Decided to try out Atlas while I wait for Pantheon. I hope this reiterates the importance of a successful launch. The game which looked cool is nothing but crashing dead servers. Massive simple issues in gameplay that a 2 hour playthrough would have revealed. I swear EVERY time an mmo releases it is a joke that no one can predict even though it's happened dozens of times now for just about every mmo... Please have a smooth launch Pantheon! I don't want you to die in a week!
SWTOR may have had the best launch ever. Exceedingly smooth and almost no bugs in the game. They had a huge budget and probably lost a lot so I am not holding this out as a model for VR but it was very worthy of praise.
As is frequently said - SWTOR was the best single-player MMO ever.
SWTOR was such a huge disappointment (outside of the single-player story aspect). They completely disregarded all the major feedback from players during the development cycle and released a terrible performing game on the Hero engine. They blew their budget on voice acting and made the trade-off be a completely bland game-play experience (only slightly redeemed by being Star Wars) with embarrassing graphics and technical issues. Just read through the forums post-release (by the way, they scrubbed the old forums so you can't see all the constructive criticism that they received from fans during development cycle, I know since I was there and even did beta testing for them).
http://www.swtor.com/fr/community/showthread.php?t=509676
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=131110&highlight=hero+engine
I believe there is miscommunication here. Dorotea means KotoR, not SWToR. Those are very different things.
This is definitely not true:
As is frequently said - SWTOR was the best single-player MMO ever.
edit: Though it is strange that she would refer to kotor as an "mmo"? Maybe she meant RPG? Personally, I find kotor2 to be a better game than kotor anyway but... I have never heard anyone say SWToR was the best at anything except voiceovers.
I think dorotea was indeed talking about SWTOR (the MMO). The quote you're confused about is used quite a bit when players talk about SWTOR, in reference to how the MMO is a better single-player RPG experience than it is an actual MMO (not meaning that it's an exceptional RPG by any means, just that it has an unusually strong single-player story while lacking a compelling multiplayer experience).
In regards to the KotOR franchise, I strongly agree with you. KotOR 2 is probably the best Star Wars story period, dark and compelling while exploring the deep flaws of both Jedi and Sith ideology. Kreia is perhaps the best Star Wars character ever, if not one of the strongest written female characters in all gaming. If you ever have a chunk of time to waste, then dive into this video, every time I watch it I want to play KotOR 2 again:
KotOR was a wonderful game. So too was KotOR2.
I was indeed referring to SWTOR which had a wonderful launch (its worst enemies don't dispute that) and an extremely good story getting new characters to what was then the endgame. Repeatable a few times but so linear that it wasn't nearly as much fun to repeat as games that had more of a sandbox feel. Poor crafting system - actually worse than poor but I was being polite. Pathetically bad endgame - do a raid, repeat the same raid, repeat the same raid.
Of course it *was* a MMO but its great strength when played through as if it was a single player game and its great ....lack of strength in other respects gave rise rapidly to the phrase "single player MMO" which was not a compliment. Sicario got it right.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that they couldn't provide the substance that so many players were looking forward to, especially with such a large crowd of SWG players who were seeking a new home with the hopes of a game that was as in-depth as SWG. I remember all the amazing ideas and recommendations put forward by the community in the development forums and it was just completely ignored. They probably could have just gotten away with making another single-player entry in the KotOR franchise without wasting the resources on making it a lackluster MMO (although what they did with Revan and The Exile was a huge letdown and now I just pretend SWTOR doesn't exist as "canon" in the KotOR universe).
SWTOR really spoiled me with the voice over and cinematic effects. It's not truly possible to have that in a MMO geared for group-play. I never had any issue with the graphics looking terrible, I thought many of the planets/environments were quite lovely (if really small - Quesh!) And I enjoyed the built-in companion romances, again more single-player RPGish, but still fun. I still pop in once in a while to mess around with my Sith characters, who were never full Dark Side, because full Dark Side options were always a bit Stupid Evil. You had to rely on companion harvesting missions to max out your force spectrum if you wanted to play like a real person, not a black and white, one-dimensional character.
*gets nostalgic* Might hop on later now. See if there are some Jedi I can go kill...
A good launch is immensely important, most people aren't gonna wait around for a game to get better or fixed and the ones that leave are not likely to come back. I know that from myself, there have been several games I tried that had a bad launch but now should be pretty much fixed and I've considered coming back, but then something new comes up and it gets put on the backburner. This is also why I think it's important that VR during Beta run stress tests, say throw in a free weekend to get tons of people playing and see how much the server can handle and if people are gonna find some random bugs nobody did so far. More eyes and so on. Obviously I would prefer if they had an actual team of testers along with us, so that way they could avoid some of the inheirent bias and the fact most of us are probably going to just be playing the game instead of trying to break it or actively searching for bugs.
With that said, a good launch don't mean much if you got nothing to keep people hooked after the first 2-3 weeks other than the novelty of something new. I do think Pantheon will be able to keep people around though, also people who may not expect to usually like this kinda game, but maybe got sick of other MMO's and wanted to try something new. The fact it's rather community oriented can be a pretty good way to keep people around.