Star Wars The Old Republic: what went wrong?

A well known computer gaming company, Bioware, attempted to produce a video game set in the universe of the Star Wars science fiction fantasy saga.  However, the game failed to catch on and from what I have been reading the team who created it and, in the case of an on going game would be expected to maintain it, has largely moved on instead of being retained.

Here is an article from Forbes about Five Lessons Learned as SWTOR Surrenders.

Apparently, from reading the article cited and looking at screenshots in it and elsewhere on the web, the game tried to outdo Blizzard's WoW by adding lots of glitz; cut scenes, video presentations conveying the backstory, etc.

But a lot of the glitzy stuff did not really make the game more fun, it sounds like.  The screen, I notice, looks really fancy and slick.  However, SWTOR left out some important things that World of Warcraft has always had going for it.

WoW supports addons to let developers customize specific aspects of the game's presentation/interaction and really, I think, add a lot more handy information in it.  There are entire web sites that explain in a wiki based format the stuff that is in the game, the stuff you do in the game, and so on.  It is actually pretty complex in terms of the number of details that are out there.

So these addons sort of soften the blow of not having as much information as you would like available to you.

If Blizzard took upon itself to provide every panache then it would be hard to ever finish anything, and the game would be huge with each person finding much to it that they felt was unnecessary.  The game would be huge, and a lot of that extra stuff would be regarded by bloat by people even if there was disagreement about what was bloat and what was impossible to do without.

SWTOR does not provide the ability to customize the game with community written addons.  Right there, that should be a warning that something which matters a lot in many ways is missing.

WoW also provides the ability to write macros.  Anybody can write a macro.  They allow a user to specify more than one action that might be performed when a user presses a certain key or clicks a certain button on the screen, sort of.

I say sort of because, c'mon, Blizzard is not going to provide a way to kill every monster in shooting range by pressing one key one time.  In fact, Blizzard bans that sort of thing both explicitly with rules that they keep presenting to their users pretty frequently, as well as making the game program itself just scoff at the notion that a whole symphony of character actions should take place with one key press or button click.

That being said, Blizzard makes macros powerful enough to be far from pointless in the game.  For one thing in some ver special cases, two actions can be performed in response to one action taken by the user.  They are not very consequential results but beats having to do it as discrete things.

The bulk of macro actions in battles serve one of the two following purposes.  The game can be offered choices based on the target and other circumstances and take different actions based on the context at the moment.

That is pretty handy.  Aside from not needing to move your fingers to a different place to do the different actions, you do not run out of keys on your keyboard and buttons on your screen.  There are finite limits to a computer user interface.

The other thing is that Blizzard will gladly allow you to tell the game to preform different actions each time you press a given key.  So, if you want to do a series of attacks when the key is pressed repeatedly, then cast a heal on yourself, and then do it all again over and over — you can do so.

Blizzard is not against simplifying game play.

The gist in part of what they absolutely do not want is to have the game botted (controlled as if by a virtual robotic player) to the point where the user can just walk away and check back later to find out how much gold the game made for him while he was gone, how much stuff the game killed for him, how much material the game farmed for him and then sold or crafted into stuff that could be sold.

The other part is they do not want people charging money to in effect be your virtual bot or gopher or whatever.  Allowing some people to do that would eventually wring all of the fun out of the game for everyone else.  Some guy would spend $50,000 to become uber powerful in the game and then act as a gatekeeper for other people to be able to have fun, or something crazy like that.  Plus, it would start getting regulated as if the things inside the game were real, which they are not.

But SWTOR does not provide a WoW like macro facility either.  There is just a small selection of buttons on the screen and you click them with your mouse or hit keys to make them take actions.  It is pretty simplistic compared to WoW which has a much richer way to interact with the game.

It seems like what SWTOR provided was a lot of eye candy.  WoW is successful because it provides opportunity and a bit of a demand to think.  In its own way, SWTOR probably did too but I think ultimately it was not engaging enough and people grew weary of it.

The article also indicates SWTOR took $400 million to develop. That is a lot of money.  It is just a computer game.  Ultimately, it just did not generate enough to recoup its costs and cover its ongoing overhead.

Blizzard was fortunate and intelligent in that there is not a lot of intellectual property in terms of the story that they have to pay license fees for.  Blizzard basically made up the WoW story from scratch by being or hiring very good story tellers.

Now that Star Wars is part of Disney, they own a lot of intellectual property encompassing stories, music, video, and so forth.  No doubt they can try something like this again, fixing some mistakes made in SWTOR.  Eventually, I think they will get it right and I do believe they actually will have another go at it.

Things did go wrong but in a game, that happens every now and then.  You just try to do better in the next round.  In this case, the game sort of failed because maybe it just was not fun enough.  All the work was supposed to create something that was fun entertainment, not just look good.

According to a forum post for SWTOR three months ago, the SWTOR game did not fail.  So time will tell what all this really means.