SWTOR Goes Free to Play

[Caeden]

Thing is, Blizzard isn't held to any standards by most of their fans (me included for a long time) but Cata is still a 2 year xpac essentially and the vast majority of content after the initial raids were rehashes. Biggest freaking mail in I've ever seen from a company like that. Firelands? New map but nary an original boss model outside I think the phoenix. Mechanics I guess were pretty cool and original. However, the zone really lacked diversity. Dragon soul? None of the environments are new and though I only ran the LFR on a SoR come back, outside Deathwing, all models were rehashes with rehashed mechanics. It was phoned in. The five mans were boring as hell too. They just didn't have the character that even the wrath heroics had.

I really wish the SWTOR devs would look more at what Trion has accomplished and on that budget. There's bugs, but for the most part its a great deal of content at a very rapid pace.

Maybe I'm starting to become a cranky old man anyway.

[Kaedis]

Quote:the vast majority of content after the initial raids were rehashes.

"Vast majority"?! The ONLY rehashed content this entire expansion was 4 heroic instances: Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep, Zul'Aman, and Zul'Gurub. Every single one of the 5 raids was original content, as were the other 7 release instances, and the 3 new instances add in 4.3. That's 29% of the heroics for the expansion, and 0% of the raids. Calling that the "vast majority" is exaggeration to the point of blatant dishonesty.

Quote:New map but nary an original boss model outside I think the phoenix.

If new boss models are all you're looking for, you're in for a very long wait. Models are expansive. Hell, most raids in the past featured half or more of their bosses derived from base models, with simply upgraded textures. How about the boss mechanics themselves? Every single one of the Firelands and Demon Soul boss fights are unique from previous content for mechanics, particularly the later-stage bosses. For the few mechanics that had occurred before, honestly, there's only a finite number of ways you can challenge a player...

You can complain about whether you enjoyed it, but putting that under the label of "rehash" is just making it into a catch phrase. None of that content was even slightly rehashed.

Rift has its advantages, but the subscription numbers prove quite inarguably that Blizzard is doing something right that Trion is not. I like Trion more than I do Blizzard, as they are a small development house with no publisher backing them (and thus breathing down their neck about profits), but that doesn't change the objective facts that Blizzard is flat better at attracting and keeping subscribers (by an order of magnitude or so).

[Caeden]

^ You basically twisted my entire post around. I was probably overly harsh, but to hold WoW up, particularly cataclysm, as this major delivery of new and unique content is not feasible either.

I said after the initial raids and about all you can really blast me for is not including "and 5 mans." To me there's rehashing (something consisting of old, reworked, or reused material - random dictionary site) content (which I think could apply to "style" now with the over-reliance on Daily Quests) and rehashing assets. Raids, the freaking centerpiece of WoW, shouldn't have rehashing of models or major mechanics when you've got a 6-7 month dev time to deliver what amounts to 7 bosses. Ultimately, Cata was simply a "milking" of the player base. The content delivery was every bit as slow with much more stuff "re-used" and much less content in general per patch.

4.1 - Absolutely mailed in. It was egregious.

4.2 - The fights I said were cool and interesting. I blasted the models and environments. They sucked as far as being "interesting" compared to Ulduar, any TBC zone, parts of ICC, and so on. Models in TBC were rarely re-used. I'm sitting here and outside of Hyjal which was all re-used models from what I can remember, nothing was re-used fully. Ulduar hardly re-used any boss models and certainly not environments. Maybe a better way was saying the zone lacked "soul?"

4.3 - Dragon Soul took hardly any art assets outside of Deathwing. Those environments were plucked straight from their database. Most mechanics are variants of stuff that's been seen before, outside of the Spine fight although you could argue that was a variant of any other add fight.

Maybe they are just truly out of ways to "challenge" players. I put challenge in quotations because it wasn't difficulty I was talking about. WoW has bar-none the hardest content available. Maybe Rift is close, but new "mechanics" are not really flowing from WoW a lot.

As far as retaining players, I'd argue a LOT of it is "group-think" mentality mixed with time investment. Combine that with most MMO's, including SWTOR, being a derivative of WoW (I don't forgive Bioware for its blatant plagiarism of WoW either), and its hard to pull someone in. Its almost that every MMO is trying to pull off what Google+ tried to pull off against Facebook. People get attached to their character and asking someone to leave that is difficult. Combine that with the basic "WoW-cult" atmosphere I've seen every time I've tried a new MMO, and its a recipe for disaster for a competitor. The only thing that will get new subs will be Titan. Blizzard can march out the equivalent of a giant turd and they will grab a LARGE sum of subs. (though I think its going to be a B2P game...)

Most people in my former guild did not switch to SWTOR and, in fact, did their best to provide "bad word of mouth" without logging in a single time. The irony is its the same damn game they're playing. My fundamental "experience" in my mind didn't change between the two. Ultimately, Blizzard's biggest asset isn't what they're doing so much as it is the blindly faithful. Sort of like Star Wars fans that will defend Lucas to the end even in light of the new Trilogy being abhorrent. (No, cata wasn't that bad! Just making an illustration! I liked Cata more than Rift honestly.)

[gomonster]

(08-01-2012 10:21 AM)Sheriden Wrote:  Surprised this isn't on the front page news or posted already!

But BioWare annouced SWTOR is going free to play this fall.

Here's my overview video for anyone who wants the details and interested in my thoughts on this change.





Here are all the links you'll need:

Announcement:
http://www.swtor.com/info/news/blog/20120731

Subscription vs Free to Play differences
http://www.swtor.com/free/features

Main Info (inc how many credits you may get)
http://www.swtor.com/free

SWTOR Free to Play FAQ
http://www.swtor.com/support/helpcenter/6449


What do you think about these changes?

does that mean ,i dont need to buy cdkey and time card ?

mmogarden