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[PATV] Monday, January 21, 2013 - CheckPoint Season 2, Ep. 32: SWTOR SGR OMG
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
BioWare tries to do the right thing and the media shits all over them.
Dog on
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-- Publisher, Saucy Goose Press
-- On Twitter @trishalynn
If this community believes that hating someone based soley upon their gender is acceptable and understandable, I have no interest in being a part of it.
Sub-head: Fans See What She Did There
As for Fabulos V, a "gay planet" makes perfect sense in the Star Wars Universe, where EVERY planet of note has exactly one climate or other feature. See also: Tattooine, Hoth, Endor, Kashyyk, Coruscant, Kamino, Geonosis, Mustafar.
Star Wars is like Zelda on a galactic scale: you have the forest planet, the fire planet, the ice planet, the desert planet, and naturally, the gay planet. If anything, Naboo is a utopian paradise by virtue of having a forest AND a grassy plain AND an ocean on the same planet.
Odd.
STEAM
It's better than just sticking to their guns and being assholes about it, but isn't quite ideal.
Nooooooo
All of my hopes
My brain's conjuring up what it's relationship with Galactus might be.
I don't blame Bioware that much for it, as I feel like it was Lucasarts that made the call on this, but I'm with the media on this one. Mistakes have consequences, and being mocked for your "gay planet" is one of them.
At 5:26, you can see the chests of Graham, Paul, James, Jer, and Tim.
Of course, this is Star Wars, where reason goes right out the window. There are already complaints that gay people do not exist in the Star Wars canon.
Yeah, the cost would have been trivial if it had been in the plan from the very start. Record a few extra lines of dialog (a small fraction of 1% of what's been recorded for the game. Nothing, really) and build whatever gender-check-switch is in there a little differently. Fixing it costs money, but building it right the first time wouldn't have actually cost anything.
It's one of the many unfortunate ways in which our civilization's lack of time machines continues to plague us.
Granted Bioware Austin's shameful lack of foresight, though, even though what they're doing now kind of sucks, it probably really is the best practical solution.
It's still true that for any new content, including same gender romantic options to begin with instead of adding them on later has a trivial cost, so they're doing that.
Sometime way back, like shortly after the game came out, they had said something about how they would consider adding same gender romance options to new companions or existing companions when they added the next chapter of the class stories. So same thing, really. It'll be on the table at the point where it's a matter of recording a couple extra lines of dialog from a VA team that's already been assembled.
Given the game's rocky financial situation, that could be never.
Developer: So what about the same-gender romances?
Boss: I'd like to have those, they're sort of a BioWare "thing" at this point.
Developer: Yeah but EA is set on the release date and we won't even have basic stuff like an LFG tool done by then.
Boss: Okay, fuck it, we'll patch the gay romance in after launch along with the LFG and a bunch of other shit that should have been there from the start. By then we'll be flush with success and resources.
*Game launches, flops horribly, everyone gets fired*
New Boss: Huh, apparently we're supposed to patch in same-gendered romances.
New Developer: We should add them in a logical and organic way that spans the existing planets and storylines.
New Boss: Ha, yeah right. Our dev team is three people and my office is in the lavatory between two urinals. Just cram it all onto one planet and let's get on with thinking of exploitative bullshit F2P transactions to add. Oh I know, let's charge people for hotbars.
That kind of scenario can't really account for what happened. At some point early in development, before there were deadline issues etc, they either decided on no some sex romance options, or simply didn't include it because it never occurred to them.
They would have had to get a fair ways into development without the intention of including them for the cost relative to anything else to become an issue.
It's a pattern that appears in a lot of large projects and software in particular. The farther into development you are, the more it costs to add something that wasn't in the original plan. Same-gender romance options would have been pretty much free if they'd been planning on them to begin with.
Now the situation is that adding them would cost a bunch of money and the game is having a hard time keeping its head above water and they have to justify that spending, etc. That's very much a situation Bioware allowed to take root, though.
The current team seems to be responding to their current situation as well as anyone could reasonably hope, but there is some blame to be laid regarding how they ended up there.
I Own the AR15 and am shopping for a Sniper Rifle. Because I enjoy the hitting the target from 150+meters is fulfilling.
Also, IT IS NON-VIOLENT, Target practices.
You devils.
Yeah every new AAA+ subscription MMO hopes to shed 75% of its users and go F2P within the first year. They're really living the dream over there. Get real, this was the flop that destroyed the AAA subscription MMO as a viable concept. A miserable failure that blackened the names of all involved.
Wait let me guess, you meant lots of games with a fraction of the development costs and expectations would have liked to have been as popular as SWTOR, right?
Ok angry internet dude! Selling 2 million+ full price boxes is a flop! You sure showed me! I'll be over here now, talking to other people!
RE: Ninja Gaiden
1. SWTOR was developed by a new Bioware Austin studio, but the Bioware founders were heavily involved. This was their baby. So it wasn't like Bioware leadership was somehow different, or they had different values. Bioware tries to be inclusive with all players.
2. Bioware doesn't just remove gender checks in romances. They write each romance to be unique and hopefully meaningful. If an NPC can be romanced by either a man or a woman, those two romances are written as two separate romances with unique dialogue/blocking/animations for each.
3. Bioware romances also change with alignment. So if you're dark side and aggressive, the romance plays out different.
4. For the 8 core classes, there was a male and female voice actor. So they're have to bring back the 16 primary voice actors, as well as tons and tons of actors for the companions and NPCs.
5. Bioware never once promised this would happen before launch.
6. It is possible (though this is speculation) that Bioware couldn't simply add SGR into the game without LucasArt's permission given that LucasArts is the publisher. This was actually a point of heated debate (that everyone seems to forget) of whether or not homosexuality exists in Star Wars. One Bioware community manager actually wrote a scathing post that they didn't believe homosexuality did exist in Star Wars, and was pretty offended that some might thing it did. LucasArts may have debated on this issue internally for a while to see how it might affect the brand.
7. Bioware decided close to launch that they would add the feature, but it would be post-launch.
8. Subscription rates fell off quickly. The game didn't make the money it was supposed to be. There were massive lay-offs. Features got pushed back. This was just one of many post-launch features that came later than expected.
9. The media did try to paint Bioware as the villain when they're probably the most LGBT-friendly developer on the planet.
They sell 2 million copies at $60, but the publisher is only seeing about $40 of that. The developer even less, but we're talking about the publisher's budget.
So they made $80 million in retail back on a $200+ million budget. Then they get subscriptions each month, but they're paying to maintain servers, support staff, etc. And they're paying developers to add new features and content, so the budget continues to rise at the same time as subscription revenue comes in.
The reason it was called a flop was because there were layoffs. No one externally knows how much money the game really made or lost, but we know it was bad enough to lay people off and make a panic move to shift to F2P.
FWIW, I really enjoy the game and renewed my subscription yesterday after not playing for a few months.