I really enjoyed the Consular story. It picks up towards the end of act 1, and I found myself pleasantly surprised a few times that the rest of the supporting characters weren't carrying the idiot ball towards the ends of the mystery-solving bits, like I figured they would be. I did really dislike that there wasn't a good snarky dialogue line for the voiceover, and you basically had to choose between stoic hero and haughty jerk, but what can you do. The class arc was definitely the best part of Corellia, which was totally forgettable to me after the first moment of being wowed on the way out of the space port.

People seem to mix up the philosophical and cultural presentations of the Sith/Jedi a lot. How each philosophy works in theory and how it works "in practice", which is to say, how it's presented in the game, are very different. You did a good job of summing up the Jedi philosophy, and the poster you quoted did a pretty good job of summing up the Jedi in practice. Your post sums up the Sith in practice, as does the above poster. However, philosophically, the Sith code is basically an interpretation of Existentialism. It can be summed up as "No one has any more god-given right to tell me what the rules are than anyone else. So I'm going to make my own rules." In practice, the Sith are backstabbing social Darwinists of the worst sort, and personally I think that's a failing of the creators of the lore. It's quite possible to have a positive interpretation of Existential thinking. Every protagonist in Gurren Lagann could be compared to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, in one of my favorite examples of that.

It's cool bro, ArenaNet has you covered too with their third game type: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Structured_PvP It actually has less PvE in its PvP than Warzones do.

No. As a BioWare RPG, the morality choices aren't terribly interesting or plot altering, and the extremely linear story has its pacing shot to hell by preponderance of boring MMO sidequests. As an MMO, the game does nothing to break the WoW mold, and in many ways exacerbates the problems of WoW-type games with their other decisions (extreme skill bloat and lack of hotbar customization chief among them). Not to mention the fact that they seem determined to push out new content rather than giving enough attention to make sure current and older content is bug-free, polished, and balanced, which makes the game feel extremely shoddy at the end-game.

Yup. But don't forget, no add-ons for the forseeable future so we might fix this mess for the devs! Because apparently 5+ years of dev time wasn't enough to figure out that having more hotkeys than hotkey slots was a Bad Idea. Maybe they'll give players a couple more bars in a year or two.

Unfinished.

I'm not blaming them for making it that way. I'm blaming them for doing a shoddy job of making the philosophy mirror the portrayal. They could have just made the Sith evil demon worshipping bad guys who followed a belief system that explicitly wanted to wipe out all life in the Universe and rule it or whatever. They certainly would not be alone in a portrayal like that. But instead the Force has been presented as a metaphysical construct that responds both to strong emotions and direct use as well as passive allowance for its "will" to move through people, with two conflicting philosophies springing up around its proper use. The Force is a sloppy mash-up of karma/Void and the Will to Power given a strange sort of mysterious sapience. Which makes sense, because the two main philosophies of how it should be approached can be summed up as bowdlerized versions of Zen Buddhism and Nietzschean philosophy. I'm okay with this. I blame Lucas for taking this premise and running with it in the most simplistic, childish way possible, by deciding the space-buddhists are the eternal good guys and the space-ubermenschen are eternal villains, by ascribing Light and Dark to them. Then I blame him for taking every last little detail of the original trilogy as being not just a reality of the times (the robes, the training styles, the lightsaber) and turning them into universal truths of the Galaxy even when it's totally ridiculous in the prequels, because he blew his creative load on podracing and Jar Jar Binks. And I find it unfortunate that he probably had a lot of say in the mass of EU writers (which includes KotOR) having little say in challenging the idea that the Republic is anything but a slightly more or less bloated corrupt bureaucracy and the Sith as anything more than mustache-twirling psychopaths from the beginning of time until the end.

'Love is not one of them' because it clashes with most of the boring writers who want to make sure people don't have to be challenged by defining Good and Evil by more than whether you throw rocks or lightning. The Sith Code is about using your passions to break free of the restrictions that other people place on you. It only says strong emotions and the willingness to act on them are the keys to setting yourself free, it doesn't say you have to be a sociopathic murderer. Kamina would find the Sith Code to be right up his alley. If you want an example of what a zealous Light Side, positive emotion Sith might look like, watch Gurren Lagann.

That's a fair criticism. I guess I could have said "the typical implications of threat are typically binary". Generally, games with a central threat mechanic are balanced such that everyone doing their thing does roughly X amount of threat, and a tank doing his thing does X+Y, with the Y buffer varying from game to game. Usually something that heavily messes with the idea of threat only mattering in terms of aggro (things like secondary targets chosen by threat level, tank-targeted disables that require an off-tank, or threat resets) is a specific exception/mechanic for a particular fight. But the post was already on the long side. It's a fair point, though.

It's invisible because the binary nature of threat (I have enough to be the primary target of X/I don't have enough to be the primary target of X) means stripping out another level of obfuscation in PvE content by making it visible. And in a trinity game, hitting a "sweet spot" of obfuscation is a way to draw out the life of content. A typical, successful PvE encounter breaks down to a few different areas in a game like this one. Itemization - Do we have enough damage, healing, and mitigation in terms of raw numbers to do more damage to the enemy than the enemy does to us (minus our healing), and the ability to deal it fast enough to finish the fight before the "end point"? Execution - Is everyone doing their PvE dance correctly? Is the tank holding aggro on the boss, the healer healing and removing debuffs, and the DPS dealing damage, while dodging or succeeding at whatever additional hoops a given boss requires? Luck - Did the healer get stunned by an add on top of the acid rain ability that they needed to dodge? Did the boss get a string of lucky crits? Did the DPS lag when he needed to move away from the group and blow everyone up? These things all interact with each other, and ultimately boil down to variations on the main theme of a holy trinity game, the Tank 'n Spank. The thing is, in games like this one, there is a pretty hard upper limit on what constitutes "fun" for the Execution and Luck parts. No one wants to lose a fight with some regularity because of something outside of their control. Most people don't want to learn an extremely complicated dance for every boss fight, (but make no mistake that most boss fights have a "solution" that is typically very specific and designed with that solution in mind.) Furthermore, successfully completing content in a gear progression trinity MMO improves your itemization, which in turn lets you get sloppier on the execution and less concerned about bad luck as you progress (this is typically what it means to have content on farm.) There are few situations where you can drastically change the basic components of the dance, because otherwise the whole trinity model begins to break down, and because it is especially specific in terms of how it should be completed and can be trivialized by completing it, there is an upper limit on replay value. Because of all of these reasons, the value of a fight drastically falls off after it's first completed by a group. There usually isn't a great deal of ways to change one's approach or improve upon the "accepted" model, and even then, very soon you'll outgear the fight and it won't matter anyway. Thus, a prime way to extend the life of a fight and maintain some sense of tension is by hiding information that allows you to complete it. Because the mechanical execution is usually pretty straightforward (and people write walkthroughs), and people don't like losing to luck, they have to keep something "unknown" to maintain that tension. "Threat" is something fairly unique to the tank-heal-DPS style games (who "tanks" in a sidescrolling beat 'em up, or an FPS that doesn't have trinity style classes like TF2?), and because other games do allow you to see resources like health and resources, it's not really reasonable to expect them to be obfuscated (even though TOR tries by hiding the combat log). Threat is what makes a tank a tank. Being hard to kill but unable to pull aggro makes you a lump, and doing a ton of damage as a squishy while pulling aggro makes you dead. Losing control of threat is one of the few things that is widely acceptable as a viable source of failure in a fight, and actually one of the only things that scales up with gear in a static boss fight. So, not that I agree with it, but all of that is why threat is hidden. Because it props up the illusion in a trinity MMO that you're interacting with different people who have consequences on each other, rather than managing your specific set of bars while you play an elaborate game of DDR on your keyboard.

7/10 while leveling the first time. It's pretty decent for an MMO, but the pacing isn't great as an RPG. 5/10 for leveling after that since it's not super great for replaying through, no matter how many times they suggest rolling alts. Especially if you leveled with 1 or 2 people of different classes and watched their stories while you leveled. 4/10 for the endgame. There's nothing really new there, and what is there is buggy and unbalanced. Thus somewhat below average.

I have a lot of complaints about this game. One thing they did absolutely right, however, was simplifying CC types in PvE. Everything either works on every mob type, on droids, or on not-droids. This is an easily noticed distinction that you can tell at a glance from looking at the mobs, 90% of the time, without having to look at a UI element to see whether this latest off-colored wolf-like thing is a beast, or a demon, or an elemental, or undead, and which one of your CCs can actually work on it. In a game that involves a lot of staring at the UI for minutia, I can't say enough how much this particular good design decision stands out.

I just wish it would have been a little more transparent. Something like a "Paid to Beta Test" title or something. I mean, that's what it translates to, but still.

Star Wars takes place a Long Time Ago. KotOR takes place ten-thousand years before that. Anyway, I've had my fill of space fantasy with glowsabers and spaceships. Bring on the fantasy with a side of clockpunk athiest sabertooth tiger-people and airships. Just a few more months now...

The gameplay, ability design, talent design, themepark quest design, gear progression style, instance design, and much of the PvP design is very similar to WoW's from about five years ago. It's fair to make comparisons when things are similar. It's especially fair to make comparisons when things are similar and competing for limited resources (IE a player's monthly sub and the time commitment an MMO usually requires). I played WoW. I quit WoW several years ago. I'm not a raging fanboy or hater of WoW, but I do think this game is even more of a WoW-clone than LotRO was. SWTOR doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is an online game with a monthly fee and gameplay motifs that are very, very closely tied to the biggest name in the genre (genres are categories of media that bear strong similarities, and thus are more apt for comparison and relative evaluation than items that are not within the same genre, btw). Acting as though nothing any other MMO dev team has done in the last 5 years is relevant to this game and its success is an ignorant faith-based preconception of how markets work, unless you think the only criterion this game should be judged on is "Can I play Star Wars online?" But it seems like a pretty common belief held by the devs of this game, so at least you aren't alone.

Well, that's good for you. I'm playing CoH for free right now, and I'm going to go back to giving them my money as soon as I'm sure that my guild's activity here isn't going to pick back up. I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason than the fact that Paragon's devs have earned my trust from years of actively responding to player feedback with very little spin or "working as intended" posts. Until then, I paid my 15 bucks, I can point out the flaws in the game as much as I want (at least until a mod closes yet another thread), and I find it hilarious that the game's defenders have resorted to picking apart a silly analogy and ad hominem attacks. The gameplay is clunky. The design borrows heavily from Burning Crusade era WoW even when it conflicts with the handful of new things they tried to do with the game. - Modded/crafted gear is cool... until you get to level 50, where the slavish dedication to WoW's gear treadmill and "showing off" requires you to look like everyone else (and "like everyone else" usually translates to "stupid".) - The engine is poorly optimized. It doesn't handle a large number of people on screen well, and can't even display high res textures outside of cutscenes. Instead we get a blurry mess that looks like it came from an early-era PS2 game. While your character's appearance should be more important than other MMOs, since they want to emphasize that you're a character in a story. - Which ties into the fact that the character customization options are hilariously limited. The racial options could make Star Trek fans blanch at how same-y and "human with prosthetics" all of the species look, and the individual customization options are lacking. Of course, the non-selectable species only seem to have 2 or 3 static facial models at most, so I guess it could be worse. - The "revolutionary" mission design is amateurish and novel at best. I'm doing the same things I did in other theme park MMOs, except I'm listening to 5 minutes of voice acting first. The class stories are fun in the sense that you get to play a hilarious Mary Sue character and nerds can use the game to play out power-trip escapist fantasies, which isn't a bad thing in itself. Of course, the way the class stories work out makes this game more actively antagonistic to RPers than any MMO I've played. - Space stations add nothing to the game but mind-numbingly boring, obvious timesinks and compartmentalization. They make the whole game seem smaller while making travel times more onerous and annoying whenever you want to get anywhere. These are all engine problems, systemic issues that would require a large amount of sudden dev time to fix, or intentional design decisions. That's not even going into the bugged content, unfinished/removed features (Match to Chest, anyone?) or a whole lot of other strange and bad design decisions.

Meh, I'm still subbed for this month while I wait and see if my guild maintains enough general interest to stay, at least until GW2 launches. In the meanwhile, I find shouting legitimate complaints and suggestions into the pillow-fort of apologists and sycophants to be fairly cathartic. I wanted this game to be good, since I spent a chunk of money on it. It's really not, for real, discernible reasons, and every time I see the most ardent supporters of the game have to relent and say "look, it didn't launch with factory standard features, sure, but it's a new game, why are you expecting it to be complete and polished? Just wait it out for some indeterminate length of time for things to get better :cool:" I feel a little bit of satisfaction.

They had several years and the feedback of many beta testers over many months, and managed to launch buggy and feature incomplete. I think a 3 year old would be pretty justified in crying about not getting any juice, if the reason was because the juice-box didn't come with a straw and they've been told to wait a few months while they finish up the straw tech. And also figure out some way to perforate the box lid since they forgot to do that too. More than that, they have exhibited a pretty strong hit-or-miss, make-it-up-as-we-go design philosophy in a lot of their systems, which doesn't inspire confidence that the fixes they produce eventually will be all that inspiring. But hey, if you wanna wait it out with your awesome jedi patience and faith, go for it.

To build off of this post, there's a pretty obvious choice here: BW has been pushing to make the post-50 game focus on "third faction" threats (to make dev time on endgame instances shorter, I imagine), and indeed seems to be setting up the Hutt Cartel as a more active antagonist in the endgame. So when they redesign Ilum (and if they're smart, they'll redesign Ilum sooner rather than later), add in a third Hutt Cartel faction on the planet, that either side can ally with. Maybe make it so that the side that's overpopulated on Ilum gets some sort of incentive (bonus valor, etc) if they decide to go do some freelance mercenary work for the Hutts. Server populations don't lie, bro. edit: and I say this as a level 50 Shadow who found the Repub side and story pretty entertaining.

I don't mind a challenge. I do mind bugged out content, or poorly tuned content. I also mind ridiculous gear grinds for uninteresting minor upgrades that manage to be boring, time-consuming, invalidate crafting, and are infuriatingly random and unrewarding all at the same time. That said, I did enjoy the game from 1-49, even if it was buggy at times in ways that really killed the mood, especially towards the end. It's just unfortunate that the core game isn't more entertaining to me. I got my alt to Taris and couldn't stomach going through the sidequests again. Haven't logged in for more than a week at this point, and don't find myself missing the game even a little.

That the playerbase is slanted to one side isn't anyone's fault, because it is not inherently a value-laden topic. Picking a side shouldn't have any greater impact in moment to moment gameplay than picking a race. This is a game, you should be free to play what you want, at least to the extent of making what amounts to a cosmetic choice during character creation (because really, with all of the classes being mirrors and the gear system being what it is, you essentially only choose a side for aesthetic reasons.) There are ways to design around unbalanced sides. Ideally, you avoid the whole problem by making it easy to cross sides or matching up 3 factions, or spread out to various objectives, so that the imbalance is more fluid and able to be controlled by the players. Barring that, cross-server warzones could increase the availability and matching for everyone, while instancing or stat bolstering can be used to balance open world RvR on servers with huge imbalances. There are ways to design around the potential conflicts that arise from the value-neutral issue of a faction imbalance. That Bioware has chosen to do this by a) Limiting WZ selection choice and making one of the random WZs same-faction enabled and b) More or less completely failing to comprehend how an open world PvP zone like Ilum functions, or should function, is the problem. People picking a side they like more shouldn't be an issue, it's something a competent system designer should accept and account for when they adopt a hard-set, two faction model for the game. Failing to account for it, or making only poor, token gestures at accounting for it, are design failures. TL;DR - Faction imbalance isn't anyone's fault. Faction imbalance being a problem is the dev's fault for failing to incorporate real solutions into the game's design.

Good luck getting a response. The closest thing to an official reply on things like this is the suggestion that you roll an alt. Apparently this really is just KotOR3. The endgame is an illusion. Have you considered New Game Plus*? *Plus not currently included. Look forward to it coming, possibly in March, with the actual Legacy system! For now just reroll.

I'll be playing CoH, and waiting for GW2's release to play that. ... Which is pretty much what I'm doing now, except I'm playing the F2P version of CoH and staying subbed here a little longer to see whether or not the rest of my guildies get bored with this game, and take care of the last thing keeping me here. So I guess I'll be resubbing to CoH, and waiting for GW2.

You're right. It happens over the course of five or so years of serious development and iteration, where game systems are heavily altered to improve the overall design. Bad design and a terrible engine are the sort of things that are extremely difficult to address after launch, without something like the NGE which alienates your customers who have come to like the game as it is. It's lose-lose to ship a modern MMO before it's ready, because unlike the buggy releases of yore, there's serious, actual, polished competition these days for people to devote their typically single MMO sub to. Unless you're looking for the most cynical, short-term profit angle based on pre-release hype.

Guild Wars 2 will be explicitly basing their RvR on DAoC. With 3 different servers competing on a single map for capture points and rotating the server matchups every 2 weeks based on performance, so servers with a stronger PvP showing will be matched up with similar realms. They've also committed to following the gear progression model of the original GW, where you don't have massive powercreep, but rather rare armor and endgame progression give you cosmetic items and more options to select from in combat, rather than a direct stat buff. Having DAoC style RvR would be fantastic, but to get there in SWTOR would require the sort of redesign that simply isn't possible once a game goes live, not to mention a resources commitment to PvP that... well, if we had that sort of commitment, Ilum wouldn't look like it does. It's not going to happen here.