“EA blames us and to some extent they’re right to. But it was fan feedback from the day we opened the forums that encouraged us to design it for the fans the way it is and that included making it more like Kotor then an MMO like Wow,” he stated mentioning that gamers actually wanted SWTOR to be more like Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), a single player role playing game by Bioware before it was acquired by EA, rather than World of Warcraft (WoW).

Fans have called him out and claim that Bioware is just pointing fingers for their own failure as they opened the official forums on September 12, 2011 where as the game came out three months later on December 20, 2011. It is hard to believe that three months worth of fan feedback could influence the game that was in development since 2006.

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I think this lackluster art is a big part of what people mean when they say that SWTOR feels like a free-to-play online game. The visuals lack the polish and splendor that you’d expect from a big-name studio. It all comes off as dull or amateurish. I suspect this is what happens when you try to solve a production problem by throwing money at it. Yes, you can hire out of the pool of artistic clone troopers that Game Developer Colleges are pumping out these days. Yes, you can pay those people $butt to work seventy hour weeks in order to to mass-produce game assets. But you aren’t going to have a lovingly crafted work of art when you’re done. You need people with both skill and experience, and then you need to give them time to do their jobs. If you don’t, then you’re going to have a sterile world with no heart.

World of Warcraft is more than just a giant skinner box of well-tuned mechanics. It’s a vibrant playground where the music, the architecture, the soundscape, and the lighting all combine to create an atmosphere and set a tone.

And don’t tell me SWTOR isn’t “trying to beat WoW”. They spent 200 million on this thing. It actually doesn’t matter if they want to beat WoW or not. They did not use their assets wisely, and we got a game that was much less than it could have been.

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In SWTOR, the game is at the bottom, and the visuals are just window dressing. Ugly window dressing, if you believe what some people are saying.

Even if you use hotkeys to activate those powers at the bottom instead of using the mouse, that bar is still the center of the gameplay. You need to manage your cooldowns, and trigger your powers in the most efficient order. You don’t choose target by aiming at them, you choose them by selecting them with the mouse or by pressing TAB.

In a game like Jedi Knight, Force Unleashed, or Republic Commando, you don’t spend all your time looking at your health bar and ammo count at the bottom. You spend it looking at the world in front of you. In fact, designers go out of their way to add as much information to the world as they can so you don’t need to look down very often. When you get shot the view kicks, your character cries out, and there’s a red flash to indicate the severity of the hit. In some games there’s even a directional arrow to go with it, so you know which direction the damage is coming from. You know you’ve been shot, and you should have a pretty good idea of how hard you were hit. All without needing to look away from the game.

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