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Star Wars: The Old Republic |OT| EA: "Let's blow this thing and go home!"

Zafir

Member
Heh, I feel the exact opposite on everything you said

- DK is dreary and rainy, I hated it while Coruscant has beautiful views of the city and some colour.
- Esseles had a better storyline than BT
- The imperial fleet is dull black and red, the Pub side is colourful and vibrant

To each their own. I don't know why people like to play on the side that always loses.

I agree with this despite being on the Imperial side myself(Friends wanted to roll Imperial). DK has a tonne of running between quests, which Coruscant didn't have quite as much of too.
 
Have you read their forums? These are not the most reasonable people we're talking about here.

Yup, many of these fans will cry bloody murder if their legacy names are touched.

Why I think they just need to make it for transfers, that multiple ppl can have the same legacy name.
 

Kem0sabe

Member
Yup, many of these fans will cry bloody murder if their legacy names are touched.

Why I think they just need to make it for transfers, that multiple ppl can have the same legacy name.

My Sorcerer was called "Darth Rage Quit" :D

I imagine some others would were lucky to get the name/legacy combination they truly wanted would me mighty upset having to change it.
 
My Sorcerer was called "Darth Rage Quit" :D

I imagine some others would were lucky to get the name/legacy combination they truly wanted would me mighty upset having to change it.

Duplicate character names always is an issue for players when doign transfers and merges, the Legacy names just further compound the issue being across so many characters on a server.
 

Miletius

Member
People on the forums represent a noisy minority that wouldn't be satisfied unless SWTOR came with free BJ's (or the female variant) for completing quests. A consistent policy is better than no policy, so I imagine this will be the route they take. It would suck to lose my legacy name, but it would suck more if I were stuck on a dead server with no people on it, so I think most will understand.
 

gatti-man

Member
Heh, I feel the exact opposite on everything you said

- DK is dreary and rainy, I hated it while Coruscant has beautiful views of the city and some colour.
- Esseles had a better storyline than BT
- The imperial fleet is dull black and red, the Pub side is colourful and vibrant

To each their own. I don't know why people like to play on the side that always loses.

I agree about coruscant. Dude imp fleet looks miles better than janky pub side. I still need to solo run through esseles. Will do that soon.

Duplicate character names always is an issue for players when doign transfers and merges, the Legacy names just further compound the issue being across so many characters on a server.

Thank god my pizza legacy is safe :D



So sentinel is very strong in pvp. My first match at lvl 14 got a close second in dps and I'm a total noob to close combat in this game and at times was just rolling my thumb across my Naga trying to dps lol. The first 3 minutes of the game i kept getting run away from until I got better.
 

GungHo

Single-handedly caused Exxon-Mobil to sue FOX, start World War 3
A mandatory legacy name change upon transfer really isn't that difficult a concept to grasp, nor should it be hard to communicate, implement, and broadcast.
I'd actually be ok with that. My legacy name sucks. I'd like the opportunity to make it a little more generic.

Is there a reason why more people go Imperial? Is it really just down to the class names and associations?
The theme colors are red, black, and gunmetal gray, and you get to oppress people without consequence (beyond Vette's picture coming up with a -1). What more does your inner child need?
 

Dunlop

Member
Duplicate character names always is an issue for players when doign transfers and merges, the Legacy names just further compound the issue being across so many characters on a server.

I think they could get away with allowing duplicate legacy names and just make sure the "first" name is unique. Just for server mergers
 
So I got to level 50 the other night with a Sith Warrior, and I am on Ilum, and I just got really bored. Is there any benefit to keep playing, other then getting money and wasting xp that I could be using when an expansion comes out?
 

gatti-man

Member
So I got to level 50 the other night with a Sith Warrior, and I am on Ilum, and I just got really bored. Is there any benefit to keep playing, other then getting money and wasting xp that I could be using when an expansion comes out?

Lvl 50 pvp. Better gear, mounts, legacy XP, money to buy races. A base lvl 50 is weak.
 

aett

Member
So I got to level 50 the other night with a Sith Warrior, and I am on Ilum, and I just got really bored. Is there any benefit to keep playing, other then getting money and wasting xp that I could be using when an expansion comes out?

Legacy levels, money for expensive Legacy stuff, Rakata implants and earpiece, level 51 armoring/hilt mods, and as of 1.2 you can also spend daily commendations on a new Relic.

I just finished getting my three Rakata daily equipments this morning, but I've only been able to do two HMs so I'm way behind on earning other endgame gear. It's easy enough for me to find time to do dailies each day since they're mostly soloable, but I almost never get a chance to do flashpoints (unless nobody is online, it seems).
 
So I got to level 50 the other night with a Sith Warrior, and I am on Ilum, and I just got really bored. Is there any benefit to keep playing, other then getting money and wasting xp that I could be using when an expansion comes out?

Gearing up to do hardmode runs, doing the operations, to further gear up as wel as gearing up your companions. Increasing your various standings in areas such as Social, Light/Dark, Valor. Getting PVP gear. Gathering resources and money for whatever you might want or for upcoming content (many are saving up their resources for the big changes to crafting in 1.2). Raising your legacy level and going for legacy unlocks (some of this is known already from the 1.2 leaks, so you can start trying to achieve what you will need to get certain things unlocked, such as your companion buff unlocks that you get by raising the affection with them.

If an expansion comes, with it likely will be new experience opportunities so your not really losing experience especially since it all still counts.

Course doings alts is generally the best thing to do to keep things more interesting or you might burn out if you spend way too much time just grinding stuff on a lvl 50 character.
 
Course doings alts is generally the best thing to do to keep things more interesting or you might burn out if you spend way too much time just grinding stuff on a lvl 50 character.

Yeah, that's really what I should have asked, is it better to keep doing end game stuff, or start to work on alts. My bad for terrible phrasing, but thanks for the answer everyone!
 
Yeah, that's really what I should have asked, is it better to keep doing end game stuff, or start to work on alts. My bad for terrible phrasing, but thanks for the answer everyone!

Try to balance between both. I mainly spend time on my Pub alt trying to finish its story to 50 but do play a bit on my original 50 for raids and random gearing up sessions and pvp matches. The grinding of dailies would drive me mad so I'm taking my time on earning those Rakata pieces which aren't even that critical even.
 

Infinity

Member
I played in a beta weekend and also gave the free trial a shot. I really liked it, but it felt and looked like a single player game. Going into it with this knowledge, does anyone think Bioware will be able to crank out enough storyline or multiplayer game content to justify the monthly expense?

I'm goIng on first impressions only. Thoughts?
 

bjb

Banned
I played in a beta weekend and also gave the free trial a shot. I really liked it, but it felt and looked like a single player game. Going into it with this knowledge, does anyone think Bioware will be able to crank out enough storyline or multiplayer game content to justify the monthly expense?

I'm goIng on first impressions only. Thoughts?

It will feel even more like a Single Player RPG as you continue to level and see a lack of players across planets. In addition to the static worlds and environments.

Unless of course you choose one of the few decently populated servers (The Fatman comes to mind), then it might not be as bad. My personal experience was that the leveling in ToR was fun (granted I did it during early access with tons of people). But after you class-story concludes, everything takes a nose-dive as the end game is abysmal.
 

Francois424

Neo Member

Not that much surprised they did personally.
EA has trashed many a good label (ORIGIN in my case) that ppl held dear, or morphed them in total and utter garbage.

Granted there is other things than games in RL, but not everyone knew that poll was going (I didn't, and am on the web a lot, imagine other ppl). But EA has it comming to them... Now if they would just get rid of the copyrighted stuff they will never re-use again at the very least. So many great games from 80-90ies are stuck under their fat ***. ><
 

Laekon

Member
Should hit lvl 16 tonight and I got a few more questions.

Should I worry about crafting as a solo player? I don't know anything about it but can it help me make money to buy better gear?

What's the point of companion quest? I've sent my companion on a few quest while running around but I don't get the point. My companion has diplomacy quest.

Are mission terminal just to fill in for lack of quest or do they have special rewards?
 

Francois424

Neo Member
Should hit lvl 16 tonight and I got a few more questions.

1- Should I worry about crafting as a solo player? I don't know anything about it but can it help me make money to buy better gear?

2- What's the point of companion quest? I've sent my companion on a few quest while running around but I don't get the point. My companion has diplomacy quest.

3- Are mission terminal just to fill in for lack of quest or do they have special rewards?

1- Depends on playstyle. If you dont want to bother too much, just take 3 gatherskills and sell the stuff on the GTN (I found Scavenging to be really good for that, great money to purchase whatever you need). If you do crafting, and only play ONE character, just pick whatever complements you best (ie: Armstech if you are a gun user, or Artifice if you use a LightSaber) and so on (BioChem is good for Healkits)

2- Companion quests are a means of getting ressources you want. ie: Scavenging -> Level 2 Metals, will provide Chanlon and Bronzium, and nothing else. It's a good way of getting mats without going to 3-4 planets and look around for hours. Some skills also have side effect (Diplomacy messes around with your alignment), or have longer mission lenghts. Diplomacy provides for the Blue/Purple receipies of BioChem. See 1st page of this thread.

3- Just a substitute for an NPC... Kinda like a billboard. Do the job, turn the results in, collect rewards. Often used for heroics.
 
I played in a beta weekend and also gave the free trial a shot. I really liked it, but it felt and looked like a single player game. Going into it with this knowledge, does anyone think Bioware will be able to crank out enough storyline or multiplayer game content to justify the monthly expense?

I'm goIng on first impressions only. Thoughts?

It's a single player game if you play it as such. The game offers all the normal MP components of any MMO, but you have to of course choose to do them as the game does not force you to group up unless it's the actual group content. The whole game was made that a person could solo through the whole thing and experience each class story as a single player game.

But if you play it as such, you are just missing out on alot of the stuff that makes the game fun. Having an active guild or friends to play with helps greatly. Guild I play with is full of great folks and play with my GF and a close friend on a regular basis as well, so it keeps things interesting and varied.

Bioware is releasing a fairly large content update real soon and each update will be adding more with future updates supposed to be coming at a faster pace along with live events kicking off finally. They already got 5 content updates in the works with story line material being done for them and voice acting recorded for also.

The launch was strong but they faltered by taking so long to get out this 1.2 update out. If they can continue with the updates on a more regular basis, all things are gravy.

And of course pick a healthy server that during prime times has heavy populations or the few that sometimes do get log in queues still.

If you enjoyed what you played, give it a shot.
 
This game has more leveling variety than wow. Simply because wow offers the difference between grinding baby dragons or baby fish doesn't make the game less samey. Atleast with swtor you get individual stories, the options to lvl by pvp and space battles (they give tons of XP so this actually works) and the option to skip planets and areas if you want. There is so much sp content I missed atleast a quarter of it my first play through. When I went around collecting datacrons it hit me just how much of the game I had skipped and i didn't start pvp until lvl 40.

It actually boggles my brain that people post stuff like this. Go do the Goblin starter zone and tell me about how WoW lacks quest variety. SWTOR has variety in a vague sense of motivation behind why you're doing the quests, a tissue thin veneer to hide your real motivation: leveling and gearing your character. In WoW, you put on rocket boots and fly over a field of zombies and burn them to death, blow up a thousand foot tall tree with a giant bomb, explore tombs in Uldum with Indiana Jones, stealth around Redridge with John Rambo butchering orcs.

As long as we are conceding MMOs to be in the arena of single player storytelling, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a claim: WoW's open world phasing is the single greatest achievement in MMO development history. It makes the MMO experience almost immersive, aside from the fact that its a bit janky sometimes. It can have negative effects on group play, but group play in SWTOR is practically nonexistent, so that's OK. Phasing allows you to feel like the things that you are doing actually matter. It allows you to participate in events in places where it would otherwise be impossible for events to occur. Compared to walking through big green doorways, it is essentially completely seamless.

WoW has variety in what you actually see and do in your questing experience, not in the pre- and post-quest rundown. Yeah, it still has its fair share of kill X of Y quests, but the monotony is nicely broken up by quests where you actually do interesting things. On extremely rare occasions the writing of the story hits high notes in SWTOR, typically at the culmination of each act for your character, so 3 times across a hundred hours of playtime. The majority of it is pointless contextualization for mundane tasks that takes itself way too seriously.

WoW has a lot of quests whose writing actually makes me laugh out loud because its a running joke within itself. The Harrison Jones and Belloc Brightblade rivalry that persists throughout all of Uldum is a good example of this. When Jones blows himself up while hiding inside of a treasure chest, a wonderful little call back to that delightfully retarded scene in KotCS. When the Dragonmaw Warchief kicks the Horde emissary into a fire and yells "THIS IS DRAGONMAW!", when I kill a warlock for a quest titled "Throw it on the Ground" and break his soulstone while yelling "I'M NOT A PART OF THIS SYSTEM", I laugh and enjoy myself.

It contextualizes itself in a way that makes it a fun parody of pop culture rather than trying (and failing) to make me care about the mundane trivialities of a poorly fleshed out digital world. It has a sense of humor instead of the asinine faux-darkness that permeates most of the cheesy Sith questlines throughout SWTOR. I could go on and on about its shortcomings as a game and not an interactive story, but the fact of the matter is that SWTORs quests have no gameplay variety at all ever. Maybe only ~20% of WoW's quests offer something unique and different, but its still a fuck of a lot more than 0% of SWTORs.
 

StudioTan

Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
It actually boggles my brain that people post stuff like this. Go do the Goblin starter zone and tell me about how WoW lacks quest variety. SWTOR has variety in a vague sense of motivation behind why you're doing the quests, a tissue thin veneer to hide your real motivation: leveling and gearing your character. In WoW, you put on rocket boots and fly over a field of zombies and burn them to death, blow up a thousand foot tall tree with a giant bomb, explore tombs in Uldum with Indiana Jones, stealth around Redridge with John Rambo butchering orcs.

As long as we are conceding MMOs to be in the arena of single player storytelling, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a claim: WoW's open world phasing is the single greatest achievement in MMO development history. It makes the MMO experience almost immersive, aside from the fact that its a bit janky sometimes. It can have negative effects on group play, but group play in SWTOR is practically nonexistent, so that's OK. Phasing allows you to feel like the things that you are doing actually matter. It allows you to participate in events in places where it would otherwise be impossible for events to occur. Compared to walking through big green doorways, it is essentially completely seamless.

WoW has variety in what you actually see and do in your questing experience, not in the pre- and post-quest rundown. Yeah, it still has its fair share of kill X of Y quests, but the monotony is nicely broken up by quests where you actually do interesting things. On extremely rare occasions the writing of the story hits high notes in SWTOR, typically at the culmination of each act for your character, so 3 times across a hundred hours of playtime. The majority of it is pointless contextualization for mundane tasks that takes itself way too seriously.

WoW has a lot of quests whose writing actually makes me laugh out loud because its a running joke within itself. The Harrison Jones and Belloc Brightblade rivalry that persists throughout all of Uldum is a good example of this. When Jones blows himself up while hiding inside of a treasure chest, a wonderful little call back to that delightfully retarded scene in KotCS. When the Dragonmaw Warchief kicks the Horde emissary into a fire and yells "THIS IS DRAGONMAW!", when I kill a warlock for a quest titled "Throw it on the Ground" and break his soulstone while yelling "I'M NOT A PART OF THIS SYSTEM", I laugh and enjoy myself.

It contextualizes itself in a way that makes it a fun parody of pop culture rather than trying (and failing) to make me care about the mundane trivialities of a poorly fleshed out digital world. It has a sense of humor instead of the asinine faux-darkness that permeates most of the cheesy Sith questlines throughout SWTOR. I could go on and on about its shortcomings as a game and not an interactive story, but the fact of the matter is that SWTORs quests have no gameplay variety at all ever. Maybe only ~20% of WoW's quests offer something unique and different, but its still a fuck of a lot more than 0% of SWTORs.

The pop culture references in WoW are really out of hand. It's like the Shrek of MMOs.
 

Kem0sabe

Member
The pop culture references in WoW are really out of hand. It's like the Shrek of MMOs.

Those can be annoying and blizzard went overboard with them, but strangely enough they fit in the universe, as blizzard games have been know to always have a self depreciating aspect to them. Remember clicking furiously on those pawns to see what they said next?

I think Bioware should strive in a future expansion to add some much needed quest variety in terms of objectives. The presentation in TOR is spot on, the voice overs, the quest dialogue for the most part, where it falls short is on the single overriding objective that dominates TOR questing...

... GO KILL THAT SHIT!
 
Or click on X blue things.

Seriously, I don't think there's another quest type in the game. At least not in the first 28 levels that I did.

I don't think phasing really solves the MMO questing problem that afflicts every MMO. It's too limited, and what's more, if you expanded it to the whole game, you've basically deleted your MMO and replaced it with an entirely single player leveling game. What makes the single player RPG feel so much better is that when you kill a boss he stays dead, when you clear out a dungeon it stays cleared out, when you defeat a monster you do it once and it's only you that's doing it. A quest can be intricately constructed and have permanent effects.

An example of how goofy phasing can feel is perfectly demonstrated in that Storm Giant quest in Zul'Drak (which I did recently). When you get on the giant, you now see hundreds of undead swarming you that weren't there before. But as soon as you jump off, they all disappear and the giant disappears. That would never need to happen in a single player game. Also, you need to kill 3 bosses and one of them is a huge walking flesh-construct named Thrym, whom you can see throughout the zone normally. But when you jump on the giant, even if you were looking at him a moment ago, he disappears and is only spawned when you kill another of the bosses.
 

Zafir

Member
WoW got to that stage by having 3 expansions and years worth of content patches though. I quit shortly after the first expansion release, and there wasn't any open world phasing back then. There wasn't any of these "Interesting" quests you speak of. It was pretty much Wall of text -> Go kill/fetch x, it's why I quit when the expansion released. Couldn't be bothered to get to 70.

SWTOR is definitely better than Classic WoW was. So it definitely did learn from it. In terms of content, is as good as WoW is now? No, of course not. You're looking at 11 years worth of development time Vs 4.
 
WoW is one of the most polished MMO's and has alot going for it, but it's old and I just can't play it anymore. Also the world just continued to become something I grew to hate because it lost most of it's seriousness and was just one joke after another. Going through the old art books and such and remember the early days, those were just the good days to me. Now you go to any major pop area and it's like a carnival. I pray SWTOR never strays from it's more serious story telling nature and not become a bunch of little references that will have you groaning. Story presentation in TOR just is so much more interesting so far. Quest variety and polishing up it's MMO components is it's biggest issue, as I think it's story telling nature is perfect as is.

Kill quests do make up most of the quests in TOR which is true, and alot of the other most common quest types such as fetch, collecting, and escort ones. I think they show alot of unique ideas in the flashpoints and such that they should attempt to add in to the game's general world. Throw in some actual puzzles..... let us use some star wars like vehicles perhaps if people like vehicle stuff from wow? Gun turrets, more environment interactivity.... make quests that have both ground and space components perhaps.... kill quests will always be the top though, and they still make up majority of all mmo quests and really it's what makes up most single player rpgs as well which tend to just be about getting from point A to B while killing what stands in your way. MMO's just stand out on the issue because presentation is simpler usually and they force you to do it far more often than in single player games which aren't filled with so many little quick quests.

Phasing works for specific things but doesn't remove the issues ppl have with immersion and MMOs since enemies still respawn and not everything is phased. The game does use it's phased areas usually that you go into where enemies don't respawn, and kinda wished they used it more.... especially since going through a big building and killing dudes just to have to go through them all as you leave is annoying. At least the phased areas give you the "exit area" button choice. Course doing it to more areas just removes having places you see other players playing in. Game doesn't really need that..... I wish they had made lot of the parts of game smaller so that you would see players more often instead of so much space that is spread out through taxi hubs.
 

Dunlop

Member
SWTOR is definitely better than Classic WoW was. So it definitely did learn from it. In terms of content, is as good as WoW is now? No, of course not. You're looking at 11 years worth of development time Vs 4.

If this game came out 3 or 4 years ago that is the yardstick I would compare it to..And I am not even sure I would say SWTOR is that much better.

I try to leave WOW out of my comparisons because there it has just so much time behind it. Rather I use Rift which also "borrows" off of many elements of WOW and I would say in some aspects does it better. SWTOR brings the companion element and story quests but outside of the is comically behind in everything.

I look forward to raiding with my friends in 1.2 but I really do not see myself being in this game a year from now. The lack of feedback on the massive changes they are doing to the game in the PTR does not bode well. I remember Mythic pulling the same stunts with Warhammer.
 
I look forward to raiding with my friends in 1.2 but I really do not see myself being in this game a year from now. The lack of feedback on the massive changes they are doing to the game in the PTR does not bode well. I remember Mythic pulling the same stunts with Warhammer.

In what way? They have explained alot of the changes. They haven't gone into detail of every single nerf/buff for every class, but they have gone over some of it and some of the stuff was brought up already months ago as coming in this patch. Don't really see most devs going and explaining every single decision being made. They also seem to be quite open to taking player input and asking for opinions especially with the 1.2 testing.
 

Draxal

Member
I try to leave WOW out of my comparisons because there it has just so much time behind it. Rather I use Rift which also "borrows" off of many elements of WOW and I would say in some aspects does it better. SWTOR brings the companion element and story quests but outside of the is comically behind in everything.

Pretty much this, the companion and story elements made leveling up/alting fun, however there is nothing new or interesting about swtor's endgame, and it lacks a ton of features that both rift and wow have that make endgame less tedious than it already is.

My frustation is that they really have no clue on how to reinvigorate endgame, one of the reasons people left wow because the endgame was boring/stale and patch content was taking forever. They really have not capitalized on this at all, and the one thing they said was going to revolutionize mmo game play was a massive failure (ilum).
 
Pretty much this, the companion and story elements made leveling up/alting fun, however there is nothing new or interesting about swtor's endgame, and it lacks a ton of features that both rift and wow have that make endgame less tedious than it already is.

My frustation is that they really have no clue on how to reinvigorate endgame, one of the reasons people left wow because the endgame was boring/stale and patch content was taking forever. They really have not capitalized on this at all, and the one thing they said was going to revolutionize mmo game play was a massive failure (ilum).

They said Illum was going to be something revolutionary? I don't remember that.

It's a bit early to say what their long term end game plans are. The legacy system and such really promotes playing alts and hopefully events can liven things up for people bored, but you have "hardcore" raider players who are of the mindset that they just want new raids, as that is all they care about. RIFT got into that problem as they pretty much just focused on releasing new end game raids but not really doing anything anymore for the lower levels outside of their temp events.

If they don't focus on raiding, you piss off alot of players. Then you have pvp players who have their needs, the casuals, and in this game especially those who just don't care about playing MP and want story/single player content.
 

arimanius

Member
WoW got to that stage by having 3 expansions and years worth of content patches though. I quit shortly after the first expansion release, and there wasn't any open world phasing back then. There wasn't any of these "Interesting" quests you speak of. It was pretty much Wall of text -> Go kill/fetch x, it's why I quit when the expansion released. Couldn't be bothered to get to 70.

SWTOR is definitely better than Classic WoW was. So it definitely did learn from it. In terms of content, is as good as WoW is now? No, of course not. You're looking at 11 years worth of development time Vs 4.

Comparing SWTOR to Classic WoW isn't realistic. SWTOR has had their entire development cycle to watch WoW and learn from their mistakes and what features needed to be in game.

IMO they have failed at this and only now are trying to catch up. Is SWTOR a fun game? At the moment for me it is. But the lack of features and some of the tweaks they are doing that just boggle my mind because Blizzard tried them before and they failed miserable. It's like they want to copy WoW from Classic to Cata step by step.
 

gatti-man

Member
It actually boggles my brain that people post stuff like this. Go do the Goblin starter zone and tell me about how WoW lacks quest variety. SWTOR has variety in a vague sense of motivation behind why you're doing the quests, a tissue thin veneer to hide your real motivation: leveling and gearing your character. In WoW, you put on rocket boots and fly over a field of zombies and burn them to death, blow up a thousand foot tall tree with a giant bomb, explore tombs in Uldum with Indiana Jones, stealth around Redridge with John Rambo butchering orcs.

As long as we are conceding MMOs to be in the arena of single player storytelling, I'm going to go out on a limb and make a claim: WoW's open world phasing is the single greatest achievement in MMO development history. It makes the MMO experience almost immersive, aside from the fact that its a bit janky sometimes. It can have negative effects on group play, but group play in SWTOR is practically nonexistent, so that's OK. Phasing allows you to feel like the things that you are doing actually matter. It allows you to participate in events in places where it would otherwise be impossible for events to occur. Compared to walking through big green doorways, it is essentially completely seamless.

WoW has variety in what you actually see and do in your questing experience, not in the pre- and post-quest rundown. Yeah, it still has its fair share of kill X of Y quests, but the monotony is nicely broken up by quests where you actually do interesting things. On extremely rare occasions the writing of the story hits high notes in SWTOR, typically at the culmination of each act for your character, so 3 times across a hundred hours of playtime. The majority of it is pointless contextualization for mundane tasks that takes itself way too seriously.

WoW has a lot of quests whose writing actually makes me laugh out loud because its a running joke within itself. The Harrison Jones and Belloc Brightblade rivalry that persists throughout all of Uldum is a good example of this. When Jones blows himself up while hiding inside of a treasure chest, a wonderful little call back to that delightfully retarded scene in KotCS. When the Dragonmaw Warchief kicks the Horde emissary into a fire and yells "THIS IS DRAGONMAW!", when I kill a warlock for a quest titled "Throw it on the Ground" and break his soulstone while yelling "I'M NOT A PART OF THIS SYSTEM", I laugh and enjoy myself.

It contextualizes itself in a way that makes it a fun parody of pop culture rather than trying (and failing) to make me care about the mundane trivialities of a poorly fleshed out digital world. It has a sense of humor instead of the asinine faux-darkness that permeates most of the cheesy Sith questlines throughout SWTOR. I could go on and on about its shortcomings as a game and not an interactive story, but the fact of the matter is that SWTORs quests have no gameplay variety at all ever. Maybe only ~20% of WoW's quests offer something unique and different, but its still a fuck of a lot more than 0% of SWTORs.

What you call unique I call cheesey, immersion breaking gimmicks.

Edit: that's my biggest problem with wow. It takes itself far too casually. Everything is a joke or cartoony. It just pulls me right out of the game.
 

Draxal

Member
They said Illum was going to be something revolutionary? I don't remember that.

It's a bit early to say what their long term end game plans are. The legacy system and such really promotes playing alts and hopefully events can liven things up for people bored, but you have "hardcore" raider players who are of the mindset that they just want new raids, as that is all they care about. RIFT got into that problem as they pretty much just focused on releasing new end game raids but not really doing anything anymore for the lower levels outside of their temp events.

If they don't focus on raiding, you piss off alot of players. Then you have pvp players who have their needs, the casuals, and in this game especially those who just don't care about playing MP and want story/single player content.

Tirion Worlds did a much better job of appeasing those markets than then Bioware (or Blizzard)has done. Rift is just hampered by a really poor IP, nobody cares about the rift setting/history, and honestly I think they hurt themselves a ton with the whiplash class balance they had earlier in game 1.1 casters were more broken than Sorcs in this game.

Tirion added chronicle modes, instant action modes and including stuff like dungeon finder/multi spec much quicker than Bioware did (or Bioware has communicated that's it going to do), and those benefitted casuals alot more than anything Bioware has done.

I mean if Bioware wants to stem the tide of casuals/bored raiders not logging on, and IMHO they haven't really given that incentive (anecdotal, as all my buddies quit swtor once they hit cap).
 
Tirion Worlds did a much better job of appeasing those markets than then Bioware (or Blizzard)has done. Rift is just hampered by a really poor IP, nobody cares about the rift setting/history, and honestly I think they hurt themselves a ton with the whiplash class balance they had earlier in game 1.1 casters were more broken than Sorcs in this game.

Tirion added chronicle modes, instant action modes and including stuff like dungeon finder/multi spec much quicker than Bioware did (or Bioware has communicated that's it going to do), and those benefitted casuals alot more than anything Bioware has done.

I mean if Bioware wants to stem the tide of casuals/bored raiders not logging on, and IMHO they haven't really given that incentive (anecdotal, as all my buddies quit swtor once they hit cap).

RIFT pvp was a huge mess the first 3 months, had the worst CC of any MMO i've ever played, even TOR or WAR were not on that level. Things were mostly solid and no matter what they kept things interesting by constantly having some kind of big event going on which TOR completely dropped the ball on. But you are right, the IP of RIFT just didn't attract people the same way. Just another generic fantasy game to most and it never was huge though had fairly decent lasting power despite it's smaller scale launch. Unlike other MMOs it didn't launch big and have a huge failure in numbers quick. It had a steady population that lasted though it's really dwindled. RIFT was good but it seemed to have gotten just ignored by many for the new shinies.

Well the biggest issue is that 3 months and they really have not added anything to the game. The 1.1 update was bs since it was like 2 weeks after launch date or so, that wasn't a real content update. No events even happened in these months. They said they plan to get the updates out faster after 1.2 and start up events after the update as well, but really they have taken way too long for 1.2 .... they should have not held so much back and just gave us some of the extra content in the meantime... like they should have activated the same faction warzones or given us the new warzone at the least.

If they can get stuff out on a more regular basis after 1.2, then good. If they continue to go slow, then they are just hurting themselves. At the guild summit they said 1.3 should be out much quicker and that 1.2 just has had too many big features that have taken too long to implement and they kept adding new stuff into the 1.2 update that further delayed things, the following updates are not of the same scale. As others have said, it's obvious that they rushed for the holiday release and the game probably needed those extra couple months instead of playing catch up right now.
 

Tarazet

Member
There's been a lot of complaining within our guild about two of the three healer classes getting savagely nerfed.. the operative is the only one that is getting some improvements, because it's currently just not as good as the two others. But you won't see me crying. Mercenaries/Commandos and Sorcerers/Sages are too easy to play and too good currently.

Playing as a Sniper, which is supposed to be a complex but rewarding class with some of the best burst DPS in the game, I get routinely outdamaged by Tracer Missile/Grav Round and Force Lightning/rock pelting spammers, and they can self-heal too. I had to roll Biochem and get a fucking Rakata Medpac just to be competitive because I don't have the survivability otherwise. My partner plays an Operative healer, and he is hamstrung by a lack of effective tools like a Sorcerer's purple drink or force speed or the free force restoration or the almighty bubble which make the class obscenely powerful.
 

Anbokr

Bull on a Donut
haha i didn't even say much. It all started after that one pull even where i trollfully whispered, "hey baby cakes;" every reply from then on was "ok.", "pvping.", "raiding.", "cool.", "maybe."
 

Zafir

Member
There's been a lot of complaining within our guild about two of the three healer classes getting savagely nerfed.. the operative is the only one that is getting some improvements, because it's currently just not as good as the two others. But you won't see me crying. Mercenaries/Commandos and Sorcerers/Sages are too easy to play and too good currently.

Playing as a Sniper, which is supposed to be a complex but rewarding class with some of the best burst DPS in the game, I get routinely outdamaged by Tracer Missile/Grav Round and Force Lightning/rock pelting spammers, and they can self-heal too. I had to roll Biochem and get a fucking Rakata Medpac just to be competitive because I don't have the survivability otherwise. My partner plays an Operative healer, and he is hamstrung by a lack of effective tools like a Sorcerer's purple drink or force speed or the free force restoration or the almighty bubble which make the class obscenely powerful.
Honestly, self healing on a merc isn't as good as you seem to think it is due to how the resource system works. Even healing spec you can overheat if you don't watch out or if everyone's taking a lot of damage(Merc AoE is shit).

I'd agree Damage wise they're definitely easier to play than a lot of classes. I don't think survivability is as great as you say though. If you're being focused on, you wont have time to get one of the heals off, and even then they only heal for around 2500 unspecced, plus they take up a lot of heat. Tracer missile is easily interrupted, too.

Melee seems to be where the survivability issues fall in my opinion. I went Rage spec on my Jugg last night. Does great damage, but if you haven't got an healer, you just die far too much since people focus on you as you're in their face. At least with ranged you can hide back a bit while dps'ing.
 

StudioTan

Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
They confirmed 1.2 won't be out on Apr 10th :(

On the plus side I should reach Battlemaster by the time it hits now and it gives me more time to get a couple of white saber crystals.
 

UltraMav

Member
I can't believe they have taken this long to get 1.2 out. I'd rather they had released smaller packs over the weeks instead of one massive patch. I guess they're banking on the hope that the "big one" will bring back all the players they've been hemorrhaging for the past month.
 

antonz

Member
I can't believe they have taken this long to get 1.2 out. I'd rather they had released smaller packs over the weeks instead of one massive patch. I guess they're banking on the hope that the "big one" will bring back all the players they've been hemorrhaging for the past month.

Issue is Its a huge content pack. They have said 1.3 will release in a shorter time frame than it took for 1.1-1.2 so if that holds true before june we should have another raid,flashpoint,warzone
 

CzarTim

Member
I can't believe they have taken this long to get 1.2 out. I'd rather they had released smaller packs over the weeks instead of one massive patch. I guess they're banking on the hope that the "big one" will bring back all the players they've been hemorrhaging for the past month.
I agree. It is taking way too long.
 

Anbokr

Bull on a Donut
I can't believe they have taken this long to get 1.2 out. I'd rather they had released smaller packs over the weeks instead of one massive patch. I guess they're banking on the hope that the "big one" will bring back all the players they've been hemorrhaging for the past month.

yeah honestly this patch was probably planned for mid march and now i don't see it coming until late april.
 
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