"The Old Republic is a monster. I can’t wait to play more."
RAWR!
Great read. They are getting an awful lot right in the mmorpg department. Fun combat, immersion, variety in gameplay options, and rich, large, open worlds are a few of my personal prerequisites. They all look to be represented.
On top of that there's the alignment system and hard choices to make which adds a layer to character development which most mmorpg's are simply lacking.
I'm more and more hopeful that this will be that WOW challenging themepark mmorpg we weren't allowed to have in the past years of jadedness and disappointments.
The only thing I am still very curious about is the scope of endgame content and how long it will take people to get that "been there, done that" feeling. If they manage to make endgame a long lasting, fun, experience, with plenty of long term incentives, for solo players and groups, there will be no stopping SWTOR.
Hopefully they will make the leveling process take some time and we won't have to debate the endgame for at least a couple months.
Edit: Wow we somehow got both fans of DA2 in the same thread! lol
"The only weirdness: seeing my fellow smuggler wander around with the same companion."
Somehow I knew they wouldn't find a way around this. I'd rather not be running around with the same companion half the playerbase has. Either give me a character creator to make my own companion, make it optional (like you get bonuses to your guy for not having the companion out, or just use the companion for the extra damage and stuff, up to you), or don't bother, imo.
In the developer video on companions it says that companions can be customized, even the color or their skin can be changed along with much else. That may either have not been implemented in the demo we're talking about yet, OR.......the player didn't know how to DO it. But it will be doable.
"The only weirdness: seeing my fellow smuggler wander around with the same companion."
Somehow I knew they wouldn't find a way around this. I'd rather not be running around with the same companion half the playerbase has. Either give me a character creator to make my own companion, make it optional (like you get bonuses to your guy for not having the companion out, or just use the companion for the extra damage and stuff, up to you), or don't bother, imo.
In the developer video on companions it says that companions can be customized, even the color or their skin can be changed along with much else. That may either have not been implemented in the demo we're talking about yet, OR.......the player didn't know how to DO it. But it will be doable.
I love you.
Just to extrapolate on this the following can be customized to your liking.
Light/dark side alignment ( this is more how they play out in quests. So Vette for example could be all nice or mean towards otehr people.
Skin color
Tatooes
Hair
Edit: Eye color
Weapons
Armor
accessories (such as eye pieces)
Tatics similar to how DA did them.
For example here is Vette just one of the companions
Excellent read. Well written by a self-admitted KOTOR Bioware fan that appears to be shallowly pleased with anything with a Bioware stamp, even knowing he is going to re-purchase and re-play KOTOR but at $15/month.
Just further bolsters my knowing, without suspension of disbelief, that Bioware has successfully dumbed-down the concept and mechanics of an mmorpg (with SWTOR) by devolving it into a single-player cooperative rpg (CORPG). Clearly being a CORPG is fine, but doing it without the lies, half-truths and false label would be more credible and appreciated, when SWTOR is clearly not a mmorpg, but more honesty a cinematic single-player and cooperative online rpg.
Since there is absolutely nothing I can point to in the article, or anything from the past learnings, that represents the condition of “massively-multiplayer”, I can only point to the authors own experience about his quest experience. . . Retrieve a family heirloom from a village. Find the missing son of two local refugees. Get a doctor to come back and administer aid to the local Republic forces. Capture a pirate. Infiltrate a Separatist base.
And also point out some down-right careless game-play interpretations or smartly spun misleading based on a year of accounts about game-play: You’re never directly offered pure grind quests – no ‘kill ten Womp Rats’. As you move through an area, you’ll be given a running counter that will offer a further reward as you progress.
In the authors own words of experience, In practice, there’s very little separating what you do in the Old Republic MMO and what you do in the Knights of the Old Republic singleplayer game: find a guy, have a bit of dialogue, and then go out into the world to kill stuff. You just do it with your friends, and see other players running around.. . . it’s doing as much as the old Knights games, in a world in which you can play with your friends.
Yes. . .a single-player lobby-system world where you see 10’s of other players on the same screen doing the same single-player acts as you in a static and sterile environment as you compete to ‘hit’ a mob first so you ‘own’ its’ kill, wash rinse, repeat.
So as I’ve said before, I do look forward to this single-player / cooperative online rpg; in that regard, this was a positive article.
I hope Bioware can push content to stay ahead of the leveling curve otherwise $15/month for a single-player / coop online rpg is going to be hard to justify for me.
Excellent read. Well written by a self-admitted KOTOR Bioware fan that appears to be shallowly pleased with anything with a Bioware stamp, even knowing he is going to re-purchase and re-play KOTOR but at $15/month.
Just further bolsters my knowing, without suspension of disbelief, that Bioware has successfully dumbed-down the concept and mechanics of an mmorpg (with SWTOR) by devolving it into a single-player cooperative rpg (CORPG). Clearly being a CORPG is fine, but doing it without the lies, half-truths and false label would be more credible and appreciated, when SWTOR is clearly not a mmorpg, but more honesty a cinematic single-player and cooperative online rpg.
Since there is absolutely nothing I can point to in the article, or anything from the past learnings, that represents the condition of “massively-multiplayer”, I can only point to the authors own experience about his quest experience. . . Retrieve a family heirloom from a village. Find the missing son of two local refugees. Get a doctor to come back and administer aid to the local Republic forces. Capture a pirate. Infiltrate a Separatist base.
And also point out some down-right careless game-play interpretations or smartly spun misleading based on a year of accounts about game-play: You’re never directly offered pure grind quests – no ‘kill ten Womp Rats’. As you move through an area, you’ll be given a running counter that will offer a further reward as you progress.
In the authors own words of experience, In practice, there’s very little separating what you do in the Old Republic MMO and what you do in the Knights of the Old Republic singleplayer game: find a guy, have a bit of dialogue, and then go out into the world to kill stuff. You just do it with your friends, and see other players running around.. . . it’s doing as much as the old Knights games, in a world in which you can play with your friends.
Yes. . .a single-player lobby-system world where you see 10’s of other players on the same screen doing the same single-player acts as you in a static and sterile environment as you compete to ‘hit’ a mob first so you ‘own’ its’ kill, wash rinse, repeat.
So as I’ve said before, I do look forward to this single-player / cooperative online rpg; in that regard, this was a positive article.
I hope Bioware can push content to stay ahead of the leveling curve otherwise $15/month for a single-player / coop online rpg is going to be hard to justify for me.
Anyone that has tried that game at any convention, or Weekend Tester or even CB Tester can just chuckle at your misleading comments.
Excellent read. Well written by a self-admitted KOTOR Bioware fan that appears to be shallowly pleased with anything with a Bioware stamp, even knowing he is going to re-purchase and re-play KOTOR but at $15/month.
Just further bolsters my knowing, without suspension of disbelief, that Bioware has successfully dumbed-down the concept and mechanics of an mmorpg (with SWTOR) by devolving it into a single-player cooperative rpg (CORPG). Clearly being a CORPG is fine, but doing it without the lies, half-truths and false label would be more credible and appreciated, when SWTOR is clearly not a mmorpg, but more honesty a cinematic single-player and cooperative online rpg.
Since there is absolutely nothing I can point to in the article, or anything from the past learnings, that represents the condition of “massively-multiplayer”, I can only point to the authors own experience about his quest experience. . . Retrieve a family heirloom from a village. Find the missing son of two local refugees. Get a doctor to come back and administer aid to the local Republic forces. Capture a pirate. Infiltrate a Separatist base.
And also point out some down-right careless game-play interpretations or smartly spun misleading based on a year of accounts about game-play: You’re never directly offered pure grind quests – no ‘kill ten Womp Rats’. As you move through an area, you’ll be given a running counter that will offer a further reward as you progress.
In the authors own words of experience, In practice, there’s very little separating what you do in the Old Republic MMO and what you do in the Knights of the Old Republic singleplayer game: find a guy, have a bit of dialogue, and then go out into the world to kill stuff. You just do it with your friends, and see other players running around.. . . it’s doing as much as the old Knights games, in a world in which you can play with your friends.
Yes. . .a single-player lobby-system world where you see 10’s of other players on the same screen doing the same single-player acts as you in a static and sterile environment as you compete to ‘hit’ a mob first so you ‘own’ its’ kill, wash rinse, repeat.
So as I’ve said before, I do look forward to this single-player / cooperative online rpg; in that regard, this was a positive article.
I hope Bioware can push content to stay ahead of the leveling curve otherwise $15/month for a single-player / coop online rpg is going to be hard to justify for me.
Not sure how your getting it's a single player /co-op because it's not. Now i will try and show you why, it's up to you if you come to the right conclusion or not.
Info: Able to control Turrets, hold bases. Designed to support Guerilla style run & gun fighting
Nothing co-op about that. there at least from reports possible to even have 200 on one side and 100 on the other with help given to the the underdog should it happen like rocket launchers to more quickly take down a base.
Operations (raids) by there sheer design is nothing solo/co-op about it. you need 8-16 people (thats 2 to 4 groups in ToR) to accomplish and in operations the companions aren't allowed so that has to be 8-16 real people.
Quote: For the average planet, I'd say that 85+% of space is located in open, non phased area - Bioware
That undoes the lobby based world thing, unless you want to call having 100s to 1000s of people in the same area lobby based. Then that would basically make every MMO lobby based.
Orange text one: This does not create a lobby based co-op game. Thats basically how a story plays out, he is given choices in the story. If you are together with a group of 4 people each one can roll a dice to see if their choice will play out.
Orange text two: So um putting quests like kill 10 robots in a side quest instead of making you have to run back to the quest person makes dumbs down the game to a C-ORPG....yeah i'm not seeing the connection. It just makes what would have been annoying to do with having to run back to the quest person. Something you can do on your spare time if you just happen to be in the area.
Orange text three: This is talking about general experience. It's basically kotor in style and feel. You walk up to a NPC and he starts talking and you converse back and forth. If you were to look at the kotor games as a whole and looked at TOR you would get the same general feel, except now it also has tons of other players involved as well. So it's basically kotor in a massively open multiplayer world...which i would have hopped people had known about for some time now as the devs have been repeating that for some time.
Frankly you can come to whatever conclusion you want. But nothing in the orange text says anything about co-op or single player and i've given a few points where it shows directly that it's not single player and infact operates like other MMOs. Both in PvP and in PvE except now you may want to get involved in the story instead of just skipping to kill the next (mind as well be) unnamed mob to get X piece of armor.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Ehm guys ... review is done by certain Tim Edwards, guy that gave Cataclysm verdict 93/100, to quote him about Cataclysm : ' A triumph. Competitors beware: this is the best MMO in the world. Once you're hooked it's impossible to stop playing ' ...
Seriously, I wouldnt take him that much seriously ... :P
I would have given the same review if of Cataclysm if I had only had limited play time. The 80-85 quest path was great the first time. It wasn't until going through it the second time that it became clear how limited it's replayability was. The way quests and such were redone in old world were good for the most part. Silverpine forest for example was amazing. It wasn't until having it for a while you realized that phasing isn't all that great. The normal mode cata dungeons were hard, but doable when we first leveled through. It wasn't until we had run the heroic versions a bunch before we realized that if everyone knew what to do then it was pretty well easymode. If you had people that really didn't know the dungeon then it was a wipe. There was no in between. None of the downsides where readily apparent at first. It took a while for them to show up so I would say his initial reviews have a history of matching mine.
I think it's funny how on this site that massively posts an extensive review on 10 minutes of gameplay causing the haters to salivate at the mouth but this preview of 6 hours of game play is less commented on. These forums are ridiculous lol. I think I'll trust what I hear from the beta testers and the average joes loving the game at the events.
I think it's funny how on this site that massively posts an extensive review on 10 minutes of gameplay causing the haters to salivate at the mouth but this preview of 6 hours of game play is less commented on. These forums are ridiculous lol. I think I'll trust what I hear from the beta testers and the average joes loving the game at the events.
Well there was a new thread in the GW2 forum about how it will be all things to all people plus unicorns so they were probably busy posting there.
I think it's funny how on this site that massively posts an extensive review on 10 minutes of gameplay causing the haters to salivate at the mouth but this preview of 6 hours of game play is less commented on. These forums are ridiculous lol. I think I'll trust what I hear from the beta testers and the average joes loving the game at the events.
Personally i love hearing reviews from people who get more time like this. Gives them a chance to analyze things and see the game for it's true self. Positive or negative if they get enough time on it then it's fine. I would have had no problem with the bit tech review if he didn't bash TOR for having basic RPG mechanics like respawning mobs, get items, kill stuff, go here type quest or saying the story wasn't interesting because it wasn't with real humans but with fake human (NPCs)
I'd like to see one negative article where someone who played the game for a decent amount of time (2 hours at least for an MMO but more is better) give their opinion on it that understands how RPGs (not MMORPGs though that helps) work at it's base core. You can still not like it but don't go after something for say having you use stats to figure out how to fight something. That would be really helpful to me.
As for the quote yeah it's kind of funny but what is more funny is when people state that one side is doing something like taking the article writers history into account then judging them, then when it happens on the other side like here, the same thing is done. oh this person thought DA was going to be the best game so we can discount his entire preview based on that.
To me i take all previews and reviews into account, bunch them all together, get a sum total and see what prevails throughout all of them. That gives me a idea of what the game will be like.
So far to me it looks like this
Good story
Fluid combat
Typical MMO combat
Looks fun but not sure about longevity.
This is the basic feel i get from looking at all of these. We will see how close my interpretations of the reviews really are to the actual game itself.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Ever notice that whenever a positive review pops up, it is always "thank you for putting into words what we already knew," but when a negative review pops up, it is "stop attacking us with your lone, inconsequential viewpoint! Nobody cares!"
"Just think of it as KOTOR 3. (Well, KotoR 2,3,4,5,6,7.8.9.10)I tried this
while testing. Turning off general chat and treating people that walk by as
just part of the atmosphere."
That was one of the comments. I could see the appeal to this. But it doesnt sound like the mmo flavor was really needed here. But thats just one guys opinion I guess. Sounds fun though.
I think it's funny how on this site that massively posts an extensive review on 10 minutes of gameplay causing the haters to salivate at the mouth but this preview of 6 hours of game play is less commented on. These forums are ridiculous lol. I think I'll trust what I hear from the beta testers and the average joes loving the game at the events.
Very true, but I'm not concerned with all that. As far as I'm concerned, the only person SWTOR needs to please is me. What they are focusing on is what I currently want in an MMO. If they deliver on that, then I'm going to love the game, and could care less what the haters say. So I don't care one bit about reviews, whether positive or negative. The only review that matters is my own review once I finally get to play the game.
Comments
Hopefully they will make the leveling process take some time and we won't have to debate the endgame for at least a couple months.
Edit: Wow we somehow got both fans of DA2 in the same thread! lol
Watch out man! Something just flew right over your head... phew that was close.
-------------------------
"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places..." ~ H.P.Lovecraft, "From Beyond"
Member Since March 2004
previews from PC gamer? they better talk nice and sweet; it's business as usual
Nice! I can't wait to play
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
I love you.
Just to extrapolate on this the following can be customized to your liking.
Light/dark side alignment ( this is more how they play out in quests. So Vette for example could be all nice or mean towards otehr people.
Skin color
Tatooes
Hair
Edit: Eye color
Weapons
Armor
accessories (such as eye pieces)
Tatics similar to how DA did them.
For example here is Vette just one of the companions
http://torwars.com/2011/07/26/getting-down-dirty-with-the-swtor-comic-con-qas/swtor_vette_companion_custom500x310/
here is Mako
http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/companions01_800x450.jpg
and Khem Val
http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/companions02_800x450.jpg
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
Excellent read. Well written by a self-admitted KOTOR Bioware fan that appears to be shallowly pleased with anything with a Bioware stamp, even knowing he is going to re-purchase and re-play KOTOR but at $15/month.
Just further bolsters my knowing, without suspension of disbelief, that Bioware has successfully dumbed-down the concept and mechanics of an mmorpg (with SWTOR) by devolving it into a single-player cooperative rpg (CORPG). Clearly being a CORPG is fine, but doing it without the lies, half-truths and false label would be more credible and appreciated, when SWTOR is clearly not a mmorpg, but more honesty a cinematic single-player and cooperative online rpg.
Since there is absolutely nothing I can point to in the article, or anything from the past learnings, that represents the condition of “massively-multiplayer”, I can only point to the authors own experience about his quest experience. . . Retrieve a family heirloom from a village. Find the missing son of two local refugees. Get a doctor to come back and administer aid to the local Republic forces. Capture a pirate. Infiltrate a Separatist base.
And also point out some down-right careless game-play interpretations or smartly spun misleading based on a year of accounts about game-play: You’re never directly offered pure grind quests – no ‘kill ten Womp Rats’. As you move through an area, you’ll be given a running counter that will offer a further reward as you progress.
In the authors own words of experience, In practice, there’s very little separating what you do in the Old Republic MMO and what you do in the Knights of the Old Republic singleplayer game: find a guy, have a bit of dialogue, and then go out into the world to kill stuff. You just do it with your friends, and see other players running around.. . . it’s doing as much as the old Knights games, in a world in which you can play with your friends.
Yes. . .a single-player lobby-system world where you see 10’s of other players on the same screen doing the same single-player acts as you in a static and sterile environment as you compete to ‘hit’ a mob first so you ‘own’ its’ kill, wash rinse, repeat.
So as I’ve said before, I do look forward to this single-player / cooperative online rpg; in that regard, this was a positive article.
I hope Bioware can push content to stay ahead of the leveling curve otherwise $15/month for a single-player / coop online rpg is going to be hard to justify for me.
Anyone that has tried that game at any convention, or Weekend Tester or even CB Tester can just chuckle at your misleading comments.
Not sure how your getting it's a single player /co-op because it's not. Now i will try and show you why, it's up to you if you come to the right conclusion or not.
Ilum
Type: Mass PvP (100s)
Info: Able to control Turrets, hold bases. Designed to support Guerilla style run & gun fighting
Nothing co-op about that. there at least from reports possible to even have 200 on one side and 100 on the other with help given to the the underdog should it happen like rocket launchers to more quickly take down a base.
Operations (raids) by there sheer design is nothing solo/co-op about it. you need 8-16 people (thats 2 to 4 groups in ToR) to accomplish and in operations the companions aren't allowed so that has to be 8-16 real people.
Quote: For the average planet, I'd say that 85+% of space is located in open, non phased area - Bioware
That undoes the lobby based world thing, unless you want to call having 100s to 1000s of people in the same area lobby based. Then that would basically make every MMO lobby based.
Orange text one: This does not create a lobby based co-op game. Thats basically how a story plays out, he is given choices in the story. If you are together with a group of 4 people each one can roll a dice to see if their choice will play out.
Orange text two: So um putting quests like kill 10 robots in a side quest instead of making you have to run back to the quest person makes dumbs down the game to a C-ORPG....yeah i'm not seeing the connection. It just makes what would have been annoying to do with having to run back to the quest person. Something you can do on your spare time if you just happen to be in the area.
Orange text three: This is talking about general experience. It's basically kotor in style and feel. You walk up to a NPC and he starts talking and you converse back and forth. If you were to look at the kotor games as a whole and looked at TOR you would get the same general feel, except now it also has tons of other players involved as well. So it's basically kotor in a massively open multiplayer world...which i would have hopped people had known about for some time now as the devs have been repeating that for some time.
Frankly you can come to whatever conclusion you want. But nothing in the orange text says anything about co-op or single player and i've given a few points where it shows directly that it's not single player and infact operates like other MMOs. Both in PvP and in PvE except now you may want to get involved in the story instead of just skipping to kill the next (mind as well be) unnamed mob to get X piece of armor.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
I would have given the same review if of Cataclysm if I had only had limited play time. The 80-85 quest path was great the first time. It wasn't until going through it the second time that it became clear how limited it's replayability was. The way quests and such were redone in old world were good for the most part. Silverpine forest for example was amazing. It wasn't until having it for a while you realized that phasing isn't all that great. The normal mode cata dungeons were hard, but doable when we first leveled through. It wasn't until we had run the heroic versions a bunch before we realized that if everyone knew what to do then it was pretty well easymode. If you had people that really didn't know the dungeon then it was a wipe. There was no in between. None of the downsides where readily apparent at first. It took a while for them to show up so I would say his initial reviews have a history of matching mine.
<p align="center" style="font-family: arial;"><a href="http://www.wizards.com/magic/playmagic/whatcolorareyou.asp"; target="_blank"><img src="http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/whatcolor_isblue.jpg"; border="0"><br/><b>Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.</b></a></p>
There Is Always Hope!
Well there was a new thread in the GW2 forum about how it will be all things to all people plus unicorns so they were probably busy posting there.
Personally i love hearing reviews from people who get more time like this. Gives them a chance to analyze things and see the game for it's true self. Positive or negative if they get enough time on it then it's fine. I would have had no problem with the bit tech review if he didn't bash TOR for having basic RPG mechanics like respawning mobs, get items, kill stuff, go here type quest or saying the story wasn't interesting because it wasn't with real humans but with fake human (NPCs)
I'd like to see one negative article where someone who played the game for a decent amount of time (2 hours at least for an MMO but more is better) give their opinion on it that understands how RPGs (not MMORPGs though that helps) work at it's base core. You can still not like it but don't go after something for say having you use stats to figure out how to fight something. That would be really helpful to me.
As for the quote yeah it's kind of funny but what is more funny is when people state that one side is doing something like taking the article writers history into account then judging them, then when it happens on the other side like here, the same thing is done. oh this person thought DA was going to be the best game so we can discount his entire preview based on that.
To me i take all previews and reviews into account, bunch them all together, get a sum total and see what prevails throughout all of them. That gives me a idea of what the game will be like.
So far to me it looks like this
Good story
Fluid combat
Typical MMO combat
Looks fun but not sure about longevity.
This is the basic feel i get from looking at all of these. We will see how close my interpretations of the reviews really are to the actual game itself.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
wrong thread, haha
Ever notice that whenever a positive review pops up, it is always "thank you for putting into words what we already knew," but when a negative review pops up, it is "stop attacking us with your lone, inconsequential viewpoint! Nobody cares!"
Sort of reminds me of watching network news.
"Just think of it as KOTOR 3. (Well, KotoR 2,3,4,5,6,7.8.9.10)I tried this
while testing. Turning off general chat and treating people that walk by as
just part of the atmosphere."
That was one of the comments. I could see the appeal to this. But it doesnt sound like the mmo flavor was really needed here. But thats just one guys opinion I guess. Sounds fun though.
Very true, but I'm not concerned with all that. As far as I'm concerned, the only person SWTOR needs to please is me. What they are focusing on is what I currently want in an MMO. If they deliver on that, then I'm going to love the game, and could care less what the haters say. So I don't care one bit about reviews, whether positive or negative. The only review that matters is my own review once I finally get to play the game.
Bioware The Old Republic Preview:Purpose selling as many copys as we can.
$$$ Send to PC Gamer from EA/Bioware.
Objectivity and honest preview is not aloud we don't pay you to write negative playing experience about game:P
Nuff said.
Where is your proof? Provide a link, please.