106 réponses à ce sujet

[Ukjack44]

I heard it on the grapevine that TOR isn't doing so well anymore? What does this mean for BioWare if it falls through the floor?

For example, BioWare have not disclosed the production value of the game but it is estimated to be around the $200 million mark, some say $400 million after advertising and wages. The game took 5+ years to make and the servers have only a light population load. When a company release a game trying to sell it to me for £64.99 and the more or less half the price a few months later, alarm bells go off in my head and that tells me that the game obviosuly isn't doing too well or as well as they planned. Especially how they are offering free play time now.

 Haters will hate and Trolls will troll. Try to keep it to the point though and to all the TOR fans this isnt a personaly attack so don't throw your toys out of your pram

[Morroian]

Servers I see have heavy populations at peak times. Patch 1.2 brought quite a few people back to the game and they have more features planned. At this point the game has probably made its budget back, it may not be the WOW killer that was hoped for but I doubt any game will do that.

[LTD]

Vast, vast majority of servers, both US and EU, are complete ghost towns now. Based on various population reports communities have been posting, EU side has grand total of 4-5 servers out of 100(!!!) that have a genuinely healthy population. Both US and EU have ONE server that is actually full. EU's sole  Full server didn't have a prime time  queue anymore last time I logged in.

Amount of servers they chose to open was beyiond ridiculous.Seriously, the game has at least 120 servers too many.  Even more ridiculous is their determination not to do some serious merging. Seriously, like 80%-90% of servers are in state where it is literally impossible for people stuck in there to find a group for..well, anything.

Way I see it, TOR failed because:
- Combining (excellent!!) voice acting with insignificant dialogue and 100000 Vanilla WoW quests makes a poor marriage.
I don't get it. They spend Bazillion dollars on VAs, then give the lot insignificant BS dialogue to work with. " Our droids are broken. Go to rebel camp. Gather 10 droid arses. May the force be with you. " That pretty much sums up what majority of NPCs in TOR will ever have to say. There's hardly ever actual dialogue, conversation happening. Nobody is there to make story deeper. Nobody is there to build his/her character and make you care of him in some distant way. Everybody is there just to tell you where to gather them droid arses. Hundreds of hours of expensive, top notch quality voice acting... and it all sums up nothing but ordinary, mediocre quest logs spoken out loud. Quests that are approx as diverese and exiting as ones Vanilla WoW had 8 yrs back.

- User Interface of this game was insanely ****ing stupid annoying  piece of **** at launch. My personal favorite were hard coded keybids behind all ctrl+WASD keys. Keybids serving  useful functions such as "turn ambience
on/off"  Thanks for that, BW! Apparently it didn't occur to them people might be interested to bind usefull functions behind WASD keys in game using WASD based movement.  Like 25% of good keybinds around WASD being flat out unavailable for use combined with complete lack of macros resulted in me actually running out of sane, decent binds for my actions. Other cunning UI stunts include debuff/buff
windows so tiny you can't quickly chek them in heat of combat, raid health bars that don't show health properly, lack of add ons.  A healer coming straight from WoW felt like he had moved to previous decade in MMO gaming.  Some(not all<3) of these things got fixed some 3 months after release. Not that many were around to see these fixes.

- Game engine is clunky and dysfunctional piece of ****. It can't handle things people have come to expect to be able to see/do in an MMO. Want to gather...say, 15 of your friends and head in big scary world to murder a pile of Republic scum? Yeah, not gonna happen. Not without everything turning into a lag fest.


- Mostly due to terrible engine I guess, TOR is heavily instanced. It efficiently isolates you from the world and breaks the vibe of you playing an MMO.  This wouldn't be such a bad thing by default if they would have used some of the advantages instancing offers. They did not. Despite instancing, world remains static. Nothing ever changes anywhere. Instancing offers a perfect, simple tool for delivering an illusion of a dynamic, living and changing world. They never do this.Not once. Maybe this calls for an example. In Instance 1 of area Z in LOTRO you enter a village. you hear brigants are about to attack the village. You do couple of quests there.  Instance 2 of the same area; brigants are now attacking the village. Houses on fire etc. Instance 3: Village has burned down. People are burying their dead. TOR's take on this obvious, widely used and extremely potential feature is as follows:  Instance 1: Fat Sith lord stands in middle of the room. Instance 2: Fat Sith lord now stands in corner of the room.

- Level/zone design is boring as all hell. It makes  an inferno of L-  shaped corridor after another after another. Some of the outside areas are really cool, if rather narrow pipes. However, none of the zones ever invites you to explore.You don't get illusion or impression of freedom. Tatooine being an exception to the rule.   I'm pretty sure it is only zone the engine allowed them to make a truly open one.  (sand, sand, more sand goes easy on Graphics-engine.) More often than not, your quests take you inside some sever, space ship, cave, prison or dungeon. None of these differ from another in any real way. It is always the same goddamned L shaped corridor.
To be fair, some of the outside areas DO look awesome. Were they not rather restricted and narrow pipes, I'd love them. Also, too many mobs everywhere.

- BW made it very difficult to form communities. Server fiasco mentioned at start of this post ensured all server communities would be rather modest in size from get go. Maybe they had to be due to the  sack of **** game  engine being unable to handle Massive Multiplayer Online population in the MMO it is running. On top of this, BW actually refused to open Server Forums, for some incomprehensivble reason. It is essential for modern, newborn MMO to provide a soil where healthy communities can be born. Guilds need some medium where to recruit and form their identity.  People need an out-of-game place where to meet their new neighbors, make friends and enemies. People need to fight, laugh, troll and get trolled with and by their new neighbors. They need to establish (to  themselves) that  they are habitants of DerpHerp-server. They need an identity of sorts. You need good in-game communication tools or realm forums in order to do this. TOR offers neither. People don't meet many people in TOR. People don't make many friends or enemies in TOR. It is impossible to like or hate "that other guild" in TOR. Game just doesn't offer player enough means to do this. This too makes the experience as a whole lacking in depth.

TOR has lots of good things going for it too though. Combat (as Sith Marauder  at least..) is awesome. Prolly most entertaining combat I've seen in an MMO. Just that you have no fun things to kill. Loads of shameless copying going in class mechanics though. Seriously and literally, Sith Warrior is 1:1 copy of Wow's Prot Warrior. Sith Inq is pure WoW as well.

World PvP is literally non existant even on busy servers. Thanks to the sack of **** game engine, all Warzones (=PvP instances) are approx. stamp-sized. Other than that they are good fun though! All in all PvP feels surprisingly balanced for such a young MMO. It's too bad TOR generally speaking rewards people doing PvP in unrewarding, boring ways. Nothing exiting can be gained via PvP. PvE instances seem "pretty good" in same stale, worn way WoW instances are " pretty good" after being pretty good for 8 damn years. No innovation there. But yeah, they are pretty good.

Voice acting truly is AWESOME. Easily best overall VA in any game I've ever touched.  Search Male Sith Inquisitor from youtube and tell me that isnt awesome!!1 Quality of VA  is pretty baffling when you consider the massive quantity of it. How I wish there were more interesting conversations to listen.


Uhh TLDR:
It is a pretty good game with pretty devastating flaws. People left en masse. EA actually offered a FREE MONTH to everyone who had an active sub.running in early April. It is somewhat telling that Sub. based MMO owned by EA offers a FREE MONTH to people three  months after launch.

Mostly TOR fell a victim to their target audience though. MMO fans make a very demanding crowd. Most of these people view MMos, rather than gaming as their hobby. They expect and demand high quality when it comes to..tools of trade like User Interface.   Many other WoW clones such as Rift actually made the initial experience, game engine and UI every bit as smooth and polished as that which  WOW offers.. and yet, all these clones flopped to varying degree. TOR 's copy of WoW was of poorer quality. Unpolished, clunky UI, terrible game engine. How on earth could it succeed? Star Wars- logo ensures initial interest and pile of die hard fans. It  won't hold people who are (eternally) searching for the Next Good MMO. Considering the sick budget TOR had, their game engine and UI at launch were truly pretty in pretty ridiculous state. Game got released at least 3-4 months too soon I says.

Modifié par LTD, 07 mai 2012 - 03:55 .

[Sajji]

With Guild Wars 2 and TES Online, it isn't looking too good, tbh

Modifié par Sajji, 07 mai 2012 - 03:05 .

[LTD]

Sajji wrote...

With Guild Wars 2 and TES Online, it isn't looking too good, tbh

TES Online uses the same engine TOR does from what I hear. I'd say it is pretty safe bet nobody, NOBODY who has tried TOR wants to go anywhere near TES Online.

[Chromie]

LTD wrote...

Sajji wrote...

With Guild Wars 2 and TES Online, it isn't looking too good, tbh

TES Online uses the same engine TOR does from what I hear. I'd say it is pretty safe bet nobody, NOBODY who has tried TOR wants to go anywhere near TES Online.

Yea I'll give TES a shot but I sure as hell won't stick around if the game can't handle more than 8 people on screen before running like crap.

[Maverick827]

EA's 2011Q4 reports are coming out today. I guess we'll have to see, then, but it's very likely that the game is still doing fine. The last reports were at three times the number of subscribers they required for the game to be "very profitable."

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

@LTD
lol so only 500-2000 people play TOR these days?!

And you're right about ridiculous amount of servers.

[Daennikus]

I actually worked with EA and Bioware comm staff to promote the game during conventions and a press release. It's Star Wars, people are hyped over it. 
Too bad they sort of sat on the assumption that Star Wars fans are easy to satisfy or that they never had MMO experience before. It's the case, many of my friends began playing TOR without a single idea of how MMOs are supposed to work. The interface itself was a clue, in my opinion, that not a lot of efforts were put into making this a serious RPG. 

A few years back, Tabula Rasa had more potential as a sci-fi game but it shot itself in the foot with a generic kill-mission gameplay.

Again, the downside of MMO's are the missions themselves. Unless you make non-combat activities a way to earn experience (crafting, finance, diplomacy, research... wait, that sounds like EVE) people will feel obligated to grind their way to complete brain-death. This is how you lose a community.
Now I'm going to resubscribe to EVE Online... 


@LTD: I did read your post and I agree with you. I... just have one comment: try to use less cussing when you write such a thought-out review. Bad language discredits you completely, and I'm not just thinking about your post when I say this. Think of the day Google brings up your post to someone of influence.

Modifié par Daennikus, 07 mai 2012 - 06:05 .

[Chromie]

Daennikus wrote...
A few years back, Tabula Rasa had more potential as a sci-fi game but it shot itself in the foot with a generic kill-mission gameplay.

That isn't what killed Tabula Rasa.

[Daennikus]

Skelter192 wrote...

Daennikus wrote...
A few years back, Tabula Rasa had more potential as a sci-fi game but it shot itself in the foot with a generic kill-mission gameplay.

That isn't what killed Tabula Rasa.

Granted, I'm no expert. It was from my own perspective as a casual player.

[Lotion Soronarr]

I find most MMO's - and especially WoW - to be boring and stale.

[Cyberarmy]

As a die hard sci-fi and Star Wars .,I had high hopes for ToR.(hope is the first step on the road to disappointment...)

But even playing it first time in beta something was amiss or maybe so smillar. İ didnt get that excitment feeling when playing an online game. I was even more excited about Rift when played it
After played 3 weeks i got bored of everything ToR can give. I found myself only PvPing and i only bought this game for its PvE potantial. Only thing kept me were the class main quests, after completed my 2 favorite classes quests i never logged back in.


Nowadays im playing GW2 betaweekends, even with 4 days of play time and its being in former beta, GW2 entertained me more then ToR.

[Chromie]

Cyberarmy wrote...

Nowadays im playing GW2 betaweekends, even with 4 days of play time and its being in former beta, GW2 entertained me more then ToR.

Man I can't wait to get in on some GW2 beta action. 

Frankly I think sandbox MMO's will be the way to go eventually. The way old school rpg's are sorta coming back maybe sandbox MMO's will. I can't wait to see what CCP can accomplish with the World of Darkness since I love Eve Online.

[Maverick827]

I wasn't impressed at all with the GW2 beta. The voice acting was atrocious, the story forces you to be an over-the-top super hero chariacture, you're forced into using various weapons to be effective, player movement feels clunky, combat was unresponsive...some of this can be fixed before release, but some of it definitely won't.

They're not going to re-write every story, nor will they re-record all of the voice acting. They seem pretty dead set on tying various weapon sets to weapon types and not, say, stances. My character is a sword and board warrior, he doesn't wield a comically large hammer. But if I want to excel at fighting multiple enemies, in GW2 I have to switch to that load out.

The animation issues are a gray area: they could be simple to fix, or they could be indicative of a much larger, much less likely to be fixed issue.

For the next beta I'm going to try to ignore the story entirely (it's really, really bad) and just run around and play it as a sandbox game, even though it is decidedly theme park.

[Ukjack44]

The GW2 beta was good... to say it was a beta. The game, unlike TOR, will actually be finished or to word it differently it will provide a fun experience without many glitches and big problems.

Checking EA stocks again.... Does not look good. Hate to be apart of EA or an investor in EA right now.

[Elhanan]

More doom and gloom here for TOR, I see; saw this title recently on their Forums, too. Personally, I am content with their content.

I play solo onPvE, and have 4 characters; three of which are currently active. The server is well populated; maybe too much so on the Fleet for my taste, but I simply use it as a Shop & Go when needed. I enjoy the storylines I have chosen, as well as the brief look I have made into the Companion's plots and interaction.

Plenty of end game material for me, too. But I do not require groups to satiate my enjoyment for play like some; simply am happy with what is there, and can avoid flawed comparisons with other MMO's.

And based on the highly mixed reviews seen of some recent and upcoming games, TOR seems to well afloat for this voyage.

[Chromie]

Elhanan wrote...
. But I do not require groups to satiate my enjoyment for play like some; simply am happy with what is there, and can avoid flawed comparisons with other MMO's.

Is this your first MMO? How could you even compare and understand? 

Modifié par Skelter192, 07 mai 2012 - 05:36 .

[Maverick827]

Ukjack44 wrote...

The GW2 beta was good... to say it was a beta. The game, unlike TOR, will actually be finished or to word it differently it will provide a fun experience without many glitches and big problems.

Checking EA stocks again.... Does not look good. Hate to be apart of EA or an investor in EA right now.

How is TOR unfinished?

Also, lol @ armchair stockbroking.

[UnstableMongoose]

Yeah, "TORtanic" would be if the game had no subs at launch and became a horrendous money sink. Population on servers may be down, but BioWare is very much correct to point out that their sub numbers haven't dropped that much. This means that even people who don't have the time to play it as frequently still have a vested interest in maintaining an active subscription.

At this point, though it's hard to reckon without any actual figures, it appears as though they've made their investment back or are within striking distance of doing so, and are trying to fan the flames so that this becomes a consistent source of green. They've consistently made progress on the game since release, and the guild summit thing was genius.

This MMO did some fantastic things with the crafting system and the social system that I hope never go away. Legacy is cool, conversations are cool, the crew system is very cool. Even if ToR doesn't become a long-term success, with luck, you'll see some of those principles adopted by other companies.

I don't believe in the term "WoW-killer." WoW isn't ever going to be offed by another MMO. It's just going to continue its downward slide into complete bullcrap and kill itself off.

TOR is ultimately a success, just not as wild a success as could be imagined. It still has the potential to develop into that with other competing MMOs shooting themselves in the foot (TERA's got a fun combat system, but its depth is absolutely horrendous and their server architecture sucks at translating their awesome system into decent PvP, WoW continuing to drive itself into the ground, etc.). They took a bunch of significant risks in terms of putting some new things into an MMO that had never been tried before, and they actually managed to, at the very least, get close to turning a profit on it. That, in of itself, is an accomplishment in a genre where risk-taking is akin to suicide.

Modifié par UnstableMongoose, 07 mai 2012 - 06:32 .

[Cutlass Jack]

UnstableMongoose wrote...

This MMO did some fantastic things with the crafting system and the social system that I hope never go away. Legacy is cool, conversations are cool, the crew system is very cool. Even if ToR doesn't become a long-term success, with luck, you'll see some of those principles adopted by other companies.

I don't believe in the term "WoW-killer." WoW isn't ever going to be offed by another MMO. It's just going to continue its downward slide into complete bullcrap and kill itself off.

TOR is ultimately a success, just not as wild a success as could be imagined. It still has the potential to develop into that with other competing MMOs shooting themselves in the foot (TERA's got a fun combat system, but its depth is absolutely horrendous and their server architecture sucks at translating their awesome system into decent PvP, WoW continuing to drive itself into the ground, etc.). They took a bunch of significant risks in terms of putting some new things into an MMO that had never been tried before, and they actually managed to, at the very least, get close to turning a profit on it. That, in of itself, is an accomplishment in a genre where risk-taking is akin to suicide.

I could not agree with this more. And Still have a great time daily in the game. I'll be with it for a bit I think.

Modifié par Cutlass Jack, 07 mai 2012 - 06:34 .

[Elhanan]

Skelter192 wrote...

Is this your first MMO? How could you even compare and understand? 

I don't compare, and seem to understand that Hater's - like coconuts - migrate.

[Chromie]

UnstableMongoose wrote...

This MMO did some fantastic things with the crafting system and the social system that I hope never go away. Legacy is cool, conversations are cool, the crew system is very cool. Even if ToR doesn't become a long-term success, with luck, you'll see some of those principles adopted by other companies.

As someone who loves a good crafting system and spent a couple of years playing as a crafter alot of the time in SWG, EQ2, Eve Online and others I don't see what's so fantastic about TOR's crafting. It's ok for a themepark but well it's no way how they had said it would be. It's definitely improved but I just don't get it.

Modifié par Skelter192, 07 mai 2012 - 07:27 .

[termokanden]

Maverick827 wrote...

Ukjack44 wrote...

The GW2 beta was good... to say it was a beta. The game, unlike TOR, will actually be finished or to word it differently it will provide a fun experience without many glitches and big problems.

Checking EA stocks again.... Does not look good. Hate to be apart of EA or an investor in EA right now.

How is TOR unfinished?

Also, lol @ armchair stockbroking.

You should have seen the armchair stockbroking on the ToR forums. Hilarious stuff.

PS: Yes. ToR's crafting system sucked. They could have copied WoW's simple system and it would have been better, but they had to make the professions unbalanced as hell. I'm not really sure what they did to improve it because I never looked back after leaving.

Modifié par termokanden, 07 mai 2012 - 07:39 .

[UnstableMongoose]

Skelter192 wrote...

UnstableMongoose wrote...

This MMO did some fantastic things with the crafting system and the social system that I hope never go away. Legacy is cool, conversations are cool, the crew system is very cool. Even if ToR doesn't become a long-term success, with luck, you'll see some of those principles adopted by other companies.

As someone who loves a good crafting system and spent a couple of years playing as a crafter alot of the time in SWG, EQ2, Eve Online and others I don't see what's so fantastic about TOR's crafting. It's ok for a themepark but well it's no way how they had said it would be. It's definitely improved but I just don't get it.

Personal preference, I suppose. I was just glad they had done something different. When you were leveling your crafting along with your character, it geniunely felt like you were getting a significant benefit out of it almost all of the time. Being able to shore up the weaknesses in my acquired gear and outfitting my companions with crafted armor while leveling was nice, and I didn't have to stop leveling to go do it. It was all accomplished through the crew system. I didn't have to go stand at an anvil and click on things over and over again for hours.

There were some flaws, most notably Slicing and Biochem being OP as all get-out, and high-level crafting being disappionting compared to low-level crafting. But everyone's got flaws.

Modifié par UnstableMongoose, 07 mai 2012 - 08:05 .