Why are all the planets so linear?

[Goretzu]

I had never heard of Vanguard so I decided to look it up and see what it was.

 

First thing I found was this description in Wikipedia:

 

"Gamespy awarded Vanguard the "Biggest Disappointment" award for 2007. Vanguard also won the awards in the categories for "Least Fun", "Most Desolate" and "Lamest Launch" in the MMORPG.com MMOWTF Awards for the worst games of 2007."

 

To be fair Vanguard didn't have anything like the budget of SWTOR, even shifted in real terms.

[CosmicKat]

You've had zip to say about this game that is in any way balanced or objective. There is a difference between discussing and trashing. Please learn it.

 

I've said plenty of positives about aspects of the game (the art, the quality of voice acting/writing, the comparitive stability, the clean-ish launch, the performance on lower end machines, etc).

[CosmicKat]

I had never heard of Vanguard so I decided to look it up and see what it was.

 

First thing I found was this description in Wikipedia:

 

"Gamespy awarded Vanguard the "Biggest Disappointment" award for 2007. Vanguard also won the awards in the categories for "Least Fun", "Most Desolate" and "Lamest Launch" in the MMORPG.com MMOWTF Awards for the worst games of 2007."

 

Vanguard's only two major problems were it was terribly optimized and you needed a HAL 9000 to run it, and it was hurt by a lack of players.

It's positives were amazing dungeons (best I've ever seen), a good balance of solo, duo, and group content. It was the "real" EQ2 as it was made by the original EQ team.

[Edzew]

you dont have to say it, the reason leveling is so linear in swtor is the story. thats why I am taking that position. if there was multiple levling choices there would be no coherent story line. I fully get why people want to level in diffrent zones, especially with swtor encouraging alts but this game is diffrent then those games. you cant go toyour capital planet before you finish you orgin world and you cant do the quest line for the dark temple / jedi temple before you deal with the revanites / justicars. [or whatever the class stories are there I think those are the planet quests] that is how swtor works

 

it gets incredibly annoying people constanly complaing about the obvious " swtors to linear" "wow has more leveling options" really with all the problems this game has you want to champion a intentinal design choice due to the nature of story telling and a design choice everyone knew about before launch... really. you haters just need to except swtor for what it is. I mean bashing swtor is so 2012

 

 

umm i think most of us here complaining about Tor being linear wasn't talking about the quests.. they/we were talking about the planets them selves, how you are led down a path with very little deviation. In other words while we are on a quest and we are getting bored with said quest we cant really go off wondering around for a lil bit. all the planets (that i have seen so far) are just about the same, same mobs, same critters, same space ports just different colors. for me its getting very boring and what little bit of exploring i do get to do every now and then i find something cool but then i wish there was even more things to find, unfortunately there isn't . To be honest i also feel the story quests are quite boring, the only thing that has kept me going is my companion but that is so sporadic im starting to loose interest in that as well. TOR's story quests are just as boring as WOW's story quest which is really sad.

[Edzew]

It sounds to me that people expect this to be like WoW, where everything is explorable. Only issue is that WoW is ONE planet and they are able to connect all their zones together. Star Wars in general cannot do that unless you only want one planet. They have to work with what they have. To create massive maps for each planet with the way SWTOR is designed just wouldn't work well IMO. Now I do agree that little things bug me. Like how there really are walls on Taris, you can't walk on mountains, ect.

 

got 3 letters there for ya bub.... SWG!!

 

Galaxies had multiple planets that were huge and why cant you still have your main story on a huge planet?? if we had bigger planets then there would/could be more for us to do later on

[psandak]

Yup, did it between a couple, Korriban is small on a speeder.

 

 

I don't really understand why they don't let you pick up quests on another starter planet, it seems fairly pointless to me.

 

Unless they technically couldn't figure out a way to do it (although that doesn't really explain heroics), in which case it's just one of a long list of things that should have been implimented better, but wasn't.

 

Look at it this way, back in vanilla, while WoW did give you the opportunity to go to different areas to level, you actually had to find a way to get there first. As someone else pointed out, if you were playing a Night Elf and wanted to go to the human areas to level in, you had to travel a LOT to get there; believe me I know because I did it. Now it is a lot easier to do. It took Blizzard, four years and two expansions before they offered two starting areas on a given continent. And it took an additional two years and an expansion to make the options of traveling to a different quest area more convenient. And that is without class stories to worry about.

[CosmicKat]

umm i think most of us here complaining about Tor being linear wasn't talking about the quests.. they/we were talking about the planets them selves, how you are led down a path with very little deviation. In other words while we are on a quest and we are getting bored with said quest we cant really go off wondering around for a lil bit. all the planets (that i have seen so far) are just about the same, same mobs, same critters, same space ports just different colors. for me its getting very boring and what little bit of exploring i do get to do every now and then i find something cool but then i wish there was even more things to find, unfortunately there isn't . To be honest i also feel the story quests are quite boring, the only thing that has kept me going is my companion but that is so sporadic im starting to loose interest in that as well. TOR's story quests are just as boring as WOW's story quest which is really sad.

 

The planets and the quests are one and the same. It is standard console game design. A string of objectives from one node that lead you to the next node, and so on. It is a flow chart map design where the world geography is implemented after the quests. That's why it feels like an artificial world with a railroad leading you from point to point, because it is.

 

The standard RPG (both pen and paper and PC) and earlier-era MMO philosophy of world design is to design a plausible world first, and then populate it with quests.

 

If you want to build a "realistic" game world you build a mountain range and then put an Orc dungeon in it. If you want to build an artificial world, you build an Orc dungeon and then put a mountain over it. The difference is drastic and most people playing MMO's nowadays have never seen how good it can be when done properly.

[Edzew]

The planets and the quests are one and the same. It is standard console game design. A string of objectives from one node that lead you to the next node, and so on. It is a flow chart map design where the world geography is implemented after the quests. That's why it feels like an artificial world with a railroad leading you from point to point, because it is.

 

The standard RPG (both pen and paper and PC) and earlier-era MMO philosophy of world design is to design a plausible world first, and then populate it with quests.

 

If you want to build a "realistic" game world you build a mountain range and then put an Orc dungeon in it. If you want to build an artificial world, you build an Orc dungeon and then put a mountain over it. The difference is drastic and most people playing MMO's nowadays have never seen how good it can be when done properly.

 

im not saying they need to change the story quests (well they could make them less boring and less strung out but that's a different thread on its own) but why couldn't they make the planet/zone bigger?? more spread out and open?? why is it so small and narow?? you could have the same thing as we have now but just bigger?? yes i know later planets are sposta get bigger as you go along but why?? why not make them all the same size? why not mix the two factions up from time to time?? i haven't seen a single opposite faction member yet.

 

for me this game is just way to constricting, its what i loved about Galaxies and Lineage II, i could go off wandering around and look at all the cool things to see or find critters to farm i.e. krayts and sand people, and even WOW to a little slighter degree (it was more of look at all the nifty things to look at)

Edited December 11, 2012 by Edzew

[hunterthesloth]

The best way to fix this would be to increase the size of each planet and and zones for different levels ( like not have ord mantel only 1-10) and add "quests" like in Runescape. I know it is not very similar to swtor but if you had missions that required you to go to different parts of the galaxy and go to different places in the planets it would change the feel of the game. The would be similar to flash points but take place like missions.