Why people think there is not much content - in fact there IS much content

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

In my theory, if someone is not playing with eight different class characters at the same time, gets the impression there is not much content. But the story / voiceover content is really huge.

And here is the flaw in concept, a game should not expect you to play 8 characters to experience the whole story content. Seriously. And if the game really expects you to do so, the levelling experience must be completely different for each class, which it is not right now.

 

I guess the storywriting, voiceovers and cutscenes creation must have been a complete work overkill, but who is REALLY experiencing 8 class stories? Who is running through all of the static planets, in same order, eight times?

 

I´d much rather preferred ONE epic storyline that fits all, one that tightly involves and interconnects ALL classes, like a Star Wars movie does. Plus ONE epic, interconnected, galaxy changing climax at the end of ALL class stories, like in the movies.

 

That way, there could have been much more time and money spent on many other aspects of the game.

 

So, how much benefit to the game are the "unique class" stories? And how much benefit is packaging up "kill x" sidequests into little voiceovered stories?

 

Wouldn´t things like minigames, social activities, casinos and space exploration be much more of a benefit to give the feeling of variation to the players?

Edited May 21, 2012 by Lord_Ravenhurst

[Samborino]

Yea i agree, the class story is a very small portion of the leveling experience. They spent way to much time and money on voice overs for every freaking quest. Ive been playing tera and i honestly dont mind the archaic non VO questing system its satisfying to pick up 12 quests at a quest hub and go out and complete them. It wouldnt be satisfying to do that for the second time through while listening to a bunch of VO for everyone of those quests.

 

Im not even advocating for tera i probably wont play after my free month is up as im playing alot of d3 right now but im just saying that going back to that questing system didnt bother me nearly as much as i thought it would and it was actually quite enjoyable in some ways and kind of a releif. Shushing my roommate everytime he came into my room because some VO was going on and not being able to talk to people on vent/ in person or being able to watch tv while playing actually took away from my mmo experience in alot of ways, it was alot of fun the first time, but not the second and thrid.

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

not being able to talk to people on vent/ in person or being able to watch tv while playing actually took away from my mmo experience in alot of ways, it was alot of fun the first time, but not the second and thrid.

 

agree to your post.. but.. you´re watching TV while gaming? That is quite a multitasking effort...

 

Well on the other hand it supports the theory of nice but rather pointless VO, especially for sidequests. In fact, if the information you get on the VO would MATTER in any way, it would be different, but it doesn´t. You get your map marker and click/kill what you need to do, the information you get over VOs does not matter to progress.

That is one of the big differences I enjoyed with Secret World, getting information and clues, many without map markers - you listen to the infos you get or you might miss a hint how to solve the quest/puzzle or even where to go and search. Something like that would be nice in TOR. Although I know Star Wars is not about puzzles, solving cases or uncover mysteries, the VO should matter or be reduced to what´s necessary.

To me it seems obvious that the available budgets would be needed in other areas of the game.

Voiceovers =/= gameplay

Edited May 21, 2012 by Lord_Ravenhurst

[Arkerus]

I posted this is in the game's early release.

If you are complaining that there is NO content, please list all the content you have completed.

 

 

Turns out, most people hadn't even beat the "normal modes" and they were still complaining. How can one complain about lack of content when they weren't even trying to beat the content that was there?

 

Turns out, most folks wanted to fiddle with housing and other misc side items. Sorry, this isn't the game for that.

Edited May 21, 2012 by Arkerus

[Dreossk]

Yep, not the game for that even tho the previous game had it. It tells a lot on their competence. Edited May 21, 2012 by Dreossk

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

I posted this is in the game's early release.

If you are complaining that there is NO content, please list all the content you have completed.

 

 

Turns out, most people hadn't even beat the "normal modes" and they were still complaining. How can one complain about lack of content when they weren't even trying to beat the content that was there?

 

Turns out, most folks wanted to fiddle with housing and other misc side items. Sorry, this isn't the game for that.

 

Again, I´d rather ask, who wants to play all 8 class stories to experience all of the content the game has to offer?

 

I got bored with my imperial alts the second time I needed to go through Belsavis. How can you experience all "content" when the game requires to do repetetive stuff in static, unchanging, unpopulated places?

 

e.g. Legacy is clearly intended as motivation to create as many alts as possible, but does it work? Even if you have 7 alts on top of your main character, levelled to 50, the rewards by Legacy are really meager and not motivating to go all through those planets.. again.

 

So, want to level up by PvP warzones instead to prevent going through the planets?

Doesn´t work on low pop servers. And on a high pop server - you really want to play four warzones, 1000+ times to level up 8 characters to 50 ?

 

See, the concept doesn´t work, wherever you look. And people don´t even get to all the class story lines because levelling gets such a chore after the second or third time.

 

By the way, in my opinion only server merges, then housing, minigames, space exploration, space combat and a class unified epic storyline in an expansion with more interesting quests, all wrapped up in a huge Hero engine revamp are the things which can win back the lost subs.

 

I would only re-sub under these circumstances.

Edited May 21, 2012 by Lord_Ravenhurst

[Gungan]

Class story is less than 30% of what you do on any given character. I am not repeating the same content 8 times for that.

[JediZenn]

agree to your post.. but.. you´re watching TV while gaming? That is quite a multitasking effort...

 

Well on the other hand it supports the theory of nice but rather pointless VO, especially for sidequests. In fact, if the information you get on the VO would MATTER in any way, it would be different, but it doesn´t. You get your map marker and click/kill what you need to do, the information you get over VOs does not matter to progress.

That is one of the big differences I enjoyed with Secret World, getting information and clues, many without map markers - you listen to the infos you get or you might miss a hint how to solve the quest/puzzle or even where to go and search. Something like that would be nice in TOR. Although I know Star Wars is not about puzzles, solving cases or uncover mysteries, the VO should matter or be reduced to what´s necessary.

To me it seems obvious that the available budgets would be needed in other areas of the game.

Voiceovers =/= gameplay

 

Sometimes it matters a little.

 

I've had VOs that suggested "bonus" objectives that I might have missed otherwise.

[Akea]

I would've preferred a reversal of the way the content is structured now. It would've been nice if the class story was 75% of a planet and the world arc was 25%. That would make leveling alts a lot less painful and voice overs could've only been focused on the class content, flashpoints and operations.

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

Class story is less than 30% of what you do on any given character. I am not repeating the same content 8 times for that.

 

Exactly. And I can not really consider the sidequests as valueable content, because it´s about 80% go there, kill someone, click some container or panel, then return. Although sometimes nicely wrapped up in a little story.

 

Still I think the class stories where the most work, and depending on many characters you play, you only experience 1/8th of the class content per character.

 

Thus, the impression of "not much content" in the game if you don´t have a huge Legacy of ALTs.

[Jederix]

I posted this is in the game's early release.

If you are complaining that there is NO content, please list all the content you have completed.

 

 

Turns out, most people hadn't even beat the "normal modes" and they were still complaining. How can one complain about lack of content when they weren't even trying to beat the content that was there?

 

Turns out, most folks wanted to fiddle with housing and other misc side items. Sorry, this isn't the game for that.

 

Easy. They played a few warzones a few times, those got stale, then they ran here and complained that there was no content.

 

Basically, as usual, it is PvPers complaining. What else is new, really?

[Jederix]

Yep, not the game for that even tho the previous game had it. It tells a lot on their competence.

 

I don't remember that stuff in KOTOR I or II. Oh, you think this was supposed to be a sequel to SWG? Now I see why what you said makes absolutely no sense.

 

This isn't and never was supposed to be SWG2.

[Monoth]

I think the VO"s would of been fine if they would of gotten rid of a lot of these small quests and instead had bigger quests that actually had tree branches in the story with maybe 3-4 completely different endings... This way you could play it different each time and see how things played out.... But instead we got a bunch of static linear quests... This is where Bioware messed up IMO...

[Datku]

Well actually when leveling up there isn't much content right now. There are these things caller Heroic 2 and Heroic 4 quests that you can't do because no one around to do them. Also rumors are a bunch of Flashpoints (instances) to run at various different levels you can't do because no one is ever doing them either.

 

My first character is the only one I have done any of these on. All my alts have had the population issues and is missing out on these parts of the game. Heck even PvP is hit or miss now...was in PvP queue on my alt yesterday for 6 hours and didn't pop once. Did Tatonie and Alderaan planets and never got a single PvP pop. So that leaves questing and space missions only. Now I know why so many people call this a single player game

[gurugeorge]

In my theory, if someone is not playing with eight different class characters at the same time, gets the impression there is not much content. But the story / voiceover content is really huge.

And here is the flaw in concept, a game should not expect you to play 8 characters to experience the whole story content. Seriously. And if the game really expects you to do so, the levelling experience must be completely different for each class, which it is not right now.

 

I guess the storywriting, voiceovers and cutscenes creation must have been a complete work overkill, but who is REALLY experiencing 8 class stories? Who is running through all of the static planets, in same order, eight times?

 

I´d much rather preferred ONE epic storyline that fits all, one that tightly involves and interconnects ALL classes, like a Star Wars movie does. Plus ONE epic, interconnected, galaxy changing climax at the end of ALL class stories, like in the movies.

 

That way, there could have been much more time and money spent on many other aspects of the game.

 

So, how much benefit to the game are the "unique class" stories? And how much benefit is packaging up "kill x" sidequests into little voiceovered stories?

 

Wouldn´t things like minigames, social activities, casinos and space exploration be much more of a benefit to give the feeling of variation to the players?

 

What you are saying points, I think, to the possibility that SWTOR is going to be a game that people dip into now and then, to get a bit of a Star Wars vibe, and experience another of the class stories. If you take a break, then going through some of the same content (zone quests, side quests) won't be as bad, as you'll have forgotten some of it anyway.

 

That's certainly how the game is turning out for me. I was subbed for a couple of months, stopped, and now I'm subbed again, because I had a hankering for the game again. It's really good fun in jags like this (i.e. if you've taken a break from it); its linearity and stage set quality doesn't become apparent till you've taken another character a fair way to level cap.

 

So, that might, in the end, not be too much of a problem. A lots of subscribers "churning" isn't ideal, I guess, but it's better than nothing.

[Urael]

And here is the flaw in concept, a game should not expect you to play 8 characters to experience the whole story content. Seriously. And if the game really expects you to do so, the levelling experience must be completely different for each class, which it is not right now.

 

I guess the storywriting, voiceovers and cutscenes creation must have been a complete work overkill, but who is REALLY experiencing 8 class stories? Who is running through all of the static planets, in same order, eight times?

 

^This supports the claim that the game is really a single player "lobby game" rather than a true MMORPG.

 

However, this is BW's first MMORPG and not their forte. They are known for single player rpgs. SWTOR was a good first attempt for BW to produce a true MMORPG but it hasn't passed the test IMHO. I hope that it will become a more robust MMORPG in the future as BW continues to learn from this experience.

 

I imagine IF the game survives, we will see an update at some point that revamps the game like *coughswgcough*. Are Star Wars MMORPGs cursed?

[Dreossk]

I don't remember that stuff in KOTOR I or II. Oh, you think this was supposed to be a sequel to SWG? Now I see why what you said makes absolutely no sense.

 

This isn't and never was supposed to be SWG2.

 

I didn't say it was supposed to be a sequel to SWG. It is the new Star Wars MMO tho, which means it should have been better than the previous one.

Edited May 21, 2012 by Dreossk

[IasonEvan]

I find it odd that we are 5 months into the game's life and "Chapter 4" of the story lines isn't out yet. If they release that after 8-9 months of the game being around there won't be anyone on to care about playing it. The story line stuff is amazing. It really is. It just doesn't seem like something that is sustainable for an MMO.

[gabarooni]

Yeah I agree I can't enjoy any class that isn't a Jedi. I don't like the sith and why the heck would I play a Star Wars game and make a toon that can't use the Force. I would like more content for my JK as im not interested in the other classes.

[Raeln]

Yep, not the game for that even tho the previous game had it. It tells a lot on their competence.

 

My gunslinger already owns his house. It's called his ship. Now, hopefully at some point in the future I'll be able to hang some decorations.

 

As for content, there are plenty of things to do. As for the leveling alts - aside from 2 small zones per race (less than half the size of one planet in TOR), WoW was the exact same. The story there made almost no distinction whether you were a priest or warrior - almost every quest just simply revolved around killing X npcs or looting X number <insert item here>.

 

As far as "content" goes - it's a mixed bag of complaints since almost no two people can agree on what they want in their MMO. For me personally, I'd rather small group content at end game and have all end game content pathways lead to the same gear within a reasonable timeframe - so players can feel they are interchangeable.

 

As for leveling alts though, alternate between factions. If someone has just leveled a Republic character, then don't go immediately leveling another Republic alt - level an Imperial character next. The game will feel almost brand new again. I have a 50 Gunslinger, 50 Commando and a 50 Sage. My next character will likely be a Sith Warrior because I need that class buff. Past Dromund Kaas, the Empire leveling experience will be virtually a new game to me since I haven't done any of those quests.

Edited May 21, 2012 by Raeln

[Nuriel]

Well actually when leveling up there isn't much content right now. There are these things caller Heroic 2 and Heroic 4 quests that you can't do because no one around to do them. (

 

All heroic 2 quests can easily be done with your companion as well as all heroic 4 quests can be done with 2 people and their companions except one H4 quest on alderaan, which is really really tough.

 

Flashpoints are of course a problem if your server is empty. But that's basically the biggest problem tor had and has in general. They better had opened only a portion of servers and added new ones on need. Whining about long server queues in the beginning would not let so many people quit because of no one to play with. While I don't have this problem at all on my server and playing together with my wife anyway, I still hope that server transfers come as soon as possible.

[Raeln]

Again, I´d rather ask, who wants to play all 8 class stories to experience all of the content the game has to offer?

 

I got bored with my imperial alts the second time I needed to go through Belsavis. How can you experience all "content" when the game requires to do repetetive stuff in static, unchanging, unpopulated places?

 

e.g. Legacy is clearly intended as motivation to create as many alts as possible, but does it work? Even if you have 7 alts on top of your main character, levelled to 50, the rewards by Legacy are really meager and not motivating to go all through those planets.. again.

 

So, want to level up by PvP warzones instead to prevent going through the planets?

Doesn´t work on low pop servers. And on a high pop server - you really want to play four warzones, 1000+ times to level up 8 characters to 50 ?

 

See, the concept doesn´t work, wherever you look. And people don´t even get to all the class story lines because levelling gets such a chore after the second or third time.

 

By the way, in my opinion only server merges, then housing, minigames, space exploration, space combat and a class unified epic storyline in an expansion with more interesting quests, all wrapped up in a huge Hero engine revamp are the things which can win back the lost subs.

 

I would only re-sub under these circumstances.

 

I think you are in the minority. Sounds like you hyped the game up into something it was never going to be.

 

People come and go and sure, TOR needs some new features. LFD for one. Storymode raiding to be made faceroll easy again is another. Sure, it would be nice to get swoop racing and pazaak. I'm not sure how much of an impact space combat would have but I'll agree that free flight space combat would be nice.

 

I don't think it will take all of those things to "win back the lost subs" at any rate. Some of those lost subs are people that can never be pleased. These include hardcore players that consume content at a rapid pace and move on until the next content patch at one extreme and young kiddies that cannot pay for more time than the free 30 days on the other end. Neither extreme are the kind of player that can be catered too and remain profitable.

[captindoom]

The is a lot of content for pve and also pvp, the problem is low pop servers

[Raeln]

Class story is less than 30% of what you do on any given character. I am not repeating the same content 8 times for that.

 

Class story is less than 2% per class in WoW and a great many people leveled mountains of alts in that game. Still do. In fact, I have a friend that recently deleted an alt warrior just to relevel him again. I don't understand why, but he did it. Maybe he changed races, I don't know.

[Dreossk]

I think you are in the minority. Sounds like you hyped the game up into something it was never going to be.

 

People come and go and sure, TOR needs some new features. LFD for one. Storymode raiding to be made faceroll easy again is another. Sure, it would be nice to get swoop racing and pazaak. I'm not sure how much of an impact space combat would have but I'll agree that free flight space combat would be nice.

 

I don't think it will take all of those things to "win back the lost subs" at any rate. Some of those lost subs are people that can never be pleased. These include hardcore players that consume content at a rapid pace and move on until the next content patch at one extreme and young kiddies that cannot pay for more time than the free 30 days on the other end. Neither extreme are the kind of player that can be catered too and remain profitable.

 

Can't answer for him but I want to point out that the hype part is BioWare's own fault when they announced the game would contain every expected AAA MMO features, which turned out to be a big lie.

Edited May 21, 2012 by Dreossk