I know that a lot of MMOs have come and gone, and despite optimistic predictions, none of them have yet knocked WoW off its pedestal. But there seems to be a perfect storm brewing in this case, with SWTOR around the corner and WoW subscribers dropping like flies. Practically every single person I have played WoW with over the last 9 months is talking up this goddamn game like it’s the MMO messiah.
I don’t want to switch games (and neither did a lot of people playing Everquest when WoW came out). I don’t care for Star Wars, either. But if everyone I like ends up leaving WoW, I won’t really have a choice (since I play WoW to satisfy social needs more than for the game itself).
Is SWTOR going to live up to all the hype? Has the WoW-killer finally come along? I mean logically, WoW won’t exist forever, so it has to be killed by SOMETHING. With very few exceptions, *everyone *I know is talking about switching to this shit. Should I wait it out like I waited out Vanguard and Guild Wars and Rift and Warhammer Online, etc? Or would it be worth going with them? I would be very unlikely to play two mmos at the same time. I’m a one-game woman.
If I end up switching games with these motherfuckers, and it doesn’t live up, and they all come back to WoW dragging their tails in shame (and dragging me back with them), I’m going to be really pissed about wasting all that time and money.
It’s Star Wars. Nerds like Star Wars. To people I know, they are ready for something to come along that’s like World Of Warcraft, but with different subject matter.
First off, I wouldn’t go cancelling your subscription. SWTOR is actually somewhat behind the curve as an MMO, little more than WoW with better graphics and a different skin. They’ve also sank a ludicrous amount of cash into it. It looks good, of course - but whether or not it will succeed is a harder matter. MMO’s have done much better positioning them as “something different” than “WoW killer.”
Second, they people I mostly see talking about switching over are semi-hardcore players: not hardcore enough to be invested in WoW specifically, but invested enough into gaming that they care. That’s not a tiny base, but it may not be enough to build a game on.
WoW has been played to death, despite the new content, it’s not new, no matter how much they add it’s STILL WoW, same story, same classes, same general mechanics. As good as it gets, there’s only so long you can play one game without being burned out.
People really, really want KOTOR 3. They’re willing to pay a monthly fee just for the story, and many of these people will likely drop it after they get all their characters up.
Bioware is the first real powerhouse to challenge Blizzard. Most of the other studios, while well liked (Age of Conan headed by Funcom, of The Longest Journey fame), don’t have the reputation Blizzard did even before WoW. I think, purely honestly, that the only two companies in the west that can possibly challenge Blizz in terms of polish and fan love are Valve and Bioware, both companies with a “when it’s done” attitude, and known for extreme quality (except with a few blunders, see Dragon Age II). Bioware has something the other “WoW killer” companies didn’t: name recognition and a rabidly devoted fanbase. Almost every other Western studio isn’t referred to by studio, while you may occasionally hear someone refer to an “Epic” game or an “id” game, the games stand and fall primarily on the recognition (or lack thereof) of the series itself, not the studio that makes it (note that I said Western, I know for Eastern companies you have your Square Enix and Nintendo, and maybe Bandai Namco). The only other company I can think of that this may be true for is Rockstar, but I don’t think they quite approach the godlike status of Valve and Bioware.
Thing is, that is already a lot to ask and a lot to achieve.
I’ve been keeping up with the hype, the beta leaks and the speculation threads on old MMO forums with a bunch of grizzled EQ vets muttering into their beards, and I’m pretty sure this game will sell a ton of boxes and digital copies. What I don’t know (and probably nobody does) is what sort of subscriber retention numbers it will have.
I cannot express enough my admiration for Blizzard and what they’ve done with their franchises. Amazing company. But they’re boring people out of WoW; the subscriber base is stagnant, for a wide variety of reasons and decisions too long to get into.
But that is to be expected. It’s a one in a million shot that WoW can retain its status as king of MMOs. It can’t keep the hard core nerd-regiment that plays 40 hours a week happy while enticing new players in and keeping the casual customer happy and always staying on top of things technologically. Someone will beat them.
Could it be Bioware and SWTOR? Well, maybe.
On the negative side, it does sound like just another MMO.
On the plus side, though:
It comes in with about the most awesome branding you can possibly ask for. Not only do you have Star Wars branding, but for the dedicated video game nerd it’s tied it with one of the great masterpeices of PC gaming.
Bioware is not some bunch of idiots. These people have been making unltra high quality RPG games for a long time.
It doesn’t have to be THAT different. The mix of traditional MMO and Bioware’s RPG interface and storytelling… I gotta tell you, I wanna play this.
I’m currently in the beta, and I can’t say much due to the NDA, but I will say that if you like persistent worlds, mmo’s in general, or social gaming regardless of setting, you will at least enjoy the time you spend in this game.
Amplify that further if you are a star wars or mass effect/dragon age fan.
If you dislike the above, wait where you are until folks prove where they are going to bunker down. Worst case is that you have to make new friends, I guess.
But we already had Star Wars. And not weak tea “old republic” Star Wars, I mean proper Star Wars, with the Empire and Luke and Vador and Stormtroopers and everything.
Old Republic Star Wars isn’t weak tea. It’s Star Wars without Lucas screwing it up. Isn’t that what you really want?
Ask me questions. I haven’t signed any NDAs at all. The PvP is fun, and not too frustrating. The spaceflight is too hard, but that’s fine, it’s just Starfox and not really related to the rest of the game.
The animation is outstanding.
The quests are… well. They’re an experience. It’s about what happens to your character during the quest, not about the ten mole asses you shoot. You will be shooting a lot of mole asses.
It might be a lot to ask for and achieve but when your main source of income is going to be “bored ex-WoW players” and you end up feeding them more of the same you are going to end up disappointed. Rift is suffering because of this, they have what is basically a “better WoW” but people are so tired of the formula that they don’t last in games like this anymore.
This is what you are going to get from SWTOR: hub based questing (kill 10 of this monsters, collect 8 of this thingies, go here and click on this thing, follow this guy around and protect him, congrats now go see this guy on the next hub/zone and do the same things again). Battle grounds you need to grind for pvp gear while being dominated by geared players, regular dungeons where you can gear up so you can do hard dungeons where you can gear up so you can raid a zone that lets you gear up so you can raid the next one. Reputation grinding, daily quests, node farming for crafting. etc etc etc, if you are ready to quit WoW you are already sick of everything that SWTOR is based around.
An MMO doesn’t have to have WoW’s 10-12 million subscribers to be financially successful, does it?
As far as I know, Star Trek Online only has one game “server” (probably a different physical server for each “zone”, but everyone in the Sirius Sector sees every other player in the Sirius Sector). I haven’t been to the end game zones (level cap is Vice Admiral or so, my highest is Rear Admiral, Lower Half ( :rolleyes: at rank title). But anywho, I don’t get the impression that this title is going to die out.
EvE is doing well, LoTR Online, City of Heroes, D&DOnline are hanging in there.
(Dunno about Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Champions Online, or DC Universe Online. Is there a place where I can see subscription numbers?)
Certainly not. But there’s a difference between a financially viable game being launched and The Next Incredible Thing That’s Going To Be As Awesome As WoW. I don’t even necessarily blame Bioware/Lucasarts for that tag, even though they’ve been doing well with the hype. Get a bunch of fanboys excited over something and they’ll jabber endlessly about it. Rift got that treatment before launch and people were talking about it as a WoW-killer, when it’s really just a solid game with a decent dev team.
WoW is weakening, definitely, but going from 3 orders of magnitude ahead of the competition to a mere 2 isn’t exactly time to start talking about its demise.
As for Star Wars: Galaxies, it was handled poorly from the start. Combat was kind of crap, the graphics were kind of boring, and the chosen setting, while iconic, was very restrictive (no Jedi is kind of a dealbreaker for a Star Wars RPG). Everything they did after launch was poorly planned too.
Going to the Old Republic means a lot more freedom to play with the setting, and they’ve pretty cleverly twisted things so that there are a lot of parallels to the Rebels versus the Empire anyway. I don’t know how the actual gameplay will stack up, but they’ve managed to make TOR look a hell of a lot more enticing than Galaxies.
In order of number of subscribers, highest to lowest (including the amount of subscribers at the time of cancellation in the case of recently-shut down games Tabula Rasa and Matrix Online with Star Wars Galaxies still chugging along until this December):
150,000 - 1,000,000 subscribers
Second Life, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy XI, Everquest, EVE Online, Everquest II, the soon-to-be-late Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, City of Heroes
SWTOR has cost several hundred millions to make, none of those other games even come close to that budget. Not even WoW cost half that. This needs to be a huge hit, hanging around like other non WoW games would be seems as a massive failure.
If you play in the beta, you have agreed to the NDA. For the most part, the worst that has come of releasing info is the loss of beta accounts, but they do have grounds to do more if details get released. You’re welcome to divulge what you wish, of course, but I’ll stick with vague overall impressions myself.
Sez you. I was in on the first day. It was nice and all, made a killing harvesting stuff, pumped up my music skills… but there was nothing to do except go someplace, take a mission to kill a nest of critters 100m thataway, kill them, come back, repeat. The PvP aspect was completely busted since Mind was so much harder to buff than the other two stats, meaning there was little reason to play anything but a Rifleman - everybody was running around with like 5000 health & stamina, 600 mind. Squad Leader and Carabineer were badly broken and killed themselves faster than the opposition could. Cooks were completely useless, since their buffs paled in comparison to what the Medics could do, for cheaper too.
Then there was the issue of teamplay being essentially useless - your party’s pistol guys shot at the mob’s health, I shot at their mind, my carabineer buddy shot at their stamina. So basically the mob died thanks only to the pistoleers, of which there were more in my guild :). Of course, you could opt to fire at one bar at random instead, which if the RNG favored you meant downing the mob a tad faster - but that also meant doing shitty damage and most of your abilities becoming useless.
And don’t get me started on the holocron retardedness.
No, really, release-day SWG was baaaaaad. I always hear people bitching about the NCE as the point where it turned shitty, but I didn’t even stay long enough to see that happen.
