Why are so many people saying this game is bad?

[Niclamus]

My biggest issues with the game are in the fact that endgame content was clearly not tested. Bonethrasher wasn't tested at all before release - you could tell by the fact that you couldn't even engage the boss.

 

Now they are pushing out patches without testing them. Once again apparent with the fact that they 'fixed' Bonethrasher, yet he is still bugged. Sure you can engage him now, but you can also die while in the dialogue getting to him.

 

Oh, and that they put in the patch notes that you can now emote while on mounts, but you cannot. Nothing was actually fixed there, and they didn't even test it clearly.

 

Oh! Also! Half of the population couldn't raid tonight because their patch broke phasing! How does that one even make it off the test shard?

 

If they do not fix all of these issues before the casual players start hitting max level, the game is not going to make it. I really enjoy this game, and I want it to succeed, but the buggy endgame is starting to wear me down.

[LilPika]

This isn't a single player game. (Ok, to some it is). For MMOs to be successful, to get people to keep paying the sub, there has to some sort of attachment to their character. A reason to grow and build them. If the design goal is to play them all you'll have a tough time creating that attachment that keeps people coming back.

 

And I totally 100% agree. But the game is mere weeks old. You have more unique content than most MMOs have in their life at your finger tips. You have eight engaging and unique storylines to get through and experience, like 8 inidivudal little stories.

 

Will social interaction become an essential part of the game? Yes, of course it will, and it'll be put in probably with a nice new big open planet and a daily quest hub in the near future. But I'd estimate less than 10% of the players are anywhere near 50 right now on even one character. You've got lots to do. Don't act like the game has nothing going for it.

[KittyPrawn]

It was marketed as an MMO though and therein the confusion may lie.

 

MMO is short for MMORPG - or massively multi-player ROLE-PLAYING game. In this instance, I might have to say that SWToR does it right. Unfortunately for Bioware, the "standard-setting" MMOs didn't really focus on interactive/immersive story, so people don't expect it.

[Iusedtoplaywow]

And I totally 100% agree. But the game is mere weeks old. You have more unique content than most MMOs have in their life at your finger tips. You have eight engaging and unique storylines to get through and experience, like 8 inidivudal little stories.

 

Will social interaction become an essential part of the game? Yes, of course it will, and it'll be put in probably with a nice new big open planet and a daily quest hub in the near future. But I'd estimate less than 10% of the players are anywhere near 50 right now on even one character. You've got lots to do. Don't act like the game has nothing going for it.

 

Im on character 3 and storylines unfortunately only encompass about 5% of the leveling experience. EVERYTHING else is exactly the same on the planets.

 

Now had your decisions in the class areas affected what side quests were available to you, replay value would have skyrocketed.

[Sumire]

I've not heard one person say the game is bad, any "normal" people anyway. Of course you will get the losers that rushed to level 50, did everything and now have nothing to do except complain and compare it with another very popular MMO that has been out 6 years. Edited January 5, 2012 by Sumire

[Yfelsung]

It was marketed as an MMO though and therein the confusion may lie. A persistent world by design is going to require a robust endgame to keep people engaged. Also, nowhere did I see the game marketed as one that would not have a robust endgame.

 

And MMO's define games from WoW to All Points Bulletin, to Planetside, to Crimecraft and a whole host of other games that have really no endgame that's not just the same stuff you do all game.

 

Nothing about MMO says "raiding" or "endgame".

 

Again, their fault.

[PjPablo]

MMO is short for MMORPG - or massively multi-player ROLE-PLAYING game. In this instance, I might have to say that SWToR does it right. Unfortunately for Bioware, the "standard-setting" MMOs didn't really focus on interactive/immersive story, so people don't expect it.

 

Yes I know what it stands for

 

Bioware is somewhat bending the traditional definition by design here and some are going to have an issue adjusting. That is of course only if 'raid or die' doesn't become the norm.

[Smartpatrol]

Because they demand instant gratification and anything that borders on non-perfection is unacceptable.

 

 

 

People throw around terms like "game breaking" without actually understanding what the word means.

 

Have you played any other MMO from release? Rift set the gold standard for how MMO's should be released(nearly flawless) any serious MMO should model themselve around what trion did with that game. Its like saying that its ok to have a primered fender on the Ferrari you just payed $200,000 for nonsense!

[Quip]

Some people genuinely think this is a bad game.

 

Some people had absurd expectations.

 

Some people like to pick fights on forums.

[Iusedtoplaywow]

Anyway all the level 50 endgame 'losers' right now are doing YOUR dirty work. Everyone on these boards should 100% be behind them and by not doing so you are shooting yourself in the foot. You will regret it one day when you are 1 of 7 people sitting in the Republic Fleet at 8 PM on a Saturday.

 

Its ridiculous.

[PjPablo]

And MMO's define games from WoW to All Points Bulletin, to Planetside, to Crimecraft and a whole host of other games that have really no endgame that's not just the same stuff you do all game.

 

Nothing about MMO says "raiding" or "endgame".

 

Again, their fault.

 

Ok let me change my statement a bit. Successful, mainstream MMOs have relied on the endgame model in their game design. If they don't find that here some will adjust and some will leave. I'm not saying there won't be robust endgame eventually. For some it just isn't there yet.

[flipper]

In those people's cases, they bought the wrong game.

 

You don't buy a game that is marketted on story and then skip the story and go for endgame.

 

It'd be like buying WoW because you want hardcore PvP and then complaining because WoW doesn't have hardcore PvP.

 

If it's marketed purely for story then it should have been made as a single player game, not a sub-based mmo. The story is a nice feature that certainly will make levelling far less of a chore for some, but ultimately this is going to be a pretty shallow mmo if that's where all the focus goes...afterall, whether you rush through it or take your time, at some point everyone is going to have finished that part of the game.

 

Even if you don't rush, by the time the first sub cycle comes around most people will have completed at least 1 empire or republic story, if not one of each. Are that many people really going to continue their sub just for at most 20% new material each class?

 

Whether they've marketed for story or not, any fool can see their focus now needs to be on content, not just endgame, but fleshing out the whole experience so you have more freedom no matter what level bracket you sit in.

[LilTikiBoy]

Have you played any other MMO from release? Rift set the gold standard for how MMO's should be released(nearly flawless) any serious MMO should model themselve around what trion did with that game. Its like saying that its ok to have a primered fender on the Ferrari you just payed $200,000 for nonsense!

 

did you just compare coding an MMO to painting a fender? i would like you to elaborate for me because this is just mind boggling. literally thousands of files of coding = paint......

[jinxsters]

I am curious to know why all the hate for this game in this forum? I been playing for about a week now, and this is the most fun I have had with an mmo since I quit playing WoW.

 

vast majority likes the game vast minority trolls the forums.

[Yfelsung]

Ok let me change my statement a bit. Successful, mainstream MMOs have relied on the endgame model in their game design. If they don't find that here some will adjust and some will leave. I'm not saying there won't be robust endgame eventually. For some it just isn't there yet.

 

APB, Planetside and Crimecraft are all monetarily successful MMOs.

 

Actually, all MMOs currently running active servers are making money, not losing money, making them the definition of successful.

 

A game doesn't even need to be in the to 20 games to be successful, it simply must make money and not lose money for the company.

 

Personally, I'd prefer SWTOR be a more niche game as niche games have always been better for my type of play style over the popular "Lets try to shove everything in one game and do it all terribly" method that WoW and other modern MMOs use.

 

The "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" has never been the path to creating a truly great MMO that people remember with fondness.

 

Think of this:

 

Ex UO players remember UO fondly.

Ex DAOC players remember DAOC fondly.

Ex AC players remember AC fondly.

 

Ex WoW players generally hate the game venomously, myself included.

 

Sure, Blizzard made the most money, so does Country Music and artists like Britney Spears.

 

How much money you make doesn't mean anything about the quality of what you produce. We live in a society where most buy what's popular, not what they like. Worse yet, they begin to like what's popular and look to others to validate what they like.

 

I'd take a modern remake of DAOC with 300k subs over a 10 million sub game any day of the week.

[hushia]

Why those people are brats?

This game has to compete with any MMOs current state, not what they were 7 years ago.

Even if they had to compete vs WoW classic, they would lose.

 

I stopped reading after that. How can you expect to not be called a brat, when you post statements like these which are blatently untrue to prove you are right?

 

I remember Wow classic's release. I think the first patch took them three days to recover from. Three days in which I could not play.. They also had much more bugs and crashes and unexpected downtime than this game.

[sampia]

Level 35 now. I feel if I have to kill one more droid, make my way through one more imperial camp or warehouse, I may scream! OMG, did the designers have no imagination so that every small, cramped world had to be so much like the ones before. I feel the gameplay started off great, but after Tatooine, the repetition is wearing me down. I just started on Hoth. Again more warehouses and imps standing around and tons more droids. I hope this isn't all I have to look forward to.

[jinxsters]

I am curious to know why all the hate for this game in this forum? I been playing for about a week now, and this is the most fun I have had with an mmo since I quit playing WoW.

 

vast majority likes the game vast minority trolls the forums.

[PjPablo]

APB, Planetside and Crimecraft are all monetarily successful MMOs.

 

Actually, all MMOs currently running active servers are making money, not losing money, making them the definition of successful.

 

A game doesn't even need to be in the to 20 games to be successful, it simply must make money and not lose money for the company.

 

Personally, I'd prefer SWTOR be a more niche game as niche games have always been better for my type of play style over the popular "Lets try to shove everything in one game and do it all terribly" method that WoW and other modern MMOs use.

 

The "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" has never been the path to creating a truly great MMO that people remember with fondness.

 

Think of this:

 

Ex UO players remember UO fondly.

Ex DAOC players remember DAOC fondly.

Ex AC players remember AC fondly.

 

Ex WoW players generally hate the game venomously, myself included.

 

Sure, Blizzard made the most money, so does Country Music and artists like Britney Spears.

 

How much money you make doesn't mean anything about the quality of what you produce. We live in a society where most buy what's popular, not what they like. Worse yet, they begin to like what's popular and look to others to validate what they like.

 

I'd take a modern remake of DAOC with 300k subs over a 10 million sub game any day of the week.

 

Not equating successful with profit. All I am saying is if you look at the current MMO market today the popular games: WOW, Rift, GW, EvE, EQ/EQII, LOTRO, etc all focus on gameplay after leveling. The endgame. If TOR is attempting to change this dynamic, then I am interested to see how they proceed. Even DAOC focused on endgame. It was more PVP/RVR (Trials was ehh to most. I liked it) but it was still after leveling.

[Yfelsung]

Not equating successful with profit. All I am saying is if you look at the current MMO market today the popular games: WOW, Rift, GW, EvE, EQ/EQII, LOTRO, etc all focus on gameplay after leveling. The endgame. If TOR is attempting to change this dynamic, then I am interested to see how they proceed. Even DAOC focused on endgame. It was more PVP/RVR (Trials was ehh to most. I liked it) but it was still after leveling.

 

EvE has no levels or endgame.

 

You can be involved in corp vs corp battles immediately in EvE upon making a new character.

 

Hell, Goon Fleet took over entire swaths of space when they first entered the game just with massive blobs of players with low skill numbers.

 

Now EvE is a game with the perfect infrastructure. I dislike the gameplay itself, personally, but all the "metagame" of how EvE works is flawless.

 

No endgame, no levels, just a world that you do what you want in.

 

If an MMO developer could combine EvE's infrastructure with a more exciting combat system, it would be the MMO to end all MMOs.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Yfelsung

[Holden_Dissent]

Im on character 3 and storylines unfortunately only encompass about 5% of the leveling experience. EVERYTHING else is exactly the same on the planets.

 

Now had your decisions in the class areas affected what side quests were available to you, replay value would have skyrocketed.

 

I know that on my commando I was given a quest by my companion of all people. So, a friend and I go to do this companion quest...... We unlocked a whole area of nar Shaddaa that we didn't even know existed. it took us on a whole different journey and all because of my trooper companion. None of his Sage companions had him go back to nar Shadaa 5 or so levels after we were supposed to be done with that planet. The odd thing is that the mobs were our level when we went back.

 

Now sure, you could've stumbled onto the area and remembered to go back 5 or so levels after the fact, but we hadn't, and probably never would've.

[Sykologist]

Uh, yes, they did. It's likely the most expensive video game ever made. So you'll have to excuse people for expecting it to play competently. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/arts/video-games/star-wars-the-old-republic-vs-world-of-warcraft-online.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

 

BioWare and Electronic Arts have spent somewhere between $125 million and $200

 

That's not "$200 million to $300 million"

[Flowerslayer]

Why do so many people say the game is bad?

 

Because, for many people, it is bad.

[failr]

I am honestly shocked that people that stand behind/love this game are trying to trash wow and paint swtor as something different. What from this game other than voiceovers is any different from wow? And even in that department wow has been adding a lot of voice overs in cata.

 

1) crafting is a facebook version of wow crafting dumbed down and not balanced.

2) raiding is a broken version of wow raiding

3) combat is less fluid and character responsiveness is horrendous, the fact that I cannot use an instant skill that causes no gcd and a trinket at the same time because animation has to play through is seriously gamebreaking.

4) phasing is done far superior in wow and actually created a much bigger variety of quests than the doors they have in swtor, imagine if you could see a republic camp that you just "took over" by completing the quest actually being taken over by imperials and seeing them there if you run by in the future, wow has that.

5) PVP, they gave every single class an interrupt, a snare, 1 single target short duration cc, 1 aoe short duration cc etc you get my point every class is the same all that differs is that some are a bit more broken than others, but don't worry they ll fix it and every class will be the same

6) Lvling that is so praised has no replaybility value, in wow you have a choice of up to 3 zones/planets to go to at each lvl range, here you have 1. Just imagine if they doubled the number of planets and made the dark/light choices in the story send you to different planet of the two and how much replayability it would ve created, but I guess they didn't have enough budget...

7) Speaking of voiceover budget why is it that half the quests are either picked up from terminals/not voice overed or picked up when you enter the zone and then you have all the droid quests they are voice overed by a beep sound... not enough budget?

8) I do not even want to go into the the pve bugs and that it took 2 hours just to figure out how to get into the hardmode raid for us because of broken lockouts(had to create an alt and use him as raid leader for that in the end...)

 

My point is that this game is as close of a wow copy as you can get, don't worry wow will add "pseudo" starship/housing system and pets/companions which btw are useless at 50 other than for doing boring dailies, you can enjoy looking at them at your house/starship and click on the facebook style dollar sign for the rest of your game time to collect your slicing reward.

 

And for the record i prefer sandbox games such as Darkfall or EVE anyway, but to see people trash wow in a closest wow copy I've seen to date is as hypocritical as it can get.

 

Don't even want to mention ui, terrain, texture, performance bugs etc, the list goes on, but this game doesn't even have the such simple feature as summon based classes or mobs that fly in the air and can be attacked from the ground and well I better stop...

[Darzil]

Not equating successful with profit. All I am saying is if you look at the current MMO market today the popular games: WOW, Rift, GW, EvE, EQ/EQII, LOTRO, etc all focus on gameplay after leveling. The endgame. If TOR is attempting to change this dynamic, then I am interested to see how they proceed. Even DAOC focused on endgame. It was more PVP/RVR (Trials was ehh to most. I liked it) but it was still after leveling.

 

You are right about LOTRO. It's why I barely play it now. In SoA I enjoyed alting, as there were many places to level. From level 50 onwards there is just one route, with no extra levelling content added since, so more than one character is no longer fun.

 

If you have to spend months (for me, weeks for some) getting to level cap in order to start having fun, then you are designing it wrong. I don't care how many other games are also doing it wrong. It's true that it's what most MMOs do, personally I wish they didn't. I'm time poor but have a decent job, I'm the mass market and can afford to pay for the subscription without noticing. If you cater for end game only you are catering for a particular part of your market that everyone else is going for too. It's not normally good for business to concentrate on the piece of the market which is most competed for and least profitable.

 

DAoC was different. It was unashamedly about PvP/RvR as the primary activity, levelling was just a way to get you to feel invested in the characters. Very few games are designed so clearly with one playstyle in mind. It truely was about endgame (though for many endgame was Thidranki not 50).

 

Focus on endgame is mostly what happens in established games which are no longer generating new subs in significant numbers, so are focusing instead on player retention, though it's always amazed me that they don't invest in content for alts as well, especially as that also adds people to lower level zones to increase new player retention.