I really wish people would stop compairing this game to other games like WoW. You cannot convince me that when WoW dropped it had literally EVERYTHING in it that it does now. I know when Everquest 2 dropped it was similar to this. Enough to lvl through and some end game content. As the expansions dropped more and more end game was pushed in until the eventually screwed it up and here we are. SW:TOR is going down a lot of different avenues at the moment that other MMO's have either not tried or succeded in. There is NO way there going to put every single thing into the origional content and I really wish you guys would see that. Your compairing a game that is 7 years old and what it has in it built up over years of patch's, expansions, and so on, to a game that is not even out yet. Put down the machete and stop hacking the gamet to peices since everyone is buying SW:TOR for the same reason. The game they have ATM sucks and they really want that something new.
Some of the stories arent that great for the class. Like the Inquisitor. It isnt very sith like as you are motivated out of fear not a lust for power and it isnt political as the class video implied. Instead you arer gobbeling up the souls of long dead (as in centuries or millenia) like pac-man does dots. I really expected far more with all the sith lore out there courtesy of the books and comics and KOTOR itself.BAne and Sidious and Zannah learned from masters and holocrons...you get power from being a ghostbuster. My opinion on that is if Bane ever had studied a holocron of this instance hed have called himself something else out of shame fro those who came before him. They could have done so much more with it...insead itsd "who ya gonna call? Sith Inquisitors!"...rather sad. On the other side of the coin the Jedi Knight story has been well done so far. From a compasny that excels at story telling this one was a total wtf moment.
By far the most annoying thing (and this is extremely annoying in all Bioware games), is that when I am in a conversation, the options for my responses do not correlate to what my character actually says, and therefore, sometimes, to the reaction of NPCs. This is not a problem in a single player game, but in this game I cannot change choices. When I want to say something, and I actually say something entirely different because the listed options are not even similar in either explicit or implicit meaning, I become extremely frustrated and annoyed. It is nearly game breaking when I get angry over a conversation option because I cannot change it. What the options are should correlate to what your character will actually say when you choose it. There is no excuse for it to not match.
For example, during a Bounty Hunter quest, before you accept, you have an option to say “Let's talk credits.” But if you select that option, your character says “I need money up-front.” These are not the same; they are not even similar, save in that they both regard money. “Let's talk credits” would usually mean you are negotiating for the sum to be paid. If the line is as short as “I need money up-front,” what reason is there to not simply display that line, so we know what we are going to say before we say it? Why is this such a pervasive problem in all Bioware games? I never know what my character is going to say, or even have a vague idea, before I select the option and hear what is actually said. It is ridiculous and maddening.
Another example, in the very same room (Nem'ros palace's cantina), when Getzo asks you to kill eels for him, you have an option to say “Is that the best plan?” “But when selected, your character actually says “Why not nab the eels and give them to Nem'ro yourself?” Not the same. Annoying. Frustrating.
These are just specific examples I have taken down now. A great example of this causing more actual problems is with the pair of Jedi lovers on Tython. The woman is jumpy, and any time a character is jumpy, you need to be careful what you say. But you say totally different things from the listed options, and upset her, when what the options are listed as may not have had the same reaction, because they are not even similar. When you cause outrage in someone, and feel like you were misled by terrible dialogue options, it is upsetting, and give the game a bad feeling. I am not sure I want to own this game, and not because of any gameplay issue, (the gameplay is great for me, though the graphics are a bit iffy), but because the conversations are so common, and so frustrating every single time.
I noticed this as well, but in the german version. Its the same, i choose an option and am surprised about what my character actually said, because i expected something else.
I also noticed, that often the supposed dialog feels more like a monolog. This is mainly because the intonation is often very unnatural. But i guess it would be super time consuming to record that many different VOs with natural intonations for every single possible dialog option and NPC /player reaction.
I am with ya on about all of these, least of all the UI. I like it, except for what you pointed out. I just wanted to be able to move it around and lock it into a position that I like. WoW did the same stupid thing and it had to be modded for it to work (and then every patch it was bugged).
like I said before, this game will be fun for a bit, then it will lose it's lusture. You will have changed your opinion by the time spring rolls around.
like it or not this game will own,now stop trolling and go back to your 1 pixel game cause from your trolling point of view u probably are a wow fanboy
like I said before, this game will be fun for a bit, then it will lose it's lusture. You will have changed your opinion by the time spring rolls around.
The main reason I'm not going to play TOR is how restricted the ACs are. There is none that can both tank and heal.
Might not seem like a big issue for most players, but I'm totally into character flexibility, to the point the only WoW classes I could ever play seriously were Paladins and Druids (the ones that can be any role). Besides, with TSW (and it's classless, change-roles-anywhere system) being released early next year, GW2 (where all classes can be any role) on the horizon, and a huge backlog of single player games from both GOG and Steam I still have to try (and all those GW achievements I still have to get), I don't feel like attempting a game where I don't like the character development.
(BTW, with both Paladins and Druids outnumbering any other class in WoW by a wide margin, I don't think I'm alone in this; it would be too much of a coincidence to have just the two classes without role restrictions have that many more players.)
I dont really have anything bad to say about the game. I played to level 20 and thought it was great. And the post above me, I thought the graphics were great to...Theres so much content in this game, it cant all look like its a 100 years ahead of its time. I know some textures are blocky but I thought the art style was amazing in the grand scheme of things.
Space combat for me is huge as well... This decision for Star Fox the Old Republic reeks of laziness on Bioware's part; its almost as if space combat was added as an after thought. At least with SWG they waited and released a decent follow-up with JTL; which in my opinion was outstanding.
I don't think its laziness, I think that space combat is simply not their thing. I think that somebody decided that it had to be included & Bioware did what they could. They should have outsourced it IMO, its clearly not their strong suit
1-UI and lack of control options (keymap?) is terrible. Hope this was only a beta problem
2-Body Types are not good, sliders for musculature at least needed to be in there even if height not a slider. you go from sickly runt to joe extremely average, to comic book hero exaggerato, to Kevin Smith.
3-Target of Target is AWOL, secondary targeting seems to have no use.
4-ambient noise provided by other peoples companions who always sound like they are in your personal space
5-Bubble Chat needed! default it off if you want guys, but put it in the game.
i agree to these 5 points, too. and regarding #2: dont forget the boobs
sad to hear that. this means i have to quit my subscription at 50 or at least to suspend it until new story-content is released.
i am not interested in sportsgames like Arena- or BG-PvP. and i will surely not go into the pve-raidmill again.
replayability is lower than expected due to the mentioned sidequests. and all this in a stonedead world.
a player driven economy which enables trade and logistics does also not exist. its just dumb brokerage. not talking about sandbox jobs like extensive architecture and building or even terraforming.
Originally posted by Hrimnir This whole article cracked me up.Basically it was painfully obvious that Mr Bitten desperately wants this game to be better than it is, and as such is downplaying things that are frankly HUGE issues.Seriously, this is how many of the points read to me:"Well, this new girlfriend i have doesn't mind giving me head... but, she really has a bad habit of biting or nipping with her teeth and it hurts like a sonofoabitch....but...but...at least im still getting a blowjob!"The fact of the matter is too many people are going to give bioware their undeserved money because they're star war fans and they dont have the mental or ethical fortitude to stand up for themselves and demand a better product.I'm so sick of people thinking BioWare is such hot shit, they've been putting a new coat of lipstick on the same pig for 10 years now and everyone keeps lapping it up like its the friggin nectar of the gods.I honestly feel like im the guy in the cult who snapped out of it and is seeing reality for what it is, whilst everyone else is still running around in a mindless haze of worship, drinking the koolaid at every available opportunity.
Yea, I did that exactly once and got kneed so hard it knocked the wind out of me. Turns out guys don't actually like it when you do that.
But seriously, reading this, I realised this is how I feel, and why I get more annoyed with each Bioware game I play. I loved NWN just, tons. I loved Jade Empire. Then it started getting stale. This it is, beyond the dialogue thing that, well, I've been there in this thread already. I've been playing the same game with the same combat and the same good/evil choices for years. NWN was obviously different and I still like it a lot, but after that, it is just the same game, over and over, with a different coat of paint.
No wonder I can't stand it after all this time.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
and why I get more annoyed with each Bioware game I play.
With Dragon Age i smelled already the upcoming desaster, even if this was still a pretty good game. with Dragon Age 2 then the big fail became reality. Nowadays Bioware does not develop RPGs anymore. They produce interactive storybooks for tinpot-heroes. You follow the linear storybook of a foreigner in a kind of interactive movie. And all other elements of a game (tools in sandbox slang) are dumbed down or fully subordinated to the all dominating storyline. Yes story is a great (not so) new pillar, but why the hell they dumbed down the rest, which does even exist in your standard-asia-F2P-theme-park?
Dont get me wrong, the storyline is great, and i will play that story for sure. And i will have fun, perhaps until new years eve or hopefully one month longer. Because i like movies, too. But please, dont call that stuff an MMORPG or even a RPG. This big bad "R" means more than making a decision from time to time between option 1, 2 and 3.
Character customization is limited to only a few options.
Armour looks all the same colour and type for various classes.
The spaceship is not very interactable and the space missions are like your on a 3d version of the old Scramble shoot em up game.
The quests are same as WoW but with voice overs. Go there kill XX then return or go to location collect XX and return.
No point in crafting as most the stuff you find is either the same or better.
No auto attack so you got to keep pressing the buttons to do even a basic attack
Graphics are basic I was playing on full settings and my PC didn't even struggle.
If this game wasn't Star Wars it would fail, but because its got that magical name to it people will play it and like it. For me its just a clone fo WoW but in space with a star wars setting to it.
1) The UI and social window are dated. They should introduce auto-grouping+teleporting really fast or it will become the main issue soon after the launch. + They should include UI mods support - nobody expected a good UI from the devs, but limiting players to the default monstrosity is just cruel. I even wonder if developers have seen the WoW mods like "bartender" or just played vanilla WoW thinking 9 mln players were fine with the default WoW UI.
2) Slow movement and WoW style taxi/windrider points (you have to run to them to enable). Another thing blindly copy-pasted from WoW. It was NEVER liked about WoW by majority of players. Why to slow players down and to make them walk in a highly technogenic world? Games like WAR and DCUO proved that fast traveling + making players move faster early (or even allowing them to fly over cities at super-speed like in DCUO) - not only has no negative effects on the game experience but also HELPs to explore the world (on the contrary to the Blizz believe that players won't experience their locations to the full if they would be allowed to travel freely at speed - what Blizz actually wanted to achieve this way - more time required to level = more $ from subscriptions).
3) PvP issues (haven't tried it myself yet, but there are lot's of complains. The best PvP I had was in WAR and I was hopping that since there are the same devs it will be much like in WAR - I still hope so).
4) Character customization is dated (try DCUO and you will know what I am talking about) - can be fixed later on. Just introduce more looks, heads, hairs, tatoos ect. There is nothing wrong about allowing players to change their head (or even race - since race doesn't seem to play any important role in the character build - just think about players, why should they level another char if all they are unhappy about is their race/looks).
No real interest in TOR personaly....but I hope it does well for it's fans.
What I DO hope is that if it is successfull ..... every Development House out there doesn't treat it as the "new magic formula for success in mmo's".
Unfortunately the cynic in me says that's a pretty vain hope.....as way too many of the decision makers in the industry seem to be people who don't understand the difference between making games (or creative works in general) and making dish detergent.
That's the thing that really irks me......people that run resturaunts understand that they way you prepare a good lobster bisque can be entirely different from the way peking duck and each can still be a very successfull dish. But the people who publish MMO's seem to have real difficulty in understanding that the way you put together one successfull MMO and the ingrediants that go into it doesn't need to be exactly the same for every MMO you make.
I played in the 11/11 - 11/13 & the 11/25 - 11/28 Beta Weekends and found the game to be a lot of fun and very addictive. I've played several MMOs over the last couple of years that I found enjoyable (at least for a while) but this is the first I've found that has that "I can't wait to get back in it" feel every time I log out. I'm an altaholic so I worked on multiple characters over the weekends and never leveled any above level 15 but found the level process very repeatable on my alts. While many quests were common to several alts, they all had their unique storyline that made leveling feel unique to each of my characters.
As for this review, my personal reactions from beta weekends:
#5 Itemization - I can't really agree with the author on this one. But I may have if Michael had given more information about what levels you need to be before seeing different levels of itemization. But on my characters climb to 15, I was seeing itemization starting to take to be available. I would not like to see it right from the start, I like having this one of the things that makes leveling fun by trying to work towards.
#4 Sidequests - Disagree. I found the sidequests interesting, especially because of the ability to choose three different prompts to respond in different ways to quest givers. This really enhanced the game and put me in an RPG attitude (the first MMORPG that's really done that for me). It is interesting to me that the reviewer implies that he felt the sidequests were beneath his character and his characters responses often reflected this. I felt differently and found my characters responded a different way. I liked that feature a lot.
#1 Space Combat - I didn't get high enough for this but since I had heard originally that there would be no space combat I don't see this as a big issue. It sounds like it's more of a solo only feature within the game (at least right now) but that's fine with me. MMOs are no longer games that are made just for group play. If the game is as successful as it appears it'S going to be, they can expand the space bound content and group functions in an expansion (if there is enough demand for it).
The good news about #4 is that you don't have to do all of the side quests. The best way I found to level while weekend testing was to que for warzones and complete the class quests and the side quests that actually appealed to me. Over the two beta weekends I took my character to level 31 this way and while I was not a millionaire, I had all of the credits I needed to purchase training and gear as well as pay for my crew to complete crafting missions.
As for warzones not being world PvP, this is true. Ilum, a level 50 world, is open world PvP. I expect to be there alot after the game releases and I work my characters up to level 50.
Edit: Oh yeah, space combat definitely sucks right now. I'm a lousy pilot, so it's mostly a nuisance for me, but if you're a big space combat fan you will be disappointed.
This whole article cracked me up.Basically it was painfully obvious that Mr Bitten desperately wants this game to be better than it is, and as such is downplaying things that are frankly HUGE issues.
Seriously, this is how many of the points read to me:"Well, this new girlfriend i have doesn't mind giving me head... but, she really has a bad habit of biting or nipping with her teeth and it hurts like a sonofoabitch....but...but...at least im still getting a blowjob!
"The fact of the matter is too many people are going to give bioware their undeserved money because they're star war fans and they dont have the mental or ethical fortitude to stand up for themselves and demand a better product.
I'm so sick of people thinking BioWare is such hot shit, they've been putting a new coat of lipstick on the same pig for 10 years now and everyone keeps lapping it up like its the friggin nectar of the gods.
I honestly feel like im the guy in the cult who snapped out of it and is seeing reality for what it is, whilst everyone else is still running around in a mindless haze of worship, drinking the koolaid at every available opportunity.
Yea, I did that exactly once and got kneed so hard it knocked the wind out of me. Turns out guys don't actually like it when you do that.
But seriously, reading this, I realised this is how I feel, and why I get more annoyed with each Bioware game I play. I loved NWN just, tons. I loved Jade Empire. Then it started getting stale. This it is, beyond the dialogue thing that, well, I've been there in this thread already. I've been playing the same game with the same combat and the same good/evil choices for years. NWN was obviously different and I still like it a lot, but after that, it is just the same game, over and over, with a different coat of paint.
No wonder I can't stand it after all this time.
So, what you guys are saying is that I didn't really have fun over the beta weekend and that I've just been brainwashed into thinking that I had a good time? Okay, whatever you want to believe.
is SWTOR the be all and end all of MMO's? No, of course not. but for me the selling points are 1) its sci-fi based: NO ORCS, WIZARDS, OR HOBBITS! I've felt a hole in my life ever since they closed Tabula Rasa. 2) Its story driven: am I the only one who's sick of grinding & running quests that have no relevance to the rest of the game?
Yes, it is a bit samey as other Bioware titles, its not perfect & I'll probably only get a couple months of fun out of it. but that's ok, thats about all I can hope for from any game and just long enough till the launch of The Secret World
Comments
hahahahhahahhahha, whew- good one!
I really wish people would stop compairing this game to other games like WoW. You cannot convince me that when WoW dropped it had literally EVERYTHING in it that it does now. I know when Everquest 2 dropped it was similar to this. Enough to lvl through and some end game content. As the expansions dropped more and more end game was pushed in until the eventually screwed it up and here we are. SW:TOR is going down a lot of different avenues at the moment that other MMO's have either not tried or succeded in. There is NO way there going to put every single thing into the origional content and I really wish you guys would see that. Your compairing a game that is 7 years old and what it has in it built up over years of patch's, expansions, and so on, to a game that is not even out yet. Put down the machete and stop hacking the gamet to peices since everyone is buying SW:TOR for the same reason. The game they have ATM sucks and they really want that something new.
Some of the stories arent that great for the class. Like the Inquisitor. It isnt very sith like as you are motivated out of fear not a lust for power and it isnt political as the class video implied. Instead you arer gobbeling up the souls of long dead (as in centuries or millenia) like pac-man does dots. I really expected far more with all the sith lore out there courtesy of the books and comics and KOTOR itself.BAne and Sidious and Zannah learned from masters and holocrons...you get power from being a ghostbuster. My opinion on that is if Bane ever had studied a holocron of this instance hed have called himself something else out of shame fro those who came before him. They could have done so much more with it...insead itsd "who ya gonna call? Sith Inquisitors!"...rather sad. On the other side of the coin the Jedi Knight story has been well done so far. From a compasny that excels at story telling this one was a total wtf moment.
I noticed this as well, but in the german version. Its the same, i choose an option and am surprised about what my character actually said, because i expected something else.
I also noticed, that often the supposed dialog feels more like a monolog. This is mainly because the intonation is often very unnatural. But i guess it would be super time consuming to record that many different VOs with natural intonations for every single possible dialog option and NPC /player reaction.
I am with ya on about all of these, least of all the UI. I like it, except for what you pointed out. I just wanted to be able to move it around and lock it into a position that I like. WoW did the same stupid thing and it had to be modded for it to work (and then every patch it was bugged).
Release the UI Bioware, please!
Character creation is the only problem the rest is fine stop tryng to find excuses for flaws.
And also its a beta so stop bashing the game.....
Its an mmo so expect expansion with more races etc etc so ur point for the races is a big fail..wait 6 months or so then u can judge an mmo.
Remember that 1 pixel game named WoW? it wasnt perfect at start..infact it was horrible and look at it now...all kids are enjoying this crap.
MMO need times to be judged its not a SP game
like I said before, this game will be fun for a bit, then it will lose it's lusture. You will have changed your opinion by the time spring rolls around.
Lumax
Amen yo...ppl expect everything to be at launch,well guyz forget its an mmo and an mmo needs time
But you can say it will own and everything is fine but can't say anything negative?
You are a fine example of a famboy and also probably 12 or something.
Bioware will patch content in.
The main reason I'm not going to play TOR is how restricted the ACs are. There is none that can both tank and heal.
Might not seem like a big issue for most players, but I'm totally into character flexibility, to the point the only WoW classes I could ever play seriously were Paladins and Druids (the ones that can be any role). Besides, with TSW (and it's classless, change-roles-anywhere system) being released early next year, GW2 (where all classes can be any role) on the horizon, and a huge backlog of single player games from both GOG and Steam I still have to try (and all those GW achievements I still have to get), I don't feel like attempting a game where I don't like the character development.
(BTW, with both Paladins and Druids outnumbering any other class in WoW by a wide margin, I don't think I'm alone in this; it would be too much of a coincidence to have just the two classes without role restrictions have that many more players.)
Not including the biggest drawback of the game - graphics, was plain stupid.
I dont really have anything bad to say about the game. I played to level 20 and thought it was great. And the post above me, I thought the graphics were great to...Theres so much content in this game, it cant all look like its a 100 years ahead of its time. I know some textures are blocky but I thought the art style was amazing in the grand scheme of things.
I don't think its laziness, I think that space combat is simply not their thing. I think that somebody decided that it had to be included & Bioware did what they could. They should have outsourced it IMO, its clearly not their strong suit
Nah, just add a full blown EVE-sandbox. problem fixed. such simple
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
i agree to these 5 points, too. and regarding #2: dont forget the boobs
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
sad to hear that. this means i have to quit my subscription at 50 or at least to suspend it until new story-content is released.
i am not interested in sportsgames like Arena- or BG-PvP. and i will surely not go into the pve-raidmill again.
replayability is lower than expected due to the mentioned sidequests. and all this in a stonedead world.
a player driven economy which enables trade and logistics does also not exist. its just dumb brokerage. not talking about sandbox jobs like extensive architecture and building or even terraforming.
so nothing to do but suspend and wait ...
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
Yea, I did that exactly once and got kneed so hard it knocked the wind out of me. Turns out guys don't actually like it when you do that.
But seriously, reading this, I realised this is how I feel, and why I get more annoyed with each Bioware game I play. I loved NWN just, tons. I loved Jade Empire. Then it started getting stale. This it is, beyond the dialogue thing that, well, I've been there in this thread already. I've been playing the same game with the same combat and the same good/evil choices for years. NWN was obviously different and I still like it a lot, but after that, it is just the same game, over and over, with a different coat of paint.
No wonder I can't stand it after all this time.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
With Dragon Age i smelled already the upcoming desaster, even if this was still a pretty good game. with Dragon Age 2 then the big fail became reality. Nowadays Bioware does not develop RPGs anymore. They produce interactive storybooks for tinpot-heroes. You follow the linear storybook of a foreigner in a kind of interactive movie. And all other elements of a game (tools in sandbox slang) are dumbed down or fully subordinated to the all dominating storyline. Yes story is a great (not so) new pillar, but why the hell they dumbed down the rest, which does even exist in your standard-asia-F2P-theme-park?
Dont get me wrong, the storyline is great, and i will play that story for sure. And i will have fun, perhaps until new years eve or hopefully one month longer. Because i like movies, too. But please, dont call that stuff an MMORPG or even a RPG. This big bad "R" means more than making a decision from time to time between option 1, 2 and 3.
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
My view after a beta test weekend.
Character customization is limited to only a few options.
Armour looks all the same colour and type for various classes.
The spaceship is not very interactable and the space missions are like your on a 3d version of the old Scramble shoot em up game.
The quests are same as WoW but with voice overs. Go there kill XX then return or go to location collect XX and return.
No point in crafting as most the stuff you find is either the same or better.
No auto attack so you got to keep pressing the buttons to do even a basic attack
Graphics are basic I was playing on full settings and my PC didn't even struggle.
If this game wasn't Star Wars it would fail, but because its got that magical name to it people will play it and like it. For me its just a clone fo WoW but in space with a star wars setting to it.
My list:
1) The UI and social window are dated. They should introduce auto-grouping+teleporting really fast or it will become the main issue soon after the launch. + They should include UI mods support - nobody expected a good UI from the devs, but limiting players to the default monstrosity is just cruel. I even wonder if developers have seen the WoW mods like "bartender" or just played vanilla WoW thinking 9 mln players were fine with the default WoW UI.
2) Slow movement and WoW style taxi/windrider points (you have to run to them to enable). Another thing blindly copy-pasted from WoW. It was NEVER liked about WoW by majority of players. Why to slow players down and to make them walk in a highly technogenic world? Games like WAR and DCUO proved that fast traveling + making players move faster early (or even allowing them to fly over cities at super-speed like in DCUO) - not only has no negative effects on the game experience but also HELPs to explore the world (on the contrary to the Blizz believe that players won't experience their locations to the full if they would be allowed to travel freely at speed - what Blizz actually wanted to achieve this way - more time required to level = more $ from subscriptions).
3) PvP issues (haven't tried it myself yet, but there are lot's of complains. The best PvP I had was in WAR and I was hopping that since there are the same devs it will be much like in WAR - I still hope so).
4) Character customization is dated (try DCUO and you will know what I am talking about) - can be fixed later on. Just introduce more looks, heads, hairs, tatoos ect. There is nothing wrong about allowing players to change their head (or even race - since race doesn't seem to play any important role in the character build - just think about players, why should they level another char if all they are unhappy about is their race/looks).
No real interest in TOR personaly....but I hope it does well for it's fans.
What I DO hope is that if it is successfull ..... every Development House out there doesn't treat it as the "new magic formula for success in mmo's".
Unfortunately the cynic in me says that's a pretty vain hope.....as way too many of the decision makers in the industry seem to be people who don't understand the difference between making games (or creative works in general) and making dish detergent.
That's the thing that really irks me......people that run resturaunts understand that they way you prepare a good lobster bisque can be entirely different from the way peking duck and each can still be a very successfull dish. But the people who publish MMO's seem to have real difficulty in understanding that the way you put together one successfull MMO and the ingrediants that go into it doesn't need to be exactly the same for every MMO you make.
I played in the 11/11 - 11/13 & the 11/25 - 11/28 Beta Weekends and found the game to be a lot of fun and very addictive. I've played several MMOs over the last couple of years that I found enjoyable (at least for a while) but this is the first I've found that has that "I can't wait to get back in it" feel every time I log out. I'm an altaholic so I worked on multiple characters over the weekends and never leveled any above level 15 but found the level process very repeatable on my alts. While many quests were common to several alts, they all had their unique storyline that made leveling feel unique to each of my characters.
As for this review, my personal reactions from beta weekends:
#5 Itemization - I can't really agree with the author on this one. But I may have if Michael had given more information about what levels you need to be before seeing different levels of itemization. But on my characters climb to 15, I was seeing itemization starting to take to be available. I would not like to see it right from the start, I like having this one of the things that makes leveling fun by trying to work towards.
#4 Sidequests - Disagree. I found the sidequests interesting, especially because of the ability to choose three different prompts to respond in different ways to quest givers. This really enhanced the game and put me in an RPG attitude (the first MMORPG that's really done that for me). It is interesting to me that the reviewer implies that he felt the sidequests were beneath his character and his characters responses often reflected this. I felt differently and found my characters responded a different way. I liked that feature a lot.
#3 The U.I. - Agree
#2 Character Creation - Agree.
#1 Space Combat - I didn't get high enough for this but since I had heard originally that there would be no space combat I don't see this as a big issue. It sounds like it's more of a solo only feature within the game (at least right now) but that's fine with me. MMOs are no longer games that are made just for group play. If the game is as successful as it appears it'S going to be, they can expand the space bound content and group functions in an expansion (if there is enough demand for it).
The good news about #4 is that you don't have to do all of the side quests. The best way I found to level while weekend testing was to que for warzones and complete the class quests and the side quests that actually appealed to me. Over the two beta weekends I took my character to level 31 this way and while I was not a millionaire, I had all of the credits I needed to purchase training and gear as well as pay for my crew to complete crafting missions.
As for warzones not being world PvP, this is true. Ilum, a level 50 world, is open world PvP. I expect to be there alot after the game releases and I work my characters up to level 50.
Edit: Oh yeah, space combat definitely sucks right now. I'm a lousy pilot, so it's mostly a nuisance for me, but if you're a big space combat fan you will be disappointed.
So, what you guys are saying is that I didn't really have fun over the beta weekend and that I've just been brainwashed into thinking that I had a good time? Okay, whatever you want to believe.
is SWTOR the be all and end all of MMO's? No, of course not. but for me the selling points are 1) its sci-fi based: NO ORCS, WIZARDS, OR HOBBITS! I've felt a hole in my life ever since they closed Tabula Rasa. 2) Its story driven: am I the only one who's sick of grinding & running quests that have no relevance to the rest of the game?
Yes, it is a bit samey as other Bioware titles, its not perfect & I'll probably only get a couple months of fun out of it. but that's ok, thats about all I can hope for from any game and just long enough till the launch of The Secret World