while the static and strangely passive mobs, and not much movement in the ambient environment either make the game feel very sterile.
The fact that i'm on a heavy server and the most players I have seen on screen at a given time outside mini game PVP is - SEVEN! YES SEVEN! - makes it feel more sterile than anything else
{mod edit} because I feel many aspect could be fixed and expanded upon to make it more fun for a broader range of people. So becauae I feel with some changes this could be a very fun game and would probably bring a ton more people to the game and help retain many others{mod edit}Makes a TON of sense to me but guess I could just lump you with the rest of the people who cant take a damn critical thing said about this game and tell me to go play wow or some crap.. yea thats' REALLY helping out the game by driving people away good job there
oh also I don't think you know what phasing is.. i'm not talking about INSTANCING im talking about zone phasing.. I'd get my facts straight before acusing people of being trolls
Sadly I don't think the engine is well suited to handle large amounts of people in the open world. Even if BW wanted to I think its limited by the hero engine. There is without a doubt a large amount of people playing the game but having so few people actually on your shard is very depressing. Even Aion (cryengine1) with its channels had tons more people.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Personally I find the fact that I am interacting with other people instead of just queueing for another dungeon where people rage quit a lot more rewarding than trying to click on NPCs.
Except in SWTOR you interact less with other players than many MMORPGs and about the same amount as in WoW.
actually you interact even less than wow thanks to the companion system and single player type story.. oh yea and the phasing..
i read someone say swtor is good for levelling with a friend, but my wife and i find it sometimes irritating. you get dragged away from each other all the time, rather than able to cling together.
Some people don't care, but it's the little attention to detail that some games bring that really pull me in and make me feel immersed. TOR is the opposite of that, lol.
that's just it. immersion.
the weirdest thing for me was when i got to wherever the hell i am now. sith capital. and you land at the star port there. now, this is the sith capital star port or whatever. ships coming and going. awesome idea.
and there's nothing happening. there's an area which has been built to look like something of a check-in area. they've gone so far as to design the counter and the queues. but there's no npcs working behind the counter, and none lining up. there's no funky droids bumping into walls as there would be in any scene in the movies.
there's nothing.
it's a ghost town.
for me, that killed immersion.
some guy in here said i'm complaining about small beans, but for me, isn't the world of an mmo as important as your avatar? i don't know what he finds important about the game (he didn't want to say), but for me, an mmo is a world to escape into after an awful day dealing with the banality of work.
i'm just surprised by the lack of novelty and life in the game. the cantinas don't even have much going on. and what's star wars without a filthy scum-ridden cantina? you can't even buy any novelty drinks.
as i said, we can knock wow as much as we like, but they still hold the throne for creating a WORLD in many facets. i would have hoped swtor could have upped wow and had a bit more life in it. i mean, a single scene in star wars has so many oddball droids and interesting background aliens/features, that i really thought they'd have worked a few into the game...
The OP's opinion is almost exactly why I didnt buy this game.
The entire world feels so artifical, no immersion whatsoever.
Passive mobs that dont move. Flying passive mobs that fly in one place. The NPCs are terrible...and then the one place you would expect the game to be full of life...a cantina.....not even the NPCs wanna hang out there. All that being said Im a PvP guy that doesnt give a baboons red ass about stuff like this normally.
After 90+ hours of playing SWTOR i feel getting annoyed by the allways same static weather, static lighting, static look of the worlds. It looks allways the same and there is no refreshing difference in the environment through a lighting storm, dawn and dusk, different clouds or whatsoever. I am at day 5 at Taris and i cant see that fucking planet again - fundamentally it has all to impress but i have really seen to much of the same and now i was going to Qesh and feel i dont like it too.
As i wrote in other places - its a great Coop-Game that makes fun but the static worlds dont have IT...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
the bland world is what makes the world seem bland. It is one of the poorist attempts to make a world I have ever seen post 2004.
Wait on 2nd thought I dont even think they atempted to make a living breathing world. Just a cluster of lifeless zones for the uninspiring story that you have to go through.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore) Now Playing: N/A Worst MMO: FFXIV Favorite MMO: FFXI
I have found the story second to none, I did not buy the game for graphics which are certainly substandard. All this talk of immersion and real worlds. Every MMO ever made works only as an illusion, one where you believe a digital replica is a world, you have to leave your common sense at the door in every MMO I have played. Scale is an issue for SWtOR but as a world it works fine, we gain a lot of talking quest givers, we lose more npcs walking around. Swings and roundabouts.
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
I've just been looking at how they do things in Mass Effect and it's the exact same thing. NPC's stand around in fake conversations that you can't hear, npcs just sitting in seats, moving their arms as if they're talking to each other. And while that's more or less fine for a single player game, as you're more focused on the ongoing plot and shooting things in the face, when you place it in an MMO it sticks out like a sore thumb.
The problem they have is that they've taken their design decisions from games such as Mass Effect and placed them into an MMO, but whereas in Mass Effect you're simply running past most npc's so don't really take much notice, when you're in an MMO you tend to be in the same area for a long length of time, moving back and fore, seeing the same things, so you spot more and more oddities in the game world itself.
Bioware have basically done what they've always done, but put it into a persistent world (or worlds in this case), and it simply doesn't work. A persistent world needs attention given to the world itself, not just the path you're taking through it. Once you stop to smell the roses you realise that they're fake, as is everything else around you. You're no longer a character in a persistent world fighting against overwhelming odds - you're little more than the space invaders space ship shooting incoming aliens.
That said, even their single player games don't have such horrible npc's as the ones outside the Jedi Temple, standing mid-action in some weird time stasis. That's simply unforgivable.
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
Sorry Loke. I always find myself agreeing with you most of the time. But not this time.
Sadly, Bethesda has now far surpassed Bioware by miles with the release of Skyrim.
The game is fully Voiced! Every single NPC in the game is interactable and respons to you. Fully story driven as well.
In SW:TOR, over 95% of the NPC's are non-interactable static objects! The only NPC's you can interact with are quest giving NPC's. With most of them just giving the sam short line of text over and over again even.
Even games like WoW, EverQuest 2 and LOTRO have a much much more interactible gameworld than SW:TOR. And that is just disturbing!
EA/Bioware made a huge mistake with SW:TOR to ONLY focus on story and Voice Over and pretty much forget about what makes an MMO and MMO. Seeing clearly how the most glaring issues and bugs are all in the multiplayer content.
It give me the impression they tried to mostly attract the single player RPG crowd to this game. But these people have so many great games to play at the moment, they are not going to be the loyal subscribers SW:TOR needs to survive!
EA/Bioware will NEVER be able to keep enough pace to churn out new Fully Voiced content to keep people busy. (and frankly, they already backing out from it, as except the first 2 flashpoints, all flashpoints after that are just standard issue dungeons with NO Voice / Story ).
If they want this game to survive, they will have to put a hell lot of resources to get the MMO features into the game and working properly... not to mention fix the absolutely horrible UI !
As otherwise I honestly fear for this games future and longterm appeal.
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
Sorry Loke. I always find myself agreeing with you most of the time. But not this time.
Sadly, Bethesda has now far surpassed Bioware by miles with the release of Skyrim.
The game is fully Voiced! Every single NPC in the game is interactable and respons to you. Fully story driven as well.
In SW:TOR, over 95% of the NPC's are non-interactable static objects! The only NPC's you can interact with are quest giving NPC's. With most of them just giving the sam short line of text over and over again even.
Even games like WoW, EverQuest 2 and LOTRO have a much much more interactible gameworld than SW:TOR. And that is just disturbing!
EA/Bioware made a huge mistake with SW:TOR to ONLY focus on story and Voice Over and pretty much forget about what makes an MMO and MMO. Seeing clearly how the most glaring issues and bugs are all in the multiplayer content.
It give me the impression they tried to mostly attract the single player RPG crowd to this game. But these people have so many great games to play at the moment, they are not going to be the loyal subscribers SW:TOR needs to survive!
EA/Bioware will NEVER be able to keep enough pace to churn out new Fully Voiced content to keep people busy. (and frankly, they already backing out from it, as except the first 2 flashpoints, all flashpoints after that are just standard issue dungeons with NO Voice / Story ).
If they want this game to survive, they will have to put a hell lot of resources to get the MMO features into the game and working properly... not to mention fix the absolutely horrible UI !
As otherwise I honestly fear for this games future and longterm appeal.
Skyrim isn't a MMO, it is a single player RPG. The day Bethesda make a MMO then we will see how much of original Skyrim is left when turned into an MMO. Till then i will reserve my judgements.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty -- Mahatma Gandhi
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
Sorry Loke. I always find myself agreeing with you most of the time. But not this time.
Sadly, Bethesda has now far surpassed Bioware by miles with the release of Skyrim.
The game is fully Voiced! Every single NPC in the game is interactable and respons to you. Fully story driven as well.
In SW:TOR, over 95% of the NPC's are non-interactable static objects! The only NPC's you can interact with are quest giving NPC's. With most of them just giving the sam short line of text over and over again even.
Even games like WoW, EverQuest 2 and LOTRO have a much much more interactible gameworld than SW:TOR. And that is just disturbing!
EA/Bioware made a huge mistake with SW:TOR to ONLY focus on story and Voice Over and pretty much forget about what makes an MMO and MMO. Seeing clearly how the most glaring issues and bugs are all in the multiplayer content.
It give me the impression they tried to mostly attract the single player RPG crowd to this game. But these people have so many great games to play at the moment, they are not going to be the loyal subscribers SW:TOR needs to survive!
EA/Bioware will NEVER be able to keep enough pace to churn out new Fully Voiced content to keep people busy. (and frankly, they already backing out from it, as except the first 2 flashpoints, all flashpoints after that are just standard issue dungeons with NO Voice / Story ).
If they want this game to survive, they will have to put a hell lot of resources to get the MMO features into the game and working properly... not to mention fix the absolutely horrible UI !
As otherwise I honestly fear for this games future and longterm appeal.
Skyrim isn't a MMO, it is a single player RPG. The day Bethesda make a MMO then we will see how much of original Skyrim is left when turned into an MMO. Till then i will reserve my judgements.
Did you read Loke's and my post? When I was referring to Skyrim, I was reffering to Bioware's single player RPG's.
Skyrim isn't the only game offering a heavily interactable gameworld. Plenty of MMORPG's out there offer that too. From WoW to LOTRO to EverQuest 2 to Vanguard... etc... etc.
It's a fact and a HUGE dissapointment how static and bland the gameworld in TOR really is. How NON interactable the gameworld is!
They took a small step forward with providing Fully Voiced story content (altho Funcom already did that with the first 20 levels in Age of Conan and after that each class story quest line.... EverQuest 2 also provided lots of Voice over NPC's that dynamically interact with you... lot of people never knew, because they never bothered to download all the available voicepacks).
...but at the same time EA/Bioware have taken a huge step backwards with everything else in the game. From the NON interactible world, to the bland zone design, to the absolutely horrible limited UI, the graphics, guild features, LFG features, etc, etc.
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
Sorry Loke. I always find myself agreeing with you most of the time. But not this time.
Sadly, Bethesda has now far surpassed Bioware by miles with the release of Skyrim.
The game is fully Voiced! Every single NPC in the game is interactable and respons to you. Fully story driven as well.
In SW:TOR, over 95% of the NPC's are non-interactable static objects! The only NPC's you can interact with are quest giving NPC's. With most of them just giving the sam short line of text over and over again even.
Even games like WoW, EverQuest 2 and LOTRO have a much much more interactible gameworld than SW:TOR. And that is just disturbing!
EA/Bioware made a huge mistake with SW:TOR to ONLY focus on story and Voice Over and pretty much forget about what makes an MMO and MMO. Seeing clearly how the most glaring issues and bugs are all in the multiplayer content.
It give me the impression they tried to mostly attract the single player RPG crowd to this game. But these people have so many great games to play at the moment, they are not going to be the loyal subscribers SW:TOR needs to survive!
EA/Bioware will NEVER be able to keep enough pace to churn out new Fully Voiced content to keep people busy. (and frankly, they already backing out from it, as except the first 2 flashpoints, all flashpoints after that are just standard issue dungeons with NO Voice / Story ).
If they want this game to survive, they will have to put a hell lot of resources to get the MMO features into the game and working properly... not to mention fix the absolutely horrible UI !
As otherwise I honestly fear for this games future and longterm appeal.
Skyrim isn't a MMO, it is a single player RPG. The day Bethesda make a MMO then we will see how much of original Skyrim is left when turned into an MMO. Till then i will reserve my judgements.
Did you read Loke's and my post? When I was referring to Skyrim, I was reffering to Bioware's single player RPG's.
Skyrim isn't the only game offering a heavily interactable gameworld. Plenty of MMORPG's out there offer that too. From WoW to LOTRO to EverQuest 2 to Vanguard... etc... etc.
It's a fact and a HUGE dissapointment how static and bland the gameworld in TOR really is. How NON interactable the gameworld is!
They took a small step forward with providing Fully Voiced story content (altho Funcom already did that with the first 20 levels in Age of Conan and after that each class story quest line.... EverQuest 2 also provided lots of Voice over NPC's that dynamically interact with you... lot of people never knew, because they never bothered to download all the available voicepacks).
...but at the same time EA/Bioware have taken a huge step backwards with everything else in the game. From the NON interactible world, to the bland zone design, to the absolutely horrible limited UI, the graphics, guild features, LFG features, etc, etc.
But we are still talking about what to expect in terms of MMOS isn't it? has Bethesda made a MMO yet? nope.
I have played all the MMOS that you mentioned and Lotro is very static and Vanguard is as dead as it gets, bunch of NPC sprinkled around a town can not put a life in a dead game. WOW is the only good example i can think of.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty -- Mahatma Gandhi
Originally posted by Loke666 It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world. If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim. Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
That's maybe because a fully linear mmo don't make much sense at the end of the road.
The problem with an mmo, is that you have a mass of people sharing the same space, which make it impossible to stop time in that space and reload it at that state you left. You can do it in a coop game because the group is like a single person, in a single player game too, but you just can't do it in an mmo, that's a fact. That's a technical issue to begin with, its not a question of you like sandbox or you hate them. It is a fact imposed by reality, mass of avatar in a shared space cannot be cut from time. You can create rubber banding all over the place all you want, as questing is doing, but still, you cannot stop time in between those banding. That space need persistence. Persistence and space make a world, which make sense for a mass of avatars to live in, its just like a perfect match. But that match doesn't happen afterward, as if it was a choice to be made, it happen before you can make a choice.
Developer refuse that because not a single game need that. Not even pen&paper game need a persistent world concept, in fact they do fair without it. You play with your group, and the GM or dev team is like creating the space needed for the group to evolve. Well in an mmo you can't do that. Accept it and we'll all do the next step, continue to refuse it and we keep on going backward. Its like my wife that refuse to put salt when she cook because, well she don't like to cook, its like refusing it's feminine soul and the pressure of society over it (wich i perfectly understand, but it really don't help much). "Do it yourself when its done", she say, and you know what, she'll never cook well. Well its the same for mmo, put salt in your mmo for god sake, and stop being such donkeys.
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
Sorry Loke. I always find myself agreeing with you most of the time. But not this time.
Sadly, Bethesda has now far surpassed Bioware by miles with the release of Skyrim.
The game is fully Voiced! Every single NPC in the game is interactable and respons to you. Fully story driven as well.
In SW:TOR, over 95% of the NPC's are non-interactable static objects! The only NPC's you can interact with are quest giving NPC's. With most of them just giving the sam short line of text over and over again even.
Even games like WoW, EverQuest 2 and LOTRO have a much much more interactible gameworld than SW:TOR. And that is just disturbing!
EA/Bioware made a huge mistake with SW:TOR to ONLY focus on story and Voice Over and pretty much forget about what makes an MMO and MMO. Seeing clearly how the most glaring issues and bugs are all in the multiplayer content.
It give me the impression they tried to mostly attract the single player RPG crowd to this game. But these people have so many great games to play at the moment, they are not going to be the loyal subscribers SW:TOR needs to survive!
EA/Bioware will NEVER be able to keep enough pace to churn out new Fully Voiced content to keep people busy. (and frankly, they already backing out from it, as except the first 2 flashpoints, all flashpoints after that are just standard issue dungeons with NO Voice / Story ).
If they want this game to survive, they will have to put a hell lot of resources to get the MMO features into the game and working properly... not to mention fix the absolutely horrible UI !
As otherwise I honestly fear for this games future and longterm appeal.
Skyrim isn't a MMO, it is a single player RPG. The day Bethesda make a MMO then we will see how much of original Skyrim is left when turned into an MMO. Till then i will reserve my judgements.
Did you read Loke's and my post? When I was referring to Skyrim, I was reffering to Bioware's single player RPG's.
Skyrim isn't the only game offering a heavily interactable gameworld. Plenty of MMORPG's out there offer that too. From WoW to LOTRO to EverQuest 2 to Vanguard... etc... etc.
It's a fact and a HUGE dissapointment how static and bland the gameworld in TOR really is. How NON interactable the gameworld is!
They took a small step forward with providing Fully Voiced story content (altho Funcom already did that with the first 20 levels in Age of Conan and after that each class story quest line.... EverQuest 2 also provided lots of Voice over NPC's that dynamically interact with you... lot of people never knew, because they never bothered to download all the available voicepacks).
...but at the same time EA/Bioware have taken a huge step backwards with everything else in the game. From the NON interactible world, to the bland zone design, to the absolutely horrible limited UI, the graphics, guild features, LFG features, etc, etc.
But we are still talking about what to expect in terms of MMOS isn't it? has Bethesda made a MMO yet? nope.
I have played all the MMOS that you mentioned and Lotro is very static and Vanguard is as dead as it gets, bunch of NPC sprinkled around a town can not put a life in a dead game. WOW is the only good example i can think of.
LOTRO is not static at all. Yeah the last expansion was a joke, but the old SoA and Mines of Moria zones were amazing!
EverQuest 2 had a lot of interactible NPC's in Cities. I loved the old Quenos at launch, with NPC's walking up to you and starting a conversation that could lead to a potential quest or just simply conversed with you. It was really amazing and a breakthrough at that time and SOE was highly praised for that in the press back then!
They had a lot of Voice over actors and you could download a lot of additional voice over packs to make other NPC's in the rest of the game fully voiced.
Just later on after some years, when the game was in decline, SOE just stopped bothering putting a lot of voice overs in the expacs anymore. Which was a shame really. But worse, they even started to remove them, so a lot of those voice overpacks you cannot even download anymore. Typical SOE tho... removing content from the game.
SW:TOR is like moving in a fake Holywood movie western town, where behind the painted front there is nothing but boards holding that front.
OP the world feels fake, not blant. Bland would mean that there is a tree there and a tree miles away. Fake means that it detracts from the immersion factor and the feeling of disbelief that you're actually walking in the KOTOR era.
SW:TOR is like moving in a fake Holywood movie western town, where behind the painted front there is nothing but boards holding that front.
OP the world feels fake, not blant. Bland would mean that there is a tree there and a tree miles away. Fake means that it detracts from the immersion factor and the feeling of disbelief that you're actually walking in the KOTOR era.
I don't think I understand your definition of bland...
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Take the NPCs.... your typical Imperial/Republic "battle scenery" includes some NPCs standing in place repeatedly "firing" lasers at a desiganted spot... regardless of whether or not there is actually an enemy NPC present.... and of course, the lasers aren't actually lasers and don't even matter. It's just a lightshow.
Now take RIFT... where hordes of ACTUAL "living/breathing" npcs roam the land attacking each other... invading camps... conquering camps... growing in number and building strongholds.
You mean Rift, where the cannons in Stillmoor fire endlessly and pointlessly at the Keep? Or just past the lift where invaders endlessly try and get to it? Or any number of other spots of "battle scenery" that are exactly like ToR's?
Take the NPCs.... your typical Imperial/Republic "battle scenery" includes some NPCs standing in place repeatedly "firing" lasers at a desiganted spot... regardless of whether or not there is actually an enemy NPC present.... and of course, the lasers aren't actually lasers and don't even matter. It's just a lightshow.
Now take RIFT... where hordes of ACTUAL "living/breathing" npcs roam the land attacking each other... invading camps... conquering camps... growing in number and building strongholds.
You mean Rift, where the cannons in Stillmoor fire endlessly and pointlessly at the Keep? Or just past the lift where invaders endlessly try and get to it? Or any number of other spots of "battle scenery" that are exactly like ToR's?
Is that the Rift you mean?
You're asking because Rift has some static battle-theme scenery in the starting area? Even though it also has rifts, that spawn groups of mobs that march across the landscape, fighting other mobs along the way? And all sorts of mobs and wildlife wandering around? NPCs that you can target, interact with, even fight if they're the other faction? All Rift's NPCs, that will fight eachother, and the mobs in the game? Which all happens dynamically, not in some scripted battle scene? You think all that gets negated because it also has those lame cannons?
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Personally I find the fact that I am interacting with other people instead of just queueing for another dungeon where people rage quit a lot more rewarding than trying to click on NPCs.
Personally i find a dungeon queueing system is what this game needs. Rage quitting is MUCH worse than there is no fast way to replace a member.
I think when I called this world "cardboard", I hit the nail on the head.
While i agree, to be fair, this kind of thing is quite fixable though. There is no need to change the game structure drastically to add some animation and flavors to the scenes.
Comments
while the static and strangely passive mobs, and not much movement in the ambient environment either make the game feel very sterile.
The fact that i'm on a heavy server and the most players I have seen on screen at a given time outside mini game PVP is - SEVEN! YES SEVEN! - makes it feel more sterile than anything else
Sadly I don't think the engine is well suited to handle large amounts of people in the open world. Even if BW wanted to I think its limited by the hero engine. There is without a doubt a large amount of people playing the game but having so few people actually on your shard is very depressing. Even Aion (cryengine1) with its channels had tons more people.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
i read someone say swtor is good for levelling with a friend, but my wife and i find it sometimes irritating. you get dragged away from each other all the time, rather than able to cling together.
that's just it. immersion.
the weirdest thing for me was when i got to wherever the hell i am now. sith capital. and you land at the star port there. now, this is the sith capital star port or whatever. ships coming and going. awesome idea.
and there's nothing happening. there's an area which has been built to look like something of a check-in area. they've gone so far as to design the counter and the queues. but there's no npcs working behind the counter, and none lining up. there's no funky droids bumping into walls as there would be in any scene in the movies.
there's nothing.
it's a ghost town.
for me, that killed immersion.
some guy in here said i'm complaining about small beans, but for me, isn't the world of an mmo as important as your avatar? i don't know what he finds important about the game (he didn't want to say), but for me, an mmo is a world to escape into after an awful day dealing with the banality of work.
i'm just surprised by the lack of novelty and life in the game. the cantinas don't even have much going on. and what's star wars without a filthy scum-ridden cantina? you can't even buy any novelty drinks.
as i said, we can knock wow as much as we like, but they still hold the throne for creating a WORLD in many facets. i would have hoped swtor could have upped wow and had a bit more life in it. i mean, a single scene in star wars has so many oddball droids and interesting background aliens/features, that i really thought they'd have worked a few into the game...
The OP's opinion is almost exactly why I didnt buy this game.
The entire world feels so artifical, no immersion whatsoever.
Passive mobs that dont move. Flying passive mobs that fly in one place. The NPCs are terrible...and then the one place you would expect the game to be full of life...a cantina.....not even the NPCs wanna hang out there. All that being said Im a PvP guy that doesnt give a baboons red ass about stuff like this normally.
After 90+ hours of playing SWTOR i feel getting annoyed by the allways same static weather, static lighting, static look of the worlds.
It looks allways the same and there is no refreshing difference in the environment through a lighting storm, dawn and dusk, different clouds or whatsoever.
I am at day 5 at Taris and i cant see that fucking planet again - fundamentally it has all to impress but i have really seen to much of the same and now i was going to Qesh and feel i dont like it too.
As i wrote in other places - its a great Coop-Game that makes fun but the static worlds dont have IT...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
And in some places, the same NPC model for every NPC in the area.
Just replying to the topic:
the bland world is what makes the world seem bland. It is one of the poorist attempts to make a world I have ever seen post 2004.
Wait on 2nd thought I dont even think they atempted to make a living breathing world. Just a cluster of lifeless zones for the uninspiring story that you have to go through.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
Now Playing: N/A
Worst MMO: FFXIV
Favorite MMO: FFXI
I have found the story second to none, I did not buy the game for graphics which are certainly substandard. All this talk of immersion and real worlds. Every MMO ever made works only as an illusion, one where you believe a digital replica is a world, you have to leave your common sense at the door in every MMO I have played. Scale is an issue for SWtOR but as a world it works fine, we gain a lot of talking quest givers, we lose more npcs walking around. Swings and roundabouts.
It have always been Biowares thing to tell a story, not to simulate a realistic world.
If you want the latter you should play another game instead, that doesn't mean TOR is a bad game, just that it have other focus than say Skyrim.
Do you guys seriously thought that Bioware should ignore all the games that made them into what they are and instead make a game that made Bethesda or Rockstar into what they are?
I've just been looking at how they do things in Mass Effect and it's the exact same thing. NPC's stand around in fake conversations that you can't hear, npcs just sitting in seats, moving their arms as if they're talking to each other. And while that's more or less fine for a single player game, as you're more focused on the ongoing plot and shooting things in the face, when you place it in an MMO it sticks out like a sore thumb.
The problem they have is that they've taken their design decisions from games such as Mass Effect and placed them into an MMO, but whereas in Mass Effect you're simply running past most npc's so don't really take much notice, when you're in an MMO you tend to be in the same area for a long length of time, moving back and fore, seeing the same things, so you spot more and more oddities in the game world itself.
Bioware have basically done what they've always done, but put it into a persistent world (or worlds in this case), and it simply doesn't work. A persistent world needs attention given to the world itself, not just the path you're taking through it. Once you stop to smell the roses you realise that they're fake, as is everything else around you. You're no longer a character in a persistent world fighting against overwhelming odds - you're little more than the space invaders space ship shooting incoming aliens.
That said, even their single player games don't have such horrible npc's as the ones outside the Jedi Temple, standing mid-action in some weird time stasis. That's simply unforgivable.
Sorry Loke. I always find myself agreeing with you most of the time. But not this time.
Sadly, Bethesda has now far surpassed Bioware by miles with the release of Skyrim.
The game is fully Voiced! Every single NPC in the game is interactable and respons to you. Fully story driven as well.
In SW:TOR, over 95% of the NPC's are non-interactable static objects! The only NPC's you can interact with are quest giving NPC's. With most of them just giving the sam short line of text over and over again even.
Even games like WoW, EverQuest 2 and LOTRO have a much much more interactible gameworld than SW:TOR. And that is just disturbing!
EA/Bioware made a huge mistake with SW:TOR to ONLY focus on story and Voice Over and pretty much forget about what makes an MMO and MMO. Seeing clearly how the most glaring issues and bugs are all in the multiplayer content.
It give me the impression they tried to mostly attract the single player RPG crowd to this game. But these people have so many great games to play at the moment, they are not going to be the loyal subscribers SW:TOR needs to survive!
EA/Bioware will NEVER be able to keep enough pace to churn out new Fully Voiced content to keep people busy. (and frankly, they already backing out from it, as except the first 2 flashpoints, all flashpoints after that are just standard issue dungeons with NO Voice / Story ).
If they want this game to survive, they will have to put a hell lot of resources to get the MMO features into the game and working properly... not to mention fix the absolutely horrible UI !
As otherwise I honestly fear for this games future and longterm appeal.
Skyrim isn't a MMO, it is a single player RPG. The day Bethesda make a MMO then we will see how much of original Skyrim is left when turned into an MMO. Till then i will reserve my judgements.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty -- Mahatma Gandhi
Did you read Loke's and my post? When I was referring to Skyrim, I was reffering to Bioware's single player RPG's.
Skyrim isn't the only game offering a heavily interactable gameworld. Plenty of MMORPG's out there offer that too. From WoW to LOTRO to EverQuest 2 to Vanguard... etc... etc.
It's a fact and a HUGE dissapointment how static and bland the gameworld in TOR really is. How NON interactable the gameworld is!
They took a small step forward with providing Fully Voiced story content (altho Funcom already did that with the first 20 levels in Age of Conan and after that each class story quest line.... EverQuest 2 also provided lots of Voice over NPC's that dynamically interact with you... lot of people never knew, because they never bothered to download all the available voicepacks).
...but at the same time EA/Bioware have taken a huge step backwards with everything else in the game. From the NON interactible world, to the bland zone design, to the absolutely horrible limited UI, the graphics, guild features, LFG features, etc, etc.
But we are still talking about what to expect in terms of MMOS isn't it? has Bethesda made a MMO yet? nope.
I have played all the MMOS that you mentioned and Lotro is very static and Vanguard is as dead as it gets, bunch of NPC sprinkled around a town can not put a life in a dead game. WOW is the only good example i can think of.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty -- Mahatma Gandhi
That's maybe because a fully linear mmo don't make much sense at the end of the road.
The problem with an mmo, is that you have a mass of people sharing the same space, which make it impossible to stop time in that space and reload it at that state you left. You can do it in a coop game because the group is like a single person, in a single player game too, but you just can't do it in an mmo, that's a fact. That's a technical issue to begin with, its not a question of you like sandbox or you hate them. It is a fact imposed by reality, mass of avatar in a shared space cannot be cut from time. You can create rubber banding all over the place all you want, as questing is doing, but still, you cannot stop time in between those banding. That space need persistence. Persistence and space make a world, which make sense for a mass of avatars to live in, its just like a perfect match. But that match doesn't happen afterward, as if it was a choice to be made, it happen before you can make a choice.
Developer refuse that because not a single game need that. Not even pen&paper game need a persistent world concept, in fact they do fair without it. You play with your group, and the GM or dev team is like creating the space needed for the group to evolve. Well in an mmo you can't do that. Accept it and we'll all do the next step, continue to refuse it and we keep on going backward. Its like my wife that refuse to put salt when she cook because, well she don't like to cook, its like refusing it's feminine soul and the pressure of society over it (wich i perfectly understand, but it really don't help much). "Do it yourself when its done", she say, and you know what, she'll never cook well. Well its the same for mmo, put salt in your mmo for god sake, and stop being such donkeys.
LOTRO is not static at all. Yeah the last expansion was a joke, but the old SoA and Mines of Moria zones were amazing!
EverQuest 2 had a lot of interactible NPC's in Cities. I loved the old Quenos at launch, with NPC's walking up to you and starting a conversation that could lead to a potential quest or just simply conversed with you. It was really amazing and a breakthrough at that time and SOE was highly praised for that in the press back then!
They had a lot of Voice over actors and you could download a lot of additional voice over packs to make other NPC's in the rest of the game fully voiced.
Just later on after some years, when the game was in decline, SOE just stopped bothering putting a lot of voice overs in the expacs anymore. Which was a shame really. But worse, they even started to remove them, so a lot of those voice overpacks you cannot even download anymore. Typical SOE tho... removing content from the game.
SW:TOR is like moving in a fake Holywood movie western town, where behind the painted front there is nothing but boards holding that front.
OP the world feels fake, not blant. Bland would mean that there is a tree there and a tree miles away. Fake means that it detracts from the immersion factor and the feeling of disbelief that you're actually walking in the KOTOR era.
I don't think I understand your definition of bland...
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
You mean Rift, where the cannons in Stillmoor fire endlessly and pointlessly at the Keep? Or just past the lift where invaders endlessly try and get to it? Or any number of other spots of "battle scenery" that are exactly like ToR's?
Is that the Rift you mean?
[quote]click to often and they tell you to go away.[/quote]
heh yeah. I remember that ever since Warcraft 2. It's one of the oldest blizzy staples.
interaction with the environment is deader than dead.
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You're asking because Rift has some static battle-theme scenery in the starting area? Even though it also has rifts, that spawn groups of mobs that march across the landscape, fighting other mobs along the way? And all sorts of mobs and wildlife wandering around? NPCs that you can target, interact with, even fight if they're the other faction? All Rift's NPCs, that will fight eachother, and the mobs in the game? Which all happens dynamically, not in some scripted battle scene? You think all that gets negated because it also has those lame cannons?
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
I think when I called this world "cardboard", I hit the nail on the head.
"Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
I need to take this advice more.
Personally i find a dungeon queueing system is what this game needs. Rage quitting is MUCH worse than there is no fast way to replace a member.
While i agree, to be fair, this kind of thing is quite fixable though. There is no need to change the game structure drastically to add some animation and flavors to the scenes.