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So seeing how the servers are down 'till 5PM my time I figured I'd write a recap of my experiences in the game so far. Hopefully some of you who are still on the fence about getting this game can find something relevant to help you decide. I am going to do my very best to avoid spoiling anything story-wise. In short – I’ve played since early access and currently have a level 31 Sith Sorcerer and a level 29 Operative.
The servers
I created my first character, a pureblood inquisitor that was destined for sorcery, on the EU RP-PvE realm Trask Ulgo. Why RP you ask? I always preferred playing on RP servers in WoW because I found a higher overall level of maturity in addition to the added advantage of being able to role-play should one desire it. I originally planned to roll on an RP-PVP server, but seeing that there was only one of those I decided to go for the PvE variant to avoid ques. In retrospect I doubt this decision actually paid off in the maturity department, because the RP realms seem to be populated by teenage drama queens which are just as annoying as the average l33t g4m3r. Moral of the story - no matter what kind of server you choose, /ignore will always serve you well. As for RP, I haven’t yet gotten into that myself. From what I’ve heard it hasn’t taken off in a big way due to people wanting to level, but there certainly are RP hubs scattered around so if you really want to do it, it shouldn’t be too hard to find. There was (is?) a lot of drama regarding server ques early on; stories about 1500 long ques which then error out on you when you’re #5 and back to the end of the line you go. There probably is some truth to that, but personally nothing even remotely close has ever happened to me playing on Trask Ulgo. The longest que I’ve had was 150 on a Friday evening (I waited for 15 minutes). I have never been disconnected while waiting. Actually, I have never been disconnected from the game, period. No crashes either.
The server maintenance is annoying. BioWare is insisting on having it at the same time globally, which means that someone is going to always get screwed no matter what. I really hope they reconsider at some point, because the servers being down 13.00-17.00 is just retarded.
The gameplay
In terms of gameplay, there are two “elephants in the room.” The first is mods, or the lack thereof. The game isn’t moddable and the default UI is something between “meh” and “terrible.” Mods need to happen and they need to happen soon. BioWare is working on it.
The second is a huge deal for me personally, but again this may be due to me having been spoiled by WoW for a long time. There is an excellent thread on the official general forums about this (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=84943) – ability delay. I don’t know what else to call it, the fact of the matter is, TOR’s combat feels clunky and dull compared to WoW’s smooth and sharp. The abilities take way too long to activate (mind you, we’re talking 0.2-0.5 seconds here) and the fact that there’s no auto-attack doesn’t help at all. This is NOT a latency or performance issue. This is a design issue and it needs to be acknowledged and fixed.
These two things aside, the gameplay is not bad. A vast majority of the time you’re fighting groups of enemies while being aided by your companion. There are multiple types of enemies - weak, strong, elite and champion. Solo content consists of mostly weak enemies, sometimes strong enemies and very rarely an elite. Multiple player content shifts everything up by one, so you get strong and elites as trash + champion bosses.
Why is this good? Fighting more than one enemy at once, especially enemies that are different in strength, is a lot more engaging than fighting a single mob. AoE abilities actually have a role to play in solo content and there’s decisions to be made constantly about which mob to CC (if it all), which one dies first, which one the companion focuses on, etc. - there’s a lot more to it than just finding an optimal rotation of abilities to throw on to one bear one hundred times. This element may not be apparent at first (personally, I wasn’t impressed until I played for a couple of days) but it really does make a difference and it’s a significant step forward in MMO evolution as far as I’m concerned.
Questing, contrary to popular belief, is not as bad as Vanilla WoW in terms of organisation. There you had quest NPCs sending you all over the known world for some crappy green. Today, WoW questing is organised in such a way that you reach a quest hub, take all the quests that are given out there, go out and do them, come back and go for another wave or move on to another hub. ToR is not all that different. When you reach a new planet (think zone – Duskwood, Ashenvale, etc. - in WoW) you usually have a class quest taking you there. In addition to that, there will usually be someone waiting for you right there at the spaceport, giving you the first step (99% of the time this is “go talk to my superior”) of what I call a zone-chain – a quest chain that spans the entire planet, from beginning to end. In addition to your class chain and your zone chain, there are “side quests” concentrated in travel hubs (which you visit while on your chains.) These are never chained and are always relatively short (“kill ten rats”) and take place in the immediate area. So the questing structure in ToR is basically this: follow your class and zone-chain one step at a time and do the side quests you encounter on the way as you encounter them. This will assure that you’re never in the wrong part of the zone and minimizes running back and forth between various quest givers and areas and gives an overall smooth feeling of progression.
One more thing regarding quests – almost every quest in the game also has a bonus quest. Let me give an example; you arrive on Tatooine and are given a quest to go find a Jawa who allegedly slept with the Moff’s wife. You reach the cave where this adulterer lives, but there are other hostile Jawas on the way, so you’ll have to kill a couple to get to your target. After you kill the first Jawa, a bonus objective appears below your main objective for the quest – “Jawamageddon: kill 25 Jawas.” This part of the quest is completely optional – if you kill 25 Jawas on your way to your target, you’ll get awarded bonus experience. Most of the time the bonus objectives are 75% completed just by virtue of having to reach your main objective, so it’s not much of a stretch to get to 100%. But if you don’t want to do it, just don’t care or play a stealth class (harhar) you can skip the bonus objectives and still receive all the rewards for the main quest. In addition, bonus quests can be chained. This is usually the case when the main quest is chained as well or exceptionally long. So in the example, after killing the 25 Jawas a probe droid would arrive and give you the followup “Stealing their cheese” which tells you to steal 5 barrels of Jawa cheese lying around the cave or something like that. Elite quests often have chained bonus quests which may lead to actual bonus bosses spawning as well.
Flashpoints (instances in WoW) are somewhat detached from levelling content. In WoW, you quested in Westfall and in the end there were the Deadmines waiting for you to “finalize” the zone with some instanced group content. In ToR, Flashpoints are military operations that take place at various places in the galaxy which rarely coincide with a planet. For instance, the very first Flashpoint in the game becomes available at level 10, right after you choose your advances class, and it’s a transport. Yeah, you and your friends board a transport ship bound for Coruscant/Dromund Kaas and encounter unforeseen complications on the way. Later Flashpoints involve assaulting space stations, responding to distress signals, etc. You access flashpoints from the Republic/Imperial Fleet (the main faction hub) although you often get recruited for them planet side by droids.
A group in ToR consists of 4 players (and/or companions – but really, for Flashpoints after the first, you should be all players) so a tank, healer and 2 DPS. I’m going to be honest here and say that I haven’t run as many Flashpoints as I have other things – this is mainly due to the fact that they feel “removed” from the natural flow of the game and require you to basically stand there doing nothing in the Imperial Fleet while searching for a group. But the encounters themselves are pretty good, they’re not all tank & spanks like it was at the beginning with WoW, but since most people seem to have a pretty terrible grasp of group play right now (people breaking CC all the time, tanks not holding aggro on more than 1 mob at a time and healers looking busy but not really doing anything, it’s all there…) they can feel hard at times. That said, if you get a decent group they’re a lot of fun.
Warzones are surprisingly fun (I haven’t had fun in WoW’s BG’s in a long time, so this came as a surprise to me). As you may have heard, there are no level brackets. Instead, lower level players get their stats and damage boosted to level 50 levels… I’m not going to comment on how well this works since fighting a higher level opponent still feels like you’re fighting some kind of Flashpoint boss, but I found that I didn’t really care and that I was far from not making a difference. Voidstar and the Alderaan Warzone are both pretty awesome, Hutball is meh, but that’s just my opinion. The biggest problem with PvP in my opinion is, as I said before, ability delay and all-round smoothness.
Crew skills, the GTN, credits
Crew skills (professions) are somewhat arcane right now. Every character can choose to learn 3 crew skills from a pool of gathering, crafting and “mission” skills (personally I’d call these advanced gathering skills, but hey). Gathering skills allow you to gather the basic materials (green quality) needed by crafting skills. Mission skills allow you to gather blue and purple materials required by crafting skills as well as some other things like various recipes, companion gifts, light or dark side points, etc.
Theoretically they’re clear and everything makes sense, but in practice the economy is pretty crazy because no one actually has any idea how much things are worth. This compounds the problem of crew missions – in ToR, there are two types of gathering. You can gather materials from nodes scattered around planets and/or you can send your companions on “crew missions” – you pay a set amount of credits (depends on the mission) and the companion becomes unavailable for a set amount of time. He then returns to you with a set kind of materials (if you send him off to a power crystal gathering mission, it’s going to be power crystals). The fact of the matter is you ARE going to be sending your companions on missions because the world nodes aren’t really that abundant. This means that you are spending money to gather resources, whereas in WoW this would be impossible, since gathering from a node is never a loss. So suddenly, your character is paying for his skills, his speeder on 25 as well as for his gathering escapades and let me tell you, it does not work itself out. You need to either be selling stuff you gather on the GTN (the auction house) or you need to have slicing as your 3d skill and spam lockboxes. Anything else means you’re either not keeping your professions up to date or you won’t be able to afford anything pretty soon.
The GTN (galactic trade network) is ToR’s auction house. But let’s be honest… it’s a pretty terrible copy of the original. For starters, when you’re looking for something, you are REQUIRED to know at least the category and subcategory of the thing that you’re looking for, before you’re allowed to search. This means that if I’m looking for Krayt Dragon Scales, I need to know that they’re a crafting material that comes from Underworld Trading. After putting this information in, I can then filter the results by name. It feels cumbersome and annoying. It’s hard to get a comprehensive look of the market because you can’t just search for “everything purple” like you could in WoW. But after the initial kneejerk reaction of “this sucks” I actually started using it and it’s far from useless – where my Sorcerer got all his credits from Slicing, my Operative gets hers from Underworld Trading and the GTN. Yes, the GTN is not perfect. It is, in fact, one of the worst things in this game. But it’s not useless and most of all, due to slicing, it isn’t mandatory. If you really can’t get used to it, hate it, don’t want to have anything to do with it, get slicing as your mission skill and your monetary needs will be met for the foreseeable future. By then, hopefully, the GTN gets much improved and the economy stabilises as well.
Credits in this game are not hard to get. But it’s easy to eat through them with crew missions. In addition to that, think about this for a moment. In Vanilla WoW, the first gold “benchmark” was your normal mount on level 40 – it cost a staggering 100 gold. In ToR, you get your mount on level 25 and it costs 50.000 credits. Yes, 50k. So it’s very easy to feel like you’re making a lot of money when you have thousands of credits rolling in, but that’s really only a couple of gold pieces. So my advice to anyone and everyone is – for your first character, decide which crafting profession you want. Learn it, and learn its gathering profession. Then learn slicing as your 3d skill and spam those lock box missions like crazy. You’ll be able to level your crafting profession normally through greens, all the while paying for all your expenses with slicing and generating a healthy surplus for when you’ll want to drop slicing and pick up the relevant mission skill at 50. Oh and just a personal little rant… if you’re thinking of going Cybertech for the mount – don’t. It’s a fucking brown tractor.
The story
Suffice it to say, the story aspect of this game is mind-blowing. Both of the stories I’ve played so far (Inquisitor and Agent) have been engaging and immersive. The zone-chains are good in their own right and the side quests offer just enough background so that they don’t feel arbitrary.
There is only one complaint I have here and it’s probably more my problem than the game’s problem. There are two reasons I stopped playing my Inquisitor – one is a huge population problem (all inquisitors, all the time… everywhere) and the second is the fact that he felt like this weirdly fake character. I decided to play him as light side right at the start, which meant that Khem Val (my companion) hated everything I did. So I had to choose – hold true to my characters… well, character, or do this weird thing where I pick all the light side answers where points are concerned but then all the brainless belligerent dark-side answers wherever I can to please my companion. Well, I chose the latter for whatever reason (probably the secret min-maxer in me  ) and I started to hate my character for it. Make of this what you will.
Well, that was what came to mind right now. I hope I was informative enough, but feel free to ask me any questions about the game and my experiences with it and I’ll do my best to answer in a timely fashion.
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Story makes the game worth instantly worth every penny. The rest is basically just bonus
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On December 28 2011 00:02 Mattchew wrote:
Story makes the game worth instantly worth every penny. The rest is basically just bonus
I agree completely, it's a fantastic story for 8 different characters. The game is an actualy RPG MMO. I LOVE IT! XD
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I agree. the story makes the game worth a purchase. But the multiplayer aspects are horrible, absolutely. This should have been a single player game and everyone involved would have been much more happy.
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On December 27 2011 23:37 RyN wrote:
The servers
I created my first character, a pureblood inquisitor that was destined for sorcery, on the EU RP-PvE realm Trask Ulgo. Why RP you ask? I always preferred playing on RP servers in WoW because I found a higher overall level of maturity in addition to the added advantage of being able to role-play should one desire it. I originally planned to roll on an RP-PVP server, but seeing that there was only one of those I decided to go for the PvE variant to avoid ques. In retrospect I doubt this decision actually paid off in the maturity department, because the RP realms seem to be populated by teenage drama queens which are just as annoying as the average l33t g4m3r. Moral of the story - no matter what kind of server you choose, /ignore will always serve you well. As for RP, I haven’t yet gotten into that myself. From what I’ve heard it hasn’t taken off in a big way due to people wanting to level, but there certainly are RP hubs scattered around so if you really want to do it, it shouldn’t be too hard to find. There was (is?) a lot of drama regarding server ques early on; stories about 1500 long ques which then error out on you when you’re #5 and back to the end of the line you go. There probably is some truth to that, but personally nothing even remotely close has ever happened to me playing on Trask Ulgo. The longest que I’ve had was 150 on a Friday evening (I waited for 15 minutes). I have never been disconnected while waiting. Actually, I have never been disconnected from the game, period. No crashes either.
Heh, you've never played WoW on a US RP server, then? It was always like that. Just as much immaturity (almost more, I'd reckon) than the normal/PvP servers.
Is the server you're on a high population server at the hours that you play? Can you determine server population in ToR?
On December 27 2011 23:37 RyN wrote:The storySuffice it to say, the story aspect of this game is mind-blowing. Both of the stories I’ve played so far (Inquisitor and Agent) have been engaging and immersive. The zone-chains are good in their own right and the side quests offer just enough background so that they don’t feel arbitrary. There is only one complaint I have here and it’s probably more my problem than the game’s problem. There are two reasons I stopped playing my Inquisitor – one is a huge population problem (all inquisitors, all the time… everywhere) and the second is the fact that he felt like this weirdly fake character. I decided to play him as light side right at the start, which meant that Khem Val (my companion) hated everything I did. So I had to choose – hold true to my characters… well, character, or do this weird thing where I pick all the light side answers where points are concerned but then all the brainless belligerent dark-side answers wherever I can to please my companion. Well, I chose the latter for whatever reason (probably the secret min-maxer in me ) and I started to hate my character for it. Make of this what you will. Well, that was what came to mind right now. I hope I was informative enough, but feel free to ask me any questions about the game and my experiences with it and I’ll do my best to answer in a timely fashion.
Does the game's ENTIRE storyline change based on which class you pick, or is it just the "beginning" sections that are the same? Or is there a general overarching storyline, with side stuff that's specfic to your class?
Also, what's the least popular class, in your experience?
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Italy12246 Posts
Does the game's ENTIRE storyline change based on which class you pick, or is it just the "beginning" sections that are the same? Or is there a general overarching storyline, with side stuff that's specfic to your class?
Each class has it's own competely different story that goes from level 1 to 50; each planet has it's own sub-story.
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On December 28 2011 00:22 goiflin wrote:
Heh, you've never played WoW on a US RP server, then? It was always like that. Just as much immaturity (almost more, I'd reckon) than the normal/PvP servers.
Is the server you're on a high population server at the hours that you play? Can you determine server population in ToR?
That's true, I've only ever played on EU servers. It is possible to determine the server population to the same degree it's possible in WoW - the server list shows server populations as "normal, heavy, very heavy or full" along with a predicted wait time if there's a que. From memory I'd say Trask Ulgo is "heavy" to "very heavy" when I tend to log on, but I'm not 100% on this. Naturally, ques only happen when the server is full, so it probably gets to that point as well in the late evening time.
Does the game's ENTIRE storyline change based on which class you pick, or is it just the "beginning" sections that are the same? Or is there a general overarching storyline, with side stuff that's specfic to your class?
Also, what's the least popular class, in your experience?
No. Every class has it's own storyline that changes in subtle ways depending on your characters decisions (light vs. dark). The all-encompassing storyline (the non-class quests) doesn't change with your class, although some dialogue may be different (my Inquisitor was always greeted with "my lord" whereas my agent with "sir.")
So in total, you have 8 class story lines (4 republic and 4 imperial) + 2 all-encompassing story lines (1 republic and 1 imperial).
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bought the game aswell, story is kick ass :D
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I hit 50 two days ago. The story is indeed very cool (Sith Warrior, at least) and worth every penny if you ask me.
Haven't had much experience with PvP or Raid content yet, so hard to say anything else. But i bet they will be refreshing to some people after years of WoW or other MMOs.
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could you elaborate on the ability delay? does each skill have a default .25-.5 second cast time or it just takes that long for no reason?
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Lets see how much of a nerf Slicing got this patch.
Hopefully not much >.< I only made 150k off of it.
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On December 28 2011 01:08 Whole wrote:
could you elaborate on the ability delay? does each skill have a default .25-.5 second cast time or it just takes that long for no reason?
It's hard to explain. It feels like latency, but it's not. My guess is that the abilities are bound to the animations to an extreme degree, so that there's an actual tangible disconnect between the keypress and the effect, with the animation in between.
Lets see how much of a nerf Slicing got this patch.
Hopefully not much >.< I only made 150k off of it.
I don't think it's going to get nerfed, didn't see anything like that in the patch notes. Nevermind, the latest patch notes say Slicing profits have been brought down "in line" with the other crew skills.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
I posted this in Swtor too,
On December 28 2011 01:13 Kipsate wrote:
I bought the game, so far I REALLY REALY like the story and the way quest interacting is done with light/dark, I also really like the companion system, what I dislike is the combat, it feels rather clunky(so far anyway), while my Mercenary has all kinds of cool moves, my Sith Assasin feels a little bland.
The combat feels incredibly clunky and not smooth, but the RPG elements in this MMO are really good, you can play it like an RPG and play it as an MMO aswell, which is great.
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On December 28 2011 01:22 RyN wrote:Show nested quote +On December 28 2011 01:08 Whole wrote:
could you elaborate on the ability delay? does each skill have a default .25-.5 second cast time or it just takes that long for no reason? It's hard to explain. It feels like latency, but it's not. My guess is that the abilities are bound to the animations to an extreme degree, so that there's an actual tangible disconnect between the keypress and the effect, with the animation in between. Show nested quote +Lets see how much of a nerf Slicing got this patch.
Hopefully not much >.< I only made 150k off of it. I don't think it's going to get nerfed, didn't see anything like that in the patch notes. Nevermind, the latest patch notes say Slicing profits have been brought down "in line" with the other crew skills.
This problem plagues a lot of MMOs. WoW set the gold standard in terms of character control. It is difficult to explain but your character just feels more responsive and crisp. I don't think this is as big a deal for people who haven't played WoW. I used to play LOTRO for a long time and I never noticed this because I didn't know any better. After I took a break from LOTRO to try out WoW, I never noticed a difference either. It was only after I went back to LOTRO briefly that I finally noticed how much crisper control in WoW is... my LOTRO character felt like it was underwater the whole time.
I hope Bioware can fix this issue because it frustrates a lot of former WoW players who are looking to switch over. This is the massive thread on the SWTOR forums about this issue: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=84943
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Good writeup. Mimics my thoughts pretty much, although I have no problem with the UI For all the time I played wow I stuck with the default!
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Thanks for the great writeup, was considering to buy and start to play an MMO again after overcoming my Guild Wars addiction 3 years ago :D but if the pvp is really bad I won't buy it now, maybe later ( Im busy with university anyway). The videos and streams I've been watching the past days also didn't convince me yet.
Guild Wars 2 is going to be my MMO anyway when it's released :D
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The ability delay is VERY annoying for me too...
Whenever an ability is instant cast, expect a 1 sec- casting time.
"Instant cast" just means that the animation starts instantly
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Going to add my little bit - playing lvl 30 Jedi Knight/Guardian, so not exactly a newbie, who's played for mere couple of hours. I also take a precise time to explore every quest and stuff I find, so I most likely didn't miss anything, regarding my concerns. Also note, that I got the game and intend to play it mostly for the sake of the Jedi storyline.
No option to toggle hood Off/On
Very little character customization
It is really disappointing, that we pick a character appearance in the beginning of the game, only to have their face covered for most of the game. Furthermore, we've been shown models, where the hoods are off, on the similar or even the same type of the apparel. Why bother making characters unique, when the hood on always completelly kills it? I could go on, regarding character look as well - I lack the possibility to customize the character even after you create them, even if it was by a vendor. old SW Galaxies had that, so why a modern Star Wars game shouldn't allow that? I could also critize the quality of textures of my Jedi Knight; they are in ridiculously low-res, that they seem so awfully blurred when you look closer...and yes, I play on the highest possible graphics settings.
No day/night cycle
Seriously, even older games had that. It may be a small thing for some, but it somewhat lowers the immersion into the game. Star Wars was always meant to be an epic experience, and small details like that would be simply awesome.
Storyline
To not be only negative, I absolutelly love the storyline. It's enough StarWarsish for me, I always overjoy when I can do some good deed, get some Light Side points and generally to be a do-gooder of the galaxy. The game lets me to do that, so I'm actually content with that. I'm also surprised how many quests there are.
Non-customizable UI
Well, that is quite a bummer as well. I want to customize it in a way, so it's comfortable for me to look at... from SC2, I learnt a specific pattern on which I go and look at my screen, and it has been pain for me to play SWTOR...and no ability to make it less painful at all.
Too 'WoWish'/limited gameplay
I'm not denying it. I disliked the way WoW was played, found it dull and boring & is one of reasons why I grew up to dislike MMO's as a genre, as they are basically just copies of WoW, more or less. It seems WoW has created some sort of standard in MMO genre, a standard I simply do not like, especially if I look back at old MMO's - I actually didn't get to see old SWGalaxies, when there was no level system and you could just mix your character the way you wanted. You could even have player characters to teach you the skills. It made an endless possibilities as to what you could do. In Ultima Online, you also got to train any skill you wanted, you had variety and again, total sand-box with many, many possibilities as to how to mix your character. Today? You pick a pre-defined class and are limited by that. Not to mention the need for mindless grind and mostly the same type of quests 'bring, kill' kind of things. Admittedly, SW:TOR at least has quest spiced up by storylines, but still... sometimes getting the quest itself done is pain in the rear end.
To bottomline it
I play this game mostly for the story as I've been an avid Star Wars fan & I got the game as a gift from my significant other, as far as MMO part is concerned, though, it offers nothing new. Guess I'll have to wait till unforseeable future to see MMO genre revitalized and with more 'sand-box' features, where you have freedom as to how to train your character, as well as in more complexion and variety. Sticking with SC2, for sure...
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From what i've read (not on this topic ) people comment that it is basically wow ,clunkier and with the same level of grinding BUT with a Star Wars spin,can you confirm that?
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The biggest favor you can do yourself when thinking about this game is to drop the idea that "this is basically WoW." It doesn't matter what game, now or in however many years, you play - if "it's basically WoW" it will never be as good as WoW. Comparing it to WoW is obviously a different matter, I do that myself. But this is it's own game and the sooner people realize that, the sooner they'll be able to enjoy it.
The combat is definitely clunkier than WoW, but as some other posters here said, it's no worse than any other MMO. Grind-wise I'd say it's about the same as Cataclysm and infinitely better than Vanilla or TBC. The first two words in it's title stand for "Star Wars" so I think that final question is pretty redundant.
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EPT
