Topic: Star Wars: The old Republic

[Lonewolf]

I have been playing this game for a bit over 3 months now and really enjoy it.

The story mode is the main point, that sets this game apart for me. I have even started to develop certain mindsets for my characters and stick to those, no longer just keeping an eye on the light/darkside points, which means that playing my Sith Warlock results in endless amounts of fun.

Another big plus is the lack of farming. You don't need to spend endless hours in area A slaughter all monster 100 times for loot and exp, then move on to higher level area B. If anything you level a bit too fast in this game, especially if you like to play PVPs.

Graphics are pretty much average, but not bad.

The space battles are also a nice touch.

The cons, that i have noticed are mostly a couple of bugs that can appear every now and then.

Also i am not so sure about the endgame content at the moment. I have got a level 50 soldier and the open world PVP on the PVP planet seems to be a bit boring. I haven tested yet operation groups and how they work. Right now i have mothballed the soldier anyway in favour for my Sith character.

What i did notice is that the Sith seem to be a bit more powerfull than their Yedi counterparts, at least thats the picture i get from the PVP fights, where the Empire wins most games.

Any other players here who want to share their experiences?

[Rasmus]

I played for two months and left in disgust.
I played WoW, and this is WoW. A few perks, like the license, the NPCs will speak (poorly, in many cases) at you, and you have lightsabers and spaceships (well, more spaceships is probably more accurate. There are some in WoW). I left WoW because it was an outmoded game. I left SWTOR because it did not try to do anything new, merely copy and add those two things.

Secondly SWTOR was rushed, and you can tell from the features and glitches/bugs. I am guessing they released 0.8 or thereabouts, and the patches currently being put into place are that for 1.0. EA buggered Bioware.
Not the game for me, clearly, which is why I left. Happy I didn't pay for the thing, greatly looking forward to Guild Wars 2 instead.

[RandomGuardsman]

 

I played WoW, and this is WoW.

  I gotta back Rasmus on this one....I played WoW since release and when I tried SwtoR I wanted my money back. This seems to be the same reaction a lot of people I know have. I ended up forcing myself to play after a while.

  Half of your game time is spent in loading screens, even though they are not long waits, I have played enough games to get annoyed by them. You start dialogue *Loading Screen* you make a few choices and accept the quest *Loading Screen* then head 2 zones over *Loading Screenx2* Do the quest that requires you to kill a handful of guys and collect loot. If anything happens mid quest *Loading Screen* and if it does not you go back to through the 2 zones*Loading Screenx2* then start the dialogue again *More Loading Screens*.
 
 Space fighting is more akin to Arcade Shooters or old Nintendo games where you are railroaded the entire time with no ability to control the ships. You just move the targetting cursor and hope you kill the enemy ships who do not really use evasive maneuvers before they shoot at you. They could have done a lot for the game if they had done a ship based system like Star Lancer or Freespace 1&2.

 The Crafting system was kind of annoying as you did not actually do anything but tell your crew to go do things then just wait for it to get done. Half of the materials you had to go from zone to zone and farm and the other half you had to send your crew out to get and *Hope* you get the item you wanted.

 The PvP and Battleground system did not interest me at all as it seemed slow and clunky. In 90% of the matches I found myself to be the only healer, as everyone wants to be straight DPS even when they roll a support class like any other MMO!

  I have to say this was pretty accurate....
 The Escapist : Video Galleries : Zero Punctuation : Star Wars: The Old Republic

  I personally did not like SwtoR. To many loading screens, pauses, bugs and I am already paying a monthly fee for another crappy MMO that I am already established in.

[Lonewolf]

Hmm, i dont know about all those many loading screens. There are some very short ones when you use an elevator for example. There are pretty long ones when arriving at a planet and thats pretty much it.

Yes, the spce fighting is more an arcade shooter and i also would have liked something more sophisticated, but its meant to lighten things up a bit, kinda like a game in a game, and it does that job good enough in my eyes.

The crafting. Well firstly you dont have to gather anything yourself if you dont want to, which is something quite positive in my eyes. What i dislike is that certain crafting skills seem to be quite worthless compared to others.

I quite like the PVP areas, though as already stated, id also like to see more content on that front.

Bugs also tend to get patched pretty fast as far as i have noticed.

[Lachdonin]

I'm with Lonewolf on the Loading Screen issue. I don't know what computer you have Random, but the only time i see a loading screen that lasts more than 5 seconds in when i switch planets.

I'm also a fan of the missions for crafting, though like Lonewolf said, some skills are just crap compared to others. I have yet to need any craftable gear, and only Cybertech and Artificer seem really useful...

That said, it's just WoW in space. The game doesn't really offer anything new to the system, just takes what WoW does well and tacks the Star Wars logo on it. I couldn't stand Rift, don't like Guild Wars (and thus don't give a rats left buttock about GW2) and haven't even made it through the free trial period of any other MMO's out there, and thus kinda understand why they went with the tried and tested gameplay... But really, it's just a gimmic to milk money out of the Star Wars fans. As if Lucas hasn't done that enough already.

[Lonewolf]

Maybe i should admit at this point, that i have never played WoW. But they have cool tv-ads, i will give them that :-)

[RandomGuardsman]

The crafting. Well firstly you dont have to gather anything yourself if you dont want to, which is something quite positive in my eyes. What i dislike is that certain crafting skills seem to be quite worthless compared to others.

  I ran Biochem and Bioanalysis and ended up spending a lot of time farming mobs and picking plants material just to level it. Then of course if you wanted to cross engineer anything you had to spend an excessive amount of time farming. Though I am one of those people that prefers to level my proffessions as I level my character.

I'm with Lonewolf on the Loading Screen issue. I don't know what computer you have Random, but the only time i see a loading screen that lasts more than 5 seconds in when i switch planets.

  Not sure how you could have missed them. It does not actually go to a screen that says *Loading*, but every little thing you do requires a little pause of runtime format to load content that is completely unnecessary. In otherwords.....*Loading Screen* and they are terribly noticeable if you pay attention. I am not the only hardcore gamer that has complained about it. SwtoR has actually been getting refereed to as the "Game of loading Screens" as a running joke from people from several other games I have been playing.

[Perigrine]

Your complaining about short waiting screens, I wonder if you really did play wow at start up as it was literally called World of Lagcraft. To to massive lag, comstant disconects and server crashes and this went on for 6 months.

Now is swtor perfect no, but its also been out for not even 4 months yet. And stability wise its leaps and bounds ahead of where wow was when it came out.

Also consider that there are basically 2 types of mmorpg out there, we'll call the one type wow style with its main focus on completing quests and instances. The other the so called korean mmo's which tend to focus more on grinding. Most mmorpg's that come out fall into one of these camps, and usually if they try to do something radically different crash on lift off(I'm looking at you ffxiv).

Now swtor is unique as it places an emphasis on a narative each class has its own story you play through and quests on the various planets tend to relate in someway or give you a sense of the larger picture. This I find refreshing as let's face it wow has given up really any pretense of having a story to it.

But yes swtor does borrow from wow but if a format aint broke don't fix it. Games like rift tried to do something unique with the buikd your own class thing but turned out really there were only a few viable builds for each archtype. And I won't even go into the train wreck that was ff xiv.

So really to be fair you need to give swtor another 3 months before you condemn it as wow was a laggy crashy piece of amphetamine parrot until about the 6 month mark

[redwall87]

I'm really enjoying SWTOR.  I tried other MMOs before but could never get hooked.  I know a lot of people complain about the lack of stuff to do at the end but its taken me 4 months to get my character to level 42 and I'm still not close to completing the story.  I play mostly for the story; PvP is a very secondary feature for me.  I like the change that the space battles bring as well.  Overall, I play at a relaxed pace and with 8 classes to play, I'm going to keep my subscription for a long time.

[Hanith]

The game was very very meh. I'm actually expecting it to go the same route as WAR (Warhammer: Age of Reckoning if you don't know). The story was nice and didn't feel overly generalized with the typical "Hello <name> the great <class>!". Gameplay wise, I think this falls flat. I played it for a few months and it was the typical MMO formula for quests:

GOTO <location>, <Kill/retreive/speak to/right-click>, <Mob/object>, <quantity if applicable>,
     <Insert abstract fluff reason here>

The actual combat was typical of any other "non-korean MMO" as Perigrine put it <Run around, shoot/chop guy, run from other guy, get stunned/back-stabbed, watch healers not heal, complain about game balance>

As Yahtzee put it: Cow go "Moo", Pigs go "Oink" and MMORPG players go "The classes are inbalanced."

The crafting was interesting but didn't really give me the feeling of crafting anything. It was more of a management role than any actual crafting. I still felt like I was grinding out mats despite questing while my underling did the "work" for me. The whole point of a "crafting" system is to gather resources and craft, not send underlings on largely meaningless tasks. Imagine minecraft with the SWtoR system.

The Light-Dark system is also not fantastic at all. Some of these don't even make sense. Example, it was considered "Dark" for me to tell the truth and have a lab assistant killed for trying to kill/imprison her master (who was simply experimenting on "pigs".) The "Light" choice was to lie and have the master imprisoned for being insane?

For those of you who don't know, this is a quick rundown on what happened to WAR:

• Game Launched-Met with great success. (On September 30, 2008 <12 days after launch> had 800K users)
• Opens new Servers to deal with increasing customer base.
• Releases patches regularly to fix bugs.
• EA fires most of development team and replaces with "newbees".
• Rest of development team re-purposed to SWtoR. <- Please Note this bit here
• No new content is released for WAR for a bit.
• Customer base drops hard as WoW releases expansion -- many servers shut down and players congregated.
• More players leave as no new patches/updates arrive.
• More servers shut down
• Game goes free-to-play with only 3 active servers left. <- Free-to-play being the effective MMO graveyard

I sincerely believe this is the same route SWtoR will take. It may take a bit longer due to hardcore SW fans, the fact that EA hasn't already turned tail and ran away with the launch profits (Just wait for the next big WoW expansion), and people who are overly zealous in it "Not being like WoW at all"; but, I'm guessing this game will be free-to-play and have less than 10 servers by 2015 at the latest. I actually expect this by February of 2014. (Honestly don't know why February, it just kinda popped into my head.)