Star Wars: The Old Republic is a frustrating game. At its core, it uses the same basic tenets and concepts that many other MMORPG’s use – holy trinity grouping, mailboxes, taxi points, a combat system that at times amounts to “stand next to each other and trade blows,” etc. BioWare has stated in the past that they didn’t set out to revolutionize the MMORPG genre, but at times, while playing, I got the feeling that the game was a boiler-plate MMO with a fresh coat of paint on it.
Now that I’ve had a chance to play the game for several months, I’d like to look back and reflect on what parts of SWTOR turned me off and kept me from playing.
Note: As with all of our editorials, they are the opinion of the writer themselves, not the entire staff here at Darth Hater. Keep that in mind and be respectful in the comments section.
World Quest Arcs
The story on each planet is the same for every character that passes through. This creates a frustrating experience for alt characters, as a majority of quests that any given character will encounter on a planet will be one of these shared world arcs. Disabling the defense turret on the other side of the hill was fresh and exciting the first time, but doing it for the third time on my alt was boring.
Uninteresting Combat & Skill System
There are too many buttons, most of them deal direct damage, and many of the skills you can pick from are percentage increases to damage, healing or defense, or they make a skill useful rather than marginal. Looking back, considering a Razer Naga or similar gaming mouse mandatory for playing the game is a ridiculous notion. However, I don’t think I could have played the game and enjoyed it at all without one. I would have been contorting my hand in unusual ways to hit button combos and activate many of my enormous cache of abilities. Either that, or I may have had to become a clicker – perish the thought. The combat itself felt like “standard MMO” combat – d20-based, a little asynchronous, and vanilla. I’ve had my fill of games that feature melee combatants that hack at each other in close range for a minute until one falls over. My blows should alter my enemy! If I thrust with my saber, my enemy should not continue firing/swinging at me, unfazed. Threat of impalement should be a real threat, as should dismemberment and serious injury.
“Many vs. One” Operations Boss Fights
Four Jedi, two Smugglers and two Troopers all teaming up to fight a big droid doesn’t feel Star Wars-y. Most of the “big” battles in the Star Wars universe, in my opinion, should be many vs. many, several vs. several, or uneven in favor of the enemy, not the heroes. Encounters like the Infernal Council in Eternity Vault got it right; ones like Annihilation Droid XRR-3, Soa and Karagga didn’t. It’s ok to pit several players against a particularly dangerous beast every once in a while, but if we’re supposed to be vaunted heroes, Jedi Masters, and beings of immense power and skill. I think that 8-16 of those individuals against one droid or beast, no matter how immense in size, should feel unfair. I would have liked to see more boss fights that pit the operations group against many enemies rather than only a few. The many vs. one boss fight issue also wasn’t helped by…
Weak Lightsabers
I swing my Jedi’s lightsaber at an enemy, he loses a fraction of his health. I know the game needs to be balanced, but a saber should be severing limbs. Not everyone wears cortosis armor or has Force-augmented ability to dodge attacks! I don’t care if Kephess has a personal shield generator – with several experienced Jedi hacking at him with energy swords and a few crack shots unloading a flurry of energy bolts into him, he shouldn’t be standing for more than about 10 seconds. The combat is too slow, long, and drawn out.
Long Loading & Travel Times
Going from planet to planet is painful. I don’t have a solid state drive, so any time I got onto my ship, off of my ship, onto an orbital station, landed on a planet, changed characters, or even alt-tabbed, I had to wait a protracted amount of time for my computer to catch up. It wouldn’t be so bad if the load times were a few seconds, but some of them are upwards of 30 seconds. It adds up. Additionally, the ship – orbital station – planet – combo made jumping into the action on a planet tough, as it took a while to get to the battle front, especially with two loading screens to work through to get there.
The Illusion of Choice
Despite being given two to three options for every dialogue tree, conversations and stories are all fairly linear. Sure, some of my light/dark decisions in Act I & II of my personal story may impact some of the people I see in Act III, but in the short term, the story doesn’t change much. (SPOILER ALERT for Jedi Knight story) If I decide to spare, execute, or intimidate Bengel Morr in the Jedi Knight prologue, the Council still sends me to Taris. (END SPOILER ALERT) There’s no differentiation in the paths I can take to get to the end. Sure, I understand why BioWare did it this way – it’s nearly impossible to keep the story threads straight as is, introducing additional branching and complexity to the class story arcs would have driven the writing team to madness. Still, it was disappointing that no matter how I played Act I, Act II would be fundamentally the same.
Expertise as a PVP Stat
I hate having to keep multiple sets of gear around for different modes of play. I can accept needing different gear for tanking and DPSing in a trinity-based combat system. I dislike, however, having to collect a full set of gear to advance in PVE, but being unable to use it in a Warzone if I want to dabble in PVP. It’s difficult for me to express why this bothers me so much, but it’s always irked me that player-originated damage is treated differently than NPC-originated damage. Damage is damage is damage – the damage type should matter (physical, energy, elemental, Force…), but the source should not, in my opinion. The true source of this problem is the stat gap between tiers of gear in a gear-dependent system, but I don’t know how else to address this problem without giving up the “gear grind” that’s supposed to keep players plugging away at the “end-game” content – without the carrot of a significant bump in stats and player potency, there isn’t a ton of incentive to keep repeating operations once I’ve seen the story. There are other games that have come up with a solution for this, but they put more emphasis on timing and active dodging in combat, which would be a big shift in the way combat is handled in SWTOR. Suffice to say, there’s a problem here, I didn’t like this as a solution in other games, and I still don’t like it in SWTOR.
Where do you stand? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Posted 9/21/2012 7:20:12 PMhere's my list:
Dual Spec should have been in at launch. nowadays i believe its mandatory in a trinity mmo.. sorry it is. the fact its taken them this long to get it in, is part of the problem IMO.
people can flame me for mentioning features from 'that other game' all they want.. but the fact is, TOR is that kind of MMO, so of course people are going to compare it. if TOR didnt want to be the next WoW, maybe Bioware/EA should have gone a different route in creating their game. Unfortunately they didnt.
and because they didnt put a product together at launch that equally matches WoW in features, they are now facing the consequences of that. and yes, I realize they couldnt have had the same AMOUNT of content in the game, but they certainly could have had the quality of life features in like:
dual spec
group finder
functioning trade network (sorry the AH in TOR at launch was bad.. it just was)
combat log
customizable UI
stuff like that is par for the course nowadays if you want to even have a chance at competing with WoW.. and bioware chose not have those in at launch.. and it hurt them. big time. you cant deny that.
yes, those features are in/coming soon.. but IMO the damage is done. they will probably recover some, but this game could have been so much more.
anyway..
Please make More Flashpoints like Black Talon. i think flashpoints can be a major selling point for TOR if they were more like this FP. unfortunately, most of the other FPs dont even come close (though there are a couple exceptions).
Increase the amount of class quest chains, and decrease the amount of world arc quests chains.. i love the stories from 1-50.. and even some of the world arcs.. its just the world arcs can get extremely dry and repetitive on your third character.
make raid encounters better. ive heard from a lot of people that raiding in TOR sucks. im no expert personally so i cant say, but i can tell you thats why my buddies quit, as well as most of the people in their guild.
Gear in this game needs a drastic overhaul aesthetically.. the end game gear looks horrible. it just does. i know gear is highly customizable now, but it doesnt change this fact. TOR has some of the worst gear ever seen in an MMO.
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Posted 9/23/2012 11:27:00 AM"Please make more flashpoints like Lost Island"
Fixed that for you ;P
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Posted 9/23/2012 4:43:05 PMMake operations brtter because I "hear" raiding in tor sucks. So you prrsonally haven't tried them then?? I have done more ops ib tor then I ever did raids in that other game.
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Posted 9/23/2012 10:47:26 PMim glad you like the ops.. not saying people cant.. heck i might even enjoy some of the ops myself..
the problem is, there are a lot of players out there that think end game needs a TON of work. just listen to some of the podcasts out there. also, i bet if the majority of raiders from that other game actually preferred the raiding in TOR.. they'd move over. unfortunately that hasnt happened. and you cant deny that.
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Posted 9/24/2012 1:13:13 PMI don't know what you're talking about 1z. The one thing that people don't complain about in TOR are the Operations. Most of the bugs have been worked out now and even more are fixed in 1.4, so there are really no complaints about the Ops anymore. When people complain about end game in TOR, they are mostly complaining about the lack of stuff to do in the game, not the Operations or Warzones. WoW always has some type of World Event, or you can go Achievement hunting, or you can craft, or you can fish, or you can explore, etc. SWTOR has almost nothing to do when you hit max level because the crafting system can only be used to benefit yourself, there are no achievements, there are no mini games, there are almost never any World Events. The only thing you can really do in TOR is explore, which no one wants to do because of the loading times. That's the "end game" complaints I always hear... Any people I ever heard complaining about Operations didn't have any of the Titles for the Operations, which just tells me that they were butt hurt about not being able to complete content in the game.
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Posted 9/12/2012 7:45:09 AMWhat I hated about Swtor, Bioware pls take note on how NOT to make an MMO. The list is a pile of ´bads includeing what I personally would have wanted in the game:
- The whole idea of a story was great in part 1, but haveing every single quest out side of the class story being a string of dialogues, became borring and the game felt lenghty. by the time I hit lvl 45 I was terring my hair out.
- The quests on rails, a complete lack of exploring was a lack og good game desing.
- The world felt extremely stale, why are all the npcs allways in packs of 3-4? ad allways there was like 2-3 melee and one caster or the other way around. Borring! and it didnt bring that epic feeling of beign a hero when you pressed button after button after button, after button after button, to finally be able to kill that bunch of mobs. It just took too long to kill stuff.
- the whole "cave" experience. Ok so I enter a house/Building cave etc etc. I fight my way all the way to the end, kill the boss or whatever. then I turn around, and most of the crap Ive allready killed have respawned! Christ now I have to start all over again killing the same mobs twice! Looking at what i stated above about the combat beign unengageing and taking too long, you can imagine how I felt after 45 lvls of the same o, same o.
- The planets, didnt feel right or exceptionally great due to the: closed in environments. Look at SWG and wow, they did it right.
- Too stale a world. why does most npc just stand around in packs instead of doing something with a purpose ? I want a live world were people are getting mugged, beaten, thrown out of pubs etc. etc. i want gang wars to actually feel like gang wars. I want the world to feel alive, I want dynamic events where gangs are fighting over turfs, or where hutts are fighting over parts of the city. I want casualties, i want peace at times, and wars to break out over someone stealing a speeder, i want cities, where hookers are wandering the streets, where drunks are boozing in corners and staggering about. In short, a place of fiction in space, where stuff happens and the tides of war are ever shifting, depending on who has the muscle or diplomacy to turn the tide.
- I want pvp that matters! Who gies a crap abput who wins some wannabee football game for the hutts ? Except if the teams are in a league, and consits of guilds against guilds etc. incl. ranking ladders! I want world pvp where what ever faction holds the planet with the gunns gets granted special privileges, like better trade.
- I want space flying like Eve online, where one can trade with each other, and establish businesses.
- I wanted a choice, of beign a trades person, musician, dancer, jedi knight, storm trooper, medic, healer etc. etc. where it was not all about busting skulls, but where you could actually experience the star wars universe!
- I wanted a bounty hunter system, where people could sign up to be hunted/ to be a hunter, and recieve rewards if beign able to capture the peron or evading long enough.
- I wanted player interaction! No not the spamming on fleet for a group etc. I wanted truly player interaction. I wanted a slicer to be able to sell his trade in sliceing armour/weapons etc. and the chance of making them better like swg. I want armour smiths bartering their goods in the street etc.
- the graphics engine, damn what a bad decision that was to use that one, it was lacky and extremely taxing on machines. Poor gaming design at its peak.
Feel free to bash, but this game could have been SO MUCH MORE than what it is. The universe is Star Wars! its the best most epic lore you can get, and you end up treating it like a red headed step child. Makes me want to cry, I had so high hopes for this, and it felt lackluster at best.
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Posted 9/12/2012 3:08:32 PMSo......what you're saying is that you wanted SWG. Go back and play it on a private server. This game ain't SWG. It's not the same company as SWG, it's not the same developers as SWG, and it'll never be SWG.
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Posted 9/13/2012 7:30:50 AMI wanted a Star Wars MMO that do not suck, where the developers cared enough for the universe to create something that works, and contains lots of choices for player interaction. Not what BW created, which is a sci fi mmo containing some Star Wars, but rather poorly implemented. The falling subs and fleeing players tell that I am/was not alone in that regard.
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Posted 9/13/2012 10:08:56 AMNo. What you said is that you wanted SWG. The reason people left are mostly not because of what YOU think. The reason people left was because the endgame was poorly implemented and there was a lack of it, the UI was too rigid, there's no add-ons, lack of updates, lack of developer communication, no gameplan for lost subs (dead servers), etc.
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Posted 9/6/2012 4:19:46 PMThe wow fanboys who cannot let go of where the game is now either never played wow at launch or have blocked that awful year to year and a half of paid beta testing you did after launch.
If you played on any of the "Main" pvp servers at launch (or sat in the queue trying to) you dealt with constant game-breaking bugs like being stuck in the crouched position when trying to loot ANYTHING. This alone with how much of the questing involved "Kill and loot xxx from yyy" set you back hours per zone if not more. SWTOR certainly has had its share of rocky issues during launch but that one issue with the wow launch that went for at least a solid 6-12months afterwards was simply embarassing. Not to mention how awful the queues were there as well as intermittent login server issues, etc.
Sure we can compare the two all day long, and yes SWTOR is definitely not at the same level as post LK or even post BC polish; but it isn't even a year old yet. A lot of the issues that bother me more are surrounding the customer service(or lackthereof). Sure blizzard's ticketing system and account system have been improved tremendously, but again that was after how many years of the same awful petition and wait to little or no response system?
Operations could and should definitely be more challenging no doubt about it; I'm not sure I'd enjoy them as much if that were the case given all of the server and instance stability issues that already compound continuity issues that you encounter in these existing operations.
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Posted 9/9/2012 2:46:44 PMWhy do so many try to compare swtor to what wow was 8 years ago? Are you really capable of making your brain blank out 6-7 years of wow polish just to do swtor justice? The game is just too damn similar to wow to not get compared with wow. And guess what, wow still exists, and that's why you have to compare it to what wow is today, not what it used to be. Well, that's what Bioware should have done anyway.
I initially loved swtor for being somewhat fresh and giving me something wow (nor AOC/WAR/Aion) hadn't for years. I still like parts of it. But in the end there were just too many issues, small and large, which eventually piled up and made me not want to log in again. I found myself logging in just because I REALLY wanted SWTOR to be something more than it actually was to me.
Some issues;
-Crazy loading times even with an SSD
-Lag in instances
-Bugged bosses
-Bugged abilitys
-Skill bloat (3-4 buttons for skills that only work on weak/strong foes? And another 2-3 just for snared mobs? COME ON! There are too few action bars even without these!!)
-Quest conversations are too drawn out. Loved the voice acting initially. By my late 30's spacebar was my best friend.
-Boring races. They're all humans with minor tweaks imo.
-Not really any freedom to explore the worlds. Railroad while questing. Most planets are just maps with enclosed pathways. Tatooine seemed nice and open at first, but then I met my first invisible wall, which totally killed immersion. Then I got killed by "out of bounds" fatigue in the dune sea, and any sense of fun was killed alltogether.
-Lack of combat log.
-Can't use addons. I LOVE customizing my UI, toying with raidframes, timerbars, cooldown notifications, quality of life questing addons etc. etc.
-No arena style pvp.
The list could go on, but these are the issues that got me in the end. Might aswell play wow, when it's there and has all this and more. I probably won't, but still, one might aswell :)
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Posted 9/10/2012 7:09:19 PMThese old arguments again?
Yeah you can say the game is buggy, they are slow to fix the bugs and that the content is slow to arrive, but the rest of your points just dont hold up, just as they didnt in the past.
Skill bloat? No one forces you to use the circunstancial skills like when the target is stunned and so. Use them if you like, but they are not necessary nor can they be used on bosses or PvP. There your problem solved.
Quest conversation are again, optional. You can skip them.
Boring races? Its star wars races, you wanna play with a Hutt or something? Maybe you want to play with the pig people? Ewoks? Jedi Ewoks? Does it sound sensible to you? Or maybe you wanna see 30 yodas running about ruining the uniqueness of the character?
Combat log exists, you need to parse it outside the game in websites for it and you can see it.
There is no need for addons. There are plenty of UI customizations options in the the current game.
No arena style PvP? Well i guess that is something that can be added in the future... but the only other game that has it is WoW and its a terrible unbalanced mess. Warzones are certainly leagues ahead of WoW in terms of balance and fun.
The list that goes on is of pety and minor issues. This game is good. Whats working against it seems to be EA, and i am sad Bioware seems to have no power to stop them. Hopefully, with F2P things take a turn for the best.
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Posted 9/11/2012 1:39:07 PMHow can you get this worked up over my personal issues with this game? The article author asked for our views, so I added some, even if I was responding to a post about "swtor vs wow" specifically.
First of all you seem to agree with me on some rather huge issues. Bugs, and the apparent inability to getting them fixed. If you have alot of patience on this area, that's cool. I don't.
Skill bloat. I have roughly 35-40 keybinds I can fit into my regular routine. That should be enough to fit even the most obscure skills. On my sith warrior it's not, IN MY OPINION.
Quest conversation. Major sellingpoint for this game. I like following them, but there's just too much "filler speech" to keep me interrested for 50 lvls, IN MY OPINION.
I find the races boring because they are too similar to eachother. Different anatomy is what I miss. And yes I know there's a skinnyboy, a fatty, a hightower and an average Joe. But all races share them. Facial features and skincolor doesn't cut it IN MY OPINION. You beating me over the head with how silly it would be to play yoda won't really change my mind.
I want an ingame combat log. "Why did I die there?" Scroll, Learn, Adapt. That should take 2 seconds, not a secure line to NASA.
Ofcourse you don't NEED addons. But I like having that freedom to customize the living bejesus out of my UI. And you telling me I don't need them is like you telling me I shouldn't buy french cheese, because there are plenty of norwegian ones (yes, I'm norwegian).
I like arena. Yes it's a wow thing, but so is the post I replied to. You liking swtor pvp over wow pvp is a matter of taste. Not a fact. Huttball is awesome tho.
That you see the absurd loading times, the lag and the linear worlds as petty and minor issues, only tells me that you have WAY lower expectations from SWTOR than I have. I too hope the game will improve further down the road. Until then, I'm going elsewhere for my fun, beacuse of all my perfectly valid reasons.
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Posted 9/11/2012 9:22:10 PMSkill bloat? Meh, who cares? Once you get away from weak/normal mobs, you don't use those abilities. Shit, I didn't use them even when I WAS fighting those mobs. Next, the comparison to WoW now and TOR now can't be made. They aren't the same games in the same stages of their life. Sorry, but it's a truth. Would you compare a 1 year old version of yourself to an 8 year old version of yourself? You can't. Blizzard has been able to adapt and learn from the things they've done. BW needs to do the same thing. Third, him telling you that you don't need add-ons is not like him telling you that you shouldn't do anything. It's like him telling you that you don't NEED them. If you WANT them, by all means, you WANT them. But you don't NEED them, which you already stated. And arena? Blizzard has already said in the past that they aren't sure they should have implemented arenas. The biggest problem? They have to tweak classes in order to fulfill team-based PvP, arena-based PvP, and PvE. It's yanking in too many directions. Arena is a lazy, FOTM PvP system.
As for your other complaints, I agree completely. All the toons are humanoid models which is boring. The quest conversation is nice and all, but I found that I turned my subtitles on and spaced through a good portion of it. How many times do I need the guy to repeat what he wants me to do? That's what my quest log is for. And the bugs. The bugs are terrible. Way too many bugs in content that's been out for nearly 10 months.
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Posted 9/12/2012 12:19:46 PMAgree that skill bloat by itself isn't a big deal. I guess the irritation factor is that some of those weak/normal skills are really cool abilitys, and i WANT to use them, but the game won't let me ;)
And I've been patient to let bioware adapt, like blizz have been doing. But as you said, things aren't happening fast enough. Not for my taste atleast. At some point they have to be able to compete with their actual competitors, and call themselves grown up.
And I kinda feel the cheese/addon analogy works (alltho it is a stretch :D). I don't NEED french cheese either, cause norwegian "brie" is available. But flavour is exciting!
Arena is a balance nightmare, agreed. But I still like it. Prolly cause I've never been competing for Gladiator.
Anyway, as stated above, still hoping swtor will have loads to offer the next time I swing by.