Monday, March 19, 2012

Star Wars the Old Republic - Dead Man Walking

I was excited about SWTOR.  Perhaps as excited as I have been about any game.  I've been a long time WoW player, and SWTOR offered the idea of the IP I love in a great, modern MMO.

I bought it early.  Played it.  Initially loved it.  For most classes, leveling 1-15 or so is a ton of fun, and you immediately feel immersed.  You play the first instance, black talon, and think "Holy CRAP this is awesome!"

You get your first space ship.  The world is your oyster.  You try out the space battles - you think:  interesting and fun mini-game.  Now you follow your main quest story and off you go.


You choose your specialization.  Oops, didn't know that was permanent.  Without online research you don't know the importance of this choice.  You choose some talents - awesome, your critical strike went up by 1%!

Ok, wow, there's PvP!  Lets get in there.  Looks fun, damn was gibbed.  Gibbed again.  All these guys running around are destroying you, and you have no idea why.  Ah ... everyone, despite level, is in there and "balanced."

You choose some professions, hey, your companion does it for you!  Except you have to click to send off your companions every few minutes.  Hmm, grindy.

Hey look, an auction house!  Maybe you'll find some cool gear, or sell some mats your companions so diligently negotiated for.  Wait, what the heck is this interface?  Drop down boxes?  Category/sub-category?  Why did they even bother?

Then you start running.  And running.  More running.  Mounts are kind of slow.  That's ok right?  The world looks great, take your time to see it!

But the quests get a little repetitive.  The main story quest is great, but this period of roughly level 20-30 or 35 is a bit grindy.  No problem, you see the epicness about to come.  Except all the other quests are grindy.  Kill X, click Y, collect Z.

The instances have reverted to a very standard tank-dps-healer set up.  Is that other guy on follow or he actually doing anything?  Am I doing good damage?  Can't customize the UI, so no clue.  So you start to skip instances.

You start trying other classes.  Levelling, while once interesting is now repetitive.  You're skipping the voice acting.  Only the main story gets any air time.

As you experiment with alts, you realize that there is no open world, that's a BS marketing myth.  Everything is on rails.  NPCs just stand around waiting to be killed like every other MMO out there.

Some of the classes have so many abilities that you run out of button bar space.  Especially if you want to finely control your companion.  Which you need to if you prefer one companion over another, but it doesn't fit your talent selection.  Which abilities actually make sense?   Do we need a simcraft here?  Sigh.

You start doing harder instances, operations, etc.  The mechanics of your class feel off.  Not as responsive as other games.  Clunky, you might say.  You look for some open world PvP - but when the PvP planet isn't closed off, you can't find anyone in the opposite faction (or too many).  Ok, no faction balance.

You start thinking:
"Aside from the amazing Star Wars IP, is this just a shitty MMO with voice acting and class quests?"
"Is this just a bad 1 player KOTOR MMO?"
"Did these guys think an MMO is a regular 1 player game with a friends list, fixed instances with role rules for groups, and some basic objective-based PvP maps for small groups?"
"So if I have 30 minutes to log on and play, I can't actually do anything because I'd be running for 1/2 of that time?"
"Am I playing 2007 WoW re-skinned?"

You'd be right.

For people who point out that WoW copied it's predecessors, making is perfectly reasonable for SWTOR to copy WoW:  WoW took concepts in niche games and created a large scale, fun, accessible MMO.  They didn't revolutionize anything, they evolved the concepts.

SWTOR has only added voice acting.  Is this an evolution for MMOs?  No.  It's an incremental "feature."  And there is nothing else in SWTOR that is evolutionary.

There could have been.

Make truly open worlds with the ability to fly directly off planets, into space, then into other planets.
Make Dark Side/Light Side matter.  Hell, why can't a Jedi go Sith?
Character customization should be much more - not just a bloated talent tree.
PvP with the SWTOR engine should be large scale.  Like Battlefront.
Innovate on the tank-healer-dps model.

It's time for a new set of MMO glasses - copying what was done before with minor improvements will net a tidy little profit for Bioware, but there is no large franchise here.

And that's too bad.