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Sadness...
maniacfox
Member UncommonPosts: 171
I was so hyped about this game, in so many ways, but I feel sad that it is not that game I was hoping it would be.
I can see that a lot of work has gone into SWTOR, but when you strip away the veneer what you are left with, and I am sorry about the cliché, is WOW with light sabres, and ultimately, not as good as WOW. At it's core, there is nothing progressive or innovative that moves the MMO genre forward.
For sure there are parts that I like, the companions are fun despite the fact that it has trivialised crafting. The personal story is awesome, but it represents a very small element of the experience. Most of the time I feel like I am enduring drawn out cinematics and meaningless choices with <insert tedious random Imperial/Sith/Republic/Jedi NPC here> just to be told in the end, "kill 10 rebels/imperials plx".
The experience is made worse by the fact that there are still bugs in the game that were present at launch, that are still not fixed and the European servers are painfully empty.
I'm sure if they had put their effort into KOTOR3 it would have kicked ass, but sadly this is not the case.
Recently I have been playing the Guild Wars 2 and Secret World beta weekends, both of these games are making small, but noticeably progressive changes to improve fundamental areas of MMOS that were getting stale, making SWTORs lack of core innovation painfully obvious.
I signed up for a 6 month sub, because I "knew" it was going to rock. How wrong can you get? I wonder how many other people are also sitting on unplayed subs? This makes me sad, because I liked Bioware and I love the Star Wars IP, but somewhere, for me anyhow, it all went horribly wrong.
Comments
What is truly shocking with SW:ToR is the impossibilty to understand why it has been so expansive to produce.
From a player perspective, I see no big difference between Rift and ToR. RIFT is even better in my opinion. This is really poor managament from both EA and Bioware. It's like a car manufacturer that would spend 200 milions dollar to develop the best stereo system for its new prototype without caring about anything else.
1. The Voice actors.
2. Have you seen the insane amount of marketing/PR? You can bet a huge chunk of that budget went into this, just to create enough hype to maximise box sales.
Sad it took you this long to figure out- i played to 50 then bout a month of pvp and was over it
3. large chunks of cash went into peoples pockets off the books.
hahaha...
no really...hahahaa...
a "player" using "perspective" would see that TOR was built like a single player game and then had multi-player tagged onto it, not just from a heavy story driven game aspect but also from the bulk of the gameplay itself. There is next to nothing in the design that looks as if it was built with many players playing it at the same time in mind...just looks like a single player game. Even the instances could have been for a single player game...would only need to ramp up the difficulty of the mobs to make it what it is.
Rift was built like an actual MMO.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
You might not like this game, I respect that. It just might not be for you. But SWTOR is superior to WoW in EVERY WAY. It is just a better game. I do want to check out Secret World once they offer a free trial, though. Just too busy for beta!
Rift wasn't the game for him. No need to redicule him for it.
Did you play WoW? You could solo play all the way to 85 if you chose to. Forcing people to group to progress is a bad idea. Giving them the option to...or play solo if they want... makes more sense.
Well, it appears WoW is better than SWTOR at one thing at least...keeping subs.
Did you NOT notice the single line of his I quoted. That was what I was reffering to, not the entire post.
That is the reason why some people quote parts of a post and not all of it...because they are only addressing that one part. TOR and RIFT and nowhere near the same because of that...TOR gave you the option to solo all the way or group all the way and even rewarded you more for grouping with that...that...thing...they called social levels.
Either way you look at it, just looking at any aspect of Rift and you see that its designed as an MMORPG...with SWTOR you have to look hard to find anything that points to Bioware starting to make that game as an MMO. Its as if they switched from single player design to MMO long after the basic design was done.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
I have always been extremely frustrated when people compare this game to WoW.
For once and for all. Swtor is nothing like WoW.
Now I am not saying that WoW is and was the best MMORPG ever. It's not even the best current themepark. However I do say it's pretty good and, at every level, it knocks SWTOR out of the ballpark to such an extent that SWTOR simply can't be compared fairly to it.
And please don't say: 'Oh well, SWTOR is only six months old. WoW's been going since 2005 or whenever' because SWTOR began development in 2005 and, in Gordon Walton. Rich Vogel, Julio Torres, Haydon Blackman etc, the BA/EA/LA team comprised some of the industry's most experienced names, all of whom should have known better.
So, please, please don't compare to WoW to SWTOR. It's like comparing apples to turd nuggets.
Yeah, I was only referring to their budget management. Blizzard invested 50milions € on WoW during its develpment stage. Following the release, like EA, they did a good marketing campain. However, Trion and Blizzard didn't waste their entire budget in one or two features that didn't have the potential to make any difference. EA seems to have spent 200m $ in voice over and marketing, nothing more.
(jtcgs: I advise you to be less aggressive
This summed up SWTOR perfectly. The $2,000 car with a $20,000 stereo system, it's still a crappy car no matter how loud the radio turns up.
I think I agree with the majority of your post. I think we all got strapped into the hype. I also think many of us (myself being one) was really looking for that replacement of SWG (original) . It was easy to be disappointed. I also agree that this is basically WoW with Lightsabers but with that being said I think SWTOR had a much better launch than WoW. I was there for WoW at launch and I got to tell you that it was not smooth and there was a huge content gap around 25-30. For those who played wow when it was launched in 2004 can attest to this.
Ok for all you people talking about WoW being superior in every way; it is a crazy comparison. Here is the main reason why. WoW came out in 2004. It is 2012. How many years of expansions and content updates is that compared to a game that was released December 2011. Fast Forward 8 years and what will SWTOR look like then? We dont know for sure and I am not going to speculate cause it is possible it ends up F2P and dies off or it improves and gains ground become the second WoW type behemoth. My personal opinion is that it wont simply because of what EA said recently about it being compared to Tiger Woods Golf.
As far as questing. We all get on here talking about questing being so wow'esque. What are we truly looking for in questing? We went from NPC text scroll to Mission terminals to random killing for XP to fully voiced quest givers attached to a storyline. Yet we are not satisfied with that. I am just curious at what we are looking for. I am including myself in this because I can find myself ripping apart questing in MMORPGs these days.
How is that possible, that this game is not what you were hoping when mmorpg.com told you it was; when the leadership here told you that this game had an 8/10 longevity? http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/367/view/reviews/load/178/page/2
All kidding aside, your not alone by a long-shot. Most mmo enthusiasts don't appreciate the corpg that is TOR. Chalk it up as a mmo mistake and learn from it.
This game has unfolded exactly as my nightmare planned. Rocky launch, Ilum failure, finally releasing a grouping tool when the subs drop and it doesn't even matter. Sad.
Honestly, I think TOR would have suceeded if it adopted a different play style. Using the uncanny valley reference; if a game plays like we expect it too, we tend to notice the difference pretty hard. Since it's a themepark we assume wow is it's base. It lacks a good bit of features and the raw power it needs. If this adopted a SWG feel, and fell short, the same deal would have happened.
Really, I just think we need some change. Not in a TERA way either. Really change the core AAA MMORPG experience.
Played - M59, EQOA, EQ, EQ2, PS, SWG[Favorite], DAoC, UO, RS, MXO, CoH/CoV, TR, FFXI, FoM, WoW, Eve, Rift, SWTOR, TSW.
Playing - PS2, AoW, GW2
I never really cared for WoW but i did played it and I did play TOR, but what in hell are you smoking?
TOR is superior over WoW in every way
can you please list all those superior features that TOR has.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
Even before they git as far as hiring actors SWTOR was expensive: EA bought Bioware/Pandemic for $620M CASH (c. $860M if you allow for the stock options).
13 games produced so far I think it is so that's $620/12 - about $50M if they were all valued the same just to buy the outline / agreement that Bioware had come to with LucasArts. And SWTOR was probably a bigger factor in the price.
One of the things that worked really well for Blizzard was to run a long, essentially open, beta. 10 months prior to the US launch with a reported 600k players. They had an EU beta running subsequently as well (slightly different client to test different things as well).
The result?
- WoW was very polished at launch with few bugs.
- When the early servers went into meltdown and WoW said sorry we need more servers people didn't say 'heard that one before' they believed Blizzard because they had been playing the game on full servers. (Yes people can post horror stories but in the big scheme of things).
- the beta was a huge - and relatively cheap - marketing success.
Sadly of SWTOR had been able to run such a beta (it wasn't as it clearly was not as far along in its development) people would have played the beta and then not bough the game.