Is has potential, but too many features are missing

[Deewe]

No, the OP describes Galaxies because he wants Galaxies back.

Not really:

 

1. Dead world: even WoW, LotRo, Rift worlds feels more alive [x]check
   
2. Exploration: AoC has even less walls than SWG, RIFT is a pure joy for explorers [x]check
   
3. Day/Night cycles: WoW, AoC, Rift, Lotro, WAR, well most theme parks MMO have this [x]check
   
4. Dynamic weather: all of the above have it. [x]check
   
5. PvP: But LotRo in all the above you can raid the enemy capital city and do open world PvP at very low level and you can choose the instance you want to queue for [x]check
   
6. Space and vehicles: Wow has 3d atmospheric flight, All others MMO have, apparently, faster mounts, if not multiplayer ones [x]check
   
7. User interface: TOR is the most restricted AAA MMO interface, even AoC is better [x]check
   
8. Etc, etc, etc.
   

Edited January 24, 2012 by Deewe

[TheHeadCapper]

Not really:

 

1. Dead world: even WoW, LotRo, Rift worlds feels more alive [x]check
   
2. Exploration: AoC has even less walls than SWG, RIFT is a pure joy for explorers [x]check
   
3. Day/Night cycles: WoW, AoC, Rift, Lotro, WAR, well most theme parks MMO have this [x]check
   
4. Dynamic weather: all of the above have it. [x]check
   
5. PvP: But LotRo in all the above you can raid the enemy capital city and do open world PvP at very low level and you can choose the instance you want to queue for [x]check
   
6. Space and vehicles: Wow has 3d atmospheric flight, All others MMO have, apparently, faster mounts, if not multiplayer ones [x]check
   
7. User interface: TOR is the most restricted AAA MMO interface, even AoC is better [x]check
   
8. Etc, etc, etc.
   

 

 

sounds trivial

[Grandpappy]

No, the OP describes Galaxies because he wants Galaxies back. He even refers to it as "the previous game" to implicitly define SWTOR as a sequal to Galaxies. He explicitly states that this game should be like Galaxies, and he has this irrational misunderstanding that somehow, the games are related on something more than simple intellectual property.

 

He's a fool.

 

SWG makes SWTOR look like crap - even after the NGE broke it. At least I could get decent FPS on high settings - like EVERY OTHER MMO on the market. BW can just bite me.

[Proto]

SWG makes SWTOR look like crap - even after the NGE broke it. At least I could get decent FPS on high settings - like EVERY OTHER MMO on the market. BW can just bite me.

 

Your sig is so true. rofl

[Deewe]

sounds trivial

Trivial in what way, to implement them?

 

Whatever trivial or not, contrary to what RazielHex is saying the OP wasn't asking for SWG. and... [x]check

[illidin]

The game technically WASN'T ready, EA made them launch the game ahead of schedule and even then the game is far better off than WoW was at launch. In other words, don't worry because the fixes, unreleased content, and features are coming.

 

This. You guys just need a little bit more faith in Bioware, I don't know how many MMO launches you've been to but SW:TOR has been very smooth.

[RazielHex]

SWG makes SWTOR look like crap - even after the NGE broke it. At least I could get decent FPS on high settings - like EVERY OTHER MMO on the market. BW can just bite me.

 

Congratulations on having a machine that's rated as high end in 2003?

[Redsuns_]

everything is sub standard and bare bones in swtor especially for a game in 2012.

 

combat responsiveness

gtn

ui

ilum joke

warzones disconnect

simple things like preferences not saving and warzone win not updated.

and many more annoyances

 

oh yeah we got the story and voice over..so sorry this is suppose to be a MMO. We want focus on good quality gameplay features not singleplayer story telling. Story sucks also anyway.

Edited January 25, 2012 by Redsuns_

[ToliverGrey]

I can honestly say that there is not a single thing in the original poster's lists that I find remotely interesting in a game. For me, any money or time developers waste on that is taking away time and money from the important parts of the game.

 

The OP's ideal game sounds more like Sims: Star Wars.

[finalape]

OP lists a lot of things that don't seem worthwhile for the resources you want spent. Have you put much thought about the development time that goes into everything you want? Resources and time could be much better spend on the gameplay experience rather than the list of cosmetics you have. You want SWG remade (talk about even more generic planets) yet do you remember that that game was innovative yet not very successful in the long term?

 

Please be more realistic with your presentation if you are going to present such a giant wall of text.

Edited January 25, 2012 by finalape

[Grandpappy]

OP lists a lot of things that don't seem worthwhile for the resources you want spent. Have you put much thought about the development time that goes into everything you want? Resources and time could be much better spend on the gameplay experience rather than the list of cosmetics you have. You want SWG remade (talk about even more generic planets) yet do you remember that that game was innovative yet not very successful in the long term?

 

Please be more realistic with your presentation if you are going to present such a giant wall of text.

 

Yes that's true - and one of the big complaints about that game was how badly it functioned and then was run into the ground and changed into another game in midstream by the NGE.

 

But - SWG still had so much to do even at launch in comparison to SWTOR and if BW doesn't add more things to do at endgame (and I mean fast) subs are going to bleed really quickly (this slide has already started)

 

And I was a big fanboi and supporter of SWTOR and BW and yet within the 1st month I realized that there was nothing worth keeping me playing so I unsubbed.

 

This month will be my last until things change - I'm not too optimistic.

[YugoChavez]

Zones are made the way they are so more than top end PCs can render them. You think the 18 year old playing on his parents Hewlette Packard they got in 2003 running XP is going to be able to render HUNDREDS of sprites and textures of skyscrapers? You think the single world server is going to be able to process that much of a graphical load if there are hundreds of players all around the place? Do you think there might be some hardware limitations that could cause degradation of data transfer because of it, let alone how much bigger transferring all those extra graphic textures the size of the client alone will get?

 

Who is this "we" you are speaking for in paragraph 3? It's certainly not the main playerbase, who though MMO after MMO demand centralized locations for basic needs in order to streamline the commerce process. They *are* in fact, in a hurry, and the developers of modern games sympathize with this thoughts because the quest hub should be a hub. You should get what you need and be out the door and back to your questing. It's just another client-server process in action.

 

 

 

 

The planets expand as you progress, and you really feel it in the Nar Shaddaa bonus series in InfoSec and NetSec, and by the time you get to Alderaan, it's huge landscape after huge landscape. There is reward in exploration, they're called Datacrons. That incites people to explore to discover these rare objects. Most are fairly well hidden. If you have such a knack for exploring, search for them *without a guide.*

 

 

 

 

This is very unimportant and affects nothing. Tell me how you use *actual data* on a *fictional world*? Where's this database that has astronomical data recorded on Tatooine, or any data on a world that is a binomial star system? It doesn't exist, man. The closest thing you've got is that Vin Deisel movie "Pitch Black" and that planet was in a Trinomial Star system and had one night every year. According to most astronomical surveys, Binomial star systems are much more common than single-star systems, like the Solar system we currently reside in, but finding planets in inter-galactic star system is still fleshing itself out to be a hard science. It's more about luck in finding shadows that move. All you want in this is flavor to a sundae, ignoring the fact that the sundae itself is delicious.

 

 

 

 

Yet again, purely flavor, though Dromuud Kaas does have tempermental rainstorms. It's such a small thing that people will clam for at start and never again talk about and ruthlessly ignore once it's implemented.

 

 

 

I consider myself rather progressive in terms of roleplaying to the point I feel cantinas are a crutch for the uncreative and uninspired; a legacy from IRC text-based systems and a banshee of the past from D&D that won't stop wailing on the psyche. I create my own social activities, and organize events for roleplaying and in-character interactions for a guild of about sixty individuals.

 

Do you know why you can't sit in every chair? Because chairs are tied to the cover system of IA and Smugglers. Try the one on your ship and watch your top bar change. The way to fix that is for them to individually code every single chair for you to sit on because they can't omit that link for those two base classes as it is integral to their playstyle. It's quite a hassle, and if it means that much to you, you will be patient to let their one engineer do this extremely tedious job until it's done, as it's far from priority.

 

As for betting? You might as well drop that idea. No game since EverQuest has allowed gambling inside it, and for good reason too. You won't see playermade lotteries or casino-type gameplay here at all. If you want to bet, put your companion on a rich mission and hope that you'll get something legendary out of it. That's the closest you'll come to this idea.

 

You can climb, you really can. You ever get that datacron in Nar Shaddaa that required jumping on all those boxes in the Coreillian sector? Or the one in NetSec that you needed the Datacard from the incinerator room for? There's three others in Taris just like it. You can save yourself 10,000 credits on an MGGS by jumping creatively along the dam in Alderaan. The environment is there, for sure, that allows for uninhibited exploration. Sometimes you just gotta look up instead of out.

 

I hereby claim that any sentence which includes "gungan" and "great moment" without the addition of "death" is false.

 

 

 

 

It is possible on Alderaan, Taris, Hoth, Voss, Belsavis, Nar Shaddaa, Ilium, Tatooine, and so on. Your argument that a planet has a "level range" is both faulty and uninformed. There is a reason that starter planets were off-limits. It was to prevent end-level players from causing unnecessary grief. This game has been developed that by the time you are exposed to Open PvP areas, you should be in your mid-20's, have most of your core skills, and be well on your way to showing specialization in your specified tree. In so many words, you should be competant enough to be able to defend yourself. That's gosh darned ingenious, and you find it restrictive that you're suddenly prohibited from flyin' your little starship on an enemy planet that's so gosh darned protected by hundreds of squadrons of fighters and dozens of capital ships because you want to take your artifact lightsaber and strike down younglings. That's not what this game is about, and killing endlessly spawning faction leaders isn't either, because it circumvents the story (Darth Malgus excluded).

 

In summary, get over it. There's plenty of places to go and people to kill if you're so inclined. You want a big battle? ADVERTISE and ORGANIZE one using some administrative acumen with those shiny new server subforums you have. If you can't put forth the effort you don't deserve the reward.

 

 

 

I enjoy the space missions. It's a great amount of fluff and it earns me a good handful of credits. If you want a flight simulation, play a flight simulator. This is an MMO, and the space missions server as side-quests. They weren't even in the foundations of development until the outcry of the beta community to fulfill some niche in some people's playstyle, so the fact that they exist at all is something of a miracle. But because Bioware has given you an inch, you ask for a mile, and this self-entitled attitude is sickening. If you want to take a ship, float in the middle of empty space, and get a good feeling of the enormous distance that space is, there's an MMO for you, it's called EVE online. This isn't that, nor should it be.

 

Your vehicle suggestions I find are ultimately silly. There's no reason for anything you've suggested besides extra work for little to no payoff. The vehicles are fine, with there being many options for it. THe speed "bonus" is plenty, and is not so much that you would feel absolutely worthless if you don't immediately have the level 3 speeder vice your level 2. There's no reason to have leftover sprites or graphics of a non-persistant ability that is, for all intents and purposes of programming, a toggled buff.

 

 

 

This is yet another point where you show you are uninformed (you have 4 bars, not 2). The UI is getting the same tools from WarHammer that the Mythic developers had near mastered in terms of customizing the default set since they're in Bioware now. Expect that in March along with Guild Banks. Hell, they just put out a video on it this weekend.

 

As for chat bubbles, there was a summit back in the late summer where it was brought up. They are on a priority list, but they're not high on it. There's so little impact that they bring because you're basically looking at one thing instead of the other. The words are still there in your window. I advise you to work with the bountiful amount of tools that you have in setting up a custom chat window and filter out everything but spatial channels so you can more rightly envision who you are by. Every person I know has done this in order to better facilitate roleplaying and in-character interactions and fully approves of this tried and true method. Stop being lazy.

 

 

 

There is no lack of races. The development standpoint, backed by LucasArts has been that human, and near-human races, are always the protagonists of star wars, not the strikingly alien ones and droids. Those are supplementary characters and support the role of the main protagonist, which is the role of the player in these class stories. As such, you would need to include the races of all companion characters, to include wookies, togruta, talz, jawa, devaronian, deshade, droids, houk, trandoshan, mon cal, weequay, chagrian, cathar, gand, sarkhai, and kaleesh. Quite a lot of diversity, don'cha think? Yet again, this comes off as entitlement, just like the 'wads in the summer were with, "The races are fine, but why isn't *my* favorite race included?" Just get over it, there's solid reasons behind this, and the legacy system has already shown to increase racial choices in the core classes (e.g., Miraluka Sith Warrior).

 

The fact you're asking for FPS mechanics in an MMORPG is both laughable and obtuse. A game did try that once, it was called Tabula Rasa. That turd was dropped on some poor development company's lap by Lord British before he flew off into space. The cover system is only for the IA and smuggler classes. It is a core playstyle mechanic developed for them only. To share it with other classes cheapens it's affect and is basically becomes an unnatural way to use basic line of sight defenses against ranged classes. It's simply not to be shared, and to implement an FPS-type mechanic into this MMO would be a horribly devastating thing in how it would change the mechanics of every single class and every single encounter. It's a bad idea.

 

The personal jetpacks for bounty hunters are meant for short bursts of speed or thrust. They're not *travelling* jetpacks. Bounty Hunters aren't the rocketeer. They're not Commander Cody (the old Sci-Fi serial, not the dude from Clone Wars). It's based fully on Boba/Jango Fetts' rocketpack, which allows him short bursts of elevation and mobility, and the bounty hunter gains abilities that emphasize the jet pack's prowess.

 

You won't start over? It's been a month. This game will operate for years. You won't start over? Lord almighty...

 

 

 

The standard prose about this bad ideas is that private, instanced areas take players out of the planets and out of the fleet. It turns a highly populated centralized area of commerce and communication from the server's faction into a deadzone, which you yourself were rallying against! They turn the game into a lobby, which is what WarCraft has become and games like DDO were developed around, where you sit and wait with no one around you until the system assigns you what you want to do. They don't incite socialization, they create a divergance to it and sever it due to severing the playerbase from itself.

 

"Having a guild is a permanent group chat"? wow. Your guild sucks. Mine has an entire backstory. We have diplomatic ties with other guilds. We have an entire storyline with a sister republic guild. We have events and an in-character player bounty system that pays members thousands for specific hits and marks we put out. We have social occassions both formal and informal. We have assigned roles and collateral duties and a fully functional chain of command for prople so they know who to go to in order to meet an expert to handle any situation that might come up. We have a class guide system in place, a craftsman expert system in place. We have all these tools to help our members be better and ensure they have fun playing the game they purchased, and all your guild is good for is "Group chat"? Your guild sucks.

 

 

 

This is more of you wanting the development team to make you stop being lazy and for them to do your work. IF you want to organize something, organize it. Operations, Hard-Mode Flashpoints, Warzones, and RvR are the basic tenets, but there's finishing your class quest, finding datacrons, finding codex entries, uncovering all explorables in every planet, doing all the bonus series' quests, meeting people. You've given this content, but if you don't want to do it, it's not Bioware's fault. There's 7 other storylines you can do. If you manage to finish all eight with all content done, then you can complain that there's nothing to do.

 

 

 

It useless fluff and wasted resources on something that will be completely unused once the novelty wears off and made into a character bank, plenty of which exist, and a private, instanced lobby, which is the antithesis to the MMO landscape that Bioware intends to cultivate. Player cities were graveyards in SWG, they were grave*stones* in UO. This is not a sandbox game. You need to get over that.

 

Funny how me telling you to "get over it" is starting to be like a little motto.

 

 

 

 

Crafting is fine. It's easy. Random is fair.

 

Get over it.

 

 

 

This isn't Galaxies.

 

This isn't WarCraft.

 

This isn't EVE.

 

Get over it.

 

 

 

 

 

you sound like a kid. just cause ur happy to endlessly play quests and grind for xp doesnt mean everyone is. i bet u never played SWG so u have no idea what its like to have a giant customizable world to live in

 

one friend of mine built a city, started a guild, was the mayor of our town...theres nothing close to that kind of freedom in SWTOR.

 

i bet u would be content no matter what BW released

 

ull learn one day. when people start abandoning this game.

Edited January 25, 2012 by Notannos
rude

[RazielHex]

you sound like a kid. just cause ur happy to endlessly play quests and grind for xp doesnt mean everyone is. i bet u never played SWG so u have no idea what its like to have a giant customizable world to live in

 

one friend of mine built a city, started a guild, was the mayor of our town...theres nothing close to that kind of freedom in SWTOR.

 

i bet u would be content no matter what BW released

 

ull learn one day. when people start abandoning this game.

 

Nice join date.

 

I was on Radiant for two years.

Insulting me isn't making a counter-argument.

 

Saying I'm a "troll" because I disagree with you devalues my ideas and opinions and illustrates you can't make a strong case against them.

 

If you want a Sandbox game, play a sandbox game. I fly Abaddon-class Battleships and Electronic Warfare ships on EVE-online when I feel the need to sandbox.

Edited January 25, 2012 by Notannos
rude quote + discussion of SWGemu

[Iusedtoplaywow]

Half of the things you want are limited by the Hero engine? 100's of NPC's rolling about doing things in coruscant? Have you even been to an area with more the 20 models present ON A 3000 DOLLAR COMPUTER?

 

Game was just not finished. Youll be lucky if you get 2 of the easiest things you requested in the next 6 months. Bioware/EA is NOT going to be dumping money into this game to finish its development with all the bad press it has already gotten.

Edited May 18, 2012 by LexiCazam
Inappropriate content - old post

[Rinkitink]

I never even thought about the fact that you have several hundred mobs just standing there. Even the mobs that wander do it in small circles.

[Dreossk]

OP lists a lot of things that don't seem worthwhile for the resources you want spent. Have you put much thought about the development time that goes into everything you want? Resources and time could be much better spend on the gameplay experience rather than the list of cosmetics you have. You want SWG remade (talk about even more generic planets) yet do you remember that that game was innovative yet not very successful in the long term?

 

Please be more realistic with your presentation if you are going to present such a giant wall of text.

 

As said a lot of time, it might not me worthwhile to you but it's essential for many people. Resources can be spent on many things and everyone would want it to be spent on the thing they like but that's egoist. There are other things beside story.

Edited January 25, 2012 by Dreossk

[Arkholm]

i certainly agree in everysingle word that you have typed my friend

[Calimwulf]

It's all about flavors of ice cream. Not everyone likes the same flavor. I didn't like SWG. I like TOR. Different strokes for different folks, but since TOR isn't SWG, then either stop playing it and go find something else more appealing or make constructive posts in the suggestion forums that might shape the future of TOR differently.

 

I say that because rants that TOR isn't SWG and that SWG was the best thing since peanut butter and chocolate were mixed together does nothing if you dislike it.

 

90% of the stuff on that list is just 'fluff', from my perspective and isn't important at all.

Edited January 25, 2012 by Calimwulf

[osuaaron]

Well stated, OP.

 

I agree the the game needs a social element. This is WoW's fault. They got away without having to think of one, so now nobody does it. It's fascinating to me that the Producer of the SIMs of all games didn't even consider that option.

 

Many players quite simply want to hang out and do meaningful things in the game that isn't fighting.

 

But then again, everyone wants the cawa doody crowd these days, so here you have it.

[Dreossk]

It's all about flavors of ice cream. Not everyone likes the same flavor. I didn't like SWG. I like TOR. Different strokes for different folks, but since TOR isn't SWG, then either stop playing it and go find something else more appealing or make constructive posts in the suggestion forums that might shape the future of TOR differently.

 

I say that because rants that TOR isn't SWG and that SWG was the best thing since peanut butter and chocolate were mixed together does nothing if you dislike it.

 

90% of the stuff on that list is just 'fluff', from my perspective and isn't important at all.

 

It's not about flavor, it's about what they have to do to keep more people interested for a longer time. All kind of people can coexist in a good MMO and it won't remove anything from you.

[Siorac]

I agree about the worlds; they need a bit more life, like traffic, crowd and proper sound effects. Also more cantinas, restaurants, that sort of thing. The rest is meh for me.

 

Oh, and on planets like Alderaan there should be cities, not just camps. A few towns or something. I love Alderaan but sometimes it feels very uncivilized.

[seallone]

These are all the things I've been pretty much saying since beta. Nice post OP... I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately I don't think we have much chance of seeing even 1/5th of what you listed anytime soon. What they DO have in the game isn't even working properly atm.

 

 

 

Yeah so true, just got a pug together and finding it hard to get in to the door FP.. PVP ilum

blah blah sever issuies, most mmo have this,

 

ability delay. list goes on. not paying for beta.

[DTAMoonDawg]

I agree with you completely OP. A lot of these social features are missing from the big MMO titles right now, and I was disappointed that SWTOR would not have them either. The ability to customize my ship, as well as a trophy case for some of my achievements, would make me ecstatic. I love little social aesthetics like that, so it would keep me occupied for a long time. I love the codex system in the game, so maybe BioWare could implement your codex achievements to award an actual trophy to display in your ship.

 

As for housing, I think a regular player home would be cool, but I think a guild hall is an absolute must. As you said earlier, guilds right now are basically a permanent group chat. Having a section on the Fleet devoted to guild halls would really make me feel more at home with my guild buddies. They could give you the option to decorate and upgrade your guild hall by putting vendors in the hall as well as your guild bank. Guild rewards would also be great.

 

Most players don't care about these features, but I have ALWAYS loved to make myself feel at home in a game, which is why I love games like Skyrim and Fallout.

[Zolexus]

Well I must say I agree with the complete post. It nails it. You really summed up the most important aspects of a good MMO and how Swtor lives up to that, very nice post.

 

Only thing I wish to add:

 

Items

 

A lot of us play MMOs to feel progression, to feel you advance in gear, the gear looks better you can show it off. However did you check the raiding gear? Not only does the raiding gear (for Siths at least) look ugly to say the least, the rakata columni and tionese all looks exactly the same bar a colour difference. How can Bioware justify that?

[RazielHex]

It's not about flavor, it's about what they have to do to keep more people interested for a longer time. All kind of people can coexist in a good MMO and it won't remove anything from you.

 

"I don't really have fun playing this game, but have you SEEN those Sandstorms in Tatooine!? Really, who could quit after seeing one of those!?"