Star Wars: The Old Republic team hit with layoffs
BioWare is laying off members of the Star Wars: Old Republic team. "Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality."
Perhaps this news was inevitable, given the struggles high-profile MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic has faced since launch. Publisher Electronic Arts has announced plans to "restructure" BioWare Austin, weeks after announcing a subscriber loss of nearly 25 percent. In a statement to Shacknews, the publisher said: "BioWare has restructured its studio in Austin today. Of the employees impacted, some will be able to join other projects within EA, others will leave the company. These are very difficult decisions, but it allows us to focus our staff to maintain and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic."
BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk wrote an open letter on the game's official forums, confirming the layoffs. "Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality."
However, Muzyka and Zeschuk want to reassure fans that--in spite of the losses--work on SWTOR will continue. "Looking forward, the studio remains vibrant and passionate about our many upcoming initiatives for Star Wars: The Old Republic," the pair wrote. "We still have a very substantial development team working on supporting and growing the game... There are many strong initiatives planned for cool new content and new features that we're excited to tell you about in the upcoming weeks and months."
"We will continue to support and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weeks, months and years to come," the BioWare heads added.
With layoffs in the Austin team, it appears continued development on The Old Republic will involve multiple studios. In a comment to Shacknews, an EA representative told us that "BioWare Austin remains a large and important part of BioWare and EA, working with other studios around the world to continue to deliver a high-quality service and exciting new content for Star Wars: The Old Republic."
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Star Wars: The Old Republic team hit with layoffs.
BioWare is laying off members of the Star Wars: Old Republic team. "Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality."-
Why don't they just stick the fork in this one and go F2P, its about the only chance this game has.....subs are fast becoming a killer of MMO's
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I remember when it first came out and every server was always full with long queues and it still felt empty, it was so rare to run into a human player.
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You've described the end game of every MMO ever.
Also the group finder and servver transfers are coming in 1.3. Of course they should really have been in 1.0 but c'est la vie.
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Slightly less bitter version : End game is killing challenging content with friends / (or with jerks as some prefer) using the fixed set of skils that the classes have available at the level cap. Continuous content is made avalable to players as better and better gear drops allow you to progress to continuously harder content.
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Why do they continue to make stupid MMO's?
Anyway, more resources down the drain. More time wasted. All this does is give justification to the suits to lay off the talent for not doing their "jobs".
Anyway back to real gaming like Max Payne 3 and Ghost Recon, MMO's are for the birds. -
It's really sad that almost no mmo can do well now. IMO WoW ruined the mmo market. The problem is most new mmos try and copy WoW and while they're successful at it people are starting to get bored with WoW. All they did was steal good ideas from other companies and implement them really crappy. I've almost sworn off mmos because no one can create a mmo from scratch with NEW ideas or lore not coming from something pre existing. Bioware failed on so many levels it's really sad to see a game that could of had so much potential and a huge fan base go down the crapper.
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World of Warcraft didn't ruin the market. What ruined the market was developers thinking they copy the core mechanics in to a different setting and expect it to do well. Most of the new MMO games aren't even real MMO games at best they are co-op games or single player experience. No one has figured out a way to create a game that integrates all the people playing in a meaningful away instead of partitioning them in to instances and having the quests pretend you are the only "chosen one".
They also need to find and build their own mechanics even if that means leaving the MMO trinity (Tank/Heal/DPS).-
Define "do well." The "real" MMO games of the past didn't exactly do fabulous either. Also, you're omitting EVE Online which I've been told has a single server for several hundred thousand players, presumably players are pretty integrated with each other.
Anyway, I disagree with you. AFAIK WoW was the driving force behind all this game design that you are railing against. Which MMO started the whole soloing trend? WoW. Who started instancing everything? WoW.
Role switching or condensing roles in an attempt to get away from the trinity isn't a home run. IMO, this will lower longevity of games because there is less need to roll alts to experience something different.-
Most of the MMO games now the community doesn't actually play a major role in the game. They are just extra people to group with should you need it. Most of the content in the new MMOs can be done solo or in small groups. Hardly any game factors in the thousands/millions of people playing in a meaningful way.
Look at the quests for most of them they all pretend that none of the other people exists. That isn't right. MMO is supposed to be a Massive Multiplayer Online Game not a Massively single player experience with the option to group raid should stick it out long enough to see it.
The MMO Trinity has existed and been in too many new MMOs and no one has done any thing new with it. The games need to have their own personality beyond a new setting. If the game world was actually enjoyable people and kept people engaged they wouldn't feel they had to make Alts.
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To be fair, there are also a ridiculous number of MMOs out now. And with so many being F2P, it makes paying an even bigger issue.
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The fact that there are so many MMOs that are running and haven't shut down means that many MMOs are doing well. There are a lot more MMOs out there post WoW than pre WoW.
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same. I still have an active sub that started maybe a month or two after launch, and the last time I had the time to log in was before the 1.2 patch. I'd like to finish my character's story before unsubbing, but I don't think I'm actually going to be able to do that.
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what I'd really like is for them to come up with a 'weekend' sub or something where you spend $5 for Friday through Sunday access, and during that time you get double/triple XP. So I could play it when I had time and actually feel like I was progressing, and not just wasting the $15 a month when I cannot play at all.
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Same. It was the first MMO I really tries since LOTRO, but I just don't have time. Combine that with empty servers and stretched out zones, and it's just too boring in stretches. Now, the first 20 levels or so are pretty fun but it just got too monotonous once you get higher.
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RIP Awston Buyowear
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So when are we getting a proper KoTOR sequel?
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This is what I've wanted all along. Fuck TOR, I want KOTOR.
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Remember when people said this would kill wow?
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Anyone who thinks any game is ever going to kill WoW is insane.
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Oh Snap! They laid off their primary Community Manager. What's going on over there? http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/22/star-wars-the-old-republic-hit-with-layoffs/
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oh dear lol.
Maybe it's because he couldn't read 130 page threads complaining about sweeping changes?
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not suprised, swtor was destined to fail the moment bioware thought they could make their own engine based off a very early version of Hero. It's not an mmo if you can't handle more than 16 players in one area without very decent rigs grinding to a halt (think less than 20fps). And as a KOTOR game it was completely half assed with each planet having almost identical cliche stories.
Oh and it released with less endgame content than warhammer online, thats always going to go down well haha.-
This is hardly the reason it failed.
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Having 1/2 of your endgame (raids + ilum) not playable by a large % of the population because of engine performance is a pretty big issues with regards to keeping people subbed long term. The actual core mechanics of swtor were pretty decent, because they were actually based of warhammer online. But just like WAR, performance issues crippled the game.
Most people agree 1-50 was a great experience (even if it was instanced as hell) but endgame was fucking bad.
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Steam isn't going to save this.
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Heavy multimedia doesn't make an MMO.
In almost anything multiplayer, gameplay is heavily emphasized by the playerbase over its presentation. This is why games like CS and the original EQ still have a strong playerbase.
EA should have simply looked to how EQ2 couldn't retain a playerbase as strong as EQ1. EQ2 took many hits in terms of gameplay and many the efforts were clearly focused on the graphics and sound. Both of which were very impressive for the time. EQ2 also boasted a large amount of voice files that took a huge amount of space for the time. Yet EQ2 still had a moderate playerbase compared to competitors (WoW) that were less stunning in presentation and its predecessor outlasted.
Rather than try to make their own game, Bioware made yet another clone with lots of strong presentation. If you're going to play a WoW clone you might as well play WoW. You have a long invested character in WoW with an already thriving community. Why start over for a similar game? This is what happens when multimedia is emphasized in a game's development.
You can take a shitty board game and give some awesome artwork to look at while you play. In the end, it's a shitty board game and will likely be played once then sold in a garage sale for a buck. -
Serious thread: Why did it fail?
Imho it was because of 1. Style over substance 2. not offering enough content long term 3. Not being better than its competitors. It seems that the Star Wars license was a sleeping pillow for BW.... -
How long before it goes F2P?
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