Nice to post this. Its still a lie. The only type of player that will take 200hrs to do it on there first playthrough is the type that has never spent a single second playing an MMO. That will also include all the "mmo noob" mistakes trying to even play the game such as download, install, setting up an account ect.
There is just no way the average player is going to take 200 hours. I enjoyed the story so I would reccomend the game based on that and only that.
There is only a few GAMES I have spent close to or more than 200 hours in and SWTOR doesnt even come close to offering the amount of content they do. Only 2 of where MMO's I played for 5years +....asherons call and WoW. The others where single player RPG's that I was a completionist in and none of them where Bioware RPGs.
Here are some things to consider. First and foremost, Bioware is huge on compiling numbers, just look at what they've done since ME1, they've statistically broken down every aspect of the game. (IE)- how many use the spacebar, how many watch cutscenes, how often do people interact with the codex, how long do they spend viewing the codex screen. They actually release this information (God knows why).
We're basing our opinions here on personal experience. I have no Idea how long (hourly) I played TOR (my highest level reached was 40). Then again I played many toons to the 20's and 30's during beta due to wipes and testing other content areas (from august until launch). It's safe to say I put a lot of time into the game.
To say it's a "lie" there has to be some kind of proof you can offer, outside of your own mileage or based on some people you may know. That's the only thing you do know about this number or any sort of average.
It's most defnitely safe to say it's an exaggeration to say the normal or average play-time is 200 hours. What that should say to anyone is the safest number they can use to beef up the game to the public, as they know as well as anyone people will break this down to a science and come up with their own interpretation of said number. As we're seeing in this thread.
Im sorry, but saying what the average is without anything to base that on but your own experience is not proof of an average.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The problem with generalizations is that they're most often wrong. I've played MMOs for nearly 12 years. I've posted in this thread that I'm at about 140 hours of game play after 7 weeks, and I'm 46lvl on my first toon. I'll probably be at around 180 hours when I hit 50lvl... so yeah, 200 hours is about right (owing to the fact that BW/EA has probably inflated the hours a bit).
And if one chews through content so fast, the problem isn't with the game design..it's likely an issue with an obsessive personality disorder.
Considering this: "So all the content you're expected to do goes in there. What doesn't go in? Warzones, crafting, socializing, auction house, space game, etc (yes, you could skip world quests and do Warzone or space game quests or Heroics for XP instead but swaps like that tend to more or less even out). Anything not required to level up is outside the estimate"
How on earth have you managed to stretch the rest into 140 hours? Have you literally just left yourself logged on in a cutscene for several hours whilst you did something else?
Or are you only doing one quest at a time, then running back to hand it in before picking up a new one?
No. By play, I mean just that, play. I listen through all the dialog, I pick up multiple quests, I fight my way to my objective, and I complete my objective. Often times I'll spot a lone gold elite in the world and fight it just to test my build and to practice. I don't use spoiler sites, nor look to forums for the FotM builds. I explore...I search for lore objects and datacrons as well as unchained quests -- you know there are isolated quests in the world not at the hubs, right?
What do you think he meant when he said some players stop to smell the roses? Some even stop to pick roses and contemplate them?
Because this game has quests, people think that it's the only thing to do. And I'm not even talking about the extra content you cited in David's comment. The other day on Balmorra, I saw a Republic unit pinned down in a crater by Imperial fire. Four gold elites were raining blaster fire down. Now I suspect a few of you on the hamster wheel (you MMO vets) would ignore something like that, and go after your food pellets to get your reward. Well, this MMO vet said...Wow, these Repulbic soldiers need help! So I proceeded to take out all of the gold elites and the other Imps to save the harried Republic soldiers.
Some of you MMO vets are so jaded, you're not slowing down to smell the roses. You're conditioned to follow the rails of the quest lines and race to endgame, lol. Well this MMO vet has left that world behind, to my utter enjoyment.
David even says you can't count the 200 hours of content by stringing quests end to end...that's not what he's measuring. He's measuring the time that people like me spend living in the world, exploring, and doing quests.
And as a side note, my crafting has been a minimal impact on total time played as Companions do all that work for me.
I'm just having a hard time believing that you guys could have taken that long just doing quest content. I'd understand it if you did the occasional warzone or spent time typing lfg in fleet. Did some crafting or maybe even repeated a flashpoint a couple of times or more.
Failing all that I'm currently just imagining that you walked everywhere and didn't even buy a speeder.
Anyways, not trying to pick a fight. Just find it hard to believe is all.
It would be more likely that a person getting 200 hours is only questing, as anything else will boost your xp, shortening the path to cap. There are a ton of side quests in this game, some require a lot of travelling and fighting, both of these aspects add a substantial amount of time to the equation.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I'm just having a hard time believing that you guys could have taken that long just doing quest content. I'd understand it if you did the occasional warzone or spent time typing lfg in fleet. Did some crafting or maybe even repeated a flashpoint a couple of times or more.
Failing all that I'm currently just imagining that you walked everywhere and didn't even buy a speeder.
Anyways, not trying to pick a fight. Just find it hard to believe is all.
It would be more likely that a person getting 200 hours is only questing, as anything else will boost your xp, shortening the path to cap. There are a ton of side quests in this game, some require a lot of travelling and fighting, both of these aspects add a substantial amount of time to the equation.
I think you've hit on something here. I don't do heroics, nor flashpoints, nor warzones. Questing and side quests. I don't even participate in the admittedly horrible space combat system. blech.
I'm just having a hard time believing that you guys could have taken that long just doing quest content. I'd understand it if you did the occasional warzone or spent time typing lfg in fleet. Did some crafting or maybe even repeated a flashpoint a couple of times or more.
Failing all that I'm currently just imagining that you walked everywhere and didn't even buy a speeder.
Anyways, not trying to pick a fight. Just find it hard to believe is all.
Well of course I've spent some time buying crafting supplies, talking to my companions and running around to vendors looking at items to purchase, I'm not going so say it's been 165 hours of pure questing, but probably a good 150-160 hours of that. I don't sit afk and craft, I have my companions do it while I'm questing. I've also spent the entire time duoing so I've spent probably, I dunno, 10-20 hours doing some of my girlfriend's class quests with her? Having said that I'm sure I've skipped at least 20-30 hours of quest content because I've almost always had quests left for planets when I leave them and I never even started the bonus series quests on Nar Shadaa, Tattooine, Balmorra, Belsavis or Hoth. There may be others I've missed.
My plan is do all that content on my first alt.
I'm pretty efficient when getting quests on doing them in the shortest travel order and getting all the quests in the same area, including both of our class quests since they tend to make each class go to the same areas, but I loot everthing manually. We also kill random bosses we see even if we don't have to and we finish the bonus quest objectves 90% of the time.
EDIT - Oh, Dredphyre's post brought up a good point, I've also skipped almost all the Heroic 4s because we usually can't do them with just the 2 of us when we're at the appropriate level and I hate having to look for groups. We do about half the Heroic 2s we get if they're close to where we're questing. So that's a bunch more content I skipped that would have added to the time played.
You're trying to make a quote say something it doesn't. Here is the actual quote that Frank Gibeau of EA gave to Gamesindustry.
Each of the six Star Wars: The Old Republic classes pack 200 hours of gameplay, EA has revealed - excluding crafting, raiding and "the multiplayer".
They aren't actually saying that the "Class quests" take up 200 hours. They're saying that there is 200 hours of gameplay for each class's play through excluding raiding, flashpoints, crafting.
This is a true statment for most by a comfortable margin. It does include all the side quests and shared quests on each world. The bonus missions for some of the worlds alone can eat up 5+ hours. He makes a statment of content length and then explicitly says what that content estimate does not include. As a logical argument the implication is that anything not excluded is included.
You seem to be getting worked up because you're interpreting it as being only the class exclusive content when he pretty clearly specifies what content he's excluding in that assertion. You'll also note that we have 2 extra classes that were not mentioned in the orrigional quote.
I'm actually a bit curous about what classes he omited or if that was a slip of the tongue. He's in charge of the overall production of over a dozen diffrent IP's so he's not exactly in the day to day production of things.
Even did he explicitly state 200 hours of class exclusive game play, which he doesn't, you're trying to micro parse the words from a corprate officer for the parent company when talking fairly off the hip to a minor trade publication.
Calm down and actually go back to the source.
You'll note that Daniel Erikson clarifies the orrigional statment to exactly the same effect.
Another thing I should mention that I just thought of. When you're talking to a quest NPC and he says:
"I need you to go into this cave to blow up a generator."
Often you'll run into situations where you have a choice of saying:
1 - Sure, whatever, just tell me where to go.
2 - Tell me more about this cave and this generator.
3 - Sure, whatever, you're ugly and I hate you, just tell me where to go.
I almost always pick the "give me more information" dialogue option because I like to have some context on what I'm doing and why.
Just a thought.
Yeah, I do this too. Especially on my Jedi who believes in the Jedi tennet: There is no ignorance, there is Knowledge. He wants to know everything he possible can about a situation.
Yall are so critical of this game but its pretty fun. I mean yea i would hate something too if i completely took for granted and ignored the big seller for the game (the story). Racing to 50 and staying negative? End game sucks when a game first comes out to act surprised by this fact....
Couldn't read past 'yall'.
For some reason I imagined some country bumpkin who has never left his home town (in bumpkin no where), having some dial-up connection and just saw Star Wars on VHS for the first time. Then, through reasearching SW online (At very slow speeds with reading writing comprehension of a 2 year old) found SWTOR and decided to download it. 12 days later after a long download and a week of picking corn for the monthly subscription, you get to level 20 and decide to share your stupidity with the rest of the people on MMORPG.com (which you also ran into inadvertently).
Comments
Here are some things to consider. First and foremost, Bioware is huge on compiling numbers, just look at what they've done since ME1, they've statistically broken down every aspect of the game. (IE)- how many use the spacebar, how many watch cutscenes, how often do people interact with the codex, how long do they spend viewing the codex screen. They actually release this information (God knows why).
We're basing our opinions here on personal experience. I have no Idea how long (hourly) I played TOR (my highest level reached was 40). Then again I played many toons to the 20's and 30's during beta due to wipes and testing other content areas (from august until launch). It's safe to say I put a lot of time into the game.
To say it's a "lie" there has to be some kind of proof you can offer, outside of your own mileage or based on some people you may know. That's the only thing you do know about this number or any sort of average.
It's most defnitely safe to say it's an exaggeration to say the normal or average play-time is 200 hours. What that should say to anyone is the safest number they can use to beef up the game to the public, as they know as well as anyone people will break this down to a science and come up with their own interpretation of said number. As we're seeing in this thread.
Im sorry, but saying what the average is without anything to base that on but your own experience is not proof of an average.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
No. By play, I mean just that, play. I listen through all the dialog, I pick up multiple quests, I fight my way to my objective, and I complete my objective. Often times I'll spot a lone gold elite in the world and fight it just to test my build and to practice. I don't use spoiler sites, nor look to forums for the FotM builds. I explore...I search for lore objects and datacrons as well as unchained quests -- you know there are isolated quests in the world not at the hubs, right?
What do you think he meant when he said some players stop to smell the roses? Some even stop to pick roses and contemplate them?
Because this game has quests, people think that it's the only thing to do. And I'm not even talking about the extra content you cited in David's comment. The other day on Balmorra, I saw a Republic unit pinned down in a crater by Imperial fire. Four gold elites were raining blaster fire down. Now I suspect a few of you on the hamster wheel (you MMO vets) would ignore something like that, and go after your food pellets to get your reward. Well, this MMO vet said...Wow, these Repulbic soldiers need help! So I proceeded to take out all of the gold elites and the other Imps to save the harried Republic soldiers.
Some of you MMO vets are so jaded, you're not slowing down to smell the roses. You're conditioned to follow the rails of the quest lines and race to endgame, lol. Well this MMO vet has left that world behind, to my utter enjoyment.
David even says you can't count the 200 hours of content by stringing quests end to end...that's not what he's measuring. He's measuring the time that people like me spend living in the world, exploring, and doing quests.
And as a side note, my crafting has been a minimal impact on total time played as Companions do all that work for me.
It would be more likely that a person getting 200 hours is only questing, as anything else will boost your xp, shortening the path to cap. There are a ton of side quests in this game, some require a lot of travelling and fighting, both of these aspects add a substantial amount of time to the equation.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I think you've hit on something here. I don't do heroics, nor flashpoints, nor warzones. Questing and side quests. I don't even participate in the admittedly horrible space combat system. blech.
Id say the "200 hours" comment was just part of the hype to sell you over on the product.
When people read interviews and previews,between the lines they are just trying to sell you their product.
when it is available that is..
Well of course I've spent some time buying crafting supplies, talking to my companions and running around to vendors looking at items to purchase, I'm not going so say it's been 165 hours of pure questing, but probably a good 150-160 hours of that. I don't sit afk and craft, I have my companions do it while I'm questing. I've also spent the entire time duoing so I've spent probably, I dunno, 10-20 hours doing some of my girlfriend's class quests with her? Having said that I'm sure I've skipped at least 20-30 hours of quest content because I've almost always had quests left for planets when I leave them and I never even started the bonus series quests on Nar Shadaa, Tattooine, Balmorra, Belsavis or Hoth. There may be others I've missed.
My plan is do all that content on my first alt.
I'm pretty efficient when getting quests on doing them in the shortest travel order and getting all the quests in the same area, including both of our class quests since they tend to make each class go to the same areas, but I loot everthing manually. We also kill random bosses we see even if we don't have to and we finish the bonus quest objectves 90% of the time.
EDIT - Oh, Dredphyre's post brought up a good point, I've also skipped almost all the Heroic 4s because we usually can't do them with just the 2 of us when we're at the appropriate level and I hate having to look for groups. We do about half the Heroic 2s we get if they're close to where we're questing. So that's a bunch more content I skipped that would have added to the time played.
Another thing I should mention that I just thought of. When you're talking to a quest NPC and he says:
"I need you to go into this cave to blow up a generator."
Often you'll run into situations where you have a choice of saying:
1 - Sure, whatever, just tell me where to go.
2 - Tell me more about this cave and this generator.
3 - Sure, whatever, you're ugly and I hate you, just tell me where to go.
I almost always pick the "give me more information" dialogue option because I like to have some context on what I'm doing and why.
Just a thought.
You're trying to make a quote say something it doesn't. Here is the actual quote that Frank Gibeau of EA gave to Gamesindustry.
Each of the six Star Wars: The Old Republic classes pack 200 hours of gameplay, EA has revealed - excluding crafting, raiding and "the multiplayer".
They aren't actually saying that the "Class quests" take up 200 hours. They're saying that there is 200 hours of gameplay for each class's play through excluding raiding, flashpoints, crafting.
This is a true statment for most by a comfortable margin. It does include all the side quests and shared quests on each world. The bonus missions for some of the worlds alone can eat up 5+ hours. He makes a statment of content length and then explicitly says what that content estimate does not include. As a logical argument the implication is that anything not excluded is included.
You seem to be getting worked up because you're interpreting it as being only the class exclusive content when he pretty clearly specifies what content he's excluding in that assertion. You'll also note that we have 2 extra classes that were not mentioned in the orrigional quote.
I'm actually a bit curous about what classes he omited or if that was a slip of the tongue. He's in charge of the overall production of over a dozen diffrent IP's so he's not exactly in the day to day production of things.
Even did he explicitly state 200 hours of class exclusive game play, which he doesn't, you're trying to micro parse the words from a corprate officer for the parent company when talking fairly off the hip to a minor trade publication.
Calm down and actually go back to the source.
You'll note that Daniel Erikson clarifies the orrigional statment to exactly the same effect.
Yeah, I do this too. Especially on my Jedi who believes in the Jedi tennet: There is no ignorance, there is Knowledge. He wants to know everything he possible can about a situation.
Couldn't read past 'yall'.
For some reason I imagined some country bumpkin who has never left his home town (in bumpkin no where), having some dial-up connection and just saw Star Wars on VHS for the first time. Then, through reasearching SW online (At very slow speeds with reading writing comprehension of a 2 year old) found SWTOR and decided to download it. 12 days later after a long download and a week of picking corn for the monthly subscription, you get to level 20 and decide to share your stupidity with the rest of the people on MMORPG.com (which you also ran into inadvertently).
What a waste of 300 million. lol
(>^_^)> MMO Veteran <(^_^<)
Currently Playing: Tera Online