If you consider travel in this game 'painfully tedious and obnoxious', then I really don't know what to say...

I am the type of person that wants to feel like my character is doing what he's doing IRL, within reason. Obviously I'm not going to like waiting in my ship for hours while I travel through hyperspace. But going into a spaceport, like he would IRL, going into his hangar, like he would IRL, and launching, again, like he would IRL for me makes the flow of the story nicer and in my own experiences, never lasts more than 2 minutes from starport entrance on planet A to starport entrance on planet B. And i only get the loading screens when I enter and leave my ship, so I really don't understand why travel times/loading screens in this game are so horrible to some people. However, this is all my opinion obviously. I simply brought up the EQ/EQ2 references because back then, travel times and loading screens were just part of the MMO Genre. Nowadays, IMO, it's more about instant gratification. Even if that means "I want to insta-travel".

The only actual loading screens I get are when I go from ship to hangar/orbital station...if I'm going from orbital station to spaceport, or hangar to spaceport, I get a quick black screen that lasts no longer than 3 seconds, tops. Same applies going the other way... I know I'll probably get a thousand "I have a top of the line system" responses, but my new-ish machine only sees full blown loading screens in the above scenarios. And I somewhat agree that EQ was a different animal. Sad, but true. However, pre-ROK EQ2 zones were way worse than loading screens in TOR ever will be. Picture 4 zone lines in Dromund/Coruscant that invoked full blown loading screens to get to the next area...that's just the cities! I guess that's why I don't really see the problem here. Going from space to ground is effectively changing your zone, which usually invokes a loading screen in any other game. Orbital stations and hangars are extensions of the ground zones. If you're seeing full loading screens going between them then I don't know what to tell you.

This... I wonder how EQ1 survived pre-PoP... Part of the experience is getting there IMO. I understand people want it now, blah blah...but honestly most MMOs make it too easy to get places anymore. Meeting stones...classes with insta-portals...SWTOR actually makes traveling a part of the gameplay, and this in my opinion adds to the immersion. However, it appears instant gratification has superceded immersion in MMOs the past 5 or so years...In short, if running from the hangar to the elevator, or vice versa is too time consuming for you and is hurting your ability to play, quit.

Right, because when you hit 16 you are supposed to turn into a cynical ******e who cannot enjoy anything for what they are anymore, I suppose. And for the record, I was 18 when TPM came out. Didn't ruin my childhood, didn't make me swear off anything related to a movie series I liked since I was 4 all because of a CGI Gungan or 9 year old brat. While you think people who like the prequels are juvenile, I think people who complain about the prequels are the same way. Nothing like crying about a couple of movies all because you built up in your mind leading up to it that "It better be like X"...when you got "Y", Lucas turned into an evil idiot who ruined everything you ever knew. Way to make a movie series dictate your life. Sounds like someone...younger than 15...

TPM didn't ruin Star Wars for me after high expecations...so I can't really comment on the correlation between the game and that movie. I will say, what ruined Star Wars for me is this: 28 years later, they made Wicket blink. It wasn't bad enough that they didn't have the foresight to just add more animatronics to the Wicket mask back in the early 80s, but to go back and add it with obviously fake CGI is just a travesty to movie making. So I guess I can correlate this with SWG...LA/SOE didn't have the foresight to add tons of quest content to a sandbox game, so 8 years later we get way too many quests, all voiced over variations of "Kill X amount of Y". And while I'm on a rant, I didn't receive my "Founder" title until over 24 hours after I made my first monthly sub payment. Way to be on the ball BW...

Ahhh, all these posts take me back to July 2003... Only then, the 'sky is falling' posts were about how SOE doesn't care...

This 3D gimmick needs to die. What I wish would happen is that they re-release all 6 so you can have a marathon day at the theatre. Seriously though, what can movies released anywhere from 7 to 35 years ago gain from this 3D garbage?

Poor guy. A bunch of sci-fi nerds mistake his saga for some overanalyzed BS like Star Trek, and cry about it 'not being correct' until he quits. However, usually when you troll someone so hard, they usually snap at some point, lol...

Agree 100%

The moon missions ended due to public apathy after a few missions. The Cold War fueled the entire Apollo project. First it was "I can launch this **** into space before you", then it was "I can launch this animal into space before you", then "I can launch a human into space before you", then it was "I can get to the moon before you"...then they pretty much said "Now what?" The biggest problem IMO, you hit on it so to speak...government control of the NASA...With the government controlling the entire program, the human "pioneering" spirit comes second to "How can this help the country?" That's why we've seen many military and civilian applications to every day products that came from NASA, but no concrete Mars mission. Memory foam and GPS are more important to the public as a whole than exploring the known universe. In their eyes, at least.

Smedley also stated that working with a 3rd Party IP can be 'hell', implying Lucasarts since this was a question he fielded during development of DCOL, their only other 3rd party IP they developed at the time. I totally respect people's opinions about SOE. I never felt as strongly against them as most, especially after my experience during the 'golden age' of EQ2 which was mostly positive. And I'm not saying they're not to blame for the NGE, but they weren't the only one to blame. It just seems like people like to place 100% of the blame for the CU/NGE on SOE because of their track record but fail to remember: A) this was Lucasarts 1st MMO B) People speculated LA was going to pull the plug at the end of 2005 if 'something wasnt done' C) It was Lucasarts employee Julio Torres who played up the NGE's 'star warsy and iconic' gameplay in a way that made him look like the second coming of Rick McCallum D) While he was doing that, SOE employee Tiggs was fired for flipping out about how the CU and NGE were mishandled from both sides, all started from LA's constant obsession of 'changing the game'. IMO, the seed was planted by LA, under the pain of pulling the plug...SOE obviously coded the monstrosity that is the NGE, so you can't go without blaming them as well either. I'm just saying that, again, IMO, placing blame solely on SOE is utterly wrong.

As much as I loved the Pre-CU...Lucasarts would probably never try it again. From their eyes, SWG was a failure...and IMO it's a shame they feel that way. Everyone is looking for their piece of the WoW pie...when SWG came out it was actually considered a moderate success. Sure it wasn't EQ1 numbers, but MMOs weren't benchmarked by how many MILLIONS of Subs they could produce back then. Horrible release schedule of new features (Mounts 4 months later???), and the inevitable misunderstanding of the core game (Where's my raidz/Jedee/Quests?) caused the population to nosedive. Pre-CU was actually becoming the most stable it's ever been by patch 14, which oddly enough was the last patch before the CU. And also within 6 months after the release of WOW... Given the amount of hype and talking up LA did before SWG was released about it shattering records and the such, you'd be naive to say that they didn't have a large hand in the CU/NGE even seeing the light of day. WoW was making money, and it was vastly different than the product they thought could break the "one million mark" back in 2003. I know it's 'hip' and 'in' to bash SOE, but the SOE I remember from 2003-2006 had horrible releases that improved dramatically over time. If you played EQ2 during this timeframe you'd probably know what I'm saying. Nowadays, I wish I could say the same thing about SOE, lol... However, given my beliefs and opinions on the rise and fall of SWG, Lucasarts would most likely NEVER make another sandbox MMO Star Wars game. They tried it once, and if they considered it a success, these forums would not exist and SWG would not be off line. IMO, of course.

1. SWG 2. SWTOR 3. Force Commander (vastly underrated imo) 4. KOTOR1 5. Shadows of the Empire

Gathering was more in depth...instead of just "Steel" and "Iron", there were multiple types of the item scattered around all of the planets...you had to find the best type of this item by surveying (Yes, they had stats too), and place harvesters down, or if you couldn't afford them or couldn't make them yet, you would take samples. Crafting itself made use of many components. IIRC a small house was like 10 wall modules, some storage module, and a power unit, plus something else that escapes me ATM. All were crafted before you could make the final product. You might be saying now "Well, screw that..." You could buy/make factories that produced these components for you en masse...this aspect is closest to TOR's crafting, but not by much, however you could drop the mats in, tell it what to make, and let it run unattended...You could then mass produce the finished product with a factory. The biggest thing was that everything you needed for your toon was crafted. All speeders, weapons, armor, even stimpacks and buffs like spice. Houses, starships, components for your starships...the list goes on and on...