[Days of grinding and toiling in games are a thing of the past]

There will always be a market for the grindy MMO's. You may not have time anymore cause you've seen it but remember theres a whole generation of gamers growing up in high school who got plenty of time and it's all new to them.

 

Most of the people who complain about the grind in WoW and other games have already spent months or years grinding on them. That's enough to be worth it from the companies point of view. You buy a game for $60, pay another $30 or $45 in fees, get tired of the grind and cancel. That's more money and more time people spent playing than a lot of triple A single player games.

 

As long as production costs aren't out of control, there's potentially a lot of money to be made and so companies will keep making grindy games.

[It's sad to see so many people unhappy with this game]

If you see commercials for a comedy, and go to the theater and the movie isn't funny, you'll be upset. It doesn't matter how good the plot, story or acting are. You expected one thing and got something else.

 

People expected an MMO in the Star Wars universe. Instead they got a Bioware single player game with some multiplayer stuff tacked on haphazardly.

[What Species do you want to be playable?]

The problem is Bioware will have to have artists adjust the look of armor for any species that is really different in size than the current ones. That's too much work and I really don't see it happening, maybe for an expansion if there's a lot of demand.

[Anyone Feel Like This game Is Dead?]

Not at all. Last night, on The Harbinger, there were consistently over 200 people on the Republic Fleet and over 200 people consistently on Coruscant

 

I was stuck on a low population server on WoW and it really sucked. I watched the server list to see which ones were heavy or full for longer and The Harbinger seems to be the heaviest populated server there is. I've been playing on it and there are definitely a lot of people on it but pretty much every other server has less people than Harbinger now.

[Things I don't like about SWTOR]

So the Bioware devs can mosey on over to Blizzard and ask to see their code? Blizzard has had years to implement the features that they have in WoW, up from the bare bones game they built from scratch over the years leading up to release.

 

The problem with this argument is that regular gamer's don't care about the reason your game is missing features. When new tablets come out, people don't say it's about the same as the original Ipad, lets give them a chance. Nobody cares WHY your product isn't as good as others.

 

Every game out there can give you reasons why some aspects aren't as good as they could be but gamer's only care if it's good or not.

[New planets need to have Republic and Empire in the same instance]

Not unless we have a balanced faction ratio. 1 Republic vs. 5 Empire will not work.

 

True for pvp servers but on PVE servers, these area's don't need to have pvp related goals and quests. You can just run around and do your quests or flag yourself for some world pvp fun.

[New planets need to have Republic and Empire in the same instance]

It'll help a lot with the feeling of the world if both factions were on the same instances crossing paths with each other. It's probably too late to do this with the current zones but I think this is really important for when Bioware designs new ones. They can have related quest stories like the Empire is doing quests to take over a planet, and the Republics quests are helping the local population.

 

Seeing each other run around will go a long way in helping the world feel alive.

 

They can expand old planets too eventually. They can come up with a new story for Tattooine for example, something like an old Jedi temple was discovered and have Republic and Empire forces questing in that same area helping their factions with getting ancient artifacts. They would just have to make a new zone that you can shuttle to from the spaceport.

 

Neutral planets like Nar Shadaa could have both sides using the same vendors and taxis and even doing some of the same quests but they can make dialogue choices split the quest line. For example, have some guy ask you for help recovering stolen goods from a gang. You can help him and end up going to a quest hub where you fight the gang or you can choose to side with the gang and end up in a quest hub where you help the gang steal and take over the area.

 

It doesn't need to have branching stories for every decision but a quest here and there that leads to two different quest hubs depending on your choice would go a long way in making you feel your decisions matter.

[The Planets Feel Too Static]

The problem I have is that if you do every quest on a planet, you'll go to every room, cave or zone except the ones for other classes. It makes the world feel a lot smaller. Every creature and room you see is there because of a quest. There isn't that big a variety of different creatures to see either, just a ton of humans and droids everywhere. That could be a limit of the Star Wars universe though.

 

In WoW, you run by areas and creatures that have nothing to do with you. They may be for quests for the other faction or ones you get from other areas but you feel like there's more to each zone than what was there for you. Having things in the world that have nothing to do with you really helps make the world feel alive.

 

In SWTOR, theres no reason to ever go back to a planet casuse you've seen every inch of it already.

 

It feels like Bioware designed the quests, and built the world around that, while WoW built a world, then made quests for you to do in it.

[Anyone else think SWToR is too easy and more of the same?]

I see where your coming from but the majority of people just want an easier game that doesn't take as long to play. They need to aim for getting monthly fees from the majority of people.

 

I do think this game was too easy though. It's a difficult balance but the harder you work on stuff, the more rewarding it is when you accomplish it. With so much rewards in this game coming so easy, it feels like less of an accomplishment and it'll be easier to walk away from the game after a few months.

 

I think there may be a market for a smaller company to do the mmo you wish this one was but they'd be taking a big risk. A smaller company won't top the big ones in subscribers but I think they could carve out a niche there.

 

There's no way a big company like Bioware or Blizzard would though cause they're gonna aim to make the most money they could.

[Things I don't like about SWTOR]

I am laughing my tail off.

You are actually saying this game sucks because it is not enough like WoW.

 

The problem is they copied the worse parts of WoW and didn't copy the parts that WoW did really well.

 

The part of MMO's that hook people is playing in a living world with a lot of other people. All the worlds feel dead and they did their best to separate people so it feels like you're playing alone.

[Things I don't like about SWTOR]

I know, another complaint thread, but I've tried to include stuff I didn't see mentioned by others.

 

 

I don't mind the bugs casue they'll get fixed and nobody will remember them like how most people don't remember early WoW bugs but Bioware made a lot of design choices that I think were based on what was easiest for them to do instead of what would be the most fun for players. The game just feels rushed and unpolished. I'm gonna make a lot of comparison's to WoW cause Blizzard made so many right decisions and it's the biggest mmo out there now.

 

 

They didn't put much effort on playable races. Mostly they all look like humans with different colored skin. And I don't know where they got cyborgs from. Looks like they just recycled humans and put metal pieces on their face. They could have included those fish guys like Admiral Ackbarbut that would have required a different designed head and maybe special effects in the voiceover, a lot more work than just changing the skin color or adding horns.

 

Blizzard communicates a lot in forums and they always mention how much work it is doing textures and artwork when people complain about how their toons look and it seems like Bioware put the minimum effort here and made all the races similar so they don't have to redesign how gear will look for races that are different sizes. If they made a Jawa class, they'd have to redo the artwork for every piece of gear that the Jawa could use to make it look right for that size. That's what Blizzard has to do with taurens and gnomes. It adds a lot of extra work in making the art work for gear and animations for mounts.

 

Also, half the quests on planets are having you kill humanoids or droids. This could be a limit of a game in the Star wars universe but they don't even have much variety on creatures. On Taris on the republic side, practically every quest was we gotta (get supplies, find something, go somewhere, save someone) but rakghouls are there and we need help. There must have been 3 or 4 separate bonus quests of killing 30 rakghouls. Yes, WoW has a ton of boars but they also have a ton of other types of stuff to kill. On every planet, it seems its just more humans, droids and maybe one or two creatures for the whole planet. It just looks like they got lazy with art design again.

 

 

The planets don't feel alive. If you do all the quests on a planet, you'll go through every zone and area except for the class specific ones. Once your done, you have no reason to ever go back. When you go through a zone in WoW, there are areas you run by that have nothing to do with any quest you have. Having things in the world that have nothing to do with you really helps make the world feel more alive and bigger. When every single room and creature you see is there because you have a quest to go there or kill it, the world just feels small and dead. It doesn't help that Imperials and Republic are on different instances when they're on the same planet so they never see each other.

 

Making separate instances is the laziest way to solve a lot of mmo problems. Instead of trying to balance creatures or respawn rates, just put those things in a new instance so the developers don't have to think of that. Why bother designing zones and quest to have room for both Imperials and the Republic when you can design a smaller one and put them in separate instances and have them use the same areas for quest hubs and vendors.

 

The fleet for both Imperials and the Republic are the same, they just shifted what each quadrant was so they wouldn't be exact copies. They didn't even bother designing different fleets for the two factions.

 

I really like this game and am having fun playing it but it really feels like they took KOTOR 3 and added some stuff so they could call it an MMO and charge people every month. All the great stuff about the game would have been just as good in a single player game and all the problems seem to be from the MMO side of it.

 

Post like these always get the same responses so I'll try to preemptively answer some of them.

 

If you don't like the game, just quit. Why waste your time making this post

This is a forum for people to communicate with each other. I've been playing video games all my life and I like talking about them with others. This is my experience with the game and want to know about what other people think of the game.

 

You shouldn't compare it to WoW cause WoW's been out for 7 years.

It's 2012. Bioware can go play WoW, see what worked and what didn't and copy the best parts and improve the worst ones. They aren't designing games in a vacuum. FPS games that come out today don't get compared to Quake or Duke Nukem. They get compared to other FPS games in the state they are in now. New cars aren't compared to the Model T.

 

SWTOR is a month old, give it more time to add features.

I tried to focus on design choices and not lack of features or content cause they'll add those later. They can add more Operations, a LFG tool and fix bugs in a patch but most of the things I've said are much deeper problems that will take significantly more work than the average patch to fix. Also, they must have known that the area most people would spend their time in was the fleet and they used the exact same design for both factions. You can't say they didn't have time design the fleet. They were just lazy or didn't care.

 

edit: I forgot to mention having groups made up of 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 dps. Queue times in WoW are bad cause theres not enough tanks for the 3 dps in each group, with every 2 dps needing a tank and healer, queue times will be worse once they eventually get the LFG tool working.