BioWare: Old Republic's Free-to-Play Success Is Uncertain

[guise709]

I don't know why people are surprised. The writing was on the wall since the beta. The game was going to flop and it did and I'm glad. Perhaps this will be the sobering lesson that Bioware needs.

 

[tehroc]

Also, the streams of content were fucking weak. I'm completely positive that is how RIFT has survived as long as it has. Just constantly streaming new content. I'm even looking forward to getting my hands on that expansion.

It's what killed TOR. If they pumped out content like Rift, I'd be willing to bet they'd easily have 1.5m+ customers. Lack of steady content is one of the factors in WOW's decline (other being dead servers, yet another mistake made by TOR).

 

[Spartan212]

I'd just like to remind about this lovely snippet

"[WoW] has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb."

This is the misguided philosophy that doomed WAR, AoC and now SWTOR. Hopefully TESO will be the last one in this string of pathetic failures and the MMO genre will start moving forward again.

Man, I've never seen that quote. Seriously? Why would anyone abandon a game with 8 years of content for a newly released game with the same price model? That's just....pathetic. Like many others, I enjoyed the game for the first couple months but bailed after the lacking endgame and god-awful pvp couldn't hold me

 

[Comocat]

I feel bad for bioware because a failed MMO is never a good thing. But then I think about all those fans who couldnt stop posting in my LoTRO forums about how SWTOR was going to kill my game, and then I smile a little bit inside.

I think SWTOR is definitely f2p material given that a story driven MMO cant possibly update on a monthly basis. On the other hand, when I canceled my sub I also scrubbed the game from my SSD so it's unlikely I'll sit through a 30g download anytime soon.

 

[walrusaurus]

COuple of things.

1) i think saying that WoW has moved to a 'partial free to play model" is hugely disingenuous. Wow has a demo-mode that allows you to play the first 20 levels out of 90, considering that it takes less than ~10 hours to get to 20 and well over 150 to get to the level cap - which is where all of wows content is - that cannot by any stretch be considered a free to play model.

2) TOR failed because it was WoW. I played wow for years and quit about 10 months before TOR came out. I played with a group of friends that i had played WoW with as well, all of us refered to all of our class abilities using their wow names. I cannot think of a single ability that we had that there wasn't a direct wow analog for. There was next to no original thought whatsoever in the actual gameplay design. Its as if they thought that the shininess of lightsabers and lightning would be enough to carry the whole game. If you want an example of how to build an mo that tastes nothing like wow, look at GW2, I'm a loving hte living crap out of that game so far.

That said, once it goes free to play i will definitely reinstall just so that i can play huttball again.