It has been a tumultuous time for Bioware and EA lately. The layoffs, server mergers, and plummet in stock price has been a pretty grim omen for the game manufacturer. SWTOR and Bioware have been receiving some tough criticisms from the gaming community and its sad to see such negativity because honestly I really enjoy playing SWTOR. I would say I enjoy it more then WoW and a lot more then Diablo III (I just couldn’t get into Diablo III – I like DC Universe Online more then D3, but I digress).
All the things people complain are wrong with the game I don’t see as negatives. I enjoy the story, the quests, the gameplay, the feel of the game. I love how crafting works, combat, instances, raids, pvp and traveling between planets is an appropriate concept for the game because its freaking Star Wars! In fact there is very little that annoys me about the game; the harsh feedback and whining from the gaming community is more annoying then anything in the game.
Yes, it plays like WoW so I would agree that one could loosely suggest its a WoW clone, but when did that become a negative? It seems to me that creating a clone of a previously successful game was the formula for success. Case in point: WoW was labeled as a clone of EverQuest and some may even argue that EverQuest was a clone of something older then it (perhaps Lineage or Ultima Online). The point is, games are made to parallel their predecessors or competitors to entice players to try their game. The more alike the game is to something they have played before, the easier it is to keep them playing it.
I have no control over the destiny of SWTOR. If Bioware has to shut it down then I am going to try to keep playing it until that day. I do think that if they were successful in going to a Free-2-Play model they may see people come back in droves because it really is a fun game. The risk though is now that they are consolidating servers, if they get a sudden influx of returning (or new) players, it may cause over-population and performance issues. It’s a difficult line to walk especially since gamers these days are so fickle and the market is saturated with so many games.
In the end, these games are a business and therefore they must make money. I trust that Bioware and EA will do what is necessary to keep producing great games. Who knows, perhaps those people that are constantly whining and complaining are the minority because the people that are content with the state of the games are too busy playing them instead of crying to complete strangers (who don’t give a rip) on the Internet.
Cheers!
