Yes, it would be a tragedy to lose such wonderful stories. Just look at TOR's exciting and cinematic storytelling:

So engaging! It's honestly shocking how inept and unpolished the storytelling of TOR is. How is it that Drew Karpyshyn could give us both TOR and this?:

It's like night and day.

From what I've seen, it's hardly the best storytelling of the EU. It wouldn't be a tragedy if it was lost.

Man, it's not fair to compare the game to Mass effect 1. That game's cinematic sequences were so amazing.

@SamDrugbringer said:

Man, it's not fair to compare the game to Mass effect 1.

Why not? They have the same lead writer, are from the same company, use similar dialog wheel systems--you'd think the most expensive game of all time would be able to iterate and improve on its predecessor.

Making an MMO was a huge mistake in the beginning if you ask me. Completely wrong venue for story heavy games.

@SagaciousJones said:

@SamDrugbringer said:

Man, it's not fair to compare the game to Mass effect 1.

Why not? They have the same lead writer, are from the same company, use similar dialog wheel systems--you'd think the most expensive game of all time would be able to iterate and improve on its predecessor.

Uh actually this game had dozens of writers and more dialog in the first 10 levels than WoW had in it's first 60. Did you really think one guy was going to write ALL of it? It was the most expensive game of all time not because of it's design, gameplay, engine, or anything else. It simply had a massive staff of people making it, more voice actors than any other game ever made, and more spoken dialog than all three Mass Effects combined.

Also the above video's are basically trolls. One of them is a crap parody that has nothing to do with SWtOR in the first place and the first one is some guy cherry picking 10 seconds scenes out of like 60 hours of gameplay, likely playing on the lowest graphics settings he could, possibly with drivers he never updated for his graphics card. The only bugs from that entire video I ever saw while taking two characters to max level and two more into the 20's was sometimes someones weapon not rendering, and once out of like..... 100+ times you hopped on a speeder it might not render. I would think that was bad if WoW still didn't have the same bug with mounts. If god knows how old WoW can be forgiven for 1 out of 100 mount uses not rendering than TOR can be too.

@Karkarov: I wasn't posting those to complain about bugs in cutscenes. I was highlighting the emotionless dialog, wooden animations, and completely flat camera which ruins any attempt at cinematography.

Please show me a scene from TOR that's a fraction as engaging or interesting as that Mass Effect scene. I really want to see the best TOR has to offer.

@SagaciousJones said:

@Karkarov: I wasn't posting those to complain about bugs in cutscenes. I was highlighting the emotionless dialog, wooden animations, and completely flat camera which ruins any attempt at cinematography.

Please show me a scene from TOR that's a fraction as engaging or interesting as that Mass Effect scene. I really want to see the best TOR has to offer.

I don't exactly have the footage on me ;p. Is the animations and such in TOR as good as Mass Effect? Of course not. Mass Effect is a single player game that is designed to look as good as it can on a console. TOR is an MMO designed to look okay but be graphically non demanding enough that people can play it on a PC that predates 360's. Apples to oranges.

If you are asking if there are decent, well written, quality conversations or cut scenes in TOR. Yeah, there are quite a few. I would point out though that the vid you linked is based on the Trooper and many scenes are from there class story. This is important because in a different GB thread about TOR I also said Trooper was basically the worst class story.

It seems like they made another KOTOR. The difference is they spent a bagillion times more money than they should have spent, and chose a bagillion times worse business model.

If it ever did die, I just hope there was some way to play the whole thing in an offline mode. They could just re-release it as a single-player KotOR spin-off.

Of course that seems entirely unlikely (that they would re-release it or at least patch in an offline mode), so I can only hope there would be alternative ways to play the game post-death.

@Jazzycola: I think the agent storyline is some of the best stuff they've ever done. So I guess I disagree?

@SamDrugbringer said:

Tor is not the most beloved MMO, by any stretch of the imagination. Most people agree that it going F2P was a sign it was not doing well. Of course, some games going F2P meant they earned LOTS of money, but ToR has a lot of hype to live up to, even now. Another team might want a new SW MMO, and if that happened, ToR might be closed like Galaxy before it.

Now, as much as many people don't like ToR, I know a LOT of people think the storylines in the game are GREAT. When I played, they were by far the best part of the game. When they announced it was going F2P I was excited to see more of them, but hearing some of the restrictions dampened that. That said, there is still the doomsday senerio. If F2P DOESN'T catch on and the game dies, it will all be gone.

Ryan said that the best parts of an MMO are the beginning and the end, and I could kind of see where he was coming from. But in a game like ToR? Where the best part is honestly in the middle? I think losing it would be a huge loss to people who like great stories in games.

The signal to noise ratio just is not there with ToR. Compared to WoW it did seem like they were thinking about story and even humor (Imperial Agent), but it still is an MMO.

If EA were to write a tight single player / co-op single player experience based on ToR it could be pretty awesome though. It is clear that a lot of care and attention went into the game.

@SamDrugbringer said:

@EXTomar said:

Oh and that reminds me of a flaw: Tying gear to the morality system is a bad idea. Gaining light/dark points unlocks gear so why bother asking the player for input?

To be fair Kotor did the same dumb thing, really. Not with gear but you majorly gimped yourself by not going all light or dark in Kotor because of the force power bonuses. I hate morality systems in most games these days.

Yea. Mass Effect had a similar problem at times. It was more beneficial to play either straight blue or straight red. Doing a mix would just limit your options. I'm done with morality systems if that's how they are going to be approached.

@SagaciousJones said:

Yes, it would be a tragedy to lose such wonderful stories. Just look at TOR's exciting and cinematic storytelling:

So engaging! It's honestly shocking how inept and unpolished the storytelling of TOR is. How is it that Drew Karpyshyn could give us both TOR and this?:

It's like night and day.

First, Drew worked almost exclusively on the Jedi Knight story. Second, the audio issues and other quirky bugs have nothing to do with the writing. Finally, you're comparing some of the best cinematic stuff from relatively short singleplayer experience to the game with the most VO and cinematic content ever released--scripting, animation and camera compromises have to be made, and even with these compromises, SWTOR has record-shattering video game budget (at $200 million).

@SamDrugbringer said:

@EXTomar said:

I feel that both Bioware and players where simply mistaken. It is true that story is often just an excuse to perform some repetitive mini-game in the MMOs but Bioware and players failed to realize is that going to the other extreme isn't the fix because they ended up with a rich story that setup the repetitive mini-game. In other words, the silly quest structure was the real issue.

So I'm indifferent about TOR. I might have some great story (dunno...does it?) but if it requires me to pick up N bot power cores by kill X number of rampaging droids, then wants me to be FedEx and take that box over to an NPC on another planet who then wants me to kill an "elite" for an item they have, return it to them so they can assemble the McGuffin then no thanks where it doesn't matter if there is some intriguing dialog at the start and end.

From what I heard, they spent huge amounts of money on all the VAing and stuff, so yes, they might have just focused too much on that and not enough on gameplay.

I LIKE MMOs and I still couldn't like ToR. It's just a badly designed game.

From what I recall of the pre-release coverage, the story and voice acting were really the only things Bioware really talked about for the most part.

@project343 said:

@SagaciousJones said:

Yes, it would be a tragedy to lose such wonderful stories. Just look at TOR's exciting and cinematic storytelling:

So engaging! It's honestly shocking how inept and unpolished the storytelling of TOR is. How is it that Drew Karpyshyn could give us both TOR and this?:

It's like night and day.

First, Drew worked almost exclusively on the Jedi Knight story. Second, the audio issues and other quirky bugs have nothing to do with the writing. Finally, you're comparing some of the best cinematic stuff from relatively short singleplayer experience to the game with the most VO and cinematic content ever released--scripting, animation and camera compromises have to be made, and even with these compromises, SWTOR has record-shattering video game budget (at $200 million).

Honestly, if they didn't want to go all the way with writing every single dialogue option then they shouldn't have made it. I can't even count the number of times my guy said the exact same thing in situations that didn't fit the situation or even fit the dialogue choice that I chose. I get that it's costly and time-consuming, but when the developers were touting their game as a MMO with mass effect dialogue options and voice-acting when in reality my character doesn't have more than 15 phrases in his vocabulary. People can keep throwing the "it's an MMO, of course it can't do that" argument all they want, but at the end of the day the developers themselves were saying if you only like single player games then this is the MMO for you.

@project343 said:

@Jazzycola: I think the agent storyline is some of the best stuff they've ever done. So I guess I disagree?

But, again, if the game isn't fun to play then it's really irrelevant how good the story is, since it'll take you 50-75 hours to actually experience the "full" story.

I played for 20ish days in December and January and I think that it was really well made but I was tired of killing hundreds of trash mobs over and over and over.... I guess that I am just done with mmo's.

Some of the individual stories were interesting after playing a bit through in many of the different classes but it was the rest of the game that was dragging things down (having to repeat a lot of that grind to see a few different things or the combat being rather stale) for me. Think if they went with a smaller co-op sqaud of your friends or a single player game the overall thing would have been a lot stronger game than the mmo which they already had running for years with galaxies, they should have just kept them separate between the single player game & mmo.