Don't compare TOR to WoW at launch, compare it to Rift.

[Chromiie]

having a good "launch" is still no excuse for that fact that rift is noting more than a wow wannabe and a damn bad one at it, its the worst crap ever being called a game...

 

Old Republic is a WoW wannabe. I never played Rift but come on TOR is such a WoW clone.

[Graburr]

having a good "launch" is still no excuse for that fact that rift is noting more than a wow wannabe and a damn bad one at it, its the worst crap ever being called a game...

 

good thing that wow has rifts, right?

 

why don't you show us where the bad game has touched you, hm?

[Marak]

having a good "launch" is still no excuse for that fact that rift is noting more than a wow wannabe and a damn bad one at it, its the worst crap ever being called a game...

 

Now now.

 

I'm still on the TOR bandwagon and I wouldn't go this far. Rift was a very solid MMO. Sometimes I regret not playing it simply based on a "I should be supporting projects like this" kind of indie hipster streak.

 

 

Not that anyone cares what a pro-TOR perspective is on this forum, I will say this about TOR:

 

 

Why can we not let games stand on their own merit? Does it matter if WoW has more features? Truly answer that question for yourself. If features is all you wanted you have no business playing a brand new game. On some level everyone here wanted to like TOR for them to have purchased it, but also they start to get caught up in this comparison war as if it matters.

 

I, personally, absolutely loved KoTOR1 and back in 2002 or whenever it was I distinctly remember saying (and this was back when I was raiding hardcore in EQ1), "Man I hope one day they make an MMO out of this era of Star Wars" and, as one can tell by my join date on these forums, the minute it was announced I was sold.

 

Now I come from a far more extensive MMO background than 99% of the people that play MMOs. I've been playing MMOs since before they were MMOs. MUDs in the 90s were what started it all. I've played every big name title to hit the shelves and some that were barely noticed. Do I sit around with a master list of things that I wish were all rolled into one MMO? No. Do I begrudge WoW for not having some of the awesome things that EQ2 has? No. Do I complain when games not marketed as a strong PvP centric game (TOR) don't have massive RvR campaigns? No.

 

Why does everyone else insist on doing this?

 

 

The only true issues I've ever seen with TOR are these:

UI responsiveness is a HUGE problem. The fact that my mouse still jerks off into a random direction is a problem. The ability delay was also a big problem. The game also needs further optimization.

 

That's it. Everything else is just people braying for what they believe should or should not be in a game from their Master List of Things That Should Be in MMOs and they do themselves no service as no game will ever live up to such a grand expectation.

 

TOR is fun to me because I loved KoTOR1 and I love MMOs. It will continue to grow and when it becomes unfun I'll quit.

 

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be fun. TOR, by most accounts, is fun.

[EvilTrollGuy]

$50 million and 3.5 years is what Rift took to make.

 

In comparison to over 6 years and $200 million for SWTOR.

 

How Rift could release with full UI customizeability, a much more polished graphics experience, a full achievements system, a dozen fully functional dungeons, three fully-functional raids within 3 months of launch, a very practical and functional combat log, a more viable and relevant crafting system, as well as fully functional dynamic content, while TOR features none of these thing-- it just boggles the mind.

 

It is so obvious that the vast majority of the capital to make TOR went into voice acting and music, it's almost nauseating to think of what the game could have been if they'd put that money into dynamic worlds, a better game engine, and testing of end game content instead.

 

Maybe I just missed the article, but has EA stated the specific amount of money that went into developing SWTOR? Haven't it all be assumptions from analyst?

[Turista]

This isn't a thread to compare TOR and Rift in terms of which is the better game, it's about which is the more polished MMO at launch based on what the MMO market expects right now.

 

Rifts main feature is dynamic content. They did a great job at that.

 

TOR's is story, with full voice-over. BW did an awesome job with it.

 

Citing those things as why one is more polished than the other is useless. Compare the UI, the grouping system, guild support, graphics and the engine, stability, basic MMO features such as an auction house and crafting.

 

I think TOR should've come out of the gate with the above more polished, or at least work faster than they are to improve them.

Edited February 9, 2012 by Turista

[Catharsian]

I've played a laod of MMO's (I really started serious play with Lineage2). ANd as each game was released if ound the content got worse but the play and functionality got better in general. RIFTS was probably the best up to date. For those that claim it was a WOW clone you need to play more MMO's, because Rifts wasn't. What was it? A Frankenstein monster of al the other popular MMO's best parts. A crafting system that was what L2 had only not limitied, a PvP system similar to DAOC and it's child WAR, Mass raid style dungeons like WOW and PQ's that were randomized as will as Player interactivity not seen ever before (I miss the Rifts).

 

Now, as for RIFTS biggst issue, they were as one of the posters put it the Anti-Bioware/Mytthic. Players whined Trion added or updated rather indiscriminately. While nice to be heard, eventually ity was too much for me to deal with. Trion just couldn't balance the Cult of DAoC and the WoWheads.

 

Rifts had what I can honestly say is the smoothest release I've ever even heard of, let alone played. And it was clean and ready to go. We're almost 3 mos into SWTOR and we still have an archaic play ssytem (as the OP pointed out).

 

As far as I'm concerned there is no excuse for the following issues in any game launched after WoW BC: (not in any order)

 

1: Lack of customizable UI. Seriously, Name one game post BC that you couldn't move you UI around or resize elements.

 

2: Sorry excuse for an Auction house. What a pain to find what you want. You can't even do a name search without inputting everything under the sun?

 

3: Non-tiered PvP (AT LAUNCH OMG). Talk about a game killer. Even PvP based games like WAR had this.

 

4: Lack of NPC differentiation. I don't need 7000 different NPC's but more than 5 to 10 would be nice. And I would put up with this is oneof the 10 weren't that damn Droid. So wish i could force lightening/Tk that thing out a window

 

5a: Inability to change your characters appearance..This is huge, if you ever learn anytthign from WoW that's the one. especially sad considereing the ammount of staff they inherited from WAR. I'm talking dyes, armor looks etc.

5b: Bad and limited choice of character customization at start, I can be tiney an frail, medium, large or huge obese? 4 body builds any game post Villians should be ashamed

 

6: Closed storylines..I'm only lvl 32 on my main and I'm already tired of either having to be a total ******* to rack up dark points or a total wimp to get light side..Why give me 3 choices is 2 of them are the same thing.

 

7: Bad stereotyping throughout the game. I'm pretty sure after playing this the George is a racist jerk. I never realized how bad it was until I played this game. And other than the Binks thing I still don't see it in the Movies, but here it's like let's just throw a poster up that says..Sandppl are dirty arabs, and Sith are rotten Nazi Germans. This kind of insensitivity, may have been fine Pre-BC when the only ppl playing MMO's were a bunch of pimply faced white kids who had no clue, but teh avg MMO player now is of random ethnicity and in their 30's. (we notice this stuff)

 

I'm hoping I summarized the basic issues taht teh OP was trying to point out. And explained why I agree with him.

[Graburr]

Maybe I just missed the article, but has EA stated the specific amount of money that went into developing SWTOR? Haven't it all be assumptions from analyst?

 

well, the salary for the voice actors comes on top what you usually have to invest (unless you save it in another department *cough* ui *cough*). so it's logical to estimate TOR was more expensive than the average.

Edited February 9, 2012 by Graburr

[TonyIommi]

ah, thanks for clarifying

 

 

 

Yeah i remember that campaign, it was defiantly designed to be provocative and bring eyeballs to the product, like any good ad campaign should do. But that doesn't reflect how it's actually expected to preform. For example, do you honestly expect to be mobbed by beautiful women when you put on an Axe branded product? =p

 

I don't mean to bash Rift. It has been a great success for Trion worlds and your absolutely correct when you say it does alot with the base it has. Let's not kid ourselves though, the hype surronding RIFT was that it was gonna be a wow killer. Now it's a great game but it's not been the success that people predicted it would be. QOL features don't assure or guarantee success on the scale that you people are thinking. If you can show me one game with all the QOL features at launch that has been a total success I will be surprised.

 

As for Rifts launch. You guys think SWTOR has bad optimization....

[MajikMyst]

Some of these things like Story/VO I would kind of hope for considering SWtORs budget was like triple to quadruple what Rift's was. But lets not give some of these things more credit than they deserve. Like Space Combat. This is such a tacked on feature. It's like looking at a beautifully built stone castle with an addition made of plywood haphazardly tacked on to the side. They only made like 6 unique space missions, then reskinned them for Repub/Imp sides and adjusted the HP values of enemies in a few. They're so mindless and boring that I do them once and forget about them..

 

I wouldn't call space combat just tacked on.. After all it is an entire different mode of game play in an MMO.. I know of no other MMO that has a 2nd mode of play.. Rift doesn't have it.. WOW doesn't have it.. As part of an MMO.. Space combat is just fine and quite good in my opinion.. As a stand alone?? No.. It wouldn't be very good.. We would most diffenately get free flight like XWA..

 

So space combat isn't just an addon.. It is something that the competition doesn't have.. WOW and Rift can't even come close to space combat.. So I think it is more than just an addon.. But that is my opinion..

[Sheridyn]

- Datacrons - Rift's "exploration" system was 10 times deeper than TOR's "datacron" experience.

 

Exactly. Rift had achievements for zone exploration, artifact hunting, zone puzzles, finding cairns, jumping from high locations, rare mob hunting, zone events and rifts, and other miscellaneous activities that varied from zone to zone. This was a huge timesink for any collectors or completionists, and provided some incentive for exploring and revisiting lower level areas. SWTOR has none of this... just some daily quests on Belsalvis and Ilum, and some world bosses that aren't worth the effort.

[Aethyriel]

Rift had more features overall and the classes all played very smoothly even though you could randomly smash together 3 "classes" (called souls there) to a total of 8 different souls for the 4 base classes and you hat the option to switch between up to 5 (!) set specs that would also atuomatically change your actionbars and save these settings. That means there were 32 (not counting PVP support souls) in the beginning and for the most part they were all balanced in PVE.

 

Rift constantly updated content and provided bugfixes for the few bugs there were, almost none of them took more than 2 minutes to download, there was hardly any downtime for the servers. Every other month you would have a worldwide event where you could collect stuff, crafting was actually useful in endgame as they also constantly updated schematics.

 

There was an achievement system and reputation system, lots of daily quests, many 5 man instances, currently there are 3 20 man raids and 3 10 man raids (at least last time I checked). You could also farm artifacts for titles, pets etc which was fun actually. The AH was pretty neat, too.

 

The UI was awesome as you could do almost anything with it from the beginning.. actually.. the only thing that was a bit of a grind and not overly awesome was leveling, which nobody cares about anymore once you hit 50. You also had a damn wardrobe and could look the way you wanted while having the stats you wanted and you had dyes to make your gear look even more just the way you wanted it to.

 

In many ways it was like WoW, just way better programmed, still probably the best mmo in terms of programming ever which is why it didn't have success. Too many people where reminded of WoW which they wanted to get away from although Trion did a great job of constantly updating content and polishing the stuff that was already there over and over again.

 

The raids were also really great, while the first two were a bit of your normal starter raid difficutly, Hammerknell, the third 20 man raid had amazing encounters and was really fun to play.

 

So, although Rift was all that awesome you might wonder why I'm here instead of there and the answer sadly is not because swtor is better, but Rift just didn't have enough players, at least on german servers so our guild went through a lot of trouble with recruitment and bad players etc til a point where the lack of other players was just unbearable and more would quit Rift for SWTOR.

 

swtor currently does nothing for lv 50 players, I was 50 pretty early, although I only got in on the 4. day of early access and had to stop playing for 2 days due to internet pproblems and really enjoyed leveling and following the story. After that soon there was nothing, for a pure DD Marauder finding a grp was almost impossible and standing around on the fleet while doing it was even worse.

 

Granted, Rift didn't have an lfg tool from the beginning but you had a worldwide channel for lv 50 players to lfg. Swtor was just great from 1-50, but now it's just boring, leveling my 4th alt to 50 now because the story is the only really awesome thing they gave players, everything else is bugged as hell, especially operations or doesn't provied any bonus any more (crafting, dailies, space missions).

 

It's a great singleplayer game, but it surely does lack endgame content and a lot of polishing... this is just WoW in a future settings, BW fails as much as Blizz did with patching and all that - takes forever and still never works, the guys that did Rift could probably fix both games within 1 month while adding double content for endgame players that is fun and gives you something to do besides raiding.

[dangerusdave]

A line that describes the developer mentality for this game

 

Soa no longer resets if he uses Mind Trap on the main tank. <- this came in 1.1.2.

(i know its an easy workaround, having someone else taunt him quick.)

 

but that it actually takes about 6-7 weeks to fix this issue is frightening.

but atleast we got a quick fix for doing emotes while mounted.

[ikkiris]

lfg/lfd imo destroys the game,makes things to easy cuts out the waiting and hardwork to get a group together.eg wow lfg has made it so you can get dungeons and gear far to easy i liked it when you had to wait ages getting a group to get a heroic thus made it feel you worked for the loot you get.you put in a lfg/lfd like wow you can doing it over and over therefore your geared and what ever else in a few hours,no work put into anything at all.

[Elecious]

Don't compare TOR to WoW at launch, compare it to Rift.

 

Why compare it to anything? At the end of the day its just pixels on a screen

[Turista]

Why compare it to anything? At the end of the day its just pixels on a screen

 

Because as human beings, that's how we learn and get better.

 

In this context, hopefully we'll be better informed when we give BW the feedback it needs from its player base to improve the game.

[archifikoss]

I didn't play Rift so I can't comment... But OP sounds pretty logical. And I agree with his premise. Comparing WoW's launch to TOR's is about as relevant as comparing the amount of content TOR and WoW have as we speak...

[Duranis]

I will not compare it to Rift.

 

Rift had a good launch.

 

This game has the worse launch in MMO history.

 

Only people who hail it as a good launch either got in on the first day (people that preorder instantly), never logged off or are just Biodrones.

 

TOR is hardly the worst MMO launch. I thought it was decent. SWG was a terrible launch (SOE what do you expect!) - remember a star wars game with no vehicles for gawd I want to say nearly 6 months.

 

True not everything in the game is "Perfect" but it isn't terrible either. For story line alone it is one of the best I have seen or heard of. I love the story line of my IA Sniper. Looking forward to following the story lines of the classes.

 

Everyone always seems to complain about Gear, PVP, AH, Crafting, and such - granted you have to have myriad of elements to keep a game going and interesting but you know I seem to find the real thing that sets a game apart from others is the story line. Every MMO is going to give you stupid quests to go to X Kill Y and receive Z. Sometimes there are decent quest lines that make play interesting for abit. But getting a story line that keeps you looking forward to the next mish, next goal, is what makes a game. That I think TOR has achieved.

 

Now I haven't reached the end game level yet, too many alts. Maybe things are stagnant at that point. Hopefully, BW has good plans to expand that section of the game. Seeing as the game is just shy of 3 months of opening I can understand end game not being a huge focus for them. Yes I know there are those of you who don't sleep, eat properly, work, goto school, or have any life outside of gaming and you reached the level CAP within weeks or maybe days of launch - I feel sorry for you because you just blow through a game without really enjoying probably. All I can say is stop being such an addict, my god, it does take time to program content, mesh in the graphics, sync in the VO, and all the other little crap that everyone thinks can be done in a single week. The Rakghoul update they released was content they started nearly a year before the game launched! Obviously they are thinking ahead but things take time and everything has to be coordinated.

 

Damn, now I forgot what I was trying to say. Oh yeah, worst launch - hardly. Could it have been better, sure. Could it have been a lot worse - oh yeah. *****, gripe, complain, yell and call BW and EA names, but basically if you don't think it is worth your money then **** and go play your crappy WoW some more.

[harkain]

there is no debate, rifts launch was >>>>>>>>swtors launch

 

rift fails at other points (their 2 buttongameplay due to macros with prio chains is plain idiocy) but their launch and their quality based on their limited budget is amazing. Swtor has had a huge budget but all we got was voice overs thats most of us space bar through after the first time..not a particulary good investment.

[Golarz]

Turn it around instead and look what SWTOR had at launch that RIFT did not:

 

- Complete VO

- Great leveling experience

- Great stories

- Space combat

- More end-game content (at launch)

- Great and a lot more balanced PvP

- Datacrons

- Light/Dark side choices (coupled with great stories making it the first REAL mmoRPG)

 

and more...

 

Yeahhh right space combat. It's rather hard to put this in fantsy world.

If You want toplay like this let's turn it aroundone more time.

 

- There are no rifts in SWTOR

- There are no invasions

- There are no events

- No dual spec (Rift allowed 4 specializations at launch!!)

 

We can do this all day.

 

PvP is same as it was in Rift - terrible.

Rift had more endgame content at launch. First of all experdt dungeons were awesome. Each of those was expanded verion of the basic one with 2-3 extra bosses.

Not to mantion waaaaaay better craft in Rift and itemization. YOu had to do Tier 1 experts to get geared up for tier 2 and then for tier 1 raides.

Here you have tier 1 pve in hardmode instances, normal operations and hard mode operations. What the hell ?

 

Light/dark side choices ? Realy ?

Like it would matter what You choose.

You can as well close Your eyes and push random button in conversation, it hase no real impact on the story or Your character. Simple mind trick for weak minds.

Edited February 9, 2012 by Golarz

[Graburr]

 

Granted, Rift didn't have an lfg tool from the beginning but you had a worldwide channel for lv 50 players to lfg. Swtor was just great from 1-50, but now it's just boring, leveling my 4th alt to 50 now because the story is the only really awesome thing they gave players, everything else is bugged as hell, especially operations or doesn't provied any bonus any more (crafting, dailies, space missions).

 

that's why I always questioned TOR's staying power. "story" and everything is great, but how many times can you experience "the story", a handful different quests per planet make maybe 5% of the whole leveling experience, the rest is the same. if you remove the story, you get a buggy and sometimes shoddy version of wow's endgame - ironically people mention all the time how great TOR is because wow was just boring with the instance grind...

[ikkiris]

nothing is better than weilding 2 lightsabers hehe not even a shadowmourne can handle the power of a saber rofl

[Azumio]

If you put all the complaints into one huge sum, it seems to me what it boils down to is:

 

To alot of people, SWTOR feels outdated. It feels like a 2004ish game released in 2012.

 

The MMORPG market has improved since then, and it seems TOR went with the basic, standard template set by WoW (Or other game) and never improved or added anything.

 

I get it.

 

Mythic and EA better hope they have some huge patches coming down the line very soon to fix that, or the population will go poof rather quickly.

[Ironspeed]

If you put all the complaints into one huge sum, it seems to me what it boils down to is:

 

To alot of people, SWTOR feels outdated. It feels like a 2004ish game released in 2012.

 

The MMORPG market has improved since then, and it seems TOR went with the basic, standard template set by WoW (Or other game) and never improved or added anything.

 

I get it.

 

Mythic and EA better hope they have some huge patches coming down the line very soon to fix that, or the population will go poof rather quickly.

 

Yeah I sure hope Mythic has a huge patch for biowares game..

[MajikMyst]

Why compare it to anything? At the end of the day its just pixels on a screen

 

The best answer of all time right here!!

 

A award for you!!

[Graburr]

rift fails at other points (their 2 buttongameplay due to macros with prio chains is plain idiocy)

 

tbh my jedi guardian just screams for a macro system with the skill bloat. imagine rift without a macro system, and you got jedi combat.

 

I always found macros lazy, but in the end you just press a button every second. it's not more engaging if it's the same buttons in a fixed order compared to the same button over and over...