Darth Hater

I'm sorry, but I really do hate most of TOR.

At the moment, what bothers me the most is the leveling, particularly from 40-50, although I have a bag of nitpicks that you could stuff skyscraper into (skill bloat, anyone? Why have I run out of space on my bars for abilities? Why does my class need like 20 different damaging attacks? I mean, Jesus, Juggernauts don't need 'a look' right now -- they need a complete revamp. The game launched with a class that immediately needed to be completely reworked from the bottom up! But, I digress, on with the complaining).

I've been playing MMORPGs since the days of UO, and have seen my share of slogs, but I don't think anything quite rivals the pain of leveling in TOR. And it's not because it's particularly long or difficult -- I mean, lord knows I have seen worse; seen questless grinding at its most absurd.

But the environments and the monsters and the pulls are just so uninspired, that I just don't know what to make of it any more. And slapping dialogue onto what basically amounts to 'go kill 10 space aliens and then return to me for a prize' doesn't improve that tired formula -- it just slows it down. What's worse is, I simply don't care. I don't care about being force-fed more C-movie-grade story; I don't care about seeing another uninspired planet; and I really don't care about hitting endgame so I can mindlessly rove through the same three WZs I've been plunked into for the last 45 levels just so I can acquire gear that will be outdated in 4 weeks.

But, again, it's the leveling arc that's at the root of this matter for me. It is the leveling arc that forms the core of the game's content, and it is where TOR falls totally flat.

What was tiresome and predictable on Tatooine boils over into ridiculous and loathesome by the time you hit Hoth and Belsavis. I thought that Alderaan had tons of wide-open, pointless 'dead space,' but so far nothing can rival Hoth in this regard. The people who blasted TOR after seeing the size of Korriban or Hutta were wrong -- TOR does indeed have its wide open spaces -- but when there is no practical purpose to 90% of this space, why even have it at all?

I keep going back to other modern games I have played that had open worlds -- WoW, LotRO, Rift -- and thinking about how they managed the space in their zones. IE, the zones might have actually been smaller a lot of the time (not always, though), but the structure of these zones was managed a hell of a lot better. I could move from a forest to a marsh to a seashore, and each place had its own unique look and feel. In TOR, so, so, SO MUCH of each planet looks exactly like the rest of it. The city worlds aside (because that's just too easy), look at a planet like Alderaan. I mean, isn't Alderaan a world kind of like Earth? IE, shouldn't there be more going on in different parts of than just A) Snow, B) Mountains, and C) Whoops, we forgot to add more snow!...?

Couldn't there be like... swampy areas... or tropical beaches? Because while the 'one environment for an entire planet' concept might work for more iconic places like Hoth and Tat, I just don't think it flies elsewhere. It turns the environments into places you just want to escape. Belsavis feels like a friggin' prison, not because of any awesome design decisions on the part of developers, but because you're trapped there for like 6 hours and all you have to look at is goofy trees and ice rock walls.

I dunno. This has turned into a rant... or I guess it was a rant all along. There's nothing that can be done about any of this, of course. I mean, how could they fix any of this? But that doesn't mean that I have to agree with the way TOR is put together, either, or be happy about it, or pretend like it works for me. It just doesn't.

I don't know what else to say.