Thanks for Ziost.

[Darth_Wicked]

Except that Nar Shaddaa is also a moon. I don't think there's any pattern to whether something is a moon or a planet.

 

Nar Shaddaa is the OBVIOUS exception due to its richness, lore-wise. Post-Vanilla however, every single daily area released in a new, previously unavailable location, was in a moon.

Edited July 28, 2015 by Darth_Wicked

[Diviciacus]

I hate Ziost for its emotional impact. That doesn't make it bad.

 

99% of people crying over Ziost are armchair developers who only think they know how long it takes to make something in a game. Like this guy:

 

Well it's been a while since I was there and don't really intend to go back there:

 

1. About 95% the same missions and dialogue for both factions
   
2. Took what, an hour to complete and is the only story content between April and October
   
3. None of the fights had any interesting mechanics
   
4. For some reason Bioware thinks the Colossal Monolith counts as a raid cluster and the fight itself is just another clusterf*ck of circle mechanics.
   

 

Just because it takes a player, who mashes the spacebar through dialogue, who does none of the sidequests and who slaughters their way through everything without paying attention to anything, an hour to go through Ziost, doesn't mean it took an hour to build.

 

It took at least a month to a month and a half to build Ziost. And probably that much again on iterations of internal testing and editing. Not to mention who knows when they managed to get at least 20 VA's in the studio.

[Bobs_YourUncle]

99% of people crying over Ziost are armchair developers who only think they know how long it takes to make something in a game.

 

99% aren't concerned with how long it takes to make something in a game. They are just giving their opinion on it overall, and I'm 99% positive that 100% of any of those who were not overall happy with Ziost are not actually crying. I am 100% positive that you took offense from others opinions on a small update to the game, but only 10% sure as to the reason why.

[Pagy]

ziost story was ok, far too short and far too anti-climactic.

 

the planet itself is tiny and useless. no pvp.

 

overall it was the most disappointing planet and release from BW to date. next to SoR of course.

[Diviciacus]

99% aren't concerned with how long it takes to make something in a game. They are just giving their opinion on it overall, and I'm 99% positive that 100% of any of those who were not overall happy with Ziost are not actually crying. I am 100% positive that you took offense from others opinions on a small update to the game, but only 10% sure as to the reason why.

 

No, they really are.

 

"Ziost is crap because I finished in less than an hour! You had four months to work on it, BIOFAIL! Where IS MY FOUR MONTHS OF CONTENT?!"

 

That's literally what all the complaints over Ziost are. "It's garbage because it's short, and if they had months to work on it, that should mean it should take me months to complete it!"

[Pagy]

No, they really are.

 

"Ziost is crap because I finished in less than an hour! You had four months to work on it, BIOFAIL! Where IS MY FOUR MONTHS OF CONTENT?!"

 

That's literally what all the complaints over Ziost are. "It's garbage because it's short, and if they had months to work on it, that should mean it should take me months to complete it!"

why aren't these complaints valid?

[DawnAskham]

Where Ziost failed (IMO):

 

Over-hyped as one of two large story updates for the year, thus player expectations were high, especially given the lore nature of the planet, and while what was delivered isn't bad, it fell short of many player's expectations. Add in the hype tied to 'May the Fourth Be With You' day and the 'big cliffhanger / reveal' and it was a let down for many.

 

It also fails in delivering replay value as the story is basically the same on every character, so those with alts grow tied of it very fast and other than acessing the WB / Operation, have little reason to bother playing through on alts, which brings us to the next fail.

 

Requiring completion of all of SoR to unlock Ziost AND requiring completion of the main Ziost line to access WB / Operation is idiotic (no group or daily content added since launch required completing previous content to access).

 

It makes zero sense to lock repeatable group content behind hours of solo story content that offers very little replay value as doing so simply frustrates and annoys players with multiple characters, especially those that level characters through alternative means such as PVP, group PVE content, and / or dailies.

 

Allowing players to start Ziost and / or offering to 'skip' to the end phase with a 'spoilers warning' would have eliminated a lot of the complaints around Ziost, especially given the lack of replay value for alts in SoR and Ziost.

 

I don't have an opinion on the daily area as I don't do dailies, though I imagine the small area and basically dead world is so different that just from a 'norms' and aesthetics perspective, there will be those that like it and those that do not, and neither opinion is right nor wrong.

Edited July 28, 2015 by DawnAskham

[Bobs_YourUncle]

That's literally what all the complaints over Ziost are.

 

Really? I haven't seen that, my own opinion of it would prove you wrong, and I dare say a fair number of complaints on Ziost was related to the handling of the may 4th cliffhanger and the daily area blandness. Anyways, it's people's opinions, no biggie.

[Elracor]

I hate Ziost for its emotional impact. That doesn't make it bad.

 

99% of people crying over Ziost are armchair developers who only think they know how long it takes to make something in a game. Like this guy:

 

 

 

Just because it takes a player, who mashes the spacebar through dialogue, who does none of the sidequests and who slaughters their way through everything without paying attention to anything, an hour to go through Ziost, doesn't mean it took an hour to build.

 

It took at least a month to a month and a half to build Ziost. And probably that much again on iterations of internal testing and editing. Not to mention who knows when they managed to get at least 20 VA's in the studio.

 

Yeah, you don't really need to mash spacebar through dialogue to finish Ziost in about an hour.

and

doesn't skip any dialogue at all and that's just above an hour + he spends time on showing off gear etc.. The side missions don't take much either but if it can make you stop crying we can say 2 hours for storyline + side quests.

 

You're making a strawman argument BIGTIME with your "an hour to build" nonsense. I know it takes time to develop and test a game. No game developer can develop game content faster than the players can play through it.

Still, the amount of content Ziost provides and the time we need to wait for KotFE is simply not good enough, especially not when Ziost provides as little replayability as it does when Rep/Imp storyline is like 95% identical.

Edited July 28, 2015 by MFollin

[Diviciacus]

why aren't these complaints valid?

 

Because development time is always going to be greater than usage time with any software, and especially games. It takes 2-3 years to build the average game. Should its story be 2-3 years long?

 

By all means, criticize the length of Ziost as being rather short. But don't be an @sshole and say they had months to work on it so it should provide months of content, if you don't know what it actually takes to make a game.

[Max_Killjoy]

I do not have a problem with the Ziost content, missions, one-way-phase, or dailies.

 

The problem I have with Ziost is that they wasted Ziost on it.

[Darth_Wicked]

I do not have a problem with the Ziost content, missions, one-way-phase, or dailies.

 

The problem I have with Ziost is that they wasted Ziost on it.

 

My EXACT same issue.

 

They could have gone for a totally generic Imperial homeworld, but instead they went for Ziost, while discarding EACH and EVERY SINGLE thing that makes it memorable to begin with, starting with the Sith Citadel, which didn't even make an appearance.

 

At the end of the day, as this image can attest to, they had Ziost lying around in some shape or form since late-2012 or early-2013 and had to use the place somehow. Shame they pretty much FAILED to make it more memorable given it's richness, from a lore standpoint.

[ForceWelder]

Ziost is the "freebie" end game zone. All things considered it is the place you go to get your chosen character in gear that is appropriate for the new expansion.

 

When it first came out, I was like everyone else. I was scratching my head wondering why the place dropped raid level loot for the completion of anything other than raid level content. The answer is of course that the devs need us to be at a certain gear level going into the expansion. And being in PVP gear (augmented and max level or not) probably won't cut it. So they over hyped a new zone and made it stupid simple and short to complete in the hopes that most of us would take the hint that we need this gear - even if we don't use it for PVP purposes.

 

It would also explain why we get a full companion set on Yavin 4. Again it is higher than 190 but the point is to give all players access to gear that they will need to be at for the expansion.

 

They gave us this ridiculously high level of gear for a reason and I suspect that the reason was the expansion that is just a few months away from being released.

 

I suspect for those players who chose the option to make a fresh 60 going into the expansion, you likely will have gray or green gear that is 190 or higher. And the Ziost gear was put in play so that more experienced players don't feel short changed.

 

The goal of these locations and the daily and weekly quests is to give us all the opportunity to have appropriate level gear to complete new content with and in this regard, Ziost fits the bill.

[Rafaman]

Lol. Come on... you guys know that Ziost was just filler right? Look, BW was working on KoFE well before the beginning of this year. That was sucking up a lot of their time. But they need something to keep us at bay after SoR, so in came Ziost. And it is what it is. A bit of story with a WB and an Ops Boss at the end. That is all. It is a stop gap and a fun one at that.

 

I'm not really bothered that they used the planet Ziost for this. This is SW "legends" property and as such can change on a dime. The story may come back to Ziost and make it relevant again, who knows. It isn't a wasted opportunity because all possibilities still exist.

Edited July 29, 2015 by Rafaman

[Six-Echo]

I don't know why is there so much hate of Ziost. In fact it is the only really good planet in the game (maybe with Korriban on pair), especially the first phase. Such an atmosphere of death and despair 10/10 IGN, such design! And a nice story in addition without stupidly childish plot twists like "woo-hoo I've just killed Vitiate solo and saved the whole world and beauty princess!". The only sad thing was a very annoying bug with "Monolithic" quest, a shame, but it's still broken.

 

And that daily area nice too. It's not stupidly big like Hoth, it's not filled with countless astoundingly strong mobs like Corellia, in fact daily-Ziost is just fine for comfortable farming and admiring of dead horizonts of this dark planet.:

 

Be happy you're not one of the many people that are bugged and stuck on the initial quests and haven't been able to do daily's for 2 weeks... right now hanging on by a thread... if the next maintenance doesn't fix it, I'm gone.

[Keypek]

Was a great brief story to get there and enjoyed doing the dailies and the bosses. But once you do it once and also get your 204 MH there is literally no reason to go back there and I haven't been for months.

 

This is why I'm afraid for KOTFE and that it'll be the same thing. A year of development time spent on a one off story that will have little purpose to revisit a second time once achievements are done.

[myrdinn]

Ziost meant something to the old emperor. Story-wise, I understand why it was the planet to be gobbled up... it is a statement of power to the imps who stabbed him in the back at Yavin IV and throughout the various story lines. I don't doubt we'll get led by the hand, storywise, somewhere to make this explicitly known... but even the characters (Marr particularly, and TShan) note that something is odd with Vitty taking root at Ziost.

 

It could be something as simple as "I had a soul anchor there", but I figure it probably has more to do with "it was an imperial capital, and I'm making my power known to they who forgot they were mine."

[Nydus]

I enjoyed Ziost as well. Frankly, it came as a bit of a nice surprise and in some respects I enjoyed in more than the Shadow of Revan (which is always a tricky subject matter to deal with given our love for that character).

 

The ending was also fairly epic, and without spoiling anything, the fan base has been asking for some permanent outcomes on the universe so I am really confused by the whining.

 

- Arcada

[Legolose]

Well it's been a while since I was there and don't really intend to go back there:

 

1. Dailies on Ziost are rubbish
   
2. Even on PvP servers there's no PvP there
   
3. About 95% the same missions and dialogue for both factions
   
4. Took what, an hour to complete and is the only story content between April and October
   
5. None of the fights had any interesting mechanics
   
6. For some reason Bioware thinks the Colossal Monolith counts as a raid cluster and the fight itself is just another clusterf*ck of circle mechanics.
   
7. In SoR they finally bothered to collapse Classic + Basic comms into one currency for simplicity and versatility and then Ziost introduces another gear currency...
   
8. As Max_Killjoy mentions below, the permanent phase jump is annoying. Storywise it makes sense, but gameplay wise you're stopping players from accessing a lot of the small amount of daily content Ziost has, and makes it a lot more annoying to access Colossal Monolith on alts.
   

 

The story and atmosphere is good and all that but not to the point where I want to go back on a regular basis with alts.

SOOOoooo what your saying is ,,, That you hate Ziost! Or am I missing something here Edited July 29, 2015 by Legolose

[Hebruixe]

I love Ziost. Do people actually complain about it? It's the best thing about SoR.

[flyersfan]

Honestly, I love the Ziost daily area. I keep saying how much it reminds me of the Normandy crash site in the Mass Effect series. Quite a different atmosphere from the rest of the game and definitely a welcome change, similarly to the Theoretika.

 

That sounds amazing. I still haven't been to Ziost, but I definitely need to finish the SoR stuff now to see this. That part of ME2 was one of my favourite parts of the series. The music, the atmosphere, the running around, the look of the moon, and the loud heavy breathing of Shepard as she runs through the dead quiet environment was all just so perfect. It really made me feel like a space marine.

 

I hope I'm not disappointed when I get to Ziost now.

[The-Kaitou-Kid]

I liked Ziost quite a bit, personally. It wasn't a gigantic update by any means but I loved the story of it. The dailies are a good break from the typical formula for dailies as well. The one with the speeder is especially nice, not something that was done much prior to Ziost so it's cool to see.

[royhenderson]

800k doing ziost fromt the first time you arrive to the dailies. And that's not even spamming (resetting) dailies to farm 8k-15k droids

[Benjann]

Seems like most of you like Ziost, but - I can only personally speak for me - hate the environment they created.

I know its a harsh word, but when I heard of Ziost coming, I did expect to see the world where once the might of the Sith Empire was located (and something like Dromund Kaas again).

I would have been happy with ruins and not just some small temples in the daily area.

It is know that most of the capital city still was intact after the battle of Yavin (so for more than 3500 years). And therefor I asked myself why not showing this in the game ... ?

 

The Ziost they gave us is nothing compared to what it used to be outside the game.

[ForceWelder]

My thoughts on Ziost ...

 

It really needs to be on the priority terminal like all the other daily areas.

 

It is short and to the point (which I like). Quest areas like Mekab that just seem to go on forever just aren't my thing. I find these long quest chains to be annoying. Especially when you are already above level for the content.

 

But on a side note, I really think a short quest chain is appropriate for the story line in this case. As a player, you are basically told you are under the gun to get this situation resolved. The longer it goes on, the stronger the Emperor gets. Your goal is to stop him and not spend three days traveling back and forth doing one thing or another. Also, the longer you are on planet, the more likely it will be that the Emperor will take control over you.

 

As for the Ziost comms ... I really don't mind them. With this being the top story level gear available currently, it is not surprising that they did do this.

 

Wish you could go there as a 59. Truthfully, people who are leveling will be in the same gear at 59 they will be in at 60 when they do go there. And the way the place is setup, I really don't see level 59 characters having issues there.