Hindsight is a beautiful thing. Anyone that has been involved in a big project knows that the goals at the beginning are barely recognizable when you get to the finished project. That's because things in life rarely go as expected so modifications are made along the way. The key in any project is starting with a good plan and while I'm sure Bioware felt they had a decent idea at the beginning, it appears in hindsight that they made some egregious errors during the planning stage.
Designing the game first as an RPG
Star Wars: The Old Republic was originally designed as follow up single player game to Knights of the Old Republic 2. The game still feels like an RPG that was shoehorned as an MMO. When EA bought Bioware the design of KOTOR 3 should have been scrapped and SWTOR should have been remade from the ground up. Instead, it appears that many of the design elements of the original game effected the end product.
Make your ship the center of the game
When I think of Star Wars I think of the X-Wing, TIE Fighters, and of course the Millenium Falcon. The designers did a great job of designing different ships for the various classes but did little else. I've said a little about it in a previous post but there's no reason players shouldn't be able to call their ship to pick them up to ease travel. It might not be the most realistic thing but it makes gameplay easier/more fun and that should trump realism in a game every time.
Killing the sense of exploration
One of the great things about Bioware's first Mass Effect game is you can explore the entire galaxy and actually land on any planet. The implementation in that game was crude and annoying but the ability to go to any world gave the game a feeling of depth. My hope for Star Wars was to have the ability to visit hundreds of planets like Mass Effect 1. Every planet would have a back story and you'd land on the world and be able to explore at your pleasure. I wouldn't expect these planets to have more than a landing area and a small area of mobs surrounded by mountains. Ideally it would have 1 or 2 quests but the key is just to have ruins/artifacts/raw material nodes to explore. This wouldn't be very popular at the beginning but the key is eventually these planets would be easy to expand for expansions.vvv
Too much emphasis on the class story
The class story is great but it feels disjointed as you work your way through the game. My biggest issue with it is I'd bet between voice acting, quest design, and video implementation they spent at least a third (33%) of their $200 million development money on this part of the game. This is just a guess but I'd bet it isn't far off.
One of the things that Blizzard learned from Vanilla WoW is they were spending an most of their time developing endgame for 5% of the players who could actually complete it. They decided to try to reverse that in following expansions. Many players complained that they were dumbing down the game but it makes sense to focus your money to increase fun for a greater percentage of players.
Compare that to Bioware's class stories. To level a class to 50 takes about 9 days or 200 hours of game time. That means it would take 200 x 8 (or 1600 hours) to experience everything Bioware has included in the game. I'd bet only a few people will level more than 2 characters to 50 which means that 75% (6 / 8) of Bioware's story will never been seen. Put another way, $200 million total cost x 33% for the class stories x 75% never seen is $50 million of the game will never be seen by 99% of the player base.
When you consider that Rift cost $50 million total to make and it had many features missing from SWTOR at launch it is easy to determine that this decision wasn't the best use of resources.
Heroic Quests
These were a total waste of development money. No one runs them because of low populations on all the various planets and there isn't a tool to help form a group.
Splitting the player base in Republic / Empire factions
One of the great things about the Star Wars universe is the battle between light and dark. While this works well in movies it is less useful in an MMO as once you pick a side you are stuck there forever. It also has the unfortunate offshoot of splitting the player base. I've never liked this game design in any game though most MMOs use it. I much prefer the D&D method of alignment which doesn't restrict play between players but does affect interactions.
My preference would be to have a universe where you don't have to pick a side. The first 10 levels would have been on 2 planets -- Korriban and Corruscant. Currently there are 8 class quests for the following:
Sith Inquistor - Assassin/Sorceror
Sith Warrior - Juggernaut/Maurader
Imperial Agent - Sniper/Operative
Bounty Hunter - Powertech/Mercenary
Jedi Knight - Sentinel/Guardian
Jedi Consualar - Sage/Shadow
Trooper - Commando/Vanguard
Smuggler - Gunslinger/Scoundrel
Instead I would propose combining the stories:
Knight - Juggernaut/Guardian
Sage - Sorceror/Sage
Assassin - Assassin/Shadow
Warrior - Maurader/Sentinel
Agent - Operative/Scoundrel
Bounty Hunter - Mercenary / Commando
Smuggler - Sniper/Gunslinger
Trooper - Vanguard/Powertech
The key would be that you'd have a class quest to level 10 and you'd establish your dark/light side leanings at that point but it would mean little as you could quest with anyone. The story would continue not on questing areas but given through your holo terminal once you reached a certain level. You'd then travel to the planet and your quest would continue based on your earlier decisions just like any other Bioware game. This has a few benefits as it allows more role play by the people that like it, immediately ends faction imbalance, and is a much better fit for the legacy system than their current plan. It would also give map designers more options than needing to shoehorn in 20 class specific instances on every planet which makes maps much larger than needed and hogs system resources.
In the end you'd have two ratings. The first would be an Empire/Republic rating as well as a light/dark rating. The light/dark would determine some of your spells and appearance but it would be cosmetic like a sage/sorceror casting rocks/lightning. The Empire/Republic rating would really only affect PVP. I'm sure there would be people that would complain that this isn't realistic as Sith Warriors didn't fight on the same side with Jedi and my response would be two fold. There are many Sith hid their true identities in the Star Wars universe. Furthermore, everyone has the option to join (or form) a Republic/Empire only guild as requirement to entry. Guilds aren't necessarily part of the Republic or Empire. They are like minded individuals with a goal of some sort which doesn't preclude members from having other interests (similar to Scryer and Aldor for Wowheads).
Questing on 15 different planets
Other than peak time, quest planets have less than 10 people on them at any time. When you consider that there are 2 million people subscribing on 200 servers that means are an average of 10,000 subscribers on every server. Most people point to the low population on every planet as proof that the game is failing but when you consider that people are split by faction, only play 1-2 hours a day, and split into 15 worlds (plus fleet/ships/orbitial stations) the average would be (10000 / 2 / 10 / 20) or 25. Add to that when a particular planet gets full they create another phased planet to make sure the game runs smoothly. All this adds to the sense that you are playing a single player game as you rarely run into anyone else.
Get rid of Fleets as hubs
They should eliminate fleets altogether and create three natural hubs for players - Corruscant, Korriban, and Hutta. The main hub would be on Hutta (or Nar Shadda if you prefer) which would be where most of the early questing (10-20) is done in the game. The rest of the game would be played on Tatooine (20-30), Voss (30-40), and Correllia (40-50). Zones would be created on each planet with multiple story lines so players have at least 2 zones they could quest at every level to eliminate repetitive play. Also, flashpoints for that level are on that particular planet so you can quest while looking for a flashpoint group.
Developing the game with an engine that couldn't handle more than 20 people in an area
Bioware denies it but it seems the biggest issue with the game is the Hero engine. The game looks amazing but it seems like the designers have actively worked to keep players as far away from each other as possible. The reason I feel that way is any time I go into the fleet with more than 20 others there is a noticeable slow down in the game and PVP has the same issues. I'm not sure why the system slows down so much but WoW has a much larger contiguous area and rarely has a slow down. If the Hero engine couldn't do the same they should have switched no matter how much it cost. There's no way the game should have shipped if they couldn't put 100 people in world PvP without lag at moderate settings on an average computer. People don't play MMOs for the looks - they play to see a world made up of other people.
Emphasize the fun
The most important thing that was forgotten in the universe is fun. I lost count how many times I saved the universe on my way to max level and after a while it becomes boring. How many times do you walk 50 steps to find something that no one else has been able to do in 400 years? How many times can you steal/save the most important artifact on the planet and get 500 credits in return?
Things like this aren't just repetitive, they're dumb. By level 20 other than my class story I really didn't have much interest in the quests because the writers chose to do the same quest over and over. WoW is a forbidden word to many SWTOR fans but Blizzard really has gotten good at designing quest areas that are fun. Bioware should have taken note.
Summation
The sad thing is most of what I've typed above will never happen because it would cost too much with little return. As I said before, Bioware had $200 million to make the game and blew it in the design phase with the focus it on class stories and forgot why we play the game. Patch 1.2 will make it better and for me it is probably a situation of "too little, too late".
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