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Star Wars: The Old Republic: Playing With Friends
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In many MMOs today, grouping is an optional behavior. Bioware is working to bring the social aspect of grouping back into MMOs with Star Wars: The Old Republic. In today's column, MMORPG.com Community Manager Mike Bitton takes a look at all the reasons that grouping in SWTOR is unlike anything ever seen in MMOs to date. Read on!
A few months ago I played the game in a full group, and going through a bunch of the story content together was really unlike anything I’d played in an MMO before. Even as someone incredibly excited for the possibility of story in an MMO, I wasn’t really sold until I experienced it in a group. With more friends looking to play the game than the max group size allows, we often talk about the logistics of keeping the group together come launch. It wasn’t until recently that we started thinking about what the storyline implications involved, as we are all interested in playing the story together.
Read more of Mike Bitton's Star Wars: The Old Republic - Playing With Friends.
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Comments
This is what my group of friends will be doing. I wish more mmo's just added some type of mentor system so no matter your level or where you are in the story you could still play together. City of Heroes did this very well but SW looks to be more complicated story wise.
Personally i would love to play with others. However i will proubly just play my main and then with friends work on an ALT. through story. I have no plan on power leveling my way through to 50. Just so i can say "Now What" The Star Wars IP has always been about the adventure and story. So i plan on taking it nice and slow. And even though i am not an RP type of person i will definatly be trying to some what RP my main. I feel like the game kinda of forces you to do this becuase of the story but we shall see
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I've tried thia approach with other MMO's and my friends suck at doing it. They always outlevel me, even after agreeing to only play certain toons together. Good luck, and hope one of your group doesn't blow it.
=( not really good freinds are they if they say they'll level with you on an alt and then level it passed you anyways, that pretty much sucks.
This is one of the big problems with quest based advancement which I've run into in other games when I tried to play with a friend. Because, let's face reality, you aren't always going to be able to play at the same time. Sure you could play an alt when your friend isn't on but if you like your main and you're really getting into playing him it sucks to have that limitation on you that you can't just log in and play him whenever you feel like it.
What usually happens with us is that one of us will get ahead and then the next time we play together the one who is ahead has to go back through all the same quests he just did with the one who needs to catch up. Which also sucks.
Another thing, even when we are playing together and set out to do the same quests with each other; if it's the sort of thing where you have lots and lots of running back and forth to do and all of it is easily handled solo we invariably end up driffting apart anyway.
I'm sure most of you know how that goes:
"oh I got the ten eyeballs I needed I'll just go turn them in while you finish up."
"Oh hey, it won't take me long to go talk to this guy while you're running back so I'll just go ahead and get that done."
and so on and before you know it you're on completely different legs of the quest sequence and once again the guy who is ahead either has to do nothing while he waits or has to go back and re-run the same stuff all over again.
For the record I'm usually the guy who falls behind when we're playing together because I sometimes like to wander off and look around just for the hell of it. Sometimes I actually even scim over the quest text while my friend always clicks past it as quickly as possible.
But then quite often I get ahead of him when we can't be on at the same time because I tend to focus on one game at a time while he often splits his game time between two games.
Anyway, yeah, this sort of thing is a problem.
Myself and a small group of friends already do this in every MMO we play/have played.
We have a set of characters that we only play when we are all online, and we have other characters that we pretty much play as and when we feel like it.
It works just fine.
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
Vanguard had the best approach that I have seen for leveling with friends. You and your friend(s) form a brotherhood and you split XP right down the middle. So while everyone in the brother hood is online playing together you are getting full xp, if only one is on then that xp is divided between everyone. If you finish 4 quests that xp is split, once your buddy gets online they do the quest then you get the rest of the xp basically. It is a great system because you stay the same level on and off line. It only sucks if your buddies dont get on or stop playing and dont tell you becasue your gonna miss out on some xp. There were some glitches with it, for instance if you died and lost xp, your recovery xp wasnt split so you could recover what you lost then go pick up your tombstone and you get a % of what you lost back and that isn't split eitherso you jump that much ahead of the group.
Sadly it doesn't appear TOR will do anything about getting on different legs of the quest but it does make it more interesting to redo the quest to help your friend progress or to make doing quests with your friend that much more interesting, and with the hologram system you can either remote join him when your away doing something else in game or you can remote turn in your quests if you don't want to run back to turn in those 10 eyeballs.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
There's absolutely no problem imho. You play with your group, whenever the group is meeting up and when your group is not around then you switch to your second toon and play solo.
What you said in reply to me Whilan:
"... also while in a group you can "mess" with your friends quest as stated in the article what this means is that if you jump into your friends quest and he wanted to save the captian and you decide to kill the captain instead and win the role. Even though it wasn't your quest, the captain is now dead in his quest and the game remembers that all the way down the road."
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Yeah, I can't see that going over well. I can already hear my friend cussing and telling me to stay the hell out of his dialogue. Or vice-versa. Maybe I don't want dark side points but my friend who has already done that quest or mission or whatever they're calling it wants to see things play out differently so he goes the evil route. Well that's great, now what do I do? Run the mission over to get it the way I wanted? Let my charcter go down a different path than what I wanted?
I really am somewhat interested in this "grouping with friends" issue because the only reason I might play this game is so my gaming buddy and I could have something to do together since he's a big star wars fan. I'm pretty much indifferent and uniterested in the game myself but it's possible I might end up playing just for that reason.
I don't understand why most mmo's don't have a mentor system. It would be an easy solution for the problem, which is indeed fundamental to all multiplayer games.
There could be a button for the group leader to decrease the level of all group members to the level lowest of a group member (it is story driven, so increasing would mean to miss something). The math behind it is simple, as most abilities and stats depend upon level, and the stats on your gear could be divided somehow.
Being that guy frequently, I don't care too much about repeating content, as I will see it sooner or later with another toon. On the other hand, it brings me together with my friends, letting me have more fun ingame, and eventually picking that other choice in a dialouge just to see what happens.
That's the great part! Finally there's consequences in your game! Even though your friend wins the dialogue you will achieve points based on your choice and not the winner.
You'll get LS/DS points based on your choice, not the actual outcome for the group. So if you choose to save him, you'll get LS points while anyone else that chose to kill him would get DS points.
"If you're going to act like a noob, I'll treat you like one." -Caskio
Adventurers wear fancy pants!!!
I really like how this brings back the static pt'ing feel of older mmo's like FFXI and EQ. I mean yea it does suck in some ways for people who like to power through an MMO, though in my opinion that's not really how one is meant to be played, but to each their own since they pay for their own sub. I, however, like the fact that people need to consider the effects of outleveling their friends, and in some ways it is good that they are punished for outleveling their static if they do agree to stay with their friends in the first place. Too many times I've tried to do something similar in WoW and it just never works, one friend always has to be a douche and outlevel the group and then you were f'd for instance grouping.
Where as in ffxi for example (I'm talking pre-level sync) if you outleveled your static you were pretty much screwed because you couldn't group with them until they caught up so there was no point in outleveling them. It's just a different kind of experience I guess and I'm definitely looking forward to the more social aspect of SW. Kudos to those who can go through a whole game solo, but I totally prefer grouping with friends every night working toward a story goal.
I feel ya, this is what usually happens to me as well... A few friends have more free time than me and just keep on going...
The story thing will make this difficult, especially preventing spoilers. I already heard one I REALLY didn't want to know.
You can make however one char you play at your own speed and one you only play when your friend/s are online. I plan to play Jedi for myself and Imp Agent with my friends.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Yeah, this is a problem I see with the game.
Once you've established your little group, how do you make sure you all stay on the same stage of the world story? It'll be hard to do.
I'd like to see some system implemented that allows you to follow up with the guy who is the furthest behind on his story, while you don't get double XP for the missions but can still go through it once more with him. Or something like that.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
It seems kind of hard to believe Bioware has not done something about this or will do something about it. It's a pretty obvious issue and while replaying the same mission "works" in a sense, it would suck that your buddy that's 10 levels over come help you in your missions taking all the challenge out of it
I'm pretty sure the fastest way to push trough the game is playing your story. it grands way more exp than grinding.
"You resist. You cling to your life as if it actually matters. You will learn."
I think this is the main problem with story driven or quest driven type of games. It seems like you are either behind everyone, and you get some people to hurry you through the content to catch up, or you are going back and helping someone who is behind you.
In contrast, a game like Precu SWG there weren't a lot of quests. So you just pop in to the server, ask what's crackin' in guild chat, and then join the party. It was a very social game, and this type of structureless content contributed to that greatly.
I've already been contacted by some old mmo buddies from SWG among other games, so I imagine I will be grouping up with them in game to a certain extent. I'll probably just be running solo though quite a bit. I have no problem with that as I will be able to focus more on the story and not feel rushed.
TBH though, I have not had a group last more than 6 months doing this on a weekly or bi-weekly plan. Will have to see if I can find one.
Say hello, To the things you've left behind. They are more a part of your life now that you can't touch them.
I never really gave thought to this. Mostly, i've played my MMOs solo, and just group up with guild or pugs to do dungeons or a scarce world group quest. While i am aware and very exited about the story driven game style of SWTOR, i haven't considred the "static group" option to see it unfold in a whole different way. Mostly because i work from 2pm to 11pm. So i play during early morning, and late night, and it's really hard to find a good group of griends in that schedule. Most of my local friends do not play video games AT ALL. And the large group of MMO friends I have are staying in WoW. So I guess I'm gonna need to scout a few servers for guilds that are active in my gaming window.
Ok but how does that play out? I say to save the guy and my friend says to kill him. My friend gets his way and we go down the "kill him" path and the fight starts. So do I jump in and help kill the guy even though I'm trying to be a good guy? Do I stand back and watch my friend fight while I do nothing? It would seem pretty screwy if I helped kill the guy and still was awarded LS points. I mean I guess it would work purely from a character building perspective but wouldn't it kind of bollox your um...immersion in the story to do evil things and still be treated by the game as if you had done something good?
Maybe in a case like that it should throw my friend and I into PvP mode and make us fight each other to see what happens. Not that I expect that to happen but it might be fun to smack him around for messing up my plan. And if he won I could be awarded LS points for trying and it would at least make sense.
In terms of story, this makes sense if a group of friends want to see everything at the same time.
However, I don't think that seeing story elements out of order is such a big deal. I love story and lore as much as the next person, but I also value being able to login, join a group quickly and play the game. That doesn't necessarily mean pugging. What it means is not necessarily worrying about where everyone is gamewise and just being able to enjoy the game content, combat mechanics and social aspects of grouping up with guild memebers.
CoH and Rift were both great at this, although the story arcs in CoH were much stronger than Rift. It wasn't such a big deal jumping on, joining a group, killing a boss and then going back a day or so later and doing the lead up missions and killing the boss again. Is the impct of the boss kill still as large? No. Is it still fun and is the game in general more fun when the system is flexible from both a story and reward perspective? Most definitely.
In this way, I hope that the community is flexible and doesn't lock into certain quests and needing to do everything in order. One of the many problems with current MMOs is the quests chains. Yes, you need them to create a great story. In terms of grouping, I hope people are flexible enough to do some steps out of order and do some steps twice. If everyone only does the current step they're on, I would be concerned that forming groups might become very cumbersome.
If you don't worry about it, it's not a problem.
This is the nice thing with playing with your spouse - given that your spouse is into games, of course - we always play together, at each stage of the quests/level anyway. I can't imagine coordinating it with a group. Good luck!!!!