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Star Wars: The Old Republic [Early Access: December 13th] Thread 2
- Thread starter Emitan
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jstevenson
Sailor Stevenson
Applied for Empire clan... I usually play good, but I think I'm going to break Imperial Agent/Bounty Hunter to start in TOR..
Actually, texture settings seem to be bugged. They're reversed in character selection.
"High" Settings
"Low" Settings
Was that just for character selection? Or was that being applied to the in game engine and dialogue scenes as well?
The in game model's textures don't seem to be changing for me. In cutscenes it looks like Low textures apply High ones.
vitaminwateryum
corporate swill
Is the site redirecting to the german version for anyone else?
BattleMonkey
Member
Yup it will be patchable
Check your browser default language settings, German is probably set as the first one.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Well got my SSD, spent an hour trying to install it. I think I need a SATA power adapter, so I ordered that which will arrive Thursday.
Sigh
Sigh
HarryDemeanor
Member
I pretty much expected it.
LowParry
Member
Haven't they already spoken about it in a previous podcast? I wouldn't expect the Bombcast folks to like it. Who knows.
Reasonable impressions. Solo play mechanically in a hotkey MMO isn't for everyone, they even mention it. The problem will be people that go into the game not understanding/expecting that.
I'm sure it's been debated to death as to whether the 'safe decision' was a good idea; does the lack of mechanical innovation make it a bad game. There's no question it's a bit lazy.
All the depth in these types of games comes from how it handles group content/interactions and whether the amount of coordination required creates a fun experience with the implementation of new strategies as a group. They're always best played with a close group that work well together and get along.
It's also fun if you meet random people and build friendships; I was lucky to have that experience in WoW and that's what really keeps people coming back to the game.
LaserBuddha
Member
The door completely shut for me when I hit level 10 and saw a pvp gear vendor.
Wouldn't it be less jarring to just make stuff like that buyable from a menu system; perhaps a communicator to a black market supplier/quartermaster/contact as opposed to having them be random vendors?
LaserBuddha
Member
I'm alluding the blatant lifting of the entirety of WoW's gameplay systems. I'm not really offended by Blizzard being copied (though it's quite cynical and insulting to consumers), but rather I'm offended by such a lack of creativity, effort, and ambition.
Not to mention that what they're closely copying is a boring, uninspired treadmill.
BattleMonkey
Member
Here we go again
Completely understand. It's certainly not a game I can see playing longterm and have my doubts about their longterm potential. There is fun to be had though and that's what matters.
Last Hearth
Member
Of course if they didn't have PVP gear we'd be hearing about how Bioware failed to properly incorporate such a basic elements to MMO play and that SWTOR is really just a single-player RPG pretending to be an MMO.
You can't please everybody.
You can't please everybody.
My GS (I wanted a physical CE) is going big with a midnight. Letting people hang out inside with the theatrical versions of the original trilogy playing on a TV, Battlefront 2 on a projector, a computer with the game running (if early access is still going then), food and drinks, costumes, and possibly a couple members of the 501st coming by.
Oh, I am so there.
Exactly. They have a strong framework and a nice wall of crazy. Sure, endgame is a big question mark, but I only want that to work well because I want people to keep playing so BW keeps adding goodies.
Same here. It came 3 days early!
Turns out I had to actually manually force it to be partitioned and then active, which was weird.
cartoon_soldier
Member
At least you have it installed!
BattleMonkey
Member
I just hope that BW does not waste all their time doing nothing but adding raid after raid after raid like so many MMO's end up doing. Feeding the end game raiders their fix is fine, but I hope we get content for the entire game. Pazaak, more races, expanding the space game, etc, etc
LowParry
Member
I think we need more info on the Legacy System.
LaserBuddha
Member
That perfectly sums up my thoughts towards Bioware and this game.
A company that used to be THE first name in PC RPG's has become over the last couple of years an intellectually bankrupt, Kotick-esque factory that constantly condescends to it's customers.
Taking some sort of cues from WoW is unavoidable for a modern MMO. WoW is indeed a boring gear treadmill, but there are still some features that Blizzard pioneered that you'll end up using if you want to live up to modern standards. It's a completely different thing, though, to take the #1 MMO on the market and just reskin and repackage it. That's a naked cynical cash grab.
The only thing they really added to the formula was their company's inexplicably vaunted dialogue system, a system which:
- Gives you choices which still manage to disconnect you from what's happening by mis-representing what you're choosing to stay.
- Almost never lets you impact or change the outcome of the conversation, save for blatant binary good/evil buttons which are childishly simplistic and intellectually insulting in their execution (this good/evil thing is less of a problem for me in the context of Star Wars, though)
- Wastes the opportunity to do anything other than show people just standing around. That said, when I see the occasional piss-poor efforts at animating actual activity in these scenes, I am thankful that most of the time I'm only seeing mouths and heads moving.
This dialogue system, which has basically been Bioware's signature thing for years now in all of their games, has not been built on or improved in any meaningful way. What have we gotten since Baldur's Gate (other than the space/budget for voice, obviously)? The one addition/improvement, added in ME1, was the ability to choose from among the uselessly vague/inaccurate dialogue options while still waiting for the NPC to stop talking. At least they gave us something to do while waiting for NPC's to stop talking, since I increasingly find myself waiting for NPCs to STOP talking when playing a Bioware game.
Anoregon
The flight plan I just filed with the agency list me, my men, Dr. Pavel here. But only one of you!
I've never had this happen to me before. Got a message and money from an NPC.
Added last build, I believe. It's kind of cool story fluff, especially since a lot of the messages change depending on how you acted in the quest.
I've never had this happen to me before. Got a message and money from an NPC.
Got a lot of them during the weekend.
Mass Effect-like mail.
Last Hearth
Member
Dude, you could have saved yourself all that typing and wrote "I hate Bioware games".
Just because you don't like their games doesn't mean there's something wrong with them, they're just not for you. Go play the Witcher or something. Oh wait, they lazily stole Bioware's dialogue wheel, so maybe not.
Just because you don't like their games doesn't mean there's something wrong with them, they're just not for you. Go play the Witcher or something. Oh wait, they lazily stole Bioware's dialogue wheel, so maybe not.
I've never had this happen to me before. Got a message and money from an NPC.
At a major (and awesome) point in the BH story, this NPC said he would ship me some gear later on since I didn't kill him. Of course, the weekend ended an hour later, so I never saw what really happens after that.
The Witcher doesn't even have dialogue wheels. I deserve to be trolled better than this.
Consular Progression Video! And it isn't even Friday.
Yeah, I saw a thread of bad hats poll for Consular.
cartoon_soldier
Member
Because its from last Friday!
I've never had this happen to me before. Got a message and money from an NPC.
That's even more proof of the "illusion of choice" in Bioware games. I did the same quest and decided to give the necklace back to the spy instead. I got an email from her thanking me, just like yours, and some credits as a reward. What's the point of offering choice, when it evidently really doesn't mean shit.
In fact, I outright tried to refuse quests by picking the negative options when presented with them. The end result was the game would continue cycling through the dialougue options until I finally accepted.
NPC: I need you to do this thing
ME: no, fuck off
NPC: ok, but I still need you to do this thing
I know there's limitations to how open ended the dialogue can be in an MMO, I'm not expecting The Witcher here, just some improvement, some real consequences/results. And I'd like to not be punished for being neutral. It like your forced to choose one extremety or the other.
Read my post about how there could be a bit of it in the game
It's not great, but there are some choices that, I think, will affect the game.
Like what?
Dialogue/story stuff aside, the morality system is going to bite them in the ass in its current incarnation. As it stands you can't play a neutral character, you're forced to go down the light or dark path because there's gear that you can/might get that requires a certain rank. So rank 2 requires 2000 points, if you have 2000 light and 200 dark that means you actually need 2200 light points to reach Light II. So essentially this forces you down a certain path and makes it so I can't answer the light/dark questions how I might want to, I'm hindered by a horrible design decision. I got a relic from a daily flashpoint that required Light II which was good for me since I decided to go Lightside full well knowing the ranking requirements on gear, but my friend got the same item from the daily but will be unable to use it at all.
I just realized today that Star Wars Galaxies will shut down on the day that The Old Republic Early Access begins.
Anybody know what they are going to do to "end" Star Wars Galaxies? Is SOE known for having cool finishing events for MMOs that are closing down, or will they just shut off the servers?
Anybody know what they are going to do to "end" Star Wars Galaxies? Is SOE known for having cool finishing events for MMOs that are closing down, or will they just shut off the servers?
LaserBuddha
Member
I don't hate Bioware games, but Bioware games have been rapidly degrading in quality recently. This isn't even really a Bioware game for the most part. It's a Bioware game while you're picking up/turning in quests. The rest of the time it is WoW.
Haha oh man. Nowhere did I indicate that I simply just don't like Bioware games. I was criticizing the actual design and execution of this game. I listed several things that were wrong with it, and none of them were "just because I don't like their games". Dismissing my opinion with "oh it's just not your thing" is about as dumb/lazy as you can get.
Even funnier, you've got that gamefaqs-esque mindset that I must be on some fanboy "team", so therefore you can make a counter argument to what I say about TOR by criticizing some other big name RPG that I never mentioned. I'm guessing if I criticized something that Sony made, you'd refute it by taking a shot at the Xbox?
If you want an echo chamber, go to the Bioware forums.
Subscribe month to month, or buy 3 to 6 months at a time for a slight discount.
LaserBuddha
Member
You'll wake up that morning, and someone will be waiting there to tell you that SWG is dead. At that point you will stumble out of bed, raise your forearms in the air, and yell "NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!!!!!!".
HarryDemeanor
Member
They're having the game end with a winner in the war. Whichever side has the highest percentage of faction owned zones through all the planets wins. They also added groups of elite level NPCs that spawn after completing faction missions that drop discs that are supposed to do something once you get all of them.
Other than that they haven't really detailed what will go on during the last day.
DimmuBurgerKing
Member
For my part, I can't wait to finish rising through the levels and story for my Smuggler and tackle more group content and PvP. That's where the fun was for me last weekend.
BattleMonkey
Member
Not sure fully later on how deep some go, but in the character storyline quests you do have quest chains that are affected in how they play out depending on your choices. Most of the world generic side quest stuff has no consequences though based on your choices for the most part, but at times you do get optional paths of how to complete a quest. Majority of quests and dialgoue choices are linear, but there are some parts that do have consequences/changes based on what you do. Group content has various ways the flashpoint can go depending on choices made or even based on players having certain skills
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