SWTOR Former Developer Daniel Erickson Talks About Game Development

Dulfy 82 Comments Aug 22, 2018

Former Bioware developer Daniel Erickson went on Reddit and commented on some of the game’s development process.
Here is the reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/98dckp/built_a_little_early_career_shrine_in_my_office/

SWTOR

I was the first designer on the project, the original lead writer and the first named lead designer (James Ohlen was functionally director and lead designer when we were a smaller team). I designed all the multi-player storyteller systems, planned and led all the chapter 1-3 content, led all the VO, and did the spiritual but not the numbers design for both crafting and the free to play conversion. Plus I wrote and came up with Huttball which I still giggle about.
We never properly priced out the cost of the Darth Malgus statues so lost money on the collector’s editions. Custom packaging, big ol boxes, etc. Also we got basically the most expensive people around to build that admittedly awesome statue. We could have made it up on volume if that was the standard game but of course that doesn’t work with limited editions. Part of why super complex board games mostly disappeared then came roaring back with Kickstarter once they could have an already bought in audience of a size possible to do a real factory run.
At the peak of Bioware Austin SWTOR development, they had 200+ developers with about that many more working offsite, freelance, etc
We started talking about the MMO when we were still making DAO and James’ vision was far more BioWare than MMO. Basically a huge, sprawling, ever expanding BioWare storyline with a multiplayer marketplace, social spaces and PVP. Like Netflix or HBO we were okay that people might unsubscribe for a bit then come back as new content appeared. We have their emails, they have the game, the worst part of marketing is done. “Hey, here’s the next Mass Effect chapter, want in?” seemed like a perfectly reasonable route and we wouldn’t have to start over every time.
As we were sold twice (first to an investment company then to EA) the pressure for this to be the mega hit meant the finger kept being pointed at WoW. The problem of course is when you say “Okay, first we copy the most successful MMO of all time, THEN we…” you’ve pretty much set yourself up for misery. If you stand in the hallway of the first three chapters and don’t look around too much on the sides you can feel what James and I both originally wanted to build but there was no path forward on spending basically all of BioWare’s money and risking everything on a game nobody had ever seen. We actually did try some action combat stuff (saber locking was awesome…until a third person jumped in to shank you) but there were just too many battles to fight at once so we backed off to something safer.
The game didn’t do as well as EA hoped because they wanted to unseat the king (WoW) with the same product instead of leaning into what BioWare was great at. But that never happens and any time your business model is “let’s be the best selling game ever or we lose” well, you can imagine. Guild Wars would not be considered successful under EA’s model.
Writers for the class stories: A couple classes had shared duties due to time constraints, staff changes, etc. more of them, however are one person. Sith Warrior: Neil Pollner. Imperial Agent: Alex Freed. Sith Inquisitor: Rebecca Harwick. Trooper: Charles Boyd. Jedi Consular: Jo Berry.
Hero Engine: That engine. Whew. When I wrote the book on the making of the game I tried to get our original lead engineer, Bill Dalton, to talk about HeroEngine and the lawyers removed every other word he said so I had to ditch the section.

Dragon Age

Getting DAO made was the hardest thing I’ve seen in my career from a marketing perspective. Marketing: “We don’t get it. What’s sexy here? What’s the hook?” Us: “Uh, every time we poll our fans they say they want Baldur’s Gate. So, uh, we’re gonna make Baldur’s Gate.” Marketing: “We don’t know how to sell that.” I did presentations on Dark Fantasy (remember there’s no Game of Thrones on TV yet), we threw some blood all over the place, pointed at the sexy people (hilarious with those graphics), etc. Eventually we basically just wore them down but they were never into it even after the success. Which, and I’m speculating here as I was gone from that team by then (as were all the key leads from DAO), is likely why DA2 and Inquisition both kept trying radically different directions.

General Game Developement

When I went to an interview to direct on Assassin’s Creed (and this was years ago, after AC3 came out) they were extremely proud that “Someone’s always working on Assassin’s Creed!” They had the main studio in Montreal, a studio in Singapore, a team I think in France, something in China, etc. It is not unusual for a major GTA level title to have closer to 1000 people than 100 people now. Just hit that “credits” button and watch it scroll. Development team sizes were about 40-60 for AAA during the changeover to Playstation 2, almost 20 years ago. Now mobile game dev team sizes look like that for AAA. Part of the reason there’s so little experimentation in content but massive experimentation in monetization is that there’s no price elasticity in games: Players don’t want to pay more than $60 if the game costs 12 million or 200 million to make. 10 years ago the guidance we got at EA was a box game needed to sell 7 million units to be worth the effort of doing it, I imagine that’s much higher now.
Post EA takeover I did some soul searching, helped a couple companies get new creative divisions or project concepts off the ground. Moved into mobile to learn more about data and direct consumer interaction (lessons we were woefully ignorant about when we launched SWTOR). A year ago I formed my own narrative studio. Alex Freed (Imperial Agent writer, Twilight Company novelist) came over to be my writing director and you may have seen the news that Drew Karpyshyn (original Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect 1&2 lead writer) left BioWare to come join us.

Nomad

Interesting read indeed!
Musco Sucks

So EA bought it and it became a shit show? Breaking news here people….
- Emprah
  
  Memba command and conquer?
  - vicentejerez
    
    emprah why
Vanguard

Interesting read. Must’ve been pretty unfortunate for the developers to go into a game’s development with the “All or Nothing / Win or Bust” plan. Makes me wonder how development would’ve been handled if EA had a different philisophy towards games.
Darth Cocoabeans

Really good read. Much appreciated. So as stated, they pretty much botched the game trying to mimic WoW. Many MMo’s have tried. None have truly succeeded. They have their own quirks and such….
- abaddonsmummy
  
  Such a shame in modern capitalist society, someone comes up with a great idea, then the money backers say NO, make it like that, that makes money.
  - Darth Cocoabeans
    
    Yeah it’s really disappointing. I think the game would garner a better following if you listened to the players beforehand, not when it seems like to trying to bleed the hardcore folks that still hang around…
- Matthew Langley
  
  Many games have far exceeded WoW, just not in mainstream appeal. Not that I think going in it with the goal to dethrone WoW is a smart goal (or even a worthy goal).
  - Darth Cocoabeans
    
    Indeed. The fantasy crowd will trump the sci-fi/space opera crowd every time…
Jep Fareborn

So some dipshit dev who worked on SWTOR just toots his own horn and deflects blame….
- Disqus this
  
  Pretty much. It’s just so easy to blame EA no matter how he and his team screwed up.
- n7x
  
  He did his job and left bioware in 2012, why would he need to “deflect blame” NOW? He was just answering some questions in comments on reddit after he posted a photo of his cupboard, that’s it. It wasn’t even an interview. Don’t write bullshit if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Slowpoke

Pretty much.

Copying WOW was a big bad idea. Especially when WOW’s model was
already getting old in 2011. And you don’t have the mature playerbase or
the update rate.
frankietheaxe

Interesting read indeed!
eugals

I remember the launch of SWTOR. I was a subscriber from early access day 1.
And in my experience the first huge decrease of the player base happened in early 2012 and the main reasons were:
– Too many bugs and inconveniences for a MMO where people are supposed to comfortably live for months;
– Buggy, glitchy and scarce end-game content;
– Lack of competition which could greatly motivate the dedicated players. No PvP or PVE leader board. Nothing similar to WoW’s armory or armory API, still…
– Did I mention bugs already?

For me personally the problem was not in copying WoW, but rather in not copying WoW wide enough, especially in the parts related to how they’re constantly improving the engine, fixing most annoying inconveniences and inventing interesting ability rotations and game mechanics.

BTW, I agree that the main story lines in first 3 chapters were awesome, but the number of mostly unavoidable side quests on each planet was rather exhausting starting from Tatooine on my experience. I wish they’ve spent less efforts on designing all those small story lines, and invested all the saved money into end-game and the engine.
- BogyOne
  
  I remember spring 2012 as the first downhill of the game. Plethora of servers backfired and it seemed as there wasn’t enough players to put up decent ops groups and that’s why before first server migration I got Nightmare Pilgrim kill which was not only server first but probably server only…
  Then around this time everyone slowed down and were waiting for one event after which they disappeared for good – Diablo III. People simply evaporated from TOR.
  - Matthew Langley
    
    Yup, for me it was even sooner… The game launched right at the long of a couple week vacation from work. I played in Beta but stopped short so I didn’t do all the content (many people had already finished out story lines and said they weren’t playing at launch due to that). I finished the Sith Warrior story in a week, loved every moment of it. Then had no clue what to do. Found a lot of others like that too. I remember being so excited when they launched Ilum so there was at least *some* end game style content, but the content was pretty mediocre
- Disqus this
  
  While I think you are dead on with most of that. For the people that I played with it was the ability delay above everything else that killed the game for so many of them.
  
  You might could classify it as a bug but I don’t think it was a bug. It’s was the shitty HERO engine they used. It caused so much of an issue in those early months it was no wonder thousands upon thousands left swtor.
- Matthew Langley
  
  I mostly agree. It was clearly stuck with an identity crisis. From here we can see that was true from the inside. A core group wanted to make a Bioware like game with some online elements. What he said sounds a lot like what was done with Mass Effect 3, a multiplayer mode that’s pretty good, DLC style content, maybe they wanted to go a step further.
  
  Then EA wanted a WoW clone MMO to appeal to the mainstream. This was so clear about the game at launch. We basically had a crappy WoW clone with a portion of a KOTOR 3 buried in it. The KOTOR 3 part was actually pretty good (though probably not as good as if they had just done that of course) and the WoW clone part was bad. I agree that having gone the full MMO route they needed to just make it an MMO first. Instead people played it a lot like a KOTOR 3. Jump in, finish the game in a couple of weeks and then leave.
  
  A big problem when the vision of the game isn’t unified. It likely could have been a significantly better game if it went 90% in just one direction.
- Paulo Gomes
  
  “For me personally the problem was not in copying WoW, but rather in not copying WoW wide enough, especially in the parts related to how they’re constantly improving the engine, fixing most annoying inconveniences and inventing interesting ability rotations and game mechanics”.
  
  That’s it in a nutshell. If they could copy Blizzard’s competence as well this could have turned out better.
Gratua Cuun

Electronic Arts buys something and we all lose – where have we heard that before?

The Devs vision: KOTOR 3 with an online marketplace and PVP

EA’s mandate: WE MUST UNSEAT WOW!!!!!

The Devs vision: Uh… we’ve… never done an MMO – we’re… we’re bioware – we do-

EA’s Mandate: WE… UNSEAT… WOW!!!! WE… MAKE… MONEY!!!!!

The Devs vision: … … right
Musco Sucks

I’d really love a current version of this, hitting the same notes and topics but on what’s happening now (how many Devs left, issues behind the scenes, etc.)
- abaddonsmummy
  
  That’s what I was hoping to read as I scrolled down.
  The current state of play would be verrrry interesting.
- Drivan
  
  Well if they had 200 dev’s when the game was in it’s prime I can only imagine that they have to be closer to 5 or 10 at the moment. It’s really eye opening to hear that even back when SWTOR launched teh average AAA game had closer to 1000 people working on it and EA gave SWTOR a fraction of that…
  From the sounds of things the online marketplace (Cartel Market) has always kind of been their (EA’s) goal, so I’m not suprised that it became their focus. I like how he call’s EA out telling us that their only focus/vision was to try to unseat WoW, but they didn’t know how to do it and that EA didn’t give them the tools, manpower or time to even attempt to make that happen.
  I loved SWTOR right up until ROTHC and even then I was enjoying it, but realized that they were having trouble. All the stuff leading up to SoR was fun and I actually loved GSF. I was irritated by all the serious glitches in the launch of SoR, I mean how do you launch a paid expansion that was as bad as SoR was that first 2 weeks? Add to it the CONSTANT issues that Ravagers and ToS STILL have….
  I liked most of KotFE, the story was fun, but I was extremely disappointed in the lack of group content. KotET was rushed and disappointing, in the grand scheme of things it was disjointed and they missed SO MANY opportunities for companion interaction that is was almost as if the writers that did KotET have never experienced the stories in the base game. The Command system was mistake and gradually releasing a raid, one boss fight at a time over the course of what, 16 months was a really stupid mistake.
  
  Lets be real, as awesome as SWTOR once was, it isn’t even close anymore. This story shows us that the folks at EA just didn’t get it from the start and when the people who were passionate about SWTOR left the vision died. Perhaps one day before I’m to old to play video games anymore EA will lose the rights to make Star Wars games, Disney will pull its head out of the Bantha poodoo and we will get another great Star Wars game…
Ermagerd

If EA wants to dethrone WoW so bad, they should just BUY WoW and destroy it from the inside like they do every game they buy into.
John Smedley

Really great stuff. He seems like a pretty solid dude. I’m on board with whatever Drew Karpyshyn is doing. He’s my favorite Star Wars author (Darth Bane).
Fubarz

Like always for EA it’s about the easy grab for money little to no effort to get. Copy something half ass from your competition cheap hardware. Stick the name Star Wars to it and you will beat the competition and rake in billions…. When it does not go to plan then go into a corner and sulk, instead of trying to fix it to make it better for the gamer and earn those billions….. Then wonder why millions do not want to buy your future product
Disqus this

The only thing worth reading in all that garbage is the confirmation that the HERO engine is truly the POS we all know it to be.
Фролов Денис

Hey, what’s the studio this guy leads now? Want to take a closer look.
- (-_-)
  
  Fogbank Entertainment, but there is almost no info about their current project
The Crying Man

Unless I’m reading that wrong, they had to get marketing’s blessing to make DAO?
- Deshik
  
  That’s a common practice man, only handful of developers can afford to make a game without beging for money support.
- Matthew Langley
  
  Marketing and usually the higher ups in charge of marketing often have a key role in the exec level of a company and what projects get support. They have to have some confidence it will make money. Fortunately they were able to get them to risk it with DAO. It was pretty risky too, people forget that though a handful of people (like myself) were ultra excited, a lot of people fell either in the camp of it not looking like Baldur’s Gate enough and not actually being that or they just didn’t get what was sexy and exciting about what was demo’d. Graphically the game was just ok and the combat etc and demos were pretty underwhelming. The benefit of a smaller company though, you can usually take some more risks when there aren’t high expectations on your shoulders.
lolipop

Nothing new here….

#FUCKEA

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ohagimaru

Nothing but excuses. Maybe you should just trash this crap and make a new MMO like you said you were going to a year ago? Updated graphics, better combat system-ARPG if possible. This game is old. Let it die. I’ve never played WoW nor do I plan to but I know enough that it has a strong community and it’s the community that keep it thriving. This game on the other hand..its only running on the the name “star wars” it’s quite dead most of the time-except for when you go to town–but hey even Black Desert is packed with people in town….AFKING LOL. I myself only come back to play when there’s a story but other than that I don’t even bother playing the game at all.

Seriously..out of all the game that copied wow…even FFXIV who used some features from WOW didn’t fail as bad..I mean it did the first time but they revamp their game and it’s quite successful now. I playing it myself while crafting atm. Blame your shitty team for your screw up.
- Jase Lerato
  
  He doesn’t even work there anymore.
Need2Crash

why not say EA fuck it up like everything else they get there hands on, EA is not bout the game and more and as far I concerned has not been for about decade or more it about how can the microtransation people to death while doing bare minimum for the game to keep game alive or play able
- Bakgrind
  
  Sad to say but it wasn’t EA that messed up SWTOR . About the only thing that they could be held accountable for was giving Bioware 200 million to build a WOW clone. And Bioware screwed the pooch right off the bat by buying the license for an Alpha game engine from Hero. The MTX was only incorporated to the after it went ftp. Of course having MTX mechanisms in the game could of been the plan all along. But non the less I put SWTOR’s failure at 90% Bioware.
Matthew Langley

A great writeup. I don’t blame EA for being EA, a bit game company focused on mega games (plenty of people clearly like a few segments of those games to sell like crazy). I blame the Bioware founders and execs who sold out to EA. Personally I get it, cache in (I’m in the Game Industry and have gone through various buy outs, all equally ending pretty badly in the long run), but they were the ones that had the passion and care for what they did and chose to sell out over that, blame them if you’re going to blame anyone.
Paulo Gomes

Nice story. One guy’s point of view. I enjoy reading these articles.

But as Backgrind says bellow, I wouldn’t put all the blame on EA. I hate EA as much as the next guy, but there were enormous mistakes made by Bioware. Backgrind already pointed out the Hero engine, KotFE and KotET were NOT on EA’s shoulders. But then again, by that time this guy was gone, so…

At least he ponts out that EA wanted this to be the “WoW Killer”, as I stated many times. And people rose up denying it. Good to know this WAS their plan all along. Even if it’s just one guy’s perspective on things.

Anyways… This has no relevance to the current state of affairs in TOR. This is history. Nice bit of history, but history none the less.

What’s going on RIGHT NOW?? What are they planning? What’s the future for this game?

That’s what I’m interested in. Even if less and less as time passes by, as I spend more of my gaming time on Tamriel…
- Darth Ji’inx
  
  One of my biggest problems with the game is the death of class story content. I understand why it isn’t feasible anymore (time/resources), but I still look back at some of the unused datamined plot elements and think about what could have been…
  
  Honestly, I think they bit off more than they could chew in the quest to make this “WoW Killer.”
  
  Personally, I like the KotFE/ET content, however; I think it would have been a whole lot better if the Outlander was a brand new character (class?) and Valkorion wasn’t Vitiate (still a connection for relevance?). I’m still pleased that Nathema was finally fleshed out with a couple of instances (KotET & FP) and some interesting NPCs (Nathema Zealots, Voreclaws, and Lord Dramath).
  - Paulo Gomes
    
    Right before I uninstalled the game for good, I did a last run of classes I really enjoyed. One last look at all that fabulous content this guy speaks about.
    
    If what he says is true (and we have no reason to doubt that), he’s behind some of the best elements in this game. So this guy was a definite loss when he quit.
    
    In all honesty, I think the guys at BW just had terrible, terrible timing, they seemed to choose the worst possible path whenever they tried to turn the ship around from the dire straits.
    
    There were good moments in Kot**. I won’t deny I enjoyed some of it. But overall it was just the wrong move at the wrong time I think. And the biggest problem for me was that the non-Force user classes just felt out of place in the story.
    
    Ironically the game flopped completely when they seemed to go in the direction of a KotOR 3 semi-thingy…
    - Darth Ji’inx
      
      The non-Force user thing was a big problem (except for a few recruitment chapters and post-KotET Iokath-Nathema FP), which could have easily been remedied with the Outlander as a new character, as I said.
      _______________________________________
      
      I’ve been taking longer breaks from the game lately with the trickle of new content. That, combined with the lack of future content info and the ever-present “game is dying” claims, have gotten me worried.
      
      As a contingency, I’ve recently rolled a new character who’s a copy of my main. I’ve been recording all of the cutscenes from his class story (Inquisitor) as he goes through the game. That way, I’ll always be able to enjoy the story even if the game dies. Furthermore, I don’t have to search YouTube for playthroughs from other people’s fugly characters who choose different dialogue options.
      
      I’ve currently done the original class story (+ Black Talon and original Revan FPs), Ilum, RotHC intro (skiping Makeb and Oricon), SoR, Ziost, and KotFE Ch. I-IX. Have you thought about doing something similar to preserve your fun memories?
      - Paulo Gomes
        
        No, I didn’t think of that. But that’s a great project. One I might just be interested in doing. Preserving all my memories and character looks? Very nice. And intelligent of you Ji’inx. I expected nothing else from you. 😉
        
        Darth Ji’inx
        
        One of the issues I had was using the same name for the clone, which is on the same server. I didn’t want to do something tacky like “Ji’inx II.” Instead, I tried to think of an adjective I could add to the name that would capture the essence of the class story. Finally, I created my Sorcerer clone “Ji’inx Ascendant.”
      - Isla
        
        That’s what eventually brought me back to the game – I wanted some final play throughs of the story, and to record the cutscenes before its inevitable death.
- Fred Garvin
  
  [OP is Fred G]
  
  Sounds like KotFE and KotET are actually more in line with their original vision; though probably with more content.
  - Paulo Gomes
    
    Exactly.
pig benis

ayyy Hero Engine 2012, those lovely memories on Ilum 5 fps open pvp
- Bakgrind
  
  Interestingly enough the Hero Engine website had at one time a long and lengthy blog which was essentially a disclaimer about which version of that Bioware knowingly purchased an Alpha build of that engine and not a fully tested and proven engine. That particular blog which was titled Hero engine meets star wars has gone the way of 404 on their website. However, you can search the web and there are bits and pieces of that blog floating around.
  
  We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton. We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor. Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places. He knows games, especially online games.
  
  Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package.
  
  “I need this,” said Gordon. “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.” Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing. “This is just what I need! I want to license your engine.”
  
  We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine.
  
  “It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”
  
  He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”
  - lolipop
    
    Overconfidence and lack of patience is *always* a weakness, not to mention lack of vision. Clearly they had some vision for story phillar, but rest is clunky copy-paste from WoW. Another sad nail to the coffin this game had from the very beginning, like i said many times before.
- Shawn Hargrave
  
  yeah why i quit would have been awesome open world pvp if they had an engine worth a fuck
Kubrickian

SWTOR is a corpse. This guy is telling us his new company is comprised of people that made up the lungs and pinky ring of that game you once enjoyed. On the flip side StarWars.com does a KOTOR Anniversary article waxing nostalgic on the game and the people he interviewed who work at Bioware Austin make NO MENTION that SWTOR still exists and is an MMO based on that game.
https://www.starwars.com/news/kotor-galaxy-of-heroes

RIP
- Shawn Hargrave
  
  lol
- Rance
  
  Tbh if I was one of them I would be ashamed too to admit that I work on the game seeing its current state.
Johnny Rode

He did a great job, in general. but completely and utterly failed on Free to Play. This is by far the worst F2P game I have ever played. And I know of no one that have gone from subscribing to remain around as F2P. All my friends quit early on, tried the F2P and never came back. i raided and played under subscription, but once I went F2P (with all unlocks), I also quit the game.
branky

The inventor of huttball!! This guy deserves Jedi status as far as i am concerned.
I fell in love with that 1rst map at launch and i still have a smile on my face when it pops.
The game was great untill 1.2 launched spiked again around 2.6/2.7 and after 3.0 it was all downhill…
Great to finaly understand why that went the way it did!!!
Shawn Hargrave

all they had to do was make swg2 swgs open world setup and tors leveling system goodbye wow but no all we have is a poorly done wow clone that cant handle 15 people in the same area smh. LOL at the malgus statue probably a doorstop to whoever owns one at this point
- lolipop
  
  EA just acts like a mental retard that tries constantly to put triangle toy into square slot…. but this is no surprise for me at all… since they tried to do that before. What makes me furious is that they now tried to do it with star wars.
- DPablo
  
  I have the CE. Love the statue. It’s on proud display in one of my Sith based cabinets.
  - Shawn Hargrave
    
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1dc9e4486ab0e0adb6345d571cbf12cd887c4e36c8cc7726db4a2a38868ff568.gif
  - Disqus this
    
    I bought the collectors edition as well.
    
    I quickly turned right around and sold that malgus statues for $80 on ebay with $15 shipping. It wasn’t good of a statue.
- infamous
  
  I still have mine. It little bashed up now. The cape got split in two and got super glued along with one of his fingers… I’d trade it for SWG 2.0 right around now. I hate WoW and I hate the clones of it. Doesn’t stop the MMO industry throwing that shit out because according to their divine wisdom sandboxes don’t sell.
- Kubrickian
  
  speaking of which have you played No Mans Sky NEXT?
  https://youtu.be/8sTFlzV9nnE
Hunterr

Explains why DAO had such a wack marketing campaign. One trailer would be interesting, then bam a bunch of Manson lol.
Fubarz

https://youtu.be/HCHqCHS1vIo
lolipop

Well, it’s not related to swtor, but like/dislike ratio though….
- Shawn Hargrave
  
  looks like shit why didnt they go with the clone wars cgi? man this looks god aweful smh
- Rance
  
  I see a lot of anime, so I should be used to any form of animation by now, but this is too cartoonish even for me lol
  - Snarf
    
    Well, for me the problem isnt that it is a cartoon so much as it looks like a half-assed cartoon. Like we dont want to invest in traditional animation, so well make some low poly 3d models and slap the toon filter on it.
    shameful
    At least the Japanese put effort into true Anime.
    star wars deserves a “batman the animated series” level of animation at the least.
    but no one makes cartoons like that anymore….
- Fred Garvin
  
  [OP is Fred G]
  
  What do you expect when the majority of the fanbase are man-children who ignore the statements from the IPs own creator who says over and over again that it was created for kids and as a 70s version of Flash Gordon; not something for them to hang their entire existence on.
  
  Resistance looks to be geared towards younger kids and anyone with half a brain should be able to recognize that in 15 seconds. My 6 year old nephew will probably love it. I will guarantee you that many of those who clicked dislike are Gen Xers who hypocritically probably watched the Droids and Ewoks cartoons as kids and loved them.
  
  Aside from TLJ and just having Star Wars fatigue in general, the fanbase is what’s driving me away from Star Wars. I’m embarrassed watching grown ass adults act like crybabies over fucking movies about space wizards and pirates.
  - lolipop
    
    hmm well that’s what they say… but then why put this show on 10 PM sunday (if i remember corectly), what children will watch it at that time? Most of them will be in the bed because of time (i bet your nephew will too most likely), school and other shit. Couldn’t they do it earlier? This is just plain stupid if you ask me.
    
    As for TLJ, i didn’t like it overall… because of decisions and scenes that well for me personally didn’t fit for star wars, it feel kinda really like those “space wizards” and “space pirates” that you mentioned. TFA was kinda better in that star wars feel. I won’t even say a word about Luke, but well. Rian completely destroyed this character imo.
    - Fred Garvin
      
      [OP is Fred G]
      
      Without a doubt that’s an odd time for the show to air. Maybe they figure most ppl watch shows on-demand these days? Still weird.
      
      My experience with the new movies is similar. Enjoyed TFA but they lost me with TLJ.
Mr. Wednesday

Never properly priced out the cost of the Darth Malgus statues, and yet it still ended up looking like a PoS
Paulo Gomes

So this guy invented Huttball… I have a funny story of sorts. and yes, I’m going to mention ESO. No, I’m not going to plug it. Rather the opposite…

To the guys that know me here, I have always stated that I’m a worthless, clueless, skilless PVP player. And no, I’m not exaggerating. Not in the least. It took me a loooong time to understand what people meant by “grass” and “snow” for instance. And lots of yelling from other people ingame I’m sure.

But among the few PVP things I did, Huttball was the one I enjoyed the most. It was one of the few I could get some sort of results. Nothing to shame you pvp’ers I’m sure. But I got a kick out of it.

Now ESO has recently started the same sort of smaller scale PVP battles we have in TOR. King of the hill, capture objectives, that sort of thing. Besides Cyrodiil and the Imperial City.

I occasionally do some open world PVP in Cyrodiil. Some very important skills are locked behind going to Cyrodiil (the Stamina heal is the one I’m always going for), and open world pvp is sort of nice. I guess.

So I bypassed the smaller scale stuff completely. Now: being a sort of completionist ( I was one in TOR, until the devs started taking achievements away… Story for another time), I did enter one of those 4×4 battles. In ESO there are 3 teams of 4 people.

Much to my surprise, there is a sort of Huttball in ESO! Of course I completely made a mess of myself trying to understand how it works…

But it is in no way better than Huttball. Kudos to this guy that designed such a great pvp thingy.

At least for me…
- Shawn Hargrave
  
  how dare you mention eso….. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9a1644580922c2a3a223813314e349294a400240d693a424b826accaa3f5b80b.png
Tony

it’s heartbreaking..PVP lovers are loving life but the people who adored the world weekly missions and the excitement of new territories teamed with a story line..the hardcore people who only play for the PVE well this game went to pot for them..I don’t know if its because the powers that be probably prefer PVP more too or what but its a shame…still happy it is around at all but missing the glory days of pve on here
- Shawn Hargrave
  
  not sure what you mean by pvp lovers are loving life. No one asked for a pvp house that has to be asked to be invaded lol how about a fucking engine that can handle open world pvp that would be nice lol
  - Tony
    
    well what is being worked on is more often pvp related…the powers that be have moved on..the big funds aren’t going to this so you can’t blame them..Paulo makes a good point for new players you get a massively good deal with so much more material than we had when we joined..I would hope the added attraction to new players would lead to more revenue which in turn would give them the funds to make it better for us old timers but that just isn’t happenning
- Paulo Gomes
  
  I don’t think anyone is loving life in TOR. Maybe the more recent players, but every veteran I talk to is somewhat disappointed with the game.
  
  Maybe they still support the game, but I think there’s a general consensus that more should be done with the game. I don’t think that point is up for discussion.
  
  There’s varying degrees of disappointment. But I see no one excited.
  
  Oh… Except BioWare, of course. But they even get excited with a server merge, so…
- Caveman
  
  Don’t forget the roleplayers. How long have they been waiting for a simple feature like a toggle option for chat bubbles now (which they promised was coming over and over again and at one point even admitted they knew how to fix but PVP stuff was of higher priority)?

SWTOR Former Developer Daniel Erickson Talks About Game Development

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