It was the worst example of a game on rails I have seen in the last few years. There was no impression of individual freedom of action whatsoever. They also managed to drain every ounce of excitement from the game while they were at it.
I played through every class to the end for the story , the game didn't really come off as an MMO to me so I only subbed long enough to experience what I wanted from it.
If i was in charge of SWTOR ,i would scrap every single last system,terribly designed game.Pretty much does everything i despise in rpg game design.
I actually love story and lore but SWTOR is laughable in that department,i thin k it was media and partners that built up that hype unwarranted.Play FFX through,there is absolutely no comparison,FFX is full of passion from the first minute right through the whole game.SWTOR is a bunch of mini games,red light green light,conspiracy theory,gee i wonder if there is an encounter when i enter that room,not much on creativity or exploration.The weapons system/combat ,just awful.
The worst is the 3 on a leash AI,are you serious,i despised that in the EQ series,people should learn from BAD mistakes.I like a game to look and feel realistic,i don't want to see 3 or more npc's all triggered at the exact same time because they are all on the same AI trigger,it is LAZY game design.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Like others said....did not feel like an MMO. The main stories were good for the most part, but you had too much bad MMO wanna-be crap in between main quests.
For me SWToR was the first theme park where I went deep into instanced PVP. I loved the 3 scenarios that were there at launch and the balance of the game — healers were very resilient and had little to no offensive power, so having 2 or 3 in one scenario made a huge difference changing the tactics your team had to use. Once they changed this approach in favour of a more common one (healers dying in a matter of few seconds) the pvp was just not fun for me anymore.
Once I stopped pvping the rest of the game didn't hold up:
The voiced dialogues for the quest are cringeworthy in my opinion, making the main character talk had the drawback of having them say the same lines over and over. For me it would be infinitely better to have well written dialogues that I have to read as opposed to characters that "talk" with punch lines.
The PVE experience was for me not worth the time. It's like they "copied" from other games the aspects I detested the most, like the rushing-through dungeons with no care in the world for overpulling and no need for crowd control.
I can't remember the name of the planet, but at launch there was this large map designed for large-scale pvp which failed miserably because of technical reasons, namely the engine. So despite them having it in game, it wasn't playable so it doesn't count.
I wish there was more to the game for me to add another point in this list, but to be honest, when I played it, the game was just this: PVP battlegrounds, alting to see the story on each class and shitty PVE.
I guess that in the end I was not enamored enough with the Star Wars IP to overlook all the shortcomings that the game had. I will keep cherishing the fond memories I have of my Jedi Guardian, Ygritte, and her exploits on the HuttBall field, joining an ongoing game to replace someone who ragequit because of a 2-0 score and turning it into a 2-3 win, as effortlessly as if she were cooking breakfast.
Came back few years after launch and found that even though I had bought the huge CE of the game I still had to pay for basic shit like hotbars. Instantly uninstalled.
Say what you want about the gameplay but they changed MMOs forever with having it be fully voiced, even your toon speaks. The class stories are some of the best in MMO history...each class story would have been a good sw film. This was also the last game from the "good" bioware.
Personally I think they should do a console release its perfect for that.
I still sub to the game even though i don't play anymore, only to check out new xpacs. If you havent played yet definitely do so, it's a good game even though the f2p is a little bit harsh, you still get to do all the content for free.
Those "changes" in your first paragraph? Exactly why I stopped playing, I want the "story" in a MMO to be one I create, and am not interested in developers telling me stories, I play single player titles when I want that.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
You had full voice acting and themes during the scenes.
You had the classic crafting
You had dungeons and raids ( yes I know it's not called that in swtor)
You had Battlegrounds (and scrapped world pvp)
How Is Swtor any different from the rest of the thempark games, yes the hype were epic, dunno what the hype was, I expected a classic themepark and the game did just that.
So what did everyone who didn't enjoy the game expected the game to be, why did it fail what was missing?
I'm one of those who fell for the hype (plus big star wars fan) and felt massively let down by the game. I tried it in closed beta, was concerned, but believed in the devs. I brought my guild over from LotRO and played SWTOR for the first year. I quit when they announced the first expansion, which exposed their lies and gave me certainty that they didn't want to improve the game.
My biggest gripes:
1) It wasn't an MMO.
With a player cap of 75, the game wasn't even massively multiplayer. As a player who values community, this player cap was very noticable to me in how quiet and empty every zone felt. This made any sort of organic grouping / bonding extremely limited, resulting in a lack of community and a general lack of courtesy towards each other.
2) The combat was really shallow.
I love depth to my combat systems. It's what allows them to stay interesting over the course of months or years. SWTOR had extremely shallow combat. The rotations for each class were quite complex, but a rotation is not depth. Beyond that, there was hardly any interclass dependence (like buffs, resource sharing etc), hardly any situational abilities and no resource management. Weirdly, the combat actually got shallower the harder the content got, because the few situational abilities we did have were primarily CC and thus useless in raids. The only time combat had any depth was in PvP (when those CC abilities suddenly became useful), but PvP suffered from....
3) Over-the-top Vertical Progression
The power creep sucked. I shouldn't have been surprised, given the game was developed by a single-player RPG dev studio, but still, it sucked. The power derived from your gear was enormous, so much so it pretty much removed player skill from the equation. I remember doing the 4-player instances whilst leveling up, first attempt they'd be a nightmare, but a single step up the gear grind and the content went from nightmare to trivial, despite no change in our playstyle. No amount of player skill could overcome the power creep. The situation was made worse by putting enrage timers on all bosses, removing any possibility for interesting tactics and forcing us all to just tank-and-spank every time. Sooooooo boring! Obviously, the power creep ruined PvP. Thats not me being butt-hurt. I was at the top of the power curve, so I was the one stomping other people. When you can 3-shot someone of the same level in a couple of seconds, your system is broken.
4) Lack of World PvP
So, throughout pre-release, Bioware made a lot of noise about how the PvP was going to be amazing in SWTOR. Remember that EA had purchased Mythic a few years earlier, so they made a big deal about advertising how some of the original DAoC devs were working on SWTOR. They specifically promised us that PvP would be equally important to PvE all through the game. That was a lie.
The lack of world pvp annoyed me most. First, if you were flagged or on a PvP server and out in the world, it was very rare to even run into someone from the other side. Granted, I was on a PvE server, but I was flagged 24/7 and in 1 year of gameplay, I had 4 fights in the open world (outside of ilum). But, that was understandable because you didn't gain renown for fighting people in the open world....
Then there was Ilum. It became a slideshow when you reached about 25-30 players, and crashed if you started to approach the cap of 75. I mean, this is the zone specifically designed for large scale open world PvP, and it didn't even remotely work!
5) The story sucked.
Controversial opinion im sure, given that the story is it's most highly regarded feature, but honestly, it sucked. Granted, I hate story in my computer games, especially in multiplayer games, but even so, SWTOR's sucked. You know it sucks when the most celebrated update in the entire history of the game is the update that allows you to skip 99% of the story and game so that you could do the 15-20 quests that didn't suck so bad. Situation was made worse by the dialogue choices, giving us the illusion that we had an input but in reality it was just a waste of time and didn't effect anything, especially as most of us (myself included) were guided by just picking light/dark choices to help with our progression.
6) It was far too easy.
With the shallow combat system, it was easy to master every single class in the game within a few weeks. Within 1 month of release, my guild had all leveled to the cap and we'd cleared both the starting raids on hardmode. We weren't even hardcore! The first raid released post-release was a little harder and required some better tactics, but was still really easy and basically a gear-check. It was only when the fourth raid was released that we finally got some challenging content, but it was still mostly a gear check, you just had a little less lee-way.
This all basically resulted in me just being bored quite a lot. I had no investment in the story, all the classes felt basically the same to play, you were just stood in different places during a fight so it made alts extra boring. The endgame PvE was too easy, world PvP non-existant. My gaming week was basically 3-6 nights of battlegrounds with guildies, then 1 night of raiding where we'd clear everything in a single 3-hour period. When they announced the first expansion, it basically told me that they weren't going to fix a single problem with the game, all they were going to do was release more story content.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
I left because it felt like a single player game in the disguise of a MMO....ALso this kind of gameplay just feels like a story where I am just going through the motions.
I got into the first weekend starter planet test and kind of got hooked. I want to say this was the Commando/Smuggler test but I can't remember for sure. Anyway the game design was a tad different at that time. However, at this point we only had this one planet for comparison. Part of the notice was that just because you were in on "this test" didn't mean you would be invited back or even in the beta.
Personally I was in all the weekend aka starter tests and got into the very start of beta.
It's been quite a few years and I really want to keep this a bit limited so... When the game first entered testing classes were very different. Commando for example was nothing like Bounty Hunter/Merc. Crafting was actually useful and could make interesting things.
I remember submitting a bug report as people were getting stuck in elevators and I (probably others as well) realized a certain character creation choice was the ONE that would result in a character that got stuck. I had logged out and got an email from part of the beta team saying if I could log in when I got the email to please do so. So I logged in and this person asked me to make a character with that option then summoned me to an elevator and spot on fixed the issue right there.
So... I had recommended the game to all my Star Wars friends. Told them how the development team was very active to bug reports etc
Then....
We had a downtime between testing phases. At that point I believe it was the lead developer or at least one of the two original big names left the team. I'd seen this same thing (with the same guy) just before another game went to complete crap. I don't mean like it was his fault. I mean like I always believed he left the other game because why stay with something that you know won't work aka big changes were coming and not what he had been working on.
So... the next phase starts. All of the "unique" aspects of all the classes were pretty much just a mirror of their counterpart. At least to me that's how it felt. Everything was gutted and made simple.
Crafting was changed to what you encountered if you joined beta at this point right through launch etc
At which point I sent flags to all my friends I had been recommending the game to and said only buy it if you are really desperate. I also apologized to them all for recommending it. It's hard to really describe at this point in time the exact ways the game changed. It was just not something I would have ever told a friend about and the original version I tested was. Sure the maps were still goat paths but the class play etc was there at the start.
The "new thing" for this phase of beta was *drum roll*. Where we pick our favorite forum posters (with the absolute worst ideas) and give them a special super secret forum of their own to directly interact with the dev team!!! All of the posters that got the special little forum symbol were people that thought the new gutted game was great!!
There was no more real interaction with anyone from the dev team. Bug reports seemed to just go to auto delete etc I certainly never got another email to log in if I could about a bug I had reported etc
I had a pre-order in for the game and didn't cancel it. I should have.. but I didn't. Even with some of the issues that would have existed anyway... I would have happily played the original version of the game I tested.
I had no interest in it from the get-go because it was easy to see what it was about. Tightly controlled game play, plus cut scenes to remind you that they control the vertical, they control the horizontal. Like watching yourself on TV in a sci-fi horror show and you couldn't change anything. Except turn it off.
Played through the quests once, and felt no need to do it again. Too "on rails" for me. I didnt find the pvp instances fun at all either. Only played for about 8 months after release.
If it was still sub-based I would give it a try for a month again. Paying for things like hot bars and level caps is a huge turn off. But maybe I wouldn't play long enough to care.
It felt like "Knock-off Star Wars" Not even like KOTOR, like something else. I tried, I even bought the $150 CE box, but it wasn't the game I was looking for. That and I really can't play any other Star Wars MMO after player SWG. Star Wars MMOs should be about living in the world of Star Wars, being a nobody and making a name for yourself. No one should be forced to start out as a hero, that should come with time, but every Star wars game you are forced to be that hero.
I had no interest in it from the get-go because it was easy to see what it was about. Tightly controlled game play, plus cut scenes to remind you that they control the vertical, they control the horizontal. Like watching yourself on TV in a sci-fi horror show and you couldn't change anything. Except turn it off.
Great Outer Limits reference there
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever rejected SWTOR. The story content ranges from amazing to decent but I always subscribe when something new drops.
I just find the endgame extremely lacking and it’s the sole reason I haven’t maintained a consistent subscription. I’m looking forward to Onslaught though. I’ve missed my scoundrel and feel excited to begin a new adventure.
I only played during beta tests, but I remember being really annoyed with having to fight my way through umpteen packs of completely static trash mobs down a corridor to get to my objective, then fight my way back down the same corridor fighting all the same packs that had respawned in a minute or two.
I remember being really annoyed by the Star Fox space combat missions, flying the Millenium Falcon through a stage over and over like I was competing for a high score in a 1990s arcade cabinet.
I'm a HUGE Star Wars fan and a big fan of BioWare, but Star Wars music and some neat voiced quests weren't enough for me to feel like SWTOR was something I wanted to invest my free time in at launch. I was interested in trying it out when it went free-to-play, but then when I read all the quality of life features they were hiding behind the paywall, I never bothered.
Comments
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
No, thanks.
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I already play single player games for that. I don't play MMO to see an streamlined SP story through cutscenes.
Joined 2004 - I can't believe I've been a MMORPG.com member for 20 years! Get off my lawn!
Now: Single player game with inhibitive cash shop.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
I got into the first weekend starter planet test and kind of got hooked. I want to say this was the Commando/Smuggler test but I can't remember for sure. Anyway the game design was a tad different at that time. However, at this point we only had this one planet for comparison. Part of the notice was that just because you were in on "this test" didn't mean you would be invited back or even in the beta.
Personally I was in all the weekend aka starter tests and got into the very start of beta.
It's been quite a few years and I really want to keep this a bit limited so... When the game first entered testing classes were very different. Commando for example was nothing like Bounty Hunter/Merc. Crafting was actually useful and could make interesting things.
I remember submitting a bug report as people were getting stuck in elevators and I (probably others as well) realized a certain character creation choice was the ONE that would result in a character that got stuck. I had logged out and got an email from part of the beta team saying if I could log in when I got the email to please do so. So I logged in and this person asked me to make a character with that option then summoned me to an elevator and spot on fixed the issue right there.
So... I had recommended the game to all my Star Wars friends. Told them how the development team was very active to bug reports etc
Then....
We had a downtime between testing phases. At that point I believe it was the lead developer or at least one of the two original big names left the team. I'd seen this same thing (with the same guy) just before another game went to complete crap. I don't mean like it was his fault. I mean like I always believed he left the other game because why stay with something that you know won't work aka big changes were coming and not what he had been working on.
So... the next phase starts. All of the "unique" aspects of all the classes were pretty much just a mirror of their counterpart. At least to me that's how it felt. Everything was gutted and made simple.
Crafting was changed to what you encountered if you joined beta at this point right through launch etc
At which point I sent flags to all my friends I had been recommending the game to and said only buy it if you are really desperate. I also apologized to them all for recommending it. It's hard to really describe at this point in time the exact ways the game changed. It was just not something I would have ever told a friend about and the original version I tested was. Sure the maps were still goat paths but the class play etc was there at the start.
The "new thing" for this phase of beta was *drum roll*. Where we pick our favorite forum posters (with the absolute worst ideas) and give them a special super secret forum of their own to directly interact with the dev team!!! All of the posters that got the special little forum symbol were people that thought the new gutted game was great!!
There was no more real interaction with anyone from the dev team. Bug reports seemed to just go to auto delete etc I certainly never got another email to log in if I could about a bug I had reported etc
I had a pre-order in for the game and didn't cancel it. I should have.. but I didn't. Even with some of the issues that would have existed anyway... I would have happily played the original version of the game I tested.
Sorry that was longer than I wanted it to be.
Tightly controlled game play,
plus cut scenes to remind you that they control the vertical, they control the horizontal.
Like watching yourself on TV in a sci-fi horror show and you couldn't change anything.
Except turn it off.
Once upon a time....
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I just find the endgame extremely lacking and it’s the sole reason I haven’t maintained a consistent subscription. I’m looking forward to Onslaught though. I’ve missed my scoundrel and feel excited to begin a new adventure.
I remember being really annoyed by the Star Fox space combat missions, flying the Millenium Falcon through a stage over and over like I was competing for a high score in a 1990s arcade cabinet.
I'm a HUGE Star Wars fan and a big fan of BioWare, but Star Wars music and some neat voiced quests weren't enough for me to feel like SWTOR was something I wanted to invest my free time in at launch. I was interested in trying it out when it went free-to-play, but then when I read all the quality of life features they were hiding behind the paywall, I never bothered.