Same here. I love the fact I can fire up Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, or PS2 and have a few hours fun without a sub.So now I have tons of free MMO content to go through. They may not be the end-all-be-all MMOs, but for a few hours here and there I'm having a blast. With the bonus of being F2P and leaving time for single player games and RL stuff. With the fact that I can't stand WoW anymore, and there are no future MMO's coming that look interesting to me, this is the best I'm gonna get.
I get what he's saying. I may not like it, but I get it.Making an alien race fully human playable is a huge amount of work, at least if you want to give players the level of customization options that they have come to expect. It takes a lot of work to make all of the customization options work together and look good, while still ensuring people still can find looks that are unique to each other.
The Togruta provide a unique problem in this regard, in regards to the tentacles. Yes, the Twi'leks have tentacles too, but they are typically behind the player, whereas the Togruta's canonically drape across the front of the character. This means that they struggle to work with the existing animations and gear without clipping -- indeed, the first screenshot you see for Ashara if you google her is one with her chin ridiculously clipping through her tentacle. While this may be acceptable for a companion who is frequently offscreen while fighting, or NPCs who we can dress and pose carefully, its much more problematic for player characters who need to be able to wear anything and perform any animation and still look good. (The Twi'leks clip somewhat as well, but much art was tweaked to make this a lot less prevalent than it otherwise would have been)
I'm not trying to pour cold water in the species discussion. Quite the opposite - if the Cathar do well, I hope to expand your options even more, and we should know the answer to that 'soonish'. I just don't want anyone to think that just because an alien is currently in the game as an NPC, that it is trivial to turn it into player art -- it's a TON of work to do that, and do it well.
I'm not giving any credit to EA and wish they would cease to be, but you cannot put the blame for this failure on the publisher who forked out 150-300 mill or whatever more it really was. The same way I'm sure Lucasarts had influence but I doubt they ordered them to hamstring the project. EA and Lucasarts wanted this to be a big hit. Mismanagement, wrong people in important positions, wrong decisions at the start of the project like engine choice, and most importantly living in a bubble for 5 years and making a WoW'07 clone are all grave mistakes made by Bioware.I get what he's saying too, but just like every other "reason" for this game lacking content in whatever form, it turns into complete bullshit when you think that they spent >$100,000,000 developing it. This game was pretty fun for the first few months, I really wanted it to succeed, but looking back it should've been obvious where it was heading when it was released by EA. This is the same company that charges everyone $60 a year for some glorified FPS map packs and roster updates for FIFA.
Which is all pretty spot on. That Engine is a huge factor for what they can and cannot do. High numbers of players cannot be displayed in a timely fashion. Graphics had to be lowered over all just to handle the few that would display. The very idea of having controllable ships, which was the point of Space Hangars (we found out in hindsight) was scrapped because the engine couldnt handle it for whatever reason. Not to mention the fact that without open space, it was just beyond pointless. Open space being a "We'll add that later" kind of thing. Putting the cart before the Horse is stating it kindly. The single player experience that this game offers is fun. But its really disappointing to find out how much better this game could have been if brighter people were put in positions of power.I'm not giving any credit to EA and wish they would cease to be, but you cannot put the blame for this failure on the publisher who forked out 150-300 mill or whatever more it really was. The same way I'm sure Lucasarts had influence but I doubt they ordered them to hamstring the project. EA and Lucasarts wanted this to be a big hit. Mismanagement, wrong people in important positions, wrong decisions at the start of the project like engine choice, and most importantly living in a bubble for 5 years and making a WoW'07 clone are all grave mistakes made by Bioware.
Damion Schubert, he whom I loath and is one of the people I wish had left the project, released this today about adding alien races:
I get what he's saying. I may not like it, but I get it.
I wonder how many subs Star Wars Galaxies had over it's lifetime and the ripple effect of NGE. Galaxies was hamstrung by using the timeframe of the movies and trying to actually create a wholly different game. However, it was something new and innovative before Lucasarts pushed to turn it into a worthless WOW clone.I'm not giving any credit to EA and wish they would cease to be, but you cannot put the blame for this failure on the publisher who forked out 150-300 mill or whatever more it really was. The same way I'm sure Lucasarts had influence but I doubt they ordered them to hamstring the project..
HR at game companies can now have potentials roll up their sleeves during interviews. "... yeah, sorry but no ...."Let's never forget these Heroes
Raided 3 nights a week in this game. Certainly not close to hardcore. Most of the guild 3 months after launch was in full raid gear. We had people getting 4-5 pieces in 1 raid night in less then 2 hours. It turned into now what do we do.I think just like any game, if you go looking for problems, you'll find them. With SWTOR they are little more on the surface than is acceptable (even I'll admit this), but they really have done a lot to resolve many of the issues that plagued the game at release. A lot of the game's failings simply come from the IP and what they didn't do with it. Look at the complaints here. Lack of free form Space and a lack of alien species have been coming up since release.
For PvE people who raid, I think any complaints about the end game are bullshit unless you're clearing Nightmare Mode EC in less than 2 hours. If you're not a raider, then you probably have a legitimate complaint since the only Flashpoint to be added since release was Kaon (which is balls easy, I 3-manned that with our DPS being a PT Pyro and his Battlemaster geared Gault) and Lost Island (which is actually challenging), but they did add the HK-51 questline (which has high and low points) and two new daily quest areas (which actually extend the story a bit). PvP players have the biggest gripe. Ranked is a joke (and I've gone over why previously), the CC is out of control, and there's no real open world PvP going on except anything put together by the players in Outlaw's Den. I think that's the most surprising to me, that with the Dark Age and Warhammer developers in the fold that more hasn't been done to push Open World in a similar vein to those games. I said it before and I'll say it again, but when Dark Age added the ability for guilds to claim keeps, and when my guild went out to Benowyc to claim it, seeing our guild emblem hanging from the walls of the keep remains the most memorable moment in my MMO gaming history. I want more of that, but I've yet to see them capable of delivering that in any capacity.
Uninstalled, and in better games with the other 2+ million who left.I don't care where you stood 3 months after release, the question is where you stand NOW.