EA's Betting That Bashing WoW Will Sell More Old Republic

[MetallicaRulez0]

I'm definitely going to check this game out, but if I can only play 1 MMO... WoW is the obvious choice. I'd say the majority of people will agree with that. SWTOR looks great, and I have never played a BioWare game that wasn't a 9/10 or better in my book, but WoW is simply too established to be unseated as King of the genre.

Honestly the only thing I'm hesitant about with SWTOR is the fact that it's a Star Wars game. How many people are going to try it out just because it's BioWare, even if they don't necessarily like Star Wars? *raise hand*

 

[Dragonpit]

There really doesn't seem to be much hope for this. It may be a good game, but their recent shots involving publicity seem to be doing better at dragging them down, rather than promoting anything. Dragon Age II has been recent casualty, and I wonder if The Old Republic may go a similar way at this rate.

 

[Mcupobob]

Who the hell is the EA marketing department? A cage of adolescent shit throwing monkeys? I'm starting to forget a time when EA wasn't always making an ass out of its self.

 

[Gennadios]

Wait, why is Wrex in that screenshot? And why is he naked?

 

[The_Yeti]

Meh, people really should stop bashing WoW, Blizzards been eagerly killing the game themselves for anyone but the most ignorantly devoted who won't leave WoW even when they stop putting out real content to focus on their new products, Swtor looks very nifty and immersive. Gibeau needs to stop ranting like he was the only one putting the pieces on the table and keep his yapper closed, The only real Quality Proven Label for games is the finished product.

~ While i'm not a star wars fan, i'm still eager to roll a Sith Inquisitor and shock some cute creatures to death while pimping my own equipment as well as a UFO. If only for however many months it takes to have seen the sights and gotten tired enough of them to mosey on elsewhere, probably Diablo3.

O how many years has it been since we felt comfortable calling ourselves a Barbarian.

Duriel was lame, Andariel had boobs, Mephisto was put to shame, Diablo was for noobs, Baal was a sissy, and as for the Hell Mode Cow King, well he was troll incentive.

The story was a short beauty, with little booty.
But when we were a Barbarian, we tapped that again and again!
Huzzah to fond 800x600 pixel memories.

 

[fierydemise]

This thread contains the first negative feedback I've seen about ToR. Sure, it's borrowing heavily from WoW. Just remember that before Halo there was no such thing as regenerating health, and now it's in almost every single new FPS. They have to walk in the giant footprints before them because straying from the path is not a wise thing to do in terms of a large-scale business venture.

Anyway, what's wrong with it? It's set in a rich, well-fortified sci-fi universe, and sci-fi MMO's in general are scarce as it is. It panders to WoW, yes, but from all reports it does it justice. BioWare have never been a poor developer.
If you're truly that bored of WoW-style MMO's look elsewhere, sure. If you fancy similar gameplay with new substance (i.e; every FPS after CoD:MW, Halo and Half-life 2 and practically every RTS post-Starcraft and C&C) then it's worth a crack, as all reports from shows have been positive.

Also, for the people worried about the endgame - worry about that once you get there.

I promised myself coming into this thread that I wouldn't do this and get into an argument about why TOR looks entirely unimpressive but since you asked here goes.

The problem with imitating WoW is that players who like WoW are already playing it and people who don't like WoW aren't. I'm not trying to be one of those people who says that something is bad just because someone else did it first, everyone who is being honest will admit that WoW borrows heavily from EQ (its chief gameplay innovation being questing as a means to level) which borrows heavily from MUDs and so on back. For a self contained primarily single player experience saying "Its just like !" can be fine but for a game, genre even, built on entrenchment its not that easy. Lets assume for a second that TOR is a better WoW then WoW (I'll get to why thats an absurd assumption later) you now have to convince people with more then 50 days played in terms of actual in game hours on the low end to leave all of that establishment, their achievements, their progression, their reputation and all those other pieces that make up why MMOs are so addicting to start from literal zero.

Yes the Star Wars license does give it an edge although I suspect that the important of the licence is somewhat overstated given what Star Wars has become over the past 5-10 years. Even assuming the licence is worth talking about its a tough sell, anyone who wants to play an MMO basically already plays WoW so TOR has to be marketed primarily toward people who up until this very moment have had wanted very little to do with them. KOTOR on release faced some of these same obstacles, convincing people who had previously not wanted anything to do with RPGs to play one but the difference between KOTOR and TOR is that the recurring cost of MMOs can tend to eat at people in a way that a stand alone game doesn't. This same issue also explains another reason other MMOs have generally ceased to takeoff, most people don't play multiple MMOs. Its pretty easy to justify the enjoyment you get out of your $15 a month for one MMO but for two it starts to become much harder.

Now to my assertion that TOR will likely be a worse WoW then WoW. First and foremost the WoW devs know what their doing and while Bioware may be a good developer they don't have 8-10+ years (WoW's development took 4+) of knowledge and experience to draw from. Blizzard has been making incremental changes for 6 years and it shows, most attempts at a WoW killer have come in toward the late vanilla, early BC kind of gameplay while WoW has been in Wrath or now Cata. Also lets look at what have made Bioware games good recently, it hasn't really been the gameplay or the combat but the dialogue and story (Ignoring the 747 sized holes in the ME2 plot). Even in the best Bioware games in recent memory (KOTOR) the gameplay has just been good enough not to get in the way of the dialogue and story rather then good in its own right. This is part of what makes the choice of making an MMO so odd, its the genre that least appeals to Bioware strengths and more toward its comparatively weak points.

Further lets look at actual gameplay decisions Bioware has made. First go check out the Talas V mission they recently posted on their website and ask yourself if that looks compelling to you. To me it looks like a joke, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of challenge going on and there is precious little in the way of mechanics. There are a number of other announced design decisions that really leave me scratching my head about what Bioware is thinking. One of those decisions that really jumps out as terrible is the removal of auto-attack for melee classes. Auto-attack is one of the most essential things that allows for PvP balance in a game where melee classes don't have cast times but casters do. I could probably go on about strange design decisions but I think you get the picture.

Lastly the question of endgame, your comment "worry about that once you get there" exactly sums up why so many so-called WoW killers have failed. Most of the various MMO failures of late have had cool design ideas, Aion's flying system was quite well conceived and the class design was interesting, Warhammer's RvR and public quests were interesting evolutions of the genre yet both flopped. MMOs are built on retention first and foremost, you don't sink 100-300 million into a project then hope to recoup it on box sales alone you put that kind of money down because you are hoping to have a paying playerbase of 1 million plus for the next few years. The only way to get the kind of retention you need for a successful MMO is end game content and as much as WoW players like to harp on the raiding content or the pvp balance when it comes to good endgame WoW is the only game in town.

The other problem with endgame that Bioware faces as previously pointed out in this thread is the goal of voice acting everything. Blizzard releases a major content patch every 6 months and it typically contains a decent amount of new content. If Bioware plans on voice actors for all the new content that either significantly slows down the patch release cycle (bad for retention) or significantly cuts into the bottom line (bad for business). There are no two ways about it if you want to put more into a patch you either have to spend time or money both of which will be very important to minimize to make a long term profit, or even to recoup costs if the $300 million budget stories are true. The entire concept of a story driven MMO is a ridiculous idea in and of itself, yes you can play up the story and lore more then Blizzard has done (although the new cata quest chains are quite good in that regard) but beyond that there is only so much you can do. MMOs are by their very nature some of the most non-linear games available and without outright railroading there is only so good and so tight you can make a story within the basic gameplay limitations. The people who frequently talk about TOR as "8 KOTORs in 1 game" have I suspect a nasty surprise coming on release.

All of the above (wow that was a lot more then I was planning to write) is not to say I want TOR to fail. Not at all I want to see it succeed because Bioware for all their recent flaws are one of the few companies making games with spots of really brilliant writing. A TOR flop is bad for gamers as a whole the problem is its really hard not to see the writing on the wall.

 

[JordanXlord]

the mistake they are making is thinking about releasing it too close to guild wars 2

i can't wait for that

i am totally rolling Char

OT

SWTOR has one huge problem,

No beta=bad

give us a beta and we will see if SWTOR is any good

 

[Aeshi]

And now I'm just going to pray more than ever that WoW wrings SWToR's scrawny little neck.

 

[Mr.Amakir]

Aww man, Bioware is getting too aggressive. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE EA?

EA kidnapped Boo and are holding him hostage to blackmail Bioware.

 

[Canid117]

EA should outright fire everyone in their marketing and PR department.

 

[Rythe]

Lots of stuff and things...

I'm going to expand a little on what Fierydemise started so we can firmly root what expectations you can have for TOR going in, and I'm also telling you that WoW is going to shrug this game off like all the other ones it's buried.

First off, TOR has two things going for it: Graphics and Interactive narratives. This game is going to stabilize in mediocrity (at best) or die very quickly based on the end sum of those two strengths. But that's the end of the good news.

TOR has WoW gameplay, straight up. The problem is that it's not as good anymore. For all the 'cover' mechanics TOR can boast, WoW has 'don't stand in fire' with an extra five years of polish added on (plus line of sight mechanics). Even the environmental interactions TOR boasts about are all incredibly basic and are now in WoW to one degree or another, that is, variations on locked doors, exploding barrels, and turrets/vehicles. But that's just nitpicking the trimmings. It's like saying Diablo 3 is going to live or die on its environmental physics.

No, what's going to really hurt TOR is that its class mechanics are starkly inferior to WoW's now that Cataclysm is out. Look closely at the Talas V demo video. Not one player character did something even remotely interesting. The caster cycled through the same 3 spells over and over again except for one instance of an area blast and another using crowd control. The trooper went pew pew and tossed grenades around. The healer, poor soul, just cycled through heal spells and went pew pew when he had nothing better to do, ignoring one CC moment. The Jedi *looked* the most interesting by far, but even that wasn't exactly lively. The gameplay is heavily based on stand in cover (if you feel like), look at target, push ability button, watch animation for the bajillionth time. Even assuming those characters didn't have all their abilities, most WoW classes have you doing more and reacting to more (internally) by level 20 or 25 these days, and that's not even close to when the really big WoW abilities come into play.

Which is to say that most WoW players are going to be wishing they were playing their old toon by the end of a week or two, and non-WoW players aren't exactly going to be enamored either. Even the newbie elementalist video from Guild Wars 2 looked more interesting if only because you could change elemental affinity and role-shift on the fly.

Beyond pretty colors, the Talas V encounter was blaaaaand. Chop up trash, video edit your way to next pack of trash, repeat five times, mention the next encounter is harder but actually affects game flow very little if at all, and end with a boss encounter type WoW had years ago. I'm not saying it was actually any worse than what WoW players are doing leveling up (ignoring the two Cata dungeon revamps), the problem is that it's just not any better. For all you WoW hater's out there that expect TOR to magically be awesome, let me be the first to welcome you to the instance grind we all know and love(hate) so well.

So now that we're both looking at a prettier WoW-clone with the novel addition of Interactive Narratives, let me drop one final thought. How big a sense of humor do you think TOR is going to have? I mean, just by past experience with Bioware? I'm going to suggest not very much. Yes, Bioware can do humor, but only in dialogue from what I've seen, and that has a very limited life span. It may surprise you, but a huge part of an MMOs appeal comes from moments of levity that break up the monotony of 'missions'. And I'm not even talking about silly missions either, but just the dumb stuff you can try and do with your characters. WoW has a pretty grand sense of humor all told, often unintentionally so, and you can't imagine how helpful that is to the social atmosphere in the game. Even ignoring Bioware, TOR's approach just doesn't look that flexible in engine/environment interaction or narrative theme.

 

[The Furbinator]

I really fail to see where they are bashing WoW in this, they promote their game (of course), and actually go on to say that Blizzard and Bioware are very different companies with different core audiences, and that both games offer different things. Seems to me that this article was written with the purpose of misrepresenting EA's words and meaning.

 

[GeorgW]

I have no doubt that TOR will be a great game and will be successful. It will definitely appeal more to me than WoW. But nothing can unseat WoW. NOTHING!

 

[Woodsey]

"Publisher Electronic Arts is gambling a lot of money and clout that the first MMO from story-based RPG experts BioWare will be able to unseat World of Warcraft as the Subscription King. "

I doubt it somehow - EA aren't stupid, they know they're not going to get anything like 12 million for a long old time.

"It's a big bet for my label and for EA," said Gibeau but he thinks that his game has a lot going for it. "I love Blizzard products, but they're not the entire market. There is an opportunity to come in with a new IP." He didn't stop there.

Didn't stop? He didn't start! He was only saying that WoW isn't the only one about.

""When I play World of Warcraft, you go and get your quests, and you go and do your quests, but it feels more like doing a shopping list at times," Gibeau said. "[TOR] is more about talking to characters, learning what's going on, investing in it, getting emotionally attached to it.""

Pointing out differences (and something that's true for a lot of people when trying to get into MMOs) in his game.

"Just in case you weren't clear as vodka on this subject, Gibeau wants to make sure you knew that TOR is different. "On multiple levels we're highly differentiated and different from World of Warcraft. We're not being slavish or imitating them at all. We're doing our own thing. We're doing our own unique way. BioWare and Blizzard have been around for almost the same period of time. They've built incredible audiences. They have their own unique cultures, and they do things very differently.""

Still don't see what he's saying that's wrong - he's complimented them here.

"Perhaps if BioWare showed off more character creation and the first few levels of play, that would get people more excited about the game."

They did those massive 6-hour opening previews a few months back that everyone raved about. This article is a little... off.

the mistake they are making is thinking about releasing it too close to guild wars 2

GW2 is out in 2012 last I heard, and that's as close a date as we've got. TOR is scheduled for this year, no firm date yet though.

Not really close.

last I heard they were aiming for fall or winter of this year for both games

Maybe so then, I was sure I'd seen a TBA 2012 on one of the latest dev videos.

 

[Soviet Steve]

It worked for the 3DO so why not here?

 

[RA92]

The Metacritic user scores have stabilized by now, though. Last I checked, the PC had around 8.3/10 with over a thousand reviews. Funny thing is, it was the console versions that had the lowest scores (both were below 7.9, I think). Looks like it isn't just the 'PC elitists' throwing a hissy fit.  

I don't care about the PC elements, I don't care about the difficulty (as long as it's at least a bit challenging on nightmare), I don't care about the simplified dialog system, those changes are probably good, what I can't wait to see is if they managed to make a good story, because I'm fearing that they may have missed the scale of the danger this time (am very paranoid about spoilers so uninformed on this too).

Oh shit, I was actually quoting DA:O reviews, the DA2 reviews are still low...
But yeah, I think people are overreacting a bit with their reviews. The only thing I feel is missing is the isometric view...

Are you sure you are looking at Da2 and not Da:O? Checking metacritic right now, user reviews for da2 is still low, it's actually got the highest user reviews on the ps3 with 4.2 (its 4.1 for pc)

Thanks a lot for the heads up.

 

[Trogdor1138]

Watch it come out and be 85% like Wow.

Seriously guys, this is low.

I'm looking forward to seeing it when it comes out despite not planning to play it.