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On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. Show nested quote +On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. Show nested quote +On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. Show nested quote +On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). Show nested quote +On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored  Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different
Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer.
1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity.
It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas.
2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells.
Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc.
3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution.
4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces.
5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours?
The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success.
I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places.
Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least.
Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time.
Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world).
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Only 14 pages of posts since January.. that's around when I unsubbed, after the first month. Is this game dieing that quickly, or just on TL?
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half the servers are dead. instead of useless bioware merging servers they have exorted everyone into rerolling on 3-4 servers total across us and eu together.
tomb of freedon nad in eu has 200x the population my previous server had (uthar wynn). on uthar wyn u never see more than 20 lvl 50's online, and unless it is prime time it is more like 4. we never get any warzones at all and there is no point at all playing the game apart from preparation for server merges or cross server warzones.
i had a lvl 65 assassin there and i loved that character. the playstyle, the talents, everything. also i raped people right and left even 1v3 against better geared opponents. i enjoyed first 2 months of playtime immensely. then server got deserted so i stopped playing.
rerolled on freedon nad 2 toons but none was as good or enjoyable as my assassin, so i lost interest in the game completely.
and i am not going to level the same character for 50 lvls just because bioware is too bored to merge servers. (it is a question of boredom alone when uthar wynn gets zero warzones during the 20 out of the 24 hours of the day, and even when we get, it is only 1 going on for empire. republic ofc has 2 hutballs going on pretty much always)
i enjoyed the leveling period but playing the same character (even the republic equivalent) for 50 levels would have me breaking my keyboard.
anyway, if i had the clarity to start in freedon nad from the get-go i imagine i would be still playing and owning. now my sub ran out and i am not going to renew untill 1.2 atleast. even then i do not have high hopes.
they havent fixed anything in this game for the past 4 months. fortunately it launched with few problems comparably to other mmo launches.
they made crafting a necessity to be competitve, and only if you are biochem since then you have access to re-usable consumables (huggest paradox in mmo history)which give you huge stat boosts unattainable in any other way. and if you dint pick biochem you are subsequently gimped. thankfully most players are wow casuals who have no idea about competitve pvp so experienced pvp'ers can wipe the floor with them even without crafting and shit.
also pve gear is the best for pvp by far.
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On March 27 2012 01:58 brokor wrote:i had a lvl 65 assassin there and i loved that character. the playstyle, the talents, everything. also i raped people right and left even 1v3 against better geared opponents. i enjoyed first 2 months of playtime immensely. then server got deserted so i stopped playing.
What game you are playing??
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Maybe you were beating people 1v3 because you are Neo and managed 15 extra levels.
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On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:Show nested quote +On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer. 1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity. It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas. 2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells. Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc. 3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution. 4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces. 5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours? The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success. I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places. Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least. Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time. Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world).
I like this game, and I thought WoW was trash. Your rant to me looks ignorant, you picked the cut and paste out of WoW class because it was familiar to you, and then you complain about it being too familiar. Play a sniper, or powertech if you want something unique. Some classes are cut and paste from WoW while some feel like something new. Some classes are harder to play and some are dumbed down. Bioware wanted something for everyone, it's up to you to choose which you want to go with. Also huttball is amazing once you get it down, it has much more depth than any previous mmorpg pvp instanced. The knockbacks in the game and stun break system are innovative and add depth to the pvp objectives. Congratulations, you beat the low levels, don't act like you know something the Battlemasters don't.
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On March 27 2012 07:48 Rah wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer. 1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity. It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas. 2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells. Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc. 3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution. 4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces. 5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours? The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success. I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places. Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least. Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time. Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world). I like this game, and I thought WoW was trash. Your rant to me looks ignorant, you picked the cut and paste out of WoW class because it was familiar to you, and then you complain about it being too familiar. Play a sniper, or powertech if you want something unique. Some classes are cut and paste from WoW while some feel like something new. Some classes are harder to play and some are dumbed down. Bioware wanted something for everyone, it's up to you to choose which you want to go with. Also huttball is amazing once you get it down, it has much more depth than any previous mmorpg pvp instanced. The knockbacks in the game and stun break system are innovative and add depth to the pvp objectives. Congratulations, you beat the low levels, don't act like you know something the Battlemasters don't.
I played an agent up to 12 in the beta, the cover mechanic is just a more contrived version of warrior stances: it opens new abilities and gives you minor bonuses when it's on, but confers a penalty (no movement). I could also do a breakdown of abilities if you prefer, but the point is that there aren't any real differences between the TOR skills and WoW skills, there's little to no aim involved in them and they all do something that falls into various combinations of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal.
You probably played WoW for a few days/months long after release and never quite got into it, which is perfectly reasonable. I've been playing MMOs since Everquest and played WoW almost since release. I've also played tons of different games both F2P and subscription, I've established a good grasp of the patterns of MMOs and what makes them fun and successful.
I'm not saying that the entire game is bad, I'm saying that it's not what was promised, nowhere near as good as it could be, and that there is no real point in playing it over WoW for PvE content. I personally don't give a flying fuck about PvP and never have*, balance in MMOs is nearly impossible: Arena Season 3-4 taught me that.
*That's not entirely true, S1 I was 3 teams off the glad cutoff and S2 I was top 10%.
EDIT: For the record, I picked Sage because I hate BioWare's dark side/renegade storytelling (it's all "be an asshole" rather than "be evil", and there's a large difference) and I wanted to play a caster. I could do a breakdown that might be a bit more obscure for every class if you gave me an ability list.
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This game is alot of fun for me i have tried almost every class the stories are really fun and the character development that I personally feel was lacking in WoW is there. I played WoW for 4 years and found the storytelling to be very lacking and often only learned of the lore from my one lore nerd friend because i didnt care to read quest text. I really enjoy the PvP, the Flaspoints are unique and different each time and the cinematic story really gets you "into" your character. In My opinion this game is WoW with all the right things changed to keep me engaged
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This game would be going much strong if they didn't f*** ilum over in their first attempt at changing it. They should've left it as it was.
What made it worse was that they didn't roll back the valor after it got farmed relentlessly by empire on every server increasing the already severe imbalance.
When Guild Wars 2 comes out, it'll be the new standard for MMO I have no doubt. Tournament mode PvP with MMR Match-making, Daily/Weekly/Yearly tournaments, Statistics, Rankings etc. will be amazing. WvW will also be amazing 
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On March 27 2012 10:08 deth2munkies wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2012 07:48 Rah wrote:On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer. 1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity. It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas. 2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells. Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc. 3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution. 4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces. 5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours? The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success. I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places. Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least. Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time. Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world). I like this game, and I thought WoW was trash. Your rant to me looks ignorant, you picked the cut and paste out of WoW class because it was familiar to you, and then you complain about it being too familiar. Play a sniper, or powertech if you want something unique. Some classes are cut and paste from WoW while some feel like something new. Some classes are harder to play and some are dumbed down. Bioware wanted something for everyone, it's up to you to choose which you want to go with. Also huttball is amazing once you get it down, it has much more depth than any previous mmorpg pvp instanced. The knockbacks in the game and stun break system are innovative and add depth to the pvp objectives. Congratulations, you beat the low levels, don't act like you know something the Battlemasters don't. I played an agent up to 12 in the beta, the cover mechanic is just a more contrived version of warrior stances: it opens new abilities and gives you minor bonuses when it's on, but confers a penalty (no movement). I could also do a breakdown of abilities if you prefer, but the point is that there aren't any real differences between the TOR skills and WoW skills, there's little to no aim involved in them and they all do something that falls into various combinations of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal. You probably played WoW for a few days/months long after release and never quite got into it, which is perfectly reasonable. I've been playing MMOs since Everquest and played WoW almost since release. I've also played tons of different games both F2P and subscription, I've established a good grasp of the patterns of MMOs and what makes them fun and successful. I'm not saying that the entire game is bad, I'm saying that it's not what was promised, nowhere near as good as it could be, and that there is no real point in playing it over WoW for PvE content. I personally don't give a flying fuck about PvP and never have*, balance in MMOs is nearly impossible: Arena Season 3-4 taught me that. *That's not entirely true, S1 I was 3 teams off the glad cutoff and S2 I was top 10%. EDIT: For the record, I picked Sage because I hate BioWare's dark side/renegade storytelling (it's all "be an asshole" rather than "be evil", and there's a large difference) and I wanted to play a caster. I could do a breakdown that might be a bit more obscure for every class if you gave me an ability list.
Comparing a sniper to a WoW warrior shows how far you're willing to stretch things to feel like you're not missing out. I have the same background as you, I was an EQ raid tank. This is the first modern MMO that I can stomach for more than a month.
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My dad loves this damn game. I really want a new game, but I think i'll just buy him some game time... le sigh.
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On March 27 2012 11:31 Rah wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2012 10:08 deth2munkies wrote:On March 27 2012 07:48 Rah wrote:On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer. 1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity. It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas. 2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells. Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc. 3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution. 4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces. 5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours? The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success. I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places. Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least. Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time. Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world). I like this game, and I thought WoW was trash. Your rant to me looks ignorant, you picked the cut and paste out of WoW class because it was familiar to you, and then you complain about it being too familiar. Play a sniper, or powertech if you want something unique. Some classes are cut and paste from WoW while some feel like something new. Some classes are harder to play and some are dumbed down. Bioware wanted something for everyone, it's up to you to choose which you want to go with. Also huttball is amazing once you get it down, it has much more depth than any previous mmorpg pvp instanced. The knockbacks in the game and stun break system are innovative and add depth to the pvp objectives. Congratulations, you beat the low levels, don't act like you know something the Battlemasters don't. I played an agent up to 12 in the beta, the cover mechanic is just a more contrived version of warrior stances: it opens new abilities and gives you minor bonuses when it's on, but confers a penalty (no movement). I could also do a breakdown of abilities if you prefer, but the point is that there aren't any real differences between the TOR skills and WoW skills, there's little to no aim involved in them and they all do something that falls into various combinations of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal. You probably played WoW for a few days/months long after release and never quite got into it, which is perfectly reasonable. I've been playing MMOs since Everquest and played WoW almost since release. I've also played tons of different games both F2P and subscription, I've established a good grasp of the patterns of MMOs and what makes them fun and successful. I'm not saying that the entire game is bad, I'm saying that it's not what was promised, nowhere near as good as it could be, and that there is no real point in playing it over WoW for PvE content. I personally don't give a flying fuck about PvP and never have*, balance in MMOs is nearly impossible: Arena Season 3-4 taught me that. *That's not entirely true, S1 I was 3 teams off the glad cutoff and S2 I was top 10%. EDIT: For the record, I picked Sage because I hate BioWare's dark side/renegade storytelling (it's all "be an asshole" rather than "be evil", and there's a large difference) and I wanted to play a caster. I could do a breakdown that might be a bit more obscure for every class if you gave me an ability list. Comparing a sniper to a WoW warrior shows how far you're willing to stretch things to feel like you're not missing out. I have the same background as you, I was an EQ raid tank. This is the first modern MMO that I can stomach for more than a month.
It's not that much of a stretch at all. It's not like it turns the game into Mass Effect or something, you get the cover bonus whether you're shooting or not, and it's not like it restricts positioning either thanks to being able to drop cover wherever you please, and even drop into cover stance when there's no cover to use the abilities.
Does dropping into cover really make you feel any better than changing stance? It makes me feel worse, it's a useless complication that I have to deal with to use the abilities I want to use, nothing more.
I'll admit, it adds some strategy to PvP, but as I said before, that's not really my area.
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The storytelling and RPG side of this game is fantastic, but the combat system and PVE is atrocious which makes it worth playing to level 50 but not worth dropping WoW for even if WoW is in it's worst ever days.
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I hate being a Sentinel because I have to get up close to people to use my abilities. Sometimes I just want to hit someone, but then I have to get closer to them, such a useless complication. Why can't all my abilities be throwing light sabers and deal the same damage? Ranged classes are so imba and just push me back all the time and snare me...it really makes me feel worse.
In other words, can we stop talking about WoW and continue talking about how ugly I'm going to be after patch 1.2 comes out and I kill Rah 1000x times in rated WZs?
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Loved the leveling process in SWTOR but endgame PvE is just lacking. I unsubbed because of this.
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On March 27 2012 12:19 justinpal wrote:
I hate being a Sentinel because I have to get up close to people to use my abilities. Sometimes I just want to hit someone, but then I have to get closer to them, such a useless complication. Why can't all my abilities be throwing light sabers and deal the same damage? Ranged classes are so imba and just push me back all the time and snare me...it really makes me feel worse.
In other words, can we stop talking about WoW and continue talking about how ugly I'm going to be after patch 1.2 comes out and I kill Rah 1000x times in rated WZs?
You're on The Twin Spears? I know you're joking, but talk to me when they take away your gap closer.
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On March 27 2012 12:35 Onlinejaguar wrote:
Loved the leveling process in SWTOR but endgame PvE is just lacking. I unsubbed because of this.
same.. i unsubed after i beat one of the raid instances on nightmare with a random group.. end game is a joke
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On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:Show nested quote +On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different + Show Spoiler +
Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer.
1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity.
It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas.
2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells.
Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc.
3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution.
4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces.
5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours?
The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success.
I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places.
Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least.
Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time.
Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world).
1) Where did they promise a "new generation that revolutionized the genre [...] and meaningful PvP"? They promised story - the game has a very good story. It has the best story out of every MMO I know. I'm not saying that you should like the story - but just that there are multiple people who enjoy the story
2) But maybe they wanted to make it a strict hotkey MMO? And I personally am happy that they stuck with this decision. Making new stuff just to be different and avoiding standards leads most of the time to crap.
3) What innovations? WvWvW is not an innovation. I dont know about those F2P titles, but feel free to enlighten us what they do.
4) No plothole. There's no broadcast via radio to every guy on the planet "The hero has arrived. Please call 555 if you need help and our hero will visit you as soon as possible".
That would break immersion for me "Hmm I'm here in a secret mission. Why does everyone (including the spies of our enemies) know that I'm here now? To give them more time to prepare?"
5) I feel like I play a MMO. Feels like I play WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, EQ, ... And at the same time I feel like I play a BW singleplayer RPG. So yes, quite different to WoW.
"The raid bosses [in WoW] have been reduced to jokes" ... yeah. Not everyone is in a top5 world guild which eases through hardmodes. While I havent played Cataclysm people who still play say Spine is as difficult as Yogg0 / LK. There are enough challenges in WoW if you're a dedicated raider. Do you really care if someone beats a raid via LFR?
It's not like difficulty modes in SP games dont exist. Or MMR systems in MP games. You are challenged according to your ability - and the reward is equivalent to the challenge (they did mention they want to introduce Nightmare mode rewards^^).
"There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options."
It's a fucking MMO. No MMO I know was difficult during the leveling phase. And forced grouping & spawn camping is not difficult.
You can explore a lot (except on the city planets). You can go to the other faction's questing zone. Sure, you dont get anything from it (apart from maybe a datacron / lore object) but you can do it.
"Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to"."
No lorebreak.
On March 27 2012 10:08 deth2munkies wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2012 07:48 Rah wrote:On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer. 1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity. It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas. 2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells. Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc. 3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution. 4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces. 5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours? The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success. I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places. Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least. Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time. Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world). I like this game, and I thought WoW was trash. Your rant to me looks ignorant, you picked the cut and paste out of WoW class because it was familiar to you, and then you complain about it being too familiar. Play a sniper, or powertech if you want something unique. Some classes are cut and paste from WoW while some feel like something new. Some classes are harder to play and some are dumbed down. Bioware wanted something for everyone, it's up to you to choose which you want to go with. Also huttball is amazing once you get it down, it has much more depth than any previous mmorpg pvp instanced. The knockbacks in the game and stun break system are innovative and add depth to the pvp objectives. Congratulations, you beat the low levels, don't act like you know something the Battlemasters don't. I played an agent up to 12 in the beta, the cover mechanic is just a more contrived version of warrior stances: it opens new abilities and gives you minor bonuses when it's on, but confers a penalty (no movement). I could also do a breakdown of abilities if you prefer, but the point is that there aren't any real differences between the TOR skills and WoW skills, there's little to no aim involved in them and they all do something that falls into various combinations of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal. You probably played WoW for a few days/months long after release and never quite got into it, which is perfectly reasonable. I've been playing MMOs since Everquest and played WoW almost since release. I've also played tons of different games both F2P and subscription, I've established a good grasp of the patterns of MMOs and what makes them fun and successful. + Show Spoiler +
I'm not saying that the entire game is bad, I'm saying that it's not what was promised, nowhere near as good as it could be, and that there is no real point in playing it over WoW for PvE content. I personally don't give a flying fuck about PvP and never have*, balance in MMOs is nearly impossible: Arena Season 3-4 taught me that.
*That's not entirely true, S1 I was 3 teams off the glad cutoff and S2 I was top 10%.
EDIT: For the record, I picked Sage because I hate BioWare's dark side/renegade storytelling (it's all "be an asshole" rather than "be evil", and there's a large difference) and I wanted to play a caster. I could do a breakdown that might be a bit more obscure for every class if you gave me an ability list.
If you have this vast MMO background. Why do you say SWTOR's skills are just a various combination of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal like WoW (!!). Why would you compare it to WoW and not the multiple other MMOs (or singleplayer games which follow the same scheme).
Also cover is more like stealth, not like a warrior's stance. Light saber forms, cells and the shadow/assassin equivalent are copies of the warrior's stance system.
The big problems SWTOR imho has atm:
- Endgame raiding (nightmare) is way too easy. But they plan to increase the difficulty in the 1.2 operations. I will wait for that. (I actually like the loot system that you dont have to run the same instance 40 times (aka 40 weeks) and still dont have every piece of loot which you want.)
- Player position updates in PvP. I always wonder why the complainers never mention this - but seems like they dont PvP enough to notice it :/
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On March 27 2012 01:58 brokor wrote:
half the servers are dead. instead of useless bioware merging servers they have exorted everyone into rerolling on 3-4 servers total across us and eu together.
tomb of freedon nad in eu has 200x the population my previous server had (uthar wynn). on uthar wyn u never see more than 20 lvl 50's online, and unless it is prime time it is more like 4. we never get any warzones at all and there is no point at all playing the game apart from preparation for server merges or cross server warzones.
i had a lvl 65 assassin there and i loved that character. the playstyle, the talents, everything. also i raped people right and left even 1v3 against better geared opponents. i enjoyed first 2 months of playtime immensely. then server got deserted so i stopped playing.
rerolled on freedon nad 2 toons but none was as good or enjoyable as my assassin, so i lost interest in the game completely.
and i am not going to level the same character for 50 lvls just because bioware is too bored to merge servers. (it is a question of boredom alone when uthar wynn gets zero warzones during the 20 out of the 24 hours of the day, and even when we get, it is only 1 going on for empire. republic ofc has 2 hutballs going on pretty much always)
i enjoyed the leveling period but playing the same character (even the republic equivalent) for 50 levels would have me breaking my keyboard.
anyway, if i had the clarity to start in freedon nad from the get-go i imagine i would be still playing and owning. now my sub ran out and i am not going to renew untill 1.2 atleast. even then i do not have high hopes.
they havent fixed anything in this game for the past 4 months. fortunately it launched with few problems comparably to other mmo launches.
they made crafting a necessity to be competitve, and only if you are biochem since then you have access to re-usable consumables (huggest paradox in mmo history)which give you huge stat boosts unattainable in any other way. and if you dint pick biochem you are subsequently gimped. thankfully most players are wow casuals who have no idea about competitve pvp so experienced pvp'ers can wipe the floor with them even without crafting and shit.
also pve gear is the best for pvp by far.
At first i was wondering wtf this guy was talking about , but then i got it. He means that he got to Valor rank 65 on his LVL 50 Assasin
I certainly do not agree that PVE gear is the best PVP gear, i have pretty much full rakata and sure i have alot more health than anyone else (which im assuming is the reason you say PVE gear is better, i have like 3k+ more health than someone in Full BM im pretty sure) but that certainly doesnt make up for no expertise, i also take probably twice as much damage for any given attack and do a hell of alot less damage as well. (expertise increases your damage against other players while decreasing damage taken, i beleive)
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On March 27 2012 22:39 Zocat wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different + Show Spoiler +
Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer.
1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity.
It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas.
2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells.
Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc.
3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution.
4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces.
5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours?
The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success.
I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places.
Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least.
Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time.
Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world).
1) Where did they promise a "new generation that revolutionized the genre [...] and meaningful PvP"? They promised story - the game has a very good story. It has the best story out of every MMO I know. I'm not saying that you should like the story - but just that there are multiple people who enjoy the story 2) But maybe they wanted to make it a strict hotkey MMO? And I personally am happy that they stuck with this decision. Making new stuff just to be different and avoiding standards leads most of the time to crap. 3) What innovations? WvWvW is not an innovation. I dont know about those F2P titles, but feel free to enlighten us what they do. 4) No plothole. There's no broadcast via radio to every guy on the planet "The hero has arrived. Please call 555 if you need help and our hero will visit you as soon as possible". That would break immersion for me "Hmm I'm here in a secret mission. Why does everyone (including the spies of our enemies) know that I'm here now? To give them more time to prepare?" 5) I feel like I play a MMO. Feels like I play WoW, FFXIV, LotRO, EQ, ... And at the same time I feel like I play a BW singleplayer RPG. So yes, quite different to WoW. "The raid bosses [in WoW] have been reduced to jokes" ... yeah. Not everyone is in a top5 world guild which eases through hardmodes. While I havent played Cataclysm people who still play say Spine is as difficult as Yogg0 / LK. There are enough challenges in WoW if you're a dedicated raider. Do you really care if someone beats a raid via LFR? It's not like difficulty modes in SP games dont exist. Or MMR systems in MP games. You are challenged according to your ability - and the reward is equivalent to the challenge (they did mention they want to introduce Nightmare mode rewards^^). "There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options." It's a fucking MMO. No MMO I know was difficult during the leveling phase. And forced grouping & spawn camping is not difficult. You can explore a lot (except on the city planets). You can go to the other faction's questing zone. Sure, you dont get anything from it (apart from maybe a datacron / lore object) but you can do it. "Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to"." No lorebreak. Show nested quote +On March 27 2012 10:08 deth2munkies wrote:On March 27 2012 07:48 Rah wrote:On March 27 2012 00:53 deth2munkies wrote:On March 26 2012 22:50 Zocat wrote:On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The thing is, just from playing the past couple days, I can tell exactly what they wanted to do: nick subscribers from WoW. That's the entire point of this game, not redefining the genre, not introducing storytelling, not being an awesome game. Do you remember this quote from WoW? "Our research shows that trial players who play World of Warcraft pass level 10 are much more likely to stick with the game for a long time. Currently, only about 30% of our trial players make it past this threshold" I think that is their target audience. They want to hook players with a basically single player experience with some MMO elements mixed in and hope people stay when they have reached max level. And the way the story is told will definitely reach those players. Afaik they also took a lot of old LotRO players. The WoW crowd (hardcore raiders) is not their target. Those hardcore raiders either play WoW or Rift. Players who use the LFR tool? Potential SWTOR players. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
It's basically taking all the basics from WoW and putting them in the Star Wars universe with a few bells and whistles of no actual gameplay value. Anyone who started playing after playing WoW would find the keybindings and interface nearly identical, from the menus to the pet commands, to the skills (as my previous post alludes to). This is meant to let people skip past the "learning to play" phase and go straight on to the "play" phase, and I can understand the value in it, but it is most definitely not directed towards people of my particular proclivities. You have a point here. But ~half a year ago I tried playing some pause-based RPG (dont recall it's name) which had fucking non-norm controls. Leftclick & box to select units? Nope. Right click on the ground to issue a move command? No. I tried to play it. But after 10minutes I deinstalled it, because it didnt follow the control-scheme norm. Copy of skills? Sure, they copied from WoW - but WoW also just copied it. If we go back long enough, apart form threat mechanics, everything is just a copy of P&P RPG abilities. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
The game basically feels like soloing a 5 man over and over and over. Fight groups of 3-4 enemies, right click a quest item, kill a big dude, rinse and repeat. Now show me ANY (rpg) game which cannot be broken down into this formula? Move from A to B. Kill/click something at B. Move to C. What makes games memorable is the story by which these basic mechanics are covered. If I play a singleplayer game which says "Go to X and loot/kill the boss" and there are 20 enemies before that - of course the quest doesnt have to tell me "kill 20 enemies". Because I have to kill them anyway, because there's no option to avoid them. In MMOs you have to add that stuff (though you can avoid it most of the time in SWTOR since bonus quests are meaningless), because there could be another player before you who killed all the enemies for you. On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
One of the more annoying nitpicks is that for story quests you can take out your holoprojector and turn in the quests without having to run back to the questgiver, yet you have to navigate hostile territory to get to all the other 70billion questgivers despite still having the same goddamn holoprojector that should let you contact them. Time filler. Same reason why we cannot have Sprint at lv1. Why there is the mechanic of rested XP (which is basically just a XP penalty - just nicely worded). On March 25 2012 16:26 deth2munkies wrote:
So it's basically a trap for people who played WoW and were looking for a change. They get drawn in initially by the similarities, but anyone whose actually played WoW for long enough will start to sift out the pattern very quickly and get bored. There's nothing substantially different between the games, just bells and whistles of dubious significance. You're still pressing the same buttons to use the same skills on the same mobs in the same dungeons in the same game.
I played WoW a very long time. Same with my guild. We're not bored Though keep in mind - we certainly play less compared to our WoW selves years ago. But we no longer want to spend 5 day/week raiding. I think if I still wanted to do that I would be bored as well. If you say you dont enjoy it - I wish you all the fun you can have in another MMO (or game) of your choice. But the games are different Well I ended up "beating" the beta, I got to lvl 15, got my ship, then the game told me, "Pay us or fuck off" so I uninstalled it. While I expect the game to not be extremely difficult at early levels, I beat the entire thing at 5 fps dying twice, once to running into 3 packs because they hadn't loaded into my screen yet, and once to the "boss" at the end, whom I ended up beating pretty easily the second time despite being 1 (even 2 on one skill) level behind from not going to my trainer. 1) Exactly, that's their target audience, and I'm saying they designed a good game as a WoW trap, but not necessarily a good game on its own that will draw non-MMO players to the genre. The WoW formula is a good one, but it's old. TOR promised an entire new generation that revolutionized the genre with story-based gameplay and meaningful PvP but, in my opinion, utterly failed thoe goals, instead basically being a carbon copy of WoW with mediocre-to-bad voice acting crammed in at every available opportunity. It seems to me like once EA decided to go all-in, they probably made them shave off a bunch of new, engaging features in favor of sticking to formula to ensure success, which saddens me. I guess the main reason I don't like the game is that I'm disappointed heavily in it, unlike my previous arguments, it's not poorly designed in general, it just has bad design goals and poor implementation of some of the new ideas. 2) Agreed, but they didn't HAVE to make it a strict hotkey MMO, they could have changed the combat system to something that felt more like Star Wars. I don't feel like I'm using the force at all, I feel like I'm casting spells. Not just that, I feel like I'm casting the same spells I did in WoW. Like I alluded to before, I played a sage (priest) with a 1.5 sec casting time nuke (smite), a channeled slow/damage (mind flay), a basically instant nuke with a stun (improved mind blast), a 1.5sec casting time small heal (flash heal), a 3sec casting time large heal (greater heal), etc. 3) Guild Wars 2 and a lot of F2P titles have been making innovations to the MMO model as of late that are extremely interesting, unfortunately, most in the latter are crippled by lack of funds and/or highly skilled game designers, so they fail, despite having good ideas. I understand that EA really wanted their 100+ million investment to be safe, but it is so safe I don't feel it's significantly different enough from its predecessors to even constitute a change of pace, much less a revolution. 4) I know the design goal behind it, I was pointing at the massive plothole (one of many) that it produces. 5) I ask you this: Do you feel like you're playing a different game? Or would you feel the same about playing WoW with reduced hours? The reasons I quit WoW were many, but chief among them was the inundation of positive reinforcement that diminished any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Now, instead of feeling good about yourself for doing something you think is awesome, the game TELLS you to feel good about yourself by giving you an achievement or some sort of irrelevant item as a prize. The raid bosses have been reduced to jokes so that people can see the entire storyline and get the feeling of beating a boss without having to work at it and experience failure before success. I see the same thing here in TOR, everywhere. You're rewarded for killing random people with bonus quests, you're constantly told how awesome you are and how you're the chosen one by every NPC in the damn game. There is no real challenge (at least at the low levels, and given how close it sticks to the WoW formula, it's easy to extrapolate) to get the best story options. There's no reason to explore any of the worlds because the questing experience is completely directed and linear, and in fact the zoning off of many worlds into different class quest areas discourages exploration by telling you you flat out CAN'T go into certain places. Add to that the design direction they've been taking, especially with the Legacy system they talked about at SXSW, where you can break the lore in half by having a pureblood sith jedi for no other reason than "we wanted to". Even worse is the fact that you can grab class abilities from other classes based on who you've maxed out, meaning in order to min/max your character, you have to level up 2 characters to max level at least. Basically, I've kind of stepped back my criticism a little bit in some areas and magnified it in others. I see what it's trying to do, but it's not for me and I really don't think it's going to work as a game for any sustained period of time. Copying WoW's successes and attempting to iterate slightly has been tried and failed in legions of F2P games (Runes of Magic, etc) and even AAA games (Vanguard, Rift, etc) and has failed every time. Given that it's a AAA MMO, it's going to make it's money back, but not much more than that. Once the initial love period falls off and the new WoW expansion comes out, people will drift back to WoW as the old standby and the TOR servers will become more deserted than they already are (I saw 4 people on the Jedi starting world). I like this game, and I thought WoW was trash. Your rant to me looks ignorant, you picked the cut and paste out of WoW class because it was familiar to you, and then you complain about it being too familiar. Play a sniper, or powertech if you want something unique. Some classes are cut and paste from WoW while some feel like something new. Some classes are harder to play and some are dumbed down. Bioware wanted something for everyone, it's up to you to choose which you want to go with. Also huttball is amazing once you get it down, it has much more depth than any previous mmorpg pvp instanced. The knockbacks in the game and stun break system are innovative and add depth to the pvp objectives. Congratulations, you beat the low levels, don't act like you know something the Battlemasters don't. I played an agent up to 12 in the beta, the cover mechanic is just a more contrived version of warrior stances: it opens new abilities and gives you minor bonuses when it's on, but confers a penalty (no movement). I could also do a breakdown of abilities if you prefer, but the point is that there aren't any real differences between the TOR skills and WoW skills, there's little to no aim involved in them and they all do something that falls into various combinations of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal. You probably played WoW for a few days/months long after release and never quite got into it, which is perfectly reasonable. I've been playing MMOs since Everquest and played WoW almost since release. I've also played tons of different games both F2P and subscription, I've established a good grasp of the patterns of MMOs and what makes them fun and successful. + Show Spoiler +
I'm not saying that the entire game is bad, I'm saying that it's not what was promised, nowhere near as good as it could be, and that there is no real point in playing it over WoW for PvE content. I personally don't give a flying fuck about PvP and never have*, balance in MMOs is nearly impossible: Arena Season 3-4 taught me that.
*That's not entirely true, S1 I was 3 teams off the glad cutoff and S2 I was top 10%.
EDIT: For the record, I picked Sage because I hate BioWare's dark side/renegade storytelling (it's all "be an asshole" rather than "be evil", and there's a large difference) and I wanted to play a caster. I could do a breakdown that might be a bit more obscure for every class if you gave me an ability list.
If you have this vast MMO background. Why do you say SWTOR's skills are just a various combination of damage/stun/slow/DoT/AoE/heal like WoW (!!). Why would you compare it to WoW and not the multiple other MMOs (or singleplayer games which follow the same scheme). Also cover is more like stealth, not like a warrior's stance. Light saber forms, cells and the shadow/assassin equivalent are copies of the warrior's stance system. The big problems SWTOR imho has atm: - Endgame raiding (nightmare) is way too easy. But they plan to increase the difficulty in the 1.2 operations. I will wait for that. (I actually like the loot system that you dont have to run the same instance 40 times (aka 40 weeks) and still dont have every piece of loot which you want.) - Player position updates in PvP. I always wonder why the complainers never mention this - but seems like they dont PvP enough to notice it :/
Aside fromm the fact that the raid only has 4 bosses for the new operation. I have high hopes for it, top guilds on the PTR right now (at least as of 2-3 days ago) only 1 guild had beat the entire operation on story mode and thats with everyone in full rakata and not a single guild has beaten the first boss on hard mode.
Since nightmare KP drops blackhole commendations now, i beleive the progression will go something like this Nightmare kp until you gear up at least a few pieces ----> Nightmare KP and first 2 bosses on hard mode----> then the rest.
Good progression system IMO I like how they are pretty much making downing Nightmare KP a prerequisite to doing hardmode explosive conflict. My guild hasnt done KP on Nightmare yet as we didnt see much of a point since hard mode drops the same loot, but starting this week we will certainly be trying it out i think.
As for the loot system, I HATE IT! So much lol. Its not enough to make me quit yet, but its certainly pretty lazy on their part. Sure i would like to see more unique rare drops and BIS that arent part of sets (currently no drops in the game that arent part of sets for end game) but my main problem isnt that. Its the fact that they rehash gear through all of their content. HM FP's drop the same gear as normal mode ops (and some of the same gear as hard mode ops) commendation vendors also give you the exact same loot that you can get fromm HM FP's as well as Normal mode ops. 8 and 16 mans also give the same loot. And for instance the new flashpoint is dropping columi gear (from every boss) thats so lazy, new content that gives you the exact same incentive (gear) as old content. And anyone who has run the old content already has 0 incentive to run it.
Sure you can say that people will run it because its fun, but i will probably only run it once or twice because its fun. Character progression is what keeps people repeating content in mmo's and its fun because you are progressing your character which is a huge draw and a huge reason why people like MMO's. Its frusterating to me that BW doesnt get this.I mean i see your point about not having so much gear in say an operation so that you dont have to run it a million times, but having new gear in different modes doesnt pertain to that. Its just lazy on biowares part to not have HM Fp's have their own loot, or commendation vendors to have their own loot so its actually still worth it to farm commedations alongside or after you have a full set of columi / tionese. The commendation vendors and HM FP's having the same loot as operations is whats unforgivable to me, it just devalues the content they create.
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