Shouldn't this be in Off-Topic? Also, RIP Kenny Rogers.

Honestly, I just want a whole new Star Wars MMO at this point. This game just isn't aging well in ANY area (especially character customization but that was already behind by 2011 standards), nor is it doing even the bare minimum of at least having a steady supply of content. I look at other MMOs that came out around the same time SWTOR, and they're killing it... whether it's through performance upgrades, new features, regular content, or all of the above. Just look at ESO (launched 2014) and FFXIV (launched 2010 then 2013). It's embarrassing honestly. I'm ready for a new dev team to give a Star Wars MMO a crack (hopefully without EA, but I don't see their contract ending)... maybe CD Projekt Red or Obsidian.

They're honestly all kind of mediocre compared to a single player BioWare RPG, but in comparison to each other, I'd have to say I liked the Sith Warrior story the most and probably the Trooper story the least (or maybe the Consular the least, I can't really remember them at this point).

Truth ^

I would have actually preferred it to be a lot more like ESO for a lot of reasons honestly. There's a reason ESO is considered one of the best and most populated MMOs on the market today. I'm not a huge fan of their combat system, but the world design and content production rate is impeccable. If SWTOR had everything from ESO (with a new combat system and open-world player housing preferably) but with SWTOR-style storytelling/cinematics, I'd subscribe for life.

Wall of text incoming Let me preface by saying this is coming from someone who has subbed (and is still subbed) since launch and participated in multiple closed betas putting thousands of hours into this game. Honestly IMO, the game started off mediocre and just degraded slowly over time more and more. Yes, there were specific features and things added or bits of content that were beneficial to the game experience through the years, but looking back on the history of the game, it was always me looking at the positives of the game on one hand through rose-tinted glasses but always waiting for "things to get better" at the same time. What it came down to was I just didn't agree with the kind of game and core systems they went with. Over-hype in the years leading up to launch didn't help either, obviously, but I was always in "Well maybe the next big update will make the game better" mode update after update yet always feeling slightly disappointed with everything that was added. Turns out it was just the game design itself from the world/map design to the combat to the crafting to the closed off worlds and lack of true exploration. I expected more from a Star Wars MMO with a $300 million budget (which at the time I think was the highest budget for a video game ever). I wanted to live in a Star Wars universe... not necessarily a Star Wars Galaxies 2.0, but something that would do Star Wars justice (like SWG did). The 8 class stories are great of course (some way better than others), but that's where it stops for me. Everything else is, and has always been, sub par in almost every way... including performance thanks to an engine that was already outdated when they built the game on it. I honestly wish they would have just made a KotOR III, and I thought the same when this game got announced, but the original dev team at the time did such a good job of marketing and hyping this game with their slow trickle of information that it didn't take me long to get fully on board with the idea of a story-based KotOR MMO, but now I wish they just would have just made KotOR III. I still to this day play through KotOR I and II after God knows how many playthroughs, yet I struggle to play any of the TOR class stories (let alone the expansions) more than once even though the class stories are this game's pinnacle. I'm at the point, even though I play occasionally, where I wish the game would just close and another Star Wars MMO can go into development and hopefully be open-world and somewhat player-driven at least. The only thing that has really kept me here this whole time is Star Wars itself. Had the game not had a Star Wars skin, I would have MAYBE tried it when it went F2P and dropped it soon after. This game should be at the top of any MMO chart, but it's not... Not even with the Star Wars name behind it. That tells me a lot, and it tells me that poor decisions have plagued this game since the beginning of development, and that's really unfortunate. This game's history is akin to the new sequel trilogy... so many missed opportunities and bad choices. It just could have been so much more.

I guess that makes me the 3rd Flurrian in the thread? You both killed me a lot. Also, to answer the OP's question, since I could talk about SWG for hours, I'll just quote Palps in TROS and say, "Everything."

I recall BW being asked about this years ago in a Q&A somewhere, and they said something about the engine not allowing for that kind of feature, but don't quote me on that. Make sense though with all the other shortcomings of the game engine, which is actually hilarious since I remember multi-passenger vehicles even in SWG.

What do you mean "so many restrictions?" I only listed 1 restriction based on current canon: the Sith not being around during this time period. Also, I have no personal agenda or dogma on how I think they should write anything. I was using common sense to deduce that there likely won't be any Sith (unless they retcon current canon) to be the antagonist force against the Jedi, which are at the height of their power during this time frame. I arrived at that conclusion 1) based on the fact that, as I said, the Sith are extinct/in hiding during this era according to current canon and 2) based on the video they released talking about these alien vikings as primary villains. That said, IF this reasoning turns out to be true, and we end up getting Jedi running around playing Political Simulator 2020 with a sprinkling of fighting against a random group of space vikings, I won't be interested. It will be "art that I don't like and don't enjoy" as you put it. To me, Star Wars is about Jedi vs Sith/Light vs Dark. Not OP Jedi vs random alien pirates. It's not me having a limited imagination, it's the fact that Disney has a limited imagination (as evidenced by the whole sequel trilogy)... I'm just being realistic in my thought processes and expectations on the matter.

Yea that sounds pretty horrible IMO... Jedi running around everywhere at the supposed height of their power, and their villain equal is a group of random raiders. No thanks. That's like the Jawas being the main villain in the Mandalorian the whole season. Unless they do a retcon and somehow bring the Sith out of hiding/extinction, I won't be interested. Jedi demand Sith like plants require sun. You can't have one without the other... unless their plan for story, like I said, is to literally just be prequel-style politics the whole time with a sprinkling of fighting with these viking-esque raiders.

Thanks for the clarification. Quote aside though, aren't the Sith still supposed to have been extinct for several hundred years by this point in the timeline?

This ^ Signed in just to QFE this post. Also, side note, but regarding the High Republic. The announcement really didn't interest me at all for multiple reasons. 1) I have no idea why they didn't choose to explore the Old Republic more when it's already established. They can say it's because they want a blank slate in a different era, but they could literally have a blank slate just the same because the Old Republic is still so unexplored. 2) Story-wise, I can't imagine why they would want to explore the High Republic era in general because, unless I'm wrong, weren't all the Sith extinct "for 1000 generations" until Episode 1? So who will be the villains in this High Republic era unless it's crime syndicates or bounty hunters? It seems to me this era of Star Wars would just be a light side Jedi-fest full of nothing but politics.

I know, I watched the Twitch stream when they first talked about 6.1. I never said I was surprised or caught off guard about what the patch entailed. Plus, this has been business as usual for years anyway. I was giving my opinion about their patch strategy/methodology in general. Content that barely spans 10 minutes (of cutscenes, mind you) should just be postponed to actual story updates because their strategy of micro-dosing content isn't working the way they want it to (to tease future story and entice players). It's just making a lot of people angry and/or annoyed, as anyone can see all over the Gen Discussion forum and in-game.

Unless a patch is purely to fix bugs (of which there are numerous, so they SHOULD be releasing patches exclusively for bug fixes), "content" of this size (and I use "content" extremely loosely) should just be postponed to the next major story update altogether. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks that. Releasing, essentially, a soundbite like this after months of waiting doesn't work to tease or build a craving for future story, it just pisses everyone off because people are already craving actual story. It serves more like a slap in the face than anything, especially to day 1 subscribers like me. I'm at the point where the game either needs to get an actual budget, or just close so the next Star Wars MMO (and we all know there will be one at some point) can come around and hopefully not be littered with mismanagement, poor decisions, poor performance, and a skeleton crew like this one has. The same thing happened to SWG. Third time's a charm I guess?

Not trying to be rude, but actually what did you expect? Have you seen the track record for this game for the past several years? It's not great...

This. Been saying the same thing for years. There's no reason this shouldn't/couldn't be the top MMO on the market, but it's been plagued with bad decisions, poor performance, poor support, and a slew of other negatives since day one. Pretty ridiculous. If it wasn't for me loving Star Wars, I would have been gone almost immediately when the game launched because it's extremely hard to like this game if you pull away the Star Wars sugar coat.

Vague and pointless thread is vague and pointless.

1) I'd be willing to bet it's safe to say I know as much as anyone else here (including you) about the topic based on what I do for a living, but that's neither here nor there. 2) I think I'll keep harping on the topic both because I can and because something needs to be done about it. 3) I'm aware that SWTOR is "CPU bound," but that isn't even a relevant term in a game as old as this with the hardware we have today. You just said yourself it uses, at most, 2 cores/threads. Therefore, the game isn't "bound" by anything from even the hardware capability of 5 years ago, let alone today. It's bound by it's own skin (the engine). That's why I gave the example of running current gen games well over 60 FPS with ease. There's no reason this game should perform so poorly for so many people. And while you're probably correct that the game is about as optimized as it can be (we don't know because we don't work there, obviously), they're just going to have to figure something out like every other persistent online game on the market does because the performance is inexcusable. Look at LotRO and ESO. LotRO released in 2007 and ESO released in 2014. Both of those games have vastly better performance than SWTOR through extensive performance revamps. There are things SWTOR can do to further increase performance outside of "tHeY hAvE tO bUiLd a NeW gAmE wItH a NeW eNgiNe." They just clearly aren't doing those things.

Yea it's set to my GPU. That's the first thing I change in the NVIDIA control panel every time I install a new driver. That was my point though - it's the game's Frankenstein'd and outdated engine, not my (or anyone else's) system. Just specs-wise, anyone who owns a current gen mobile phone are above the specs necessary to run SWTOR even. I have a Galaxy Fold which has 12GB RAM for God's sake.

I've been harping on this topic for years with no answer, so don't count on EAWare to giving you one either. It's honestly one of my biggest problems with the game... the fact that I'm running a 1080 STRIX and can barely maintain 30 fps in warzones or high populated areas regardless of graphics settings, but yet I can run any current game on the market on Ultra (with the exception of RDR2) well above 60 fps with ease. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever get a true performance upgrade. This is arguably the least supported AAA MMO on the market with the most popular IP behind it... and idk about anyone else, but that's pretty sad to me.

The underlying reason many of us are complaining about this is because EAWare will go out of their way to fix something that isn't broken or change something that was perfectly fine the way it was, but then they'll ignore near game-breaking bugs that have existed since launch, ignore player feedback in general on a grand scale, and not maintain the game technologically by updating with the times (i.e. a 64-bit client, memory utilization upgrades, stuff that most other games have done and are doing actively like ESO, for example). So yea... I think people here are pretty valid in their annoyance.

In this case, I don't think it has to do with change, it just has to do with the music sucking. Even Star Wars fan films have higher quality and infinitely more "Star Warsy" sounding music.

Best thing to happen to Star Wars since Rogue One

While there are a few lucky outliers (you apparently being one of them), there have been, and still are, thousands of players who go from 120 FPS in the open world down to 25-40 in WZs and Ops regardless of their specs or settings used. Makes no difference. I have built 3 completely different PCs during my time in SWTOR (2 Intel, 1 AMD), and this game has still performed horribly. TBH, the best performing PC was the oldest one, which makes zero sense. The point is there are definitely major issues that have needed fixing for years now. At this point, people should be able to run this game on a potato, but you have people with God rigs who have a slideshow in WZs and Ops.

I wouldn't count on it. It would have been done already because the game has needed a performance update for several years. Games newer than SWTOR have already even gone through performance/upgrade enhancements (ESO for example). I honestly think their engine is just too borked to do anything with.