Star Wars - The Old Republic - Page 228

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'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.