Not unexpected. not sure what the reviwer was expecting going in to the game, i smell some bias in the article but then again that is why it is called a review and not "absolut truth". I would personally have given it a 5/10 today but then again i would only have given it a 6 or 6.5 at launch.
Not all that bad for a review but not one i fully agree with.
A perfect example of a poor implementation of F2P. I am now convinced BioWare has no idea what they are doing nor do they really care about the player. The point of F2P should be to incite users to SUBSCRIBE. Not to restrict them to the point they dont want to play.
Some of the things I read in the article were rediculous. I cant UNLOCK a character with MY OWN MONEY until I play 10 levels? That is just stupid. Im all for microtransactions but 3 USD+ to buy a 5-pack of a medic robot so I dont have to go back to the beginning?
I actually re-installed the client to play through the 8 stories, but after reading this article I dont see the point. I hope BioWare or whoever is in control comes to their senses.
I think we will be reading a few tears over this one, be it laughter or rage induced I can't tell. Most sites never do a second review of a game and for good reason as it admits they may not have done it right the first time. But that's an admission most sites quietly make anyway. Hype and first impressions, the need to be the first on the net with a review, money, it all works against the industry being trustworthy.
4/10? HEHEHE! think the reviewer admitted that Maestia is more fun. I won't call the review fair and unbiased but its his pro take. It is telling how quickly opinion swings though...
I completely agree with their take on the free to spend money on every little thing option. But saying GW 2's personal stories are better than the SWTOR class stories is extremely laughable.
I completely agree with their take on the free to spend money on every little thing option. But saying GW 2's personal stories are better than the SWTOR class stories is extremely laughable.
I agree with everything in the review other than the GW2 stories being better. The reviewer may have gotten carried away at that point. I also didn't know about the race lvl 10 thing. That is so stupid I've got to imagine it's a bug or oversight.
Originally posted by meddyck I completely agree with their take on the free to spend money on every little thing option. But saying GW 2's personal stories are better than the SWTOR class stories is extremely laughable.
I agree with everything in the review other than the GW2 stories being better. The reviewer may have gotten carried away at that point. I also didn't know about the race lvl 10 thing. That is so stupid I've got to imagine it's a bug or oversight.
So now some reviewers are going to make up for their original overinflated reviews by going to the other extreme? Didn't deserve most of those initial ones giving laughable high scores and overlooking a multitude of issues.
But that doesn't mean it deserves this low either.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
So now some reviewers are going to make up for their original overinflated reviews by going to the other extreme? Didn't deserve most of those initial ones giving laughable high scores and overlooking a multitude of issues.
But that doesn't mean it deserves this low either.
So now some reviewers are going to make up for their original overinflated reviews by going to the other extreme? Didn't deserve most of those initial ones giving laughable high scores and overlooking a multitude of issues.
But that doesn't mean it deserves this low either.
Actually, 4/10 is being pretty nice.. I really don't think it deserves any higher. The f2p model for this game is the worst I have ever seen and the world is still completely lifeless and static. Not to mention the high level gear is damn ugly. The only thing this game has going for it is the solo storyline. If it was a single player game, I'd rate it at 6 or 7 out of 10.
"You are all going to poop yourselves." BillMurphy
"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
Although I would have given the "re-release" of SWTOR a 2/10. Namely because the stuff EA took away (as per F2) was lame-brained, and the game, as a whole, is an inferior WoW clone. Not a Star Wars worthy game.
For a real good Star Wars game, I'll just play console games I guess. I hate to say it, but SWTOR is "WoW in space". It breaks my heart too. What a shitty MMORPG
hold on I need to let it out of my system ..
What a shitty MMORPG
What a shitty MMORPG
What a shitty MMORPG
Ok I feel better !!! :-)
I love Star Wars too .. I freakin love it. This makes a bad game hurt more
"thanks EA .. What an incredible smell you discovered!"
And they rated AoC higher ;3 lol. Always a good laugh reading review sites like this. They pander and give great scores at release and pander and give much lower later.
Originally posted by Swanea And they rated AoC higher ;3 lol. Always a good laugh reading review sites like this. They pander and give great scores at release and pander and give much lower later.
I always say "dont judge hype and potential but actual product".
Even i say SWTOR had lot of potential (i rated it 6 on launch) and since nothing of that came true i quite agree with 4/10. Its realistic, no BS.
Originally posted by Swanea And they rated AoC higher ;3 lol. Always a good laugh reading review sites like this. They pander and give great scores at release and pander and give much lower later.
The game did have a solid 8/10 foundation at release, but this is a MMO with a $15 monthly fee, not a single player game.
EA/Bioware have not made much progression since release. They should have released all the contnet they said they had for it "KOTOR 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and beyond" plus some more unique features, before merging servers or doing a lame F2P system.
I agree with the score, but not for the reasons the reviewer sums up:
Eurogamer: "It then suffocated them with padding, slow levelling and an endless array of tedious stock quests that no amount of dialogue could jazz up."
On the contrary, the leveling was WAY (and I mean WAY) too fast. People could and did hit the max level in a few days while skipping almost 90% of the games' content (especially in later days if leveling mostly through dungeons).
I do agree that the stories were lacking and especially not created equally (the empire had much more interesting stuff, even the audio was more complex on the empire side). The world arcs weren't cohesive storylines and bar a few exceptions they were indeed uninteresting, especially on the later planets.
In general, all stories lacked memorable characters, powerful antagonists and emotion (you couldn't relate to any character dying if you only did some irrelevant fetch quest for them).
Eurogamer: "Even so, it's a clumsy adequacy weighed down by the fact that, while it does provide player-versus-player and story-based dungeons and endgame content as the genre demands, most of its best content would have been much more enjoyable done as a single-player game."
That's not really true, many of the multiplayer aspects actually held the most promise. I fondly remember several of the heroic 4 quests that actually did offer a cohesive storyline. I also really liked the PvP that the game started out with.
The only problem with these systems is that the devs completely lack the necessary vision to support them: the myriads of group missions were often hidden away behind uninteresting quests that no one did, or you had to do absurd unrelated precursor quests. That and the fact that they had lacklustre rewards and that they were difficult to find groups for, just made it so people didn't bother any more.
As far as dungeons and end-game went, there was a HUGE period of time without any content updates (more than 3 months), while bugs and messy mechanics persisted. In general, they were also way too easy, depending too much on DPS races and "avoid the red circles" for difficulty, above any real strategy.
Recent dungeons have done it a bit better, but that was far too late. The rewards for hardmode dungeons were also completely pointless, except for the last boss, whose loot was subject to horrible RNG for the longest time. If you died and got thrown out of the instance while the last boss died, you also missed any chance at loot, and that went unfixed for super long.
PvP in TOR was interesting and fun in my opinion. But again the devs just turned 180° away from their initial vision of longer, epic fights in favour of the instagib stunfest that it quickly became at the cap. Expertise as a PvP stat is horribly designed, giving veteran players both a damage boost against and a damage reduction from newer players, making anyone who is lacking in that department a free kill.
In world PvP, the game suffered not only from population imbalance and horrible engine issues, but also from the mind-boggling unwillingness to let people meet up to actually do PvP while leveling. Even on PvP servers, everything in their power was done to stop players of opposite factions from meeting, including leveling areas on seperate sides of the planets and boss-level guards between them that one-shot any player of the appropriate level who tries to cross.
On the subject of gear, stuff just keeps going in the wrong direction. But little of that is mentioned in the article.
TOR introduced an interesting take on gear at first, giving you access to orange gear pieces that you can then customize with mods to serve your stat needs, while you keep looking the way you want. But somewhere in beta, that feature that spanned almost the entire spectrum of gear in the game, got turned way down, applying only to a select few pieces. An absurd decision.
More of these inexplicable changes followed: you couldn't get a full matching set of orange gear at first (in most cases) and crafters could make almost no orange pieces. The most useful recipes: for mods, re-usable stat boosts and heals were all stuffed into two crafting professions (cybertech and biochem), making these the only worthwhile professions in the game. The other professions couldn't even craft anything useful if they got a rare recipe from raids, because almost all of those resulted in a "bind on acquire" item that was of a much lower tier than the raid you were actually doing, and often not even useful for your specific class / role.
The much touted "reverse engineering" mechanic, turned into a frustrating RNG mess that resulted in sub-par items (again, except for BioChem / Cyber).
Furthermore, orange items completely lost their point at the level cap. Because set bonuses and purple gear ruled over all, result: everyone ended up looking the same again. When they finally tried to fix this by adding more orange gear and letting the set bonuses be bound to the mods in the gear, instead of the gear itself, they inexplicably only made that apply to the newest tier of raid / pvp gear which NO ONE had. Therefore forcing people to go through another arduous grind to look the way they wanted.
Throughout the endgame, instead of nourishing the concept of mods as an interesting fusion between customization and economy, the system was used as a bad excuse for poor itemization (forcing people to grind out more items, to then drag the mods out of them to replace the sub-par mods that came on a new set item) and as a money sink, with mod removal ramping up in cost tremendously.
PvP gear suffered from massive RNG in the first stages of the game (even more than PvE), despite that it was still easier to get than PvE gear and many a raider started with a set of PvP gear. Not once, but twice did they create a PvP currency (first mercenary commendation, then ranked commendations before ranked warzones came) that could not be earned directly, but had to be grinded out through the regular currency.
Today, they keep adding ever increasing tiers of PvP and PvE gear to the game and especially in PvP this has given rise to a massive dickfest in the community between newbies or casuals who get destroyed by people with more expertise AND more stats than they and the epeen crowd on the other side who believes it isn't too bad and feels that they have the right to faceroll others after their "hard work".
Eurogamer: "The Old Republic's biggest failing as a free-to-play game, though, is its attitude. It doesn't simply push you to subscribe. It levies so many petty restrictions that it ends up feeling like the goal wasn't to attract newcomers so much as spite any who dared show up."
I fully agree with this, the current cashout freemium model is just plain despicable. The above quote also illustrates nicely how the game has treated its new players in PvP and PvE: it has just been pissing all over them, an attitude that is sadly reflected in the remaining population of vets as well (at least when I left, on Tomb of Freedon Nadd).
Not to mention the disdain that is shown towards old players, who do receive a little bit of cashshop currency upon returning, but see their earned money and gear from before locked away entirely.
---
My conclusion is that this game held a lot of promise at first, throughout the first months of play I did have a great time despite the shortcomings of the design. But the way developers and publishers mismanaged this project over the months just twarths all imagination, it is truly and utterly mind blowing.
If I had to take a guess (something I don't enjoy), I'd say that it appears as if there was an internal conflict between two distinct visions:
1) Giving the players more choice and freedom and allowing them to customize their experience.
2) Fear of what might happen when you give players freedom and the decision to restrict them as much as possible and cash out fast.
You see this returning in the orange gear debacle, for example: a good idea that gets turned back so far that it loses all appeal.
I could talk about much more: the Ilum debacle and the engine, the persisting bugs, the slow death of entire servers, the lack of difficulty in the release, the /facepalm moments in the stories, the cost of respecs etc.
But it all boils down to this: a game isn't complete without giving the player the childish feeling of excitement for what lies behind the horizon (especially in a star wars game).
TOR doesn't have that any longer. I can safely state that the game was better off in beta when the group of visionary people in the design team still seemed to have the upper hand over the boxed-in uncreative minds, than in it's current state.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Comments
Not unexpected. not sure what the reviwer was expecting going in to the game, i smell some bias in the article but then again that is why it is called a review and not "absolut truth". I would personally have given it a 5/10 today but then again i would only have given it a 6 or 6.5 at launch.
Not all that bad for a review but not one i fully agree with.
This have been a good conversation
A perfect example of a poor implementation of F2P. I am now convinced BioWare has no idea what they are doing nor do they really care about the player. The point of F2P should be to incite users to SUBSCRIBE. Not to restrict them to the point they dont want to play.
Some of the things I read in the article were rediculous. I cant UNLOCK a character with MY OWN MONEY until I play 10 levels? That is just stupid. Im all for microtransactions but 3 USD+ to buy a 5-pack of a medic robot so I dont have to go back to the beginning?
I actually re-installed the client to play through the 8 stories, but after reading this article I dont see the point. I hope BioWare or whoever is in control comes to their senses.
Sad what happened to this game....
oooooor you just sub for a month and set up all the charatcers you like and then play to your little hearts content on the F2P after that.
Sometimes i think people are trying to make life more difficult for them self.
This have been a good conversation
I think we will be reading a few tears over this one, be it laughter or rage induced I can't tell. Most sites never do a second review of a game and for good reason as it admits they may not have done it right the first time. But that's an admission most sites quietly make anyway. Hype and first impressions, the need to be the first on the net with a review, money, it all works against the industry being trustworthy.
4/10? HEHEHE! think the reviewer admitted that Maestia is more fun. I won't call the review fair and unbiased but its his pro take. It is telling how quickly opinion swings though...
DAOC Live (inactive): R11 Cleric R11 Druid R11 Minstrel R9 Eldritch R6 Sorc R6 Scout R6 Healer
I agree with everything in the review other than the GW2 stories being better. The reviewer may have gotten carried away at that point. I also didn't know about the race lvl 10 thing. That is so stupid I've got to imagine it's a bug or oversight.Before F2P. it was level 50
Star Trek Online - Best Free MMORPG of 2012
So now some reviewers are going to make up for their original overinflated reviews by going to the other extreme? Didn't deserve most of those initial ones giving laughable high scores and overlooking a multitude of issues.
But that doesn't mean it deserves this low either.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Riding the wave of public opinion.
Actually, 4/10 is being pretty nice.. I really don't think it deserves any higher. The f2p model for this game is the worst I have ever seen and the world is still completely lifeless and static. Not to mention the high level gear is damn ugly. The only thing this game has going for it is the solo storyline. If it was a single player game, I'd rate it at 6 or 7 out of 10.
"You are all going to poop yourselves." BillMurphy
"Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone."
Spot on review!
My appreciation for Eurogamer just went up!
Although I would have given the "re-release" of SWTOR a 2/10. Namely because the stuff EA took away (as per F2) was lame-brained, and the game, as a whole, is an inferior WoW clone. Not a Star Wars worthy game.
For a real good Star Wars game, I'll just play console games I guess. I hate to say it, but SWTOR is "WoW in space". It breaks my heart too. What a shitty MMORPG
hold on I need to let it out of my system ..
What a shitty MMORPG
What a shitty MMORPG
What a shitty MMORPG
Ok I feel better !!! :-)
I love Star Wars too .. I freakin love it. This makes a bad game hurt more
"thanks EA .. What an incredible smell you discovered!"
Want a nice understanding of life? Try Spirit Science: "The Human History"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
I always say "dont judge hype and potential but actual product".
Even i say SWTOR had lot of potential (i rated it 6 on launch) and since nothing of that came true i quite agree with 4/10. Its realistic, no BS.
The game did have a solid 8/10 foundation at release, but this is a MMO with a $15 monthly fee, not a single player game.
EA/Bioware have not made much progression since release. They should have released all the contnet they said they had for it "KOTOR 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and beyond" plus some more unique features, before merging servers or doing a lame F2P system.
Star Trek Online - Best Free MMORPG of 2012
I agree with the score, but not for the reasons the reviewer sums up:
Eurogamer: "It then suffocated them with padding, slow levelling and an endless array of tedious stock quests that no amount of dialogue could jazz up."
On the contrary, the leveling was WAY (and I mean WAY) too fast. People could and did hit the max level in a few days while skipping almost 90% of the games' content (especially in later days if leveling mostly through dungeons).
I do agree that the stories were lacking and especially not created equally (the empire had much more interesting stuff, even the audio was more complex on the empire side). The world arcs weren't cohesive storylines and bar a few exceptions they were indeed uninteresting, especially on the later planets.
In general, all stories lacked memorable characters, powerful antagonists and emotion (you couldn't relate to any character dying if you only did some irrelevant fetch quest for them).
Eurogamer: "Even so, it's a clumsy adequacy weighed down by the fact that, while it does provide player-versus-player and story-based dungeons and endgame content as the genre demands, most of its best content would have been much more enjoyable done as a single-player game."
That's not really true, many of the multiplayer aspects actually held the most promise. I fondly remember several of the heroic 4 quests that actually did offer a cohesive storyline. I also really liked the PvP that the game started out with.
The only problem with these systems is that the devs completely lack the necessary vision to support them: the myriads of group missions were often hidden away behind uninteresting quests that no one did, or you had to do absurd unrelated precursor quests. That and the fact that they had lacklustre rewards and that they were difficult to find groups for, just made it so people didn't bother any more.
As far as dungeons and end-game went, there was a HUGE period of time without any content updates (more than 3 months), while bugs and messy mechanics persisted. In general, they were also way too easy, depending too much on DPS races and "avoid the red circles" for difficulty, above any real strategy.
Recent dungeons have done it a bit better, but that was far too late. The rewards for hardmode dungeons were also completely pointless, except for the last boss, whose loot was subject to horrible RNG for the longest time. If you died and got thrown out of the instance while the last boss died, you also missed any chance at loot, and that went unfixed for super long.
PvP in TOR was interesting and fun in my opinion. But again the devs just turned 180° away from their initial vision of longer, epic fights in favour of the instagib stunfest that it quickly became at the cap. Expertise as a PvP stat is horribly designed, giving veteran players both a damage boost against and a damage reduction from newer players, making anyone who is lacking in that department a free kill.
In world PvP, the game suffered not only from population imbalance and horrible engine issues, but also from the mind-boggling unwillingness to let people meet up to actually do PvP while leveling. Even on PvP servers, everything in their power was done to stop players of opposite factions from meeting, including leveling areas on seperate sides of the planets and boss-level guards between them that one-shot any player of the appropriate level who tries to cross.
On the subject of gear, stuff just keeps going in the wrong direction. But little of that is mentioned in the article.
TOR introduced an interesting take on gear at first, giving you access to orange gear pieces that you can then customize with mods to serve your stat needs, while you keep looking the way you want. But somewhere in beta, that feature that spanned almost the entire spectrum of gear in the game, got turned way down, applying only to a select few pieces. An absurd decision.
More of these inexplicable changes followed: you couldn't get a full matching set of orange gear at first (in most cases) and crafters could make almost no orange pieces. The most useful recipes: for mods, re-usable stat boosts and heals were all stuffed into two crafting professions (cybertech and biochem), making these the only worthwhile professions in the game. The other professions couldn't even craft anything useful if they got a rare recipe from raids, because almost all of those resulted in a "bind on acquire" item that was of a much lower tier than the raid you were actually doing, and often not even useful for your specific class / role.
The much touted "reverse engineering" mechanic, turned into a frustrating RNG mess that resulted in sub-par items (again, except for BioChem / Cyber).
Furthermore, orange items completely lost their point at the level cap. Because set bonuses and purple gear ruled over all, result: everyone ended up looking the same again. When they finally tried to fix this by adding more orange gear and letting the set bonuses be bound to the mods in the gear, instead of the gear itself, they inexplicably only made that apply to the newest tier of raid / pvp gear which NO ONE had. Therefore forcing people to go through another arduous grind to look the way they wanted.
Throughout the endgame, instead of nourishing the concept of mods as an interesting fusion between customization and economy, the system was used as a bad excuse for poor itemization (forcing people to grind out more items, to then drag the mods out of them to replace the sub-par mods that came on a new set item) and as a money sink, with mod removal ramping up in cost tremendously.
PvP gear suffered from massive RNG in the first stages of the game (even more than PvE), despite that it was still easier to get than PvE gear and many a raider started with a set of PvP gear. Not once, but twice did they create a PvP currency (first mercenary commendation, then ranked commendations before ranked warzones came) that could not be earned directly, but had to be grinded out through the regular currency.
Today, they keep adding ever increasing tiers of PvP and PvE gear to the game and especially in PvP this has given rise to a massive dickfest in the community between newbies or casuals who get destroyed by people with more expertise AND more stats than they and the epeen crowd on the other side who believes it isn't too bad and feels that they have the right to faceroll others after their "hard work".
Eurogamer: "The Old Republic's biggest failing as a free-to-play game, though, is its attitude. It doesn't simply push you to subscribe. It levies so many petty restrictions that it ends up feeling like the goal wasn't to attract newcomers so much as spite any who dared show up."
I fully agree with this, the current cashout freemium model is just plain despicable. The above quote also illustrates nicely how the game has treated its new players in PvP and PvE: it has just been pissing all over them, an attitude that is sadly reflected in the remaining population of vets as well (at least when I left, on Tomb of Freedon Nadd).
Not to mention the disdain that is shown towards old players, who do receive a little bit of cashshop currency upon returning, but see their earned money and gear from before locked away entirely.
---
My conclusion is that this game held a lot of promise at first, throughout the first months of play I did have a great time despite the shortcomings of the design. But the way developers and publishers mismanaged this project over the months just twarths all imagination, it is truly and utterly mind blowing.
If I had to take a guess (something I don't enjoy), I'd say that it appears as if there was an internal conflict between two distinct visions:
1) Giving the players more choice and freedom and allowing them to customize their experience.
2) Fear of what might happen when you give players freedom and the decision to restrict them as much as possible and cash out fast.
You see this returning in the orange gear debacle, for example: a good idea that gets turned back so far that it loses all appeal.
I could talk about much more: the Ilum debacle and the engine, the persisting bugs, the slow death of entire servers, the lack of difficulty in the release, the /facepalm moments in the stories, the cost of respecs etc.
But it all boils down to this: a game isn't complete without giving the player the childish feeling of excitement for what lies behind the horizon (especially in a star wars game).
TOR doesn't have that any longer. I can safely state that the game was better off in beta when the group of visionary people in the design team still seemed to have the upper hand over the boxed-in uncreative minds, than in it's current state.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!