I hope that no one takes this review seriously. WoW came out in 2004 bud. 20 years ago we we're playing on the super nintendo, get your time line right.
or maybe learn to read i said 10 years for Wow, ok its 8 big deal. And 20 is for pong and pack man, heard of those maybe?
The scores don't match the criticisms. I pretty much feel this way about all the SWTOR reviews. It just smells of kiss ass. Reviewers list a number of major negatives yet still give 9/10 scores. I believe that honest reviews are just dead. Sad.
Soooo... because you don't like the game, every review that says the game is great is lying. Uh huh. That's a load of garbage and you know it. Your opinion doesn't match othger peoples opinions. thats life. But it IS your opinion.
While it is true that my opinion of the reviewers opinion isn't consistant with the score he gave that is my opinon, My opinion is that that a score of 9 should be almost perfect and without any real flaw. In the end we all can all just wait 6 months to see if this game is a success. No one can make that determination right now. Maybe I just have higher standards for an mmo than most. /shrug
No i'm sorry graphism quality is under a medium quality game made today, that explain the 4. I just can't give it even a 5 and be honest here, well 5 would be the best in any case. The game is heavily instanced; such bad quality graphism have no explaination to me, if the game was seamless, no instanced that would be a somewhat good graphism and would get a 6 which is still low, but not for Swtor design.
edit:
Ho and between i don't talk about art style, thats an other matter, i don't judge that is such scoring. I find "the clone war" serie artstyle not that bad actually at its time at least, you would know it if you worked a bit in 3d.
9.5/10 on polish? Really? I haven't played a AAA title in a long time that was anywhere near as buggy as this game. Quest bugs, mobs in the walls bugs, can't move bugs, people crashing on load, huge memory leaks, massive graphical stuttering on high end machines that has several hundred page threads on their official forums. We should be a lot further along than they kept the servers up at launch being a big win. It's on par with, and possibly worse than AoC for launch bugs.
The scores don't match the criticisms. I pretty much feel this way about all the SWTOR reviews. It just smells of kiss ass. Reviewers list a number of major negatives yet still give 9/10 scores. I believe that honest reviews are just dead. Sad.
I'm inclined to agree, which makes it all the more important to actually READ the review and not focus so much on the given score.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
Reviews like this are why no one takes game reviews seriously. Everyone who likes the game is going gaga over it I am sure, but it is just so disingenuous. The two categories I have the most issue with:
Gameplay: I am sorry you simply cannot give a 9/10 to this game. Even if one only factors in the atrocious UI (admitted by even the most adamant of fanbois) and the ability delay (admitted by the devs) and nothing else, you cannot reasonably call the gameplay "almost perfect" which is essentially what a 9/10 is. At best, one could say that the gameplay doesn't detract from the other aspects of the game that one might like. But that would put it firmly in the middle range of numbers.
Heck even in the review you admit to it being "familiar" and then spend a paragraph explaining why that isn't necessarily bad. If you have to make excuses for something, chances are its not as great as you want it to be.
Polish: 9.5? Really? One step less than perfect for a game that scrapped several features they touted just before launch, has 2 major exploits that have already wreaked havoc on the economy, a barely functional market interface, no combat log*, story stopping bugs, no AA, etc. BW just decided to strip everything out of the game that didn't work well, and even the stuff they left in isn't really any more stable that your run of the mill big-budget release. 'Hey that car has no muffler, trunk space, back seats, power steering, or power anything but the tires are well inflated and the engine runs so I am gonna give it top marks for design'
* the combat log is a big one to me because, it is essentially all that an MMO is. MMOs are basically just graphical MUD's. How then can a company fail to implement the most basic of functions to the game? What terrible coding must exist that you cannot properly translate the data that already exists into a text log file. This is a process that I would be shocked was missing from a game in the 90's. (And before a fanboi jumps in and exclaims how great it is not to be measured I just want to point out that I don't care whether you like it or not, the point is that BW admitted that they intend to have it but failed to implement it correctly before launch)
Ultimately reviews like this are useless. You can love a game all you want and if you do, more power to you. I am not one to wish ill on you if this is what you want to play, but if you are going to try and give a review for the public to consider you have to be honest about what the product is. When every single number is inflated the whole scale gets so condensed as to be completely irrelevant.
Reviews like this are why no one takes game reviews seriously. Everyone who likes the game is going gaga over it I am sure, but it is just so disingenuous. The two categories I have the most issue with:
Gameplay: I am sorry you simply cannot give a 9/10 to this game. Even if one only factors in the atrocious UI (admitted by even the most adamant of fanbois) and the ability delay (admitted by the devs) and nothing else, you cannot reasonably call the gameplay "almost perfect" which is essentially what a 9/10 is. At best, one could say that the gameplay doesn't detract from the other aspects of the game that one might like. But that would put it firmly in the middle range of numbers.
Heck even in the review you admit to it being "familiar" and then spend a paragraph explaining why that isn't necessarily bad. If you have to make excuses for something, chances are its not as great as you want it to be.
Polish: 9.5? Really? One step less than perfect for a game that scrapped several features they touted just before launch, has 2 major exploits that have already wreaked havoc on the economy, a barely functional market interface, no combat log*, story stopping bugs, no AA, etc. BW just decided to strip everything out of the game that didn't work well, and even the stuff they left in isn't really any more stable that your run of the mill big-budget release.
* the combat log is a big one to me because, it is essentially all that an MMO is. MMOs are basically just graphical MUD's. How then can a company fail to implement the most basic of functions to the game? What terrible coding must exist that you cannot properly translate the data that already exists into a text log file. This is a process that I would be shocked was missing from a game in the 90's. (And before a fanboi jumps in and exclaims how great it is not to be measured I just want to point out that I don't care whether you like it or not, the point is that BW admitted that they intend to have it but failed to implement it correctly before launch)
Ultimately reviews like this are useless. You can love a game all you want and if you do, more power to you. I am not one to wish ill on you if this is what you want to play, but if you are going to try and give a review for the public to consider you have to be honest about what the product is. When every single number is inflated the whole scale gets so condensed as to be completely irrelevant.
Well written and critical of the the non-critical fanboyish style that the review was written from. Reviews are supposed to be objective. List out the pros and cons and the problems and then the merits... this one failed to do that on every level.
Just remember:
Unbounded hope is a dangerous thing. It causes you to do things that don't make sense, take risks that are completely unwarranted, make foolish interpretations, and see things that aren't really there."
It's obvious they've never even played the game. Read down a few lines and you'll see things like: "Admittedly, you can distract yourself with mini games like speed racing for credits..", and, ".. once you earn the credits and experience to buy your own ship, massive multiplayer skirmishes in deep space beckon.".
That said, it's a strange review, as if they didn't want to do it so gave a bunch of negative comments. Somehow it still scored 4/5 though.
Graphics, pretty good, not mind blowing but pretty good, hands and mouth sync is really good.
Animation, top notch, best I've seen in an MMO.
Story, absolutely brilliant.
polish, for a game not yet a month old, as good as RIFT if not better.
Longevity, simply astounding, alts, legacy, pvp, rp, best themepark for longevity honestly.
Gameplay for the style of game is pretty damn good also.
Innovation, yea story is nice but beyond that not much.
8.5-9/10
Has the potentional to be fantastic.
You're kidding right? TOR is not even close to the polish that RiFT had at launch, for one there were no game breaking bugs in RiFT unlike TOR and RiFT wasn't missing any key features like a good UI or combat log.
Since i already know i will get Another temp ban for speaking my mind. i will just say... YAY Great job MMORPG is the best MMO website out there Yay!!!!! Now i will go run naked in medow full of flowers!! Oh joy to us all!!!
Honest question to keep discussion going: if the score wasn't there, and we were just talking about Mike's words, would this whole argument even be taking place?
It's not ultimately the numbers that matter, a B grade, 4-stars, 8/10, 87/100, three and a half thumbs up... it's the content. And even there you may have things to contend. But the actual words are what matter is my angle.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Honest question to keep discussion going: if the score wasn't there, and we were just talking about Mike's words, would this whole argument even be taking place?
It's not ultimately the numbers that matter, a B grade, 4-stars, 8/10, 87/100, three and a half thumbs up... it's the content. And even there you may have things to contend. But the actual words are what matter is my angle.
The problem is that he didn't even attempt to delve into any of the negative aspects of the game.
Honest question to keep discussion going: if the score wasn't there, and we were just talking about Mike's words, would this whole argument even be taking place?
It's not ultimately the numbers that matter, a B grade, 4-stars, 8/10, 87/100, three and a half thumbs up... it's the content. And even there you may have things to contend. But the actual words are what matter is my angle.
I feel a bit dirty for saying it but I will anyways: I told you so. Earlier in the thread.
Seriously? One of the least objective official reviews ever written for this site!
Even though everything in the game is authentic Star Wars in appearance, it still manages to come off as mediocre. The aesthetics of the game are horrible when you consider they manage to take Star Wars and have it look and feel so "bleh". Part of it is the very deliberate way in which the textures all somehow manage to look like textures produced by the WoW artists.
The technicals of the crafting system are fine, but there is no in game economy because they didn't design crafting in a way to sustain an in game economy. Some people may enjoy the money sink, but crafting is a failure with in the bigger picture of the economy.
Combat is 100% based on World of Warcraft. There is absolutely nothing dynamic or innovative about it. It's a system with too many skills to fit on two full skill bars, with a core of skills you spam when ever they are off cooldown and a few that are very situational.
The UI is sufficiently WoW like, but with out the ability to customize anything beyond turning some elements on or off.
The story is the only real positive for the game if you are looking for features that rate above average. PVP is horrible and unbalanced. Space Battles are a repetative mini game. The game engine should never have been applied to this project and it's limitations cause performance issues and have forced horrible compromises in world design.
Polish? The game still has tons of very obvious bugs, let alone obscure ones that one might understand being missed before launch. The item mod system was pushed with out enough development time, which has contributed to the broken economy. 80% of the armor in game looks like a five year old designed it.
Story is the limits of innovation here, with the entire rest of the game a copy/paste hack job pulling from WoW and a number of mediocre MMOs as well.
A 7.3 for this game would be very generous. An 8.7 completely sacrifices the site's credibility.
I dont really consider SWTOR an MMO, more a singleplayer in a multiplayer enviroment.
Im currently playing a consular in the 30´s and ive been playing 95% solo.
The game is just no cut out to play in groups, since each class has it own storyline and the players must go separate ways. So, since im playing it solo, i must do all sidequests for any given level to keep my level up to do the class quest. But doing all these sidequests takes away the focus of the main story for my class...which i sort of allways forgot what it was about...
Im suprised to see tha high rating for a Star wars game where space is just a minigame an dyou cant pilot your ship and it just looks silly.
Seriously? One of the least objective official reviews ever written for this site!
Even though everything in the game is authentic Star Wars in appearance, it still manages to come off as mediocre. The aesthetics of the game are horrible when you consider they manage to take Star Wars and have it look and feel so "bleh". Part of it is the very deliberate way in which the textures all somehow manage to look like textures produced by the WoW artists.
The technicals of the crafting system are fine, but there is no in game economy because they didn't design crafting in a way to sustain an in game economy. Some people may enjoy the money sink, but crafting is a failure with in the bigger picture of the economy.
Combat is 100% based on World of Warcraft. There is absolutely nothing dynamic or innovative about it. It's a system with too many skills to fit on two full skill bars, with a core of skills you spam when ever they are off cooldown and a few that are very situational.
The UI is sufficiently WoW like, but with out the ability to customize anything beyond turning some elements on or off.
The story is the only real positive for the game if you are looking for features that rate above average. PVP is horrible and unbalanced. Space Battles are a repetative mini game. The game engine should never have been applied to this project and it's limitations cause performance issues and have forced horrible compromises in world design.
Polish? The game still has tons of very obvious bugs, let alone obscure ones that one might understand being missed before launch. The item mod system was pushed with out enough development time, which has contributed to the broken economy. 80% of the armor in game looks like a five year old designed it.
Story is the limits of innovation here, with the entire rest of the game a copy/paste hack job pulling from WoW and a number of mediocre MMOs as well.
A 7.3 for this game would be very generous. An 8.7 completely sacrifices the site's credibility.
That is all your opinion and thats great and all but tbh I disagree with you and clearly the reviewer does as well. Also you want to bitch about all the bugs and such but name even one mmo that released with more polish. I find this whole thread a riot as everyone and their brother comes in declaring they were paid for the review or they are biased toward bioware or whatever, all of the talk is just that talk and the opinion of said person. I can't stop laughing when I read how the review destorys the sites credibility, then that must mean it destroys the rep of every single game site on the planet because they are all praising the game.
Anyone complaining about being bored, having run out of content, having hit 50 and having nothing to do...
You have NO ONE but yourself to blame. To have experienced all this game has to offer, you must've played most of your waking hours since release.
Please just let me point out that these people described above are NOT EVEN CLOSE TO A MAJORITY of the gaming community. Not even a significant portion.
If you play a game non-stop for days on end and don't bother with things like... Having a job, or contributing to society, or partaking in other hobbies or relationships, you have only yourself to blame when you run out of content. It certainly is not the fault of the developers.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. When you figure that one out you may actually slow down enough to enjoy life.
The point is that many are trying to get thrue the fanboi firewall is that the game could be much better, what TOR is a singleplayer MMO and really nothing more.
Why cant the mobs be more active, why cant the quests be more different i'ts always kill x amount of mobs to the target quest circle click a few items and get "optional" quest kill shitloads of more, the quest are all the same.
Check EQ2, Vanguard, SWG to name a few how to mix quests.
What about housing?, no your spaceship is not anything close to housing.
Exploring whart happend to that it's a frikkin space game, you cant explore anything just funle thrue a planet doing quest hub after a quest hub with mindboring voicovers to kill a few uninportant mobs.
Bioware is a big company EA is evev bigger and what did we get..........a game that would rock your socks off 2001, this is 2011 beginning of 2012 and we have travled back in time with this game, i really dont get it.
Honest question to keep discussion going: if the score wasn't there, and we were just talking about Mike's words, would this whole argument even be taking place?
It's not ultimately the numbers that matter, a B grade, 4-stars, 8/10, 87/100, three and a half thumbs up... it's the content. And even there you may have things to contend. But the actual words are what matter is my angle.
You are correct Bill, that the actual written review is better than the associated scores. The review even touches on a few flaws here and there, while in the end downplaying their impact. At other times, the article puts the most positive spin on things in a way that makes clear the motive is to find a way to portray this mediocre game in a much more flattering light than it deserves.
The scores are the lighting rod. Not only are they too high in almost every instance, incongruously so when paired with elements of the game that are sorely lacking, but often they don't even gel with what the reviewer has said in relation to a given aspect of the game.
The same review could just have easily been paired with a score of 7.8 and it not only would have been a bit closer to the truth, but it probably would have been a much better reflection of the pros and cons put forth in the article. Subtract the spin from the review and you end up with a game in the low 7s, which is probably what the game currently deserves.
The commentary on polish and the game being an example of EA not always rushing games to launch prematurely surely tips the hat on the goal of the review, spin. Many of the most seriously flaws of the game are pretty clearly linked to the fact that the game was rushed. It really needed another six months or more. If the game had been budgeted for a five year development, instead of four, it's even possible that some of the more fundamental problems could have been avoided. So much here seems a compromise to a too limited development window, not the least of which is the game engine itself, which is not adequate in any way for an MMO that aims to be a serious contender as a top tier title.
how can u do a review of game not even out a month yet?
when titanic the movie came out not even a day all the reviews where this is a pos movie and its god aweful then a month later its the biggest movie of all time (i think its a pos movie myself though lolz)
Honest question to keep discussion going: if the score wasn't there, and we were just talking about Mike's words, would this whole argument even be taking place?
It's not ultimately the numbers that matter, a B grade, 4-stars, 8/10, 87/100, three and a half thumbs up... it's the content. And even there you may have things to contend. But the actual words are what matter is my angle.
The main problem I have with the whole review are the scores. They're so out of place with what the reviewer described in the text. For example, after saying the cutscenes were innovative, he went on to say, "On the flip side, BioWare doesn’t do much else that’s innovative with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Crew Skills are certainly neat, as I described above, but other than that, the game is purely derivative of games like World of Warcraft, and is even missing quite a few features some may consider “standard” at this point."
Yet somehow, Innovation scores an 8. How?! By his own admission the only thing that's really added anything new to the genre are voice overs, that's eit, and some standards of MMO's are even missing.
I also disagree with some of the things he has to say, such as this, "While your class story is a largely single-player experience (friends can help you with the combat portions or spectate the cutscenes), the vast majority of the game content is multiplayer in nature, and just as story-centric.".
Which frankly just isn't true. Almost everything you do is largely a single-player experience, he even admits as much on the next page where he says, "You run around the world and do quests (that happen to have dialogue and cinematics) and you group up for a couple of heroic quests per world.".
A couple per world. That's hardly the vast majority of content being multiplayer, is it?
And polish. 9.5/10?! I got to a max level of 26 before I quit and I'd seen a ton of bugs and encountered a load of problems before then. At one point my Jedi Guardian leapt across at an enemy and ended up stuck under the world. That's hardly polished.
So really, this just isn't a fact, "Fortunately, BioWare seems to have drilled all this into their heads when developing this game, possibly to a fault, given how long it took the game to come out. They’ve been polishing this game for what seems like an eternity – and it shows. Sure, there are bugs and some issues, but overall the game is incredibly polished.".
So it isn't incredibly polished. It has bugs that have been killing the economy, that allowed people to exploit their way to 50 in record time, as well as bugs that cause a variety of other problems. He seems to have stuck his head in the sand here and cried, "Nope! Nothing wrong!".
Finally, he really explains nothing about the actualy gameplay. The gameplay generally comes down to a voiceover with a reason to go somewhere and click three glowing items that are hidden between a bunch of mobs that stand around waiting to die. That's basically it. The vast majority of quests are the same thing over and over.
i dont care about scores or much else when a game hasnt even been out a month how can anyone review it good or bad is just stupid. If it werent a mmo i would understand but this bieng a mmo least let it be a month before any review...
i dont care about scores or much else when a game hasnt even been out a month how can anyone review it good or bad is just stupid. If it werent a mmo i would understand but this bieng a mmo least let it be a month before any review...
why? have you played it? right now it is a good game. not great, but good. the UI is holding it back, really, outside that the game is very nice.
longevity you are right on, we have to wait and see, but in every other category you can make an informed comment on it now.
Comments
Sarcasm? :P
I dont think anyone is going to suggest they honestly payed off 30 sites/magazines so far.
The review is spot on.
or maybe learn to read i said 10 years for Wow, ok its 8 big deal. And 20 is for pong and pack man, heard of those maybe?
While it is true that my opinion of the reviewers opinion isn't consistant with the score he gave that is my opinon, My opinion is that that a score of 9 should be almost perfect and without any real flaw. In the end we all can all just wait 6 months to see if this game is a success. No one can make that determination right now. Maybe I just have higher standards for an mmo than most. /shrug
No i'm sorry graphism quality is under a medium quality game made today, that explain the 4. I just can't give it even a 5 and be honest here, well 5 would be the best in any case. The game is heavily instanced; such bad quality graphism have no explaination to me, if the game was seamless, no instanced that would be a somewhat good graphism and would get a 6 which is still low, but not for Swtor design.
edit:
Ho and between i don't talk about art style, thats an other matter, i don't judge that is such scoring. I find "the clone war" serie artstyle not that bad actually at its time at least, you would know it if you worked a bit in 3d.
9.5/10 on polish? Really? I haven't played a AAA title in a long time that was anywhere near as buggy as this game. Quest bugs, mobs in the walls bugs, can't move bugs, people crashing on load, huge memory leaks, massive graphical stuttering on high end machines that has several hundred page threads on their official forums. We should be a lot further along than they kept the servers up at launch being a big win. It's on par with, and possibly worse than AoC for launch bugs.
I'm inclined to agree, which makes it all the more important to actually READ the review and not focus so much on the given score.
Reviews like this are why no one takes game reviews seriously. Everyone who likes the game is going gaga over it I am sure, but it is just so disingenuous. The two categories I have the most issue with:
Gameplay: I am sorry you simply cannot give a 9/10 to this game. Even if one only factors in the atrocious UI (admitted by even the most adamant of fanbois) and the ability delay (admitted by the devs) and nothing else, you cannot reasonably call the gameplay "almost perfect" which is essentially what a 9/10 is. At best, one could say that the gameplay doesn't detract from the other aspects of the game that one might like. But that would put it firmly in the middle range of numbers.
Heck even in the review you admit to it being "familiar" and then spend a paragraph explaining why that isn't necessarily bad. If you have to make excuses for something, chances are its not as great as you want it to be.
Polish: 9.5? Really? One step less than perfect for a game that scrapped several features they touted just before launch, has 2 major exploits that have already wreaked havoc on the economy, a barely functional market interface, no combat log*, story stopping bugs, no AA, etc. BW just decided to strip everything out of the game that didn't work well, and even the stuff they left in isn't really any more stable that your run of the mill big-budget release. 'Hey that car has no muffler, trunk space, back seats, power steering, or power anything but the tires are well inflated and the engine runs so I am gonna give it top marks for design'
* the combat log is a big one to me because, it is essentially all that an MMO is. MMOs are basically just graphical MUD's. How then can a company fail to implement the most basic of functions to the game? What terrible coding must exist that you cannot properly translate the data that already exists into a text log file. This is a process that I would be shocked was missing from a game in the 90's. (And before a fanboi jumps in and exclaims how great it is not to be measured I just want to point out that I don't care whether you like it or not, the point is that BW admitted that they intend to have it but failed to implement it correctly before launch)
Ultimately reviews like this are useless. You can love a game all you want and if you do, more power to you. I am not one to wish ill on you if this is what you want to play, but if you are going to try and give a review for the public to consider you have to be honest about what the product is. When every single number is inflated the whole scale gets so condensed as to be completely irrelevant.
Well written and critical of the the non-critical fanboyish style that the review was written from. Reviews are supposed to be objective. List out the pros and cons and the problems and then the merits... this one failed to do that on every level.
Just remember:
Unbounded hope is a dangerous thing. It causes you to do things that don't make sense, take risks that are completely unwarranted, make foolish interpretations, and see things that aren't really there."
- Brian Katz
Like this one?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/dec/23/star-wars-old-republic-game-review
It's obvious they've never even played the game. Read down a few lines and you'll see things like: "Admittedly, you can distract yourself with mini games like speed racing for credits..", and, ".. once you earn the credits and experience to buy your own ship, massive multiplayer skirmishes in deep space beckon.".
That said, it's a strange review, as if they didn't want to do it so gave a bunch of negative comments. Somehow it still scored 4/5 though.
You're kidding right? TOR is not even close to the polish that RiFT had at launch, for one there were no game breaking bugs in RiFT unlike TOR and RiFT wasn't missing any key features like a good UI or combat log.
Since i already know i will get Another temp ban for speaking my mind. i will just say... YAY Great job MMORPG is the best MMO website out there Yay!!!!! Now i will go run naked in medow full of flowers!! Oh joy to us all!!!
Honest question to keep discussion going: if the score wasn't there, and we were just talking about Mike's words, would this whole argument even be taking place?
It's not ultimately the numbers that matter, a B grade, 4-stars, 8/10, 87/100, three and a half thumbs up... it's the content. And even there you may have things to contend. But the actual words are what matter is my angle.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
My Review Manifesto
Follow me on Twitter if you dare.
The problem is that he didn't even attempt to delve into any of the negative aspects of the game.
I feel a bit dirty for saying it but I will anyways: I told you so. Earlier in the thread.
Seriously? One of the least objective official reviews ever written for this site!
Even though everything in the game is authentic Star Wars in appearance, it still manages to come off as mediocre. The aesthetics of the game are horrible when you consider they manage to take Star Wars and have it look and feel so "bleh". Part of it is the very deliberate way in which the textures all somehow manage to look like textures produced by the WoW artists.
The technicals of the crafting system are fine, but there is no in game economy because they didn't design crafting in a way to sustain an in game economy. Some people may enjoy the money sink, but crafting is a failure with in the bigger picture of the economy.
Combat is 100% based on World of Warcraft. There is absolutely nothing dynamic or innovative about it. It's a system with too many skills to fit on two full skill bars, with a core of skills you spam when ever they are off cooldown and a few that are very situational.
The UI is sufficiently WoW like, but with out the ability to customize anything beyond turning some elements on or off.
The story is the only real positive for the game if you are looking for features that rate above average. PVP is horrible and unbalanced. Space Battles are a repetative mini game. The game engine should never have been applied to this project and it's limitations cause performance issues and have forced horrible compromises in world design.
Polish? The game still has tons of very obvious bugs, let alone obscure ones that one might understand being missed before launch. The item mod system was pushed with out enough development time, which has contributed to the broken economy. 80% of the armor in game looks like a five year old designed it.
Story is the limits of innovation here, with the entire rest of the game a copy/paste hack job pulling from WoW and a number of mediocre MMOs as well.
A 7.3 for this game would be very generous. An 8.7 completely sacrifices the site's credibility.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
I dont really consider SWTOR an MMO, more a singleplayer in a multiplayer enviroment.
Im currently playing a consular in the 30´s and ive been playing 95% solo.
The game is just no cut out to play in groups, since each class has it own storyline and the players must go separate ways. So, since im playing it solo, i must do all sidequests for any given level to keep my level up to do the class quest. But doing all these sidequests takes away the focus of the main story for my class...which i sort of allways forgot what it was about...
Im suprised to see tha high rating for a Star wars game where space is just a minigame an dyou cant pilot your ship and it just looks silly.
That is all your opinion and thats great and all but tbh I disagree with you and clearly the reviewer does as well. Also you want to bitch about all the bugs and such but name even one mmo that released with more polish. I find this whole thread a riot as everyone and their brother comes in declaring they were paid for the review or they are biased toward bioware or whatever, all of the talk is just that talk and the opinion of said person. I can't stop laughing when I read how the review destorys the sites credibility, then that must mean it destroys the rep of every single game site on the planet because they are all praising the game.
Anyone complaining about being bored, having run out of content, having hit 50 and having nothing to do...
You have NO ONE but yourself to blame. To have experienced all this game has to offer, you must've played most of your waking hours since release.
Please just let me point out that these people described above are NOT EVEN CLOSE TO A MAJORITY of the gaming community. Not even a significant portion.
If you play a game non-stop for days on end and don't bother with things like... Having a job, or contributing to society, or partaking in other hobbies or relationships, you have only yourself to blame when you run out of content. It certainly is not the fault of the developers.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. When you figure that one out you may actually slow down enough to enjoy life.
P.S. The cake is a lie anyhow
The point is that many are trying to get thrue the fanboi firewall is that the game could be much better, what TOR is a singleplayer MMO and really nothing more.
Why cant the mobs be more active, why cant the quests be more different i'ts always kill x amount of mobs to the target quest circle click a few items and get "optional" quest kill shitloads of more, the quest are all the same.
Check EQ2, Vanguard, SWG to name a few how to mix quests.
What about housing?, no your spaceship is not anything close to housing.
Exploring whart happend to that it's a frikkin space game, you cant explore anything just funle thrue a planet doing quest hub after a quest hub with mindboring voicovers to kill a few uninportant mobs.
Bioware is a big company EA is evev bigger and what did we get..........a game that would rock your socks off 2001, this is 2011 beginning of 2012 and we have travled back in time with this game, i really dont get it.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
You are correct Bill, that the actual written review is better than the associated scores. The review even touches on a few flaws here and there, while in the end downplaying their impact. At other times, the article puts the most positive spin on things in a way that makes clear the motive is to find a way to portray this mediocre game in a much more flattering light than it deserves.
The scores are the lighting rod. Not only are they too high in almost every instance, incongruously so when paired with elements of the game that are sorely lacking, but often they don't even gel with what the reviewer has said in relation to a given aspect of the game.
The same review could just have easily been paired with a score of 7.8 and it not only would have been a bit closer to the truth, but it probably would have been a much better reflection of the pros and cons put forth in the article. Subtract the spin from the review and you end up with a game in the low 7s, which is probably what the game currently deserves.
The commentary on polish and the game being an example of EA not always rushing games to launch prematurely surely tips the hat on the goal of the review, spin. Many of the most seriously flaws of the game are pretty clearly linked to the fact that the game was rushed. It really needed another six months or more. If the game had been budgeted for a five year development, instead of four, it's even possible that some of the more fundamental problems could have been avoided. So much here seems a compromise to a too limited development window, not the least of which is the game engine itself, which is not adequate in any way for an MMO that aims to be a serious contender as a top tier title.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
how can u do a review of game not even out a month yet?
when titanic the movie came out not even a day all the reviews where this is a pos movie and its god aweful then a month later its the biggest movie of all time (i think its a pos movie myself though lolz)
The main problem I have with the whole review are the scores. They're so out of place with what the reviewer described in the text. For example, after saying the cutscenes were innovative, he went on to say, "On the flip side, BioWare doesn’t do much else that’s innovative with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Crew Skills are certainly neat, as I described above, but other than that, the game is purely derivative of games like World of Warcraft, and is even missing quite a few features some may consider “standard” at this point."
Yet somehow, Innovation scores an 8. How?! By his own admission the only thing that's really added anything new to the genre are voice overs, that's eit, and some standards of MMO's are even missing.
I also disagree with some of the things he has to say, such as this, "While your class story is a largely single-player experience (friends can help you with the combat portions or spectate the cutscenes), the vast majority of the game content is multiplayer in nature, and just as story-centric.".
Which frankly just isn't true. Almost everything you do is largely a single-player experience, he even admits as much on the next page where he says, "You run around the world and do quests (that happen to have dialogue and cinematics) and you group up for a couple of heroic quests per world.".
A couple per world. That's hardly the vast majority of content being multiplayer, is it?
And polish. 9.5/10?! I got to a max level of 26 before I quit and I'd seen a ton of bugs and encountered a load of problems before then. At one point my Jedi Guardian leapt across at an enemy and ended up stuck under the world. That's hardly polished.
So really, this just isn't a fact, "Fortunately, BioWare seems to have drilled all this into their heads when developing this game, possibly to a fault, given how long it took the game to come out. They’ve been polishing this game for what seems like an eternity – and it shows. Sure, there are bugs and some issues, but overall the game is incredibly polished.".
So it isn't incredibly polished. It has bugs that have been killing the economy, that allowed people to exploit their way to 50 in record time, as well as bugs that cause a variety of other problems. He seems to have stuck his head in the sand here and cried, "Nope! Nothing wrong!".
Finally, he really explains nothing about the actualy gameplay. The gameplay generally comes down to a voiceover with a reason to go somewhere and click three glowing items that are hidden between a bunch of mobs that stand around waiting to die. That's basically it. The vast majority of quests are the same thing over and over.
i dont care about scores or much else when a game hasnt even been out a month how can anyone review it good or bad is just stupid. If it werent a mmo i would understand but this bieng a mmo least let it be a month before any review...
why? have you played it? right now it is a good game. not great, but good. the UI is holding it back, really, outside that the game is very nice.
longevity you are right on, we have to wait and see, but in every other category you can make an informed comment on it now.