Poll: Could Bioware make TOR singleplayer?

[Gizmo1990]

As most will know, The Old Republic is tanking even with it's new Free2Play model and I was wondering if they could make it into a single player game to make some money back.

I played The Old Republic for about 4 months. In that time I did both Jedi stories, most of the Smuggler and some of the Trooper. I was basicaly playing only for the story and due to the amount of side quests you need to replay in order to be a high enough level to continue I just could not finish the Smuggler or Trooper stories.

How much work would it take to strip the more boring side quests out and sell it as a Single player game? And would anyone buy it?

 

[The Madman]

Even if they did it wouldn't make The Old Republic any better. Seriously, I don't understand people who say somehow the story is good in that game. Now obviously I didn't play every class, but for those I did it was just a slog to get through with uninteresting characters and almost no actual elements of either choice or consequence. Maybe one class is just better than the others and I didn't play that class, but what classes I did play were thoroughly mediocre at absolute best.

Trooper was particularly disappointing as the only class I played into the higher levels. Even Femsheps voice and a decent beginning couldn't keep the story from falling apart after a time and squandering what little potential it might have had.

I mean it wasn't necessarily a terrible game, I've played worse... but honestly if I want more Kotor I'd much rather just replay the original two than play ToR, especially knowing as I do how little respect Tor pays to the story of the original games.

 

[BrotherRool]

I don't think anyone would buy a game now that they knew had been canabalised out of a free to play game. And a lot of the areas would be the wrong size and feel really empty and the design should be all off. A lot of decisions in making an MMO shouldn't be the same decisions in making a single player game.


...also Obsidian wouldn't be writing it /snark

 

[Sixcess]

Is it really doing that badly since F2P? I haven't been following the financial news about TOR for a while but the servers seem relatively busy - admittedly there's a hell of a lot less of them than there were at launch.

From a gameplay point of view I see no reason why it couldn't be reworked as singleplayer - it already plays more like a singleplayer game than any other MMO I know of - at least as far as levelling content is concerned, and the levelling is the most Bioware-ish part of the game and surely the big draw. With less sidequest padding it could easily be KOTOR 3 - or KOTOR 3 to 10, so to speak.

But... I'd guess that EA/BW would be extremely reluctant to do something so final to what was supposed to be their flagship MMO, and in any case I suspect most of the people who would have bought it if had been singleplayer from the outset have played it by now so the opportunity has been lost.

If the game is failing that badly then it's more likely to go the way of Star Wars Galaxies and be shut down altogether once the licence comes up for renewal, whenever that is. That said, although viewed as a failed MMO, SWG lasted for 8 years before the end (ironically days before TOR launched) so I wouldn't write TOR off just yet.

All in all I'd say if it was shut down tomorrow and re-released as single player - yes, I'd buy it. It's fatally flawed as an MMO, but it's a good singleplayer experience.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

snip

The only one I'd call genuinely bad is the Inquisitor plotline. There are several I'd grade as "mediocre," like the Consular and Knight plotlines. The rest are more-or-less good, with the standouts being the Warrior and Agent plots. Your mileage may vary.

OT: You can actually just play SWTOR as if it was a single-player game with an always-on internet connection. The side quests aren't terribly necessary for leveling - you can safely skip entire planets without falling behind. You'd miss out on Flashpoints, which I'd call a loss because some of them are really great, but overall you can just boot up the game right now for free and pretend you're playing KOTOR3.

One of the missteps Bioware made when designing the game in that they didn't account for the replay factor. With eight separate class stories, they must have known that people would want to play through the game again, but they structured the levelling so that everyone goes to the same planets and does the same story quests with their class quests tacked on the side. If they'd done what WoW did and added alternative zones in the same level bracket, people would be able to play the game two or three times without repeating content.

 

[The Madman]

The only one I'd call genuinely bad is the Inquisitor plotline. There are several I'd grade as "mediocre," like the Consular and Knight plotlines. The rest are more-or-less good, with the standouts being the Warrior and Agent plots.

Again I can't speak for all of them not having played any but the Trooper past level 25ish, but what I did experience was just thoroughly mediocre and disappointing.

Using Trooper as an example since it's the only one I played thoroughly, the story just never actually goes anywhere. The class has a decent setup and a neat premise but you actually finish that storyline around level 30 in an anti-climactic fashion that takes absolutely no account of your previous actions. From then on it's just one 'grand super evil' after another with absolutely no build up or dramatic tension.

"Oh look, another super death planet destroyer thing. Go blow it up."

"Hey, Trooper person, there's... umm... another Moff, yeah, one of those guys that's all totally evil and needs assassinating. Go kill em."

"Ancient evil, sith awakening evil, blah blah you know the drill."

There's no story or impact behind any of it, just a series of repetitious set-pieces that quickly begin to feel redundant after the second or third ancient evil stopped and grand moff killed or captured. Meanwhile the original class story which did have some promise is completely forgotten in the past, having had absolutely no impact whatsoever and having concluded in a disappointing manner. It's all just an excuse to keep you moving from planet to planet.

And that's only the class quests. Combine in the planet quests and in my time as a tropper I must have stopped a dozen or so super evil wannabe sith deathstar and killed more moffs and generals and sith lords than the entire cast of the original Star Wars movies and lame Prequels combined.

It's just all so pointless and bland and repetitive. Nothing felt like it had impact, nothing felt like it mattered. Nothing.

And I haven't even mentioned what they did with Revan or the story of Kotor 2.

 

[OpticalJunction]

I didn't know the game was tanking after f2p,heard it was actually doing pretty well and the populations were rising,etc. Where did you hear otherwise?

 

[sage42]

Yes, yes they could. They could set it 200 hundred years before The Old Republic, and it could involve a supposed "Sith Lord" who isn't really a Sith Lord and his apprentice fighting an evil force. and it could be called Knights of The Old Republic 3

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

snip

Your mileage may vary, of course, but one thing I should point out (spoilers for the Trooper and Warrior plotlines!)

Spoiler

General Rakton, the man you spend the last third of the Trooper plotline trying to kill, is the same moff that formerly commanded the black ops squad that Lieutenant Pierce - one of the Warrior's companions - used to be a member of. Pierce's companion quest involves getting his black ops squad back together, getting in touch with the moff, and storming the Bastion on Corellia - the same assault that you stop as part of the Trooper plotline.

With that perspective, the Trooper's actions are much more meaningful in that they're referenced in other player's class quests. There's the obvious stumble in that the Trooper doesn't know that until he plays the Warrior plot or meets someone who does, but it's pretty cool to talk to a friend about it and find out that your stories were connected in subtle ways. It's a nice touch, and if your problem was that the Trooper plot lacked meaning, I think that perspective adds to it.

 

[Rawne1980]

I doubt it.

Quite a lot of people that wanted to see the stories already have. Those that left because they didn't like it as an MMO are highly unlikely to pay more money for it again.

I know I personally wouldn't pay any more money towards that game whether it be as a single player game or the mess that is the MMO.

On top of it not being all that great a game, out of 8 classes, only 2 or 3 of the story lines were any good.

Consular, Knight and Trooper are so mundane it's hard to put it into words. Inquisitor is half arsed. Warrior is average. The only ones with any appeal are Bounty Hunter (and that doesn't include the character who's about as likeable as Fred West), the Agent and the Smuggler. I say 2 or 3 because some people disagree over which ones they prefer but I have yet to meet anyone who liked more than 3 of them. I only liked Agent and Smuggler, Bounty Hunter was tolerable but not fantastic.

So putting that into a single player game, it's still going to have a massive chunk that people just don't like.

 

[The Madman]

snip

Your mileage may vary, of course, but one thing I should point out (spoilers for the Trooper and Warrior plotlines!)

Spoiler

General Rakton, the man you spend the last third of the Trooper plotline trying to kill, is the same moff that formerly commanded the black ops squad that Lieutenant Pierce - one of the Warrior's companions - used to be a member of. Pierce's companion quest involves getting his black ops squad back together, getting in touch with the moff, and storming the Bastion on Corellia - the same assault that you stop as part of the Trooper plotline.

With that perspective, the Trooper's actions are much more meaningful in that they're referenced in other player's class quests. There's the obvious stumble in that the Trooper doesn't know that until he plays the Warrior plot or meets someone who does, but it's pretty cool to talk to a friend about it and find out that your stories were connected in subtle ways. It's a nice touch, and if your problem was that the Trooper plot lacked meaning, I think that perspective adds to it.

That is neat, I didn't know that. Unfortunately it still doesn't really change anything in terms of the Trooper storyline throwing him at you with little context or meaning. The problem is that there's no reason for anyone playing the Trooper storyline to care about him or to have any reason to want to kill him aside from someone having told them to do so.

In movies as well as videogame there's a saying; show, don't tell. Tor barely does either.

With the Trooper storyline there was potential with the original character arc where you're betrayed because by doing so, the people who did that made it personal. You had a motive to want to see them brought down, and you'd been given a chance to interact with them albeit briefly before said betrayal so they're not just faceless adversaries. It might be simple story-telling and not particularly original, but as a plot point it works. Unfortunately that story wraps itself up pretty quickly (not satisfyingly either) and from that point forward you're basically just told "This guy is bad, do this." or "This thing is bad, do that.". It's poor storytelling, even if there are a few neat connections between said baddies you've been told to kill and other players story.

TOR was far from the worst game I've played and there were definitely moments where I was having fun, visiting and exploring the environments was well done and as far as MMO combat goes it was alright. But the story I was just generally disappointed with.

As I've said before maybe some of the other class story are better, but for me at least not even Jennifer Hale could keep me interested.

 

[Asita]

From a gameplay perspective? Yes and no? You can pretty much solo the entire game outside of heroics and flashpoints (both of which are designed with a full party in mind, and several of which actually require multiple players to act at the same time). That said, the setup is distinctly MMO in scope. Take away all the players and you're left wondering why the heck the planets are so gosh-darn big. Heck, you still do on planets like Hoth and Tatooine. With single player in mind you'd actually probably be better off cannibalizing the planets so as to give each class a different layout. At the same time, the repetition of sidequests would certainly be a more glaring issue in single player than it is in MMO format, so again we're left with either cannibalizing the quest layout or multiplying the total number of sidequests 4 and giving each its distinct quests. Offhand, I'd lean more towards the latter than the former if only to cut down on the total length of each respective storyline, but of course that wreaks havok with the levelling calculations and I doubt there are enough sidequests to adequately flesh out each variation if divided four ways.

Simpler answer is that they probably could do it, but they'd be ill-advised to.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Yes, yes they could. They could set it 200 hundred years before The Old Republic, and it could involve a supposed "Sith Lord" who isn't really a Sith Lord and his apprentice fighting an evil force. and it could be called Knights of The Old Republic 3

Exactly. So much hope for Knights of the Old Republic 3. Utterly destroyed when it was revealed the next Old Republic game would be an MMO. Still, maybe they can salvage bits and pieces from the story and mix it into KOTOR 3.

 

[The_Lost_King]

I don't want a single player TOR. I want KotOR 3.

 

[Lunar Templar]

i don't see why it couldn't be done. it's practically a single player game as is

 

[ShinyCharizard]

I think we can all agree that everyone wanted KOTOR 3. I think even Bioware would have preferred it to be singleplayer but were told to make an MMO by EA.

 

[Bat Vader]

I think they could turn it into a single player game. They would have to either make the party quests a lot easier or take them out but I think it could be done. I would buy it again as a single player game.

 

[Reaper195]

They already did. It's called KOTOR.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

Doubtful. Anyway, I don't see why they would need to resort to such game-shredding tactics. Since going free to play, the population in the servers has skyrocketed to the point where it's kind of concerning. There are almost always two or three servers that are listed at full capacity, and the rest register between heavy and very heavy populations. It's getting to the point where they may need to add the servers they cut before.

 

[deviltry]

Even if they did it wouldn't make The Old Republic any better. Seriously, I don't understand people who say somehow the story is good in that game. Now obviously I didn't play every class, but for those I did it was just a slog to get through with uninteresting characters and almost no actual elements of either choice or consequence. Maybe one class is just better than the others and I didn't play that class, but what classes I did play were thoroughly mediocre at absolute best.

Trooper was particularly disappointing as the only class I played into the higher levels. Even Femsheps voice and a decent beginning couldn't keep the story from falling apart after a time and squandering what little potential it might have had.

I mean it wasn't necessarily a terrible game, I've played worse... but honestly if I want more Kotor I'd much rather just replay the original two than play ToR, especially knowing as I do how little respect Tor pays to the story of the original games.

Have you tried Imperial Agent? Personally that was one of the better story in gaming industry for me.