Sw: Tor

[Activate: AMD]

Got a nice email from BioWare/EA today. Star Wars: The Old Republic is now free-to-play up to Level 50.

For those keeping score at home, the level cap in the game is 50, so they're essentially making the whole game free-to-play. I'm sure they're putting hooks in so that you'll have a better experience if you pay, but damn. There's only one reason they would make the whole game free, and it ain't because it's super popular.

I wonder what the guys working on the Elder Scrolls MMO are thinking. If EA, BioWare, Star Wars and $200 million dollars couldn't make a successful MMO, then I doubt the guys at Bethesda will do any better.

And because I'm a business nerd, I just have to note that $200 million is a lot of money. There's no way that EA made or will make their money back. I bet EA CEO John Riccitiello is on his way out. Which is a shame, because Riccitiello is way more progressive than Larry Probst was. I'm sure once Riccitiello is gone, they'll bring back some bean counter who will say "make more Madden and FIFA games! Make all of them! Keep making them!"

I have heard that the FTP conversion is still a joke.. that they nickel and dime for obnoxious features that are basically necessary for basic gameplay. That is not the way to win people over, its just going to piss them off. I think the elder scrolls MMO is also a huge mistake, one of the major draws of the TES series on PC has always been modding. MMO means taking that out, and taking away a huge portion of the value of the base game.

[Keven]

I have heard that the FTP conversion is still a joke.. that they nickel and dime for obnoxious features that are basically necessary for basic gameplay. That is not the way to win people over, its just going to piss them off. I think the elder scrolls MMO is also a huge mistake, one of the major draws of the TES series on PC has always been modding. MMO means taking that out, and taking away a huge portion of the value of the base game.

Yeah, I'm sure these F2P games all nickle and dime you to death. Still, all these traditional subscription model MMOGs are slowly transitioning to F2P. Even WoW is F2P for the first 20 levels as I recall.

The businessmen must have come up with some model where when the number of active monthly subscribers drops below "X", then it's more profitable to go to F2P.

[3dfxrain]

I played it too much, got bored of it. Have they fixed the frame rate of the pvp battlegrounds?

[3dfxrain]

It was a very nice game when the content was new and interesting.