games com cologne 2009 Live demonstration review

Sioned

Greetings....

First of all let me state that this is MY and MY friends impression of the booth visit other people may focus on other details and may have another understanding about this presentation. This is not a neutral review based on facts only. It just reflects our opinion.

Yesterday I was at Bioware's/Ea's Star Wars: The Old Republic booth. It took about nearly 2 hours to get inside. And then we had a 35 min presentation inside.

What we were shown was the well known cinematic trailer of the sith attacking Currosant.

After that we were given a 30 min Live Demonstration were 2 LA Representatives played the game infront of us.

 

First of all the Producer, whos name i already forgot (sorry), explained the fundamental concept of SWTOR.In the eyes of Bioware there are 4 keys to mmo:

Combat

Exploration

Progression

Story

Their understanding is that so far mmos only cover the first 3 keys very well but lack the 4th key "Strory". Bioware describes this story part as their USP and as their most skillful field of expertise.

We were shown the Bounty Hunter, The smuggler and the Sith Warrior classes and some of their actual gameplay abilites. After Those 3 class presentations they showed us an instance based onboard of an imperial capital ship.

Now please don't get me wrong. I am fully aware that this whole presentation is simply a glance at an alpha or even pre-alpha state of the game. I CAN ONLY DESCRIBE THE CURRENT STATE. I am not evaluating the version we will see next year. My negative and or positive remarks are to be meant to see what still needs works in my eyes and what looks promising. The Chars where from level 3-8 for your information.

 

The UI

Well when i comes to a user interface and the skill icons - i dont think i ever saw anything more colorful that the UI of SWTOR. the UI definetlz needs work because everything seemed to be too large for me and covering too much of the screen. But it is possible that this was a presentation UI so we as visitors can actually read all the numbers and skills.

 

The Bounty Hunter

After the Cinematic Trailer the inside of the Buildings looked ... simply horrible. The faces of all humanlike male chars looked compared to the full rendered sequences of the movies disgusting. Same for the basic walking animation. This really needs work. The female face design looks much more refined. Same for the male/female chest model. All male models NPC and PC look like Mr. Universe at his prime. Anabolica seems to be the daily breakfast . Overall all models seem to lack polygons and details. Now i can already see all the flamers jump into this thread claiming that it is a comic style and so on... It just doesnt cover it. The Charcters look misplaced and don't seem to fit in the surounding world. Inside it might be even acceptable but when we go outside we see the REAL NICE GRAFIX. The Outside view over cities or camps looks really good and is nowhere near the comic look of the chars.

But back to the gameplay. The BH is a ranged profession and we were shown some gun and heavy weapon fighting. At a level of 5 or 8 the BH was able to use his jetpack to hover about 8 m above the ground and shooting the targets underneath him. Also hovering makes him hard to reach for the melee NPCs.

 

The Smuggler

Well the affinity of this PC towards Han Solo was well kinda obvious. While the LA Guy was running through an enemy outpost we were shown how you could interact with the environment by taking cover and proning. When there is a place for you to take cover compared to your target, there seem to be the option to highlight possible cover spots with a silhouette. If this ability is only for the sumggler or for all classes - i don't know. The Smuggler fought actual like a smuggler - dirty but effective . In a 1 on 1 situationthe smuggler kicked the balls of his foe and while the fo went into a kneel position the smuggler shot him in the head. Cruel but effective. And it shows that bioware has some nice ideas about skills and chain skills.

 

The Sith warrior

Our little evil lighsaber guy. As you would expect of a sith he uses the saber and some force to defeat the opponents. Large distances are crossed with a force jump follo by multiple saber blows. Some skills look kinda roughed up based on their animations. Blocking enemy blaster fire or melee attacks off and attacking backs looks really smooth tho and just feels right. Force push and force choke have some matching animations nothing flashy or overly active stuff. That btw goes for all skill animations we have seen - the effects are minimalistic just how i like it.

 

The Instance of an imperial capital ship

This time the sith warrior and the BH were together. The captain of the ship didnt follow the order to go after a powerful jedi so you are were send to deal with it. Here we were shown the conversation system which looks really promosing but i am still confused about how it actully works for groups. The group members seem to able to talk together and the outcome of the conversation influences the progressing of the instance. As we expect of Bioware they seem very eager to deliver a mmo with some real plot. All dialogues are with voice over - the samples we were given were English french and german. Even tho the german and french ones did hurt my ears well at least they are there. Those of you that already played KOTOR know that each choice in a dialogue or action that you make can influence how others react towards you or what quests you are given later. This will be so in SWTOR too.

 

Thoughts and my opinion

Now comes the part that really troubles me. After the presentation the Bioware guy stated that: Yes we will have PVP, Yes we will have crafting, Yes we will have guilds. That reminded me of the 4 keys and i noticed something for Bioware the mmo has 4 keys: Combat, Exploration, Progression, Story - i fear bioware lacks a 5th key Social interaction and community. So far SWTOR seems to me like a COOP game that i can play with up to 5 ppl. Nothing massive Nothing epic. I really do fear that bioware lacks the fundamental understanding about HOW MMOS work and that they don't realize the impact of the social aspect of an mmo. I hope i am wrong but this presentation planted this fear into me. It was not about what the guy said - it was about what he didnt mention at all. Now we can of course argue that they wanted to present their USP and so they focused on the story but to just discard social interaction like they did there leaves me speechless.

If the models and the gameplay stay as they are - i exepct the target market of this game to be 8-20 years old. For me this game currently just lacks too many things.

AGAIN THIS IS THE CURRENT GAME STATE.

I will follow this game closely but for now i am disappointed.

Edit: ohh and one more thing i was about to jump up and strangle the Bioware guy as he said ICONIC CLASS.

Let the troll and flame fest begin

Sincerly Yours Sioned

Yunbei

Thanks for sharing this. I was thinking of driving over to Cologne, but then I sorta hate crowds. *__*

I share your view on the chars, esp. the male chars look terrible. Thats not comic, thats just ugly indeed. Lets hope the char design improves. And as you say it does not fit the relatively detailled world, as far as I have seen in ingame footage.

Varny

I hate the character models too they look like a Spider in a comic book with massive limbs and a small body. They have the plastic looking spikey hair and the Human Male face that I've seen is ugly as hell.

The instancing makes me worried because I want open worlds and not Guild Wars. I don't mind if it's laid out like WoW cause it has a nice seamless world with instances that feel natural. However if It's a loading screen every 30 seconds then theres no way I'm playing.

Leonona

The ugly graphics is a result of the Hero engine they are using for this game. It may come with some great tools for building online worlds, but graphics wise it's just seems way behind. Perhaps the world has seen better artists than those working on this game too.

Sioned

The Hero Engine is no Excuse for this. Why should the same engine be able to create kinda detailed monsters and such a nice scenery but only so pure Player Character Models models?

Tiller

Naw, it isn't all because of the hero engine, though it does have it's graphical limitations it seems. It's just the art they chose. They wanted to copy WoW. I hated WoW's graphics tbh, but I still played. This style is timeless in some ways and ages better. Go as far back as a series called Monkey Island. Remember playing Monkey Island 3 with the cartoon graphics? It looked pretty good. Then they came out with 4 and used the same 3D engine Grim Fandango used, but by 2000 when it released it was already dated looking, yet MI3 still looks really good even by today's standards, though I assume you could play it in flash in a browser by now.

 

I know this isn't the best comparison, but it's the best I could come up with. Also another thing to remember is that high poly count avatars take tremendous computing power, by keeping that aspect low and the environments high they can still retain that good look to the game, yet allow it to run well. For most gamers the real eye candy is the environments. I know some enjoy taking snap shots of their pretty avatars, but that comes at a cost to others who have lower end systems, and most of the time you aren't staring at you guys face and muscles, you're interacting with the rich environments. This, like WoW will allow the game to much more accessible.

 

I know some have issues with the character models, and that’s fine. For me I’m pretty neutral about it. They aren’t overly pretty, but not disgustingly ugly and poorly designed (I’ve seen much much worse to the point where I would be embarrassed to use them if I was making the game) For me the environments are more important. If I had to compare the SWTOR environments to WoW’s, I would say SWTOR definitely looks better.

 

Now on to the social aspect. This was just one instance in the game and it’s not live yet so of course you aren’t gonna see 300 players in an outpost. If I was to take a guess I would say that this MMO is both single player like, and multiplayer like. There are some old KOTOR fans who just don’t wanna play with others, this game will allow them to do so. Then there are the players who want to be in large groups, and this game will have raids, PvP, RvR, crafting, economy ect.

 

I imagine in some ways it will be like GW. But, end game I have this feeling things will change, you will see almost an entirely different game open up to you. They said they wanted a game for everyone, from the solo player, to the guilds. A mix of open areas and of course you need instances to do the story. So I guess it’s really going to be up to you the player, how this game plays for you. I’m already in a guild, so I know from day one I’ll have plenty of people to hang with.

 

Dominisi

I just got through watching the demo-footage, and I had a lot of the same initial reactions.

 

The graphics at a glance, look sub par, but for some reason the further they went along in the demo-footage, the better they seemed to get, which was definately a benifit. So, I will attribute that to just the lack of some of the game being polished.

Now seeing some of the combat, it definately looks like it will be enjoyable, making you feel like a badass and all, but what I did not see was like the OP said, any social interaction, all I saw was instaces and your companion running around. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that from what we've seen you can solo most of the game, that really caters to those of us gamers who don't have as much time as we used to, but still, the social interaction needs a boost, from what I can precieve it will be towards the endgame where there are encounters that you and your compainon can't handle.

Overall I'm still looking foward to the game.

Marcus_

Originally posted by Varny


I hate the character models too they look like a Spider in a comic book with massive limbs and a small body. They have the plastic looking spikey hair and the Human Male face that I've seen is ugly as hell.
The instancing makes me worried because I want open worlds and not Guild Wars. I don't mind if it's laid out like WoW cause it has a nice seamless world with instances that feel natural. However if It's a loading screen every 30 seconds then theres no way I'm playing.

/agree

 

It`s a single player game,i don't like it ,sorry.