Why doesn't swtor utilize the entire planet???????

[Softwalker]

Star Wars Galaxies sucked. It's easy to make massive planets when 99% of them are flat lifeless plains.

 

Don't be bitter that your game of choice wasn't as good as you thought it was. If it was, it would still be around now.

 

Did you play before or after the NGE?

[Tombius]

Star Wars Galaxies sucked. It's easy to make massive planets when 99% of them are flat lifeless plains.

 

Don't be bitter that your game of choice wasn't as good as you thought it was. If it was, it would still be around now.

 

It still is around strokerhontis, and im playing it more than this excuse for an mmo. this is more like a single player ,once you hit lv50 you either sit around waiting for an expansion or redo the whole lot with an alt. This is a star warsy version of wow at the moment and its not doing a brilliant job either.

[DarkCarnage]

I agree but a planet is massive...you could have an entire mmo take place on one planet...wow did that for a while before outlands and it wasn't even all of azeroth...

 

maybe but even now there places we can not get to in our own world and we ahve teh tech if we really wanted to. they open some area later for newer content likely. it be like " hey we found a forgotten sith emple over on planet X, come check it out... oh crap it evil !! help !~"

[hamsterboom]

the reason SWG has clear landscapes was in the design for player housing ..which for the fact i have yet to see a better model for player housing in a game.. some of the decorating in the homes was brilliant.

 

i would like bigger planets i hate invisible zones you'd can't enter.

 

but with bioware spending all this money and time on the game i don;t think it is thaty good i haven't even logged in for past couple of days as i know all i have are quests upon quests and nothing other than that to do .

 

((don;t get me wrong i am not unsubbing, i;ll just wait it out until they make improvments))

[gurugeorge]

The planet "zones" in this game (actually more akin to "continents" in other MMOs) are huge, especially the later ones. If you want to explore, explore, there are lots of things tucked away, nothing spectactular but it's always worth poking around. Particularly, it's fun for explorers to look for Datacrons WITHOUT USING A GUIDE (can you imagine? )

 

I agree they could have more "small rewards dotted around for exploring" though. And also, there could be a bit more "life" to the NPCs in general, and the game world be a bit more responsive to the player all round (e.g. more clickable things/NPCs with flavour text).

 

Perhaps you mean that each "planet" only has one "vibe" about it, whereas real planets would have, eg. their own temperate zone, their own jungle zone, etc? But that's a feature of the Star Wars mythos - Hoth is "ice", Tattoine is "desert", Kasshyk is "jungle".

 

If it's not any of the above things, then I think your expectation of what's possible in an online game is a bit unrealistic.

[DarthWomprat]

I feel as exhilarated walking the aisles in the grocery store as I do running around some of these planets.

[crew_dawg]

RPers are funny.

[Necrolepsy]

Of course not, but at least make the planets feel like they're the size of more than one city. Take a look at Skyrim - there are varied landscapes and all sorts of places to go and that's just one small continent in the grand scheme of the entire planet. It makes the world feel like a planet, rather than just one city that you have to take a spaceship to get to.

 

Skyrim isn't more than 1 planet...

 

Anyway, they have to have room to add stuff from the wall of crazy, the things you mentioned I'm sure will be added as time goes on. Prioritising resources to gameplay before mini-games is just a smart thing to do.

[Necrolepsy]

I agree but a planet is massive...you could have an entire mmo take place on one planet...wow did that for a while before outlands and it wasn't even all of azeroth...

 

And it sure as hell wasn't to scale if people are going to infer that's what's needed also.

 

Example - Icecrown Glacier zone was meant to house ~250,000 undead in itself.

[Daeborn]

Why doesn't swtor utilize the entire planet?

 

Probably because millions of square miles would be awfully hard to run quests in.

[Daeborn]

Take a look at Skyrim

 

That's all you needed to say.

 

Bye, enjoy Skyrim.

[notebene]

Nice idea and write up, thanks.

[TheOnlyKyrenS]

i love you op

[skinthinner]

wait, so you are asking for a normal MMO sized landscape for each planet?

 

say, the entire 'world' of warcraft to be what one planet is in TOR? wozza...

 

Even with your spread out idea... that is simply giving the illusion of a larger area and more 'exploration'. It really doesn't matter if the map is one large 'blob', or a bunch of smaller 'blobs'.... it is the same mass in a different layout.

 

In short, the layout as is...well, imagine a globe cut in half and laid flat... it looks odd, but that is the same 'planet' space spread out...

 

Also, the current layout now allows for expansions, extra parts of the planet laid out and added, etc. wheres if you had a set 'world' you would have to smash stuff in, or have some kinda 'cataclysmic' happening to add new things.

[Powerhowse]

Because Lucas arts doesn't want too.

 

There was once a MMO that had exactly what you requested.

 

7 complete plannets with massive explorable areas and secrets to find.

 

 

There was nothing interesting on a majority of the planets. It was completely lifeless land. Even then it didn't feel like a planet, it felt like a section of the planet. SWG had a huge land mass, but it had nothing on it. There was no reason to explore. Sure you could go across the entire map, but you would see nothing interesting.

 

It was a sandbox though and people needed to be able to place down their camps, so I understand the design choice, but saying the land was explorable is an overstatement.

[DarthKhaos]

OP it's called room for expansion. Just like other games at launch there are always areas you wonder why isn't there anything up there or over there. Then an expansion or 2 later and BAM! Well lookie here.

[its_them]

Tatooine is the only planet that actualy feels like one IMO.

[-Fritz-]

go watch the movies and tell me you see them explore entire planets, or just the cities and certain areas they need, and you pretty much have your answer.

 

 

 

to me a more major issue would be something like, oh i dont know, why am i stuck with companions i would never get along with which makes me not like playing my chosen class?

 

even if i always leave them on the ship i still have to listen to their story sections and listen to their pathetic little lines when i do the space battles.

 

 

 

 

for instance i loved played my jedi shadow as tank spec.

 

then i got Tharen and realized this guy is my ONLY option for a healer companion.

 

i honestly cant stand the guys "metro" attitude and we would never get along or hang out in real life, yet i am forced to have this guy with me if i want to be strong because hes my healer pet.

 

 

things like this ruin the game much more than how big the planet landscape is.

[Azzras]

1. Because as small as they are now people still complain that it takes to long to get around them.

 

2. Because this gives them room to have expansions without creating a bunch of new planets. They can send us back to them into areas we havent been yet.

 

3. Because no matter what they did people wouldn't be happy.

 

1. Faster speeders would solve this I think. (maybe flight on certain planets)

 

2. BW stated they want over 200 planets by the end of the game's life. I certainly hope they saved the templates used for each of the current planets. I would love to see them expand them more and make them feel more 'planet like'.

 

3. I could argue then why ever add anything. You can't please everyone, but you can please some. Expanding the maps would allow for exploration, more endgame areas, more areas to level (could add areas to planets that have say 20-24 area and a 35 - 39 area. This would give you more options when leveling instead of go here, then go here.)

 

So to sum it all up, expanding/adding areas on any given planet isn't that bad of an idea in my humble opinion.

[Ohnoto]

Tatooine is the only planet that actualy feels like one IMO.

 

I'm hoping that in future expansions they will expand Tatooine to include Mos Espa and Mos Eisley, though in that town you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, you'll need to be cautious.

[smexymage]

It's a;ways been my assumption that they will expand the planets as the game expands. In addition to adding new planets they will unlock new areas in the exisiting ones, 8 years from now the planets we're on now will be fully explorable.

 

Thats my hope anyways.

[gurugeorge]

What world pvp?

There basicly isnt any places at all (I know they are, but take out ilum and one spot in tatooine or something) that you can really be in danger of the other side, everything is different area, heavy guarded (I tried getting in to a republic area on hoth I think, failed badly, was alone though).

 

To have proper world pvp you need wast(er) open(er) areas of conflict and same quest objectivs or atleast some form of crossing the path..

 

Oh, I must be hallucinating the fights I've recently been having on Voss with random Sith then, while we've been questing in the same areas.

 

I also must have been hallucinating the open world PvP I've enjoyed on Tattoine, Alderaan, Balmorra and Hoth.

 

Silly me. I forgot that I have to have some special dev-made reason to PvP, other than, you know, just randomly encountering players from the other Faction while out questing AND EXPLORING. Oh, but then I forgot - I can't explore either, because this game is poor for exploration, isn't that right?

 

Yeesh.

Edited February 24, 2012 by gurugeorge

[Baelish]

Of course not, but at least make the planets feel like they're the size of more than one city. Take a look at Skyrim - there are varied landscapes and all sorts of places to go and that's just one small continent in the grand scheme of the entire planet. It makes the world feel like a planet, rather than just one city that you have to take a spaceship to get to.

 

What are you smoking? Skyrim's setting is the equivalent of the entire SWTOR setting; every planet. If they'd made each planet as detailed as Skyrim's setting, you'd

 

a) not be playing the game yet, as the setting would still be being created

b) be paying an order of magnitude more for the game, both in up front and subs fees.

[LizardSF]

You know, it seems some people are really locked into the word "planet" as if it meant something from a GAME DESIGN perspective.

 

Every time someone says "planet", think "zone".

 

This game has, currently, 17 ZONES, each of which are divided into multiple sub-zones. The total size of each zone varies a lot, generally increasing as you level up. To travel between zones, you use your starship. (It also has the fleets, and I'm not counting FPs, WZs, space battle zones, etc.)

 

Adding more sub-zones to an existing zone is good design IF the new sub-zones add something new and different, that still fits with the tone, design, theme, and so on, of the existing sub-zones. Simply adding "more of the same" is extremely poor design, and doing it via procedural content generation is also extremely poor design.

 

I would rather see new zones (planets) with new themes, tones, and stories, than even more of the same. At the same time, if there's a good reason to add new sub-zones to existing zones, giving us reasons to re-visit familiar worlds without just repeating the same content with slightly bigger numbers (expanding the story, revealing new secrets, showing us something unexpected about the world that still fits with established lore), that's good, too.

 

Find every lore item and datacron in the game *without* maps or spoilers of any sort, or asking anyone in chat where to look, then come back and tell me there's not enough exploration. (I'm not even close to this goal. Hell, I missed half the lore items on my starting world, and it was TINY.)

 

(PS: If you want to get an idea of what a planet sized planet is like, see if you can find a copy of Arena -- the FIRST Elder Scrolls. It was HUGE. It was also all randomly generated and once you'd seen any part of each major region, even for a few minutes, you'd pretty much seen it all. Daggerfall shrunk the world considerably, but it was still almost entirely procedural, except for a handful of hand-coded areas. The remaining games dropped the area covered even more... Morrowind was, what, a couple of square miles of simulated terrain?... but had much more hand-written content. Exploration is only fun if there's something to find. Procedural content generation has improved a lot since Arena, but it's still far inferior to hand-coded content. It only works in games like EVE, where the "content" is provided by other players trying to kill you, and the "environment" is just a pretty colored backdrop to your game of Spreadsheets & Sociopaths. Hmm.... I like that phrase...)

[LizardSF]

Tatooine is the only planet that actualy feels like one IMO.

 

Been to Hoth yet?

 

MF'er is HUGE. You can climb some of the mountains and get frakkin' spectacular views. And I love the spaceship graveyard. It's atmospheric visually and has some great backstory.