|
On November 28 2011 23:42 aksfjh wrote:
Your story keeps going as far as I know. I hit 21 last night and I was still chasing the villain(s) laid out from the beginning zone quests. It will likely take you all the way to 50, assuming you don't completely ignore the other quests in the zones.
Right, the story Arcs take you across 3 Acts to level 50 and they all have an ending. I am just wondering if anyone has an approximation on how long an average one takes based on their experience. There are some people on here that have beaten a few arcs throughout the Beta so was hoping for their estimates to get an idea.
|
i played the beta on the weekend and i was quite impressed by how long the leveling took. i didnt do any instance or any pvp, just quests and i needed 10+ hours to hit lvl 13. i died 1 or 2 times i think, so that cant be the reason. i guess you can reduce the time by an hour if you skip all the quest dialogs, which i didnt do, but still. compared to Rift, WoW or other MMOs, thats pretty long to reach lvl 13. i played a jedi sentinel, so i wasnt a tank or healer btw
|
SPACE COMBAT IS SO COOL! OMG, I must buy this game (but only if a friend can have parental controls)
|
On November 28 2011 23:55 Enox wrote:
i played the beta on the weekend and i was quite impressed by how long the leveling took. i didnt do any instance or any pvp, just quests and i needed 10+ hours to hit lvl 13.
Running 20 mins to each location is probably a good part of that. The objectives, while easily found on the wonderful, unmovable, and unalterable map, always seemed really far away at the very end of a cave that is on the other side of the starting zone. I remember having to switch my auto-run key to something more accessible because I was using W more than any of the other keys by far.
|
Played a lot more this weekend than I did on my earlier testing weekend (same release date as Skyrim) and I was pleasantly surprised. It actually got more fun as I leveled, and while my first PvP experience was meh (I'll need to give it another shot) I enjoyed my first flashpoint and it felt moderately difficult for being the very first one. I also liked that it was designed for 2 people, you shouldn't need to coordinate 5 strangers for it to be fun.
On the surface, the companion crafting seems to be cool, but I could see it getting tedious as you just repeatedly send him away to gather shit for you. But it's a nice way to dump credits, and should keep inflation from getting out of control (D2, WoW with Daily Quests).
As long as they stay on the ball and keep improving the game, I think it can be successful.
|
"but I could see it getting tedious as you just repeatedly send him away to gather shit for you."
You can't! Gathering-Missions have ridiculous costs at higher levels. At 150+ you have to pay like 800-1200c for each mission.
|
On November 29 2011 02:29 Rikke wrote:
"but I could see it getting tedious as you just repeatedly send him away to gather shit for you."
You can't! Gathering-Missions have ridiculous costs at higher levels. At 150+ you have to pay like 800-1200c for each mission.
I noticed this too. However, if you keep questing and don't spend your money on things like stims and medpacks, you'll find that the increased time on missions correlates pretty well to loot and quest rewards. It may require some more specific farming later, but at least the farming will be centered around credits instead of materials. The farming can even be done in conjunction with the gathering.
|
The thing I really enjoy so far is that this feels like a single player game with a multiplayer element.
Instead of just loads and loads of quest text, everything seems fleshed out and entices me to continue to play. Especially when each class has its own story arcs.
|
What's interesting about seeing so many people enjoying the Beta Weekend is that I felt the exact same way for about the first 3-4 weeks playing the game, leveling to 40 on a couple different chars etc. I even wrote a glowing review of the game on the Beta Forums. But strangely, I ended up falling into the same trap as many, many other people and just lost interest in the game. It got boring for me, repetitive. I think there are several reasons why, mainly social reasons (i.e. being more of a single-player game), but I never felt that way in EQ or WoW which technically are way more "grind-happy" than TOR.
Sigh, if only I still felt the same as I did when I started it.
|
^ I found too much overlap with the dialogue and quest routes to really get into it past 1 character of each faction, maybe 1 force user and 1 gun user from each would work. Having done a side quest once should let you just bypass the dialogue but that would kind of defeat the point of their hard work with the VOs. It just goes from Cool to Ugh pretty quick for me. I'd love to play for the class quests but with how much side quests you need to do each time makes it tough.
|
I had a blast playing this weekend. Two weekends ago I went with a Juggernaut and an Assassin, and this week I played the alternate ACs on the Blue Team. Sentinel is a BLAST questing. Damage damage damage. Downside: almost zero utility (thru 20) in PVP. In stark contrast to this is the Balance Sage. There's a reason Sages and Sorcerers are really popular in WZs-- Balance specced Sages are ridiculous... but also ridiculously fun. While I hear they were even more broken before, they (we) probably need a little more tweaking, at least in the lower levels, in order to be brought more in line with the other classes.
The other thing I noticed is that the first FPs on each side seemed very different, with respect to their difficulty. We had a hell of a time in my first two trips thru the Empire side one. The Republic side was smooth, even tho we had three people and a companion for our fourth.
I made a list of small bugs and stuff I'll be sending to BW sometime this week. The only game-breaking one I encountered was randomly getting stuck on flat terrain on Taris. When I switched toons for a few minutes and then came back, it stopped happening.
tl;dr-- Balance Sages are awesome (and slightly out of tune), first FP Empire side is harder than its Republic counterpart, random stuckness on flat terrain on Taris (fixed by relog, in my single experience). Also, leveling became more enjoyable the higher in level I became.
Apart from that, a very solid game. There seems to be some lag between command input and execution, but that may have been my connection (80-100ms, I don't remember where the server I was on was located). I found it hard to execute Project while kiting (meaning run away, jump, turn, cast, turn back). Might take some hammering out on their end, or I might just be really rusty.
Also, BW vastly improved tab-targetting from the build two weeks ago. I had a hell of a time cycling thru targets in PVP before, now it's almost WoW-smooth. Whatever we say about WoW, we must also say that they made combat mechanics very smooth-- input to execution was smooth, tab-targetting worked well.
|
On November 29 2011 04:15 SCST wrote:
What's interesting about seeing so many people enjoying the Beta Weekend is that I felt the exact same way for about the first 3-4 weeks playing the game, leveling to 40 on a couple different chars etc. I even wrote a glowing review of the game on the Beta Forums. But strangely, I ended up falling into the same trap as many, many other people and just lost interest in the game. It got boring for me, repetitive. I think there are several reasons why, mainly social reasons (i.e. being more of a single-player game), but I never felt that way in EQ or WoW which technically are way more "grind-happy" than TOR.
Sigh, if only I still felt the same as I did when I started it.
Honestly? Who cares.
Will this game survive? Well, does it really matter? It will certainly make enough money from game sales alone. For a price of a regular game, you get a game, that can last you for weeks, which you can only dream of these days. You get at least two completely different playthroughs, which makes this thing a bargain. You don't even have to bother with other people, just close everything MMO related and play it solo. It would be a mistake, but it is an option.
If it dies later on, you got your moneys worth, if it doesn't, you can always renew and play some more, if they add more story.
|
On November 29 2011 04:15 SCST wrote:
What's interesting about seeing so many people enjoying the Beta Weekend is that I felt the exact same way for about the first 3-4 weeks playing the game, leveling to 40 on a couple different chars etc. I even wrote a glowing review of the game on the Beta Forums. But strangely, I ended up falling into the same trap as many, many other people and just lost interest in the game. It got boring for me, repetitive. I think there are several reasons why, mainly social reasons (i.e. being more of a single-player game), but I never felt that way in EQ or WoW which technically are way more "grind-happy" than TOR.
Sigh, if only I still felt the same as I did when I started it.
Are you also basically saying that what you didn't like about TOR is that it felt more single player during beta? I highly doubt guilds or premade PvP was anything as organized as it will be when TOR officially releases.
Just my .02
|
Canada11369 Posts
One of my biggest complaints about this is they are still being way too conservative with the combat system. It's an archaic hold-over from WoW and probably before, but the whole press buttons and wait for cooldown needs to go. If they had stolen from Mass Effect 1 and 2's combat system, it would have been substantially better. There are the cool abilities on cooldown, but gunfights like first person shooters like aiming and being able to miss. The old cover system was clunky, but changing the combat system would really revolutionize this genre.
My biggest disappointment with MMO's all along has been combat. I came in expecting a little more Ocarina of Time type combat, but the standard has remained unimaginative so far.
|
The game kind of gets more stale as you play longer right now but I think that has to do with not having very many people to play with at higher levels. It's such a pain to find anyone 30+ to do some of the higher flashpoints for me. It's odd though because a lot of the zones say they have 200-300 people in them but general chat is just completely empty. Not sure why that is yet. I know if I was the only level 85 in WoW, it would be INSANELY boring as well. Feels like 80% of people in the beta get to level 10 and either stop or reroll, because I see Black Talon's forming constantly all day and night. I'm hoping this empty feeling in the higher levels goes away on release because I'll actually have other people to play and network with.
|
the game get more fun the more you play
for all the people who stoped under lvl 10 you realy miss the game and cant judge the game from that either .
that like open wow , kill 5 wolf , do one quest and say , ho that the main town here ?
you would look pretty stupid to say that to anyone no ?
anyway im lvl 19 and got my space ship and just open the map ..... see all the world to explore and im going to subs .
if you want judge the game and say that bad finish the damn tutorial plz or get out of the first world actualy ( lvl 10-12 )
|
On November 29 2011 09:06 Falling wrote:
One of my biggest complaints about this is they are still being way too conservative with the combat system. It's an archaic hold-over from WoW and probably before, but the whole press buttons and wait for cooldown needs to go. If they had stolen from Mass Effect 1 and 2's combat system, it would have been substantially better. There are the cool abilities on cooldown, but gunfights like first person shooters like aiming and being able to miss. The old cover system was clunky, but changing the combat system would really revolutionize this genre.
My biggest disappointment with MMO's all along has been combat. I came in expecting a little more Ocarina of Time type combat, but the standard has remained unimaginative so far.
having thousands of players plus thousands of movable objects on one server makes it difficult to implement real time combat with those kind of calculations.
I personally liked EQ2s system where you only had cast times and recovery times, but no global cooldowns.
Melee abilities had a casttime, sometimes as short as 0.15 seconds during which an animation was performed. each ability had a recovery time during which you couldnt cast a 2nd ability, sometimes as short as 0.1 seconds.
Those small downtimes plus animations being able to finish as intended made the combat quite enjoyable.
For example as an assassin you would do your normal thing until you see certain classes using certain raidbuffs that last for a short time only, then you activate your buffs and use a special ability that stealthed you for 5 seconds after every successfull melee ability, then use all positional stealth abilities in a row, making sure to not forget about the ones with long casttimes at the end. Then if you didnt screw up you would use a special ability that did damage based on amount of casttime you spend on stealth abilities for the last seconds, ranging from pityful damage to rivaling your 15 minute cooldown trademark decapitation move.
This performace would require good concentration to do the right keypress every 0.3 seconds, along with the requirement to coordinate your cooldown stealth abilities to be up during this time, while your nonstealth damage over time abilities and debuffs need to be used beforehand.
That was exciting combat without the need to aim manually.
I dont like the WoW way where you have to do nothing for up to 2 seconds after every action you do.
|
Played to twenty this weekend as Sith Warrior(went Juggernaut) and Imperial Agent(Sniper). I have a love hate relationship with this game.
I love Star wars, I grew up watching the films every December, reading the expanded universe novels repeatedly and playing with figures like a boss while I played Jedi Knight and X-wing vs Tie Fighter. To anyone who is a fan this game is like stepping into the best thing ever like getting to play with your action figures as a kid but better because they never had all the cool species action figures.
Having said that, it's flawed. The combat system is sluggish and awkward at times for the Agent and you find yourself out of energy spamming the basic attack even after using the cooldowns to restore energy. That's not fun. The whole system has a gcd on every ability and while you can que the ability up it just feels off. Say what you will about WoW's combat system but the gcd they use is I believe .5 second, while the SWTOR seems to be longer(again I could be wrong but I don't believe I am feel free to correct me) Even on the Sith warrior while the combat felt smoother and more polished I found myself just not feeling like the tanky character that I was supposed to be(Juggernaut is a tank/dmg) I didn't have a way to really pull aggro and while I did have crowd control effects I felt constantly zergish in groups as opposed to any tactical choices. I got a taunt far too late in leveling(I can't be a flashpoint tank if I can't actually pull targets off people).
I do admit the game can be hard even with companion. I don't see where all these people are coming from where they are able to solo all the heroic group stuff. Try soloing Friends of Old all I gotta say. Companion or not you will die I don't care what class you are. The game has an acceptable difficulty curve. I don't feel they take away from the group aspect/social interactions. The starting world heroic quests are -not- really that heroic.
My biggest gripe on this game which is both a compliment to it and annoying is that the story makes your character feel like a part of the bigger story, in Wow(even cataclysm's excellent quest system) you feel more like the soldier and not the hero unit and in this game it's the opposite. You are the hero(or bad guy), the dialogue really pulls it off well but it does it almost too well where I feel my character is no longer my own and it's really just the universes and I am just borrowing it. It's at the sametime amazingly driving to play but also alienating to the player.
Overall, if you like Star Wars, if you like Mmo's you will like this game. However you won't be converted if you don't like mmos, if you expect it to be a wow killer your wrong(the term itself being stupid), and if you think it's going to be some "hardcore"(because having quest locations on a map is ezmode instead of downloading the mod that'd pop up to show you them anyway that's hardcore) experience you will be let down.
It's..it's Kotor the mmo. Pretty much that.
|
One of the cool things about this game: modding equipment. If you find a piece you really like (that's blue quality or better), you can equip different mods to it. This causes the gear to scale, increasing armor or damage with better mods, along with the latent stat increase from the better mods. This allows you to keep wearing cool looking stuff, and give you the chance to incrementally improve without breaking the bank.
|
I played as a knife operative up to level 31, and dabbled in the other specs toward the end. It's an amazingly fun class if you like being versatile and surprising the people you group with, and all their moves look sick. I was able to solo some heroics I ran into easily, and I've topped the charts in both healing and damage seperately in pvp. I went into beta with operative because it looked like the class I was least likely to play, and now it will be my first choice for sure. Fighting jedi with knives? The balls on that guy.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
