Back when BW made those games they still had Black Isle studios, they were true geniuses.

Litterally nothing, this game would had been a revolution in 2004 for me. Now it's just hanging with poor design decisions compared to other games. The maps are huge, but feels small because of the way they are designed. The gameworld is about as exciting to look at as a piece of soap. The story feels lacking because of the disconnect there is between what you're told and what happens in the world after you are supposedly done with it, E.i. nothing. The questing is archaic and while it might had been awesome 7 years ago, other games have moved on and/or innovated on the 3 basic quests to give a diverse experience and break the monotomy. Loading screens are everywhere and rips me right out of what little immersion I might have. And the combat is attrocious with the priority to animations over effects. No, I wouldn't pay money to give them the budgets to do anything about all this because: 1. it's problems that rests at the core of the game, it will require a relaunch to fix it. 2. due to 1 it would be throwing my good money after bad money. What BW needs to do is to get someone in charge who didn't stick their heads in the ground ca. 2004 and said "I have the perfect idea for an MMO!" Perhaps they could, with a large enough paycheck, get the old Black Isle people back in the fold because the creative in BW seems to have only gone downhill since they left.

The problem as I can sense it is that there's only one soundchannel. I have a headset capable of playing surround and it doesn't happen. Sound either comes in on one side and jumps to the other or it vanish because another sound have taken priority. Or it comes from both sides at once in order to create the illusion of surround. The budget for this game was used on cutscenes rather than ingame stuff that would make the experience feel more immersive. Either that or the hero engine is a load of male bovine excrement that really can't handle something as simple as an 80's walkman could.

That is a great example of a nonanswer if I ever saw one, seriously, politicians could learn from that one. "Several of the issues brought forth" that includes everything from what is discussed here repeatedly as well as to the myriad of bugs submitted trough tickets. "Have allready been dealt with and you should see the fixes integrated in coming patches." No, you can't both have fixed and not fixed an issue, internal builds doesn't help the playing community one bit and with the frequency they are patching, some of that stuff should had been in. Especially if it had been fixed. "Including those coming this month." Again, this could be anything from ranging to bugs on quests or people getting killed by taxis. Mind you, he's not lying one bit in the sentence, that's what makes it so brilliant, however everything it says is so vague that BW can defend it against anything and any complaint about lack of important fixes there might be.

You do realise that you are talking hyperbole.

No, it's just the small things you notice when you are out there killing things, and it makes the gamefield feel more alive. All MMO's of this genre is about mobs standing in fields waiting for you to kill them, TOR is just very obvious about it.

You pretty much described the entire game, even the big "open" planets like Hoth and Tatooine have several rockwalls bisecting the playing field.

This isn't a matter of "give it time" the things I described in my first post, minus the fishing bears, were all things that was in the game at release. That it's not in TOR is either laziness, time constraints or sheer incompetence on the world designers part in how you make something feel alive. BW these days seems so focused on telling a story that they have forgotten how to -show- a story because I remember Fallout 2. It was a bloody desert most of it and it had a more living world than this and that's what, 15 years old?

Yeah, it's not Blizzard's fault that everyone wants to be like them, it's the others fault for wanting to be like Blizzard. Blizzard didn't "kill" the MMO genre, countless firms who tried to be like WoW did instead of being themselves did.

It is, it's the small things that matters, sure you can get the big things wrong, who cares about the big things, who cares if the modellers uses trees that only grows on two seperate continent, what matters is that it's a forest, it's there and it looks like a forest. However if they didn't put in the sound of the birds, rustling of leaves in the wind and critters, your mind will scream at you "PAY ATTENTION! SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE!!!" because it doesn't -feel- like a forest. This is what a forest is: Trees scattered on a field in large enough quantities, in the woods there are birds, you can hear the leaves and you can see animals if lucky. TOR so far gets the first part right in that they show what a given place looks like, they just never show what ANY of the places feel like (Nightmare Forest excepted and that's still only 50 % right). It's like the Uncanney Valley: it might look human but it doesn't feel human.

In WoW things happens in the world, even if it is as scripted as anywhere else. In some areas you have predators suddently attacking prey. I've seen wolves hunt after critters. There are some bears in Northrend that are standing by a river and actually fishing for food, sometimes they get lucky, other times they don't. A rabbit running across a meadow, a squirrel ducking behind a tree, a roach spreading its wings and fluttering about before landing another place, two mobs engaging in conversation a patroller coming in to join them, perhaps berate them, then walks off again. TOR lacks all these small touches that serves to make the gameworld something other than a field where you kill things. Even the wamprats in Anchorhead on Tatooine are just another kind of angry mobs that will attack you if you get too close. There is nothing in the game that tells the story about the zone, with one exception, the Nightmare Forest on Voss. Whatever the designers were on when they made that should had been given to them earlier because you can actually feel what the zone is about just from being in it. It still lacks the small touches like critters and such but goddammit it actually has an atmossphere and an ambience beyond "field with groups of 2-4 mobs, kill at your own leassure."

I'm not a fan of the story in this game, it's far too much "tell" and not enough "show" for my taste. While this was how it was in the olden days of MMO's you did a quest, you got told something happened when you handed in the quest and nothing changed in the world, and that was just how it was. At least up untill December 7, 2010 where Cataclysm released and Blizzard showed Phasing 2.0 and showed that what you do in game can actually affect the game world. Many people here have said that they won't ever go back to playing an MMO that doesn't have voice acting in it. My stance is that I won't ever be able to immerse myself in an MMO that doesn't have a changing and evolving world. Phasing as done in WoW gives the quest designers opportunities to play around and do things that are outside the kill/fetch/use categories or just enhance them so you aren't doing it the same way all the time. It creates an opportunity where NPC's can move around and do things, they can be rescued and actually BE rescued. Not just run to town, despawn and repop back where you found them in peril, so that when you walk back can have your awesome deed completely nullified because he's still lying there, under the same rock. I was just on Corellia and opened some doors and gratefull NPCs poured out of them. I was expecting the doors to open and NPCs walk out while thanking me. Instead I was greeted by a cutscene which then repeated itself 4 times and completely dragged me out of the world just to show me something that could had been done without a loading screen. That's not story, that's just cutscene **** and it takes further away from the feel of a changing world because you are only shown things in cutscenes. It feels like a bad movie where they have to cut to someone telling the audience what is going on.

By my calculations you have put 11½ hours into this game, pr day, if I calculate from prerelease, even more if you came online the 20th. Barring special circumstances, that's not healthy since you'd have to skimp on either food, sleep or social interaction. It sounds like you tried WoW prior to the relaunch of the old world in Cataclysm, and for that I can't fault you anything for finding the levelling experience stale as old bread. Just as well I'd probably find the levelling in TOR a fresh breath of air simply from the voice acting alone since back then you'd do the same three quests in WoW the same way all the way to max level, just like you do in TOR. However with the release of Cataclysm, Blizzard stepped up their game and did something about the old boring "kill 10 boars" quests, they even put in some new quest types, which was quite refreshing. That as well as seeing how your actions actually physically changes the worldscape around permanently, trough gameplay via their phasing technique, makes for a very satisfying experience. At least for me, seeing what I'm doing counts for more than merely being told. I never tried Aion, it seemed to flashy for my tastes, too much style over substance. Conan I tried, and quit over gameplay issue and WAR I quit in a fit of nerdrage because I couldn't recognise the Warhammer World I care for >_>

This is the first game from BW I've played since Black Isle was shut down, it's not a good impression >.<

How can you be unique when every person of your class has followed the same storyline?

Better graphics, yes, more interesting design and use of the said graphics, no. WoW has style, TOR has surface, style will almost always draw more people. Eventually you do get tired of being told the same thing, it's like visiting someone and they always repeat the same story and being shown is still a better storytelling method over being told. WoW is better at showing than TOR is, in it's designs, in the world and when it wants to affect you emotionally (No little Pamela Redpath, I'm not crying, I'm just sweathing trough my eyes). In a roleplay you have free choice, you have a GM (poor bastard) who has to adapt to what you as players do, even when you mess up his carefully planned adventure. There's no such thing in TOR, if you do something that would mess up the story, someone comes in a picks up the pieces so you do what the game wants you to do anyway.

Silly me, and here I thought the only markets that mattered were the ones where you earned money. Appearently asian people aren't real people and is not using real money, which I'm sure all the companies trying to break -into- the asian markets will be surprised to hear.

Yes you can, if TOR used the same phasing technology as Blizzard, none of the quests would be "one time only" and you would still see the world change according to your actions. It would be more satisfying than being told you changed things when you can take two steps back where you came from and see nothing has happened. Sure, you get told a great deal many times you have driven the Rakghouls back across Taris, the moment you leave the main city, you still run into the very same Rakghouls as when you arrived. If there was a few proper phasings instead of just phases, those area could be free of Rakghouls and in the process of being rebuilt.

BW is also using a lot of optical illusions to make the maps appear larger than they are by blowing up the zone in the map interface. I noticed this on Balmorra when I had to go, at least to the map, a vast distance to get the a quest point, an npc even told me it was far out, when I got there I looked back and saw I could practically spit the distance.

They are allready lifeless before Tatooine, because they are just part of the backdrop. If you pass a group of 3 npcs talking, you can't click them, sometimes they will do a skit and due to the single soundchannel (whoever caused that needs to be fired out of an airlock) you can hear the conversation they have nomatter how far you ride away. What I'm talking about is the little things you have in WoW where the animal mobs walks around for example, or fight each other due to their predator/prey relation. Critters small and big walking, crawling, flying running around in the world also reminds you that there is other life here than what you have arrived to exterminate. Even though it's a very small thing, something like a wolf running off it's patrol path to kill a rabbit or a squirrel fills me with a sense that the world is alive. In TOR you don't have that anywhere, on Hoth tauntauns and wampas happily brush shoulders without even looking at each other funny. No day and night, it might be a conscious design feature, in that case it's a bad one because we're not playing a singleplayer where the time is arbitrary fixed between certain events happening. An MMO is supposed to feel like a living breathing world. I still remember the first time in WoW when night fell over Darkshore and The White Lady and The Blue Child danced across the starry night. It was magic, pure and simple. And the weathere, I have run into one account of weather and that was a subzone on Belsavis where there was snow in the air, it gave a good feel to the setting, sadly once I left the zone, I also left the weather behind.

I can't be bothered to read trough all this, so I'll just say that I have decidedly more positive experiences with the LFG in WoW than I have had bad experiences. I guess it has something to do with the attitude you enter it with. Me, I'm polite, I say "hi" I wait for other people if I'm going too fast, I give polite pointers if I can see them doing something wrong on a class I'm familiar with and explain tactics if people don't know them. I don't ever curse a wipe either or cuss at people for not being perfect, I explain to them what they did wrong. Some will accept it the advice, others will shout at me because they are too selfimportant to realise they made a mistake and other again will go total douche. And you know what? That was the exact same ratio I had before the LFD when I went into a random group. The upside is that the douches can't run around on my server and shout out lies about me because I bruised their egos. Another upside is that I don't have to guilt my guildies, or push them, into doing an instance when they don't want to and lastly I can actually go out and enjoy this world that the artists and designers created for me instead of being confined to my major city, or Fleet in this case, waiting, hoping to a get group.

I don't think it would be as much of a problem if the game actually simulated a world and not just plains of various colours and textures with groups of 1-3 mobs scattered around on it. Where are the critters, where is the mob interaction, no weather, eternal day or night. Just some of the things that makes a large world seem dead and pointless. If they had used all the space for something creative, it would had been awesome.

I feel you, it's not like it's better for males, we get to choose between "You need to be hospitalised" "You need to eat something" "WHOA where did Thor come from?" and "No fat person has ever looked like that!" Where's the average built toons? I had to go with the overtly muscular because looking at the skinny emo kid would had killed the remaining wish I had to play this game.

I doubt they can do that, because it doesn't seem to be phasing like WoW does it, it seems more to be small instances in the world.

The game puts the gun to your head because either the content will be designed around people having gotten those extra stats and those who don't will have a harder time than they should have. Or the content gets designed around those who don't have it and it becomes a joke for those who do. Anyone who's done any endgame content will tell you that even small differences can change the outcome. If a boss has an attack that does 9999 damage and you only have 9998 health and you could had gotten 10000 with a datacron, you're a liability to the team you're with. I'm talking out of history here, WoW started with encounters that was designed around people's base expected stats and some buffs, no flasks, no pots and no elixirs. Then they began designing encounters around people having all buffs, all flasks, all elixirs and chainpotting like crazy because else content was a joke. This made the game feel like a bloody job due to all the outside preparations you had to get. In time Blizzard has trimmed down their stuff so now many classbuffs overlap so you can be expected to have it, you can only have one flask and only use one potion in fight. These factors means that the design team have a base of expected buff they can work with and even with these lax terms, just missing one of these buffs can make a fight significantly harder than it should be under optimal conditions.