Please BW, I want SWTOR to be a game not a TV show

[CloudCastle]

This has been bothering me, but chap 16 clinched it. I love this game and I love story. I'm probably the kind of player that KOTFE was marketed toward. Something about KOTFE is really not working for me, and I think BW deserves to know why. Chapter 16 especially was a disappointment to me.

 

Problem is: I want to feel like I am playing an interactive game, not watching a TV show.

 

1) Cutscene Dialog - Cut scenes have gotten longer, but opportunities to choose what my character says have diminished. Up until KOTFE, virtually every single time your character was due to speak, a dialog wheel would show up. Not anymore.

 

2) Cutscenes without my character present at all - I find this jarring, because it throws me out of my character's head and reminds me that I am a player watching a screen, rather than being an active participant in the story's events.

 

3) Final battle outcome - Rarely have I ever experienced a story end boss that I was not allowed to defeat. We have not one, but FOUR villains, and NONE of them saw their comeuppance. Do we really need four villains? Why not let us succeed by defeating even just ONE of them? Even when I was given opportunities to take action and influence events, my choice was ripped out of my hands and tossed aside. I feel more like a passive observer than ever. Why give those choices if you are not going to honor them?

 

4) Story left unfinished/unresolved - No closure, no answers to the dozens of questions the story presented. Did the scions ever come back? No. Did kneeling to Valkorion end up having an consequences? No. What does Val want and why has his personality changed since he was called Vitiate? Who knows? Just how many plotlines were left dangling? All of them I think. I feel like I've stepped into a season of "Lost."

 

If I wanted to watch a TV show, I'd be sitting on my couch. When I fire up SWTOR, I want to be an active participant in the SW universe. Enough with the passive plotlines. Enough with the "choices matter."

 

I want to feel like I matter.

 

Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and I don't presume to speak for anyone else. No, I am not leaving.

[bncsmom]

Exactly!

 

This makes me feel like I'm sitting in front of the tube watching an episode a month for anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple hours, depending on how much we actively get to do. Cutscenes are way too long! I would have been extremely pleased with this "expansion" if they'd left 75% of the cutscenes out. Think about how much more they could have done with actual content if they'd reduced the amount of time and money spent on cutscenes!

 

Please tell us you're listening to us, Bioware. We want playable content, not cutscenes. Please!

[CloudCastle]

Exactly!

 

This makes me feel like I'm sitting in front of the tube watching an episode a month for anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple hours, depending on how much we actively get to do. Cutscenes are way too long! I would have been extremely pleased with this "expansion" if they'd left 75% of the cutscenes out. Think about how much more they could have done with actual content if they'd reduced the amount of time and money spent on cutscenes!

 

Please tell us you're listening to us, Bioware. We want playable content, not cutscenes. Please!

 

I don't mind the cut scenes per se, or even the increased length. But if the cut scene is going to be that long, then I should have that many more opportunities for my character to talk/interact/make choices, etc. I don't want to be a passive viewer of the story, I want to feel like I'm part of it.

[SerraShar]

2) Cutscenes without my character present at all - I find this jarring, because it throws me out of my character's head and reminds me that I am a player watching a screen, rather than being an active participant in the story's events.

 

Got this feel as soon as I saw they changed Vitiate for Valk and we still and never had an explanation .

 

And BW , Destiny is something you are supposed to SHOW and have it Fufilled . Not have an NPC tell you about it .

[HuaRya]

Couldn't agree more.

 

It forces us out of the group aspect of the game and into solo player in a box mode. Antithetical to how a guild functions as the only thing you can do is pat each other on the back or comment on the cut scenes.

[Pietrastor]

Longer cutscenes are totally fine IF they're treated as a reward for completing an interesting gameplay sections. They shouldn't occur every 2 steps. It's the basic mistakes basically the entire industry made in PS360 generation, I wish Bioware wasn't repeating it. Makeb and SOR had longer and more elaborate cutscenes too, but the gameplay was better. Seeker droid/macrobinoculars, puzzles, traversal/exploration etc. KOTFE does too much basic unavoidable combat on tiny maps without much diversity (even already existing systems like macrobinoculars or seeker droid are not utilized at all, barely any puzzles or exploration).

[Slurmez]

Indeed and they are exceptionally banal for half the classes in the game and constructing magic guns was laughable. KoTFE was a decent enough story (c16 was a terrible season conclusion" but had no place in a MMO, cut scen followed by a linear path where3 mobs will drop down on you and repeat was a joke.

[millio]

I agree with every point you make, I was very disappointed with this.

[bncsmom]

Makeb and SOR had longer and more elaborate cutscenes too

 

No, Makeb and SoR had conversations, not so much in the way of cutscenes. There's a difference to what those expansions had and the cutscenes of Fallen Pants. When you approach the NPC and click on it to have a conversation, you interacted with the NPCs. A few of them were longer and could be considered cutscenes but we still interacted with the NPCs quite a lot. Most of what we said was based on our choices in the conversation we had.

 

In Fallen Pants, we could barely do anything without being thrown into yet another cinematic. You killed two Skytroopers on the way out of being unfrozen from your carbonite tomb? Great! Here's a cinematic! Walk two steps in the Zakuul swamps? Wonderful! Now, watch this cinematic! Battle Arcann for a few minutes on Asylum? Awesome job! Guess what?! We have another cinematic for you to watch!

Edited August 10, 2016 by bncsmom

[SerraShar]

No, Makeb and SoR had conversations, not so much in the way of cutscenes. There's a difference to what those expansions had and the cutscenes of Fallen Pants. When you approach the NPC and click on it to have a conversation, you interacted with the NPCs. A few of them were longer and could be considered cutscenes but we still interacted with the NPCs quite a lot. Most of what we said was based on our choices in the conversation we had.

 

In Fallen Pants, we could barely do anything without being thrown into yet another cinematic. You, killed two Skytroopers on the way out of being unfrozen from your carbonite tomb? Great! Here's a cinematic! Walk two steps in the Zakuul swamps? Wonderful! Now, watch this cinematic! Battle Arcann for a few minutes on Asylum? Awesome job! Guess what?! We have another cinematic for you to watch!

 

fallen pants XD hahaha you just made my day!

[millio]

I accidentally a post Edited August 10, 2016 by millio
double post

[bncsmom]

KOTFE does too much basic unavoidable combat on tiny maps without much diversity (even already existing systems like macrobinoculars or seeker droid are not utilized at all, barely any puzzles or exploration).

 

I definitely have to agree with this. Seeker and macrobinoculars missions would have been nice, or at least add a few of the droids to find with the macrobinoculars, if nothing else. And how about a few new datacrons on Zakuul?

[bncsmom]

fallen pants XD hahaha you just made my day!

 

 

I found this on YouTube the day or the day after 4.0 was released. About laughed my behind off! Since then, I call it "Fallen Pants" almost all the time.

[Damask_Rose]

Problem is: I want to feel like I am playing an interactive game, not watching a TV show.

 

1) Cutscene Dialog - Cut scenes have gotten longer, but opportunities to choose what my character says have diminished. Up until KOTFE, virtually every single time your character was due to speak, a dialog wheel would show up. Not anymore.

 

2) Cutscenes without my character present at all - I find this jarring, because it throws me out of my character's head and reminds me that I am a player watching a screen, rather than being an active participant in the story's events.

 

3) Final battle outcome - Rarely have I ever experienced a story end boss that I was not allowed to defeat. We have not one, but FOUR villains, and NONE of them saw their comeuppance. Do we really need four villains? Why not let us succeed by defeating even just ONE of them? Even when I was given opportunities to take action and influence events, my choice was ripped out of my hands and tossed aside. I feel more like a passive observer than ever. Why give those choices if you are not going to honor them?

 

I was just thinking about why the "story expansion" isn't satisfying the story lover in me, and your top 3 were also my top 3.

 

1. The Cutscene Dialog. With so few options to choose my responses I don't feel like my character is mine. Too few opportunities to reaffirm my character's personality.

 

2. Cutscenes without my character present at all. I really don't need to see Arcann and Vaylin being whiny brats. We never had scenes without our characters before, and the earlier villains didn't suffer for it. That screen time would be better spent developing our character's relationships with the other characters.

 

3. Final battle outcome. When I fight a boss, I want to really fight it. I don't want to pretend fight it. It is jarring to have a boss nearly beaten, then switch to a cutscene where suddenly it's the boss who is stomping you instead. (On a related issue, level-sync really hurt the impact of the original boss fights. They should be challenging and they aren't anymore. They are anti-climactic now.)

 

My 4. Is the "KotOR style" companion recruitmenst. Like the over abundance of choiceless cutscenes, the voiceless cutscenes divorce me from my character. Much of our characters' personalities come through the voice acting. I try to read those lines to sound like the voice actors, but I fail spectacularly

 

My 5. I need to see the devastation Zakuul wreaked. I'm just not feeling it. KotFE feels like it's in it's own little bubble and not connected to the rest of the game. The Starforges could have provided some of that context, but they don't. Instead you traipse through untouched landscapes.

[Lunafox]

I was just thinking about why the "story expansion" isn't satisfying the story lover in me, and your top 3 were also my top 3.

 

1. The Cutscene Dialog. With so few options to choose my responses I don't feel like my character is mine. Too few opportunities to reaffirm my character's personality.

 

2. Cutscenes without my character present at all. I really don't need to see Arcann and Vaylin being whiny brats. We never had scenes without our characters before, and the earlier villains didn't suffer for it. That screen time would be better spent developing our character's relationships with the other characters.

 

3. Final battle outcome. When I fight a boss, I want to really fight it. I don't want to pretend fight it. It is jarring to have a boss nearly beaten, then switch to a cutscene where suddenly it's the boss who is stomping you instead. (On a related issue, level-sync really hurt the impact of the original boss fights. They should be challenging and they aren't anymore. They are anti-climactic now.)

 

My 4. Is the "KotOR style" companion recruitmenst. Like the over abundance of choiceless cutscenes, the voiceless cutscenes divorce me from my character. Much of our characters' personalities come through the voice acting. I try to read those lines to sound like the voice actors, but I fail spectacularly

 

My 5. I need to see the devastation Zakuul wreaked. I'm just not feeling it. KotFE feels like it's in it's own little bubble and not connected to the rest of the game. The Starforges could have provided some of that context, but they don't. Instead you traipse through untouched landscapes.

 

I love cutscenes, but I would like to feel more like it's my character and that I can control what she/he says, more like in the vanilla stories. I especially agree that I don't like it when my character isn't included in the cutscene. I don't really need to see Vaylin and Arcann being whiny bishes, and I especially don't need to hear that woman's voice. Vaylin...aka Nails On Chalkboard...urgh. The less I hear that the better. It's not like we got to see Baras scheming against us. So I suppose what I'm asking for is limited first person point of view. We experience, see and hear, whatever we are a part of.

 

The omniscient or third person point of view is great for books, it gives a lot of versatility but it tends to estrange the player from the game's cutscene. It doesn't feel like 'us' anymore when we're privy to everything said by everyone.

[JabbaWabbA]

the most annoying thing ever was escaping arcann's ship.

 

literally would run for maybe 7 seconds and then there was a cutscene, run for 7 seconds.....cutscene. what the hell was the point of that? why not just make it one entire cutscene of the character escaping? or maybe, actually let us play the escape? that was a Family Guy-esque of a time filler.

 

 

on the contrary of my above criticism, i thought the arcann fight was pretty fun and the mechanic was unexpected. i did not use the magic lightsaber.

[Dragondog]

The cutscenes of villains in KotFE work. I like those. But we know who they are. In the class quests, or at least some of them, it wouldn't have worked because we didn't know who they were and finding that out was part of the story.

 

I have no interest in playing KotFE on all of my characters. The class stories were interesting and varied. But this one size doesn't fit all attempt at story that is KotFE has failed miserably.

Edited August 10, 2016 by Dragondog

[Icestar]

There is a season II, the new expansion.

 

I am sure we will get more answers there.

 

I really like what they do

[Gokkus]

I want to feel like I matter.

 

I agree with much of what you said and the above sums it up nicely.

 

Worst part is, most season 1's of TV shows actually have a good ending because they never know whether there will be a second. SWTOR knew by chapter 16 that they would have a second season so they just gave it no ending...

The kind of ending a 7th season of a series would have when most of in the inspiration is gone, they dont know any new things to introduce so they make sure they can recycle the old stuff.

Edited August 10, 2016 by Gokkus

[Darka]

it reminds me of one of the early leaks for TOR, shortly after official announcement , it popped up that surveys had gone out to some gamers months before about what turned out to be TOR.

One of the things I do remember is it asked if we would enjoy "book like content" or something along those lines, installment based, Guess that turned out the popular choice.

While KOTFE is slightly different installment style to the game before it, that is the style that they are going with, installment/book/chapter/TV episode.

[CloudCastle]

1. The Cutscene Dialog. With so few options to choose my responses I don't feel like my character is mine. Too few opportunities to reaffirm my character's personality.

 

Yes, this is what I mean exactly. I don't feel like I have much control anymore over who my character IS and how I can differentiate characters that I play on alts either. Every time that people complain about there not being enough choices, the counter argument always surfaces that branching paths are too hard for BW and not enough resources, etc. Many of us would appreciate merely having more chances to respond to game events differently, to display our character's motivations and personalities. I want to see my Force users talk up the mysticism behind their beliefs and my outlaws crack jokes in the face of certain death. I want NPC's to respond like they recognize my character or at least acknowledge who my character is and not just treat me like some generic no-name hero.

 

My 5. I need to see the devastation Zakuul wreaked. I'm just not feeling it. KotFE feels like it's in it's own little bubble and not connected to the rest of the game. The Starforges could have provided some of that context, but they don't. Instead you traipse through untouched landscapes.

 

The biggest problem I see with Zakuul is the new areas of Zakuul itself. Playing KOTFE feels like stepping into the looking glass or through the Narnia wardrobe. I leave behind the open world of Star Wars and enter these confined corridors and locked instances. I have no reason to go back and explore, to do other little quests there or hang out. The world feels static and unreal, and as soon as I step out again, the door closes behind me and Zakuul fades away. Like a TV show. This is an antithesis of what an MMO usually strives to achieve.

 

 

The omniscient or third person point of view is great for books, it gives a lot of versatility but it tends to estrange the player from the game's cutscene. It doesn't feel like 'us' anymore when we're privy to everything said by everyone.

 

I'm so glad there are others who "get" this. I wasn't sure if this particular complain would resonate with anyone else. In the vanilla game, it was extremely rare for a cut scene to take place without our character in it, and if it did you could still imagine your character standing somewhere in the vicinity watching....like when we get to see the results of explosions we set off. Even if the POV is inside the building, I can accept that little shift in perspective, because my character is still the catalyst in the scene, still part of the action even if only indirectly.

 

But then Ziost came....and that was the first time I got the "huh?" moment. How does my character know what the destruction on the surface of the planet looks like as it is happening, if she is on the space station the whole time?? Yet the scene ends with my character standing by the terminal with her mouth hanging out like she just witnessed it all somehow through some massive invisible telescope.

 

But KOTFE took this a step even further. Now entire scenes are taking place that have NOTHING to do with my character, that are scenes from, in essence, another character's story.

 

Even the ending of KOTFE felt like a TV show. I've never seen credits roll in a game like this before. It felt like someone slamming cymbals in my face just to remind me, (in case I didn't notice already), that yes, it is just like watching a TV SHOW.

Edited August 10, 2016 by CloudCastle

[RameiArashi]

I agree with much of what you said and the above sums it up nicely.

 

Worst part is, most season 1's of TV shows actually have a good ending because they never know whether there will be a second.f.

 

Blakes 7 ended with the heroes apparently killed. No next season to reveal the villains weapons were on "stun".

 

Sapphire and Steel ended with the title characters imprisoned in a space time trap for all eternity. No next season to show how they escape.

 

The original V mini series ended with the invading aliens still in charge. They had to do a second one to defeat them. Then somebody had the bright idea to do a weekly series which reversed the victory for no good reason. The weekly series than ended with a bomb about to go off and kill the main characters. No next season to explain it didn't.

 

Alien Nation ended with a plague which was killing of the friendly aliens threatening half the main characters. A horrible TV movie years later backed the story up to where the plague had just begun not been ravishing the planet and then cured it before any major character could be effected. Originally one of them was supposed to die and the plague take an entire season to deal with not less than 2 hours to find a miraculous cure. There was also a horrible subplot n which teenage male alien has an affair with his human school teacher, and she is not arrested for statutory rape or sexual assault.

[Slerdnico]

 

Problem is: I want to feel like I am playing an interactive game, not watching a TV show.

 

 

TV show you say? Hm.....

 

...and I disagree with you a bit. I'm kinda liking these new cut scenes and such.

[TUXs]

Title of the thread = PERFECT! During chapter 16, when I could move, it always seemed like it was just far enough to trigger a new cut-scene.

[cyrusramsey]

What gets to me is the bits of story every month. Perhaps I am not exactly the target audience, I can't get myself to wait a week for a new episode, will watch tv shows when they've concluded, so am most certainly not going to wait a month for bits of story.

 

I've taken one character on each faction to Odessen so I could access Star Fortresses and Eternal Championship, will take one character through the end of KOTFE for DvL, but then I will most likely not touch any of the new story content until there is some sort of conclusion. Or perhaps until they make it a requirement for some more interesting activity again, so they can show how everyone is playing the new storyline.