter of would.


    MMO porjects are notoriously hard to get going, only and take a lot of investment and love to do well.

    Besides I think The High Republic is a KK pet project, and it seems awful by everyone's standard. - but it would have been the ideal setting to do an MMO outside the old republic.


    KotFE to Star Wars the Fallen Empire - would be the natural successor

  6. #86
    Quote Originally Posted by Saltysquidoon View Post
    Ah, I get you.
    You are of course right to an extent there are only so many ways to skin a cat within any given gameplay style.

    That said it is still possible to make classes that feel (don't underestimate the importance of 'feel') and play entirely different from WoW. The Disciple of Khaine in Age of reckoning is kind of a debuffing fistweaver (but still sort of different), which is something wow wouldn't have for five years after that game launched and wow just straight up doesn't have support classes like the debuffing aspect of DoK or FFXIV Bard or Dancer.

    My complaint wasn't the vague similarities of hotbar combat, my point was and annihilation marauder was a straight lift from a feral druid for example.
    Are talking about launch swtor or something?
    They really are nothing alike these days.

    SWTOR classes feel very different nowadays from Wow ones, for the better i might add. It's the best class design of any mmo atm, imo.

    Unless you mean something simplistic such as "oh it has a couple of dots therefore it's the same". At which point... there is no reasoning with you.

    So... Feral works as such:

    You build up combo points with the use of self regenerating energy. CP generators (cost energy):
    Shread - raw damage
    Rake - small dot

    Thrash - small aoe dot
    swipe - small raw aoe damage

    You then spend on:
    Rip - long dot
    Ferocious bite - raw damage, refreshes rip
    Primal Wrath - aoe dot

    These abilities above don't have any cool downs!

    cool downs:
    Tiger's fury 30 sec free energy and small damage increase.
    Berserk 3m cut on energy costs and generate more CP's
    covenant ability


    Annihilation Marauder:

    Generate rage to use abilities with: (doing republic version)

    Zealous strike - raw damage, 14 sec cd generates 6 rage
    Force melt - small dot, 11 second cd generate 3 rage

    Spend on these:
    Overload saber - buff, your next 3 (raw damage) attacks generate a DoT - 11sec cd 3 rage
    Merciless slash - 14 sec cd - raw damage + buff that lowers its cd 4 rage
    Cauterize - long DoT 2 rage
    Slash - raw damage no cd 3 rage
    Dispatch - execute ability raw damage 9 sec cd 3 rage

    Filler abilities:
    Twin saber throw - raw damage 16 sec cd can reset (also AoE)
    blade barrage - raw damage 16 sec cd

    AoE:
    Force sweep - raw damage, spreads your DoT's, 5 sec cd 2 rage

    cooldowns:
    Force clarity - 4 stacks 28 sec cd buffs next raw damage ability
    Zen- converts your 30 stacks of centering into a 100% crit buff and heals the group with your dot damage
    Valorous call - immediately generate 30 stacks of centering 2m30sec cd

    cooldowns will vary slightly with Alacrity values.

    Do these really seem like they play the same to you?
    Last edited by Swnem; 2021-06-22 at 02:34 PM.

  7. #87
    Swtor class design is top tier.

    The main issue with the game is the absolutely atrocious engine and how disjointed the world feels with so many planets, as opposed to usually one single big land mass where everyone is on other mmos.

    I love the game, and play a few months every couple of years, but the clunky engine is horrible.

  8. #88
    Immortal Darththeo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Saltysquidoon View Post
    Ah, I get you.
    You are of course right to an extent there are only so many ways to skin a cat within any given gameplay style.

    That said it is still possible to make classes that feel (don't underestimate the importance of 'feel') and play entirely different from WoW. The Disciple of Khaine in Age of reckoning is kind of a debuffing fistweaver (but still sort of different), which is something wow wouldn't have for five years after that game launched and wow just straight up doesn't have support classes like the debuffing aspect of DoK or FFXIV Bard or Dancer.

    My complaint wasn't the vague similarities of hotbar combat, my point was and annihilation marauder was a straight lift from a feral druid for example.
    As someone who played both a Feral Druid and a Annihilation Marauder at the same time ... I am going to have to go "WHAT?"

    Yes, there are similarity, but that is because both are melee DPS with some dots. That isn't really a lift at all. I can see where you are coming from, but honestly, I have to go that is a huge net you casted too. So you are further limiting what is limited already.
    Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power.
    Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall set me free.
    –The Sith Code

  9. #89
    Quote Originally Posted by Roxinius View Post
    no it wouldnt have been but had it not been rushed out for the holliday season and given 6 more months of polish it wouldnt have went free to play nearly as quickly
    It still would have, because the problems weren't that he game was rushed, it was that BW's hubris left them making stupid decisions.

    They likely wouldn't have spent 6 months on endgame content, because they thought it would take players 3+ months to hit max level.
    The structure of the game with 8 unique storylines didn't lend itself to longterm support as supporting 8 unique storylines would be insanely time consuming and expensive even if they copied much of the basic quest structure and keep the cutscenes/dialogue class specific.
    The engine wouldn't have been improved during that time, especially not without extensive data coming in from players, so the "the game chugs with more than a dozen people on screen" problems at launch would have still been there.

    It was simply not set up for success, at all. Sure it had the "BioWare Magic(tm)" and the Star Wars IP, but that was never going to be enough to account for the design issues present in the game that were pretty core to its foundation.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Greevir View Post
    It only shows when you first install the game. Since it was used in production they were required to give credit.

    As for SWTOR, didn't Bioware say something along the lines of the engine barely looking like the Hero Engine due to the amount of modifications they had to make to it?
    Huh, they might have patched it out because I could have sworn there was a HE logo/legal lines on bootup, but I just checked and it's gone now.

    And they may have said that, they used an early beta version of HE for SWTOR so it likely is very different from the stock HE that exists now. But it's still the core HE tech, just finished by BW's mediocre engineering teams. I desperately wish BW would invest in good engineers, it seems like that's an area they always decide to cut budget from to spend elsewhere first : /

  10. #90
    Quote Originally Posted by hulkgor View Post
    Swtor class design is top tier.

    The main issue with the game is the absolutely atrocious engine and how disjointed the world feels with so many planets, as opposed to usually one single big land mass where everyone is on other mmos.

    I love the game, and play a few months every couple of years, but the clunky engine is horrible.
    I do agree. The classes and in general story flow is amazing. But they did put it all on top of that cluck machine of an engine. Really a shame.

  11. #91
    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    Kinda. It's likely not bringing in much money, and really hasn't for quite some time. It had a great bump around KotFE but that didn't seem to last long. It's scoped out to support the current playerbase/revenue stream, which means it likely doesn't have a "full" team working on it. If it was bringing in more money it'd have more devs devoted to it, but sadly while it did recover a bit with the F2P launch and the KotFE arc (other expansions didn't seem to do as much for the game) it's never quite hit the kind of numbers to devote a very big team to : /

    The studio isn't "bare" though, the staff are just working on other projects. They were doing that modern fantasy game for a hot-second until it got canned, they were doing a ton of the lifting with Anthem for a while, they're supporting other multiplayer elements within games etc., just not sticking solely or even primarily to SWTOR anymore.
    I think the reality is that MMOs are just not profitable games. The development time and cost of employing a huge team, support staff, running servers, etc is large, and profits tend to be small. Even with WoW, sure it makes a lot of money, but Hearthstone and Overwatch crushed it and cost waaaaaaaaay less to develop.

    The miracle is that despite all of that, SWTOR still gets new content and remains online. Should probably have been taken down ages ago, but it wasn't.

  12. #92
    Quote Originally Posted by korijenkins View Post
    I think the reality is that MMOs are just not profitable games.
    That's not remotely true. You have juggarnauts like WoW that were bringing in a billion+ annually, plus most other MMO's are still modestly (or considerably) profitable. ESO does very well for Zenimax, Black Desert does well for Pearl Abyss, FFXIV does well for Squeenix etc. Hell even GW2, despite its struggles and the internal chaos at ArenaNet over the years, still brings in around $80M a year which is damned solid and likely turning a pretty tidy profit for Anet/NCsoft. And GW2 has had a...let's say "rough" go of it having never fully recovered to the pre-Heart of Thorns levels of revenue it had (though is surprisingly stable, even during times of little/bad content like the last quarter of DRM missions most folks didn't like).

    Quote Originally Posted by korijenkins View Post
    The development time and cost of employing a huge team, support staff, running servers, etc is large, and profits tend to be small. Even with WoW, sure it makes a lot of money, but Hearthstone and Overwatch crushed it and cost waaaaaaaaay less to develop.
    They're risky, not unprofitable. The risk comes with the considerable costs to create a MMO more than anything else. Even for non-MMO's, a bad launch can gut a studio if it doesn't have great financial backing, games are just very risky overall. But most MMO's on the market right now are still profitable at varying levels. EG7 just bought up Daybreak and shared numbers on their MMO's, and while they're not raking in the dough they're all pretty healthy financially - https://massivelyop.com/2020/12/02/e...thanks-to-eg7/

    But you have to look at margins in addition to the raw dollar values on these products. Sure OW made (not really still) tons of money for Blizzard, but you have to put that into context with the amount of money they spent on Titan over the decade or so it was in development and we'll never know those numbers. Big raw dollar gains, likely considerably less of a margin if you factor in the decade of Titan development. Games like Hearthstone are simply much lower risk games since they cost so much less to develop and support. It does very well and at one point was bringing in $40M a month, but it's likely much lower now.

    And in terms of total revenue for those three titles (these are incomplete numbers based on estimates or what little Blizz has released) - WoW was around $9.25B as of around 2017, OW turned a cool $1B within its first year, and HS appears to be pulling in around $100M a year but has trailed off in the past few years.

    Quote Originally Posted by korijenkins View Post
    The miracle is that despite all of that, SWTOR still gets new content and remains online. Should probably have been taken down ages ago, but it wasn't.
    Hard disagree here. SWTOR was going to remain online for the terms of the license at the very least (like WAR with EA, which survived for around a decade where it was largely forgotten and abandoned), and it was never "unsalvagable". The F2P relaunch doubled its revenue and put it back in the black, but BW missteps over time have caused the game to ebb and flow in terms of support. Now it's on more of an "ebb" with only a few smaller content updates every year, and I don't think it's seen anything "major" since the Onslaught expansion in 2019, and I haven't seen any teases/announcements for upcoming expansions.

    If the F2P relaunch had tanked, which it didn't, it'd likely be in the same state WAR was in where it wouldn't be receiving any content updates. But it worked, so they had four more pretty sizable expansions (Shadow of Revan, Knights of the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne, Onslaught) in the subsequent years.
    Last edited by Edge-; 2021-06-22 at 07:39 PM.

  13. #93
    ffxiv was so bad, they refused to take monthly fee for it, i remember this shit game well. When they finally did ffxivARR it was waaay better and actually worth paying for. SWTOR was never that bad and therefor can never pull of an ffixivarr style of comeback.

  14. #94
    Quote Originally Posted by VinceVega View Post
    Nop. There will never be a new big succesfull MMORPG again until wow will be let go by Blizz.

    No matter what you think about current wow. Millions of players come back to it every new expansion. Maybe they leave again. But they still payed Blizz around 100 €$ whatever each. People who play wow will nearly always come back to wow if they want to play MMOs (which is a shrinking base of players for years).

    Some of them look into other MMOs from time to time but most of them just float by like FF14, ESO and Swtor. Succesfull? Sure. SUccesfull enough for another big investor? Nop. Noone wants to compete with wow on that scale anymore.

    Kickstarter manages to spew out a project here and there but none of them ever get finished or keep what they promised.

    There won't be another Star Wars MMO. There will be however tons of games like battlefront where they can suck you dry via microtransactions. Because THOSE are the most profitable games ever. Not even wow can compete with that. Look at fortnite, candy crush, lol and stuff like that. Companies want to invest into that.

    Why amazon decided to test this market still eludes me. New world will be quite succesfull at the start given the exposure it got. But as every other MMO it will die quickly.
    My favorite thing is when people make a big deal about something happening in WoW that the FFXIV straight up say they expect people to do, that being people coming back for patches/expansions and leaving after they "finish." As if it's not something that happens with basically every video game.

    Shows the lengths addicts will go to try to prove they aren't addicts. Even better are the people that think people won't come back, even though historical evidence disagrees with them. People came back to play facsimile of a 15 year old game. I don't know how people can possibly argue they won't for a 6 month old game.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by vizzle View Post
    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 SWTOR engine is/was a concept engine never meant to be used for a retail release.

  15. #95
    Way too late for that. EA isn't going to pour more money into the game at this point.

  16. #96
    Quote Originally Posted by Dakhath View Post
    EA isn't going to spend money on something that is long in the tooth and doesn't have an absolute guarantee to make serious bank after. Just have to take a look at Anthem to see that.
    SNIP...
    I think there is a lot of truth in that.

    EA just isn't going to invest the amount of money needed to do anything with swtor. They are happy to ride it out till their contract ends in 2023. I have no doubt it makes enough to not shut the doors but 2023 is closing in.

    Like anthem, development will just eventually stop and while it kind of feels like that now it's so slow, EA will leave servers up and collect their monthly fees and cash shop fees and generally ignore swtor from then on. Which is likely the only reason anthem is still up and running as well. There is a chance someone still spends money to buy it or in the over priced cash shop.

  17. #97
    Immortal Darththeo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by quras View Post
    I think there is a lot of truth in that.

    EA just isn't going to invest the amount of money needed to do anything with swtor. They are happy to ride it out till their contract ends in 2023. I have no doubt it makes enough to not shut the doors but 2023 is closing in.

    Like anthem, development will just eventually stop and while it kind of feels like that now it's so slow, EA will leave servers up and collect their monthly fees and cash shop fees and generally ignore swtor from then on. Which is likely the only reason anthem is still up and running as well. There is a chance someone still spends money to buy it or in the over priced cash shop.
    SWToR kind has already gone through that phase.

    There were 3 years between KotFE and Onslaught where they started just trickling out content in the form of flashpoints for the most part.
    Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power.
    Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall set me free.
    –The Sith Code

  18. #98
    I do not think so. The Star Wars IP took a massive hit with the last trigoly. SW is nowhere near as popular as it used to be i am afraid.

    I played SWTOR at launch, and it was a fun mmo. Back then Bioware was still a good studio as well. The game suffered a lot from its technical issues and the limited number of races available though (blue human, red human, human, human with horns, human with tentacles..). No Jawa, no Wookies etc.

  19. #99
    Quote Originally Posted by quras View Post
    Which is likely the only reason anthem is still up and running as well. There is a chance someone still spends money to buy it or in the over priced cash shop.
    That's very much not why. I highly doubt Anthem has generated enough revenue to even be statistically significant in a long time. They leave it up because it's a bad look to kill it so soon and the operating costs for a game without an active development team and a small server footprint (tiny population) are negligible. They lose more on the reputation from from a quick closure than they lose financially by keeping the game live.

  20. #100
    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    It was simply not set up for success, at all. Sure it had the "BioWare Magic(tm)" and the Star Wars IP, but that was never going to be enough to account for the design issues present in the game that were pretty core to its foundation.
    What would you say those are?

    I only played it from around a month or two after launch up until a little after they announced they were going f2p. But during that time I enjoyed the game, I really only quit because I had a hard time finding a good guild with the game hemorrhaging players and I had finally found a great one and it dissolved the second they announced f2p + my friend was trying to convince me to join his wow guild to do their weekend raid.

    But I enjoyed the shit out of swtor, I honestly can't remember having any glaring "core" issues with the game. It just had bugs and needed some polish and a lot of that stuff got fixed over the course of me playing. Granted at the time I had quit wow and the last time I had touched an mmo was TBC, but swtor just seemed like an improvement by comparison.

    It was really the only time I've ever played an mmo where I actually enjoyed making alts because of the 8 storylines basically being 8 different lil rpg's I got to experience. I revisited it for a few days more recently and at least the questing felt like it held up.

    I have no idea where they went with the game after the Denova raid though.
    ..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.

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