animehermit said:
Therumancer said:
There's plenty of endgame content considering the game hasn't even been out a month yet. There are TWO raids, Karraga's Palace and Eternity Vault, with more content coming later this month. WoW didn't launch with any raiding content at all and has gone more than half a year without content updates before.
and not just the endgame is being expanded upon, the Legacy System, Guild ships and expanded Space combat are all on the list of things coming down the pike for SWTOR.
I disagree about story and voice acting being important. I think that's SWTOR's finest point, the sheer amount of story in this game is astounding. Context is important, and I think that's what makes TOR a cut above the rest of the pile. What you do has effects on how people react to you and how your character grows. No longer is your character simply an avatar through which you play the game, now YOU get to decide who that character is through the decisions he/she makes.
The point isn't that there should be a story or contest, merely that they paid to have every bit of it voice acted as opposed to requiring people to read their way through it, which was a tremendous amount of resources to expend that could have been used to create more content.
It should also be noted that current MMOs are competing with WoW as it is now, NOT as WoW was when it first launched. This is a common mistake and why so many games wind up suffering after a few months and looking toward a free to play model. A new MMO has to understand it's not dealing with a bunch of "nubs" like WoW was but jaded veterans who learned from WoW. It also has to understand that right now the games surviving in the marketplace are those games as they launched PLUS all their expansions. Players generally aren't going to pay subscriptions every month while twiddling their thumbs waiting for more content to be added to the game. At the best you wind up with situations where you have players who cancel and re-up once in a while when something new comes out, which tends to not make enough money to support the game.
This is why EA Louse's message was seen as a good thing in some quarters despite it's negative tone. A 400 million dollar development budget combine with the amount of time the game intended seemed to imply that EA learned from other failed MMOs and had realized that to maintain itself for years the game needed years worth of content and to launch with as much material as say WoW and all of it's expansions combined in order to hold onto that player base.
You seem to be right about the raids (my bad) but I will say this, with people already maxxing their characters in the first couple of weeks, and the buzz about lack of content, what do you think is going to happen? You might want to say "well if people don't like this and leave, that's fine by me, good riddance, I'm content" but the thing is that to sustain itself those people are needed.
Who knows, I could very well be wrong, but look at the pattern with say DC Universe Online at the beginning of last year, another game which launched with a similar strategy. Despite some fairly bold talk, it was free to play by the end of the year.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this gleefully as I really do like ToR and hope it's an exception, but I'm a jaded veteran and a realist, and as good as it might be it just seems to have made too many classic mistakes which we've seen before right from the beginning.
To be honest if we're going to see another WoW or blockbuster on that level we're going to need a production company that takes it seriously and gets a budget close to that 400 mil or the equivilent for the year in question, and that might be conservative. The producers and devs are also going to have to realize that while there are new MMO players coming into the hobby the majority of players are those who have been involved for quite a while. Those millions of WoW players they want money from? They aren't noobs anymore BECAUSE they played WoW. Thus another simplistic, introductory level MMO isn't going to mean much. A tutorial is fine, but trying to ease someone who never played an MMO before into the game gradually through 80% of the game content or whatever is counter productive. What's more the company needs to realize that the time when a game is sold is the end, not everything leading up to it even if that is also important. What keeps people re-upping is having something to do every day with their favorite character once they are no longer earning exps and leveling up.
I hope your right, I honestly do, but right now I have to say it doesn't look paticularly good to me, despite the brave face of EA. We'll see what happens. Hopefully in a year or two you'll be saying "I told you so", as opposed to ToR being an example to point fingers at as a failure for a lot of reasons.
Honestly though I hate the FTP/Microtransactions model, and honestly I think a lot of that is coming from the realization that subscriptions fall off once people finish the content but "gating" the content allows real money to form a barrier which can extend the play of addicts and keep a game profitable especially if all those "microtransactions" can amount to more than $15 a month in many cases. Rather than face reality and develop MMOs at the level they need to be at given the expense, FTP is an attempt to keep the current development level financially viable.
That's my thoughts at any rate.
