wifeaggro
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Posts posted by wifeaggro
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So what are you trying to say...cause I don't have a clue. I know what astute means I just don't know what YOU mean....
clever and perceptive: shrewd and discerning, especially where personal benefit is to be derived.
I believe what he is saying is your clever . And rifts team lead by Scott hartsmen was hand picked paid well and zero corperate restrictions on their game. Rifts lvling process was very monotonous it was no where near as fun as TOR. But its end game was far better its itemization much more thought out. Class system for the win its hands down the most original class system in a MMO.
Im no rift fanboi but i will say this for aDX 9 game with an old engine they rewrote the code contained in it and made it a beast its a smooth beautiful game world. this is what he is talking about Rifts team , compared to EAowares' team. Personally had Bioware gotten private investors Hired big gun expierenced project leads, dodged the EA aquistion .TOR would have been better for it.
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Meh, I've seen way worse...Rift anyone?
But it could be better.
See i found rifts game desgin and end game far far better then TOR, The leveling expierence and story was no where near TOR's , but enviromnetly , presentation and innovation with its class system and rift events. It was way above TOR, espically in visuals and options.
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Very well put! +1
thank you i usally enter these forums in a shark cage. Ive been outspoken about issues since November 2008. say la vie i did not like TOR's totall game expierence oh well there are those that do but im uessing the MMO veteran will feel uncomfotable with TOR for a long term game.
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Really? All of the info leading up to the release made this pretty obvious, at least to me.
So my post is on topic, I'm going to let my sub auto-renew one more time, so that's at least one more month.
No no no Bioware touted this as a true MMO bro, some of us brought those concerns back up in late 2009 and bioware assured us it was an MMO and that only our class stories would be instanced then in late 2010 they started to slightly change their toon and reworded how they described the game when posed the MMO question.
But your right all the info did point up to what it was . Blinded by our own hopes, but considering they said they were making a true MMO and not a hybrid we took them on their word.
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as soon as my Sub runs out . If they can make it a real MMO i will come back.If i want the current expierence im having ill just play D3 it is better itemized.
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This post, like many others, addresses some big problems with the game. It's difficult to remember much of the leveling proces, simply because, in my opinion, this game doesn't trigger a lot of emotions.
The game itself is too easy to level up solo, and fails to 'prey' on the feeling of achievement. If the game had lots of properly incentivized group content, you could combine a sense of achievement with social interaction. Strong bonds are forged when obstacles are overcome in a group, but SWTOR hardly brings people together in this fashion. Neither flash points (nor heroics) are necessary for substantial gear progression, and the aforementioned exist in their own separate vacuum, which means they have no connection to the world. World quests should - at least sometimes - culminate in flash points, instead of being the result of a random "holocall of heroism" from the guy or gal upstairs.
They messed up the loot too, big time. I honestly can't find a single item I really desire in the current databases. The items feels disconnected from the flash points. If I go to Athiss, I want to be able to find an item that belonged to a person of note with relevant ties to this specific place. Basically, if you enter a pirate stronghold, you wanna find cool stuff that it would make sense for pirates to possess. And don't get me started on item aesthetics...good lord... O_o
Loot has been heavily trivialized, since prototypes and artifacts are available to everyone and their brother from the get go. In the-game-that-shant-be-mentioned, an epic item was just that, freaking epic. It's bad enough that items seem void of any soul, being mere stat upgrades, but to make matters worse, they decided to make loot tiers completely pointless. As such, they don't motivate as much as they should.
What we're left with, is a game that makes grouping redundant, and fails to properly cater to those who chase after the rare and the exotic in order to feel a sense of accomplishment and uniqueness. Mix that with linear, corridor-like worlds, that you're basically punished for trying to explore, and you end up with a monotonous gaming experience which has serious longevity issues.
Pretty depressing for those of us who followed this game for years, hoping for a thrilling experience that left you wanting for more, not considering unsubbing with the game barely past the two month mark.
Ya its an uncomfortable posistion as a fan of Bioware, a fan of the MMO genre and borderline obsessive with following this game. for 18 months prior to TOR's release i was on the forums every day. Listened to three different Fan site Pod casts. Followed every rumor thread or blog just to glean info.watched every game video to glean info from speculation. As you can see from my join date i had followed the game from its announcement.
When i was invited to beta 2 it was amazing. I cannot say i was overly impressed with TOR from my beta expierence but i would only alow myself to get to lvl 20 then reroll to a different class at which time the cycle was usally over.
I can say the story was completely enjoyable. but i noticed serious design decsions that solidfied the game would not hold long term apeal for me, unless the endgame was a rock solid content packed expierence. the static world withe corridor driven planets made me feel like i was playing a larger scale DA. I over looked it trying to convince myself that it would open up on the later planets. And the lack of life in the enviroments was due to it being beta and the animations and ambience would be better at launch.
All in all SWTOR is not a true MMO. its a massive single player game with multiplayer options and a social hub to dispatch from.The lack of social features is astounding espically in the guild department, which is mind blowing consider the pre launch ramp up they spun with pre deployment.Though it sounds horrible ill stick with Companies like Blizzard and (cough) even sony (i know the flame ill get for that last one) But both of those companies have created game worlds and mechanics that stand the test of time. Id love to see Trion get 120 million and a large IP to work with and see what they could create.But this was my Very last BW purchase. I might buy ME3 when it goes on sale if EA allows steam to have it.
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If you could, can you list your overall experience with the Hero Engine as it has been modified by BioWare and back up some of this idle speculation with real facts?
What exactly will prevent them from implementing a dynamic weather system or day and night cycles, for instance?
Please be specific.
I have Zero expierence with the hero engine. Ive only the things that Bioware themselves have said they can and cannot do with the engine and their design concepts. They cannot or will not ever add dynamic weather or day and night cycles. they have already stated it on several occasions. the obvious fact that they are having trouble just getting high res textures to work for the game speaks volumes about the reworked hero engine they have coded.
As for my expierence with it i can only comment on my game time. After playing TOR and then playing a MMO devolped in 2008 on half the budget, that has DX 10 options high res pacs ,and more graphic options then a single player game.handles 64 person siege battles with destructable enviroments with minimal FPS stuttering at 70 frames consitent. compared to standing still on the fleet with 20 people surrounding me doing nothing in a completely static enviroment and getting 20 frames i can say that biowares engine is underwheling and my expierence with their engine is negative.
And before you nerd speak on me and claim it is my system it is not
intel i 7 990x OC'd to 4.2 ghz liquid colled
Gforce 590gtx 3 gig Video card driver 285.62
8 gigs of ram corsair 1333
win 7 x64 ultimate.
10,000 RPM Raptor
internet speed Fios 4.5 up and down
With that said Bioware did some really cool things with their game, but most of them revolve around single player expierence. They are a great Devolper but they should have not gotten into the MMO market with out some big guns in the MMO devolpment field directiong and leading their teams. the inexpierence shows point blank , their concepts were short sighted.
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It is a single player game . with online features
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Whoa, you just voiced what people had been saying since 2008. though it was a small voice in the devolpment forums it was all things that the small voice feared.The only way to fix it is with new planets designed differently. Larger more wide open spaces. Room to explore. More sandbox elements are an absolute must. In-depth crafting. Player housing on planets and non instanced. More in-depth harvesting.The only thing that will save this game is D-E-P-T-H.
Also, it just seems that nothing you do in the SWTOR world really matters.
BW's almost doctrinal stance on the solo story design is a mistake. Their stance on solo gameplay as a whole, in an MMO, is a mistake.
SWTOR's group content is INCONSEQUENTIAL. If I did 5 fp's total, that would be a lot. There is no need to do them. You do not need to do them to advance in any way. I made it to 50 on one toon and 20 on another in 30 days without them. You say I missed out on great gear??? Really and with what consequence? NONE! And I was constantly ahead of the leveling curve right up to Corellia which is 47-49.
The group content is fun that being FP's and Op's but it's old and tired and in the end doesn't matter as everyone will get good enough gear or better gear without trying so there is no point to it.
People on the forums tell you do the FP's, OP's, crafting and such but none of it really matters in the end. Crafting : you will loot better gear while PvPing or running regular quests , fps or ops, so no point. Gear is easy to get so everyone will have it so again no point to ops or fp.
At end game the game really becomes pointless especially on Ilum as Republic.
That's one of the biggest things I come away with is that the game is too easy, too much good gear drops for nothing, no one needs you and you need no one. No middle game content that would make someone slow down. No real Epic questing going on. It's just more like doing assignments. You will get everything you want guaranteed. No risk whatsoever. It's epically boring.
It's the state of MMO's today I guess. Kind of sad actually.
The truth is ive played all the planets a couple of times over or more more on some of them. been playing since beta 2 so i attribute some of my ambivelance to burn out. but truth be told i remember nothing of my leveling expierence or the planets minus a few bright spots. I remember zones and expierences more in AOC Eq 2 Rift,and even EQ 1 crystal clear. I have gaming friends form all those games we made friends and transitioned to other MMO's as a group.
Ive not met one new person in SWTOR and it was not for lack of trying either, Ive had that expierence where i hit the add to group plus sign on their portrait and recieved a tell sayin no thank you i dont need help. more then a few times. I do think if SWTOr does have a massive burn off and it teaches the industry a big monetary lesson perhaps they will move form the pure theme park design and go back to some of the traditioninal game design that held subs for longer cycles.
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How bout we start with the simple things you learn in Game Design 101. Like weather effects and a day/night cycle? And then get rid of "exhaustion zones". Hey, see those beautiful mountains over there!? No, you can't go to them
SWTOR design is not easily fixed. engine concepts and philosphies about what gamers want. all those things combined make up SWTOR's fundemental design. Its not easily corrected. if you looka how hard of atime they are having just getting high res textures into game is telling the story of their game engine and design choices. Games released in 2004 have better textures and all the Dynamic world effects. Bioware made a dieliberate decision to leave these things out and concentrate on doing what they know ow to do, and picked an engine friendly to their strengths. the things that will make TOR feel aive will never happen, dynamic weather, day and night cycles, dynamic NPC's dynamic content. it will not happen in TOR the story 4th pillar is bioware focus and its central support the other 3 pillars are extremly weak by design that will not change it would take them rewritting the base hero engine they have devolped on and we all know that aint gonna happen.Enjoy TOr for what it is a great single player game with a plethora of multiplayer features. The market is going to go nuculear over the next 5 years with the big budget MMO's in production ,and the few good ones that have survived the storm will get better as well.
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Really single player? Every game is single player if you don't have any friends. But I can see why no one wants to group with you.
Lol the only reason i log on is to group with guildies who need FP's run other then that when i have game time i just sit in Team speak and BS with my friends. sorry my opinon offends you but its how i feel. If you look at my join date you can see i was a fanatic about this game. though im outspoken about some of the design decisions everything i had concenrs about are the biggest complaints.
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That is by going to other zones on a open pvp server and looking for a fight. However this is what I find NOTHING. When i loaded into the zones there was 7 people listed on one planet leveling and 3, i kid you not 3 leveling on another. How bad is that??? The saddest part was I only found 5 total imps to fight on both these planets (one was AFK). Now before someone says "well they are all on Illum pvping" i am going to put a stop to it. The health of a new game is measured by the amount of leveling people in each zone. This game after 2 months or so doesnt have anyone leveling. On a friday night I can hardly find another 40 plus to fight against, whats with that? That is a sign that either people hated the game and unsubbed already or everyone is at 50.
When wow came out there was a endless stream of people playing in almost every zone. Open pvp all the time. What makes this game so different? What happened to the 1.7 million subs? Maybe if the lower level player base started putting together what is driving them to unsub, maybe just maybe this trend can be reversed.
Before you flame this with "your on a low pop server" "there is nothing wrong with my population" junk let me say this sever was one of the highest poplulations when the game first release.
One cause to have people quit is the resolve system in pvp in general. If people have others they should list them here. It would be helpful for BW to see what it driving people away
Well that is the fast lvl process i dont know why devolpers think we want that when they provide a BS broken end game that has bad itemization and buggy mechanics. My prediction is by 90 days this game will have the largest burn off of any MMO to date. but it will still reatain 750 k subs. its sad but true they sold out produced a single player Lobby type game with massive online features and called it a MMO. TOR will be success on IP alone the MMO veteran wont stay. only the single player gamers.
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I read the developer Q&A session thoroughly and throughout the grand speech it became clear to me that everything would be amazing in this mega-patch called '1.2'. However, if you read between the lines you will see that looking back on their patch naming conventions these fixes will come in the form of: 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, 1.2.4, and so on.
Going on that assumption (because I highly doubt that THAT many chances will come in a single update from what we've seen so far) all of the 'fixes' and tweaks we read in the Q&A will actually be part of '1.2' as he said, but all of 1.2 will likely stretch 4-6 months total until they get to 1.3.
You can bash me all you want, but I bet you I'm right. When people complain about it they'll just say something like "well, we told you it was going to be in 1.2, but our development cycle s include several segments to 1.2 which are released over time."
you could be right. BW is extremely slow with devolpment, and now that EA is involved they like to use colorful language and double speak to explain away things they say prior to what they were not able to acomplish.
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Many people have said they're bored with this game at 50 and this is quite common with mmos, especially when they have just launched. More flashpoints and operations are great but what about some solo flashpoints that would allow players to bring 3 of their companions? I think this would be a great idea to add some variety to the end game content and break up the monotony of running dailies.
The flashpoints would have to be a bit easier than the ones designed for a group of 4 actual players so maybe a "solo" difficulty could be added or perhaps some completely new FPs could be added down the road after Bioware can gauge their popularity.
Thoughts on this?
Its already a single player game. I will just play skyrim if want to play alone full time. the future for MMO's looks bleak in all honesty very grim. If this is the best BW could do with 120 million in devolpment im pretty much done with any new releases.
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We play the same EQ2? You talking bout the port where you get your jumping mount? I mean if immersive to you means cram a ton of people on screen and make a couple talk when you click on them then you should be pretty immersed in swtor lol.
Unfortunately i am not. aside from the Story which is great. the rest of the game words is extremly flat. you would be suprised how much passive things like dynamic lighting and weather cycles bring to a game world. But to answer your question i felt more immersion in Vanguard then this game.TOR shines in some area's but not this one.
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Roll an alt. Enjoy the different stories and have fun... Make some friends maybe?
In all honesty the tools Tor provides are very minimal to encourage social interaction or make it easy. some world wide LVL chat system would be extremely helpful for 50's not everyone sits on the fleet . and perhaps a player search by lvl not only the zone your in.Lets be honest here TOR is a single player game with Lobby type options for multi player . it has some MMO features but its pretty stripped down. the only way to have fun in TOR is to be part of an active guild of 10 or more daily players.
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So I have always felt, since beta anyway, that the swtor world felt dead. Not just in the number of players but the environments. Lifeless cities. No ambient sound. Well played the Tera beta the last 24 hours straight and it confirms these feelings even more.
The cities feel so alive. Players are everywhere. Sounds of city life, crafting, players dueling in the dueling ring. I actually felt like part of an MMO WORLD. The list goes on and on. Yes it has flaws too (Korean) just makes me hope and some point Swtor will feel more alive.
I tested this theory my self and decieded i would test the ambience against a 2004 game EQ2. I was amazed at how alive the world felt Freeport felt very immersive . Patrols NPC's shouting at you waving you over. I am a bit fearful for TOR future seeing how much damn time i spent following it. Tor feels static and lifeless is a basic design flaw and i dont know that they can correct it. TOR shnes in some area's and fails miserably in others.
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it needed an expansion 3 weeks ago.
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My goodness.
This thread has really blown up while I have been gone.
Singleplayer
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Best MMO of 2004
Epic i did not catch that until some one else pointed it out.
Mine would read "I want what Bioware is smoking"
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That was a whole lot of forum F E L L A T I O.
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Can we get a new tally?
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Yup. If only Bioware had built servers and designed a game client that could actually handle a normal MMO population, rather than being forced to artificially limit the populations of their servers to compensate for their terrible engine. Then they could have opened 140 servers instead of 220, and most of these issues, including the queues, wouldn't have been issues at all.
Even when servers are "full" they don't seem all that heavily populated. The problem is all on Bioware's end.
Harsh. but quite possibly the truth. The best MSPORPG game ever designed. Massive single player online role playing game. so many good things about the game and at the sametime so many bad things. the problem is the bad things seem to be fundemental core design flaws, not surface bugs and cracks. the longer i play the end game , Every time i try to play an alt, the flaws become over whelming.
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I doubt many people outside of BW/EA know the financial breakdowns but typically speaking when a budget is created for a project, in my experience, we don't include "licensing" within the scope of "development" costs. That licensing is cost is actualized outside of the cost to build.
So is the 300M the total budget including everything? Is it the cost to build? Regardless of semantics here the fact remains that this title was NOT ready for release and it would appear after the first 2 months that it's not managed well.
Some of this is just my opinion but when you look at simple things like - security to prevent hacking/cheating, very little Q&A for patches and fixes to patches (repeatedly), poorly executed PTR, the heaping numbers of bugs... This just begin to really add up.
Hey, lots of people don't care about those things and fine to them. However, there are 300k+ people who did. Does that mean the game is dead? Nope. Does it mean that BW needs to get their act in gear? Yeah, pretty much.
Ya they actually released what the break down was for Subs at least. BW 33% LA 33% EA 33%. !00% of game sales went to EA which they already recovered the investment money plus profit.
SWTOR: Theme-park MMO design. End of the road?
in General Discussion
Posted
it actually changed payment models, and became much more successful and profitable. LOTRO failed because it broke form traditional end game and had no Sauron faction. many many players wanted to play evil faction . that plus no true end game raiding or Dungeons really hurt it at launch. It was a turbine game that right there was aa bad decision.