Is Star Wars: The Old Republic four years out of date?

The game will be a success no matter what, in my personal opinion. Unless the servers never go up. People will follow it, play it but will it last as long as World of Warcraft? Who knows.

Well have to wait and see.

God if I see another article comparing WoW and TOR I'm gonna find them and punch them in the face. WoW is not the first MMO and Blizzard copy all its predecessors UI, function and game play from every other MMO before it! Freakin irritating!

Well, you come across many opinions and not all of them are wrong.

Some expect the same thing, because comfort/familiarity breeds more people wanting to play your game consistently. The majority, unfortunately, are not for new and exciting things, unless they can be fun.

For those wanting new systems, new learning curves and expectations need to be expected. It is the same with a CoH vet coming into DCUO and pointing to a non-robust character creator. They are right, but the Devs want players to collect pieces.

And actually, really, programming starts on day one. Any of the new MMOs being released were programmed on old tech; if some radical new graphics MotherBoard enhancements came out, these MMOs won't be taking advantage of them, unless they delay their releases.

I love innovation, but really, I know SW:ToR is not going to be "totally innovative". I am fine with this, but other fans keep thinking their "ultimate dreams" on what a next-gen MMO should contain ("We can raise Puppies in SW:ToR!" :P )and then get sad when they see their "pie in the sky" dreams not coming to fruition.

I think there will be other games that bring innovation to the table, but SW:ToR is NOT it. I expect this and I KNOW this and I still believe I will have fun.

Didn't I read somewhere that Bioware was aiming for about 2 million subs? That's well below WoW but still very successful for an MMO. There seem to be a few major misconceptions among people that talk about new MMOs.

1) You need to innovate to be successful
2) You have to "beat" WoW (whatever that means) to be successful

Neither make much sense. Blizzard has never made a particularly innovative game, including WoW. They've taken the standard ideas and improved upon them with their own little touches, while releasing extremely polished products. Which seems to be exactly what Bioware is doing here.

Anyway, only time will tell. But I see a lot of people out there claiming developers need to 'reinvent the wheel' without any actual ideas about what they might look like, other than saying "not like WoW".

I get kind of annoyed when people pull the whole "it's just like WoW" card. Of course there's going to be some similarities, it's the same genre. People still pay for games like CoD: Black Ops, even though the controls haven't really changed since the original (and have been adopted by other FPS titles as well).

It comes down to what makes the game unique. For me, I'm intrigued by the story of the game, as well as a few of the other mechanics in the game. Having a crew for your ship, for example, is something that is most definitely NOT in WoW, and I think is a cool idea.

I played WoW for many years and definitely plan on playing this title. I'm even doing a couple run-throughs of KotOR in anticipation.

What were people really expecting?

Innovation doesn't happen when that kind of money is at risk.

I think SWTOR will be a decent mmo but it will feature much of what all the others feature its major unique feature is its single player story driven content, if you aren't looking for a great single player story driven mmo where you can roll multiple classes and have a different level experience then you're looking for another game. You might be able to group, pvp, craft etc but that won't unproven concepts it will be what already works because thats what people are already paying for in other games.

As always mmo in development gets put too high on a pedastal by people who don't know enough to expect what they do. If you want ground breaking innovation look to indie games because only people who risk their own money get the luxury of risking it on a whim.

I think the major problem is every one wants a change in the MMO industry but when it happens the game goes un-noticed. It's to different, no no we can't have that, so when you make a new game with similar function thin it's called a clone which in fact to be a clone of something it has to be an identical copy of another system, which it is not by definition alone. TOR is doing things that no one else has done to these extent. For Star Wars fans out there we should just be happy at all we're getting a new SW MMO to play, and to all the aggro writers out that cant get over the fact that TOR is going to kick much ares in the MMO market they are just scared of how successful it's really going to be.

Most anticipated game of 2011 is GW2 , even birds know that (and yet Massively users didnt get the memo)

Precisely because it aims to break the mold and do everything different from WOW

It will be the first big budget MMO that has almost no similarities to WOW

In business, there's this thing called core competency. Basically, companies identify what they are really strong in, and use that strength to differentiate itself from its competitors.

Bioware is using its strength in story telling in SW:TOR. They keep talking about the 4th pillar because they want to hammer in the message that this will be what differentiates their game. I agree with them concentrating on what they do best.

If someone else feels that strongly that it's time to reinvent the MMO genre, they are welcomed to step up to the plate. Bioware is under no obligation to do that.