Just a question, do you solo everything including ops and hardmodes? It sounds to me from what you're saying that if you team up to overcome something you can't do alone, you are by definition being carried.

The funny thing is that if it was any other genre than MMO it would be. "Stop comparing the 7 year old game to this, this is newer and have had a chance to look at what others did wrong before it and improve on it so of course it's going to be better." If this had been an FPS and you could favourable compare a 7 year old game to it, the outrage would be insane. As it would if it was an RTS or RPG or any other acronym for that matter. But because it carries the MMO acronym it gets a free pass. Because it carries Star Wars, it gets a free pass and of course since it's BioWare, that's another free pass. Look, no strikes at all, game is perfect, so why not compare it to the 7 year old game, it can only come up favourable after all, right? Sarcasm aside, yes, MMOs get constantly changed and new stuff added and old stuff changed, that's the way it is. However that just means that you as a competing developer has a living design sheet to what is working and what is not, especially when you try to make a product that is as similar in structure as TOR is to WoW. You can actually clearly see it in the design process where they were in WoW when they were making quests. lvl 1 to Alderaan is clearly classic WoW/TBC all you do is run around kill, use and collect, the bonus quests are all "kill many dudes" and the chains are "kill some-->kill LOTS-->kill boss-->hand in boss drop." Then there's Alderaan, Balmorra and Quesh where the bonus objectives begins to diverse while the basic quests are still same old same old. One of the best bonus chains I did was on republic Aldaraan where I had to 1. kill 10 guys 2. gather some keys 3. then use the keys on a door 4. get a code from inside that room 5. reprogram some defense turrets 6. gather explosives, use explosives on a loading droid who put them into a shuttle 7. kill the pissed off Sith who appeared because you blew up his spaceboat 8. hand in an item he dropped. That was actually fun because I had to do a lot of different things in succession and none of it had any cutscenes to tear me out of the game. Then around Belsavis it falls apart again and you begin to get bonus chains that are "kill many-->kill LOTS-->kill boss-->hand in item" again. Oddly enough your basis quest objectives begins to differ and look a lot more like the quest structure of WotLK where you had to do different things in a row. It's as if they looked at basis WoW/TBC and said "we need these quests!" designed some planets and added bonus quests. Somewhere along the timeline WotLK comes out and the bonus quests not yet added gets a lot more involved. The rest of the quests they add to the remaining planets becomes the WotLK pattern while the bonus quests regress to "kill 10 dudes-->kill 45 dudes (Whiskey Tango Foxtrot)-->kill boss" for gods know what reason. It feels very incoherrent troughout the game.

What's this I don't even... So you're telling me that a science fiction game shouldn't include the usage of any science fiction gadgets other than what the characters are wearing? Part of the appeal of Star Wars to me is that it's not primarely about Force users, there are lots of people living in that world who has loads of tech at their disposal. Some of the biggest threats to the galaxy has been non force users, ordinary men and women who happens to have an army at their disposal and way too much time on their hands. And you're telling us that we shouldn't have access to it because it would essentially make the game feel too high tech? F*** that noise, I'd love to be able to pilot some of the walkers standing around to make a troopdrop or drive a tank into the middle of the action, get in to the turret and blast away. I want me tech, and the funny part is that WoW feels more hightech because it lets you play around with wierd stuff while TOR only shows it to you.

Yes, this is bad because it's the same way you do everything all the time. Go kill is literally go kill, go fetch is literally go fetch and use is literally use button. At least in WoW they give you something different to kill with. Or something different when you have to go and fetch something. Or something other than buttons to press. How many variations of the 3 basic quests have you seen in WoW Wrath and forward? From the moment you arrive in Borean Thundra and untill you finish you will have done those 3 quests in several ways other than just "beat with club" "fetch item from ground" and "press button in wall." One of the first quests you do have you "use net on mob, then beat with club" followed by a "go and blow stuff up!" (which is always fun). On Howling Fjord you have a questline that concludes with "using speargun to kill mobs in a gory explody manner." In TOR in general you have long quests that concludes with "use blaster on man untill man dies/surrender." Which wouldn't be that tiresome if that wasn't the way you did -every- kill quest in the game. Variety, it's the spice of life.

For some reason all I could hear while reading that was: "You spin me right round baby, right round like a record baby, right round baby" Where did they pick up this guy, Washington?

Flying mounts was an evolution, even evolution can be innovative, don't bend words just because you don't agree. The Siri in iPhone4S is an evolution of previous attempts at voicecontrolling a phone, that doesn't make it any less innovate. Achievements were older than just WAR, WAR ran with them as part of the journal and it provided tangible benefits in the form of XP, thus not really making them achievements, but another form of levelling. What other games have done phasing? Please do tell me because Phasing as done in WoW is a line of code Blizzard themselves made in order to fix a bug on a daily quest in Blade's Edge Mountain and it evolved from there into the innovative feature it is today. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25192 Singleplayer games don't have phasing, they have things physically moving or being deconstructed with code or simply not respawning, which is impossible to carry out in an MMO if you want as many people as possible to see something. And I haven't seen a single of the MMOs I've played actually use Phasing, AoC used various instances for private content in Tortoge, Guild Wars was instances, WAR didn't and TOR doesn't, they just instance areas and call it phases. WAR is younger than WoW and EQ2 is older than WoW by a month, if they had PVP gear in at start, they get that hat.

WoW innovated with Phasing, noone before had ever done that not even single player games since they could just choose what got destroyed and what didn't. A persistantly changed world in an MMO is revolutionary, especially one that can exist on multiple levels of accessability. It's the ultimate expression of "Show, don't tell" and I for one is very interested in seeing what Blizzard does with it in their forthcoming work on WoW as well as their future MMOs. Yes, multiple, because besides Titan they are working yet another unnamed MMO. That said, I'm really curious as to what Titan is, perhaps Blizzard want to reinvent the sandbox, the titans did after all create the world according to greek mythology.

I can remember one place that stands out for me in my entire levelling experience and that's the Nightmare Forest on Voss because it had ambience and atmossphere, else it was just brown field, red field, brown corridors, grey corridors, and Tatooine and Hoth just seemed like reskinned versions of one another with a lot of mobs akwardly inserted into the world in a hope of giving it the illusion of life. Wampas and tauntauns living peacefully right up and down each other >.< The infamous snow cat, just... meh. I wonder if whoever designed the Nightmare Forest was on drugs that day, if that was the case they should had handed them out sooner.

So TOR was actually a time machine that made you go back to 2004, sweet!

And it's still more satisfying than TOR because there's something to look at while you're flying. It feels like less of a bore and you're never actually ripped forcefully out of the game's immersion the way you are in TOR. It might, if you have fast loading screens which is not everyone, objectively faster to go from one zone to another. This amount of time is relative though since yes, Booty Bay to Ghostlands takes a long time, flying from Stormwind to Redridge Mountains doesn't. However, and this is the big one: Subjectively, travels in TOR feels like it takes a lot longer than it actually does because you action is always broken up by walls and barriers in the form of black screens and loading screens.

No, all the instances in the game ran out from the same server connected to X amount of server clusters. So you would have all the people who wanted to raid, which was many at that point, as well as all the people who just wanted to run instances and the poor hamsters just couldn't run any faster. I remember fighting a horde guild, not in pvp, where we would have people run against the instance portal to get in before the others I do remember that they changed their server architecture because of it to accomodate it.

If they did that it would become mundane and thus boring. That being said, I did hear ye' olde Wilhelm, I can't remember where, I can just remember I was doing a quest even more boring and stupid than the others. And then out of nowhere a wild Wilhelm appeared and put a smile on my face

I remember that old doughnut, wasn't that because everyone wanted to see everything at once and the instance servers were strained well beyond capacity? I actually never saw people leave because of it since what they were waiting for was still fun. I quit TOR because it didn't feel like Star Wars to me and that it made me feel I stepped back into an alternate 2004 where everything was worse for some reason, which is not a good thing. Probably one of my better reasons, I quit Guild Wars because I couldn't jump.

No, EA gave BW money to create a game. BW worked for 7 years on said game, which unless you are Blizzard is an astronomical amount of time in development. EA decided that they needed the massive amount of money back they had BW to make this game so it was probably a matter of "pay up or pay back." However, and make no mistake, BW is responsible for everything included or excluded in the game. - They worked on one of the most recognised franchises on the planet. - They had several prior MMOs to look at and learn from their mistakes and successes. - They had the biggest budget ever used on MMO development. - The chance to make the engine do whatever they wanted since they rebuilt it from the core and out. And what is the released result? A lot of worse off versions of a limited set of things that didn't work in other games either. The only real praise I can give BW is that with only 200-300 million dollars they managed to create a working timemachine, because I sure felt like I was back in 2004 when playing TOR.

You know, this is just my personal opinion, however, I do think that both EA and BW would be jumping up and down in joy untill they displaced the axis of the earth if they were able to pad their subscriber numbers with asians paying by the minute. A paying customer is still a paying customer.

I think you have a point, the people I see derailing threads with referencing WoW the fastest are the people defending the game visciously. From a psycological viewpoint, it's really interesting to see the amount of projection going on. "It's everyone else wanting WoW, not me!" as they seem want to do.

The problem is that the journey bland and there's nothing to look at other than the landmarks you go to for your quest.

She's right, Blizzard didn't copy from previous games, they stole, that is why they are now the benchmarks. There are two saying that encompasses this directly "Hacks copy, great artists steals" and "I'm only where I am today because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"

Then I'm happy I didn't play KoTOR because I'd had gone absolutely mental. Then again, the main antagonist in both are wielding lightsabers, yes? And hot key combat works well on melee type combat since it's "bash button=bash enemy." However, when it comes to gun use, using the left mouse button as a trigger is more intuituve. And no, it wasn't about "only killing players at lvl 50" it was about actually using some of the things in the game. At lvl 50 on Ilum, there's what, 8 daily quests? I didn't count them. And they are all done the same way, find mobs, kill mobs using your gun/sword/force power. And this is in a game that's littered with turrents, vehicles, robots, fighterplanes and other kind of technology. I should not be limited to doing my daily quests, or ALL my quests for that matter, with just my gun. Where's a daily quest to call in airstrikes, or use a walker to plow trough infantry or manning a turret to kill enemies. I know they can do the later since they do it in Colocoid War Games, however it's poorly realised since they are just on autofire. Bringing up the game whose very name will start a thousand angry messages, you do different things there in daily quests and questing for that matter. You use gadget, you fly on drakes, drive tanks, uses gun turrent, you perform bombing runs, picks up things that affects you in wierd ways, ect. Bottom line is that due to the way that WoW uses the technology that's lorewise in the game, it feels more hightech than TOR does and how messed up is that?

WoW is nothing special in your eyes, however for a lot of people it's a game where they can log in if they have an hour and actually get things done and there are a lot more people who max have an hour a day than those who can set aside 10 hours in different intervals troughout the week. It's those people you want to catch and keep as subscribers. I notice a lot of people are advocating against an LFG tool on the basis it makes it a lobby game. WoW introduced it and it actually reduced the lobby feel. The player can go into the world and work on other things while waiting in queue. The people who sit in a major city in WoW are those who wants to, not those who are forced to. In TOR, the people who sit in major cities are those who are forced to, in order to participate in running flashpoints. In WoW, a player can log in, press a button, see how long they have to wait on average and decide if it's worth their time and then do something else while waiting. In TOR, a player can log in, hit enter, write "<Role> looking for <Flashpoint>" hit enter and repeat the process ad nauseum untill such a time luck shines upon them. And if a player only has 1 hour, guess what option they prefer.

It's too alike, it doesn't feel like anything I've ever seen in Star Wars, EVER and that's the problem, the system doesn't fit. Building your story first, then deciding on the gameplay and then somehow make those as far removed as what anyone of us can see and remember from the Star Wars universe is astoundingly poor design. Here's how it's done: 1. Realise your concept "we want to make a Star Wars game" 2. Realise what Star Wars is "it's a game that features a little magic in an otherwise hightech setting" 3. Conceptualise gameplay from the "feeling" of the setting "okay, so there's guns, and some people who runs around with glowing swords, how can we make those two radical different styles of gameplay meet?" 4. Create the world, find out how you want it to look 5. Find out what to do with the world "We want to use this world to tell a story" 5. Figure out how you want to tell the story "We want to tell the story trough voice acting and cinematic cutscenes." Not: 1. "We want to make a story driven MMO" 2. "Let's make it Star Wars" 3. "We also need some landscapes the story can happen in" 4. "Oh and we need some gameplay, most people are used to hotkeys" It's backwards and only hurts in the end because basic gameplay get pushed down to 4th tier when basic gameplay is what you spend most of your time doing in between the story and to push the story forward.

Last time when you bought a technological product, one of which there exists many varieties of in the modern world, like say a mobile phone, did you buy one that had: - less features than your old one - more features than your old one - better features than your old one - worse features than your old one - a combination of any of the above? Like it or not, WoW's rise to prominence have brought in a new kind of gamer, a gamer that is person playing games as well as a consumer. In the past the people who played MMO's were enthusiasts first, meaning gamers, and consumers second. Mistakes were overlooked and glossed over, troublesome gameplay was heralded as cutting edge because it was what people was used to. Then WoW entered the scene, it made it's mistakes, some things were glossed over, however, what it did do was that it created a new playing experience where troublesome gameplay was cut down, features that were in other games were combined into one and realised on a grander scale in user friendliness compared to what others had done. MMO-reality changed as the people inside the MMO reality became more diverse and came from more walks of life. Now those consumers are moving on for this and that reason, they have come to expect a certain base reality and their experience in this game, where the certain base realities are missing, are just as jarring for them as when the old school of MMO gamers came into WoW and saw everything, in their eyes simplified. That very simplification is what other people see as accessability. Where people go wrong of each other is where "simple," "easy to use" and "easy" get mixed up. Just because something is simple and easy to use, doesn't mean it's simple. Riding a bicycle is on paper simple, yet there are so many automatic reactions ingrained in us, when we ride one, that if we lost those, riding a bicycle would be impossible. Driving a car on the other hand, that's easy, get in seat, turn key, use gears depending on transition, press pedal. And yet it is not simple because there are a lot of things you need to keep an eye on and be aware of at the same time. Speed, traffic, surroundings, warning signs, ect. What people are wanting is the same accessability and ease of use as they are used to experiencing, not that the game is too little like WoW. My personal opinion is that it's too much like WoW and somehow managed to pass up on the user friendly and easy to use parts. If designed properly TOR would not be anymore WoW if it incorporated the things users expect from WoW with their own design and spin on things. Just like my cat is not a dog just because he likes the occassional fetch and can walk on a leash.

No, they hired a bunch of top gamers from EQ1 because they were in touch with what gamers wanted out of the game as in the sense of "What is people really tired of, what works and how can we make both of those better while at the same time giving it our own spin."

"It's not his fault that he's hitting me. It's his boss, he's stressing him out and sometimes, sometimes I know I do things that upsets him too much so he slaps me. He doesn't mean to, honest! Because I know deep in my heart that he loves me because he always apologises afterwards and then he's really nice, just like when I met him. It's just his boss, that's all it is, just his boss..." That is what it sounds like to me when people are saying "it's not BW, it's EA." This game was in development for 7 years and, if guestimates are to be considered, had a recordbreaking production cost. They had several games to look at while designing the game and decided to think about nothing and just take from other games what they thought they should have without looking at how or why it worked on how they could make it their own property. Companions crafting for you affect the basic gameplay, area loot makes looting multiple mobs more convenient. Beyond that it's just windowdressing that does nothing to how you fight, kill or otherwise interact with the allready sparse environment. I mean, this is a hightech setting with some magic thrown in for good meassure, and other than that they two systems runs their parallel courses. The Force doesn't affect technology, it's use, function or development, thus it doesn't become a crutch that new development is hindered by. Some tech, like a lightsaber, is better used by force user and that's about it and there's even cases of technology being able to replicate some of the effects of Force users. And yet I don't feel part of a high tech world, I do however feel strangely removed from it with all the vehicles, turrets and tanks that I can only look at and not use. In combat as a commando I don't feel like I'm shooting at people, I feel like I'm using a magic wand that does whatever I need it to do. I saw a video of two guys playing TOR with the intent of getting one of them to buy the game and when the first of them explained the Trooper (Commando) what he said was "And this is your mage character, lots of hardhitting cast time abilities). And you know what, he was right, it does feel that way. I rewatched the old Clone Wars that Genndy Tartakowsky made for CN and damn, the ARC troopers, especially Captain Fordo is basically what I wanted the trooper to be, and it's just not even close. BW had a lot of material at hand, they obviously used it as almost all designs mirrors something that was shown in the original trilogy or the prequel trilogy and the expanded universe built around it. They just completely failed to catch the feeling in it. There is a saying "only hacks copy, artists steal" as in the sense that stealing something is making it your own whereas copying is just making another version because you want it. BW has so far shown that they are only capable of copying, even the dialogues and questshandouts are worse versions of previous itterations within the same company. Fallout 2 is in my mind a much better game than TOR, despite being years apart and set some of the staples that BW is running with today, only did it in a much more mature way. In closing, yes, it is BioWare's fault, EA just gave them the money to make this product and eventually demanded that they saw some of it coming back into their pockets.

I was there, it wasn't as bad as this, it made part of the game uninhabitable for certain classes/levelranges. It didn't break entire aspects of the server's economy and gear balance. And the Center For Disease Control got a spiffy new algorithm to test out the spreading of plagues.