June 19, 2013

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5 Things SWTOR Got Wrong

Following up on this post, I decided that I would take a look at the top five things that SWTOR got wrong (at least so far).  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still having a blast a month after launch, but this game has some issues.  Read on for more:

The Classes

Each faction only has four classes.  Four.  And, two of them are Jedi class.  I realize that Bioware was making some assumptions that Jedis, bounty hunters, and smugglers were going to be popular classes, but only four classes at launch?  I was disappointed in the lack of variety of class choice.  As a suggestion, perhaps Bioware could have offered a merchant class?  What about a hybrid class of soldier and being “force sensitive” where you could use blasters and have kinetic powers like sentinels in Mass Effect?

Also, I was very disappointed that there are no racial bonuses in the game.  Yes, each race has a different social ability, but I would have liked to seen something that increases your stats or gives a special ability such as quicker running.

No Sandbox

SWTOR is screaming to be a sandbox game.  Yes you are free to maneuver about and explore the entire universe at your leisure.  But with the rich artwork and planetary environments, I am disappointed that I must progress in my quest line in a linear fashion.  This is the Star Wars Galaxies yearning crying out here, but SWTOR would be such a better game if you were given a choice of which planet and how you would like to progress your quest line instead of being locked to a planet for 5-10 levels or so.

I am hopeful that a bit of the sandbox element can be introduced into this game with future planets.  Also, Bioware hasn’t introduced player housing or shops yet.  It will be interesting to see how they address these items.

Rinse and Repeat

Outside of the story quest line, the planetary quests are predictable and copies of each other:  go to this area, do the bonus mission, kill the main bad guy, turn in quest.  At least I don’t have to put on my Fed Ex hat and run delivery missions across and entire planet though.

If the game didn’t have the class story lines and most of the quests were constructed like the “normal” ones, I would lose interest in this game very quickly.  Yes, even with lightsabers.

Crafting Balance

You know you have an imbalance in crafting when a majority of the player base believes that there are only two currently useful crafting professions.  Bioware appears to be aware of this issue and has (and still plans to) make changes to the crafting professions in order to balance out their usefulness and make all professions appealing to all players.

However, this issue should have been addressed in beta.  I realize that most beta testers were focused on quests and combat and only dabbled in the crafting to see how it worked (/raises hand).  Bioware should have seen that smart players would overwhelmingly flock to anything that would give them the greatest advantage and instantly declare anything less undesirable.

I have also heard that endgame crafting is practically non-existent: that you can obtain much better endgame gear from missions and quests.  Since I haven’t hit 50 yet, I can’t confirm this but if this is true would already cripple a questionable crafting system.

Too Traditional

I was disappointed that Bioware decided create a game with the traditional MMO elements instead of taking a chance on something new and different.  At its base, SWTOR is a game where you complete quests, kill stuff and level up.  Yes the story is excellent and does offer a new element in the MMO genre that shows that story is important in a MMO and can engage its audience instead of having them mind numbingly “kill 10 rats” over and over again.

However, this was a chance to break the traditional MMO way of doing things.  SWTOR has the typical tank, DPS, healer classes.  It has a linear class progression that follows a linear quest progression.  It has junk loot, and buffs, and dungeons, and….you get the picture.  SWTOR isn’t a WoW clone, but it didn’t do enough to distinct itself from WoW, LOTRO, Everquest, or any other large MMO created over the past 10 years.

I was expecting more than an online KOTOR.  I was expecting a game that would change the MMO landscape as we knew it.

Conclusion

As I’ve said before, SWOTR is a fun game and I am enjoying my time.  I have subscribed for the next three months, but unless things change, I am going to have to seriously evaluate if my time and money are worth giving to this game.

I am hopeful that Bioware is going to address their shortcomings and do all that they can to right this ship.  The future success of the game depends on how they develop and mature this product now that such a large percentage of the player base is at or quickly approaching end game.

Filed Under: General, Popular Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

5 Things SWTOR Got Right

I apologize to the seven people (Seven!  We’ve been growing our readership!) who regularly read this blog, but I haven’t written a review of SWTOR yet for three main reasons:

  1. No one cares that much.
  2. So many reviews have come out already about SWTOR’s launch.
  3. A lack of motivation.

But, I have felt that as an owner of a SWTOR fansite, I have a obligation to give a review of the game or at least my two credits worth.  If I don’t people ThatINevermMetOnTheInternetMightThinkI’mLameAndRuinMySelfEsteemForTheRestOfMyLife.  Plus, I wouldn’t have much credibility as a “blogger” if I didn’t have a review of the game on my blog about the game.

Instead of writing a review, I decided that I would write two articles.  The first one will be a list of the top things that I think Bioware did an excellent job with.  I’m hoping that by not turning out the standard canned review, people will notice that I’m “creative” and am willing to “go against the grain” and not concede to typical standards.  Other men will want to be like me.  Children will look up to me.

So without further ado, I proudly present this self serving article where I describe the five things that SWTOR got right about the game:

The Story

I won’t spend a whole lot of time on this point (see #2 above) since so much has been made about the quality of the SWTOR class stories.  I must also stand up and applaud the writing team at Bioware for their ingenuity at crafting the various story lines.  I’ve enjoyed the Jedi Consular story up to level 35 so far, and have dabbled a bit in the Jedi Knight story.  Both have been awesome.

The Companions

Many worried that companions would ruin SWTOR as a MMO and turn it into a PvE only game.  When the game was launched, most everyone quickly realized this was not the case.  The combat has been adjusted accordingly (ever try to fight a mob without your companion?) and more difficult challenges in the form of Herorics and Flashpoints exist for those who want to group with real players.

I love the witty banter and comments from my companions as well as how their presence affects my dialogue choices.  I must confess that SWTOR is the first MMO where I’ve read every line of dialogue and every quest description our of fear of missing something important or doing something that will send my companion back to my ship, stomping their feet and locking themselves in their quarters until I apologize or at least lure them out with a Twinkee.

The Scenery

SWTOR has some of the best landscapes that I have ever seen in a game.  The immediate foreground landscapes aren’t anything special, but the ones in the distance are marvelous.  If you get a chance, climb to the top of a mountain, or look off into the distance and admire the sun (or suns) rising up above the horizon.  Star Wars has always been known for its diverse and exotic planet locations and Bioware did a great job of capturing that, from the bright lights of a big city like Coruscant to the desolate sand dunes of Tatooine, this game feels like Star Wars and the art team deserves major Kudos for making this happen.

The Little Things

Bioware did away with a lot of the little things that have annoyed me in past MMOs:

  •  Inventory full?  Send your companions off to sell your trash.
  • Area Loot enables you to pick up all of your drops all at once.
  • You can craft with resources in your bank.
  • YOU CAN SEND COMPANIONS TO CRAFT FOR YOU.  I don’t have to spend countless hours over a workbench trying to create an Epic Robe of Awesomeness.  My companions can do that for me while I’m out blowing stuff up.
  • You can complete crafting missions OFFLINE.

All of these little annoyances with other MMOs aren’t an issue here and it has been wonderful.

Security

Having the security authenticator available at launch and smartphone apps available soon after have been awesome.  With a secure account, I won’t have to worry about anyone stealing my password and emptying out my cargo hold.  I don’t even have to think twice about playing SWOTR over an open WiFi connection.  If someone steals my key code, who cares?  I will have to use a different one the next time I want to log in.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised to see almost no credit farming spam in the game.  I believe that I’ve had a credit farmer whisper me once in game about buying credits from a site somewhere.  In other MMOs I’ve played, you couldn’t escape the farmers.

Bioware has shown that they are serious about their customer’s security and play experience.  They get the highest marks for security out of any MMO on the market.  It’s kind of sad to think that my favorite video game is more secure than my bank though.

Conclusion

I won’t bother assigning a random score, number of stars, or even lightsabers to this game.  I would encourage everyone to pick it up and try it for a month.  If you’re having fun, keep on playing.  When you stop having fun, stop.  But definitely, spend some time in the SWTOR universe.

 

 

Filed Under: Game Play, General Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Launch Day Instancing

Georg Zoeller hit the official forums to talk about the use of instancing in the starter zones on launch day:

“Launch is a pretty unique situation in many regards. It creates loads on part of the game (the Origin Worlds) that are never seen again after that point.

There are several ways to handle this:

A) Phase (or instance) these areas to handle the temporarily highly inflated load.

B) Design the areas as if they were always under full load. That would lead to large, empty areas after the initial rush in which the normal player population gets lost. You create a large desert – fine if the planet is called Tatooine, but generally large areas with duplicated content suck in MMOs.

C) Put out tons of additional servers for a few days to handle the temporarily inflated load, then consolidate them later. Players generally don’t like that, as it destroys communities.

D) Put up long, multi-hour queues. Players hate that and you really don’t want to be exposed to:

‘My lord, permission to land on Korriban has been denied. They say the planet is full and that the Sith Environmental Protection Council has decided to protect the native population of K’lor’ slugs from being overharvested by denying entry to new visitors.’

E) Don’t do anything, after all it’s temporary and tell players to ‘deal with it’. This leads to people ‘waiting for respawns’.

We opted to go with (A) since it’s a native, well tested feature of our game engine (we work in different phases/instances on our development servers), it can be activated on the fly and deactivated as population levels normalize and since it has the least impact on players.

We definitely plan to minimize the use of this mechanic, but as with our decision to limit the launch supply of the game to a manageable number of players, we are making these choices in order to guarantee satisfaction for the paying customers that will flood our service at launch day.”

Of all of the choices he laid out, I agree that A is the lesser of all of the evils.  If done correctly, most players won’t know that they are in an instance and won’t care since it won’t interfere with their launch day gameplay.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,

SWTOR Won’t Be Released in October

According to this article, EA CFO Eric Brown all but guarantees that SWTOR won’t be released in October.

“Brown also said during the conference that Star Wars: The Old Republic is still aiming for a Q4 release, but, as the firm mentioned earlier in the year, it is prepared for a possible slip into Q1 2012.

“We have a date set internally, with a lot of assumptions around it,” he said. ”We’re not done until we’re done. … We’re not going to know with enough certainty to publicly announce a release date, until later this month or sometime in October.”

I take this to mean that if they are considering announcing the release date in October, that the game won’t be released in October.  I’ve always thought that SWTOR would be released in November and statements like this one tend to support that theory.

 

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,