While I still enjoy SWTOR and def feel it is not nearly as poor a game as many believe I do see a lot of the OP points other then the story, SWTOR has the best story telling of any MMO to come out hands down(that I have played). Of course that stops once you hit max level and that is where most people stopped playing the game. Lack of world events with any structure and lack of updates are big for me. I completely agree the graphics espcially on stuff like gear lack depth and variety. I also do not like the removable mod system to the gear I think that is poor design along with the entire crafting system. I do enjoy pvp in warzones a lot though I agree if you spend any length of time in them the constant stuns begin to devour your will to play.
There are many, many details to cite. If you recently went to Divinity's Reach in GW2 you SEE how an alife, animated GOOD city is. With NPC which walk and chat, with details to see! THAT is how a living city looks like! Not these dead zombie apocalypse world like Coruscant! Bioware devs ALWAYS said what was not important. Swimming wasn't important, funny sidequests weren't important, non-human races weren't important... but guess what: it is such small things which ARE important!
But above all: ARROGANCE. Sheer and bleak arrogance.
I hated it down to my guts and bones how they always brushed of every critique with their vision and how they knew ALL BETTER! Well better my ass!
I wrote what to make better here until my fingers bled! Read my f***** old posts!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I still love the game because of the story aspect and also because it's star wars. But what made me quit the game was:
- All my guildies left so i pretty much played alone for a while.
- The static world, it doesn't feel alive like for instance WoW or GW2.
- The loading screens were driving me insane, i know it's alot better now but still not good enough.
- The time bioware took to release new content/improvements.
Overall i think it's a good game and i'll be back to it once it goes F2P, but i still can't help to think that it could have been so much more if it was in the right hands. :
Hopefully if Bioware decides to make a Mass Effect MMO they do it right.
Welcome to the club. The club for those who love SW but think SWTOR was a downright cruddy game.
You were the last holdout, if all your guildies quit before you :-)
It won't be very enjoyable with all the freemium gimps scheduled to take place though, just sayin. You knew the game before when you could use the GTN, the mailbox, shout stuff in general, have adequate inventory/bank. Freemium downgrades you. Flashpoints are going to be limited in the new freemium game, along with PVP WZ's. So if you liked WZ's, you will only be able to do a small number per week. It was hinted at just a few per week via interviews with SWTOR staff.
To be honest, there were multiple causes that I stopped playing.
1. No PVP. Open PVP was dead. Ilium was dead. Only 4 8vs8 warzones. You could be warned, banned for doing PVP even on PVP servers. When one guild on pvp server invided some planet and took control over it they got warned for doing so. WTF ?
2. Grind, grind, grind - lvl 1-50 is just full of kill 20-40 monsters (with multiple stages sometimes, kill 40 then 20 and then 10) AND NOTHING MORE. Then you are faceroll on lvl 50 and you must grind more. And it's always like this. Grind on easy mode set so hard stuff can become easy. Nothing more. Pathethic.
3. No replayability, 100% linear. All that lines, dialogues and voice actors and they were unable to do interesting story. Not even ONCE. Seriously - GW2 have branching in main story while you can't pick dialogue lines !. Biofail. You have 2 factions. While personal story (one short quest every few levels) are unique (yet still broing) everything plays the same. Same quests, same order, same place, same time. Everything the same. Once you played once both republic and empire - you are doomed to repeat same stuff over and over.
4. Pathetic combat and class system. I was expecting some side switching or something. NO. You are Rep or Imp. That's it. Combat is old school stuff and have lot of flaws. And you can use only 1 single weapon whole time. Now compare it to GW2 where every class can use multiple weapons, having different combinations of that weapons to have multiple sets of skills just because of that. And you can switch dam weapons. IT'S COMMON SENSE. When your rifle is out of ammo, pick up a pistol. In TOR you have nothing.
5. Boring like hell after you hit 50.
6. But the worst part is that they have NO F****** IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING. They nerfed my class (Operative Agent) to the ground making stealth burst dps class some mele fighter running around with a small knife. They nerfed it to the point where other class (Assasin) could do exact same thing as Operative but BETTER. Totally stupid. Then they buffed one of the best mele classes (Warrior/Knight) even more and make it next FOTOM class.
7. Nothing fresh. When I was playing TOR there was old smell all around. It was like WoW or Rift but with different textures. Except dialogues. I stopped playing probably after 3 months.
Let's start with the first thing. I'm no friend of MMO questing. This particular aspect is rather a general rant and is not specifically aimed at SWTOR. Developers think they are doing all of their customers a favour by streamlining the questing experience. Streamlining this aspect just makes it even more pointless. Accept a quest and then let the automap direct you where to go. The quest journal as well will keep your progress so you always know when a task is done. You end up picking as many quests as possible, work on it like on a ToDo list. Return to get your rewards. No need to read quest descriptions or follow dialogues with NPCs. Yawn. If a game does all the thinking for me then it's: adios amigo.
This leads me to the next issue. You can only interact with Quest givers and occasionally continue a companion storyline. Bioware boasted to bring MMOs to a new level with their focus on story. But why can't you communicate with other NPCs? In a good single player CRPG there are not only quest givers but also lots of other NPCs to interact with (for hints, atmosphere, etc.). Older CRPGs even allowed to talk with your party members any time you wanted for informations about their background and for general advice. Admittedly with the companion system Bioware did more than other MMOs did. But this only lacks in comparison with what a good CRPG can do (and did).
The game world is very huge but you can hardly interact with it. There is a chair in a cantina. No, you can't sit on it. There is a door. No you can't open or close it. There is a lake or river. No, you can't swim and dive there. There is a cart? No, don't even think about it. There is a ladder. No you can't climb up. To be fair other MMOs as well have limited options for interaction.
For a science fiction themed MMO there is a lack of space (space on rails isn't enough). You can't get a ship to transport other players from planet A to planet B. Well, actually your party members can enter your ship if they have already unlocked their own ships.
The pvp is fun, hardly different from what other MMOs offer. But you'd even expect some PVP in space. On a PVP server you hardly ran into players from the opposite faction because the leveling zones where kept seperate.
Some more activities like pod racing or pazaak would have been interesting as well.
Bioware simply deliverd a standard MMO. They probably followed the trends of the past years and made their game accordingly. In the end it was too streamlined which in turn made it feel soulless.
For me SWTOR lacks much that makes a good single player game. Even F2P wouldn't tempt me to go back. On the other hand it's a standard MMO with the standard gear threadmill. Must all activities in this genre revolve around the so called vertical progression? Yawn.
The game is too linear in where to go and when to go there. One would think it would be safe to visit all those planets no matter your level to at least visit the capital city.
A game of civilization with a random map and random factions has more replayability than a themepark MMO like SWTOR.
1) Really hackneyed classic MMO endgame. Unfitting a Star Wars game, in my opinion. Bioware should have taken a good look at Star Wars and come up with at least *some* new gaming mechanics that would fit it; not try to fit Star Wars into classic MMO mechanics.
Also, bad implementation of said mechanics.
I would so like to see something closer to their original vision: A KOTOR 1, 2, 3... 9. More of a Bioware game.
2) Dead world. They've really botched that "living breathing Star Wars universe" feel. All the planets / cities feel like ghost towns. No sense of background, no proper NPC life... That's a big downer for me in an MMO. For a good way of doing this, see GW2's cities.
The way they handled Server transfers mainly, looking at SWTOR as a game by itself
But overall, the fact that SWG was shut down. SWG and SWTOR would have made a great combination. I liked the crafting, housing, Beast Master, Space etc in SWG but SWTOR did not need to have that for me, if SWG was still going. I would have played both - probably SWG mostly and then SWTOR too. However as SWG is not going, it made SWTOR very shallow, and pretty much done with it now. If SWG was still active I probably would not have reached level 10 on one character in SWTOR by now, and probably subbed to it every month since Dec/Jan
Only reason I stopped playing is that I ran out of story and didn't feel like playing through another character as areas were becoming light on other players.
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Too "Wowified". Everything, classes, quests, shear amount of specials, end game, character creator, everything. If I wanted to play WoW, I'd play WoW. The 1s who like WoW will still be there. Why developers insist on WoW copies, after so many have bit the dust, never ceases to amaze me.
You play in TOR's world, you don't "live" in it. As other have said, no housing, nothing to call your own, no making your mark on the world. Everything is as the other guy's with the same class.
Crafting reaked. There is simply nothing in TOR except combat.
All the reasons why this game failed for me is stated above. No reason to repeat it. There are things in the game that I do like, but the negative outweighs the positive.
In any case, I would have been happier if they would have just spent all that money on creating a CGI TOR movie and making KOTOR 3 than wasting it on this wannabe MMO disappointment.
Everything was actually good in the game, except endgame.
I vividly remember nearly no complaints with the game, other than class balance woes and the fact they didnt have a high quality graphical settings...that is untill people started running hard modes/raids and playing on ilum. Thats when shit turned sour.
I remeber how boring the endgame pve was, how much of a pain it was to find a group since few did anything other than pvp (wich i found to be true in rift as well...for some reason people hate endgame pvp these days i guess rifts was good too unlike sw)...oh and since everyone was pvping and ilum was a laggy hot mess of zerg standoffs...everyone just pvp queued...which of course got boring fast.
Huttball was my favorite take on CTF to date however, really enjoyed that, the rest of the pvp maps sucked imo and you didnt get to choose.
Eitherway...from what everyone else here will say, know that it was a great game untill you got to endgame or started rerolling a bunch. Also note i hate themeparks for the most part, which is why i was surprised when i enjoyed the leveling and storyline.
I waas excited for this game. I bought the collectors, and a 6 month sub.
I was in denial, bought another 6 month sub while not playing much.
I am shocked this game isnt awesome. My favorite games of all time were from Bioware. MassEffect2, Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon age Origins. I also loved Star Wars buying the blue ray 6 movie set.
The great aspect of the game is the story, incredible sound and Voice acting. Then its a sharp down hill from there.
The combat was not bad, but not great. character development was not complex or interesting to keep you coming back. While the storyline is good, you have to grind and grind to get to the next part of the story. So it becomes disjointed. Progression was very bland.
The BIGGEST most obvious thing with this game for me, is the complete lack of effort. There is no attention to detail. Classes from republic to empire are lazy mirrors. Funneled to the same story areas. The character creation was extremly weak and had me shocked. The graphics, animations, NPC movement, environment was poor. Its like they went quick instead of took pride in their work. One quest for example, I'm out to get a bad guy who had prisoners. Im walking around in a boxey looking room, and theres 4 slaves tied up to a bed. EACH Bed and EACH slave/prisoner, was the EXACT SAME BALD HEADED GUY. What? were they quad druplets or just lazy programming? They couldnt atleast make them look different?
I'm so dissapointed and felt that I had reasonable expectations.
Now Im giving GW2 a try. I was kinda mad at the GW2 crowd here on this site, because they seem to WANT to bash SWTOR. Well, it turns out they are right. The attention to detail, mentioned above, is through the roof. Everything looks hand placed and high quality. The underwater combat is the most amazing thing I have ever seen from ANY game doing underwater stuff.
I liked the battlegrounds, more than in any other MMOs of the last years. But since I didn't like the other aspects of the game (dungeons, raids, crafting), I quitted. Didnt want have a sub just for bgs.
I wasn't the hero. I was given control of someone else's hero. Actually I was given the choice between three different heros someone else wrote. And wrote poorly. All three choices may have been the 'hero', but I thought all 3 were dipshits. On every class. Period.
I should probably add i was content with the 'world grouping' as i grouped up and did alot of that content, However i was not pleased with their 'instanced content'.
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Comments
While I still enjoy SWTOR and def feel it is not nearly as poor a game as many believe I do see a lot of the OP points other then the story, SWTOR has the best story telling of any MMO to come out hands down(that I have played). Of course that stops once you hit max level and that is where most people stopped playing the game. Lack of world events with any structure and lack of updates are big for me. I completely agree the graphics espcially on stuff like gear lack depth and variety. I also do not like the removable mod system to the gear I think that is poor design along with the entire crafting system. I do enjoy pvp in warzones a lot though I agree if you spend any length of time in them the constant stuns begin to devour your will to play.
Thats about it for me.
It was nothing like the original three movies.
Thats it.
There are many, many details to cite. If you recently went to Divinity's Reach in GW2 you SEE how an alife, animated GOOD city is. With NPC which walk and chat, with details to see! THAT is how a living city looks like! Not these dead zombie apocalypse world like Coruscant! Bioware devs ALWAYS said what was not important. Swimming wasn't important, funny sidequests weren't important, non-human races weren't important... but guess what: it is such small things which ARE important!
But above all: ARROGANCE. Sheer and bleak arrogance.
I hated it down to my guts and bones how they always brushed of every critique with their vision and how they knew ALL BETTER! Well better my ass!
I wrote what to make better here until my fingers bled! Read my f***** old posts!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Welcome to the club. The club for those who love SW but think SWTOR was a downright cruddy game.
You were the last holdout, if all your guildies quit before you :-)
It won't be very enjoyable with all the freemium gimps scheduled to take place though, just sayin. You knew the game before when you could use the GTN, the mailbox, shout stuff in general, have adequate inventory/bank. Freemium downgrades you. Flashpoints are going to be limited in the new freemium game, along with PVP WZ's. So if you liked WZ's, you will only be able to do a small number per week. It was hinted at just a few per week via interviews with SWTOR staff.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8NNHmV3QPw&feature=plcp
Recognize the voice? Yep sounds like Penny Arcade's Extra Credits.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
To be honest, there were multiple causes that I stopped playing.
1. No PVP. Open PVP was dead. Ilium was dead. Only 4 8vs8 warzones. You could be warned, banned for doing PVP even on PVP servers. When one guild on pvp server invided some planet and took control over it they got warned for doing so. WTF ?
2. Grind, grind, grind - lvl 1-50 is just full of kill 20-40 monsters (with multiple stages sometimes, kill 40 then 20 and then 10) AND NOTHING MORE. Then you are faceroll on lvl 50 and you must grind more. And it's always like this. Grind on easy mode set so hard stuff can become easy. Nothing more. Pathethic.
3. No replayability, 100% linear. All that lines, dialogues and voice actors and they were unable to do interesting story. Not even ONCE. Seriously - GW2 have branching in main story while you can't pick dialogue lines !. Biofail. You have 2 factions. While personal story (one short quest every few levels) are unique (yet still broing) everything plays the same. Same quests, same order, same place, same time. Everything the same. Once you played once both republic and empire - you are doomed to repeat same stuff over and over.
4. Pathetic combat and class system. I was expecting some side switching or something. NO. You are Rep or Imp. That's it. Combat is old school stuff and have lot of flaws. And you can use only 1 single weapon whole time. Now compare it to GW2 where every class can use multiple weapons, having different combinations of that weapons to have multiple sets of skills just because of that. And you can switch dam weapons. IT'S COMMON SENSE. When your rifle is out of ammo, pick up a pistol. In TOR you have nothing.
5. Boring like hell after you hit 50.
6. But the worst part is that they have NO F****** IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING. They nerfed my class (Operative Agent) to the ground making stealth burst dps class some mele fighter running around with a small knife. They nerfed it to the point where other class (Assasin) could do exact same thing as Operative but BETTER. Totally stupid. Then they buffed one of the best mele classes (Warrior/Knight) even more and make it next FOTOM class.
7. Nothing fresh. When I was playing TOR there was old smell all around. It was like WoW or Rift but with different textures. Except dialogues. I stopped playing probably after 3 months.
Let's start with the first thing. I'm no friend of MMO questing. This particular aspect is rather a general rant and is not specifically aimed at SWTOR. Developers think they are doing all of their customers a favour by streamlining the questing experience. Streamlining this aspect just makes it even more pointless. Accept a quest and then let the automap direct you where to go. The quest journal as well will keep your progress so you always know when a task is done. You end up picking as many quests as possible, work on it like on a ToDo list. Return to get your rewards. No need to read quest descriptions or follow dialogues with NPCs. Yawn. If a game does all the thinking for me then it's: adios amigo.
This leads me to the next issue. You can only interact with Quest givers and occasionally continue a companion storyline. Bioware boasted to bring MMOs to a new level with their focus on story. But why can't you communicate with other NPCs? In a good single player CRPG there are not only quest givers but also lots of other NPCs to interact with (for hints, atmosphere, etc.). Older CRPGs even allowed to talk with your party members any time you wanted for informations about their background and for general advice. Admittedly with the companion system Bioware did more than other MMOs did. But this only lacks in comparison with what a good CRPG can do (and did).
The game world is very huge but you can hardly interact with it. There is a chair in a cantina. No, you can't sit on it. There is a door. No you can't open or close it. There is a lake or river. No, you can't swim and dive there. There is a cart? No, don't even think about it. There is a ladder. No you can't climb up. To be fair other MMOs as well have limited options for interaction.
For a science fiction themed MMO there is a lack of space (space on rails isn't enough). You can't get a ship to transport other players from planet A to planet B. Well, actually your party members can enter your ship if they have already unlocked their own ships.
The pvp is fun, hardly different from what other MMOs offer. But you'd even expect some PVP in space. On a PVP server you hardly ran into players from the opposite faction because the leveling zones where kept seperate.
Some more activities like pod racing or pazaak would have been interesting as well.
Bioware simply deliverd a standard MMO. They probably followed the trends of the past years and made their game accordingly. In the end it was too streamlined which in turn made it feel soulless.
For me SWTOR lacks much that makes a good single player game. Even F2P wouldn't tempt me to go back. On the other hand it's a standard MMO with the standard gear threadmill. Must all activities in this genre revolve around the so called vertical progression? Yawn.
The game is too linear in where to go and when to go there. One would think it would be safe to visit all those planets no matter your level to at least visit the capital city.
A game of civilization with a random map and random factions has more replayability than a themepark MMO like SWTOR.
I'll keep this relatively short.
Two things:
1) Really hackneyed classic MMO endgame. Unfitting a Star Wars game, in my opinion. Bioware should have taken a good look at Star Wars and come up with at least *some* new gaming mechanics that would fit it; not try to fit Star Wars into classic MMO mechanics.
Also, bad implementation of said mechanics.
I would so like to see something closer to their original vision: A KOTOR 1, 2, 3... 9. More of a Bioware game.
2) Dead world. They've really botched that "living breathing Star Wars universe" feel. All the planets / cities feel like ghost towns. No sense of background, no proper NPC life... That's a big downer for me in an MMO. For a good way of doing this, see GW2's cities.
1. no server chat channel
2. no cross faction communication at all
3. unbalanced classes
4. too many BoP items
5. crafting for the lols
The way they handled Server transfers mainly, looking at SWTOR as a game by itself
But overall, the fact that SWG was shut down. SWG and SWTOR would have made a great combination. I liked the crafting, housing, Beast Master, Space etc in SWG but SWTOR did not need to have that for me, if SWG was still going. I would have played both - probably SWG mostly and then SWTOR too. However as SWG is not going, it made SWTOR very shallow, and pretty much done with it now. If SWG was still active I probably would not have reached level 10 on one character in SWTOR by now, and probably subbed to it every month since Dec/Jan
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Too "Wowified". Everything, classes, quests, shear amount of specials, end game, character creator, everything. If I wanted to play WoW, I'd play WoW. The 1s who like WoW will still be there. Why developers insist on WoW copies, after so many have bit the dust, never ceases to amaze me.
You play in TOR's world, you don't "live" in it. As other have said, no housing, nothing to call your own, no making your mark on the world. Everything is as the other guy's with the same class.
Crafting reaked. There is simply nothing in TOR except combat.
All the reasons why this game failed for me is stated above. No reason to repeat it. There are things in the game that I do like, but the negative outweighs the positive.
In any case, I would have been happier if they would have just spent all that money on creating a CGI TOR movie and making KOTOR 3 than wasting it on this wannabe MMO disappointment.
Stale, dated design
Uninspired, horrible art direction
Poor character customization
Flash-game equivolent space content
Complete themepark thus zero freedom to really make the experience your own
Not everything, but a lot of weak writing, bland stories and just a general failure to capture the spirit of adventures in the Star Wars setting.
I'd equate the game to some of the average-to-poor episodes of The Clone Wars.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
Everything was actually good in the game, except endgame.
I vividly remember nearly no complaints with the game, other than class balance woes and the fact they didnt have a high quality graphical settings...that is untill people started running hard modes/raids and playing on ilum. Thats when shit turned sour.
I remeber how boring the endgame pve was, how much of a pain it was to find a group since few did anything other than pvp (wich i found to be true in rift as well...for some reason people hate endgame pvp these days i guess rifts was good too unlike sw)...oh and since everyone was pvping and ilum was a laggy hot mess of zerg standoffs...everyone just pvp queued...which of course got boring fast.
Huttball was my favorite take on CTF to date however, really enjoyed that, the rest of the pvp maps sucked imo and you didnt get to choose.
Eitherway...from what everyone else here will say, know that it was a great game untill you got to endgame or started rerolling a bunch. Also note i hate themeparks for the most part, which is why i was surprised when i enjoyed the leveling and storyline.
I waas excited for this game. I bought the collectors, and a 6 month sub.
I was in denial, bought another 6 month sub while not playing much.
I am shocked this game isnt awesome. My favorite games of all time were from Bioware. MassEffect2, Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon age Origins. I also loved Star Wars buying the blue ray 6 movie set.
The great aspect of the game is the story, incredible sound and Voice acting. Then its a sharp down hill from there.
The combat was not bad, but not great. character development was not complex or interesting to keep you coming back. While the storyline is good, you have to grind and grind to get to the next part of the story. So it becomes disjointed. Progression was very bland.
The BIGGEST most obvious thing with this game for me, is the complete lack of effort. There is no attention to detail. Classes from republic to empire are lazy mirrors. Funneled to the same story areas. The character creation was extremly weak and had me shocked. The graphics, animations, NPC movement, environment was poor. Its like they went quick instead of took pride in their work. One quest for example, I'm out to get a bad guy who had prisoners. Im walking around in a boxey looking room, and theres 4 slaves tied up to a bed. EACH Bed and EACH slave/prisoner, was the EXACT SAME BALD HEADED GUY. What? were they quad druplets or just lazy programming? They couldnt atleast make them look different?
I'm so dissapointed and felt that I had reasonable expectations.
Now Im giving GW2 a try. I was kinda mad at the GW2 crowd here on this site, because they seem to WANT to bash SWTOR. Well, it turns out they are right. The attention to detail, mentioned above, is through the roof. Everything looks hand placed and high quality. The underwater combat is the most amazing thing I have ever seen from ANY game doing underwater stuff.
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There was so much to this game that was fail im not going to list them all.
but the day i played huttball 22 times in a row is the day i uninstalled. and thats not even the tip of the iceberge.
Nothing, I still play it. When I get around to getting one character to the end of their story, I start one I haven't seen yet.
Playing:SW:TOR
Played: A lot.
Beta tested: Freaking everything.
Looking forward to: Nothing.
I quit because:
The combat animations were laggy
Having a central HUB for players to congregate made the planets feel abandoned
Space combat was a joke
In a Galaxy you should feel that it is open, and the game couldn't feel more limiting if they tried
Trade skills sucked and were pointless
Mirrored classes across factions
Arrogance of the development team
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One day i just stopped logging in...
I should probably add i was content with the 'world grouping' as i grouped up and did alot of that content, However i was not pleased with their 'instanced content'.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development