-Also, I agree with EP. I see this losing money irrespective of how good the game is.

It could in fact be an awesome game. That game could also be a massive commercial flop. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m just betting that there’s no way it ends up making Bioware money.

Remember that WoW had fewer people playing at its launch than now (I assume?) afterall.

Which is not to say that TOR will have server merges; maybe it will be successful on a completely unthinkable scale and show constant growth. But “successful” MMOs in this day and age (like Rift) do show server transfer and condensing/merges a few months after release. I’m not saying it will immediately replace WoW, but the fundamental tech behind Warcraft is aging, and it shows. As Diablo III and whatever Titan becomes near release, WoW will get progressively more and more back-burnered until the world moves on. Enthusiasm is flagging for the title, which is sad. It’s a landmark of the genre and something I have sunk literally countless hours into, and made a group of friends that are in many ways closer to me than people I grew up with.

Server merges are a sign that the game doesn’t have the population to keep the servers viable whilst separate. That’s not a sign of ‘healthy’ MMOs or ‘typical’ use. It’s a sign of a declining playerbase due to an inability to retain players: signs of a failure or a dying mmo.

Show me presently long-term viable and successful mmos with declining playbases and I’ll show you squares that are round.

EP has this one right. I’m with him all the way.

I know you want it to succeed, but wishing isn’t the same as having.

Every last one of us has said we will regroup in SW:TOR, because most of us are Star Wars fans (we’re mid-20s and 30s nerds for the most part; how could we not be?), and it looks like the most likely successor to the type of gameplay we fostered in our WoW guild.

I do not presume to know whether or not The Old Republic will replace WoW, but I will say this: If I join an MMO again, it is unlikely to be WoW, and it is becoming increasingly likely that the next MMO that I play will be The Old Republic.

SW:TOR, on the other hand, doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a PVE/PVP MMO in the style of Everquest I/II, WoW, AoC, Rift, etc. But it it has two benefits: first is an established story continuity that people love from prior single-player games, and second is that it has BioWare’s general level of fit and polish. Even a “bad” BioWare game like Dragon Age II is still a well-put together game with full voice acting, excellent graphics, usable and intuitive combat, and a tightly-woven narrative.

@DG: I get that; KotOR is a monument of gaming, its sequel less so, but the world is poised for a new PVE MMO to take over WoW’s throne. The problem with other offerings is that no one cares about the story; Rift’s lore is invented out of whole cloth and just sucks. WoW had an established, popular setting and lore. So did Warhammer and Conan, though those were botched by Mythic and Funcom’s blundering. BioWare generally doesn’t fuck up story, even if they fuck up other shit, so I think the established Expanded Universe lore will help draw people in to the game and make them care about endgame raiding as something more than an arbitrary gear grind.