Star Wars The Old Republic

Quote from csyver

I just tried one of the space missions. It's probably the worst gameplay I've played this year. holy shit it was bad. i am impressed with how shitty it was.

Same thought since beta... Next!

http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/sit ... /sorcerer/

I lol’d

I know copying WoW probably makes a lot of sense (and I don’t claim WoW was completely original either) but I’m not really sure the whole tank, heal, damage trinity really works in a sci-fi setting. Surely there are better ways you can MMO this franchise without Lightsabre: 8-12 damage.

It’s also kind of strange to me that how much people like modern MMO’s is often directly proportionate to how little they have to interact with other people. Oh this new MMO is great becaus the dungeons have storylines and I can play singleplayer with my AI companion... play single player games?

i understand that you can copy wow because it's the most succesful mmo out there, but isn't copying wow going against the logic of this business? i mean if people wanted to play a game that is reminiscent of wow, wouldn't they just pick wow to play in the first place? there are so many mmos crashing because everyone believes them to be the new "wow killers", but really, that isn't possible. the mmo business isn't the fps business, where you can copy paste elements (such as between the battlefield and modern warfare games) and still expect a large group of players to play on both. a mmo requires commitment in the form of a subscription, so most people will be hard pressed to find time to play more than one at a time.

because im a hipster, i was into mmos much more back before wow was released and i can't help but think how awesome it would be if some of those games that came before wow were actually remade into mmos today. i mean take dark age of camelot, which is my favorite mmo ever, because it just had everything done right. the pve was awesome because quests were very nonlinear, they were epic and they required some thought and skill from the player rather than jus t kill x of y and hand shit into z. the environments were and are still some of the most memorable, because of how they went about creating a unique atmosphere for every goddamn realm, and every region in every realm. it even had shit like grace periods after you started a new character so you could get acquainted with the different classes before picking one.

but the greatest thing about this game was the amount of challenge it issued you in the end, and the balance of the end game in pvp. this wasn't some pussy ass game where all you do for the end game was pve to get gear so you could pve better. here you had a full scale balanced 3 faction war. why 3? because 2 factions will only ever have one front between each other, whereas 3 will always have a more dynamic front. it gave an entirely new meaning to virtual battles the way you could flank groups and win with a specialized group versus entire fucking hordes of people. you had EPIC SCALE pvp raids to get specific objects that would help your realm get an advantage over the other realms. i remember basically trying to get to one of these and walking over corpses for fucking miles before i got to the actual battle. you might think this doesn't matter, but holy shit it makes an impression of how war could be (kinda like how call of duty 4 had the scene where you were dying after the bomb - no real gameplay, just gives you an impression). by far that game holds some of the best experiences ive ever had, and it never ceases to amaze me that people would rather reproduce something everyone already has instead of creating the things that people are MISSING.

goddamn. they don't make mmos like they used to.

I just had this issue, I just agreed to a renewal based planed and cancelled right after and it works...

I don't see why I need to worry about renewal until my current time expires.

they want you to sign up, play your free time and then forget to cancel and keep paying. everything about this launch is an attempt to nickel and dime the public at every chance they get.

did anyone see the digital preorder fees? when people bought it on origin the game was $75, then a digital preorder fee of $5, then tax of $5, so people who preordered the game paid $85. the people who bought it after it was released "only" paid $80. then you have an option to buy a security key to "make your account more secure", but ingame there's vendors that are locked for everybody unless you have purchased a security key.

it's really quite pathetic, and i wonder if they would have been such jews if they didn't piss away $300 million on the development.

speaking of $300 million, why aren't there non-humanoid alien races? was it too expensive to adjust armour models for something that didn't follow the 4 body shapes they launched with? and why is the customisation so poor, why can't i choose a voice, why can't i be a wookie? there's a lot of things missing from the game, and when a game costs $80 (eighty fucking dollars! and then a subscription after that! and people bought it, and just reinforced the fact that developers can get away with this bullshit!) you kinda expect a lot more than what you currently get.

i wonder how many months we will wait till we see the level cap expansion pack and a new race to play: the wookie! preorder now for only $49.99, preorder fee of $17.99, get yours today!

here's a few more things that pissed me off, i know you're all so interested:

there's 150+ people in the game area i'm in, where are they all? why is the level so fucking HUGE. everything is over scaled, the first imperial city is so large it becomes a chore to travel around it, and it feels lifelesss - if they had simply cut the size by half or 3/4 then the city would have felt like a bustling metropolis, it would have been less painful to walk around, and you would actually see more than 1 person every 5 minutes.

i've been playing with a friend and everytime we see someone else questing we're like "oh shit look, there's someone else here!".

i used to play Age of Conan, and even when that game hadn't gone free-to-play and it was feeling completely lifeless and dead, you could still walk into a city hub and find people everywhere, and i thought those hubs were too big, but SWTOR take it to a whole new dimension. and this is in launch week, a week where the highest levels of traffic in these areas will be seen - and already it's dead. surely they must have forseen this? or did they keep the obscene scale in simply to falsely extend the game time by having you run everywhere for longer.

they know it's a problem as well because at level 13 or 14 they give you a passive sprint which increases your out of combat movement speed significantly. it's like a big "fuck you" to all the pointless running you did up to that point, why did they do that? it's fucking ridiculous.

HOWEVER. the only reason i am typing all this is because the friends i play with are all asleep right now and i am waiting for them to wake up so we can go spend another day playing it. so it's not all bad.

i really like the fact that the game doesn't feel too much like you walk into a quest hub and it's all "go collect 12 boar penises". everything feels like it flows very well, you get a couple of quests at a time, and the xp flows so you never have to grind anywhere, the storylines make it feel like you're actually accomplishing something, and the fact that you can do everything as a group is really cool. i love being able to enter my friends story instances, and help him with the stuff there. the group conversations are great as well, it actually emphasises the fact that you're playing an MMO.

the writing is pretty horrible, but i am getting used to it, voice acting is also cringe-worthy at times. and why is there a fucking flirt option, why do you get the choice to fuck some old woman, why bioware,. why can't they leave sex out of their games, do they think people are going to sit there jacking off to jabba the hut slopping his greasy gargantuan green cock into some wookie's slop-hole. jesus christ it's pathetic. i read a great quote somewhere, how bioware are putting sex into everything and it's actually getting really old now, bioware managed to make sex boring. how do you even do that.

so yeah, whatever. i can see it going f2p in a years time once they've milked everyone dry. they did nothing challenging with game mechanics, it's all competantly built and implemented but nothing really blows you away. once everyone hits level cap there's nothing to do, the pvp is broken and boring and feels like a cluster fuck - 6 of the classes feel so similar that it's hard to know wtf is going on, and any melee skills are pointless because range utterly rape everything (i topped the damage charts as a level 11 in a level 19 capped match). the raids are tank and spank in the worst possible way. the UI is WoW, the hubs are WoW, everything is WoW with a star wars twist, and they haven't even managed to capture the gritty feeling the star wars films had.

overall i give it 5 gameplays out of a possible 23 hardcores.

Quote from Sentura

i understand that you can copy wow because it's the most succesful mmo out there, but isn't copying wow going against the logic of this business? i mean if people wanted to play a game that is reminiscent of wow, wouldn't they just pick wow to play in the first place? there are so many mmos crashing because everyone believes them to be the new "wow killers", but really, that isn't possible. the mmo business isn't the fps business, where you can copy paste elements (such as between the battlefield and modern warfare games) and still expect a large group of players to play on both. a mmo requires commitment in the form of a subscription, so most people will be hard pressed to find time to play more than one at a time.

True, most of your target customers are playing other MMO’s, have invested hundreds of hours into it, and are unlikely to play simultaneous MMO’s because of both the cost and splitting game time. So giving them same game with a different skin probably won't work. However the other side of this dilemma is they’re the most expensive genre out there to create so you can’t afford to go totally loony with the mechanics when you know stuff like the Talent Training Trees work, and it’s fair to say the main draw of a Star Wars MMO is Star Wars.

Some of WoW’s changes are simply better than what we had before too: It took an obscene amount of time to max level in older MMO’s, playing solo was restricted to a few classes that weren’t supposed to be played solo but could, and there were no instances so bosses were free for all. WoW had a few world raid bosses in vanilla that were kind of frustrating – though partly because they had all the tools to be a griefers dream.

To be honest WoW doesn't really feel like an MMO anymore but a smaller game with the best lobbies ever. I think that’s because they’ve systematically removed drama and reduced community interaction to a minimum.

Quote from Taylor

WoW had a few world raid bosses in vanilla that were kind of frustrating – though partly because they had all the tools to be a griefers dream..

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I ENJOY WATCHING LOWBIES JOIN THE FIGHT FROM ALL AROUND THE ZONE JUST TO FUCK YOUR RAID OVER. YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY SIR!

Ermm just about every subscription based MMO I've played requires you to register additional game cards or credit card before playing. It's got nothing to do with EA being greedy. Not that I agree in the practice, but it's quite common.

It's quite simple, cancel if you don't like the game

Also compared to other MMO's there is very little "WoW" feeling in this game, WoW was not the first MMO either, just because it became super main stream doesn't mean that they invented what is considered standard for the genre. There's a reason mechanics are the way they are, they work. This is far closer to KOTOR than WoW

@ Rick - yeah I agree that the cities are waaaay too big - it's such a chore running about since they spread all the important stuff purposely far away from each other. Perhaps they intended to avoid the lag generated from 100#s of people hanging out together. The most probable solution would be to add more fast travel taxi's in places people actually need, they might of learned this in Beta but not had the time to fix.

You people find any excuse to bitch about a game, don't you? Stop watching so much Zero Punctuation. This game is fantastic.

The areas probably feel empty because they instance every zone like in AoC so that you're not competing with 50 people for quest mobs/items. I'll admit that they're a little aggressive in their use of this.

Can't comment on too much of the instancing as all I've done is the Black Talon (which is one of the best instances I've ever played in any MMO).

I'm a little surprised no one's mentioned the lack of loading screens. There's so much streaming going on in this game, you almost never see a loading bar.

Quote from 2d-chris

Ermm just about every subscription based MMO I've played requires you to register additional game cards or credit card before playing. It's got nothing to do with EA being greedy. Not that I agree in the practice, but it's quite common.It's quite simple, cancel if you don't like the game

Ty, not sure how many time this has to be explained.

Also, what is so "WoW"-like in this game? How many MMO's have you experts in all things WoW played?

Don't talk wet. The talent trees are an exact copy with the names jumbled around. And I've played plenty of MMO's that didn't use this system: EQ, AO, Aion, Lineage II, so don't try that noise.

also it's sad to see that every game just defaults to be based on a cooldown ability system rather than integrating cast time channeling and combat styles. hey let's just simplify all challenge to one button presses without timing or skill needed! let's not make conditional skills that let players effectively use openings. /wrists

Quote from Sentura

also it's sad to see that every game just defaults to be based on a cooldown ability system rather than integrating cast time channeling and combat styles. hey let's just simplify all challenge to one button presses without timing or skill needed! let's not make conditional skills that let players effectively use openings. /wrists

Sweater has channeled abilities, abilities with a cast wind up, and conditional abilities. Hell, my Sith Warrior has 2 out of those 3. [Blocked Image: https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/public/style_emoticons/default/mapcore_smilies/emot_shakehead.gif]

All servers are still down, what to do, what to do?

Quote from 2d-chris

All servers are still down, what to do, what to do?

Captains Log..... Edit* Its up!

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No life here I come

Quote from Taylor

Don't talk wet. The talent trees are an exact copy with the names jumbled around. And I've played plenty of MMO's that didn't use this system: EQ, AO, Aion, Lineage II, so don't try that noise.

WoW didn't invent skill trees, they just established a really well-designed implementation of them for an MMO. NEXT!

Quote from Serenius

WoW didn't invent skill trees, they just established a really well-designed implementation of them for an MMO. NEXT!

as a junkie i also think that amphetamines are well designed drugs