EA Considering "Different Models" for The Old Republic
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
Guild Wars 2 doesn't need to stand a chance. That's where games that try to fight WOW fail. They are competing with WOW. Guild Wars has never been competing with anybody. Instead, they looked to a different corner of the market and locked it down. They aren't competing with WOW, they're going after a different userbase.Dendio said:
X3ccdohl said:
nice, the random gankings where really not ok with me, made more annoying by the fact i was play a light side pure blooded Sith (enjoy the irony, i did)
anyway, i doubt it'll be 'wildly successful', but it will save it
There are a couple that charge $10/month, but the only one that comes to my head right now is EA's Ultima Online(Which is 14 years old).Sneezeguard said:
I was looking forward to Guild Wars 2, then the fanboys ruined it. I'm not going to even touch it now with those type of people playing.
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GW2 isnt directly competing with wow, since its got no monthly subscription people can play it and wow at the same time, the big reason these all fail is that its hard to play and pay for 2 mmos at the same time, but if you eliminate the need to pay for one than people can play the free one whenever the payed one runs out of content and vice versa.Dendio said:
![Fr]anc[is](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/l/93/93202.jpg?1620797781){kind=avatar}
I only unsubscribed from the game because I wasn't in the mood for it anymore. I fully intend to go back to it once I am again, as there's still plenty for me to do and I very much love TOR. However, I'm thinking I should hold off until EA stops being vague about the free-to-play notion (that and my income has slowed recently, freelancing isn't that great).
Also, for the love of bog, stop using that screenshot for TOR articles. It was funny BEFORE that bug was fixed. That bug was fixed months ago.
Also, for the love of bog, stop using that screenshot for TOR articles. It was funny BEFORE that bug was fixed. That bug was fixed months ago.
The problem with SWTOR is simply that it literally made every mistake it wasn't supposed to. The WoW-killer might appear, or simply a game that will replace WoW, but in order for that to happen it pretty much has to do everything that SWTOR was going to be in the minds of it's fans and what it's devs implied.
A lot of the predictions for TOR wwere based around the information that it was pretty much the "Avatar" of MMO projects, with close to a billion dollars being fed into this thing. In reality the amount of funding it had was considerably more modest, which also meant that it wasn't going to meet the heights of what was possible, and be more along the lines of what we'd expect from a "normal" high budget game.
Among the first things the fans were asking is what was the endgame going to be like, EA played it coy, but implied it was going to be huge. As a result when people played the game and found out we had a typical (ie very weak) endgame that was pretty much it's death knell as any kind of wow-like phenomena. It's very true that WoW didn't have a huge endgame when it first started, but at the same time it wan't really competing with anyone else that did either, where games coming up now are competing with WoW. Developers constantly fail to learn from their mistakes, and EA/Bioware pretty much jumped into the same pit as everyone else. People are going to play through any amount of content and hit whatever the "top" is for a character pretty quickly, the make or break point for people is being able to keep those players motivated to play their top level characters and re-upping subscriptions in order to do so.
I'll also go so far as to say that probably 99% of the problem is casual gamers and deciding to cater to them. The problem with a robust endgame is that casual players will QQ that they don't think it's fair that they won't be able to get the phattest lewts and biggest rewards without putting in a huge amount of time and effort, and actually having to become skilled at the game. By making a game where casuals can acheive the lofty heights of power, you kind of removed a lot of the motivation from the other players, assuming there was much content for them, which there typically isn't.
Likewise a lot of the "streamlining" is kind of counter productive. A point a lot of people miss is that while the "old school" 40 man raids meant that not many people could raid because of the time, committment, and organization, it means that you wound up with a VERY dedicated base of people who kept reupping their subscriptions just so they could raid once or twice a week. Something that gave WoW a solid, core audience during it's most pivotal times of development. It had the benefit of having sprung off of that kind of thing, to add/change things in a more casual direction to get the best of both worlds.
Most people become attached to one or two characters, if when you max them out all you really have to do is use the game as a glorifed chat client, and hang out on a space station waiting for queues or groups.. groups which can zerg most of the content (though admittedly not all of it), your going to lose a lot of people, your certainly not going to keep enough to get the kind of mainstream uber-success ToR was angling for.
A lot of the predictions for TOR wwere based around the information that it was pretty much the "Avatar" of MMO projects, with close to a billion dollars being fed into this thing. In reality the amount of funding it had was considerably more modest, which also meant that it wasn't going to meet the heights of what was possible, and be more along the lines of what we'd expect from a "normal" high budget game.
Among the first things the fans were asking is what was the endgame going to be like, EA played it coy, but implied it was going to be huge. As a result when people played the game and found out we had a typical (ie very weak) endgame that was pretty much it's death knell as any kind of wow-like phenomena. It's very true that WoW didn't have a huge endgame when it first started, but at the same time it wan't really competing with anyone else that did either, where games coming up now are competing with WoW. Developers constantly fail to learn from their mistakes, and EA/Bioware pretty much jumped into the same pit as everyone else. People are going to play through any amount of content and hit whatever the "top" is for a character pretty quickly, the make or break point for people is being able to keep those players motivated to play their top level characters and re-upping subscriptions in order to do so.
I'll also go so far as to say that probably 99% of the problem is casual gamers and deciding to cater to them. The problem with a robust endgame is that casual players will QQ that they don't think it's fair that they won't be able to get the phattest lewts and biggest rewards without putting in a huge amount of time and effort, and actually having to become skilled at the game. By making a game where casuals can acheive the lofty heights of power, you kind of removed a lot of the motivation from the other players, assuming there was much content for them, which there typically isn't.
Likewise a lot of the "streamlining" is kind of counter productive. A point a lot of people miss is that while the "old school" 40 man raids meant that not many people could raid because of the time, committment, and organization, it means that you wound up with a VERY dedicated base of people who kept reupping their subscriptions just so they could raid once or twice a week. Something that gave WoW a solid, core audience during it's most pivotal times of development. It had the benefit of having sprung off of that kind of thing, to add/change things in a more casual direction to get the best of both worlds.
Most people become attached to one or two characters, if when you max them out all you really have to do is use the game as a glorifed chat client, and hang out on a space station waiting for queues or groups.. groups which can zerg most of the content (though admittedly not all of it), your going to lose a lot of people, your certainly not going to keep enough to get the kind of mainstream uber-success ToR was angling for.
The problem with Star Wars is that they tried to copy WoW's end-game to an absurd degree. It's almost like a Star Wars mod for World of Warcraft, that's how similar their PvE end-games are. You cannot directly compete with an opponent who has 8 years head start and TEN MILLION PEOPLE already playing it. MMO players are creatures of habit: if their friends play WoW, they will play WoW. Even if your game is good, it has to be good enough to pull entire social groups and guilds away from WoW, and you don't do that by doing a quick copy/paste job.