With Day 1 of the 2012 SWTOR Guild Summit totally done and dusted (our coverage of the key panels here, here, here,here and here), there’s one very striking theme that resonated with me.
SWTOR is here for the long haul.
A lot of you will rightly say “what, you only just worked that out?”. I suppose I’ve always realised this is a game that has a good lifespan ahead of it, but today’s panels really brought home the depth and breadth of developments BioWare are working on in relation to the game. Sure, any MMO has never-ending development requirements and yes, there’s no shortage of stuff some people argue should have been in the game before launch anyway.
All that aside, the amount of new stuff on the horizon, whether officially on the development roadmap or on the “wall of crazy” referred to during the day, is enormous. I see that as nothing but a sign of a game that has a lot of fun twists and turns ahead.
Another encouraging observation was the obvious interplay between members of the Dev team. Although like any team there’d be tensions and conflicts, there was an obvious robust respect between the panel members and humorous comments where there were philosophical differences in approach to the game. Assuming it wasn’t a front (and I doubt it was given how long the panels went for and the obvious good humour), this also bodes well for the game.
So for me overall, the Guild Summit is more than just an event for BioWare to schmooze some of the more hardcore players in the game. It’s also been an interesting illustration of an engaged development team and a long list of future improvements to the game which should see its viability continue for a long time yet.
Do you agree?
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Definitely – very excited about the future of SWTOR! Some people seem to be caught up comparing it with WOW, forgetting that WOW has had seven years of refinement, and SWTOR has only been out for a couple of months. The development team is showing fantastic signs that they are committed to continually refining the game and bringing out new content – which is made even more interesting by the story-rich nature of the game.
When the initial budget is over $200,000,000 the shock would be if they weren’t here for the long haul, not that, with subscribers into 7 digits, they haven’t already recovered their investment. Meanwhile I see the vast majority of the players being here for the long haul too and that can only be encouraged by the “we’re here for the long haul – we’ll fix the issues” attitude of the development team. Personally I’ve not seen any issues that are even close to being a deal-breaker for me, and those that might become annoying in the long haul seem to already be on their agenda to fix 🙂