Star Wars: The Old Republic Random Question/Discussion thread - F2P

[Alderaan]

And personally, I like class roles because it involves teamwork as opposed to every class being able to tank, heal or DPS on the fly. It makes it less about teamwork and more about group zerging.

Just my two credits.

Think you have the 2 mixed up. Teamwork will be more important when things are not static. Everyone will have to work together to survive, instead of just standing there spamming heals on the tank.

[Ohemgee]

Developers just need to make mobs bat shit hard. But nothing AV pre-nerf hard.

[Arelian]

Isn't this a SWTOR thread? There's a GW2 thread for that game.

Edit: For something constructive...

My personal takes on the game after getting my hands on it for a few days. Do note, I went into this with zero expectations and have done almost no research prior to playing on classes and such:

Graphics - It looks... okay, I guess. A lot of negative space makes any real impressive textures stand out. I don't like the character design too much but that's just my opinion. I'd give it a 7/10 for graphics.

Sound - At first I thought it was good, but then I realized a good number of the tracks are just rehashes of the Star Wars theme. It's only memorable because the original theme itself it so ingrained in most of our skulls. The sound effects get wonky sometimes, but it's mostly what you'd expect from a Star Wars game. The voice acting bugs me as well. There are two voices for every class, male and female. Every male Bounty Hunter is Steve Blum, for example, and for a game that emphasizes that your character is a special and unique snowflake having your guy sound the same as everyone else is just... immersion breaking, especially in Flashpoints. The NPC voice acting sounds hollow at times, but that may be more of a dialogue issue. 6/10 for sound.

Story - Simply put; abysmal. It seems Bioware has forgotten one of the bigger elements of writing - the hero's journey.
I started as a Jedi Consular and guess what? Instead of starting off as a no-name jedi padawan I was a highly anticipated force-wielding badass. Nobody wants to watch the strong guy get stronger, there's no tension or anticipation of seeing how awesome I get story-wise. Remember the beginning of KotoR, where Revan was just a random soldier who's powers weren't really known yet and remember how half the fun of the storyline was watching Revan grow in strength? Yeah, that's thrown out the window here. Your character is amazing from the get-go and it is simply juvenile.
There's also seemingly no repercussions besides obvious ones. Your dialogue choices usually trigger maybe 1 or 2 special lines of dialogue from the NPC, but there's an obvious jump immediately afterwards as the NPC goes through their canned script.
The story is simply boring and predictable. For a game that many people are saying will be carried on it's story, this is troublesome.
One thing in particular that made me laugh really hard was on my Consular, within moments of setting foot in the Jedi Temple a fellow padawan (Read: NPC) started flirting with my character. Bioware really wants to make a dating sim, I think.
4/10 for story.

Gameplay - Need I really go into this? I felt like I was playing Generic of the Old Republic. I had my standard MP bar that most of my attacks used, though interestingly enough it filled itself back up quick enough. I'm not going to sit here and say I've played every class extensively, because I haven't, but I doubt that there's a class in this game you haven't played to death in another game. Oh, expect to be running for the vast majority of your playtime in this game. Cities are absolutely massive, taking 20 minutes for me to run from one end of a major city to the other. Unless there's a method of in-city quick travel that the game neglected to tell me, I think this is absolutely horrible. I realize it gives the city scale, but having a quest that asks you to run from one NPC to another - and they happen to be on opposite sides of the city - is a miserable experience when I'm running forever. 3/10 for gameplay.

I do think SWTOR will sell well initially. The Star Wars brand name alone is enough to sell people on the game. I don't think it'll do a good job of holding subs once people realize it's your standard MMO fare plus a few major annoyances. Running a Flashpoint for the first time is pretty neat and fun, but they are extremely lengthy and I dread running them multiple times for gear. The cities and areas being too large is another major complaint of mine.

I can't think of much else to say at the moment, but if you guys have any questions I'd be happy to try and answer them for you!

[Elrina]

GW2 is not groundbreaking. Its just more of the shit people want that already exists.

I feel you need some sort of direction for content from the game. Nothing to do advance the story, but there's a huge balancing issue without properly orchestrating how to introduce content (especially getting everyone on board with dynamic content.) Knowing where to get gear drives endgame. Having the decision to choose is going to be interesting to play out, but again, balancing issues is a short term concern. Actually finding likeminded people to do common things in a long term that you are on board with is another is another (I havent read anything on guild management, but people are people). If you have no life and do everything in the game, cool. But I enjoy competition.


GW2 will be interesting, but who knows what the SWTOR release will be. Plus GW2 is a one time payment

I actually mentioned in my last post that most of what they're doing isn't necessarily working with completely original ideas, but taking good ideas from elsewhere and building on them so that they work better and are more fun. It's essentially what WoW did when it released, none of that was new, it was just compiled together in a way that made it more appealing to the masses than anything that came before it. Blizzard capitalized on that momentum, and it's what turned WoW into what it is.

As far as direction, I'm not sure why you would expect there isn't any. The story surrounding the game is supposed to be extremely extensive, and I'm quite sure there will be a defined method of introducing each type of content before being thrust into it. The dynamic events themselves are simply an evolution of the questing system that will allow the world to feel more like a living and breathing place. Persistent change will be normal and common, the world will continue growing and expanding and changing as time goes on. Stories and ideas will still be abound throughout the world.

Guild Wars 2 is like a monumental statement of the argument between instanced content vs open world. Quests are instanced, in a way. Available to everyone at any time, but it only effects them whether they win or lose. GW2 changes this by making every quest naturally open to everyone, scaling between one person solo questing or a dozen working on the same quest, and one person can win or lose it, creating a cascade of chains that could potentially change the world around it leading to other events that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Agito seems to think it will be people mindlessly bashing monsters together, like Besieged in FFXI or DEs in Rift (I didn't play Rift, I'm going off the context of his statement and what I've heard elsewhere), but that is obviously not the case to anyone who has paid any attention to how they will work.

Just so you know, they haven't actually detailed it (that I know of), but I believe they've stated that they're working on extensive guild management and tools (including native apps for iOS and Android, from release day, to be able to take part in guild chat, among apparently several other external apps for the game).

I don't have an argument for Kupo. I don't know much about the "last stand" feature, and don't know how I feel about it personally myself either. I can handle some criticism from that end, I don't really want the game to be "too easy" either. The article Mann0war linked regarding the decline of WoW was well written (even if I disagree with a couple of the conclusions) and well said. It's something ArenaNet should be watchful for, because a sense of accomplishment is important, and we don't want everything just handed to us. (I actually see this as the biggest challenge the game has, personally.)

As far as actual competition, however... From the dozens of activities/mini-games they have planned, to their PvP plans, from what I understand they have an extremely large interest in the game being competitive. This is a recent interview linked in the GW2 thread, and this is a quote pulled from it:

First and foremost we wanted to be clear and send a message that said, ‘We want Guild Wars 2 PvP to be taken as seriously as any FPS online or RTS competitive game.’ We want to be number one.

We want Guild Wars 2 to be what you think of, when you think of competitive MMO gaming. We had a line around our Gamescom booth all weekend long that was full of people just playing constantly. The response was overwhelmingly positive; everyone really enjoyed it, and the feedback from the players was really cool to see.

Anyway, you seem pretty intelligent about it. And you're right, no matter the hype, we won't know for sure how the balance between the content and everything else will work till it's released. And the subscription fee aspect on top of everything else is something I think a fair amount of people are still underestimating. $15/month isn't a lot, but when you have options between AAA MMOs, and both of them are enjoyable and fun, but one of them charges you nothing, while the other costs you somewhere between $140~180 annually (depending on if they offer discounts for bulk 3-6/month payments), which are you going to choose? Especially the casuals. When kids are asking their parents for it, it's a selling point, when casuals just want to log in for some fun collecting cosmetic crap or chasing achievements, with the economy as it is, not having to pay monthly for the game is going to be just as big a selling point as any single feature the game has.

Also, Agito, the conclusions you come to sometimes don't seem to make any sense whatsoever. I don't know that I'm going to go as far as Kuishen, but seriously, I can't tell sometimes if you just haven't done any research into what's going on in either SWTOR or GW2 either and you're just making terrible assumptions, or if your understanding of how features are intended to work is just mistaken. I'm not sure how that can be resolved, but it's hard to argue or discuss something with someone who isn't exhibiting a full grasp on the material they're arguing about.


Edit:

Isn't this a SWTOR thread? There's a GW2 thread for that game.

My apologies. The discussion was regarding SWTOR, then led into discussion about why people were criticizing this while lauding GW2, then into discussion about faults GW2 has as well as SWTOR. It's hard to really have a discussion comparing two games without doing it in a thread devoted to one of those games, but (I, at least) will try to temper it down a notch.

[Zerocool]

Developers just need to make mobs bat shit hard. But nothing AV pre-nerf hard.

To be honest, this is one of the concerns I do have with PvE content in GW2. While I like the fact that they're making the game more accessible than your typical MMO, I hope that doesn't mean they'll make encounters ridiculously easy. Especially with a more skill based combat system they have the potential to make some really interesting encounters.

[Ohemgee]

All in all, we'll know when the games come out. Its a loose example, but the Battlefield beta was a really old version of the game, it looks to be solid, but they fed us a lot of old shit that isn't reflected in to the game.

Payment on the other hand is huge to me, not that I can't afford it, but on a principle, I don't want to pay for something that doesn't hold its value. $15 a month requires developers to release engaging material, that's literally what we're paying for since Freemium is knocking on the door with enticing content.

I love Star Wars (prequels). But I'm also jaded. Something tells me that I'm really complacent and willing to settle on something established.

[Elrina]

- All in all, we'll know when the games come out.

- Payment on the other hand is huge to me, not that I can't afford it, but on a principle, I don't want to pay for something that doesn't hold its value.

- $15 a month requires developers to release engaging material, that's literally what we're paying for since Freemium is knocking on the door with enticing content.

- I love Star Wars (prequels).

I agree with you completely on all of this. :3

[Greedouw]

been playing for a couple hours now... I like it

[Agito]

Dungeons in Rift take alot longer to complete than the ones in swtor. Even with a really good group of people using optimal dps rotations it took a minimum of 3 hours to complete Deepstrike mines and that's without any wipes.

[Arelian]

And those dungeons sucked as well. What's your point?

[Ohemgee]

Those dungeons were piss easy when I did them. Having the best of the best helps, but once you figure things out in Rift, every thing works like a clock.

[Man0warr]

The original level 50 hard modes in Rift were pretty hard even with elite raider types from other games, once you got the gear and learned the bosses though it got much faster. Then they got nerfed...

Hope GW2 dynamic content isn't like rifts in RIFT, all those dynamic invasions pretty much go unused once everyone hit cap.

[Kuishen]

Well it's definately true that GW2 copied the last stand perk from Call of duty, unless i'm blind you lay down on your back and you get to knife people when you get killed.

That's something that hasn't really been discussed yet and we don't know how it works (at least not in the Q&A/Vidoes I've seen). Also I hate to break this to you but Call of Duty was not the first game to do that... So your original statement was just idiotic to say the least. Regardless, will try to stop bringing Guild Wars 2 into this. I don't even remember how it happened this time.

[Alderaan]

Posted this on our forums but i thought i'd share my issues so far up to level 40. I'll leave out the obvious "WoW in space, nothing new" stuff since it's been discussed to death. Having a guild member that works for BW is nice since a lot of us are on the fence about this game.

-Needs a better target frame and character frame with actual numbers, not just bars. I'd like to know the actual HP and % of my target without having to scroll over it. Also needs some sort of target of target.

-Needs a wardrobe feature with a dye system. Can't believe this isn't in yet. So many neat looking coats and cloaks i've had to npc when i leveled up into worse looking stuff.

-Needs the ability to preview and link items. According to Heelim, BW didn't think people used this feature much? Mind blown.

-Need the ability to resize and move unit frames and UI elements. I hate hate hate hate the disappearing chat box.

-Doing heroics with friends of different levels that are on different planets and in the middle of nowhere is going to get annoying fast. The time it takes to gather everyone is a bit long.

-Dunno if it's some sort of raised exp bonus but i'm constantly broke and behind on buying my skills. Maybe this will be corrected with a slower leveling curve, or maybe this is a known issue.

[Ohemgee]

I want my star wars to be like this:

[Natallon]

Omg that video. Laughing so hard!

[Insanecyclone]

nope.avi

[Kuishen]

nope.avi

fucking lol

[Agito]

I'm sure anything will bleed after getting struck by a lightsaber. Though it's a mystery how the deadly energy from a swipe at your target causes internal bleeding.

[Elrina]

Actually, I'm pretty sure a lightsaber would cauterize a wound as it was made.