LAWL

[GSBmodders]

Bioware's old republic is going free to play, honestly this game needs a fucking mercy killing already. Where the fuck is Jack Kevorkian at now that he is needed?

 

 

Starting in November 2012, players will be able to access levels 1-50 of the storylines for Star Wars: The Old Republic for FREE!

 

Gaming industry news source Gamasutra.com reports: "After less than a year on the market, The Old Republic is going free to play. In November, Electronic Arts plans to add a new free-to-play option on top of the existing subscription service, allowing users to play any character class up until level 50, albeit with a few restrictions on accessing new content and other game features."

 

A "free to play" business model is a method of publishing games most commonly seen in social (Facebook) and mobile games; but is also an expanding model for MMOs. It's often a switch made when a game starts to see falling subscription numbers. By allowing free access to games, a company can boost the number of participants, and instead supports the operation of the game (servers and new content) by allowing premium access and items to players willing to pay.

 

The news from EA follows on other disheartening numbers from the MMO standard, World of Warcraft, which lost 1 million subscribers in the last 3 months.

 

It also comes after significant bad news from the BioWare Austin studio which developed the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. The studio has been forced to lay off a number of employees since the game's debut while key staff like executive producer Rich Vogel have since left the company.

 

Hopefully, the change will be for the better for fans of the franchise who haven't had the opportunity or funds to give the new game a try. BioWare regulars will certainly recognize familiar characters and archetypes that have characterized the studio's productions, and for fans of games in the sci-fi genre, The Old Republic may present itself as a diverting follow-up for those seeking something after the recently concluded Mass Effect franchise.

 

[Ark of Truth]

Wow that is unexpected. I wonder if I can get a refund on my retail copy.

 

I very much don't you are going to get the full use of the product though when it is F2P.

 

We will just have to wait and see.

[windpl]

Wow that is unexpected. I wonder if I can get a refund on my retail copy.

 

I very much don't you are going to get the full use of the product though when it is F2P.

 

We will just have to wait and see.

 

Not really, at last half of people interested in this title knew it will happen eventually.

 

If you used key, you won't. If not hurry, and return game to store or sell it (soon they will drop price really hard)

[Jexsam]

Anyone with a functioning brain that could take off their fanboy goggles for a minute could see this thing was doomed from the start. Everything about it screamed "lousy WoW clone". Its only selling points were story, VO, and the name Bioware on the box. It did nothing truly new or creative, banking on Star Wars fans being dumb enough to play WoW with a Star Wars skin.

 

Not that I have much room to talk about stupid decisions, I have an LTS to Star Trek Online. But at least STO has interesting types of gameplay between the pseudo-3D space combat and shooter-ish ground combat.

[Ark of Truth]

Well I played The Old Republic for about a month and it was a good game and it fitted in with the knights games but I kept thinging something was missing from the game.

[HanPL]

The game is missing on thing.

Players lol.

Right now SWOTOR have less than 1 milion players that's why they decided to switch to F2P asap.

[Mashi]

Last time I heard, they were just shy of 450k active subs, which means it was just breaking even.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

At some point George Lucas thought about touching a possible keyboard that might in some universe be used to help maybe write even a fraction of one percent of one percent of one millionth a percent of the code for a possible version of the game that was then maybe scraped because it sucked.

 

Therefore, the game failed.

[CaptainChaos]

Wow that is unexpected. I wonder if I can get a refund on my retail copy.

Not really. They've been hemorrhaging subscribers since the game got out of it's free month. What little worked well (such as PvP balance' date=' which was good no matter what people tell you otherwise) was destroyed after 1.1. The game had to survive on it's story which just doesn't cut it in an MMO. And as "good" as the storys were, they were still just rehashes of shit SW fans have seen for the past 40 years. What little originality Bioware injected into the story was just rehashes of overused fantasy cliches. That's really what SWTOR is, Fantasy cliches with SW assets.

 

And don't get me started on the design team for the gear. It's much more akin to a cheap fantasy MMO rather than Star Wars. Didn't really matter though because the game is so damn ugly, Jedi Academy had better looking textures and had actual lightsabers rather than the glow sticks we were stuck with in SWTOR.

 

I very much don't you are going to get the full use of the product though when it is F2P.

You'll basically have access to all 8 "single-player" storylines, which is all the game has that polished anyway.

 

Not that I have much room to talk about stupid decisions' date=' I have an LTS to Star Trek Online. But at least STO has interesting types of gameplay between the pseudo-3D space combat and shooter-ish ground combat.

[/quote']It took Cryptic months to make STO ground-combat anything resembling "fun" and it still sucked. I really enjoyed the space combat, but it was also hella-broken if you knew how to build your ship right. The game just lacked any depth and ended up going the same route as SWTOR: "HEY remember that show you liked! Here's a game built on nostalgia! PLEASE BUY OUR GAME!"

 

This is my problem with big license games like this. Try finding a WoW player who knows anything about the lore. Meanwhile, STO and SWTOR have nothing but call-backs to much better content. SWTOR has been pushing HK-51 (a character from KOTOR2). Nothing original there. But they also already had him coded into the game (they just pulled him out), so they're really just ripping off their own game at this point because they can't come up with anything original. Of the other "cool" upcoming content is just crap from the movies (Rancors and Sith Chairs and Carbonite Han OH MY!)

 

STO had the Galaxy-X from Next Gen. They got people to whore out for friends to join the game, then just said "screw it" and charged $30 for it on the C-Store. That and hundreds of bridge packs. The game had the best character creator I've ever seen though. BW should have just bought the program from them because what we ended up with in SWTOR was terrible.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

Star Wars itself is nothing but fantasy cliches in a space setting, so it's cliches with cliches still in space.

[Kodiak]

Star Wars itself is nothing but fantasy cliches in a space setting' date=' so it's cliches with cliches still in space.

[/quote']

 

There is a reason for that you know... it created those cliches. The original trilogy would not have been nearly as successful as it was if it had been cliche from the beginning.

 

Now, more on the mark about STtoR.

 

I'm not surprised in the least this finally occured. There was some murmurs about this a couple of months ago where EA quickly dismissed the dip in subscriptions. Having played the game for about a 5 month period, I will admit the game was lack luster. I often discribed it to friends as Warcraft in space. MInd you, I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I played SWG until Lucas Arts broke it with that bullshit NG patch. I was among the excited when I heard it was coming out, and I'm now among the dissapointed in its current state. The only thing the game has going for it was the voice acting.

 

The real culprit in all this isnt so much BioWare in my mind. Even though people are still pissed at the ME3 fiasco, I strongly believe that EA is more at fault here then anyone else. They've always been greedy money grubbing cock suckers who area always looking for the next big cash cow and they felt SWtoR was it. I get the impression that EA felt that the Star Wars name alone was going to make the game successful.

 

Another force I feel is at play here is that the bulk of MMO players are fed up with paid subscriptions. They've been raped for years at $15 a month for content that rarely changes. With other games proving that F2P business models can work, I think people are start to expect the otherall shift in the industry. The dipping numbers over at Blizzard supports this. A game that has thrived for 8 years now but has never really changed. People are figuring out that its not worth paying $15 a month for a level grind.

 

In the past, the industry was able to strong-arm the customers into dealing with it, due to the limited MMO products onthe market. That isnt the case anymore, MMOs are a dime a dozen now. Star Wars wasn't worth the money to me... so I went back to Star trek. Why? I have a LIfetime subscritoin that has already paid for itself. Sure the content may not be as vast or new as STtoR, but I'm not getting juiced each month either.

 

If EA had approuched the SWtoR release with any real intelligence and market research, they would have predicted this as a potential hazard and followed the F2P model from the beginning.

 

In order to stay competitive in any sort of business or industry, you have to keep up with current market trends. The current MMO trend is to follow a F2P model and its EAs own fault for ignoring that.

 

Do I think a F2P model will save SWtoR?

 

No, I don't. Mainly becuase I don't have any faith in EA's ability to run the model effectivly. I can certainly be proven wrong, but I expect EA to do what they've always done and try deperatly to squeeze the customer for every penny until it drys up, and then they'll pull all funding resources. No resources means no new content. You see where I'm going with this.

 

I do apologize for turning this into a lecture. Didn't mean for it to get that long but needless to say I'm not a fan of EA or thier business ethics.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

No, Star Wars DID NOT created those cliches; it merely adapted them for a space setting. And because it became so popular, people attribute them to Star Wars first without realizing that they're far older than Star Wars.

[Jexsam]

Star Wars itself is nothing but fantasy cliches in a space setting' date=' so it's cliches with cliches still in space.

[/quote']

 

There is a reason for that you know... it created those cliches. The original trilogy would not have been nearly as successful as it was if it had been cliche from the beginning.

 

You're joking, right?

 

Star Wars is a pretty textbook retelling of the classic journey of growth. Every cliche that has existed since people were writing stories is present. The sword of light, for instance; a magical blade that can cut through nearly anything with ease. It's just Excalibur, or Perseus' crescent sword, or Thor's hammer. Then you have the old mentor, sort of like Tireseus, the seer Odysseus went to. Being thrust against impossible odds is just as old hat. Odysseus, again, was against the elements and some angry deities. Star Wars only created an interesting universe, nothing more.

 

The reason it was so successful was a combination of having great effects for the time, and having a very well-executed retelling of many classical themes.

[CaptainChaos]

Star Wars itself is nothing but fantasy cliches in a space setting' date=' so it's cliches with cliches still in space.

[/quote']Eh? Not so much. The original team cobbled of lot of the original trilogy together from WWII imagery, Japanese culture (Bushido and wandering Samurai being two examples) as well as some Shakespeare and other assorted mythologies (so, there's some fantasy elements in there). Lucas always seemed to be much more inclined to "rip-off" reality with SW. If you ever checked out the new clone wars cartoons, you see it evident immediately with the way he parodies the old WWII propaganda movies.

 

The problem is when a company like BW gets ahold of the SW license. What they release is either direct rips from other SW IP (hey look another wise-cracking smuggler with his wookie companion) or just overused fantasy cliches right out of D&D. Looking at where BW got their start, it isn't surprising.

 

Ever notice how many "ancient evil" galaxy controlling races exist in SW-EU with the capability to destroy everything that you don't see in content supervised by Lucas? This makes sense in something like Star Trek. But with a galaxy spanning empire like in SW? Not so much.

 

Another force I feel is at play here is that the bulk of MMO players are fed up with paid subscriptions. They've been raped for years at $15 a month for content that rarely changes.

I like your post and this is a good point. WoW lost 2 million (last I checked) subs not because people were tired of paying $15 a month for content. They lost subs because cata just kind of sucked. A big part of this was the backlash from alliance players because while all the content was hit or miss' date=' Alliance really got no content of note. This boiled over bad with the "kill faggot Alliance" video made by a bunch of neckbeards which [i']they played at Blizcon.[/i]

 

Oh yea, and the Cata Ending with the aspects saying "My planet needs me, I must go."

 

But people still keep going back to WoW because, for the most part, the content move is either ahead or parallel. Yea, there's no more epic Alterac Valley games, but there's still the ridiculously hard raid content (which SW can't even begin to compete with. We were 9/10 nightmare after a month of operations. We would have been 10/10 but SOA is so goddamn buggy). There's more I won't go into to try and keep this on-topic. Meanwhile, BW has constantly been narrowing the scope of SWTOR with regards to PvP, basically giving no reason to even leave the fleet at level 50.

 

But seriously, The content in SWTOR is bad. "Payment in kisses" hahahahaha, oh damn.....

[Guest]

Absolutely pathetic, but completely unsurprising. I knew EA was going to fuck up yet another game, yet another license, and yet another game developer with their bull shit practices. Did you guys know that SW:TOR lost over 400,000 subscribers previously?

 

This is absolutely hilarious.

[Kamen Rider Kuuga]

Well to be fair to EA, NOBODY could do an MMO of Star Wars well enough to keep it purely pay to play for any long span of time. WoW was a one in a quadrillion fluke; nobody can replicate it.

[Irishredneck]

I disagree BaconMinion. GuildWars 2 may be the one to kick WoW off in it's "pay to play" throne. I've been playing the beta and it's echelons above what Blizz has.

 

GW2 will go live on the 28th of this month.

 

Did I mention you DO NOT pay a monthly fee to play?

 

OOps.. re-read your post.. nothing to do with Star Wars or space.. never-mind.

[Mashi]

I'll be honest, I heard people saying the same thing about the last 8 or so MMO's to come out from people too.

[GSBmodders]

Well to be fair to EA' date=' NOBODY could do an MMO of Star Wars well enough to keep it purely pay to play for any long span of time. WoW was a one in a quadrillion fluke; nobody can replicate it.

[/quote']

 

a true open world pvp system like ncsoft delivered with it's launch of lineage 2 back in the day would have propelled TOR to the top of the charts. MMO Gamers want PvP. What they dont want is a massive grind. Had NCsoft learned that lesson sooner lineage 2 would still be pay to play itself as it stands however it had an extremely long run due mainly to it's abilities to satisfy the pvp junkies like myself