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All the Worst - An Extremely Long Winded Review of TOR
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That's kind of a shameful way to use your vet status to get sympathy.
I'm a vet who supports vets but not for petty uses.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
opening of your thread you state how boe bop items break the lore of the game right there I disregarded this review as that ranks up there among the dumbist things to complain about in the world.. boe and bop items are a brilliant idea that keeps economies clean and gives players reasons to runt here own instances. To let lore ruin gameplay is easily one of the dumbist ideas I have ever heard right there alone I disregard anything you have to say regarding the game.
Actually wanted to respond to this post... to counter the points made as honestly and non QQ as possible. This coming from a long time fan of RPGs MUDDS and early MMOs 2nd gen and current gen MMOs
After having experienced two Beta weekends now, I have to finally say something somewhere about this game. That something is that I'm highly disappointed in this installment of the Star Wars franchise!
we'll start right here with the glaringly obvious. you played a beta. not a demo. and you played on a stress test weekend. also no mention of system specs. or general experience with the game.
my similar experience with these recent beta weekends. were. obvious.. que times ranging from 2-5min to much longer ques of 15-30 min. i didn't experience any hard game crashes. but did experience several graphics, audio and or gameplay glitches. most of which i'd chalk up to unfinished content. or collision issues. ie voice audia being really loud or really silent randomly. ambiant noise not tracking with char position. etc etc etc. it's a beta weekend? did you report any bugs?
I had the benefit of playing on 2 systems on the two separate beta weekends. an older intel core duo and a newer i5 sandybridge system. there graphics improvement simply from being on a better rig was noticable. i imagine people will need newer/decent computers to get the most out of this or any mmo.
TL;DR VERSION: Star Wars: The Old Republic is simply more of the same old garbage that you've seen in every other WoW clone to date.
this is a common and annoyingly insulting trash statement. just because some game looks like another they are not clones. and WoW is not the godfather of gaming. it too stole many idea from previous and current games. most people have a very hard time distancing their WoW experience from any other game.
It is less refined, less polished and you're simply trading swords for lightsabers.
this is another petty jab. again.. BETA WEEKEND. but more to the point SwTor utilizes a mix of ranged and melee "skills" with the absence of auto attack all actions are hotbutton abilities. ranged/blaster using classes have a wide mix of attacks, and utility classes like BH and IA/Smuggler get an interesting assortment of CC type abilities and "wow factor" visual attacks. ie grenade attacks, rocket launchers.. little drones or robot thingies. lassos. stock hits. charges... hiding/cover mechanics and stealth mechanics. as well as theme specific healing abilities. that don't rely on theological archetypes like WoW does. but more on science/medicine or the force. so the notion that it's just swords for lightsabers is a childish knock. and simply not true.
Their single point of ingenuity is an abundance of voice acting which takes the same exact dialogue options found in any other game and puts a voice to them. It has zero longevity and will probably hemmorage the majority of it's player base within 3-4 months of release as players finish the main storylines and realize that WoW, EQ2... ect offer the same end game experience with more polish, customizable UI's and better graphics.
i will actually agree somewhat on this point. as a RP minded person the forced story, the heavy lean to the voice acting/story elements is a negative in my book as well. That being said it is a very immersive feature of the game. All games are grinds. even sandbox games. its what the game offers to mask the grind that differentiates these games. and having full voice does a lot to make this pill easier to swallow. it also really does add something to the mindless slog of instance nonsense ... it helps a great deal when you can hear a voice actor plea for mercy or bargain or have wrath/disdain for your character. it comes across and it does affect you. and makes the game interesting.
as to UI and "polish" again... BETA. and UI tweaking is easily a couple months out patch feature. that isn't needed right out the gate. the UI in swtor is functional enough. keybinding is allowed to custmize. the as yet unavailable options to resize/refit the UI elements to your individual tastes... will more than likely be added later.
Back to my highly opinionated review: This game pretty much takes the worst part of MMO's and puts them all in one place. I work better with lists, so let me list out the issues that drive me crazy:
this is more vauge blanket QQ. and when putting forth an opinion it helps to offer some evidence/facts to back it up or examples to the contrary. the old "this sucks" explanation doesn't win you any hearts and minds.
1) Bind on Pickup, Bind on Equip. This is one of the most immersion breaking aspects of MMO worlds in existence. My first MMO experience was EVE and it has set the bar extremely high. If I want to fit laser beams on my Hurricane, then I put the damn laser beams on there. No, I don't get any bonuses for using the wrong weapon on the ship, but at least I have the choice to do whatever I damn well please. This extends to finding a lightsaber that I don't want or need and not having the option to give it to my buddy just because I equipped it once. Apparently there's this magic superglue in MMO land that permanently attaches items to one single player at which point your options are to use it or throw it away. How ridiculous. I can't believe people aren't up in arms that this convention is still being copied ad nauseum from World of Warcrap.
people tend to trot out the whore of immersion/realism whenever it fits their needs. why is BoE/BoP any less immersion breaking that a "save" button. or a "logoff" switch. or any menu or aspect of a game that is a game. This particular beef is clearly the OPs personal preference towards more "hard core" minded games. that allow full loot. or all loot with zero restrictions. which are fine for PvP centric games like Eve but rarely work in more PvE mass market games where people do get attached to items and where the system isn't designed to facilitate item churn. Swtor isn't a hardcore type of game. it isn't even the same as SWG that had a very loot neutral mentality.
Swtor has hinted at several features that will help to eliminate gear grinding and constant loot whoring. in terms of item enhancement and or upgrade ability. so that you can keep your cool jedi robe and not need the new shiny glowing hat of doom. but honestly. eye candy is what drives subs. it's purely an economic motivation on the part of game devs. it will be one of the more enduring legacys of WoW.
If you need people to keep questing for items, then simply give items a chance of loss on death or make it to where a weapon can only be repaired so many times before it needs to be replaced. Poof, no need to glue everything to everyone anymore. If game items can be lost or destroyed through game means, then people will need to keep searching for them just in case the one they have breaks or gets lost on death. Not only that, but it creates a vibrant economy where crafters will know that there will always be a need for their products rather than selling it to someone once and now they'll have it forever and never need your item again.
Here the OP piggy backs one issue.. mainly unrelated into another. again this simply isn't how Swtor is designed. in a game like Eve where item destruction and loss are part of the game a very mechanized and healthy crafting culture is necessary. in a PvE based theme park game...without those dynamics. crafting in general is more of an auxilary pursuit.
i would tend to agree that ingoring crafting as a valid and valuable element of mmos is sad. but it isn't make or break. I'd argue that the loss of player housing is much more detrimental to mmos than loss of crafting (as most people craft to min max ..or just enough to save a bit of time/money ...and the very limited percent of people who compete top end crafting are rare. and generally mete out into guild clicques or whatnot and that there exist no real games with health econs anymore)
swtor offers crafting via companions. to eliminate some of the grind. and tedium of crafting. companions can do some of the mindless stuff. or go on missions to collect resources/rare items. player ships function as limited housing. giving players private personal space. customization of which isn't fully known(at least to me)
the OP puts forth that seperate vibrant communities of crafters and consumers is the way to go. swtor puts forth a system where a player can micromanage his/her own small community of crafters. to meet the consumable needs of their class and or craft for the great community. eliminating the bottlenecks and hoarding that drive player econs to extremes
2) Classes. Yay, another MMO with the class system lifted right out of 1970's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. *puke*. Can we please let this convention go? Are we really this imagineless when it comes to creating games? Why can't I make a character with Attributes and Skills and then play what I want to play? Hey BioWare, Gary Gygax called from fourty years ago and wants his antiquated and clunky character system back. Give us Attributes, then let us choose from a list of skills and advantages.
another cheap jab with a fair bit of plain old wrong in it. Swtor utilizes the newer model of hybrid classes. mainly setting up a visual style and then giving branch/Advance class paths to make that visual archetype into a range of playable styles. Sith inquisitor for example. is the caster archetype, a healer/CC class a stealth/melee class. hybrid off tank/tank class. ranged caster class and so on and so forth. blaster non-jedi classes normally get a pure dps. support roll/off heals/ and either a stealth or a tank role. it varies. true it's not as pure as saying. str, end, dex, wis, int and just picking whatever you want. but it's also not as stupid as that either.
when you play in a game where the logical conclusion is grouping/group cohesion for instance raiding it is absolutely necessary to have some idea of the rolls or attributes or abilities a class can/is bringing to the table. having pre-defined "classes" helps with this.
there was never going to be a free form style of char progression. keep playing Eve. or pick up Skyrim if you want this. but have fun mainly playing alone.
For instance, if I want to create a double bladed lightsaber wielding Jedi who wears heavy armor and has a small amount of skill in blaster pistols, then I should damn well be able to. If you're afraid that force powers and heavy armor are too powerful a combination, then give force powers a percent chance to fail that grows higher with heavier sets of armor. See? That took me less than two seconds worth of imagination to balance heavy armor and magic. You think that Jedi that can use heavy blasters might be game breaking? Well there's a way to mitigate that with a teeny bit of imagination. If you want to play a Jedi, then you need to buy into an advantage called Force Mastery. Different force powers and combat stances require a higher level of Force Mastery, therefore if you want to be a decent Jedi, then you won't really have enough points left over to spend on heavy blasters anyhow.
this sort of proves the exact point. and for someone who QQ hard on realism... odd that you then want to totally disregard the lore of the game to have the me me me pretty little snowflake type char progression. and how is a pool of points and scaling access to skills any different than a class? and i dunno if you noticed but your 2 seconds of imaginate of heavy armor affecting cast percentages might have you getting a txt from gyrax from 40 years ago.
but again... swtor isn't this sort of game. it isn't D&D where you d-roll up your base stats, choose a feat, and then go adventuring at random. yes there are some rigid elements to class. some generic and forced abilities that pigeon hole you into being what your class is. but it's fairly obvious. if you like lightsabers player a jedi if you like guns be a trooper. but if you like being stylish while whipping out your pistol be a smuggler. but if you like sniping and stealth and don't need a fedora... then maybe imperial agent. it's not that hard. that restrictive... or that limiting. it simply is what it is.
but i would ask. if you had a free form system. even with the D&D style class/armor/ability restrictions how would that be better or different that what swtor actually is. or is it simply the labels that clash so hard.
3) Inventory. Why why oh why do games still have slotted inventories? I can carry 50 sets of heavy armor chest pieces or 50 pieces of chewing gum. They all take up the same amount of space on my character, and when I run out of that space, well, I just couldn't possibly carry another stick of gum. But If I take one stick of gum off of my character, then I can suddenly carry an Ewok in my left cargo pocket. Give each item a weight and give our characters a carrying weight limit based off our combined strength and endurance attribute.
again.. realism when it suits. why an inventory system relies on slots vs weight. who knows. most likely this is to spare the public the trouble of thinking. suffice to say the average person probably couldn't hump more than 20-30lbs around without crying about it. push that to 50-80lbs and you're getting to a practical limit. maybe go crazy and be like 100-150lbs. but... do you really want to start playing games that restrict things to human limits. and even then in fantasy games how do you acct for the variance in str of other made of creatures. is it fair that an ogre can carry more phat l00tz than a hobbit. yeah it might be more realistic. but people in the end... probably really don't care. again swtor is not a hardcore game. where inventory is a make or break realism element.
4) Levels. This goes along with classes. The 70's are calling again and this time their getting ready to sue for plagiarism. Levels are so boring and old school. Oh, you're a level 50 Sentinel. Well, I know exactly what you can do to me since you're just a cookie cutter, carbon copy of all the other level 50 sentinels in the game. Instead, they should have quests reward us with force points that we can either invest into attributes at a high exchange rate or skills and advantages at a lower exchange rate. Then we can make the character that we want to play instead of the one we're shoehorned into.
at this point...we're basically only left with. why don't you go scrape together 100 mil and make your own game. swtor uses levels. sure there are pros and cons to this. levels give people benchmarks. allow for logical and progressive layouts of npcs/mob progression. etc etc. they also are limiting in many of the ways you illustrate. but again most of this is to streamline the process of codifying a person's usefulness to a group. cause honestly. what's easier: lvl 50 sent dps spec LFG or... sentinel with 20 force pts in telekenisis 50 force pts in healing and 100 force points in a little bit of blasters. i mean how do you know that person isn't sitting on another 50 pts he/she hasn't spent yet? or if the sent class didn't exist. how do you know which skills or which abilities they spent pts on? it gets retarded really quick. you need the quick reference. or maybe not need. but it sure helps.
5) Space Combat. I'm having a hard time even trying to figure out what StarFox is doing in my Star Wars MMO. What the crap is this pure utter garbage BioWare? I know you guys have meetings to discuss content. You know the guy that stood up and said "Hey, lets put StarFox in the game and call it space combat"? Yeah. Fire his ass. Then fire the guy who said "Hey, that's a great idea!". If you didn't have enough time to develop good space combat, then just don't do it! Tell us it will be in a future expansion and leave it the hooha alone! ... and for heavens sake, if you're going to copy someone elses game then why didn't you copy X-Wing or Tie Fighter?
the rail space combat has been known for awhile. it simply is what it is. anyone with half a brain realizes it's simply what they could throw together fast to put it on a box top as a feature. and most likely a space combat sim element will come later. for more money. see how that works.
6) Character creation. Honestly, if you're not going to put sliders in the game that allow us to modify our characters in every shape and size, then don't bother with character creation at all. This system has to be one fo the worst I've ever seen in my life. If you want some inspiration, then go download the free trial of EVE and create a few characters in that game, then redesign this crap. The short skinny body type is absurdly short and skinny and the big fat body type is a beached whale. Now I realize that I was just testing the beta and maybe the character creator was simply limited to a few options, but with only a couple of weeks to go until full release I don't see a lot of possible changes here.
here i will agree with you almost entirely. char creation is pretty weak. but really.. if you're using Eve as the counter example. you should know that eve had laughable to zero char custimization for the longest time. only recently has the captain avatar thing come about. and unless i'm mistaken..everyone's ships look exactly like everyone else's ship. but it is true the customization options for char body types and whatnot are pretty paltry and fairly disappointing. but honestly. i've never understood games where you can go totally OCD on customizing the distance of your eyebrows on a toon... and then slap on a helmet 2 seconds into the game. etc.
would have been nice to get some slider bars to at least make my char's breasts huge. but again BETA
7) Character progression. Go to place "X" and kill a bajillion of "Y" and bring their lower intestines to "Z" has been done before. In fact, it's been done to freaking death. You've beat the dead horse so much now that it's just a pile of organic goo. Not only that, but it makes absolutely no sense that my Light Side Jedi needs to go slaughter 50+ justicars to complete a quest... especially when I just finished another side quest that shows the Justicars treating their prisoners fairly and honorably. "Just don't do it" some of you will say like some anti Nike spokepeople. Well, if I "just didn't do it", then I'd never gain a level past 10 during the entire game.
I never complain without providing an alternative, so here it is: Instead of slaughting our way through thousands of innocent people who inexplicably attack us for walking within some arbitrary agression bubble, let us have fewer and more meaningful fights. Give us situations where we know that there's a sith presence in the Black Sun territory, but we don't know where, so we have to talk to NPC's, hack terminals and use the force in other interesting ways in order to locate this sith operative and then we need to carfully plan our attack. For instance, we find out that he's operating out of room X and wth a little research we discover that room X runs directly under a main hot water pipe so we send a droid in to make sure that the water pipe bursts just before we attack which distracts him and causes hot water damage... ect. So many imaginative ways to have character progression without wholesale slaughter.
... and don't ever send my highly trained and skilled Jedi to fetch some ridiculous item that a droid could go pick up and bring back. It IS beneath my character and his/her abilities.
this is a somewhat valid point. but Swtor isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. GW2 might be more your cup of tea if you're looking to see innovative game concepts. and i agree. with it getting close to 20 years in the life of MMOs some element of selective targeting... or meaningful combat that was more than stand there and mash buttons. would be nice. but unless you go twitch or round combat it's incredibly hard to actualize this in a real time multiplayer enviroment. dynamic content is an entirely different argument. and i agree here as well. i'd love to see combat scenarios where a large raid must break up to eliminate concurrent multi facetted threats. i'd love story based investigative quests. that aren't mindless ...collect 5 moose knuckles. i just think the tech doesn't support it. and this type of stuff isn't the purview of mass market games ... indie games or small house developers bring this sort of innovation. and then the big boys steal it.
8) Tab Targeting. This is really boring. Tab+1+2+3, Tab+1+2+3, Tab+1+2+3, Oh this ones epic so +4,+5,+6... *puke*. There's a game that came out in 2008 that pretty much had the perfect combat system. That, much disregarded, game was called Age of Conan, and although it failed very hard on so many levels it did give us one of the best combat systems I've ever used. You walk up to what you want to fight, hit a combo hotkey and then you have to push some other keys to execute whatever combo you want to execute... oh and if your sword, spear, giant hairy banana manages to hit three enemies facing you, then you damage all three of them! How novel!
again your advocating for game features that don't exist in swtor and were never advertised to be in game. does not having them or more innovative features make swtor a bad game? i dunno. i can honestly say that there are plenty of aspects of swtor that are let downs. because the hype has been so high. and i think the game will hit a certain wall/crash because of it. but in a certain way it is ridiculous to expect something from nothing.
and honestly what's wrong with tab targeting? do you need some more indepth method to select a target? and i dunno if this is news to you. but if you check out the keybinds there's normally more options. nearest target, last target. target of target, focus target. assist tank. and others normally. so... if you're limiting yourself to tab tab tab. you're just painting yourself as a baddie.
which also brings up the simple point of ... there are all sorts of ways to play any mmo. and for every person who thinks there's no "skill" in a theme park game. they're also the people most likely to spam one or two buttons and never really have any fun with the interface/controls. so you have only yourself to blame for the boring monotonus game you're playing.
swtor does offer talents that add splash damage... or AOE splatter to attacks. and AoC combat system got dumbed down over the years because it was easier to exploit the 4 combo moves or .. more effective to use lesser 2 combo attacks twice than wait on a 4 combo attack etc etc. so... any combat system. requires tweaking. so again BETA
9) World on rails. What's the point of playing a game if everything is spelled out for you and you're simply guided straight down a walled in path? That's what a movie or TV show is... you get the same experience every time you watch it. A game should have the ability to have a different experience every time you play it. If there's an island that we need to assault, then put it out there, let us find it and let us plan our own way in past the guards and defences. Instead we get a straight path right to the door that we aren't allowed to veer off of because if we do, then there's this magic invisible force field that tells us we just went off the railroad tracks and how dare we try to play the game our way! They wrote it and dammit, we're going to experience exactly what they want us to experience! How dare you, sir, want to approach the island facility from it's less guarded western approach and sneak through the pineapple plantation unnoticed to one of the rear air ducts and crawl past the guards to drop down on the sith lord from behind! That simply wouldn't be as fun as beating up and a bajillion pixel punching bags along a straight path to your target!
it's not a freeform sandbox mmo. that being said. clever players normally can exploit terrain, archtecture or other enviromental elements just fine in themepark mmos. sure you can't create your own way to a boss. but honestly. in real life there are no pine apple orchard you can sneak passed guards in to drop down a air conditioner duct via to OWN a boss. and besides. that's your playstyle. what if i want to walk right up to the front door and smash my way through waves of trash before going toe to toe with the boss?
would it be nice to have more dynamic npc AI or whatever... sure. but is it really playing the game if you simply bypass the content by exploiting the one path some poor coder didn't anticipate someone using to end round the difficulty of reaching content.
10) Graphics. Again, I realized that we've only played the beta so far, but there's really only so much more they can do with the engine they are using and it's not much. If the goal was to create a cartoony game that everyone can play, then why not go the shaded cell route like Borderlands. If it's going to have a comic book feel, then go the extra mile and make it look like a comic book. I'm really starting to believe that this game powered by the same engine that KOTR and KOTR II were powered by. It doesn't look all that much better to be honest and those games were both released last decade. If you don't want photrealism, then don't do it, but this halfway in between stuff is just painful to look at after playing Witcher 2, EVE, Age of Conan and Skyrim.
the game isn't AoC or witcher or skyrim. AoC when it came out.. killed machines(i blew out a HDD due to it crashing my comp so much). its probably exactly why no other MMO has tried to launch with truly impressive/even coming close to cutting edge graphics. a game like skyrim would be an F-ing nightmare played online with dozens of people running about. even as a single player non-online game it's prone to crashing simply by fact of code glitches. And honestly. Eve in massive group combat... becomes a mess.
there's a fine line between realism and performance that these games must walk. Swtor has a certain style. love it or hate it. there's no real objective good or bad about it. it looks fine. enviroments are varied and don't look plastered. the sounds/ambiant noise is good. the little effects are there. and chars look the part for their class.
what more do you want?
On a final note I'd just like to say that I'm sick and tired of playing the same game over and over with a different skin and a different name. I pre-ordered it long ago and therefore I will play through the main quest line on a couple of characters, but then it will go right on the shelf beside all the other WoW clones while I pack up and go back to a game where I'm not shoved in a tiny box and pointed at my next target like a guided missile.
there's a bit of irony in this statement. you're playing mmorpgs over and over again and yet somehow want them to not be mmorpgs. there are certain limits. be these the finances of the company making the game. the tech of the game. the tech owned by people playing the games that make innovation come at a very high cost. i'd agree that it'd be great if more game developers took more risks to push the envelope and create ...rather than rehash. and while Swtor certainly does have some faults. you really can't fault it for not being what it never was.
i'll conclude by saying that swtor is not going to innovate anything. hopefully they'll generate interesting content that provides meaningful distraction and entertainment for the playerbase without too many gimmicks. that being said the story elements and voice acting are top notch. it's star wars. and feels like it. and it distances itself from the "fantasy" model by being more guns/tech/aliens as opposed to elves/swords/dragons etc.
if you're expecting sandbox. in almost any capcity you'll be disappointed. it's safe to say there is near Zero free form freedom in this game. what you do get are tried and true choices that will be very familiar if you like the existing crop of mmos...
one would hope that with launch... the game will recieve attention and updates worth of such a AAA franchise.
/walloftext
The OP's review of the game was just one big QQ fest it seems. Super bashing wall of text. Don't like it don't play it.
The "in a nutshell" review.
I was wondering when you will come to pat him on his back. You have done it 225 times before why break the pattern? and you forgot to add 'it is for my children and swtor is a single player game'. It never gets old. You have only said it like 100 times before.
B-I-N-G-O!
all these reviews from 'pro gramers' and 'mmo veterans' are so annoying. it is like you guys dont want a new game to besuccesfull. that same sort of reviews were made about rift. i played wow since vanilla and i still dont see the 'clone' u idiots speak of. omg skill trees 'wow clone'. skill bars 'wow clone' are just a couple of examples. there is no such thing as a polished game no more. the days of nintendo 64 releasing a game with no bugs at all are gone. ive come to learn that if i do the opposite of all the wow fanbois and negative nay says i tend to actually enjoy a game and realize they retarted and wrong.
this just in: FPS PRETTY MUCH USE THE SAME CONTROLS EVERY GAME. If something works why change it. the only thing that has changed with fps is that instead of using the arrow keys like in doom and doom 2 you use keyboard and mouse now.
in fact stay in wow with ya single button macro to do everything noob shit. i dont want to play with QQ babies
This thread blew up. I guess if you want people to reply you need flameworthy content.
To the OP: I agree with a lot of what you are saying. Actually, some of your ideas are pretty good to be honest. If these IP's didn't take so effing long and require so much time and dedication, I'd say MAYBE you should be calling the shots on a game suh as this.
The MMO genre has *barely* evolved in any way shape or form since WoW. It was successful, and thus, companies like BioWare want to copy it to copy the level of success WoW had. For some reason, what they don't understand, is that there is a potentially gigantic number of the MMO populous who would like to see the next step in the MMO world. BioWare/EA had the money to do it, and yet the chose to play it safe, VERY VERY safe, as safe as they possibly could by creating WoW 2.0 on a platform that just about every geek loves.
Smaller start up companies are the ones who are making the biggest leaps and bounds in terms of MMO-innovation, but because of their lack of funding and following, and most always crippled by launch statistics, things aren't going as smoothly as they should be in terms of the MMO-evolution we are so desperately waiting for.
Perhaps we will eventually get lucky and a big company with the right amount of money to invest will put it into making the next best thing. Until then, if we want to continue our online roleplaying game addiction, we are stuck sifting through titles like WAR, Rift, ToR, playing them for a few months and then moving on to the next one that pops up. It's kind of sad. I like SW:TOR and I think it has a shit ton of potential but it's up to BioWare to fulfill that potential. Whether or not they will do so at all, we will have to wait and see. But THUS far, the product being delivered to us is exactly what we knew it would be all along. WoW 2.0 in space, with lightsabers. I had fun in WoW for a while, so I know i will get SOME fun out of this game. And then I'll move on, assuming drastic changes are not made that I would like to see.
Anyone that states all crazy shit that happens on deployment (and makes it seem like its a daily thing) for the sake of strengthening their credentials is either A. insecure about what they really did in the sandbox ; B. think that people will actually care what they did and will then change their opinions to the big bad war vet; or C. is full of shit.
If you have an opinion then discuss it with the intelligence that you were given and not on the bloated idea of your self importance. No one cares about your war time service more then you so get over that. Just some advice from a guy whos been playing army for 15 years and decided long ago that what I did on my tours is my own personal thing and no one else has the right to know what I went through (except my battle buddies).
A "WoW" clone? I think not. Of course, all of these "truth's" people are throwing out are very subjective. Keep in mind your opinion isn't the truth to everyone since of course it is an opinion after all.
As far as a wow clone goes, yes there are some things that are very similar. It has characters, story, levels, professions and what not. If that makes it a wow clone, then I guess it's really an ultima clone, or maybe meridian 59 (or whatever the name of that game goes). Is any iteration of call of duty suddenly a wolfenstein or doom clone because they share the same basic framework?
My tastes are quite different these days. I dislike WoW. Not because it's a bad game. It's in fact, a very good game. I'm tired of WoW as I think many other people are and that is the biggest reason many bash it. People on these boards act like Bioware ripped of Blizzard's code, reskined it and slapped the SW:ToR name on it. It's hardly that. Honestly I don't feel it plays or acts anything like WoW (basic combat/character development aside).
Honestly it's a great game and I think a lot of people will like it. I know I'll be spending a great deal of time on it and I look forward to the expansions it will have. Not everyone will like it but again, it's all subjective to the person who's going to be paying for it.
/shrug
Im sorry but i find your review too much agressive and not very realistic, also the lack of wisdom on it is very obvious, im not complaining on the review itself but how you did it, im almost convinced that you can do it better though.
To the OP:
----> That way to Guild Wars 2. The Themepark game that is actually trying to move the themepark MMOG out of the darkages that is the WoW paradigm. Sure it still has the look and feel of the themepark (levels, classes) but besides those it is finally bringing freedom and choice to the themepark MMOG.
My main problem is that we are only going to get one Star Wars MMO for at least the next decade, and instead of something really innovative and new, we get a literal cut and paste copy of WoW. Oh, wait I'm sorry, they added ranged tanking. So I can tank from 10 meters way instead of 1 meter away, so that makes my claim completely invalid. lol
I guess there's never any hope for these big IP's. They will always be given the safe treatment so they can cover royalties to Lucas the Hutt.
Oh, and lol at the guy named SgtAirborne who is pissed at me mentioning my recent deployment. Irony much? I demand you change you change your screen name. How dare you bring your military service into the gaming community! lol
Hehe, how does this extremely negative review of the game get 10 pages of replies and my well thought out post gets no replies? I took ages over my review and it's dropped to page 4 with no replies in less than half a day.
Anyway.
As for this guy's review, well I'm not even sure he played the same game as I played this weekend. I don't remember being asked to kill a bajillion of something. I don't even remember being asked to kill 50 of something. I thought Bioware handled the questing very nicely. Nothing I was asked to do ever came across as a kill 5 or fetch 5 type of quest that is so familar in a dozen dozen MMOs. There were instructions to kill 10 of something but it was an optional add on and you were nevr required to do so. I actually found that I was fullfilling those tasks easily in the course of reaching my story based objectives.
Story based is exactly what the questing in SWTOR was. It was like one big epic quest that started at level 1 and will finish at whatever level SWTOR calls max. I always felt like I was doing something to further my character.
Ok in some ways I find myself wishing that SWTOR was as open as SWG, but I've barely scratched the surface of the crafting. I have a feel it can be as much a part of my character as it was for my SWG time. The world is perhaps not as open as what I remember in SWG, and there is certainly no housing or player cities. There is your ship though, but I haven't gotten that far in beta.
I think I saw someone hit the nail on the head earlier when they said this is a sandbox loving guy after a game to satisfy his needs. He's looking in the wrong place because I don't think Bioware have ever suggested they are making a seriously open game. I don't really like the terms sandbox and themepark because there is far too much overlap in the genre to really classify so narrowly. If I had to put SWTOR in a category it wouldn't be sandbox though. Very few games would be sandbox, or especially the depth of sandbox that the OP is after. He should perhaps be playing something such as Xsyon. Yes, I know it's a poor game with a small audience, but that's often what you get for such a narrow frame of wants from a game.
He certainly shouldn't be coming here and listing a whole page of complaints that a game doesn't have what he wants when that game never really appeared to be likely to provide that. It's like buying a sandwich from a vegetarian cafe and asking why they don't have ham. You'll get told you've come to the wrong place. At least he was constructive, even if he was angry, but that's besides the point in his case.
.
No, that's a terrible anaology. It's like going into a vegetarian sandwich shop and every sandwich on the menu is lettuce and rye with a different name.
Some of us are sick of eating lettuce on rye every meal, and calling it "le lettuce au rye" doesn't change the fact that it's still lettuce on rye. I want to walk into the vegetarian sandwich shop and see lettuce on rye, tomato on sourdough, tofu burger on wheat and lots of options. Not the same thing renamed time and time again.
QTF. Or, to make it really stick, the latest lettuce on rye is wrapped with some interesting health facts to read and is 1$ more.
You should probably make your own game instead of talking about it. I would love to see your response after a few years of development.
You knew this was themepark. You knew you did not like that fact, but you did not do enough research to back up your rant. and ended up with some very incorrect facts. You like sandbox and you think everything should be sandbox. You are entitled to that opinion. You have fun now.
What a great review!
The funny thing is, this is hardly even a sandbox vs linear game issue... The game could have addressed all of the OP's concerns without even being a sandbox. Maybe slightly less linear, but thats it.
He wasn't asking for player cities, elaborate crafting systems, housing, player driven economy, conquest, scripting, or freeform skilltrees. For the most part he is just sick of the same old classes, etc.
And anyone who is saying the contrary is foolish.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Did you get to coruscant with a republic char? Because the 'bonus' missions on there (and every planet thereafter) are outragous and do boil down to 'kill 60 more of x enemy'. It's called a 'bonus' mission but you have to do them or you fall behind the leveling curve in your story if you don't. Also past level 20 your personal story goes dramatically into the background. Where as the first 20 odd levels it's about 4/1 missions/story missions but after that it becomes much less important. You can do dozens of missions between every single story mission. It kinda sucks. I really enjoy the story but after 20 it almost becomes the games background.
LMAO that is a fantastic analogy of what is wrong with themepark MMOGs these days. They are all lettice on rye with different names. TOR does nothing to change that fact besides things like companions and that you listen to people talk instead of reading a block of text.
For me, GW2 is the vegetarian restaurant that finally realized tomato on sourdough could be just as good as lettuce on rye, if not better.
I can't speak for everyone, but I can say without a doubt---I loved the game. And I can tell you that the vast majority of people that participated in beta the last couple of weekends did as well. I know that's gotta hurt that not everyone shares your OPINION (notice the difference between opinion and fact), but you'll eventually get over it.
I don't fault people for not liking the game. I fault people who think that their opinion is the only one that matters. Considering millions of people will be enjoying this game, that's obviously not the case.
@OP: "My first MMO experience was EVE"
And this will always be your problem - Sandboxes good - Themeparks - Bad.
To me - Eve is a pain in the ass and sucks...to each his own as they say
Currently playing SWTOR and it's MUCH better than it was at launch.
See you at launch!
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