atduncan Posted December 29, 2012 Share Posted December 29, 2012 Decisions = as pointless as this game Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MariaD Posted December 29, 2012 Share Posted December 29, 2012 Vette is basically a good person. Why is she fighting hard for a vicious Sith Warrior who butchers everyone and loves it? Interesting you should mention Vette here... If you don't take her shock collar off, she does not talk with you at all. But you can shock her once a day. If you do take it off, you can see the story and marry her (as a male). Jaesa can be Light Side or Dark Side and the stories are pretty different. Also in the Warrior story, there are several NPCs you can choose to kill or to spare. If you spare them, they come and help you on a pretty difficult fight later on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MariaD Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 I thought some more about this thread in general, and came to the conclusion that I would absolutely hate for RP decisions to have PvE or PvP consequences. PvE and PvP is all about optimization. RP is all about storytelling, character development, and moral choices. We have too much of that "Do I choose what is right, or do I keep my job?" mess in life, to enjoy it in games... I don't want for my raid team to pressure me into talking to my companions this way and not that way so I can optimize my tanking stats! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darklordpotter Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 I thought some more about this thread in general, and came to the conclusion that I would absolutely hate for RP decisions to have PvE or PvP consequences. PvE and PvP is all about optimization. RP is all about storytelling, character development, and moral choices. We have too much of that "Do I choose what is right, or do I keep my job?" mess in life, to enjoy it in games... I don't want for my raid team to pressure me into talking to my companions this way and not that way so I can optimize my tanking stats! I don't think anyone is suggesting that it should affect your stats just the comps and endgame is little affected by comps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashlockheart Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 (edited) The more I play this game, the more this becomes apparent to me. Part of the appeal of the game is the decisions you make along the way. You choose to save someone or murder them, do the right thing or the wrong thing. But the more I play the more I realize these decisions really have no long term consequences. You might murder someone in cold blood as they beg for their lives and your companion does not approve. You get -200 affection. No biggie. Give them a couple of gifts and all is forgotten. You might kill hundreds of people. Again, no biggie. I did something with my toon the other day that prompted my companion to basically give me a lecture about how horrible I was. They were right too. But the next mission, everything was fine. My decision had no consequence at all in how they performed in combat or anything else really. Yes, you can argue that ultimately your decisions push you either LS or DS but let's be honest here, the same gear you can get on one side you can get on the other side as well. It goes by different names, but it's completely comparable gear. There's really no advantages/disadvantages to going one way or the other. Am I the only one who wants to see some decisions that have permanent, long term impacts? I'm not saying every decision should be that way, but I think some should. Some decisions should permanently turn your toon one way or the other. An extreme act of nobility or a an extreme act of savagery should permanently impact your toon in much more fundamental way than just 100 LS points. I think it would add a lot if there were decisions you could make that would cause your companions to just leave rather than deal with your crap or maybe stick around because they had to, but their combat effectiveness would be diminished because they didn't care. Vette is basically a good person. Why is she fighting hard for a vicious Sith Warrior who butchers everyone and loves it? I can understand what you mean. They might add some thing to the choice to make it more interesting. How ever what I find more interesting then any thing else how a person reacts to what choice they take. See it may be a game in reality, but it is kinda a scary when hearing a person say murder is no biggy. I wonder if they would feel the same if what you did in the game happened for real. And I am reffering to just the person choiceing what they want to do in the conversasion. Not every thing else in starwars such as the force, or lightsabers. But what if the npc was a real person, and if you killed them in the game. They got killed in real life. Would it still be no biggy? That is what I find more interesting. How much heart do us as humans really have? Are there many people out there with killer instics? Kinda does make you think. How people treat others in the game is also mind blowing. If I could I would do alot of test with games just to see were the mind can go. Edited January 1, 2013 by Ashlockheart Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kneemo Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 Completed Knight story with Dark side choices: A master in the council says my heart is too evil for her to allow me to become a master. then a member of the republic army says that i'm good in their book, so he says he will give me the title of General. cool. cutscene ends and i still end up with Master title instead of General. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uber_the_Goober Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 What's done is done - this will not change. It's inherent to the way the game is structured. Save your passion for convincing the devs of the next game you play, before they get done making it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Izorii Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 You get the illusion of choice. Yes its not true choices but then again your in an MMO if our choices matterered they would need to instance/phase everything which means you would only be able to party with people who made the same choices or people you killed may show up because your party saved them. Its going to take a very smart person to have story, choices and an MMO and make them all work. All I think we can hope for is rather than galaxy spanning events we get personal strories and so we can feel like we do get choices rather than the fact I kill a nearly imortal being save the galaxy and bring balance back to the force only to learn no one cares. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grammarye Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 (edited) Funny though but before launch they had said that our decisions will have an impact on our class story. So far, I've only gotten more or less spam in my mail box from those I let live. This may have been mentioned before, but before launch, you could have your companions die rather than required to join you. You were permanently locked out from having them available. Needless to say, Bioware drowned in the rage posts of people who essentially said 'but I didn't realise they'd actually die!!'. We've spent a decade conditioning MMO players to have nothing important change and everything be attainable. Actually, we've done it with more than MMOs. Go through Skyrim and count how many times people actually care about what you did (other than the exceptionally well informed guards, and even they still think I occasionally serve mead to the Companions despite running the place). Edited January 1, 2013 by Grammarye Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimG Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 You get -200 affection. No biggie. Give them a couple of gifts and all is forgotten. Well, you chose to give the companion gifts to negate the affection loss. You could go through the game without giving companion gifts if you really wanted consequences. But instead, you chose to negate the consequences because you didn't want the consequences. There would be stronger light side/dark side consequences if this was a game like KOTOR where people just play at home by themselves, but since it's a MMO and they have to deal with customer support requests, forum rants, etc., they basically have to try to idiot-proof the game by preventing someone from clicking a button once that negates everything they've done the entire game. It is the same way with companions. At one point in beta, you could kill companions....they warned testers you would need your companions at later points in the game. Yet, people killed off their companions and then complained that they wanted it undone....and that was just in beta...not even in live play. So your choices have consequences, just on a smaller scale....an email and reward from a NPC, a small shift in LS/DS points, a different quest reward, different follow-up quests being opened up or closed off. Nothing where you can break your character with one decision. Given that we're talking about 50 levels of gameplay....soon to be 55 levels....I don't think 1 decision should have THAT much of an impact anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asuka Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 Shoe-horning story and dialog choices into an MMO is the culprit. They simply don't belong in the game and they destroy the "world feel" of the universe. The "chosen one" plotlines make a persistant world an impossibility and without a persistant world, an MMO will never form a community. Terrible games have survived for years based entirely on the strengths of their persistant worlds and communities (SWG for example). TOR is technically a vastly better game than SWG but it is unlikely to match the life of SWG simply because it is not an MMO. SWG survived about 1 year before SOE murdered it then it was no longer SWG. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MariaD Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 (edited) See it may be a game in reality, but it is kinda a scary when hearing a person say murder is no biggy. I wonder if they would feel the same if what you did in the game happened for real. I don't think it's meaningful to transfer in-game events to real life that directly. My juggernaut killed his 14,000th Republic player character yesterday. I don't think any person on Earth other than the guys who bombed Hiroshima knows how that feels for that many people to die by your hands. But it's more like chess in-game, really. Consensual. Edited January 1, 2013 by MariaD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rehneu Posted January 1, 2013 Share Posted January 1, 2013 Early beta, you were able to do things in the game that did, in fact, have consequences that were based on your choices. Just an example, you were then able to kill your companions if you wanted to. As a result, you never got them back. These things were removed to eliminate the tickets that would have been submitted by countless people saying they never knew it was a permanent thing. So, when they originally stated that all decisions matter, it was true....back then. Things have since long changed. To bad really, as that would have been rather cool to see what kind of limitations some would have placed on themselves due to their choices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amuntet Posted January 2, 2013 Share Posted January 2, 2013 MMO Players can't handle permanent change well. Any idiot who doesn't wear a helmet on a regular basis could spend 3 seconds and realize that choices could have an impact, but not be permanent. You could anger a companion into leaving. And you could then perform some series of actions to get them to rejoin your crew. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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