Star Wars: The Old Republic will kill WoW - outsourced to Broadsword

[DalekFlay]

I was hugely disappointed by the game as a whole, but I'll give credit where it's due: the Agent storyline is actually pretty good.

Indeed. That was what I played first, so I assumed there were seven more stories of that caliber waiting for me.

The Jedi Knight is far from that caliber though. At least for the first ten levels.

 

[Exar Kun]

I was hugely disappointed by the game as a whole, but I'll give credit where it's due: the Agent storyline is actually pretty good.

Indeed. That was what I played first, so I assumed there were seven more stories of that caliber waiting for me.

The Jedi Knight is far from that caliber though. At least for the first ten levels.

Jedi is quite generic, I'l tell you that now. Warrior is way better.

 

[DalekFlay]

Jedi is quite generic, I'l tell you that now. Warrior is way better.

Yeah but I already did Agent, so another Imperial would be a lot of the same content. I wanted to see the Republic side. Figured I might as well go jedi knight since it's supposed to be "KotOR 3" in most respects.

Maybe it picks up.

 

[DalekFlay]

I got bored of both the Jedi Knight and Sith Inquisitor stories pretty quickly. Also I disliked the gameplay of the Jedi, just jumping in and then pressing 1, 2 and 3 over and over without much strategy or movement.

Ended up trying a trooper since I liked the Imperial Agent so much and people told me the stories were similar. They really are, you're more a Republic Agent than a trooper but I guess they wanted the class names to be different. Gameplay is more fun as well, running around shotgunning people. The game is insanely boring because of the MMO aspects though, so it will probably take me years to level a trooper up to the end, just playing here and there when waiting for to start something else. It's free though, can't complain.

Don't see myself branching out to any other MMOs though, unless they focus on story as much as TOR does.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

You could give a whirl to Neverwinter or Star Trek Online, and only play the user-generated content. Those have better writing than TOR anyway.

 

[Jarpie]

You could give a whirl to Neverwinter or Star Trek Online, and only play the user-generated content. Those have better writing than TOR anyway.

 

[Frian Bargo]

Do you need to pay for PvP? If not, what exactly is end game content? Questing with groups? PvP? Because IMO the story and dialogue appear to be the only things worth playing this for, if that.

 

[DalekFlay]

You could give a whirl to Neverwinter or Star Trek Online, and only play the user-generated content. Those have better writing than TOR anyway.

I might try some others but I'm wary of falling down that hole. I don't really like the gameplay much at all, and have no desire to ever group. I just tried TOR for story and to see the areas.

 

[Drakron]

I might try some others but I'm wary of falling down that hole.

I am going to say to avoid PWE games as they decided to make their shitty Steam-wannabe client mandatory, if you had then installed it should be fine but otherwise if want to play them, do it with the Steam client.

 

[Exar Kun]

Do you need to pay for PvP? If not, what exactly is end game content? Questing with groups? PvP? Because IMO the story and dialogue appear to be the only things worth playing this for, if that.

You need to pay for unlimited access to warzones. If not you are limited to 5 a week, which might be fine if you are a casual PVPer. Basically Operations, flashpoints, and warzones you need to be subscribed or somehow jew the system getting tons of passes like many preferred players do.

Story is all free except for Makeb content.

 

[Rahdulan]

I got bored of both the Jedi Knight and Sith Inquisitor stories pretty quickly. Also I disliked the gameplay of the Jedi, just jumping in and then pressing 1, 2 and 3 over and over without much strategy or movement.

Ended up trying a trooper since I liked the Imperial Agent so much and people told me the stories were similar. They really are, you're more a Republic Agent than a trooper but I guess they wanted the class names to be different. Gameplay is more fun as well, running around shotgunning people. The game is insanely boring because of the MMO aspects though, so it will probably take me years to level a trooper up to the end, just playing here and there when waiting for to start something else. It's free though, can't complain.

I think the main problem is that you'll run into certain obstacles when you reach around level 20, primarily the fact that your two meager hotbars won't suffice anymore because the game feels the need to drown you with skills. At that point you'll probably want to fork out $4,99 to get Preferred status and have FOUR hotbars.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/26/b...-shut-down-apac-servers-for-the-old-republic/

BioWare has announced plans to shut down its Asia-Pacific servers for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Players on those servers will be migrated to North American servers, in what SW:TOR Community Manager Eric Musco calls a “multistep process“.

The move comes as a response to complaints that servers in the Asia-Pacific region are inadequately populated. Fans suggested several ways to address the problem, with BioWare eventually opting to remove the servers altogether. Musco says the studio will need to update the Free Character Transfer System in order to cater for recent game updates, as well as the forthcoming 2.0 update and Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion pack, so it may be some time before the transfer is completed.

Once those issues are addressed, players on APAC servers will be offered Free Character Transfers to the buzzing North American servers of the same gameplay type. “Mastar Dar’Nala (PvP) will transfer to The Bastion (PvP), Gav Daragon (RP-PvE) will transfer to Begeren Colony (RP-PvE), and Dalborra (PvE) will transfer to The Harbinger (PvE),” the community post reads.

“We are moving as quickly as we can to make this happen, but we want to make sure this is a smooth transition, so it will take some time,” Musco said.
The move comes weeks ahead of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion’s April 14 release.

Another nail in the coffin. Very good.

 

[Drakron]

You know that was back in March right?

 

[Drakron]

And imagine my surprise as the MMO cocksuckers of the industry (Massively) even come down and say "yep, TOR F2P really fucking sucks".

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/0...al-swtor-free-to-play-experiment-fo/#comments

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Ahh, so the game still blows?
Good, good.

 

[Lhynn]

And imagine my surprise as the MMO cocksuckers of the industry (Massively) even come down and say "yep, TOR F2P really fucking sucks".

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/0...al-swtor-free-to-play-experiment-fo/#comments

Arent the biggest mmo cocksuckers the guys at mmorpg?

And massively isnt that bad i guess, i read their articles from time to time, but you just cant trust these sites.

 

[Drakron]

Arent the biggest mmo cocksuckers the guys at mmorpg?

Try to top this:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/04/01/captains-log-a-star-trek-online-player-uses-math/

They also put other bullshit, they have a few pet games that they defense to death when said games have problems and they refuse to even address issues.

 

[Lhynn]

Arent the biggest mmo cocksuckers the guys at mmorpg?

Try to top this:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/04/01/captains-log-a-star-trek-online-player-uses-math/

They also put other bullshit, they have a few pet games that they defense to death when said games have problems and they refuse to even address issues.

motherfucker

 

[Fens]

Try to top this:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/04/01/captains-log-a-star-trek-online-player-uses-math/

oh that's droll... it's all fine, because statistically the 3 guys with baseball bats saying "nothing happened" outweigh the one beat up guy with blood on his face who says "help"

 

[Xor]

So my roommate started playing this a while back and he kept incessantly bringing it up every time we talked about gaming (which is about 70% of what we talk about, the other 30% being Scrubs references), and after a while I finally broke down and tried the game out just so he'd stop telling me what a great game it was and we could go back to talking about League of Legends.

Anyway. I was surprised to find myself enjoying the game, in the same way I enjoy mindless time-wasters like Peggle or Plants vs Zombies. I would play with the sound muted while watching Breaking Bad and old Mystery Science Theater episodes, and since I played WoW for 5 years and SWTOR is basically WoW with a shittier engine and voice acting actually doing quests didn't take up much of my attention. I rolled a sith warrior and ran around slaughtering the enemies of the empire, which was pretty amusing in the way Bioware evil usually is. SWTOR's zones are planets, which vary in size and environment but always have the same environment throughout, which can get tedious when you're on boring planets like Tatooine or Hoth. Clearing a planet usually involves doing 3 to 5 story quests and about 20 side quests, which is pretty stock for the genre and gets pretty tedious after a while. The f2p restrictions started to chafe around level 20, so I spent $5 for preferred status (mostly so I could have bank, goddammit).

I'm near the level cap now and I think I've finally burned out. It kind of surprised me that I was leveling so quickly, because I know there's an xp reduction for free players and I was expecting a vanilla WoW-like 15 day /played grind to the cap, but I think I only have something like 3.5 days on this character, and several hours of that are me being AFK because the load times are so atrocious that I didn't want to quit when I had to do things like make food or go grocery shopping, lest I have to go through 3 loading screens and wait about 5 minutes just to get back in game. On the whole I liked the storyline. The writing was passable and filled with Star Wars cliches, I basically knew Baras was going to betray me from our second conversation and pretty much called the exact moment it would happen about 4 worlds early. The companions range from I don't care to amusing, and I even found myself being nice to Vette, partially because I'm an obsessive-compulsive completionist who must max out everything but also because Vette is adorable and her dialog is genuinely funny, something I am loathe to admit. Jaesa was basically a microcosm of how hilarious Bioware's writing can be; one moment she's a naive and vulnerable padawan and the next she's the galaxy's most ruthless psycopath. Quinn is a tool and reminds me of Carth fucking Onasi, do you really need to put him in every goddamn game you release, Bioware? For fuck's sake. The other companions were just forgettable. On the whole the companion thing is one of the few single player RPG elements that I think actually works in an MMO, and it's done pretty well - you have a dedicated leveling partner you can feed gear to, and who can fill a deficient roll for you, allowing you to effectively level as a healer or a tank and still quickly kill things. Or you can level as a tank and take a healer companion and be effectively immortal.

I have a laundry list of criticisms for SWTOR, but they're all things people have brought up before. The f2p model is shit, and it seems to be insidiously designed to encourage people to sink several hours of their time into the game and then reveal that the game is practically unplayable unless they want to spend $15. That's what everyone I talked to says about the game, too, that the f2p is just there as an "extended trial". Which is bullshit. I played DC Universe Online (again with my roommates) and that game had a f2p model where I honestly can't remember a single restriction except a ridiculously low currency cap, but there was nothing interesting to spend currency on in that game anyway.

Load times are godawful. I should not have to sit in front of 2 loading screens just to see the goddamn character select screen. Plus planets take in excess of 5 minutes to load sometimes, which makes it really inconvenient to leave and, say, visit the auction house if the planet in question doesn't have one. To compare with WoW, when I click to start WoW there's a brief delay before the game launches, then I can log in and immediately choose a character. Then there's a somewhat lengthy load time, and that's it. I can play the game for hours without ever seeing a loading screen; the only times it comes up are changing continents or going into instances, which usually load quickly. I don't have to see a loading screen every time I change zones.

On the subject of changing zones, I was somewhat appalled to learn that there are no level progression forks in SWTOR. What I mean is, everyone who is level 10-16 on the imperial side will be leveling on Drumond Kaas, and everyone who is level 47-50 will be leveling on Corellia. I understand why they had to do that, it's because they couldn't allow people to choose from multiple planets to level on and still have coherent storylines that demanded you stick to one planet for a certain length of time. I still don't think it's a good decision, though. That means if I am ever struck with the urge to level another character, I'll have a new class storyline to look forward to while doing the exact same side quests I did before. MMOs are all about grinding, but grinding can get boring quickly, so anything an MMO can do to stave off boredom is usually a welcome addition. To compare again to WoW, in that game there are as many as 3 or 4 zones you could be leveling in at any one time, and they're usually vastly different visually with different quest chains to follow so you don't get fatigued from doing the same thing repeatedly. SWTOR doesn't have that, and my plans to play through the first 20 levels or so of the Imperial Agent class to see the story have pretty much fallen by the wayside because I just don't have it in me to go through the same worlds again. I'm sure there are some MMO players with more grind fortitude than me who won't be affected by this, but it sure as hell bothers me.

The idea of combining single player RPG elements with an MMO was an interesting one, but I have to say the execution in SWTOR is pretty sloppy, and the entire concept really limits what the game can do. Since everything in the game is voiced, adding new content to the game becomes a logistical nightmare. You will never see a new class or a special new race added to the game, since new voicework would need to be done for basically everything. It also means that new content is much more expensive to produce, because it needs to be voice acted. The fact that instances are story-driven I'm sure sounded good on paper, but I did one flashpoint twice and I was already bored with the conversations that people for some reason refused to skip. I can't see that being anything more than a hindrance with the grind-based nature of MMOs.

My favorite 5-man instance in all of WoW is the Deadmines. I don't know why, probably because I almost never did 5-mans in vanilla and in TBC and Wrath I got so sick of farming heroics that I want to block all those instances out of my mind. Deadmines has a story to tell, but much of that story is told through visuals. There's quest text to tell you more or less what's going on, but just running through the instance gives you an idea of what Van Cleef is up to. You see slaves mining ore, a giant foundry, and finally a battleship with shitloads of cannons. So you learn that he's using slaves to mine ore, then processing the ore, and finally you see he's built a dreadnaught to enact his campaign of revenge against Stormwind. The defias quest line is one of the more interesting in WoW, with rebellion, political intrigue, and pirates. And it manages to be interesting without a single line of voice acting. The lack of cinematics and voice acting also makes it much less painful to repeat, which is kind of important for an MMO where repetitive grinding is basically all there is to do.

SWTOR's visuals leave much to be desired as well. The one flashpoint I did was basically the same generic factory that I'd see a dozen times before on other worlds. The planets themselves vary visually, but once you start entering "dungeons" everything starts to look familiar after a while. There's the cave environment, the temple environment, the factory environment, and so on. The only difference in those areas are the layout and what monsters the developer decided to populate the area with.

I can't imagine playing through the sith warrior story again. I already know what happens, and the few paltry different dialog responses I'm sure there are if I chose light side options instead of dark side ones aren't enough incentive to go through the frankly painfully boring grind again. And that's ultimately my biggest problem with SWTOR - I found myself thinking that there's an at least mediocre Star Wars RPG buried in this game somewhere, but it's buried under the need to do pointless side quests to level up enough to progress to the next story chunk. I found myself thinking how much more I would be enjoying this game if I didn't have to spend 3 hours killing 10 republic cobblers to get to the next part of the story. I'm sure SWTOR's endgame is as flaccid as the rest of the game's MMO elements; ideas ripped from WoW without learning from their mistakes or realizing what made the design work in the first place combined with awkward single player elements randomly inserted by developers who clearly have no idea why people play MMOs or how to keep their interest.

I could go on about the game's faults, because it really does have quite a few, but what's the point. The game was a massive failure, and is now only surviving on life support because of a rushed out expansion and the Star Wars brand name. What's the lesson here? Don't put your MMORPG in the hands of people who have never developed (or I suspect even played) an MMORPG before. At least when Blizzard wanted to make an MMO they hired really high profile Everquest players to help with the development, so they could get a sense about what people want from MMOs and how they could make that more accessible. That didn't turn out well in the end, but at least they tried.

TLDR: single player RPG mechanics and MMOs mix about as well as oil and water. The single player parts are hurt by the MMO bits and the MMO parts are hurt by the single player mechanics. Also the overall experience is bland and completely forgettable, but I guess that's par for the course with Bioware games lately.

 

[Lhynn]

Its shit. If you have any questions as to why, all you have to do is read this ^
Dont be so soft on it because you enjoyed it, any mmo with friends is fun.

 

[DalekFlay]

TLDR: single player RPG mechanics and MMOs mix about as well as oil and water.

Yup. Elder Scrolls is about to learn this.

Sadly I believe it's still the future, because companies see it as a path toward killing piracy and greater monetization.

 

[commie]

So my roommate started playing this a while back and he kept incessantly bringing it up every time we talked about gaming (which is about 70% of what we talk about, the other 30% being Scrubs references), and after a while I finally broke down and tried the game out just so he'd stop telling me what a great game it was and we could go back to talking about League of Legends.

Anyway. I was surprised to find myself enjoying the game, in the same way I enjoy mindless time-wasters like Peggle or Plants vs Zombies. I would play with the sound muted while watching Breaking Bad and old Mystery Science Theater episodes, and since I played WoW for 5 years and SWTOR is basically WoW with a shittier engine and voice acting actually doing quests didn't take up much of my attention. I rolled a sith warrior and ran around slaughtering the enemies of the empire, which was pretty amusing in the way Bioware evil usually is. SWTOR's zones are planets, which vary in size and environment but always have the same environment throughout, which can get tedious when you're on boring planets like Tatooine or Hoth. Clearing a planet usually involves doing 3 to 5 story quests and about 20 side quests, which is pretty stock for the genre and gets pretty tedious after a while. The f2p restrictions started to chafe around level 20, so I spent $5 for preferred status (mostly so I could have bank, goddammit).

I'm near the level cap now and I think I've finally burned out. It kind of surprised me that I was leveling so quickly, because I know there's an xp reduction for free players and I was expecting a vanilla WoW-like 15 day /played grind to the cap, but I think I only have something like 3.5 days on this character, and several hours of that are me being AFK because the load times are so atrocious that I didn't want to quit when I had to do things like make food or go grocery shopping, lest I have to go through 3 loading screens and wait about 5 minutes just to get back in game. On the whole I liked the storyline. The writing was passable and filled with Star Wars cliches, I basically knew Baras was going to betray me from our second conversation and pretty much called the exact moment it would happen about 4 worlds early. The companions range from I don't care to amusing, and I even found myself being nice to Vette, partially because I'm an obsessive-compulsive completionist who must max out everything but also because Vette is adorable and her dialog is genuinely funny, something I am loathe to admit. Jaesa was basically a microcosm of how hilarious Bioware's writing can be; one moment she's a naive and vulnerable padawan and the next she's the galaxy's most ruthless psycopath. Quinn is a tool and reminds me of Carth fucking Onasi, do you really need to put him in every goddamn game you release, Bioware? For fuck's sake. The other companions were just forgettable. On the whole the companion thing is one of the few single player RPG elements that I think actually works in an MMO, and it's done pretty well - you have a dedicated leveling partner you can feed gear to, and who can fill a deficient roll for you, allowing you to effectively level as a healer or a tank and still quickly kill things. Or you can level as a tank and take a healer companion and be effectively immortal.

I have a laundry list of criticisms for SWTOR, but they're all things people have brought up before. The f2p model is shit, and it seems to be insidiously designed to encourage people to sink several hours of their time into the game and then reveal that the game is practically unplayable unless they want to spend $15. That's what everyone I talked to says about the game, too, that the f2p is just there as an "extended trial". Which is bullshit. I played DC Universe Online (again with my roommates) and that game had a f2p model where I honestly can't remember a single restriction except a ridiculously low currency cap, but there was nothing interesting to spend currency on in that game anyway.

Load times are godawful. I should not have to sit in front of 2 loading screens just to see the goddamn character select screen. Plus planets take in excess of 5 minutes to load sometimes, which makes it really inconvenient to leave and, say, visit the auction house if the planet in question doesn't have one. To compare with WoW, when I click to start WoW there's a brief delay before the game launches, then I can log in and immediately choose a character. Then there's a somewhat lengthy load time, and that's it. I can play the game for hours without ever seeing a loading screen; the only times it comes up are changing continents or going into instances, which usually load quickly. I don't have to see a loading screen every time I change zones.

On the subject of changing zones, I was somewhat appalled to learn that there are no level progression forks in SWTOR. What I mean is, everyone who is level 10-16 on the imperial side will be leveling on Drumond Kaas, and everyone who is level 47-50 will be leveling on Corellia. I understand why they had to do that, it's because they couldn't allow people to choose from multiple planets to level on and still have coherent storylines that demanded you stick to one planet for a certain length of time. I still don't think it's a good decision, though. That means if I am ever struck with the urge to level another character, I'll have a new class storyline to look forward to while doing the exact same side quests I did before. MMOs are all about grinding, but grinding can get boring quickly, so anything an MMO can do to stave off boredom is usually a welcome addition. To compare again to WoW, in that game there are as many as 3 or 4 zones you could be leveling in at any one time, and they're usually vastly different visually with different quest chains to follow so you don't get fatigued from doing the same thing repeatedly. SWTOR doesn't have that, and my plans to play through the first 20 levels or so of the Imperial Agent class to see the story have pretty much fallen by the wayside because I just don't have it in me to go through the same worlds again. I'm sure there are some MMO players with more grind fortitude than me who won't be affected by this, but it sure as hell bothers me.

The idea of combining single player RPG elements with an MMO was an interesting one, but I have to say the execution in SWTOR is pretty sloppy, and the entire concept really limits what the game can do. Since everything in the game is voiced, adding new content to the game becomes a logistical nightmare. You will never see a new class or a special new race added to the game, since new voicework would need to be done for basically everything. It also means that new content is much more expensive to produce, because it needs to be voice acted. The fact that instances are story-driven I'm sure sounded good on paper, but I did one flashpoint twice and I was already bored with the conversations that people for some reason refused to skip. I can't see that being anything more than a hindrance with the grind-based nature of MMOs.

My favorite 5-man instance in all of WoW is the Deadmines. I don't know why, probably because I almost never did 5-mans in vanilla and in TBC and Wrath I got so sick of farming heroics that I want to block all those instances out of my mind. Deadmines has a story to tell, but much of that story is told through visuals. There's quest text to tell you more or less what's going on, but just running through the instance gives you an idea of what Van Cleef is up to. You see slaves mining ore, a giant foundry, and finally a battleship with shitloads of cannons. So you learn that he's using slaves to mine ore, then processing the ore, and finally you see he's built a dreadnaught to enact his campaign of revenge against Stormwind. The defias quest line is one of the more interesting in WoW, with rebellion, political intrigue, and pirates. And it manages to be interesting without a single line of voice acting. The lack of cinematics and voice acting also makes it much less painful to repeat, which is kind of important for an MMO where repetitive grinding is basically all there is to do.

SWTOR's visuals leave much to be desired as well. The one flashpoint I did was basically the same generic factory that I'd see a dozen times before on other worlds. The planets themselves vary visually, but once you start entering "dungeons" everything starts to look familiar after a while. There's the cave environment, the temple environment, the factory environment, and so on. The only difference in those areas are the layout and what monsters the developer decided to populate the area with.

I can't imagine playing through the sith warrior story again. I already know what happens, and the few paltry different dialog responses I'm sure there are if I chose light side options instead of dark side ones aren't enough incentive to go through the frankly painfully boring grind again. And that's ultimately my biggest problem with SWTOR - I found myself thinking that there's an at least mediocre Star Wars RPG buried in this game somewhere, but it's buried under the need to do pointless side quests to level up enough to progress to the next story chunk. I found myself thinking how much more I would be enjoying this game if I didn't have to spend 3 hours killing 10 republic cobblers to get to the next part of the story. I'm sure SWTOR's endgame is as flaccid as the rest of the game's MMO elements; ideas ripped from WoW without learning from their mistakes or realizing what made the design work in the first place combined with awkward single player elements randomly inserted by developers who clearly have no idea why people play MMOs or how to keep their interest.

I could go on about the game's faults, because it really does have quite a few, but what's the point. The game was a massive failure, and is now only surviving on life support because of a rushed out expansion and the Star Wars brand name. What's the lesson here? Don't put your MMORPG in the hands of people who have never developed (or I suspect even played) an MMORPG before. At least when Blizzard wanted to make an MMO they hired really high profile Everquest players to help with the development, so they could get a sense about what people want from MMOs and how they could make that more accessible. That didn't turn out well in the end, but at least they tried.

TLDR: single player RPG mechanics and MMOs mix about as well as oil and water. The single player parts are hurt by the MMO bits and the MMO parts are hurt by the single player mechanics. Also the overall experience is bland and completely forgettable, but I guess that's par for the course with Bioware games lately.

Wait...wait...'scrubs references'? That God awful thing with that slimy Joo masquerading as 'comedy'?? Say it ain't so Xor....SAY IT!!!!!!

 

[Rahdulan]

How long can you last?

 

[J1M]

Is there any opportunity in SWOTOR for a F2P player to make real-world money from playing the game? I remember that in the previous Star Wars MMO, there was at least one guy who turned crafting into a full-time job and a car for his wife.

I made about $50 playing Neverwinter, even though they do their best to prevent inter-player trading of currency. Sadly, the number of buyers is very low because they would prefer to get their Zen from the publisher's store.