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A SWTOR Review: Insight into some of the Real Issues?
Lauski007
Member Posts: 5
I haven't had an account for almost two months now with SWTOR, and can't post my "final thoughts" regarding the game on their forums. I've always appreciated reading @MMORPG, so I thought I'd finally add my first post. I've thought a lot about what troubled me with SWTOR and I haven't seen it said QUITE the same way anywhere yet.
Mainly, the problems I encountered let me know early on (Main: 35, Alt: 30 or so) that this game wasn't for me. I tend to be the kind of person that looks ahead. Tries to see where something is going. When it's riddled with too many problems and I'm not enjoying the journey, it really pulls the fun out of it. I can't see the point in playing.
So, here we go...
Voice Acting: It's polish, not a Feature:
Let's start off with something simple: The voice acting is exciting, neat and different at first. It's refreshing! You're really going to like it. The main story lines are pretty good. There's your classic BioWare "twists" and what not. A lot of people delivering the lines are the real deal.
The problem? Well, after you get over it a bit, you start to realize that for your sidequests you're just listening to someone tell you in almost excruciating detail all about how this is this, and that is that, but only to have your mini-map, numerical objective and "classic MMO" type indicators appear as soon as you were done. What's the point then? You can argue immersion, but only to a point with 10 other people looking just like you hearing the same thing about them being the "chosen one" aswell, and the 20th red or green "barrier" that you run into that artificially allows/prevents you from entering a story area.
I've never been one to read all those little in-game books you find in Oblivion/Skyrim, but I do pride myself on the fact that I otherwise try to soak up every last bit of detail in the games I play. SWTOR tested this resolve. A second play through? A third? Oh forget about it. Most of you probably will hit spacebar and start skipping the lines.
What this means is that the game hasn't fundamentally changed with the "4th Pillar: Story" -- they've just polished an existing thing. They read the dialogs to you. Wow. Or do I mean, "WoW", but with read dialogs? Either way. But surely, the element of choice must help with this a bit? That leads us to our second problem...
The Smoke and Mirrors of Dialog Choice:
Dialog choices seemed great at first. I love them in other games, BioWare's especially. What's wrong here is that your choices don't actually matter all that much. I am used to deciding to play a certain way in the games I play, and having that choice lead to consequence. What separates a good game from a great game are the choices being presented in a way that you TRULY could pick either one and not be hindered numerically, by stats, or numbers and just enjoy your immersion, your story. And seeing that choice play out later.
A couple of key things began to break down the fun for me, revealing to me what the game really was:
You can play a character to be the most evil, nastiest badest mo-fo (or nicest) in the sidequests, but everything is happy happy happy or (sithy sithy sithy) in your main story quest. No relation that I could see. No consequence or pickup of these stories down the road, other than the main, mandatory line, which hadn't deviated in any major way from my playing and testing the two classes I chose.
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You are penalized for playing the way YOU want to play. What is up with my companion affection going up and down (sometimes in MAJOR ways) with the things I choose? I understand the concept of affection gain/loss in other games... characters will leave your party, and you'll partner with the ones who agree with you, and THAT'S your party. But not here. I heard you can actually NEVER get a companion to leave you, no matter how rotten you are to them. Furthermore, your companions' affection is what judges your success with missions you send them on. So now we have a numerical tie and incentive to choose to THEIR liking, not yours, plus, even if you force through it (like I did) you are going to have to suffer and pay credits for it (by purchasing gifts to artificially inflate how much they like you).
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You will ultimately discover, you can "retry" a dialog by pressing ESCAPE at any time if you see your companion react/not react. You, ultimately, will have the choice of, do I want affection points? Or by golly, am I going to select MY choice the way I want to, in spite of the fact that it doesn't actually matter? I submit, with a little better writing, we could have two interesting choices that aren't going to really aggrevate my companion, or with a little better developer time, have a system of searching for and partnering with companions that YOU choose, because they are like YOU and can work WITH your style of gameplay (Subject to change with your ALTs, making for more interesting play-throughs).
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[My only "story" here is carefully ambiguous, as not to spoil]: The choices you make, even when you THINK you are going to choose something interesting, aren't appropriately rewarding! So playing as a goody-goody Sith on one character, I had the option at a point to choose what was presented as "a lot of power", something that the someone else in the quest really wanted too. But, I was supposed to save him! Not destroy him! ... Ah, the dark side had finally tempted me. For the first time in the game, my companion was NOT pissed at me for being a goody goody and we went against the wishes of my quest giver and so-and-so met his fate! Excellent. Fun. I felt excited that finally the game had DONE something neat. Let's just say the reward for the quest, was an absolute joke, and I had not done ANYTHING out of my way to otherwise have that piece of equipment it was intended to replace. So sad.
Voice Acting Actually Harms the Community:
This all being said, what the worst thing about it is, the voice acting actually may do more harm than it does good. In small doses it's a great add-on. When it's everywhere and you have to muddle through speech after speech just to go kill 5 womp rats, you aren't able to provide the same attention to the people you're paying $15 / month to play with! I think another key reason this game breaks down and people are complaining about server pop and "emptiness" isn't that they made too many servers, that server population is dying or that the worlds are too fragmented and sharded, but it's that our heads are buried in dialog.
Where we used to interact with people and learn about them and their stories, is lost in SWTOR to smoke and mirrors dialog. I think the voice acting should have been tuned back substantially to all but a few major sidequests and main story. This could have allowed them to significantly improve quality & elements of choice in the quests that they had, and allocate money instead to improving other needed "MMO Basic" features we've come to expect of the genre, and actually ADD some new, REAL features for us to get excited about.
Lack of Exploration and the "Rail System":
When you receive the quests through this game (be it for better or worse with the voice acting) you begin to find that you're very limited in where you can go. You're not very free to move about the cabin. There aren't any exploration achievements, nor rare crafting nodes tucked away in the hills. Instead you find, if not of going where the quest-giver told you to:
Suspiciously placed mountains, valleys and cliffs funnel you "THIS WAY ===>"
Invisibile Barriers and Warnings of "Becoming Exhausted" if you don't turn around
Red/Green Barriers for your story or someone elses that you can't enter
Getting suddenly killed and blasted off your speeder by the opposing faction. *I had no idea I was even NEAR these little bases sometimes, I was just exploring and could hardly see them!* No warning, no chance... just death.
So great. Lots of fun there. The only thing that they DO offer, the datacrons which buff your characters' stats are "hidden" about the game for the explorers in us... but try mixing little hidden boxes with the things I told you above, and see how fun it is to comb the planet looking for the one little rock ledge that you can actually jump on and jump on and jump on to find that hidden area. That's what it really comes down to. Skilled jumping with a pretty bad jumping system / unrealstic representation of physics.
Lastly, the game really let me know how bad it could be on Nar Shaada. I don't know if any other planets get like this, but literally walking down hallway after hallway, on a map where I couldn't tell where I was, was awful. In my experiences on Nar Shaada, I never clearly saw where the quest was when it wasn't directly in the area I was in at the moment, nor could I easily find my friends that came to the planet without "starting over"... IE: Trying to remember which corridor it was that I came in on. And it all looked the same. I think the developers somehow managed to confuse themselves when they programmed it, because taking an elevator in one spot teleports you sometimes to somewhere entirely different.
Lack of Scaling Content:
Unless you level lock with friends, or "wait until we're 50", you'll find it's just plain stupid to play with friends, especially if sitting by them in real life. If you're just a couple levels above the quest, the content becomes silly. You end up just going through the MMO Motions -- "MMO-tions". Press, press, press, kill, collect, turn-in, repeat.
Playing by yourself even, the lack of content scaling as a problem is evident from the forums: People often complaining the quests are too hard, the leveling is too slow, the quests are too easy or the leveling is too fast. To me, a seasoned MMO'er of many years, I found the content to be too easy. I was skipping planets (every other with my ALT/MAIN) and still never that impressed nor challenged. I believe it to be silly to not play the game how I want to play it to artificially increase difficulty. IE: Taking off armor, not using the companion system, or not leveling my crafting...
The crafting system is a Deep Ocean of Complex Content, but you might as well just skip a rock over it...
Crafting at first was fun. I love the idea of reverse engineering and a chance at discovering rare items that are valuable. But with your level going so fast (relative to the time/credit investment required to achieve those purple schematics @ level and benefit from them), and the content being so easy, made me realize my efforts were only to be replaced by some basic gear I was going to get through the next kill/fetch quests I'd be given, and would only make the game "easier" and "less challenging and fun" to me. I imagine you may as well just skip all of it until 50 and can grind out the most cost effective route to 400/400. You'll be fine.
The Bait of Beta (or Free Weekends):
I wasn't going to play any more MMOs. But a Beta Weekend allowed opportunity to meet the curiosity of someone who casually signed up for it, not really expecting anything to come of it. I got invited.
I got a taste of voice acting, the stable, solid programming and servers, the cool reverse engineering crafting system, the idea that there was a story to be discovered, the illusion of real choice in my dialogs, PVP, a branching flashpoint (Thank you BioWare, but why is only the FIRST flashpoint this good??) and overall, a pretty good experience. Later on, almost everything unravels that seemed to be, and what's left is just more of the same. I felt tricked.
Let's wrap up...
Final Score / Value:
Like I said, I tried to review issues and topics I don't see spoken about that much in reviews. What about all the basic stuff? Well, read elsewhere for it. The PVP is fun, (except for the Illum fiasco, or whatever's going on there), the game is stable, and well done production-wise, the developers seem a little slow perhaps to respond to the games' issues, but 1.2 looks to be pretty good in quantity (nothing major in my books to make me want to come back) but, you'll enjoy SWTOR if you like Star Wars and the basic MMO model + not having to read quests. But otherwise, it's more of the same, and it's "lite".
[ 7.0 / 10 ]
What's that mean as far as value goes? For someone like me, having the issues I do with the game-- I don't think this game is worth anything more than the monthly subscription they charge. Certainly not $60 up front, please don't buy the digital collector's edition ($80) and certainly not the $150 Collector's set like I did (unless you really just want the physical extras). The in-game stuff just isn't worth it.
If any of my points above rang loudly with you, you'll want to resist the power of the dark side a little longer until this game really offers something new via future patches and buffs up its lack of standard MMO features that were omitted at launch...
Comments
7.0/10...you Sir were to kind!
Nice review...my main issue was I felt that I was playing a single player game. As I was going through the zones and not see many other players and no one from the other faction lost it for me.
Edit:
I had the same feeling in the orginal guildwars, but at least I was just paying for the box.
i wonder why threads like OP's are popping up all over the place NOW, when all this was obvious about the game 2 years prior to its release.
The answer to your question in one word. " Hope "
MAGA
This was all pretty much known way before beta even started. If you had done some research and not listened to the rabid SW fans then you could have saved yourself the price of a CE edition at least. The price of the standard edition might be worth it if it didn't have a subscription fee attached to it.
It is at heart basically a single player game.
very good review.
the voice chat is good for the actual story line but for quests where you go kill X amount or collect Y of Z its just a time sink.
I know that if I space bar through the chat I can still get way points to quests so listening to voice chat is just a waste of time unless I feel like enjoying the story , but the problem is the story for most quests is really boring .
But back then it was "A New Hope."
AMIRITE?
Re: SWTOR
"Remember, remember - Kakk says 'December.'"
Yea I have to agree with one of the commenters , this should have been known to you or anyone before the plunked down 60 bog ones and anyone who pays big money for any collecters edition is nutty IMO.
The Bioware stories never get old to me , even the side stories held some interest , I would rather listen to a side story than read a wall of text and if for some reason the side does not interest I can always space bar.
I am generrally a solo artist in games (with the exception of shadowbane) but I found myself grouping quite a bit and enjoying it, I like small groups that dont become overwealming and the social points were a fun addition.
This is a story game so it is going to have to be on rails nothing surprising their, but in the end Bioware did what they do best and that is create a world around a story with voice overs , cut scenes, and mmorpg elements
As I implied/said, I wasn't really into MMOs anymore, and liking Bioware games, this one brought me out of the woodwork... What great timing, eh?
Why the CE though? Supply and demand, I guess. I always have enjoyed spending extra on games I love for CE stuffs. When I saw "in game exclusives" and how rare these seemed ($300+ Amazon/Ebay), the risk was too great to not have one to me for $150, when opportunity struck.
I'm going to really research as much as possible next time to reduce the chance of disappointment, I've learned a lot about what I *don't* want in an MMO for (cough) only $150... Maybe that's a good deal compared to some! :-)