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Directly from beta
Deewe
Member UncommonPosts: 1,980
Personal rating: B (Expecting B+ @launch)
(Edited after 2nd beta round)
==> All in all a good MMO, still very rough on the edges especially on the UI side
Game feels uneven, some stuff are well polished and others are lacking. Not a former Blizzard quality if you ask.
Sadly the last build felt more bugged than the prior one (ex: tab targetting not working, hearing others companions)
Game feels like Star Wars the Restricted Wars [on rails].
UI needs luvin' [Shall be fixed ASAP]
Character customization is lacking (body features and gear). [Might never be improved]
Some quest lines are not that great or even illogic
Housing is even worse than LotRo
Space sim is disappointing
Intro: The cinematic are great.
Still the animated parts with in game graphics felt rushed. Ex passing the blockade with the Smuggler did not feel like a blockade at all. Whent through way too easily, felt like the opponents where on tea time. Or the ships landing didn't feel that great either.
Server Selection: Done the trick, nothing great, nothing bad either. Could be improved with filters like only display a zone, or a type of server and then sort them by name or status or zone...
Character Creation: Painful and lacks options.
1) Still even on lowest mouse setting it rotated the camera way too fast.
2) Zooming in and out felt like there was only 2/3 camera distance settings
3) Can't change the camera vertical axis.
4) I wished there was a tattoo less option for Zabracks and Mirialan.
5) Also I saw no non symmetric tattoos on republic characters
6) Would have appreciated to be able to die tattoos
7) Human female faces looks either like youngsters of ugly.
8) Rattataki jewellery don't look great and have like 4 choices that you can combine
9) Mirialan = Space Orks and Sith = Blood Elves. BTW the low poly on Sith tentacles are horrid.
10) Can't choose the makeup color on female characters
11) Cyborgs "add-ons" looks ugly
Questing:
Way too many answers are about greed or NPC always giving us $$$
As a Jedi Knight played mostly a Jedi Knight and always selected the Dark answers.
The early story felt bland, uninspired and lacking [Beware of spoilers]:
1) Being raised from Padawan to Knight is way too fast and felt nothing special. More like ok you are now 18, welcome to the club you can now buy your smokes and drink alcohol.
2) Dark choices were mostly about greed and greed and greed. I thought I was playing a mercenary not a Knight.
3) The Jedi council member have to be really blind, death and stupid. The Dark answers were so openly evil that it felt weird not to have them react and put us directly in a force cell.
4) Done my best to get rid of the droid and the best they find to impose us this piece of junk is you need a companion..., is that the best you can do?
5) At a point we are poisoned (or at least said we are) and... nothing? Am I not supposed to be sick, dying or something?
6) I did never feel like I was THE or even A hero. (Not that I care though)
As a Trooper
I found the class story much more well written and better tied together. Not only it felt better but it made sense and as a player you could buy it. Only down side, once again you're not a merc but a soldier $$$.
As a Smuggler
While a bit cliche some lines are pure jewels.
As an IA
You can feel the writer is indeed mixing 007 with Bourne Identity and shake them well.
As a BH
The great hunt is a bit overdone but it's a good way to out you on track and I liked most of the the story choices
Ambiance: World is totally static. NPC and mobs are static. There aren't any critters nor world creatures. No bird singing, no NPC chatter. The world feels like sanitized. Also never felt there was war going on on Ord Mantell. For example in WAR you felt like there was something going on and in RIFT you really felt you landed in the middle of a war (at least just after character creation).
After seeing it I do not buy the "can't have day/night cycles due to specific planets color settings". At least some planets needs it. They feel too much static and it won't kill the immersion, even otherwise to blur/fade their basic color during the night.
Game looks SW it does not feels SW.
Combat: Felt really nice but for ranged characters to stand in the open like it was nothing.
Toss cable on the Knight Droid was replaced by a stupid droid force leap in the melee = Silly. Please keep the droid at range and have it freeze mobs that tries to close on it so they stay in range of the JK
Note: Still unable to automatically display all cover slots for the smuggler while moving. However I liked how he automatically rolled to the selected covered spot, even if I was a bit far from it.
Class being carbon copy from one faction to the other is disappointing.
Abilities: Honestly they should replace the #1 ability for each class with an autoattack. Spamming it is annoying in the long term and it doesn't help making the combat more vibrant. Only more like a hassle. BTW the companions abilities should not be locked in the companion hot bar. I was unable to rearrange them the way I needed them.
Item Collection: Area loot is even better than in Rift as wider.
Inventory: Once again a MMO with painful inventory management.
1) Some icons are really difficult to distinguish from others. Ex stims and grey items looks alike on my monitor. I had to be careful not to sell them
2) Miss a sell grey items at vendor (Yes I know we can use the companion do so)
3) Miss filter bags, like in WAR or better WoW ArkInventory. And I'd like separate, resizable bags.
4) I wish there was a small icon on every item to categorise them: ex heavy armor, medium armor, 1h saber, 2h saber... so we don't need to mouse over an item to know who can use it.
5) Bag space is too small early in the game.
6) Gear management is tedious due to the fact we are not being able to have inentory/loot and companion & character window open at the same time.
Character Sheet: Graphically speaking looks neat but should rise a bit the T7 droid companion display as it's cutting it's legs.
Functionality wise:
1) Hide slots toggle should be next to the head slot.
2) Wish I had a shoulder pad slot and I could hide these ugly shoulder flaps. (You're going to either love/hate them at hight level)
3) Can't zoom in/out the character doll.
4) Frame should be resizable and moveable
I looked alike all characters around, was forced using gear that I did not like.
=> Felt like I was playing a character provided by the server, not mine.
Movement: Running animations felt a bit too rigid, like having a stick in the bottom. Female looked like they were walking with heels not running around in a dangerous area with guns. Didn't like the way female arms are moving while running.
Zones: Switching instances = 30 minutes cooldown. WTHeck???
Graphics: Really like the work done by the environmental artists. Really don't like some of the gear.
For example Coruscant brown and gold senator robes are really ugly: from the choice of colors to the design through the textures. Hopefully a place holder.
Some textues are washed out others looks like plastic instead of cloth or metal.
In cut scene you can see the colors are bleeding from one zone to the other, maybe due to the lack of AA
Really dislike the huge shoulder pads on top tier gear.
Story Line/Voice over: Acting acting is nice, while all the sentences does not always melt well as have diferent speed/tone/level. In my play time I already noticed my character repeating the same sentence a few times. I can foresee players starting skipping V.O. fast, at least after levelling one character on each faction. And I did started skipping V.O. during my second session. Note: I wasn't even rush levelling.
Really dislike the multy pass rendering in cut scene. It's not helping the immersion. But it seems the rendering has been improved as bit faster.
Did not like I had to hit multiple times space bar to go down to the dialog choice when there are many dialog lines.
UI: TOR biggest issue right now.
Map: Poorly implemented.
1) It's stuck in our face in the middle of the screen
2) Non resizable
3) Non moveable
4) Can't select multiple entries like vendor + trainer
5) Can't zoom in/out (mouse zoom option isn't handy)
6) Can't center the map around our character
7) The door/stairs/elevator icons to select other maps are too small for clicking conveniently
8) Can't create waypoints
9) Would like a frame less faded, moveable and resizable map
10) Would like to select a destination (ex trainer) and have an optional in game line drawn to guide us to the destination in interiors, as in SWG or Dead space or better: follow a mouse droid
11) Would like in world waypoints as in SWG, so no need to constantly open the map to know where to go in exterior
Keybinds: Needs more options and put keybinds in 2 columns for each function not 2 rows. Also missing a mouse look toggle. Can't bind CTRL to ventrilo.
Crafting: mostly useless for current character, better for alts.
1) From what I saw rewards and loots are better than crafted items.
2) It's really unpleasant not be able to queue missions
3) Wish we could see in game what can be crafted with a profession without being obliged to train it.
4) It would also be handy separate crafting profession on a side and gathering ones on another in the codex.
5) Needs more filters for items types, class and so on
Housing: Not a house but a glorified transportable bank.
Guilds: N/A didn't used it, but seriously no guild banks at launch? (Ok Rift did this mistake too)
PvP: Did not try that.
Space: Suggestion: don't advertise it too much.
Final word: It's Star Wars, we can travel faster than the light, have real conversations with droids and we have to go to a terminal to send or receive a text message?
[P.S.: All the above is a matter of personal opinion]
Comments
well this seems as a big let down to you but you state that is a personal opinion so its ok :P
one thing to note thought...
many people will not take your opinion seriously if you consider WoW launch as an A+ or even saying it was better than RIFT lauch.Even RIFT haters say that the game was one of the abysmal MMOs with a solid launch.
anyway!
I hope our personal opinions differ quite a lot because if its near at what you describe then what other people say is either lies or blind fan-boyism but then again it might be the other way around :P
I really like your write up Deewe.
I agree character creation is somewhat lackluster and they could use some more/better options.
Sterter worlds really don't seem to have too much in the form of ambience, I only really felt a change when I hit taris, and then moving forward you really see some better world activity later on, especially on Alderaan and Balmorra.
I don't think they should add an auto attack, if you played the knight, you would know that later on you get a number of abilities that build force, so you really only need to utilize the #1 key when those abilities are on cooldown or you are out of range. I rarely had a problem building force and didn't use the 1 key much after level 15 on my SW.
Agree with inventory completely, I hope they fix the implementation of it, don't like wasting cash on bags, but it turns out to be worth it to buy them as you earn twice as much money when you can hold more loot.
Female characters running kind of do look a little strange, but to be honest thats similar in many games.
zone switching with the 30 minute cooldown is ridiculous, they need to shorten that to 5 minutes.
Some gear is still placeholder, and a lot of it looks the same, but with the help of the appearance tab we should be good.
Completely agree on the UI being the biggest issue.
I like the fade out of the map, and don't think its a major issue, but resizing is key here. Multiple waypoints aren't a necessity, but should be really simple to implement, so not sure why they don't have them in yet.
Not sure what you mean with the keybinds, could you elaborate?
I found crafting to be really good for my characters, as long as you know what to craft. Of course, at the early levels you're stuck without a companion if you want to be a dedicated crafter, but for a good player this is a non-issue, and you can always group up instead.
You can queue a number of items to CRAFT you can't queue a number of items to GATHER and you can't queue MISSION skills. --- > the bug here is, after you set 1 item to craft and leave the queue window if you go back in to the crew window you have to wait for the items to finish before you select new items. <pro tip> queue all your items at one time and you can have up to 5 items queue'd to craft.
Housing is weak at this moment.
The guild system is alright, nothing special, you get invited, you have a welcome message, you have a guild chat, no guild halls. There are ranks and abilities in game, nothing more.
I think you covered a lot of the issues I agree with, and my score was pretty close to yours, slightly higher because I did PvP and it IS pretty awesome. Good overview though.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
Planetside 2 - Terran Republic
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http://www.shadowshand.com
giving WoW an A+ at launch is assinine. the game became great not long after, but the first month or 2 and even longer were plagued with crashes and bugs.
smoothest launch for me(and ive played most everything worth mentioning) is Rift. for both the state of the game and the quality of it. swap rift and wows launch ratings and youre more on target. makes it hard for me to take everything else you say serious.
Yeah, I don't know of many people that would give WoW an A+ at launch. There were a lot of issues with it to the point people had to be refunded game time for all the crashes and downtime.
I like your review, but I have some points of contention on some of the stuff that I don't need to point out since Dubya pretty much summed up my thoughts.
Can't really speak to WoW at launch, but I see this game as doing at least as good if not better than Rift, simply due to a strong architecture and a good amount of testing going on. I believe it will be smooth, and the problems with the game itself will be minimal. Performance has been pretty good on the weekend tests, whereas before in beta they did have some hitching along the way. Most of that has cleared with the new builds.. everything is looking up.
If you take into account that the game is in beta most oof your points seem petty. The other complaints just seem petty even if the game is 2 years old.
I'm at least glad that even though you didn;t want to speak of the good things in TOR, that you at least acknowledged the game is in the "B" range. For me its definitly in the "A" until a few months after launch. Then I will revisit that grade when the bugs are fixed and new features are implemented.
EDIT: OH, and BTW like everyone else said, WoW's launch was horrid. SWTOR looks ten times more polished then WOW did even 6 months after launch.
Yeah, people tend to forget how many issues WoW had at launch. If it had the same launch today, it would never survive.
I believe it will do better than Rift. It is a very polished game already and has a lot of promotion behind it. I played only a limited amount of time in the beta and I didn't have any issues, although the game its not really my cup of tea.
The game is releasing in a month. I think it's time to stop calling in beta like we are going to see major changes right before release. And if there are countless posts listing all the wonders of TOR without listing a single problem.
My biggest issue is that story doesn't matter. Regardless of what you pick, darkside or lightside you get the same reward and your story continues. You might get different reactions from NPC's but your story doesn't change. It wouldn't be a big issue if Bioware hadn't been selling story as such a major feature for so long.
And this is where you are wrong. I've been in the beta for a long time and let me tell you that they have been making huge changes with every build for a while now.
For example in this build they removed portable cover from Operatives and Scoundrels, added the legacy system, added and balanced a bunch of abilities, made huge changes to crafting, fixed a TON of bugs, as well as hundreds of other changes.
Bioware has done this every single build so far. There will be more changes before launch, lots of them. This isn't some shoddy indie mmo developer. This game isn't FF XIV, or Mortal Online, or WAR, or Age of Conan. Bioware gets stuff done, fast.
They pump out code really quickly, and I for one expect a lot to be dont in the next month (not to mention post launch).
As far as story not mattering and there not being different rewards, that is also incorrect. You get light and dark side points, companion affection, and some times different quest goals depending on what you pick. May not seem like much, but light/dark side points can affect what kind of gear you can use. Also there are plenty of examples of different choices affecting what you have to actually do on the quest.
It also affects how the story is told and what your perception of your character is. Which is a huge deal to me, because I am very interested in the story.
Shadow's Hand Guild
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The Secret World - Dragons
Planetside 2 - Terran Republic
Tera - Dragonfall Server
http://www.shadowshand.com
Thanks for the feedback guys.
To be totally honest I do expect BioWare to do quite a lot improvements until launch but in my book, so far, Rift was more fine tuned than what I'm expecting from TOR day one.
IMHO, at this point the success of TOR will mostly depend on two factors:
How fast they are going to improve the game
How fast they are going to deliver new content
Thing is while they do have a great IP on their side, there's a mighty challenger zooming on the horizon: GW2.
Top of that you can expect Rift to deliver content even faster than ever.
P.S.: see you @launch in the V.I.P. lounge
Not sure if someone mentioned this but:
Companions can be sent off the sell your grey items. It is built in game and can be done from anywhere.
You stay sassy!
I knew this when I wrote the OP and well isn't it kind of silly to have your companion disappear for 60s to sell your grey items when you are close to a vendor and maybe even already browsing his inventory?
That's a perfect example of the polishing difference between a Blizzard product and TOR.
Shrug, difference of opinion. I don't see a difference in the things BW does for polish and what Blizzard does for polish, but to each their own viewpoint.
Do you still intend to play SWTOR at launch? I had actually my bet running on that you wouldn't, at least I wouldn't if I had the same constant complaints towards a game that you seem to have, or at least that you played it but intended to be gone within a month or 2.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Maybe I'm missing something, but the point is to have your companion clear out your inventory for you when you are far from a city and your inventory is getting full.
Polish? What sort of options did Wow have for inventory management? It had none for years!
Most use add-ons for years prior to UI overhauls by Bliz (no friggin idea what they have now. Haven't played that dung pile in years). The only issue you have is basically how easily icons show up. I got used it but hopefully they can tweak them further to speed things up.
The point about the companions is that you can send them BEFORE you hit town. You either are recalling back, hitting a speeder route or using your own speeder ... all of which you could send off you companion prior to starting any of those methods and will even be back within seconds of a recall. It isn't really something one needs to ever worry about but will take some getting used to.
Still waiting to see Bioware's final stance on add-ons is in the long term anyway. I'd rather just simply start with adding UI scaling for now and all is good for the time being.
You stay sassy!
I played WoW at launch and personally had zero issues. Concerning the UI of this game: Wait for add-ons for extra features or replacements. And I'm sure Bioware will update it in the future. As for the fuctionality of it, people are saying it's smooth/clean and gets the job done.
Not to beat the dead horse, but it really does damage your credibility when you give WoW's launch an A+.
That being said, I think B is a fair score given your apparent priorities, though I don't agree with many of your issues.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
I do this all the time, but I have found that you shouldn't ever have grey items sitting in your bag when you are standing in front of a vendor.
I always sell my grey items as my bag fills up WHILE I'm questing or in a Flashpoint or whatever. When I'm done questing or heading back to a hub or something, I send my companion off while I'm traveling back to town. By the time I get there my companion is back for conversations. Also if you're walking into a big city (Coruscant or Kaas City for example) you have a little bit of walking before you get to your quest turn-in or any vendors usually. This is a perfect time to send your companion off to sell stuff. By the time you get to your quest turn-in your companion will be back to participate in the conversation.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
Planetside 2 - Terran Republic
Tera - Dragonfall Server
http://www.shadowshand.com
I pre-ordered as well.. but I think I'm probably not as positive as you. I've been in the beta since March and I just... well to be honest this thursday the 24th is 3 weeks until Early Access starts....
I agree pretty much with your two factors.. but also would add in:
Their ability to fix current and long term issues in the next 3 weeks.
Why? Simply because the first 30 days are very critical to an MMO.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned much since the NDA dropped... well maybe it has been.
This last build was only the second time they carried characters over. The first time they had issues... this time they have issues. I do have some concern when I have not seen them able to carry characters in between builds without isssue... or seen them able to fix those issues in any kind of timely manner. Simply telling people the solution was to start a new character.
To me that is kind of a critical thing to be able to do.. in an MMO. In general it wouldn't even be suprising to see a "balance" pass on some classes during the first 7 to 14 days (in any MMO). Well if you hose all those classes... the reaction of your player base may not be positive. So anyway.. in beta we have never seen them able to do this without causing issues and its pretty much 3 weeks until Early Access starts.
We have not had enough focused testing on "end game" and its relatively fast to end game on the level curve. I would expect that pre-made groups/guilds will have people at 50 in the first 7 days (meaning some less than 7).
We were supposed to have a "high level" server deployment to get focused testing on end game. Well they have tried this twice before... once by adding them to existing servers (hosed the servers) and the second time was a high level server (which immediantly crashed and was taken offline.. brought back online and taken offline while the last phase was still active). The current (third time) the deployment was delayed .. watch the sticky for updates. When they have deployed these the characters are level 40 up to around 43 maybe 45 (its random).
So with 3 weeks to go.. we don't even have the focus server up.. no real ETA on it.. so I don't really think we'll get the focus they wanted before Early Access.
I don't really have anything "bad" to say about the game...
Its more of a concern factor because the first 30 days are generally pretty critical for an MMO. I'm not an EA employee or shareholder so I guess I don't really have much of an investment. However, I am a Star Wars fan and this is going to be my only option ... since that other Star Wars game shuts down the same day early access starts for TOR (and that other thing that SOE runs isn't my kind of game regardless.. clone wars or w/e its called).
I have a much longer list of issues that bother me/bugs I've reported that still exist etc
Its just these few things that really concern me... the rest is pretty minor or more based on my opinion than anything.
*edit*
I would add in an entire rant about Ilum and the promised "end game" pvp focus planets (and the entire lack of most of that in any phase of testing). Which to me is a pretty large factor but.. some people don't pvp at all and I hate the entire pvp mini game system for Warzones so that really gets into my personal opinion. Ilum isn't so much opinion because most of what they talked about at trade shows has never been given to us in any functional manner and Ilum is supposed to be one of many "pvp control point" planets.... and since EA owns WAR/DAoC and UO.. there should be some really impressive pvp in this game.. that I feel is lacking or even lackluster currently.
regarding their stance on add-ons, georg discusses this at the recent EU fansite summit at about 13mins into the Q&A(dont worry the Q&A audio is in english)
http://the-force.eu/blogs/173-fansite-summit-q-a-mit-georg-zoeller
I think he just means in terms of polish. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that this game is going to be more successful than Rift, barring some major unforseen catastrophe.
In fact there are 2 points here:
The first being the great feature being allowing you to sell grey items from anywhere in the wild. Rated *****
The second being while you can do the first there's no sell junk button on vendors.
I do agree that the lack of the second can look as very minor but I dare saying it's in those kind of thing that you recognize Blizzard and lately Rift polish too. That's what IMHO sets apart, for now, TOR and those 2 games.