could SWTOR pull a FF14 and re-launch as SWTHR

[Kathranis]

ARR relaunched FFXIV three years after its initial launch, when it was still very much a modern, arguably cutting edge game for the genre.

TOR is a decade old. The engine is full of technical issues. It looks dated. They could overhaul everything, but they might as well just make a new game. It would probably be less work to start from scratch than to try and retrofit something that was behind the curve ten years ago.

And I really don't think High Republic is where the money would be at. I know Disney is currently pushing it in comics, but as an outsider, it has like zero buzz. Even googling it right now it's only being talked about on a couple websites that churn out Star Wars and comic book related videos every day. Maybe The Acolyte Disney+ series will make people more interested, but right now it's kind of nothing.

It's too bad that the sequel trilogy restricts things so much, because "The New Republic" set in the time between The Mandalorian and the sequel trilogy would probably be super appealing to people. You've got Luke's new Jedi Order, the Sith Eternal, the remnants of the Empire, and the fledgling New Republic. You could really create a different dynamic where the imperial factions are now rebels and warlords, the Jedi and New Republic are doing reconstruction, etc.

[Berndorf]

My biggest reason for doubt is the MMO fad seems to have ran it's course. New ones are a lot less common these days than 10 years ago when every 4 to 6 months you had the next "Wow killer" releasing.

But yeah, those two companies and the IP COULD do it for sure. The better question is should. Hell they probably poop out mobile games for pennies on the dollar of an MMO and post record profits on it. Sucks for people like me that would love a deep Star Wars MMO. But it is just how I see it. They just don't want to spend the money to do it, to maintain it, and to continuously add new content. You can even see it in the expansions of SWTOR. It goes from craziest MMO story telling ever in the original game to mission hubs and dailies really fast in expansions.

My bet, not want but bet, is they just keep to the norm here. Drop an expansion or mission update once in a while. Maybe make some seasonal stuff and do whatever it takes to keep the shop going strong and let it ride.

I used to think that but there is an absolute **** ton of mmo's slated to come out later this year and a ton of new gaming studios of which a few are also working on new mmo's. I think the issue is more of sci fi mmo's just not being able to catch on that well even when set in the sw universe and you get to have jedi and sith running around with light sabers on top of guns and spaceships with established lore.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I used to think that but there is an absolute **** ton of mmo's slated to come out later this year and a ton of new gaming studios of which a few are also working on new mmo's. I think the issue is more of sci fi mmo's just not being able to catch on that well even when set in the sw universe and you get to have jedi and sith running around with light sabers on top of guns and spaceships with established lore.

Tons of plastic gets dumped in the ocean every year.. but its not ideal.. volume doesn't really mean quality or healthy situation.

[Wangming]

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

Please no. I've had my fill of the Rebellion Era. Even the High Republic was careful to only go back in time to still have Yoda as a jedi master cause nobody in the Disney era is confident enough in the story they want to tell to attempt to do it without at least a bloody cameo. That is why the Old Republic era was so good. It was a complete blank slate where everything can go.

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.

And? Can they not be a WoW killer if they are Sci-fi? Honestly SWTOR had the best potential.

First with the class stories that even let you choose stuff they did something very "not-wow" instead of just trying to copy it.
And second, they had the Star Wars IP. The reason WoW is so hard to kill is because it is ingrained in pop culture. Just making a better game is not enough. Like a better novel series won't kill Harry Potter. Same is true for Star Wars. Not even Rise of Skywalker could kill it, because it is fucking Star Wars.
So these two pop culture giants could have had a great battle. Unfortunately SWTOR never had a good content schedule and it only got worse with time.

[Berndorf]

Tons of plastic gets dumped in the ocean every year.. but its not ideal.. volume doesn't really mean quality or healthy situation.

Point being though that I don't think they'd be investing hundreds of millions of $ into a genre that there's no market for. I mean everyone is free to their own opinions but I think this is some degree of proof that the genre isn't on its last legs and people still enjoy playing them in varying forms.

[Cracked]

I played SWTOR on release for about 2 months. I liked some aspects of the game, but ultimately it was very hollow and devoid of content, fundamentally single player for the most part and overall it didn't have the high points of RPG progression. Content-wise it's probably gotten much better, but the other points I'm not so sure.

[Edge-]

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.

Well, Massive is working on a Star Wars game on their Snowdrop engine so that's likely happening. Probably not a full fledged traditional MMO, but will be something similar to Division.

- - - Updated - - -

Tons of plastic gets dumped in the ocean every year.. but its not ideal.. volume doesn't really mean quality or healthy situation.

Except that's a bad analogy. We haven't had too many big MMO's for a while now, and there haven't been many in development until more recently. Yeah, there was the post-WoW fad of everyone trying to bandwagon on that success, but that died off long ago and the MMO scene has been pretty sparse. It's only more recently that we're seeing bigger MMO's in development again, and that's a good thing. We need more "new blood" in the MMO scene, especially games that aren't just trying to copy WoW's success.

[Saltysquidoon]

I feel like this game is some sort of avatar for frustration, like for every good thing there's just a whole bunch of shit that pointlessly held it back. I remember the big shit fight that came from bioware refusing to release the game anywhere too far away from the servers (which was silly because at the time wow had no oce servers and blizzard didn't care).

You have to applaud the attempt to lean into bioware's strength and try and release a story for every class and hats off some of them are even good. Not to mention the game has all the systems one might expect in an mmo.

On the other hand
The game is ugly as sin, in some places it feels like the walls are going to do that cartoon joke where they fall over and it was cardboard all along.
The zones are often very poorly designed with respect to quest flow and most are very large for the sake of being large but aggressively empty.
Animations range from 'this is an animation' to goofy as hell.
The MMO padding sidequests massively kill the pacing of the story sections (in fairness this is an issue FFXIV)
Gameplay-wise it is obviously (a now very outdated) wow clone. I don't mean hotbar based rpg I mean anyone who played wrath can probably tell you which spec correlates with which wow spec after about three abilities. Here's a freebie a hatred SA is an enhancement shaman, like it just straight up is an enhancement shaman.

I don't know if bioware's reach exceeded its grasp or there was some EA meddling or if the game was always doomed to the dustbin of naked wow clones but it kinda sucks. Also, even if this game was successful I'll still never not be mad we didn't get KotOR III.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Point being though that I don't think they'd be investing hundreds of millions of $ into a genre that there's no market for. I mean everyone is free to their own opinions but I think this is some degree of proof that the genre isn't on its last legs and people still enjoy playing them in varying forms.

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.

[Roxinius]

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.

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

[Greevir]

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.

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?

[Rogalicus]

On the other hand
The game is ugly as sin, in some places it feels like the walls are going to do that cartoon joke where they fall over and it was cardboard all along.
The zones are often very poorly designed with respect to quest flow and most are very large for the sake of being large but aggressively empty.
Animations range from 'this is an animation' to goofy as hell.
The MMO padding sidequests massively kill the pacing of the story sections (in fairness this is an issue FFXIV)
Gameplay-wise it is obviously (a now very outdated) wow clone. I don't mean hotbar based rpg I mean anyone who played wrath can probably tell you which spec correlates with which wow spec after about three abilities. Here's a freebie a hatred SA is an enhancement shaman, like it just straight up is an enhancement shaman.

Aside from animations, this all applies to FFXIV after rework.

[Binaris]

If this game were to the a reborn treatment, I don't see it going well. Another form of star wars mmo, if done right could do well. But a reborn treatment would carry a lot of this games problems over needlessly.Not to shit on swtor. It holds a place in my heart. But i'd rather see a huge closedown project then a rebirth.

1. Port the game into an offline single player experience.
2. Companions would be able to fill roles in flashpoints/ops to a full group and tune them around it.
3. All cosmetics should be unlockable somewhere and be usable on all your characters.
4. Open up moddings to allow people far more talented than myself to build up and expand the game to new heights. The SW fandom would eat that shit up. We would have whole new, complete voiced stories made by the fans for the fans.

I would buy that game. I have played the stories. I have loved them. And I would buy them again to have them.

[Swnem]

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

Fair enough. I didn't know that.

[Wangming]

Star Wars and LotR...yep..with the movies and books behind them, they had a huge potential. In fact...no matter that SW:ToR made a billion dollars until today - I consider that game a "failure" (measured by the potential that I think it had)

Instead of constant "analysis" about why "WoW is dead" and who will kill it next, I would rather be interested in somebody taking a look at those other two MMOs and what went "wrong".

Sure...they did make their money so while I consider them a failure, they fail on a high level. You know,,,it is like expecting Justice league to make the same 2.7 billion as Avengers: Endgame and "only" bringing in 700k

To be fair it was easy to see why JL didn't work as well as Avengers. They wanted things too quickly without properly setting up the characters.

As for the failed MMOs......that would require the devs to be very open about what went wrong. If you look at the Noclip documentary about FFXIV you hear them going into very specific details about why the game ended up being a mess. But not all teams are this open. Take Blizzard for an example. There is also a short dodcumentary about how Project Titan turned into Overwatch. Their explanation to the fall was pretty much "It didn't work and we felt bad cause we were used to success". That was all.
We could learn a lot from these projects if the told us all about them. But I'm not sure if they will.

[OokOok]

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...)

Really wouldn't do anything, swtor suffers from one things other MMOs don't suffer from. It's based off a movie. Also TOR is the only reason the MMO isn't dead, the TOR takes place in a time period where there's SO MUCH story potential for expansions/bad guys. It's not just orcs orcs orcs orcs orcs orcs LEGGGIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOON. The raids are always unique and the story bad guys are always out of left field and changing. Arcann isn't a sith so you can't say Sith are always the bad guys! loop hole

Why is this important? because a lot of people don't like star wars the movies so why would they play a game based off the movies in terms of taking place in the same .... galaxy far far away etc. Where as MMOs like WoW/ffxiv are a fantasy created world. If Warcraft had no video games and they only had that garbage movie they made and THEN they released WoW? the game would flop hard. That's what WoW had going for it, it's previous fan base were all gamers from WC1,2,3 and other MMOs who wanted to try a new fantasy setting

But swtor fan boys are all middle eaged/old nerds who love watching the movies and collecting shit, i'd say half the star wars fans I meet IRL don't even like video games they strictly just collect stuff so swtor's market just doesn't hit the nail. It's literally why most games based off shows/movies don't ever do good, Harry potter was one of the biggest movie franchises in the world and probably still is..... yet all of it's video games are trash and don't sell. Like literally if someone says "I hate orcs" You just tell them to play alliance and kill the orcs, if someone says "I hate lightsabers" well they aren't playing swtor then

Despite this, I love SWTOR personally. It's honestly probably the best MMO out there for solo play. The individual class stories all voiced are amazing, Shadows of revan, fuck even KOTFE/KOTET is amazing the first couple times. Malgus is love malgus is life, Malgus is my emperor

[Saltysquidoon]

Aside from animations, this all applies to FFXIV after rework.

I don't know if I can get down with that my man.
FFXIV zones are ugly yep
Design-wise you're always on a 'track' (which is something wow does too it's just often better at disguising it) whereas SWtOR zones are more like TBC WoW where you just get sent to hubs in random locations.
I would say FFXIV's animations are unambiguously overblown (and reasonable minds might differ on how good that looks) but they're certainly not bad in the same way SWTOR's can be.
Fairplay on the side quest point.
Eh, FFXIV doesn't play like a wow clone most of the jobs are pretty different from WoW I don't think WoW has anything close to SUM or RDM off the top of my head. SWTOR has a lot of obvious straight lifts from WoW specs. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, the force power-based jugg is basically how I always headcanoned Vader to fight, even thinking about it makes me hyped enough to consider downloading the game again.

[Darththeo]

I don't know if I can get down with that my man.
FFXIV zones are ugly yep
Design-wise you're always on a 'track' (which is something wow does too it's just often better at disguising it) whereas SWtOR zones are more like TBC WoW where you just get sent to hubs in random locations.
I would say FFXIV's animations are unambiguously overblown (and reasonable minds might differ on how good that looks) but they're certainly not bad in the same way SWTOR's can be.
Fairplay on the side quest point.
Eh, FFXIV doesn't play like a wow clone most of the jobs are pretty different from WoW I don't think WoW has anything close to SUM or RDM off the top of my head. SWTOR has a lot of obvious straight lifts from WoW specs. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, the force power-based jugg is basically how I always headcanoned Vader to fight, even thinking about it makes me hyped enough to consider downloading the game again.

I never understood the complaint as that there are limited roles. The only difference is cosmetic really when it comes to that.

[Saltysquidoon]

I never understood the complaint as that there are limited roles. The only difference is cosmetic really when it comes to that.

I'm sorry I don't follow.

[Darththeo]

I'm sorry I don't follow.

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.