A Tale of Two Games: ToR and WoW - Review!

[Blazinng]

The OP seems heavily biased in favor of WoW. You say the quests arn't conventionalized in WoW, well they are. I basically mindlessly did every quest in WoW.

[dvvx]

Did WoW start out as a giant? Absolutely not. It took time and many improvements to make it what it is today. Heck, Blizzard still has some improving to do. Some points I can agree with, the others I cannot. SWTOR should have launched with more features, but it didn't. But I don't think it's dead. It could die if BioWare ignores consumers, but I don't think they will.

 

They are already ignoring consumers. Most of these features were requested during beta.

[KiznaCat]

I can remember, when WoW was announced, with all those features taken from Other MMO's from it's time. But many thing just poorly made.

 

And so much standards missing, like Player Housing. What kinda was standard back in 2004.

Proper PVP missing.. and so on. It was at his release, the probably worst MMO out in the wild. But why is it still around? Simple answer: People gave it a chance, and did let it improve and grow over time.

 

 

Also, ToR doesn't take idears from WoW. It takes the idears from where WoW took them. As I said earlier. I can't remember anything in WoW, that I didn't see before in another MMO.

[Ramonez]

The last line of your "review" pretty much solidified your fanboyism, and made your "review" biased. Who are you to review anything anyway? What company do you work for? Why should we care? This whole thread just screams "I need attention!".

[KiznaCat]

Oh, also forgot: If a game goes F2P, it doesn't mean that it is bad.

 

In fact, Blizzard might be able to do much more money if they came up with a F2P system.

[Korrigan]

btw, auto attack = filler :: filler = auto attack. how is a filler ability not an auto-attack when it's main purpose is to use it between abilities with cooldowns? Point is, the spamming of a filler ability is essentially the same as not spamming an auto-attack. Prove me wrong.

Wrong. An auto attack is done all the time in addition to your skill based attacks without player intervention. The filler is used when you don't have enough resources for a skill based attack. VERY different balance.

 

Auto attack:

1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1

2----3--4----5-3--

 

Filler (SW:TOR):

2-3-1-1-4-1-5-3-1

[Pigeye]

Surprisingly well-mannered thread for such a hard-line OP.

 

I have to agree that I don't think you can compare this to WoW in value terms, Blizzard have had more than just a head start. But WoW comparisons are unavoidable as BW have made it clear their sights are aimed directly at the WoW playerbase. If only they'd just kept mum!

 

I was very cynical before the TOR came out - I thought the preview videos and sneak peeks looked truly dreadful, but I've been really pleasantly surprised. I'm enjoying it very much - and I've only grouped a few times so I can't comment too much on the social tools, but as a solo game it's very good.

 

The downside though, is that it's also way, way too easy. The only mechanics to slow down progress seem to be making you run back and forth a lot, copious amounts of dialogue and bonus objectives (which you don't actually have to do, so not really complaint-worthy).

 

Money is ridiculously easy to come by - I have more than I can spend, and I've never crafted or sold anything, companions make soloing too easy - insta-summon a tank, dps or healer! who needs friends?? I have all these Pots which I've never used...they're just junk. Death is pretty meaningless, you just respawn wherever and try again if you do die. You can repair everything for pennies anyway.

 

The map, which someone above me claimed was excellent, irritates me endlessly. You can't zoom into zones from the global map unless there's a "door" leading to them, and objective guides sometimes lead you to the wrong place, sending you around in circles. Mission descriptions in the Log don't always tell you where the Hand-In NPC is either, which doesn't help much.

 

The thing is, the map and log are dead easy to fix, but the companions, ease of levelling, painless death, are all By Design. It doesn't matter how you feel about MMOs... the biggest audience out there is the people who haven't played MMOs - that's how WoW became so big, by reaching out to the masses. This isn't a game made for the hardcore... if it survives as long as WoW entirely depends on if they can keep adding content.

 

Personally I think if you give everything away too early then you're screwed in the long-tail... I really like SW:TOR, but it does feel like it's boxed itself in a bit. How's it going to feel when they release expansions and they're lower quality? Have they left enough room to innovate? They can't keep pouring money into voice acting for 7 years, EA want to make money, not spend it all...

 

As for UI mods, I'll be surprised if we see those anytime soon. The UI behaviour feels clunky and hard-coded; there aren't even any draggable windows, which is rather archaic - the kind of thing you'd expect on a console game, not a PC game (not just an MMO).

 

Who cares anyway. It's fun at the moment.

Edited December 24, 2011 by Pigeye

[Fenger]

Great job comparing a veteran game that has been around for many years to a breand new game that hasnt had a fair chance to grow yet.

 

I take you up on your challenge - lets just see what TOR is like even just 1 year down the road.

 

Everything listed here is your opinion (of which I disagree with everything you have said) and needs to be treated as such.

 

Compare apples to apples my friend, cause your not doing that now.

 

Compare TOR to wow in December of '03 and at least I myself found far far more bugs in wow, far less content in wow, and more class issues in wow at that time than Tor has now, so in my book Tor has already outshined wow.

[dvvx]

Great job comparing a veteran game that has been around for many years to a breand new game that hasnt had a fair chance to grow yet.

 

I take you up on your challenge - lets just see what TOR is like even just 1 year down the road.

 

Everything listed here is your opinion (of which I disagree with everything you have said) and needs to be treated as such.

 

Compare apples to apples my friend, cause your not doing that now.

 

Compare TOR to wow in December of '03 and at least I myself found far far more bugs in wow, far less content in wow, and more class issues in wow at that time than Tor has now, so in my book Tor has already outshined wow.

 

This argument was already brought up. It's asinine to compare a game released in 2012 with a game released in 2003. Should we also compare ToR with MUDs from the mid 90s? It's a dangerous slippery slope.

[kennn]

Wrong. An auto attack is done all the time in addition to your skill based attacks without player intervention. The filler is used when you don't have enough resources for a skill based attack. VERY different balance.

 

Auto attack:

1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1

2----3--4----5-3--

 

Filler (SW:TOR):

2-3-1-1-4-1-5-3-1

 

Your theory would prove correct if you could auto attack at the precise instance of using an ability. Fact is, that's not how the mechanics work in standard auto-attacks. You can not simultaneously be auto-attacking as you use an ability. More specifically, this is because abilities reset the auto-attack timer. Thus, your theory is incorrect.

 

Filler attack (swtor) is an auto-attack b/c it carries the same principle as a standard auto-attack. You can label it what you want, but both are ways of doing damage which cost no resources to use. Both are used when abilities are on cooldown. The only difference is that you spam click one (swtor) and you don't on the other (wow).

[dvvx]

Oh, also forgot: If a game goes F2P, it doesn't mean that it is bad.

 

In fact, Blizzard might be able to do much more money if they came up with a F2P system.

 

Unless a game is primarily based on the f2p system (like LoL), if the game goes f2p later in its lifecycle, the game is bad.

[markdienekes]

I'm having more fun in this game in one week than I've had in Warcraft for years.

[Vrumpt]

Got the where your upset because of no auto-attack and stopped. Removing auto-attack is the best move the genre has made since public quests/dynamic events started appearing. You are obviously just too attached to old things.

 

Worst part of it? Your paying for something you hate. I know this because you are posting here. That means you either don't actually hate it or are just incredibly stupid. I'll choose the latter, since you enjoy auto-attack.

 

Regardless the most vocal thing you can for something you don't like is stop your support for it. Seeing as how your are still here, your a troll. Nice stuff.

[Donbooger]

I agree with the OP, I really like TOR but it falls just short in most categories to WOW.

 

If wow were not such an old well played game and both were released today wow would belt hell out of it, tor is worthy time sink for now but for me to be playing it in 6 months its going to need a lot of work. Good review.

[Exsidium]

The thought of playing WoW another day makes me want to vomit, I will personally never play another mmo from Blizzard. I quit that game over a year ago..coincidentally, that was also around the time I alpha tested a very rough, buggy version of this game, and nothing has been the same since. Tell you what, I'm subscribing to this thread right now. I'll be back in a year, when a discussion like this would be even REMOTELY FEASIBLE and we can see where everything stands then.

[verdifer]

Can't really understand why folks come on forums to compare games, if you fell a game isn't as good as another then go play the other game it really is that simple.

[krameriffic]

Oh good, this again.

 

I enjoy TOR.

 

I've been playing it for a year now.

 

I have no intention of stopping.

 

What's the problem?

 

I really hope it turns off the hardcore WoW players, and that they all really do follow through and leave - they're what made WoW unbearable in the first place. A game that can be played casually with enough content to keep me occupied for years? Sign me up. I'm sure there are plenty of like-minded people who will come for the story, and if all the "less QQ more pew pew" mind-set leave because of it, then we may have a shot at a decent community.

 

Why is this the only counterargument I ever see? Why is it impossible that this game does things inferior to the way WoW does them in spite of how hard it has clearly tried to copy it? Is the game playable? Absolutely. Is the game fun? Indeed. Does it have its redeeming qualities and even things it does better than WoW? Yes.

 

But at the end of the day, it still feels immature as an MMO compared to what WoW has grown into. It makes all those rookie mistakes Blizzard seemed to make in designing things over the years. It's not even that I am a WoW fanboy, I'm not. I play all MMOs the same: a fast burn up to max level then a subscription cancellation after I've seen all the content. I come back for the expansions to see the new content they've wheeled out then I cancel again a month later.

 

On paper, it's the perfect MMO for me. I love the idea of story-driven quest lines with unique ideas and events for each different class. I love the idea of more focused leveling, of having different planets with different environments and different political and social things going on in them. But at the same time it's so horribly constrained by being an MMO and not taking the risks that WoW did. The vehicle quests in WoW are *********** awesome and give an interesting sense of variety to the leveling. There are quests where you transform into other beings and sneak into bases with different skillsets, quests where you fly around the world at early levels and do all this wacky **** to break up the monotony of "collect 10 cat teeth" quests.

 

Story quests in SWTOR should do that, but instead all of the intrigue arises out these bookend conversations between the player and boring NPCs who you can't shake the feeling are conducting the same conversations with a thousand other people playing the same class. It never manages to capture the magic of the RPG part of the MMORPG experience that WoW managed to do with per-zone story driven leveling in its new incarnation of the old world.

 

At the end of the day, it's stuck in this stupid limbo between being a single player cRPG like KOTOR and being another ****** WoW-killer MMO like Rift and WHO before it. It doesn't leave me satisfied as a person pursuing just the story because they make me do all these stupid uninteresting sidequests alongside the reasonably interesting main story in order to keep me up to level and capable of continuing. It's really hard to build meaningful sidequests into an MMO. WoW found a way to do it through extensive phasing and introducing a bunch of wacky mechanics unique to a select few quests in each zone. SWTOR tries to do it through instanced conversations and meaningless moral choices. Neither game does it well compared to a true single player RPG experience, but at the end of the day, WoW still does it BETTER.

 

I don't want to play WoW again because I ALREADY PLAYED IT. Do you understand why you've grown tired of it and probably never want to play it again? It's the same reason you get tired of any content driven story game: because it's never going to be as good the second time through as it was the first. SWTOR's individual plotlines will be no different. Your choices are meaningless, so it's not like playing KotOR over again as a light side guy or choosing Iorveth's path instead of Roche's in Witcher 2. It's still the same bland combat and tissue-thin veneer of a world, and nothing will ever change that.

[Krovan]

I like TOR

 

I don't like wow

 

I don't agree with your review, and didn't bother to read past the first complaints

 

Starting to wonder if blizzard is hiring it's minions to spread garbage in the TOR forums...maybe Kotic is making all these threads while he watches the subscriptions drop daily.

[kennn]

Why is this the only counterargument I ever see? Why is it impossible that this game does things inferior to the way WoW does them in spite of how hard it has clearly tried to copy it? Is the game playable? Absolutely. Is the game fun? Indeed. Does it have its redeeming qualities and even things it does better than WoW? Yes.

 

But at the end of the day, it still feels immature as an MMO compared to what WoW has grown into. It makes all those rookie mistakes Blizzard seemed to make in designing things over the years. It's not even that I am a WoW fanboy, I'm not. I play all MMOs the same: a fast burn up to max level then a subscription cancellation after I've seen all the content. I come back for the expansions to see the new content they've wheeled out then I cancel again a month later.

 

On paper, it's the perfect MMO for me. I love the idea of story-driven quest lines with unique ideas and events for each different class. I love the idea of more focused leveling, of having different planets with different environments and different political and social things going on in them. But at the same time it's so horribly constrained by being an MMO and not taking the risks that WoW did. The vehicle quests in WoW are *********** awesome and give an interesting sense of variety to the leveling. There are quests where you transform into other beings and sneak into bases with different skillsets, quests where you fly around the world at early levels and do all this wacky **** to break up the monotony of "collect 10 cat teeth" quests.

 

Story quests in SWTOR should do that, but instead all of the intrigue arises out these bookend conversations between the player and boring NPCs who you can't shake the feeling are conducting the same conversations with a thousand other people playing the same class. It never manages to capture the magic of the RPG part of the MMORPG experience that WoW managed to do with per-zone story driven leveling in its new incarnation of the old world.

 

At the end of the day, it's stuck in this stupid limbo between being a single player cRPG like KOTOR and being another ****** WoW-killer MMO like Rift and WHO before it. It doesn't leave me satisfied as a person pursuing just the story because they make me do all these stupid uninteresting sidequests alongside the reasonably interesting main story in order to keep me up to level and capable of continuing. It's really hard to build meaningful sidequests into an MMO. WoW found a way to do it through extensive phasing and introducing a bunch of wacky mechanics unique to a select few quests in each zone. SWTOR tries to do it through instanced conversations and meaningless moral choices. Neither game does it well compared to a true single player RPG experience, but at the end of the day, WoW still does it BETTER.

 

I don't want to play WoW again because I ALREADY PLAYED IT. Do you understand why you've grown tired of it and probably never want to play it again? It's the same reason you get tired of any content driven story game: because it's never going to be as good the second time through as it was the first. SWTOR's individual plotlines will be no different. Your choices are meaningless, so it's not like playing KotOR over again as a light side guy or choosing Iorveth's path instead of Roche's in Witcher 2. It's still the same bland combat and tissue-thin veneer of a world, and nothing will ever change that.

 

pretty much just hit the nail on the head.

[GamblerLee]

It's really annoying how this community deems you as a WoW fanboy if you compare it to SWTOR. They consider WoW players to be immature, but ironically I've met more immature people from this community, than from WoW. It's great that you're supporting this game, but at least be more respectful, and actually point out your reasons why you believe this game is better than WoW, and not just insult the ones speaking out their opinions.

Go ahead and call me a WoW fanboy if you wish. I'd rather be considered a WoW fanboy, where the community is less immature..

Okay my rant is done

[Sammyboyy]

Agree 110% with what you said about PvP in this game.

 

Total.

 

***********.

 

Joke.

[ColonelKer-Nal]

I agree with most of the points OP makes, but I think there's a lot of people that are just tired of WOW, and they will happily play a different game even if it's slightly worse, as long as it has high production values, like SW:TOR. But yes a lot of its features seem tacked on and hit or miss.

 

The problem here is that this is hardly a different game. It's WoW in Star Wars skins with a few innovations.

[Engleheart]

I agree with a lot of what you have said, expect the game is dead. If they don't fix a lot of what you are talking about here with pvp and a few other things, then yeah its dead.

 

 

Combat text and fix a lot of the pvp is priority #1 for this game to last past a year. The GCD has to go to 1sec, really not the thing to try and set urself apart from wow with.

[Engleheart]

also the If ToR was Communist Russia, PvP would be human rights. thing

 

 

I laughed so hard I almost ruined X-mas.

 

on another note, the story telling and "life story" as you put it are enjoyable to me and a lot of people, but i do see times when im like sthu and telling me what to do, with extra lightside points please.

Edited December 25, 2011 by Engleheart

[SpeckledHen]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

 

It was the blurst of times. Happy Holidays.