Star Wars: The Old Republic Begins Cutting Servers

[Icehearted]

I don't know which they've done that was worse; attempting to add to the already over-saturated mmo market by poorly utilizing a rich IP, or not giving fans what they really wanted all along, KotOR 3.

I imagine we could be seeing a very different story had they not chosen to exploit their fans with an MMO rendition of a beloved series, or this might have just been more junk we could ***** about since their post-EA releases have been pretty pathetic.


Either way as a brand BioWare does not mean quality, certainly not like it used to.

 

[immortalfrieza]

I have never understood why some people hail TOR as a totally worthless shit of a game and want to see it fail. As far as games go, TOR is pretty good. The game play is solid, the story is solid, the graphics look good except for a little hiccup here and there, and as far as MMOs go, it's also fun. Surely you can not base a game on its shadow animation.

I can't get either why easily one of the best games ever made, much less one of the best MMOs ever made is getting so much ire. TOR is an EXCELLENT game, and it has plenty of content if you, I don't know, LOOK for and actually DO it, instead of just blitzing through the main story of 1 or 2 classes and ignoring everything else. I've been playing TOR since early access, 6 hours a day almost every day, and I STILL am only about 3/4ths of the way through my second character at this point. Why? It's because I actually DO everything on each of my characters, and I TAKE MY TIME!!!

TOR not only has a great story, which, you know, makes it feel like there's actually a point to your character's existence, and Bioware deliberately sought to keep all the tedious, boring, unnecessarily long B.S. that other MMOs put in to soak up hours out of their MMO. TOR is my favorite MMO yet, and it already kills WoW in virtually every aspect except subscriber numbers, and it looks like WoW is slowly heading for it's own fall too.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

-snip-

You are right the gaming as we know it is doomed.

HOWEVER, this is a good thing. Modern triple A gaming has stagnated the entire medium, publishers have grown into bloated monsters more concerned with profit than the customer. Game budgets in the millions and the cost of advertising being even higher have resulted in games needing to sell millions of copies just to break even and leading both publishers and developers to 'play it safe' and and release games that are indistinguishable to the untrained eye.

This can't go on forever and history shows us it doesn't. While many of the causes of the 1983 videogame crash are not in our present mix it still serves as a reminder as to what happens when consumers go 'no more'.

And they are, as you stated that rabid fans that circle like a pool of piranha but others have left triple A behind.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-adventure
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crateentertainment/grim-dawn
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts

These are some of the games that have been funded in recent times on Kickstarter, which has allowed niche genres a chance to flourish that have been ignored by publishers as 'not profitable'.

So yes there may come a time when I will not be able to buy a game containing "ultra deluxe graphics" but personally given a choice between shoving a piece of high resolution military hardware up my nose and Planetary Annihilation/Wasteland 2/(insert indie title here) I'll go indie.

Just because some publishers have painted themselves into a corner doesn't mean gaming as a whole is doomed. Just the stupid/greedy companies are.

 

[tangoprime]

Sad, because I'd just decided to get back into the game, and was having all kinds of fun on a light population server, basically it felt like a single player game. As soon as I was forced to migrate, I remembered why I stopped playing before and unsubbed again.

All the characters have pretty great storylines, but it kind of diminishes the story driven feel of the game when there are a dozen people with the same companions as you running around trying to kill the same objectives as you, and seeing the fleet hub packed wall to wall with people sitting on speeders wearing stupid looking mis-matched armors spamming drivel in chat. God I wish you could just play this game on your own.

 

[AlotFirst]

I like the fact that Adam starts with this:

A short while ago Star Wars: The Old Republic reported a drop in player population during peak hours.

And in that first sentence he links to an article dated the 24th of April. Almost five months, clearly a short while. :S

 

[Istronen]

Only a quick message here which is actually a question to you, the distinguished respectable gamermen and gamerwomen: I bought the original version of the game and I'd like to try it but I'm unsure. Should I wait until november before that whole mess clears or install it ASAP and have a go at it before everything goes under? I'm not really upset if I lose the 30? I paid for the game if I still can use the discs to install it and then it updates to whatever state the game will be put in. If I had bought the Collector's Edition, I'd be pretty pissed off of somehow I was smart enough not to waste my money on that. However I have the Collector's Edition of Tera which I still haven't gone around to trying yet either but that one was very affordable and fairly priced.
Hmm, if I can think of more things to comment or ask, I'll make another post but this is all I had in mind at the moment. Game on, pals and enjoy life! Best wishes from Finland

 

[shava23]

Actually I re-created my account because my old account on The Escapist is on an ISP that's hopelessly wedged, so this is now on my gmail account. It was just easier. The old days of having your email on your friend's linux server is apparently past...

 

[Istronen]

In some way the older days seem to have been better but not everything goes downhill nowadays. I've begun noticing that if I don't update my computer, I'll soon be unable to play the up and coming games that will (propably) require obscenely powerful configuration to run the game in an acceptable framerate. This issue is certainly a big minus but I can't complain really. If I want to keep on gaming, I have to pull out the dough from some magical jar eventually For example Dark Souls seemed to require a better gfx card than I have. I just tested it, the game worked fine but it was an odd game with minimalistic feel. When compared to Skyrim which draws the player in very quickly and imposes a dangerously addictive habit, DC seems more like some kind of challenge and puzzling adventure meant for different moods.

I hope this post has any usefulness to some of you, I kinda lost the main thought and went on to write about another but such things happen I guess combining elements from the past and present we can achieve something greater when games are concerned. I don't really have anything to say about email servers except that I used to have one situated similarly as the other poster described but my friend discontinued the use of that service which he paid for during many years. I use Gmail too, it's a convenient service and works nicely with my modern cellphone too ^_^