From what I understand, the negative aspect of having Jedi was that people then stopped fulfilling all of the other roles in the game that made it great. No one wanted to be an entertainer when they could be a JEDI! No one wanted to be a Medic when they could be a JEDI!!
Am I correct on this?
If that is the case, get rid of the entertainer and medic, and focus on Jedi.
You just said it .. Jedi is much more preferable than medic and entertainer by most players. So why provides classes people want less, rather than the one that everyone likes?
In the original game all classes were dependent on each other or better said, would be served a purpose. Entertainer gave buff's and healed death damage. Medic's gave buff's and healed during combat. They had a reason to exist. Crafter's were needed because you had weapon's decay. Once you remove the reason, then yes they pretty much became useless.
As far as Jedi's went. The game was based on the original movie(s). Which had 3 jedi's. Letting everyone become a jedi pretty much killed it being a Star War's game.
I'd have kept the profession, crafting, and housing systems, as well as JTL. Other than that, the game needed a complete rework. So many systems were obviously half-finished, combat was a macro fest which got turned into some weird hybrid action combat... thing, the engine was a poorly optimized resource hog, and it was just riddled with bugs, bugs, and more bugs.
Honestly, I will never understand how people can hold SWG in such high esteem, but I do understand why.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#3 Forced Faction Balance (When Wanderhome became heavily Imp little PVP happened because I was not going to flag up in a town with 10 Imps calling me a P****. If you force Faction balance PVP would be a lot better
#4 I would add some kind of PVE instances but no like WOW instance. More like I can Zone into a phased base with a group of my friends and have an objective to do. Its not worth it if 500 are doing the same thing in an open world.
#5 Game events like Naboo would be under siege and all the main towns would have PVP and PVE phased events so only so many people could be in a phase and doing the event. I dont want large 500+ people dropping trucks on mob spawns, I want a tactical hey you need to fight off Imperial attack in sector 3 with 5 to 40 people, and some tactical play to it.
It seems to be a fair assumption that many here think SWG (pre-NGE) was the pinnacle of what they want in an MMO. Personally, I never got to play it (may check out the swgemu), but I've researched it a lot. Assuming it wasn't absolutely perfect, I'm curious as to what you would have liked to see done differently.
Also, please tell me your favorite aspect of the game? What did you do most often in it?
I would post this in the actual SWG forum, but considering there hasn't been a post in there for the last 3 years, I don't suspect I'd get much of a response.
To me, It was only the pinnacle of mmo's in regards to its social elements, economy, and class system. There was a lot wrong with the game but it still felt like a living, breathing world where you were always hanging out with other players whether grinding quests, exploring, having a party/event, or just chatting in a busy cantina.
The things I'd change about pre-NGE..
Fix a plethora of bugs Get rid of skill spam. You shouldn't have to spam only 1 or 2 different skills out of your 20+ skills available simply because the ones with the dumbest looking animations are the best. Enhance skill animations while moving, and fix skill animations not showing at all. Make questing terminals/quests less crappy Upgrade graphics to post 00's era graphics. Develop multi platform support. IE: Apple, PS3/4, Xbone/360 Give more development options & incentives to spend time in player cities. Don't flop the launch. Listen to the playerbase and don't do CU or NGE. Keep penalties for Jedi and the effort required to skill up incredibly high like it was. (They should be somewhat rare)
What isn't subjective is the incredible and wide spread anger over the implementation of said features that's is still deep seated in many fans of this game to this very day. What isn't subjective is the games population plummeted after these changes never to recover leaving the game to limp along until it was finally put out of its misery.
And what isn't subjective is TOR, a MMORPG that allows players to play Jedi and Sith, achieved good financial success much better than SWG.
So they tried to save the game, and botched it with more bad implementation. As others have pointed out before, players (i assume he means most players) want to play Jedi rather than some dancers in a pub.
What isn't subjective is the incredible and wide spread anger over the implementation of said features that's is still deep seated in many fans of this game to this very day. What isn't subjective is the games population plummeted after these changes never to recover leaving the game to limp along until it was finally put out of its misery.
And what isn't subjective is TOR, a MMORPG that allows players to play Jedi and Sith, achieved good financial success much better than SWG.
So they tried to save the game, and botched it with more bad implementation. As others have pointed out before, players (i assume he means most players) want to play Jedi rather than some dancers in a pub.
This argument can't actually be made with supporting data. One "Alpha Class" was added to the game that if achieved by in game mechanical means granted a 2nd character slot and abilities beyond those achievable by normal professions.
People wanted an advantage and a 2nd character slot, doesn't = they wanted Jedi. Jedi was simply the only way to achieve those advantages. Had they made multiple professions unlockable "Alpha Classes", then we would have data we could use to determine that people wanted "Jedi" instead of just an advantage over other players. I don't agree with Alpha Classes being in games to begin with, but had they made for example Jedi, Commando, and BH combat Alphas I think we would have seen far fewer Jedi.
Let me also add, comparing the mmo market of 2010+ with the market of 2003 in an attempt to illustrate success/failure is a serious case of comparing apples to oranges.
The best thing to happen to SWG reputation was what happened to it.
It ws in a death spiral before they made the changes. THATS why they made the changes.
People somehow have this revisionist history when they look at that game.
I also think maybe 10% of the people who claim to have played it (pre) actually played it. But since its the cool thing to say everyone tries to make the claim.
While the numbers were declining, it was far from a "death spiral". They had close to 200k subs when they inflicted the NGE on everyone.
And why were the numbers declining?
Because SOE mismanaged the game into the ground.
Not because SWG was a bad game, in many ways it was a very good game. But because SOE refused to spend money on fixing bugs and incomplete systems, in favor of nerfing and re-balancing professions and screwing around with the jedi system for the last 12 months before the NGE.
Pre-NGE SWG players wanted 2 things: more content, and fewer bugs. Instead SOE did whatever they hell it was doing.
The NGE was just the final bad decision in a long line of bad management decisions.
That is the real history.
I agree. In fact, Koster stated the game was actually gaining players up (despite the bugs, flaws and incomplete systems) until the Jedi holocron system was implemented, then the subscribers numbers began to fall - - never to be recovered. He stated, " Satisfaction fell off a cliff. I never
did see a marketing push for Jedi — never saw a marketing push for the
game at all, to tell the truth. But what I do know is that one month
after Holocron drops began, we started losing subs, instead of gaining
them. SWG had been growing month on month until then. After Holocrons,
the game was dead; it was just that nobody knew it yet."
SOE was always working on the next cash grab (more Jedi content/improvements, and the next expansions outside of JTL which should have been part of the launch IMHO) than focusing on fixing the core game that was released in such a buggy, incomplete state. I totally agree.....SWG was mismanaged into the ground.
I would suggest that those who want to know what actually happened to SWG go to Raph Koster's blog site and read his postmortem series analysis of SWG.
What isn't subjective is the incredible and wide spread anger over the implementation of said features that's is still deep seated in many fans of this game to this very day. What isn't subjective is the games population plummeted after these changes never to recover leaving the game to limp along until it was finally put out of its misery.
And what isn't subjective is TOR, a MMORPG that allows players to play Jedi and Sith, achieved good financial success much better than SWG.
So they tried to save the game, and botched it with more bad implementation. As others have pointed out before, players (i assume he means most players) want to play Jedi rather than some dancers in a pub.
Uh... you mean the game that was forced to go FTP before its first year was up? While I agree that Jedi are probably incredibly desirable for any SW fan, having jedi and sith didn't save SW TOR from tanking. And as we've seen, allowing Jedi as a starting class didn't do much for SWG either. So I think its safe to flush the whole "We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke
Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted
more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat." down the shitter where it belongs. Both games had problems far deeper than what character classes they allowed.
Considering that SWTOR went F2P went it had more subscribers than SWG had at its peak, and that it still remains the second most played MMO in the west (over 1 million players per month in the west alone)....do you still feel comfortable stating that it "tanked"? lol
There is no doubt that if SWG was more like SWTOR when it launched, it would have done MUCH better than it did.
What isn't subjective is the incredible and wide spread anger over the implementation of said features that's is still deep seated in many fans of this game to this very day. What isn't subjective is the games population plummeted after these changes never to recover leaving the game to limp along until it was finally put out of its misery.
And what isn't subjective is TOR, a MMORPG that allows players to play Jedi and Sith, achieved good financial success much better than SWG.
So they tried to save the game, and botched it with more bad implementation. As others have pointed out before, players (i assume he means most players) want to play Jedi rather than some dancers in a pub.
Uh... you mean the game that was forced to go FTP before its first year was up? While I agree that Jedi are probably incredibly desirable for any SW fan, having jedi and sith didn't save SW TOR from tanking. And as we've seen, allowing Jedi as a starting class didn't do much for SWG either. So I think its safe to flush the whole "We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke
Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted
more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat." down the shitter where it belongs. Both games had problems far deeper than what character classes they allowed.
Considering that SWTOR went F2P went it had more subscribers than SWG had at its peak, and that it still remains the second most played MMO in the west (over 1 million players per month in the west alone)....do you still feel comfortable stating that it "tanked"? lol
What isn't subjective is the incredible and wide spread anger over the implementation of said features that's is still deep seated in many fans of this game to this very day. What isn't subjective is the games population plummeted after these changes never to recover leaving the game to limp along until it was finally put out of its misery.
And what isn't subjective is TOR, a MMORPG that allows players to play Jedi and Sith, achieved good financial success much better than SWG.
So they tried to save the game, and botched it with more bad implementation. As others have pointed out before, players (i assume he means most players) want to play Jedi rather than some dancers in a pub.
Uh... you mean the game that was forced to go FTP before its first year was up? While I agree that Jedi are probably incredibly desirable for any SW fan, having jedi and sith didn't save SW TOR from tanking. And as we've seen, allowing Jedi as a starting class didn't do much for SWG either. So I think its safe to flush the whole "We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke
Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted
more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat." down the shitter where it belongs. Both games had problems far deeper than what character classes they allowed.
Considering that SWTOR went F2P went it had more subscribers than SWG had at its peak, and that it still remains the second most played MMO in the west (over 1 million players per month in the west alone)....do you still feel comfortable stating that it "tanked"? lol
You are aware that none of that is true, right?
Correct, SWTOR is #3 behind ESO. WoW is #1. SWG had 450k subs at its peak. SWTOR dropped to 300k and that's when F2P was announced.
What isn't subjective is the incredible and wide spread anger over the implementation of said features that's is still deep seated in many fans of this game to this very day. What isn't subjective is the games population plummeted after these changes never to recover leaving the game to limp along until it was finally put out of its misery.
And what isn't subjective is TOR, a MMORPG that allows players to play Jedi and Sith, achieved good financial success much better than SWG.
So they tried to save the game, and botched it with more bad implementation. As others have pointed out before, players (i assume he means most players) want to play Jedi rather than some dancers in a pub.
Uh... you mean the game that was forced to go FTP before its first year was up? While I agree that Jedi are probably incredibly desirable for any SW fan, having jedi and sith didn't save SW TOR from tanking. And as we've seen, allowing Jedi as a starting class didn't do much for SWG either. So I think its safe to flush the whole "We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke
Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted
more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat." down the shitter where it belongs. Both games had problems far deeper than what character classes they allowed.
Considering that SWTOR went F2P went it had more subscribers than SWG had at its peak, and that it still remains the second most played MMO in the west (over 1 million players per month in the west alone)....do you still feel comfortable stating that it "tanked"? lol
You are aware that none of that is true, right?
Correct, SWTOR is #3 behind ESO. WoW is #1. SWG had 450k subs at its peak. SWTOR dropped to 300k and that's when F2P was announced.
The only problem with your retort, is that I have actual facts on my side...
According to Gordon Walton, "SWG had briefly gone over 400k but settled down into a 200-250k level before NGE was ever conceived."
According to BioWare, SWTOR's subs stabilized at "just under 500k" at its lowest point, and has only increased since F2P.
According to BioWare, SWTOR has over 1 million active monthly players.
ESO has yet to make any official statements on active player numbers. And for the record, game sales/accounts/charecters created do not = "active monthly players"
Why are we debating which game was better than the other? Which tool is better, a wrench or a screwdriver?
An MMO needs approximately 200k active players in order to be financially successful (probably less these days). I know that X-Shift will never reach 10 million players like WoW. I don't want it to. I'd rather my game be a great game for 200k people than a decent game for 10 million.
I simply said that, in my experience, the general consensus seems to be that SWG had done everything right, and it's rare to hear that level of agreement when discussing MMOs, so I wanted to know more about what people liked and disliked.
I stopped because of the lag. Mass PvP was impossible. What i remember wasnt that great was the combat and skill system. crafting, RP, open worlds, no instances, ressource system, armor system, weapon system, ... Those were the great parts. Open world pvp (not mass pvp) was also thrilling (ohh a red dot a red dot!!!!) what i would change: new graphics better (open) skill system better animations and combat better servers (coding) back to Pre CU NGE PvE (random placement of mobs was strange, not intuitive) improvement
SW TOR had a big launch, was idolized by the gaming community and press, and then once players had burned through the game's main party piece, the character story, they realized the rest of the game was just your bog standard themepark and went off to play something else. Which was my original point. Just being able to play a jedi or sith wasn't enough to keep players subscribed after the class story ran out.
So? If the point is to have the players buy the box (in the beginning) or buy some stuff in the cash shop and then play the stories, what is the problem?
A f2p clearly don't need to keep players subbing to be successful. In fact, TOR makes a lot more money than SWG, and is not going to be shut down any time soon. How long did SWG last? Is TOR going to last longer, and make more money?
SWG is definitely a good idea that was implemented badly. The goals, the underlying design, the whole philosophy of the game was great. But, they implemented it badly, resulting in incomplete systems, lots of imbalance, dodgy UI, tons of bugs.
i.e. a bad game.
nah ... after reading countless posts and opinions about this game for many years it's more likely: "imperfect awesome game". Never had the pleasure of playing it, but "bad game" is not congruent with the vast majority of opinions of this title. You no likey does not equal "bad game".
a badly implemented game (not my words) does not make a bad game? What .. a well implemented game makes a bad game?
Good or bad is subjective and is about the enjoyment you get out of a game. The implementation can have a big bearing on enjoyment, but its not the be-all-and-end-all.
Yes, it is subjective. You are the one who said it was implemented BADLY .. your words, not mine. So you think games that are implemented badly (subjective judgment by you) can be a good game?
Personally, good games to me are the ones which have good ideas *and* implemented well (both judged subjectively of course).
As I already said in the post you quoted, yes, I believe a game with bad implementation can still be a good game.
Likewise, I believe that there are many well implemented games that are bad.
Implementation is just one of many factors I use to evaluate whether a game is good or bad. It has a bearing on the final outcome, but not a huge amount. So, SWG had (imo):
Good class design
Good world building
Excellent crafting
Good social features
Good leveling
Good PvP
Average combat
Bad class balance
Bad implementation
Bad user interface
So overall, SWG was, in my opinion, a good game. It had far more good points than bad points so I was able to overlook the bad implementation. Implementation is purely about the code, and bad implementation results in bugs, memory leaks, server crashes etc. It is very easy to overlook these things if the rest of the game is good.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
As I already said in the post you quoted, yes, I believe a game with bad implementation can still be a good game.
Guess you are very lenient in games. In my books, a game needs to have good design (ideas) *and* good implementation to qualify as good.
But again, that is subjective.
SW TOR had a big launch, was idolized by the gaming community and press, and then once players had burned through the game's main party piece, the character story, they realized the rest of the game was just your bog standard themepark and went off to play something else. Which was my original point. Just being able to play a jedi or sith wasn't enough to keep players subscribed after the class story ran out.
So? If the point is to have the players buy the box (in the beginning) or buy some stuff in the cash shop and then play the stories, what is the problem?
A f2p clearly don't need to keep players subbing to be successful. In fact, TOR makes a lot more money than SWG, and is not going to be shut down any time soon. How long did SWG last? Is TOR going to last longer, and make more money?
Most estimates of development costs for SW:TOR seem to put it around $200m.
To make back their money from box sales alone, at $60 per box is 3.3m box sales. Given that most people dont pay full price for an MMO box, you're looking at more like 5m box sales just to cover development costs of initial game.
When it was launched, SW:TOR sold 2m boxes in first few months. However, by month 6, subscribers had dropped below 500k. So, 6 months after release, Bioware still hadn't recovered their initial development costs and they were bleeding subscribers at such a high rate that they were never going to cover it. That is why they went F2P.
So, commercially at least, SW:TOR was a failure until it went F2P, but the conversion managed to bring in enough people to keep the game going.
Beyond that, comparing how much a game makes now (2015) to what a game made a decade ago is pointless. Development costs, size of the market, ongoing costs etc as so vastly different that its pointless. You can only compare proportional stats, like market share, % return on investment etc, but we don't have access to those numbers.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
The economy was over inflated and out of control. I think this happened because buffs were to powerful. I was able to make 300k an hour buffed by grinding missions. So I could make 2+ million in a day if I just hammered it.
The combat was queued up and kind of boring/slow. They would need to update that.
Balance some of the weapons and skills a bit more.
The missions were stale. The go and kill this spawn point over and over is just boring.
Honestly, I think SWG is one of the games that would fall flat today. It was a huge time sink. I think earlier MMOs were able to get away with it. No almost everyone would find SWG unplayable. Even the people crying for it to come back.
I just don't think we will see a game where combat is that boring and downtime that plentiful have a player base of more than a thousand or so.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
I just don't think we will see a game where combat is that boring and downtime that plentiful have a player base of more than a thousand or so.
Most likely not. In fact, today's game needs to be fun at every turn because there are just so much competition.
I literally stared at my steam library on my big screen tv last night (yes, i have a steamlink, so i can play anything on TV) and could not decide what to play. So many good games that i have not finished.
The economy was over inflated and out of control. I think this happened because buffs were to powerful. I was able to make 300k an hour buffed by grinding missions. So I could make 2+ million in a day if I just hammered it.
The combat was queued up and kind of boring/slow. They would need to update that.
Balance some of the weapons and skills a bit more.
The missions were stale. The go and kill this spawn point over and over is just boring.
Honestly, I think SWG is one of the games that would fall flat today. It was a huge time sink. I think earlier MMOs were able to get away with it. No almost everyone would find SWG unplayable. Even the people crying for it to come back.
I just don't think we will see a game where combat is that boring and downtime that plentiful have a player base of more than a thousand or so.
I will have to agree with you on the huge time sink that was involved with SWG. That is one of the reasons I left it. If I had bad luck it might take me an hour to jump 3 planets just to get to where my friends are. That was a pain.
The combat down time due to dying was a huge time sink unless you had friends who could heal you. Now That could be reworked because today's death penalties are well go to X spot then just teleport back to Point A.
By Definition MMOs are a time sink just the mere fact it cost more money to make than any other game out there. Publishers must make an in-depth game that players play for a year or more because as we can see making these interchangeable MMOs that players play for a few weeks at a time just is not working nor is it profitable unless you make it P2W. Basically a Wallet game.
With that said you need better time sinks. SWG in-depth crafting is a good time sink because when I make rocket launchers I had to figure out what combination of materials and stats were needed to make the best rocket launchers. It took skill and time to learn, it was not a sit in a hospital waiting for your stats to regen. Again example of a good and a bad time sink. One is fun the other is not.
By Definition MMOs are a time sink just the mere fact it cost more money to make than any other game out there. Publishers must make an in-depth game that players play for a year or more because as we can see making these interchangeable MMOs that players play for a few weeks at a time just is not working nor is it profitable unless you make it P2W. Basically a Wallet game.
What are you talking about? f2p MMOs are the bulk of the market now and they grow despite 80% of players quite after 30 days.
You don't need players to play for a year or more to make money. You just need to fleece the whales.
Comments
In the original game all classes were dependent on each other or better said, would be served a purpose. Entertainer gave buff's and healed death damage. Medic's gave buff's and healed during combat. They had a reason to exist. Crafter's were needed because you had weapon's decay. Once you remove the reason, then yes they pretty much became useless.
As far as Jedi's went. The game was based on the original movie(s). Which had 3 jedi's. Letting everyone become a jedi pretty much killed it being a Star War's game.
SWG (pre-cu) - AoC (pre-f2p) - PotBS (pre-boarder) - DDO - LotRO (pre-f2p) - STO (pre-f2p) - GnH (beta tester) - SWTOR - Neverwinter
Honestly, I will never understand how people can hold SWG in such high esteem, but I do understand why.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
#2 More Player Run Bases
#3 Forced Faction Balance (When Wanderhome became heavily Imp little PVP happened because I was not going to flag up in a town with 10 Imps calling me a P****. If you force Faction balance PVP would be a lot better
#4 I would add some kind of PVE instances but no like WOW instance. More like I can Zone into a phased base with a group of my friends and have an objective to do. Its not worth it if 500 are doing the same thing in an open world.
#5 Game events like Naboo would be under siege and all the main towns would have PVP and PVE phased events so only so many people could be in a phase and doing the event. I dont want large 500+ people dropping trucks on mob spawns, I want a tactical hey you need to fight off Imperial attack in sector 3 with 5 to 40 people, and some tactical play to it.
The things I'd change about pre-NGE..
Fix a plethora of bugs
Get rid of skill spam. You shouldn't have to spam only 1 or 2 different skills out of your 20+ skills available simply because the ones with the dumbest looking animations are the best.
Enhance skill animations while moving, and fix skill animations not showing at all.
Make questing terminals/quests less crappy
Upgrade graphics to post 00's era graphics.
Develop multi platform support. IE: Apple, PS3/4, Xbone/360
Give more development options & incentives to spend time in player cities.
Don't flop the launch. Listen to the playerbase and don't do CU or NGE.
Keep penalties for Jedi and the effort required to skill up incredibly high like it was. (They should be somewhat rare)
One "Alpha Class" was added to the game that if achieved by in game mechanical means granted a 2nd character slot and abilities beyond those achievable by normal professions.
People wanted an advantage and a 2nd character slot, doesn't = they wanted Jedi.
Jedi was simply the only way to achieve those advantages.
Had they made multiple professions unlockable "Alpha Classes", then we would have data we could use to determine that people wanted "Jedi" instead of just an advantage over other players.
I don't agree with Alpha Classes being in games to begin with, but had they made for example Jedi, Commando, and BH combat Alphas I think we would have seen far fewer Jedi.
SOE was always working on the next cash grab (more Jedi content/improvements, and the next expansions outside of JTL which should have been part of the launch IMHO) than focusing on fixing the core game that was released in such a buggy, incomplete state. I totally agree.....SWG was mismanaged into the ground.
I would suggest that those who want to know what actually happened to SWG go to Raph Koster's blog site and read his postmortem series analysis of SWG.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/
There is no doubt that if SWG was more like SWTOR when it launched, it would have done MUCH better than it did.
You are aware that none of that is true, right?
Correct, SWTOR is #3 behind ESO. WoW is #1. SWG had 450k subs at its peak. SWTOR dropped to 300k and that's when F2P was announced.
The only problem with your retort, is that I have actual facts on my side...
According to Gordon Walton, "SWG had briefly gone over 400k but settled down into a 200-250k level before NGE was ever conceived."
According to BioWare, SWTOR's subs stabilized at "just under 500k" at its lowest point, and has only increased since F2P.
According to BioWare, SWTOR has over 1 million active monthly players.
ESO has yet to make any official statements on active player numbers. And for the record, game sales/accounts/charecters created do not = "active monthly players"
An MMO needs approximately 200k active players in order to be financially successful (probably less these days). I know that X-Shift will never reach 10 million players like WoW. I don't want it to. I'd rather my game be a great game for 200k people than a decent game for 10 million.
I simply said that, in my experience, the general consensus seems to be that SWG had done everything right, and it's rare to hear that level of agreement when discussing MMOs, so I wanted to know more about what people liked and disliked.
crafting, RP, open worlds, no instances, ressource system, armor system, weapon system, ... Those were the great parts. Open world pvp (not mass pvp) was also thrilling (ohh a red dot a red dot!!!!)
what i would change:
new graphics
better (open) skill system
better animations and combat
better servers (coding)
back to Pre CU NGE
PvE (random placement of mobs was strange, not intuitive) improvement
A f2p clearly don't need to keep players subbing to be successful. In fact, TOR makes a lot more money than SWG, and is not going to be shut down any time soon. How long did SWG last? Is TOR going to last longer, and make more money?
As I already said in the post you quoted, yes, I believe a game with bad implementation can still be a good game.
Likewise, I believe that there are many well implemented games that are bad.
Implementation is just one of many factors I use to evaluate whether a game is good or bad. It has a bearing on the final outcome, but not a huge amount. So, SWG had (imo):
- Good class design
- Good world building
- Excellent crafting
- Good social features
- Good leveling
- Good PvP
- Average combat
- Bad class balance
- Bad implementation
- Bad user interface
So overall, SWG was, in my opinion, a good game. It had far more good points than bad points so I was able to overlook the bad implementation. Implementation is purely about the code, and bad implementation results in bugs, memory leaks, server crashes etc. It is very easy to overlook these things if the rest of the game is good.Most estimates of development costs for SW:TOR seem to put it around $200m.
To make back their money from box sales alone, at $60 per box is 3.3m box sales. Given that most people dont pay full price for an MMO box, you're looking at more like 5m box sales just to cover development costs of initial game.
When it was launched, SW:TOR sold 2m boxes in first few months. However, by month 6, subscribers had dropped below 500k. So, 6 months after release, Bioware still hadn't recovered their initial development costs and they were bleeding subscribers at such a high rate that they were never going to cover it. That is why they went F2P.
So, commercially at least, SW:TOR was a failure until it went F2P, but the conversion managed to bring in enough people to keep the game going.
Beyond that, comparing how much a game makes now (2015) to what a game made a decade ago is pointless. Development costs, size of the market, ongoing costs etc as so vastly different that its pointless. You can only compare proportional stats, like market share, % return on investment etc, but we don't have access to those numbers.
The combat was queued up and kind of boring/slow. They would need to update that.
Balance some of the weapons and skills a bit more.
The missions were stale. The go and kill this spawn point over and over is just boring.
Honestly, I think SWG is one of the games that would fall flat today. It was a huge time sink. I think earlier MMOs were able to get away with it. No almost everyone would find SWG unplayable. Even the people crying for it to come back.
I just don't think we will see a game where combat is that boring and downtime that plentiful have a player base of more than a thousand or so.
--John Ruskin
I literally stared at my steam library on my big screen tv last night (yes, i have a steamlink, so i can play anything on TV) and could not decide what to play. So many good games that i have not finished.
The combat down time due to dying was a huge time sink unless you had friends who could heal you. Now That could be reworked because today's death penalties are well go to X spot then just teleport back to Point A.
By Definition MMOs are a time sink just the mere fact it cost more money to make than any other game out there. Publishers must make an in-depth game that players play for a year or more because as we can see making these interchangeable MMOs that players play for a few weeks at a time just is not working nor is it profitable unless you make it P2W. Basically a Wallet game.
With that said you need better time sinks. SWG in-depth crafting is a good time sink because when I make rocket launchers I had to figure out what combination of materials and stats were needed to make the best rocket launchers. It took skill and time to learn, it was not a sit in a hospital waiting for your stats to regen. Again example of a good and a bad time sink. One is fun the other is not.
You don't need players to play for a year or more to make money. You just need to fleece the whales.