Yeah looking at most of your screenshots the game looks like shit compared to the visuals I had going when I beta tested. Wonder if they dumped them down for this particular stress tests. Cause I love this game but it did not nearly look as shitty as the screens i've seen in this thread. I'm sporting 2x480gtx's though which might make a difference Anyway it's beta test stuff the game wont look bad once all the bells and whistles are released with the game at launch.
What on earth does the movies have to do with this game? It's supposed to be set AGES before anything in the movies.
Uh, everything? Star Wars games are always like this. The movies are canon to the nth degree.
which other pre movie games are you now refering too? if you don't have any source for this i'm gonna go ahead and assume you're pulling this from the deepest parts of your ass.
it looks bad
Good think Kotor and mass effect still works and didnt go anywhere. i dont need anymore. 2 perfect space rpg
yeah, looks almost the same ....
Out of curiousity, did you try it yourself or only look at some screenshots ?
i didnt played it and I won't, becouse I don't like mmo. I would proboably try it out if there was singleplayer campaign.
I dont find it any fun to search for team and stand in front of giant boss for 1hour clicking left mouse button. fun
3080 | ps5 pro
Sin317-"im 31 years old and still surprised at how much shit comes out of my ass actually ..."
SteamDRM-"Call of Duty is the symbol of the true perfection in every aspect. Call of Duty games are like Mozart's/Beethoven's symphonies"
deadpoetic-"are you new to the cyberspace?"
it looks bad
Good think Kotor and mass effect still works and didnt go anywhere. i dont need anymore. 2 perfect space rpg
yeah, looks almost the same ....
Out of curiousity, did you try it yourself or only look at some screenshots ?
i didnt played it and I won't, becouse I don't like mmo. I would proboably try it out if there was singleplayer campaign.
I dont find it any fun to search for team and stand in front of giant boss for 1hour clicking left mouse button. fun
I know exactly what you mean but this game is too good to give up and if you dont want to you can just skip all the social aspects and simply play this as a singeplayer rpg.
One things that great with doing this is you can find players to help you with heroic missions which are missions that are genereally too hard for a singel player to finish. these are all sidequests though so you can just skip those aswell.
Dont mess with God, he can impregnate your girlfriend/wife without taking his pants off!
it looks bad
Good think Kotor and mass effect still works and didnt go anywhere. i dont need anymore. 2 perfect space rpg
yeah, looks almost the same ....
Out of curiousity, did you try it yourself or only look at some screenshots ?
i didnt played it and I won't, becouse I don't like mmo. I would proboably try it out if there was singleplayer campaign.
I dont find it any fun to search for team and stand in front of giant boss for 1hour clicking left mouse button. fun
I have no idea what game you're speaking of with 1 mouse button combat, but it sure as hell isn't swtor.
it looks bad
Good think Kotor and mass effect still works and didnt go anywhere. i dont need anymore. 2 perfect space rpg
yeah, looks almost the same ....
Out of curiousity, did you try it yourself or only look at some screenshots ?
i didnt played it and I won't, becouse I don't like mmo. I would proboably try it out if there was singleplayer campaign.
I dont find it any fun to search for team and stand in front of giant boss for 1hour clicking left mouse button. fun
so, you are judging the game without having played it at all, having no idea what it is, from some bad screenshots ?
What on earth does the movies have to do with this game? It's supposed to be set AGES before anything in the movies.
Uh, everything? Star Wars games are always like this. The movies are canon to the nth degree.
which other pre movie games are you now refering too? if you don't have any source for this i'm gonna go ahead and assume you're pulling this from the deepest parts of your ass.
Look at KOTOR, look at Jedi Knight, Look at Force Unleashed, etc. The shows are frequently referenced, if not directly, then indirectly (either through mechanical design of characters or the art style itself)
Out of curiousity, did you try it yourself or only look at some screenshots ?
i didnt played it and I won't, becouse I don't like mmo. I would proboably try it out if there was singleplayer campaign.
I dont find it any fun to search for team and stand in front of giant boss for 1hour clicking left mouse button. fun
so, you are judging the game without having played it at all, having no idea what it is, from some bad screenshots ?
do you work at IGN by any chance lol ?
not yet. Waiting for official reviews ...but I don't like old republic comic style anyhow
3080 | ps5 pro
Sin317-"im 31 years old and still surprised at how much shit comes out of my ass actually ..."
SteamDRM-"Call of Duty is the symbol of the true perfection in every aspect. Call of Duty games are like Mozart's/Beethoven's symphonies"
deadpoetic-"are you new to the cyberspace?"
well, my sole reason to play this game is to have a dels, but in the same time i hate pure dps classes. especially assasins/rogue types.
heading to swtor forum, but if tanking require a shield +1h ls or something, and healing is not posible with a dels ... i may have found another reason for not buying this .
the "shield" is not visible. By default, "Shields" in offhand have only a 5% chance to remove 20% damage, but talents/stance will raise to more %. However you still fight with the saber and not with a "shield" in your hand hehe.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]I will not be buying The Old Republic[/SIZE][/COLOR]
I keep trying to find reasons I should buy TOR, and have expressed this several times to friends who have also been lucky enough to get into the beta, but ultimately I simply cannot justify purchasing a BioWare-flavored mediocre MMO.
TOR gets a lot of things right: Presentation is spot on with superb voice acting, impressive environments with consistent and thematic art direction, and even a moderately compelling story line, but it is in no way a complete or functional game. Almost everything else about TOR is lacking and incredibly unimpressive, all the way from core class design to the user interface.
I tried to drink the kool-aid, I really did. I even called friends who had been in the beta before me out on their negative outlook of the game, but low and behold, I now feel that they were right all along.
Everything about TOR with the exception of its presentation reeks of half-baked implementations, shortcuts and complete and utter apathy. It's actually jarring as you play through the game to see how abysmal some of the content gets and how lazy the game's production feels. It's as if TOR has a design document sitting around that's artfully crafted, filled with ambitious ideas and deep conceptual fervor that was simply pushed into the waste bin by an EA executive who didn't give a crap about how good or bad the game is, and only cares about the bottom line.
Despite this, I have played a Guardian, Scoundrel and Mercenary to the level cap across the 3 builds I've been in the beta, for no other reason than boredom and ample free time. If I had anything better to do TOR was invariably put to the wayside, even though I was privileged enough to play in a beta that thousands of people would have killed to be a part of.
Total playtime is ~350 hours since I was invited (~3h/day), but most of that is in quite dense play sessions, followed by extended breaks. I would ballpark that it takes about 2 weeks of dedicated play to reach the level cap per build.
"Based on your experience today, how likely would you be to recommend TOR to a friend"
This started as an 8 and briefly jumped to a 10.
Now I usually just close the window.
The game is simply not what its cracked up to be, and Bioware is doing an incredible disservice to its dedicated fan base by conning all of the weekend beta testers into seeing the only good content the game offers up in the first ~20 levels of play, and even then it is rife with bugs and instability.
If you have reached beyond Coruscant and Dromund Kaas and ventured into Taris and Balmorra, this is what the game truly is: Ample wasted space, long runs, uninteresting story lines, and laden with kill and collect quests.
And without further ado, reasons I will not be buying TOR:
[SIZE="3"][COLOR="DarkOrange"]TOR is far and away the least mechanically fun MMO game I have ever played. [/COLOR][/SIZE]
This is a bold statement, but I feel it is very justified. Relative to other games I have played in the MMO genre, TOR does not hold up well, featuring a myriad of problems with its general gameplay. Everything from a clunky (and dysfunctional) skill queue to the unresponsive TAB targeting system, the game simply does not feel like a game of its caliber should.
To its credit, it has actually been getting better over time (there is no more acceleration on jumping, for example), but it is no where near the responsive level it should be, and has a staggering amount of small issues that culminate into a major headache that simply make the game un-fun.
Off the top of my head, issues that need to be fixed that directly affect playability of TOR:
Skill queue lockups that prevent skill use entirely
The cover system in general, which has devolved to "press a button before you press a button"
AOE targeting indicators that are absent or completely unreflective of size
Debuff tracking is terrible
Lack of [Mouseover] style macros (lack of a macro system in general, but most predominantly this)
Reactive buffs not displaying in a useful or intuitive way (i.e., WoW's glowing borders on action bar buttons that indicate a proc)
World-clicking in general is a headache (small objects, clustered enemies, companion obscruction)
Companion AI is awful (example: not attacking on offensive spell channels and casts, only on instant and reactive events)
Nameplates of dead NPCs need to go away unless they are targeted
There are a lot more problems that affect playability that are more case specific, but that list hits the vast majority of the problems that make playing the game in general unfun.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Story does not make up for other short comings[/SIZE][/COLOR]
"I want to save the story for live, so I won't play my class in beta."
I can't tell you how many times I've read this (or a variation thereof) on public forums in relation to weekend testing. This statement alone acknowledges that story is not a sustainable enough part of a game to make it worthwhile. When it comes to TOR, the story is the only reason in many cases to slog through the game. People are actively avoiding the story now so they won't "waste" it for later.
What people don't seem to understand about TOR is that past the first couple planets, your class story actually fills an incredibly small portion of the overall content of the game. I would estimate upwards of 85% of the game is recycled every time you play a character of the same faction. On later planets, it will get to the point that you may actually forget entirely what is going on in your story quest, as well as major characters and why they are important.
Repetitive questing content:
The general composition of each planet is pretty simple: they are divided into sections (usually divided by map segments) where you will do 1-2 story related quests, and an inordinately high amount of side content. On lower level planets this is not a very noticeable issue, as you require less quests to level (The first 2 planets are 1-~18 of 50 levels.) On later planets, this disparity can get staggeringly high. For example, on Quest, Bounty Hunters have exactly 1 class quest, which takes about 5 minutes to complete. Literally, 1 class quest for an entire, although short, planet.
Light/Dark illusion of choice:
The light/dark system is a very poorly conceived system that punishes you in several different ways while only affecting the story in very minor ways in most cases:
You will feel obligated to be consistent in your choices, and may be forced into situations you disagree with if a neutral option is unavailable. Picking lightside when at Dark 5 will drop you to Dark 4. There is no buffer at all.
Going the "grey" route is actually not that big of a deal, however your character will be completely insane if you try to keep the bar between dark and light 1 to access all color crystals
Picking choices you agree with penalizes you the most, as you will not have the benefits of a maxed out light/dark scale (relics, cosmetic gear) and not be able to use all color crystals.
Because the system is a single scale, there is a huge opportunity cost associated with picking one choice over another. If I pick a +100 Dark option, I can miss out on a +100 Light option, meaning I effectively received -200 Light (assuming that I was going light-leaning) putting me even further away from my Light V goal... but that guy really needed to die.
The choices you make in the Light/Dark system are generally frivolous in nature as well.
You picked Dark and killed Darth Superdude!
You picked Light and nobly spared Darth Superdude!
You picked neutral and Darth Superdude was never heard from again.
All roads lead to Rome, as they say.
If this was a non-class quest, and not part of a core planet quest line (which they all have past Coruscant/DK) it is 99% likely you will never see or hear from Darth Superdude again except by mail, with a small sum of currency, provided he didn't die. You'll probably collect a bounty on him if he did. Again, it's an illusion of choice.
Dark/Light choices outside of class quests are the main offenders of this as they literally change nothing about the story except the dialogue you see when you turn them in, or whether or not you cinematicly strike/shoot/shock someone.
There are some cases in the class story quests I have done where I wondered "What would have happened if I went Dark instead of Light here?" but the answer is always the same: I would have just killed a different named NPC, and the story would have continued in a way that is consistent with the next step.
The final story quest will sometimes make you want to know what happens if it plays out a different way, but there is not a single chance I (or most rational people for that matter) would spend over 100 hours to find out first hand. Most will just look it up on Google or ask around. Without the ability to quick save/load like you would in a traditional Bioware RPG, the player will tent to experience apathy towards the story instead of being able to go back and actually see the differences.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Grinding, and other tired MMO mechanics[/SIZE][/COLOR]
TOR had a huge opportunity to do something fantastic with its game that has never been done before in any MMO I've had the privileged of playing: Removing the leveling system entirely. My character could have progressed through an epic tale, and advanced as a rate reflective of where I was in the story so all content would be relevant to my abilities at all times. As new skills were introduced, the game could provide situations for me to use them and learn how to play my class. Instead, it opted for the tired XP treadmill that would allow me to (begrudgingly) kill 500 rats to collect their 200 teeth, because all rats don't have teeth, and of course they only have 1 each.
Not only are there quests that feature grinding as a core objective, there are bonus quests to encourage grinding too. The sad part is that if you actually skip the Bonus kill quests you will fall behind the XP curve. I had a class quest with a kill 135 bonus quest. This is not an exaggeration.
The XP system is not the only place TOR is just another tired, old MMO. I sure am glad I have to buy these skill ranks, repair my gear and carry these vendor purchased crafting materials... Oh, this boss has 800,000 HP and is completely un-threatening? I guess more health means he's harder. Good thing they removed auto-attack so I have to be here to perform this completely trivial endeavor.
I seriously don't understand where the disconnect happened between the community who has been playing other MMOs for years and the BioWare development team. Did it occur to no one down at that office in Austin that MMOs have been boring and same-ish, with droves of people leaving them for quite some now?
No one is asking TOR to re-invent the wheel, but it goes backwards in a lot of places.
A cooldown on resurrection for classes who aren't healers? Somehow, I feel classes without healers will need to resurrect people significantly more than those with healers.
There is no summoning mechanic in the most current build (although it was briefly, and completely non-functionally in a previous one.) Putting everything on the Fleet or Ilum was a nice touch. It's like implementing teleporting to dungeons, only lazier.
I can't understand how a company with the Star Wars license wouldn't push the boundaries of current game design. It astounds me. Being able to put the words Star Wars on the box for your game not only ensure that it absolutely will not fail (because if Episodes 1-3 didn't kill it, nothing will) but look at how big of a turd The Force Unleashed 2 was and it still sold something silly like 600,000 copies.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Being a hero, and other Anti-MMO ideas[/SIZE][/COLOR]
Back at Gamescom '09 when we were first introduced to Hutta and the Bounty Hunter class () and there is a lot of marketing speak about how classes all feel iconic, and how everyone should feel like a hero.
When it came to class mirroring, the idea of iconic classes was thrown out the window. Going full auto on someone as a Trooper makes a lot of sense, but needing to devise a flamethrower alternative falls into a huge grey area. The concept works fine (mostly) for the force users, but for the tech classes, it just gets kind of silly.
Calling your ship to do a bombing run, or laying down an orbital strike is not iconic.
Shooting Kolto darts at people is not iconic.
Punching people instead of shooting them because all tanking classes needed to be melee for gameplay reasons is not iconic.
This is simply a matter of gameplay being incompatible with canon, and forcing the design to fit the gameplay needs. While admirable, this completely backfired and just turned into a ton of skill bloat and overlap. When I think of a Trooper and a Bounty Hunter, I feel they would be similar, but not mirrors, yet the game pushed the square peg through the round hole anyway.
This is a major design flaw in my estimation. Last time I checked, the Empire also has troopers, so why couldn't I just play one of those? Let's pretend they don't have a -100% accuracy modifier... And does the Republic never work with mercenaries? I can't find any good reasons the republic can't hire a Bounty Hunter (off the record, of course.)
Then there is the whole concept of being a hero, or feeling heroic in general, which is honestly just replacing 1 NPC with 3. At no point in the game does combat feel "heroic", it just annoyed me as a melee class because I had to run between ranged NPCs to heroically kill 3 weak rats instead of 1 normal rat.
Everyone who zones into the class phase will kill the same boss, get the same rewards, be a hero. This is very fitting for a single-player experience, but makes your story feel extremely hollow in a multiplayer environment. This is just a fundamental conflict between how an MMO works, and how a single player game works; ultimately, nothing you do in an MMO can be important because thousands of other players need to do it too.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Planets made of phase portals and wasted space[/SIZE][/COLOR]
This may be considered more of a minor gripe, but when playing the game you will notice something on subsequent playthroughs: No phased areas are used by more than one quest. There are 2 Lightsaber forges on Tython, one for Knights and one for Consulars, even though they both go to it to do the same thing. Areas need to be made much larger because of this, and if the game were able to dynamically place doodads or modify terrain to accommodate the needs of certain quests the planets would have much more space to feel less like hallways. TOR's phasing tech is simply not up to par.
If a hallway requires more phase portals to facilitate more quests, it gets longer and longer. This snowballs to an insane amount of empty space required when you have upwards of 60 phased areas on a planet.
This may have been intended to facilitate the "do class quests with your friends!" feature, but seeing how many flaws it has (inability to see many conversations, not seeing any conversations that happen outside of phases) it seems like more of a happy side effect of a poorly developed system to begin with.
The only quest in the entire game I can think of that actually shares a phased area is the quest in the ice fortress on Hoth, and even then, both factions go there to kill exactly the same guy (although the 2 planet stories surrounding the area are completely different.) I imagine this lone portal as the most technical challenge the phasing system has.
I'm going to ignore all technical issues (they can't ride elevators, they can't jump off ledges, they don't walk through doorways which used to feature gates/doors, etc.) but pretending they don't exist doesn't make the annoyance of them go away. We'll also ignore the AI issues which I alluded to previously in this post.
Companions have a major flaw, where some companions are simply worse than others, and for the most part the situation genuinely doesn't matter. This is another fundamental breakdown between the MMO and the single-player story experience that is TOR. When I play Mass Effect 2 on Easy, I can use whoever I want, but when I play on Insane, I always use Miranda. Since TOR only has 1 difficulty level, it doesn't seem like a good idea to use anything but your best companion at all times, as content in the world is scaled around having them and they aren't simply a friendly tag along.
In the current build, it is inadvisable to use anything but the healing companions as they vastly reduce your overall downtime. In previous iterations of the system, the tank companions were always the optimal choice and DPS companions the build before that. The gameplay needs of the player take precedence over the desire for story variety, as the companions never truly influence how the story plays out unless the player modifies their conversational choices to suit their companions preferences (see: to score affection points.)
There are also companions that are mandatory for certain quests even though their gear may be 30 levels behind the times, and the order you acquire certain companions can make some classes harder to play than others (Warriors get their healer on Balmorra, Knighs on Hoth), or make crafting far more annoying (Knights have 3 companions at the end of Coruscant, Agents get their third companion on Alderaan, 4 planets later.)
Ultimately, companions are just pets that you need to fully equip with currently weapons and armor if you want them be even remotely effective. They are more of a burden, but are so required because of how gameplay is designed.
If this were a single player game, and companions had more dedicated content, they wouldn't feel nearly as tacked on as they do. In Mass Effect 2 I liked all of my companions and knew all about them because their content was my content. They became part of my story. Nothing about TOR companions feels even remotely close to the level of ME2 in terms of story, and I genuinely feel no attachment to them, I simply select them by roll, and try to keep them as equipped as possible, while blissfully ignoring the existence of the other, less useful ones. Once I hit 50, I just feed them gifts.
There is no reason that large portions of content (both planet and class) shouldn't be tailored for specific companions conversationally more so than they are, which would give them all interesting story lines that don't require you spamming gifts at them, or answering dialogue in a certain way. I can't think of any reasons not to go fishing through companion quest dialogue trees for optimal affection points, just to unlock more companion content faster.
Pretending the companion system isn't flawed (story vs. functionality) is a bit of a stretch, and as you get higher level the problem only get worse. The whole system is just lazy which heavily detracts from the story feel, with the exception of your first (or second) companion who is well integrated into your class story line.
It doesn't take a mathematics major to figure out that the stat system in TOR is inherently flawed. There are stats that add static stats (class primary stats and power) and stats that add scaling stats (crit, surge) meaning that there will be a point at which 1 crit will be worth more than 1 power and vice versa. This will be a math problem, and moddable items will facilitate these variables fully. The mod system allows for people to choose stats (including base stats like Aim and Strength) over stats like Crit and Surge, and I can tell you right now, without having any numbers or idea how some classes work, that there will be an optimal solution, and people will min/max the system in as much time as it takes them to whip together a rough spreadsheet.
Augment slots exacerbate the issue further, as they provide "free" stats on top of the moddable nature of items. If they just give raid gear Augment slots no one crafts, and if you don't give raid gear augment slots, crafting is mandatory. If I can get a raid drop epic and strip its mods to put them in a craftable item with an augment slot, there really won't be much variety to the game.
If this is what the final version will be, I almost feel ashamed for the folks down in Austin for this obvious and major oversight. They may as well take the stats off of everything and just put a rating on gear if it remains as it is at current since there will only be one "correct" way to itemize.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]There is basically no endgame![/SIZE][/COLOR]
This is probably the biggest hangup of all as it means that TOR devolves into nothing more than a single player game with a monthly fee until there is something worth paying for to progress my character.
I don't want to read some smug idiot posting about how "Molten Core wasn't in WoW at launch" because it was. Patch 1.1 was the launch patch, look it up on WoWPedia. Was it buggy? Yes. Was everything in it except for Ragnaros killable? Yes. WoW also came out in 2004, and is the reference to what games that want to be taken seriously need to live up to. I don't care if you love or hate WoW, but I think it's pretty sad if you're emotionally invested enough in a game to hate it.
In every build so far, endgame has consisted of virtually zero fully functional content although it is getting more plentiful each build, with new issues cropping up every build as well. There are daily quests on Ilum and Belsavis, and 3 level 50 flashpoints that are nearly functional currently.
Hard mode instances are just scaled up versions of the originals and blatantly untested. No boss mechanics are different, and the encounters are extremely hit or miss in terms of difficulty (some are unbeatable currently.) Based on how poorly most flashpoint content has been implemented on their initial pass throughout my time in beta, I have very little faith that the Hard modes will be balanced for live and they will likely be entirely too simple if what's on the servers now is any indication.
Eternity Vault is buggy. Leaping at a turret on the first trash pull throws you into space and disconnects you until your raid group kicks you, leaves the instance, and resets the phase. The second boss desyncs from the instance and is unkillable without the ability to avoid his attacks, which is basically the entire fight. I don't know how many bosses are in the Eternity Vault, but it will be down within 2 weeks, and all Hard Modes within a month based on what I saw and the fact we were able to rag-tag together a random pug in greens and beat the first boss with virtually no information on him in 4 pulls.
Non-moddable crafting is completely useless at the level cap. All trainer learned items when fully RE'd to Artifact quality are lower rating than the lowest rated Operation drops. All Schematics that drop from Ops make Artifact quality gear right away, so the RE system is entirely useless in the grand scheme of the game.
Space Combat is an afterthought like a fart in the breeze. Although it scales up with you as you level, there is nothing challenging or notable at the end of the journey. If you level all the way to 50 before doing any kind of Space Combat, all but 3 of the missions will be painfully simple because of ship upgrades. This still feels like a totally half-baked feature and the only reason people will do it is for easy, fast, XP while leveling and free credits at the level cap.
Skill trees are 100% illusion of choice. There is only 1 right way to spend talent points and be effective at your intended role. There is a reason WoW is abandoning this terrible design, and it's because you might make a total of 2 real choices when filling them out. They are also a trap for new or inexperienced players.
Total lack of macro support makes things like trinkets and off the GCD skills annoying to use as they require individual key presses. This makes skills like my "causes next cast to be instant" skill harder to use an an emergency than it should be. Why would I use it on anything but my biggest heal?
There is no LFG tool and every single flashpoint falls between planets, meaning that in order to assemble a group you have to wait on the fleet stations and hope you randomly find people, stay on the planet just before it and wait for people to finish the planet to join you, or hope you can catch people at the beginning of the next planet before they feel too far in to leave and come back. It is incredibly inconvenient to get groups together for flashpoints, and even with servers queue'd out to the max for the beta weekend, it is a nightmare getting groups for anything but Black Talon/Eseless (which only require 2 people, and spec doesn't matter at all.) The Hammer is just after Coruscant/DK, and it took over 20 minutes to find a healer when we had 3 people waiting to go. We got him through sending random unsolicited tells.
[SIZE="3"]Final Thoughts[/SIZE]
From what I've seen of TOR since August, I could not in good conscience recommend that people who really want to experience that whole MMO feeling all over again waste their time on TOR. It brings nothing meaningful to the table and will be coasting to success on what's left of Bioware's reputation and the Star Wars license.
People who are excited to leave other MMOs and come play this will only be disappointed by its endgame offerings, and this will be a giant step backwards for the MMORPG genre as a whole.
TOR is simply not good enough to pay a monthly fee for.
For tl;dr ppl:
The summary is basicly: we only saw the first 20ish levels of the game, which is the actual good part, the later parts of the game are filled with padding, grind, a shitton of usual MMO kill-quests, and comparatively very little amount of actual class and story content, that in the end gets chocked to oblivion under the mountains of filler. He also criticized the complete pointlessness of the crafting system, saying that even the most valuable crafted items are just bellow the more basic looted stuff at max level. The rest are just bitching about things that are ultimately necessary compromises for the sake of the MMO gameplay.
After this, my enthusiasm decreased enough to go into wait-and-see mode. I was fully prepared to buy it later in December, but I think I'll wait a month or two. By that time there should be enough player feedback to determine if the post-20 content is really as bad as this guy claims. And it seems there are other long time testers who agree with him completely.
To be honest, I can easily imagine EA trying to rush the game through the door, first giving a taste of the actual good part of it to the public, while not offering an actual long open beta to allow for a really educated decision. So yeah, after this, it looks suspiciously like the usual demo-tactic. Offer a glimpse of what's good about the game and don't show what's the rest of it is like.
This weekend test made me forget about the earlier bitching from various people in the beta about how lackluster the game actually is. Almost made the do a 1st day buy. Thankfully this post reminded me that with such an ambitious project and previous dark clouds gathering around it, it's very unwise to go out and buy it based on the first few days worth of content.
Last edited by zmed on Mon, 28th Nov 2011 21:34; edited 4 times in total
[QUOTE=Nautix;11376781]I've been a tester since August, and...
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]I will not be buying The Old Republic[/SIZE][/COLOR]
I keep trying to find reasons I should buy TOR, and have expressed this several times to friends who have also been lucky enough to get into the beta, but ultimately I simply cannot justify purchasing a BioWare-flavored mediocre MMO.
TOR gets a lot of things right: Presentation is spot on with superb voice acting, impressive environments with consistent and thematic art direction, and even a moderately compelling story line, but it is in no way a complete or functional game. Almost everything else about TOR is lacking and incredibly unimpressive, all the way from core class design to the user interface.
I tried to drink the kool-aid, I really did. I even called friends who had been in the beta before me out on their negative outlook of the game, but low and behold, I now feel that they were right all along.
Everything about TOR with the exception of its presentation reeks of half-baked implementations, shortcuts and complete and utter apathy. It's actually jarring as you play through the game to see how abysmal some of the content gets and how lazy the game's production feels. It's as if TOR has a design document sitting around that's artfully crafted, filled with ambitious ideas and deep conceptual fervor that was simply pushed into the waste bin by an EA executive who didn't give a crap about how good or bad the game is, and only cares about the bottom line.
Despite this, I have played a Guardian, Scoundrel and Mercenary to the level cap across the 3 builds I've been in the beta, for no other reason than boredom and ample free time. If I had anything better to do TOR was invariably put to the wayside, even though I was privileged enough to play in a beta that thousands of people would have killed to be a part of.
Total playtime is ~350 hours since I was invited (~3h/day), but most of that is in quite dense play sessions, followed by extended breaks. I would ballpark that it takes about 2 weeks of dedicated play to reach the level cap per build.
"Based on your experience today, how likely would you be to recommend TOR to a friend"
This started as an 8 and briefly jumped to a 10.
Now I usually just close the window.
The game is simply not what its cracked up to be, and Bioware is doing an incredible disservice to its dedicated fan base by conning all of the weekend beta testers into seeing the only good content the game offers up in the first ~20 levels of play, and even then it is rife with bugs and instability.
If you have reached beyond Coruscant and Dromund Kaas and ventured into Taris and Balmorra, this is what the game truly is: Ample wasted space, long runs, uninteresting story lines, and laden with kill and collect quests.
And without further ado, reasons I will not be buying TOR:
[SIZE="3"][COLOR="DarkOrange"]TOR is far and away the least mechanically fun MMO game I have ever played. [/COLOR][/SIZE]
This is a bold statement, but I feel it is very justified. Relative to other games I have played in the MMO genre, TOR does not hold up well, featuring a myriad of problems with its general gameplay. Everything from a clunky (and dysfunctional) skill queue to the unresponsive TAB targeting system, the game simply does not feel like a game of its caliber should.
To its credit, it has actually been getting better over time (there is no more acceleration on jumping, for example), but it is no where near the responsive level it should be, and has a staggering amount of small issues that culminate into a major headache that simply make the game un-fun.
Off the top of my head, issues that need to be fixed that directly affect playability of TOR:
Skill queue lockups that prevent skill use entirely
The cover system in general, which has devolved to "press a button before you press a button"
AOE targeting indicators that are absent or completely unreflective of size
Debuff tracking is terrible
Lack of [Mouseover] style macros (lack of a macro system in general, but most predominantly this)
Reactive buffs not displaying in a useful or intuitive way (i.e., WoW's glowing borders on action bar buttons that indicate a proc)
World-clicking in general is a headache (small objects, clustered enemies, companion obscruction)
Companion AI is awful (example: not attacking on offensive spell channels and casts, only on instant and reactive events)
Nameplates of dead NPCs need to go away unless they are targeted
There are a lot more problems that affect playability that are more case specific, but that list hits the vast majority of the problems that make playing the game in general unfun.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Story does not make up for other short comings[/SIZE][/COLOR]
"I want to save the story for live, so I won't play my class in beta."
I can't tell you how many times I've read this (or a variation thereof) on public forums in relation to weekend testing. This statement alone acknowledges that story is not a sustainable enough part of a game to make it worthwhile. When it comes to TOR, the story is the only reason in many cases to slog through the game. People are actively avoiding the story now so they won't "waste" it for later.
What people don't seem to understand about TOR is that past the first couple planets, your class story actually fills an incredibly small portion of the overall content of the game. I would estimate upwards of 85% of the game is recycled every time you play a character of the same faction. On later planets, it will get to the point that you may actually forget entirely what is going on in your story quest, as well as major characters and why they are important.
Repetitive questing content:
The general composition of each planet is pretty simple: they are divided into sections (usually divided by map segments) where you will do 1-2 story related quests, and an inordinately high amount of side content. On lower level planets this is not a very noticeable issue, as you require less quests to level (The first 2 planets are 1-~18 of 50 levels.) On later planets, this disparity can get staggeringly high. For example, on Quest, Bounty Hunters have exactly 1 class quest, which takes about 5 minutes to complete. Literally, 1 class quest for an entire, although short, planet.
Light/Dark illusion of choice:
The light/dark system is a very poorly conceived system that punishes you in several different ways while only affecting the story in very minor ways in most cases:
You will feel obligated to be consistent in your choices, and may be forced into situations you disagree with if a neutral option is unavailable. Picking lightside when at Dark 5 will drop you to Dark 4. There is no buffer at all.
Going the "grey" route is actually not that big of a deal, however your character will be completely insane if you try to keep the bar between dark and light 1 to access all color crystals
Picking choices you agree with penalizes you the most, as you will not have the benefits of a maxed out light/dark scale (relics, cosmetic gear) and not be able to use all color crystals.
Because the system is a single scale, there is a huge opportunity cost associated with picking one choice over another. If I pick a +100 Dark option, I can miss out on a +100 Light option, meaning I effectively received -200 Light (assuming that I was going light-leaning) putting me even further away from my Light V goal... but that guy really needed to die.
The choices you make in the Light/Dark system are generally frivolous in nature as well.
You picked Dark and killed Darth Superdude!
You picked Light and nobly spared Darth Superdude!
You picked neutral and Darth Superdude was never heard from again.
All roads lead to Rome, as they say.
If this was a non-class quest, and not part of a core planet quest line (which they all have past Coruscant/DK) it is 99% likely you will never see or hear from Darth Superdude again except by mail, with a small sum of currency, provided he didn't die. You'll probably collect a bounty on him if he did. Again, it's an illusion of choice.
Dark/Light choices outside of class quests are the main offenders of this as they literally change nothing about the story except the dialogue you see when you turn them in, or whether or not you cinematicly strike/shoot/shock someone.
There are some cases in the class story quests I have done where I wondered "What would have happened if I went Dark instead of Light here?" but the answer is always the same: I would have just killed a different named NPC, and the story would have continued in a way that is consistent with the next step.
The final story quest will sometimes make you want to know what happens if it plays out a different way, but there is not a single chance I (or most rational people for that matter) would spend over 100 hours to find out first hand. Most will just look it up on Google or ask around. Without the ability to quick save/load like you would in a traditional Bioware RPG, the player will tent to experience apathy towards the story instead of being able to go back and actually see the differences.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Grinding, and other tired MMO mechanics[/SIZE][/COLOR]
TOR had a huge opportunity to do something fantastic with its game that has never been done before in any MMO I've had the privileged of playing: Removing the leveling system entirely. My character could have progressed through an epic tale, and advanced as a rate reflective of where I was in the story so all content would be relevant to my abilities at all times. As new skills were introduced, the game could provide situations for me to use them and learn how to play my class. Instead, it opted for the tired XP treadmill that would allow me to (begrudgingly) kill 500 rats to collect their 200 teeth, because all rats don't have teeth, and of course they only have 1 each.
Not only are there quests that feature grinding as a core objective, there are bonus quests to encourage grinding too. The sad part is that if you actually skip the Bonus kill quests you will fall behind the XP curve. I had a class quest with a kill 135 bonus quest. This is not an exaggeration.
The XP system is not the only place TOR is just another tired, old MMO. I sure am glad I have to buy these skill ranks, repair my gear and carry these vendor purchased crafting materials... Oh, this boss has 800,000 HP and is completely un-threatening? I guess more health means he's harder. Good thing they removed auto-attack so I have to be here to perform this completely trivial endeavor.
I seriously don't understand where the disconnect happened between the community who has been playing other MMOs for years and the BioWare development team. Did it occur to no one down at that office in Austin that MMOs have been boring and same-ish, with droves of people leaving them for quite some now?
No one is asking TOR to re-invent the wheel, but it goes backwards in a lot of places.
A cooldown on resurrection for classes who aren't healers? Somehow, I feel classes without healers will need to resurrect people significantly more than those with healers.
There is no summoning mechanic in the most current build (although it was briefly, and completely non-functionally in a previous one.) Putting everything on the Fleet or Ilum was a nice touch. It's like implementing teleporting to dungeons, only lazier.
I can't understand how a company with the Star Wars license wouldn't push the boundaries of current game design. It astounds me. Being able to put the words Star Wars on the box for your game not only ensure that it absolutely will not fail (because if Episodes 1-3 didn't kill it, nothing will) but look at how big of a turd The Force Unleashed 2 was and it still sold something silly like 600,000 copies.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Being a hero, and other Anti-MMO ideas[/SIZE][/COLOR]
Back at Gamescom '09 when we were first introduced to Hutta and the Bounty Hunter class () and there is a lot of marketing speak about how classes all feel iconic, and how everyone should feel like a hero.
When it came to class mirroring, the idea of iconic classes was thrown out the window. Going full auto on someone as a Trooper makes a lot of sense, but needing to devise a flamethrower alternative falls into a huge grey area. The concept works fine (mostly) for the force users, but for the tech classes, it just gets kind of silly.
Calling your ship to do a bombing run, or laying down an orbital strike is not iconic.
Shooting Kolto darts at people is not iconic.
Punching people instead of shooting them because all tanking classes needed to be melee for gameplay reasons is not iconic.
This is simply a matter of gameplay being incompatible with canon, and forcing the design to fit the gameplay needs. While admirable, this completely backfired and just turned into a ton of skill bloat and overlap. When I think of a Trooper and a Bounty Hunter, I feel they would be similar, but not mirrors, yet the game pushed the square peg through the round hole anyway.
This is a major design flaw in my estimation. Last time I checked, the Empire also has troopers, so why couldn't I just play one of those? Let's pretend they don't have a -100% accuracy modifier... And does the Republic never work with mercenaries? I can't find any good reasons the republic can't hire a Bounty Hunter (off the record, of course.)
Then there is the whole concept of being a hero, or feeling heroic in general, which is honestly just replacing 1 NPC with 3. At no point in the game does combat feel "heroic", it just annoyed me as a melee class because I had to run between ranged NPCs to heroically kill 3 weak rats instead of 1 normal rat.
Everyone who zones into the class phase will kill the same boss, get the same rewards, be a hero. This is very fitting for a single-player experience, but makes your story feel extremely hollow in a multiplayer environment. This is just a fundamental conflict between how an MMO works, and how a single player game works; ultimately, nothing you do in an MMO can be important because thousands of other players need to do it too.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Planets made of phase portals and wasted space[/SIZE][/COLOR]
This may be considered more of a minor gripe, but when playing the game you will notice something on subsequent playthroughs: No phased areas are used by more than one quest. There are 2 Lightsaber forges on Tython, one for Knights and one for Consulars, even though they both go to it to do the same thing. Areas need to be made much larger because of this, and if the game were able to dynamically place doodads or modify terrain to accommodate the needs of certain quests the planets would have much more space to feel less like hallways. TOR's phasing tech is simply not up to par.
If a hallway requires more phase portals to facilitate more quests, it gets longer and longer. This snowballs to an insane amount of empty space required when you have upwards of 60 phased areas on a planet.
This may have been intended to facilitate the "do class quests with your friends!" feature, but seeing how many flaws it has (inability to see many conversations, not seeing any conversations that happen outside of phases) it seems like more of a happy side effect of a poorly developed system to begin with.
The only quest in the entire game I can think of that actually shares a phased area is the quest in the ice fortress on Hoth, and even then, both factions go there to kill exactly the same guy (although the 2 planet stories surrounding the area are completely different.) I imagine this lone portal as the most technical challenge the phasing system has.
I'm going to ignore all technical issues (they can't ride elevators, they can't jump off ledges, they don't walk through doorways which used to feature gates/doors, etc.) but pretending they don't exist doesn't make the annoyance of them go away. We'll also ignore the AI issues which I alluded to previously in this post.
Companions have a major flaw, where some companions are simply worse than others, and for the most part the situation genuinely doesn't matter. This is another fundamental breakdown between the MMO and the single-player story experience that is TOR. When I play Mass Effect 2 on Easy, I can use whoever I want, but when I play on Insane, I always use Miranda. Since TOR only has 1 difficulty level, it doesn't seem like a good idea to use anything but your best companion at all times, as content in the world is scaled around having them and they aren't simply a friendly tag along.
In the current build, it is inadvisable to use anything but the healing companions as they vastly reduce your overall downtime. In previous iterations of the system, the tank companions were always the optimal choice and DPS companions the build before that. The gameplay needs of the player take precedence over the desire for story variety, as the companions never truly influence how the story plays out unless the player modifies their conversational choices to suit their companions preferences (see: to score affection points.)
There are also companions that are mandatory for certain quests even though their gear may be 30 levels behind the times, and the order you acquire certain companions can make some classes harder to play than others (Warriors get their healer on Balmorra, Knighs on Hoth), or make crafting far more annoying (Knights have 3 companions at the end of Coruscant, Agents get their third companion on Alderaan, 4 planets later.)
Ultimately, companions are just pets that you need to fully equip with currently weapons and armor if you want them be even remotely effective. They are more of a burden, but are so required because of how gameplay is designed.
If this were a single player game, and companions had more dedicated content, they wouldn't feel nearly as tacked on as they do. In Mass Effect 2 I liked all of my companions and knew all about them because their content was my content. They became part of my story. Nothing about TOR companions feels even remotely close to the level of ME2 in terms of story, and I genuinely feel no attachment to them, I simply select them by roll, and try to keep them as equipped as possible, while blissfully ignoring the existence of the other, less useful ones. Once I hit 50, I just feed them gifts.
There is no reason that large portions of content (both planet and class) shouldn't be tailored for specific companions conversationally more so than they are, which would give them all interesting story lines that don't require you spamming gifts at them, or answering dialogue in a certain way. I can't think of any reasons not to go fishing through companion quest dialogue trees for optimal affection points, just to unlock more companion content faster.
Pretending the companion system isn't flawed (story vs. functionality) is a bit of a stretch, and as you get higher level the problem only get worse. The whole system is just lazy which heavily detracts from the story feel, with the exception of your first (or second) companion who is well integrated into your class story line.
It doesn't take a mathematics major to figure out that the stat system in TOR is inherently flawed. There are stats that add static stats (class primary stats and power) and stats that add scaling stats (crit, surge) meaning that there will be a point at which 1 crit will be worth more than 1 power and vice versa. This will be a math problem, and moddable items will facilitate these variables fully. The mod system allows for people to choose stats (including base stats like Aim and Strength) over stats like Crit and Surge, and I can tell you right now, without having any numbers or idea how some classes work, that there will be an optimal solution, and people will min/max the system in as much time as it takes them to whip together a rough spreadsheet.
Augment slots exacerbate the issue further, as they provide "free" stats on top of the moddable nature of items. If they just give raid gear Augment slots no one crafts, and if you don't give raid gear augment slots, crafting is mandatory. If I can get a raid drop epic and strip its mods to put them in a craftable item with an augment slot, there really won't be much variety to the game.
If this is what the final version will be, I almost feel ashamed for the folks down in Austin for this obvious and major oversight. They may as well take the stats off of everything and just put a rating on gear if it remains as it is at current since there will only be one "correct" way to itemize.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]There is basically no endgame![/SIZE][/COLOR]
This is probably the biggest hangup of all as it means that TOR devolves into nothing more than a single player game with a monthly fee until there is something worth paying for to progress my character.
I don't want to read some smug idiot posting about how "Molten Core wasn't in WoW at launch" because it was. Patch 1.1 was the launch patch, look it up on WoWPedia. Was it buggy? Yes. Was everything in it except for Ragnaros killable? Yes. WoW also came out in 2004, and is the reference to what games that want to be taken seriously need to live up to. I don't care if you love or hate WoW, but I think it's pretty sad if you're emotionally invested enough in a game to hate it.
In every build so far, endgame has consisted of virtually zero fully functional content although it is getting more plentiful each build, with new issues cropping up every build as well. There are daily quests on Ilum and Belsavis, and 3 level 50 flashpoints that are nearly functional currently.
Hard mode instances are just scaled up versions of the originals and blatantly untested. No boss mechanics are different, and the encounters are extremely hit or miss in terms of difficulty (some are unbeatable currently.) Based on how poorly most flashpoint content has been implemented on their initial pass throughout my time in beta, I have very little faith that the Hard modes will be balanced for live and they will likely be entirely too simple if what's on the servers now is any indication.
Eternity Vault is buggy. Leaping at a turret on the first trash pull throws you into space and disconnects you until your raid group kicks you, leaves the instance, and resets the phase. The second boss desyncs from the instance and is unkillable without the ability to avoid his attacks, which is basically the entire fight. I don't know how many bosses are in the Eternity Vault, but it will be down within 2 weeks, and all Hard Modes within a month based on what I saw and the fact we were able to rag-tag together a random pug in greens and beat the first boss with virtually no information on him in 4 pulls.
Non-moddable crafting is completely useless at the level cap. All trainer learned items when fully RE'd to Artifact quality are lower rating than the lowest rated Operation drops. All Schematics that drop from Ops make Artifact quality gear right away, so the RE system is entirely useless in the grand scheme of the game.
Space Combat is an afterthought like a fart in the breeze. Although it scales up with you as you level, there is nothing challenging or notable at the end of the journey. If you level all the way to 50 before doing any kind of Space Combat, all but 3 of the missions will be painfully simple because of ship upgrades. This still feels like a totally half-baked feature and the only reason people will do it is for easy, fast, XP while leveling and free credits at the level cap.
Skill trees are 100% illusion of choice. There is only 1 right way to spend talent points and be effective at your intended role. There is a reason WoW is abandoning this terrible design, and it's because you might make a total of 2 real choices when filling them out. They are also a trap for new or inexperienced players.
Total lack of macro support makes things like trinkets and off the GCD skills annoying to use as they require individual key presses. This makes skills like my "causes next cast to be instant" skill harder to use an an emergency than it should be. Why would I use it on anything but my biggest heal?
There is no LFG tool and every single flashpoint falls between planets, meaning that in order to assemble a group you have to wait on the fleet stations and hope you randomly find people, stay on the planet just before it and wait for people to finish the planet to join you, or hope you can catch people at the beginning of the next planet before they feel too far in to leave and come back. It is incredibly inconvenient to get groups together for flashpoints, and even with servers queue'd out to the max for the beta weekend, it is a nightmare getting groups for anything but Black Talon/Eseless (which only require 2 people, and spec doesn't matter at all.) The Hammer is just after Coruscant/DK, and it took over 20 minutes to find a healer when we had 3 people waiting to go. We got him through sending random unsolicited tells.
[SIZE="3"]Final Thoughts[/SIZE]
From what I've seen of TOR since August, I could not in good conscience recommend that people who really want to experience that whole MMO feeling all over again waste their time on TOR. It brings nothing meaningful to the table and will be coasting to success on what's left of Bioware's reputation and the Star Wars license.
People who are excited to leave other MMOs and come play this will only be disappointed by its endgame offerings, and this will be a giant step backwards for the MMORPG genre as a whole.
TOR is simply not good enough to pay a monthly fee for.
For tl;dr ppl:
The summary is basicly: we only saw the first 20ish levels of the game, which is the actual good part, the later parts of the game are filled with padding, grind, a shitton of usual MMO kill-quests, and comparatively very little amount of actual class and story content, that in the end gets chocked to oblivion under the mountains of filler. He also criticized the complete pointlessness of the crafting system, saying that even the most valuable crafted items are just bellow the more basic looted stuff at max level. The rest are just bitching about things that are ultimately necessary compromises for the sake of the MMO gameplay.
After this, my enthusiasm decreased enough to go into wait-and-see mode. I was fully prepared to buy it later in December, but I think I'll wait a month or two. By that time there should be enough player feedback to determine if the post-20 content is really as bad as this guy claims. And it seems there are other long time testers who agree with him completely.
To be honest, I can easily imagine EA trying to rush the game through the door, first giving a taste of the actual good part of it to the public, while not offering an actual long open beta to allow for a really educated decision. So yeah, after this, it looks suspiciously like the usual demo-tactic. Offer a glimpse of what's good about the game and don't show what's the rest of it is like.
This weekend test made me forget about the earlier bitching from various people in the beta about how lackluster the game actually is. Almost made the do a 1st day buy. Thankfully this post reminded me that with such an ambitious project and previous dark clouds gathering around it, it's very unwise to go out and buy it based on the first few days worth of content.[/quote]
Doesn't really surprise me one bit, but i'll take it as it comes.
I doubt that is true. Why make a MMO with a subscription free, but make everything past level 20 crappy so that no one decides to resub?
Nobody said it was on purpose. They just might have tried to bite more than they can chew. I can easily imagine them realizing half way through that it's simply impossible to fill a whole MMO campaign worth of space with fully fleshed out story content on a reasonable budget and in the end resorting to colossal amounts of filler. Especially because this is the first MMO from Bioware, which makes them inexperienced, especially for a game with this large scope.
After seeing several long time testers agreeing most of the things he wrote, I'm more than willing to postpone buying this and see what the general consensus is going to be.
There were warning signs before the this weekend (other testers, ex-devs, etc), but this early-game content bamboozled us and made us forget the bad things people closer to the source tried to warn us about.
Last edited by zmed on Mon, 28th Nov 2011 21:59; edited 1 time in total
[QUOTE=Nautix;11376781]I've been a tester since August, and...
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]I will not be buying The Old Republic[/SIZE][/COLOR]
I keep trying to find reasons I should buy TOR, and have expressed this several times to friends who have also been lucky enough to get into the beta, but ultimately I simply cannot justify purchasing a BioWare-flavored mediocre MMO.
TOR gets a lot of things right: Presentation is spot on with superb voice acting, impressive environments with consistent and thematic art direction, and even a moderately compelling story line, but it is in no way a complete or functional game. Almost everything else about TOR is lacking and incredibly unimpressive, all the way from core class design to the user interface.
I tried to drink the kool-aid, I really did. I even called friends who had been in the beta before me out on their negative outlook of the game, but low and behold, I now feel that they were right all along.
Everything about TOR with the exception of its presentation reeks of half-baked implementations, shortcuts and complete and utter apathy. It's actually jarring as you play through the game to see how abysmal some of the content gets and how lazy the game's production feels. It's as if TOR has a design document sitting around that's artfully crafted, filled with ambitious ideas and deep conceptual fervor that was simply pushed into the waste bin by an EA executive who didn't give a crap about how good or bad the game is, and only cares about the bottom line.
Despite this, I have played a Guardian, Scoundrel and Mercenary to the level cap across the 3 builds I've been in the beta, for no other reason than boredom and ample free time. If I had anything better to do TOR was invariably put to the wayside, even though I was privileged enough to play in a beta that thousands of people would have killed to be a part of.
Total playtime is ~350 hours since I was invited (~3h/day), but most of that is in quite dense play sessions, followed by extended breaks. I would ballpark that it takes about 2 weeks of dedicated play to reach the level cap per build.
"Based on your experience today, how likely would you be to recommend TOR to a friend"
This started as an 8 and briefly jumped to a 10.
Now I usually just close the window.
The game is simply not what its cracked up to be, and Bioware is doing an incredible disservice to its dedicated fan base by conning all of the weekend beta testers into seeing the only good content the game offers up in the first ~20 levels of play, and even then it is rife with bugs and instability.
If you have reached beyond Coruscant and Dromund Kaas and ventured into Taris and Balmorra, this is what the game truly is: Ample wasted space, long runs, uninteresting story lines, and laden with kill and collect quests.
And without further ado, reasons I will not be buying TOR:
[SIZE="3"][COLOR="DarkOrange"]TOR is far and away the least mechanically fun MMO game I have ever played. [/COLOR][/SIZE]
This is a bold statement, but I feel it is very justified. Relative to other games I have played in the MMO genre, TOR does not hold up well, featuring a myriad of problems with its general gameplay. Everything from a clunky (and dysfunctional) skill queue to the unresponsive TAB targeting system, the game simply does not feel like a game of its caliber should.
To its credit, it has actually been getting better over time (there is no more acceleration on jumping, for example), but it is no where near the responsive level it should be, and has a staggering amount of small issues that culminate into a major headache that simply make the game un-fun.
Off the top of my head, issues that need to be fixed that directly affect playability of TOR:
Skill queue lockups that prevent skill use entirely
The cover system in general, which has devolved to "press a button before you press a button"
AOE targeting indicators that are absent or completely unreflective of size
Debuff tracking is terrible
Lack of [Mouseover] style macros (lack of a macro system in general, but most predominantly this)
Reactive buffs not displaying in a useful or intuitive way (i.e., WoW's glowing borders on action bar buttons that indicate a proc)
World-clicking in general is a headache (small objects, clustered enemies, companion obscruction)
Companion AI is awful (example: not attacking on offensive spell channels and casts, only on instant and reactive events)
Nameplates of dead NPCs need to go away unless they are targeted
There are a lot more problems that affect playability that are more case specific, but that list hits the vast majority of the problems that make playing the game in general unfun.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Story does not make up for other short comings[/SIZE][/COLOR]
"I want to save the story for live, so I won't play my class in beta."
I can't tell you how many times I've read this (or a variation thereof) on public forums in relation to weekend testing. This statement alone acknowledges that story is not a sustainable enough part of a game to make it worthwhile. When it comes to TOR, the story is the only reason in many cases to slog through the game. People are actively avoiding the story now so they won't "waste" it for later.
What people don't seem to understand about TOR is that past the first couple planets, your class story actually fills an incredibly small portion of the overall content of the game. I would estimate upwards of 85% of the game is recycled every time you play a character of the same faction. On later planets, it will get to the point that you may actually forget entirely what is going on in your story quest, as well as major characters and why they are important.
Repetitive questing content:
The general composition of each planet is pretty simple: they are divided into sections (usually divided by map segments) where you will do 1-2 story related quests, and an inordinately high amount of side content. On lower level planets this is not a very noticeable issue, as you require less quests to level (The first 2 planets are 1-~18 of 50 levels.) On later planets, this disparity can get staggeringly high. For example, on Quest, Bounty Hunters have exactly 1 class quest, which takes about 5 minutes to complete. Literally, 1 class quest for an entire, although short, planet.
Light/Dark illusion of choice:
The light/dark system is a very poorly conceived system that punishes you in several different ways while only affecting the story in very minor ways in most cases:
You will feel obligated to be consistent in your choices, and may be forced into situations you disagree with if a neutral option is unavailable. Picking lightside when at Dark 5 will drop you to Dark 4. There is no buffer at all.
Going the "grey" route is actually not that big of a deal, however your character will be completely insane if you try to keep the bar between dark and light 1 to access all color crystals
Picking choices you agree with penalizes you the most, as you will not have the benefits of a maxed out light/dark scale (relics, cosmetic gear) and not be able to use all color crystals.
Because the system is a single scale, there is a huge opportunity cost associated with picking one choice over another. If I pick a +100 Dark option, I can miss out on a +100 Light option, meaning I effectively received -200 Light (assuming that I was going light-leaning) putting me even further away from my Light V goal... but that guy really needed to die.
The choices you make in the Light/Dark system are generally frivolous in nature as well.
You picked Dark and killed Darth Superdude!
You picked Light and nobly spared Darth Superdude!
You picked neutral and Darth Superdude was never heard from again.
All roads lead to Rome, as they say.
If this was a non-class quest, and not part of a core planet quest line (which they all have past Coruscant/DK) it is 99% likely you will never see or hear from Darth Superdude again except by mail, with a small sum of currency, provided he didn't die. You'll probably collect a bounty on him if he did. Again, it's an illusion of choice.
Dark/Light choices outside of class quests are the main offenders of this as they literally change nothing about the story except the dialogue you see when you turn them in, or whether or not you cinematicly strike/shoot/shock someone.
There are some cases in the class story quests I have done where I wondered "What would have happened if I went Dark instead of Light here?" but the answer is always the same: I would have just killed a different named NPC, and the story would have continued in a way that is consistent with the next step.
The final story quest will sometimes make you want to know what happens if it plays out a different way, but there is not a single chance I (or most rational people for that matter) would spend over 100 hours to find out first hand. Most will just look it up on Google or ask around. Without the ability to quick save/load like you would in a traditional Bioware RPG, the player will tent to experience apathy towards the story instead of being able to go back and actually see the differences.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Grinding, and other tired MMO mechanics[/SIZE][/COLOR]
TOR had a huge opportunity to do something fantastic with its game that has never been done before in any MMO I've had the privileged of playing: Removing the leveling system entirely. My character could have progressed through an epic tale, and advanced as a rate reflective of where I was in the story so all content would be relevant to my abilities at all times. As new skills were introduced, the game could provide situations for me to use them and learn how to play my class. Instead, it opted for the tired XP treadmill that would allow me to (begrudgingly) kill 500 rats to collect their 200 teeth, because all rats don't have teeth, and of course they only have 1 each.
Not only are there quests that feature grinding as a core objective, there are bonus quests to encourage grinding too. The sad part is that if you actually skip the Bonus kill quests you will fall behind the XP curve. I had a class quest with a kill 135 bonus quest. This is not an exaggeration.
The XP system is not the only place TOR is just another tired, old MMO. I sure am glad I have to buy these skill ranks, repair my gear and carry these vendor purchased crafting materials... Oh, this boss has 800,000 HP and is completely un-threatening? I guess more health means he's harder. Good thing they removed auto-attack so I have to be here to perform this completely trivial endeavor.
I seriously don't understand where the disconnect happened between the community who has been playing other MMOs for years and the BioWare development team. Did it occur to no one down at that office in Austin that MMOs have been boring and same-ish, with droves of people leaving them for quite some now?
No one is asking TOR to re-invent the wheel, but it goes backwards in a lot of places.
A cooldown on resurrection for classes who aren't healers? Somehow, I feel classes without healers will need to resurrect people significantly more than those with healers.
There is no summoning mechanic in the most current build (although it was briefly, and completely non-functionally in a previous one.) Putting everything on the Fleet or Ilum was a nice touch. It's like implementing teleporting to dungeons, only lazier.
I can't understand how a company with the Star Wars license wouldn't push the boundaries of current game design. It astounds me. Being able to put the words Star Wars on the box for your game not only ensure that it absolutely will not fail (because if Episodes 1-3 didn't kill it, nothing will) but look at how big of a turd The Force Unleashed 2 was and it still sold something silly like 600,000 copies.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Being a hero, and other Anti-MMO ideas[/SIZE][/COLOR]
Back at Gamescom '09 when we were first introduced to Hutta and the Bounty Hunter class () and there is a lot of marketing speak about how classes all feel iconic, and how everyone should feel like a hero.
When it came to class mirroring, the idea of iconic classes was thrown out the window. Going full auto on someone as a Trooper makes a lot of sense, but needing to devise a flamethrower alternative falls into a huge grey area. The concept works fine (mostly) for the force users, but for the tech classes, it just gets kind of silly.
Calling your ship to do a bombing run, or laying down an orbital strike is not iconic.
Shooting Kolto darts at people is not iconic.
Punching people instead of shooting them because all tanking classes needed to be melee for gameplay reasons is not iconic.
This is simply a matter of gameplay being incompatible with canon, and forcing the design to fit the gameplay needs. While admirable, this completely backfired and just turned into a ton of skill bloat and overlap. When I think of a Trooper and a Bounty Hunter, I feel they would be similar, but not mirrors, yet the game pushed the square peg through the round hole anyway.
This is a major design flaw in my estimation. Last time I checked, the Empire also has troopers, so why couldn't I just play one of those? Let's pretend they don't have a -100% accuracy modifier... And does the Republic never work with mercenaries? I can't find any good reasons the republic can't hire a Bounty Hunter (off the record, of course.)
Then there is the whole concept of being a hero, or feeling heroic in general, which is honestly just replacing 1 NPC with 3. At no point in the game does combat feel "heroic", it just annoyed me as a melee class because I had to run between ranged NPCs to heroically kill 3 weak rats instead of 1 normal rat.
Everyone who zones into the class phase will kill the same boss, get the same rewards, be a hero. This is very fitting for a single-player experience, but makes your story feel extremely hollow in a multiplayer environment. This is just a fundamental conflict between how an MMO works, and how a single player game works; ultimately, nothing you do in an MMO can be important because thousands of other players need to do it too.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]Planets made of phase portals and wasted space[/SIZE][/COLOR]
This may be considered more of a minor gripe, but when playing the game you will notice something on subsequent playthroughs: No phased areas are used by more than one quest. There are 2 Lightsaber forges on Tython, one for Knights and one for Consulars, even though they both go to it to do the same thing. Areas need to be made much larger because of this, and if the game were able to dynamically place doodads or modify terrain to accommodate the needs of certain quests the planets would have much more space to feel less like hallways. TOR's phasing tech is simply not up to par.
If a hallway requires more phase portals to facilitate more quests, it gets longer and longer. This snowballs to an insane amount of empty space required when you have upwards of 60 phased areas on a planet.
This may have been intended to facilitate the "do class quests with your friends!" feature, but seeing how many flaws it has (inability to see many conversations, not seeing any conversations that happen outside of phases) it seems like more of a happy side effect of a poorly developed system to begin with.
The only quest in the entire game I can think of that actually shares a phased area is the quest in the ice fortress on Hoth, and even then, both factions go there to kill exactly the same guy (although the 2 planet stories surrounding the area are completely different.) I imagine this lone portal as the most technical challenge the phasing system has.
I'm going to ignore all technical issues (they can't ride elevators, they can't jump off ledges, they don't walk through doorways which used to feature gates/doors, etc.) but pretending they don't exist doesn't make the annoyance of them go away. We'll also ignore the AI issues which I alluded to previously in this post.
Companions have a major flaw, where some companions are simply worse than others, and for the most part the situation genuinely doesn't matter. This is another fundamental breakdown between the MMO and the single-player story experience that is TOR. When I play Mass Effect 2 on Easy, I can use whoever I want, but when I play on Insane, I always use Miranda. Since TOR only has 1 difficulty level, it doesn't seem like a good idea to use anything but your best companion at all times, as content in the world is scaled around having them and they aren't simply a friendly tag along.
In the current build, it is inadvisable to use anything but the healing companions as they vastly reduce your overall downtime. In previous iterations of the system, the tank companions were always the optimal choice and DPS companions the build before that. The gameplay needs of the player take precedence over the desire for story variety, as the companions never truly influence how the story plays out unless the player modifies their conversational choices to suit their companions preferences (see: to score affection points.)
There are also companions that are mandatory for certain quests even though their gear may be 30 levels behind the times, and the order you acquire certain companions can make some classes harder to play than others (Warriors get their healer on Balmorra, Knighs on Hoth), or make crafting far more annoying (Knights have 3 companions at the end of Coruscant, Agents get their third companion on Alderaan, 4 planets later.)
Ultimately, companions are just pets that you need to fully equip with currently weapons and armor if you want them be even remotely effective. They are more of a burden, but are so required because of how gameplay is designed.
If this were a single player game, and companions had more dedicated content, they wouldn't feel nearly as tacked on as they do. In Mass Effect 2 I liked all of my companions and knew all about them because their content was my content. They became part of my story. Nothing about TOR companions feels even remotely close to the level of ME2 in terms of story, and I genuinely feel no attachment to them, I simply select them by roll, and try to keep them as equipped as possible, while blissfully ignoring the existence of the other, less useful ones. Once I hit 50, I just feed them gifts.
There is no reason that large portions of content (both planet and class) shouldn't be tailored for specific companions conversationally more so than they are, which would give them all interesting story lines that don't require you spamming gifts at them, or answering dialogue in a certain way. I can't think of any reasons not to go fishing through companion quest dialogue trees for optimal affection points, just to unlock more companion content faster.
Pretending the companion system isn't flawed (story vs. functionality) is a bit of a stretch, and as you get higher level the problem only get worse. The whole system is just lazy which heavily detracts from the story feel, with the exception of your first (or second) companion who is well integrated into your class story line.
It doesn't take a mathematics major to figure out that the stat system in TOR is inherently flawed. There are stats that add static stats (class primary stats and power) and stats that add scaling stats (crit, surge) meaning that there will be a point at which 1 crit will be worth more than 1 power and vice versa. This will be a math problem, and moddable items will facilitate these variables fully. The mod system allows for people to choose stats (including base stats like Aim and Strength) over stats like Crit and Surge, and I can tell you right now, without having any numbers or idea how some classes work, that there will be an optimal solution, and people will min/max the system in as much time as it takes them to whip together a rough spreadsheet.
Augment slots exacerbate the issue further, as they provide "free" stats on top of the moddable nature of items. If they just give raid gear Augment slots no one crafts, and if you don't give raid gear augment slots, crafting is mandatory. If I can get a raid drop epic and strip its mods to put them in a craftable item with an augment slot, there really won't be much variety to the game.
If this is what the final version will be, I almost feel ashamed for the folks down in Austin for this obvious and major oversight. They may as well take the stats off of everything and just put a rating on gear if it remains as it is at current since there will only be one "correct" way to itemize.
[COLOR="DarkOrange"][SIZE="3"]There is basically no endgame![/SIZE][/COLOR]
This is probably the biggest hangup of all as it means that TOR devolves into nothing more than a single player game with a monthly fee until there is something worth paying for to progress my character.
I don't want to read some smug idiot posting about how "Molten Core wasn't in WoW at launch" because it was. Patch 1.1 was the launch patch, look it up on WoWPedia. Was it buggy? Yes. Was everything in it except for Ragnaros killable? Yes. WoW also came out in 2004, and is the reference to what games that want to be taken seriously need to live up to. I don't care if you love or hate WoW, but I think it's pretty sad if you're emotionally invested enough in a game to hate it.
In every build so far, endgame has consisted of virtually zero fully functional content although it is getting more plentiful each build, with new issues cropping up every build as well. There are daily quests on Ilum and Belsavis, and 3 level 50 flashpoints that are nearly functional currently.
Hard mode instances are just scaled up versions of the originals and blatantly untested. No boss mechanics are different, and the encounters are extremely hit or miss in terms of difficulty (some are unbeatable currently.) Based on how poorly most flashpoint content has been implemented on their initial pass throughout my time in beta, I have very little faith that the Hard modes will be balanced for live and they will likely be entirely too simple if what's on the servers now is any indication.
Eternity Vault is buggy. Leaping at a turret on the first trash pull throws you into space and disconnects you until your raid group kicks you, leaves the instance, and resets the phase. The second boss desyncs from the instance and is unkillable without the ability to avoid his attacks, which is basically the entire fight. I don't know how many bosses are in the Eternity Vault, but it will be down within 2 weeks, and all Hard Modes within a month based on what I saw and the fact we were able to rag-tag together a random pug in greens and beat the first boss with virtually no information on him in 4 pulls.
Non-moddable crafting is completely useless at the level cap. All trainer learned items when fully RE'd to Artifact quality are lower rating than the lowest rated Operation drops. All Schematics that drop from Ops make Artifact quality gear right away, so the RE system is entirely useless in the grand scheme of the game.
Space Combat is an afterthought like a fart in the breeze. Although it scales up with you as you level, there is nothing challenging or notable at the end of the journey. If you level all the way to 50 before doing any kind of Space Combat, all but 3 of the missions will be painfully simple because of ship upgrades. This still feels like a totally half-baked feature and the only reason people will do it is for easy, fast, XP while leveling and free credits at the level cap.
Skill trees are 100% illusion of choice. There is only 1 right way to spend talent points and be effective at your intended role. There is a reason WoW is abandoning this terrible design, and it's because you might make a total of 2 real choices when filling them out. They are also a trap for new or inexperienced players.
Total lack of macro support makes things like trinkets and off the GCD skills annoying to use as they require individual key presses. This makes skills like my "causes next cast to be instant" skill harder to use an an emergency than it should be. Why would I use it on anything but my biggest heal?
There is no LFG tool and every single flashpoint falls between planets, meaning that in order to assemble a group you have to wait on the fleet stations and hope you randomly find people, stay on the planet just before it and wait for people to finish the planet to join you, or hope you can catch people at the beginning of the next planet before they feel too far in to leave and come back. It is incredibly inconvenient to get groups together for flashpoints, and even with servers queue'd out to the max for the beta weekend, it is a nightmare getting groups for anything but Black Talon/Eseless (which only require 2 people, and spec doesn't matter at all.) The Hammer is just after Coruscant/DK, and it took over 20 minutes to find a healer when we had 3 people waiting to go. We got him through sending random unsolicited tells.
[SIZE="3"]Final Thoughts[/SIZE]
From what I've seen of TOR since August, I could not in good conscience recommend that people who really want to experience that whole MMO feeling all over again waste their time on TOR. It brings nothing meaningful to the table and will be coasting to success on what's left of Bioware's reputation and the Star Wars license.
People who are excited to leave other MMOs and come play this will only be disappointed by its endgame offerings, and this will be a giant step backwards for the MMORPG genre as a whole.
TOR is simply not good enough to pay a monthly fee for.
For tl;dr ppl:
The summary is basicly: we only saw the first 20ish levels of the game, which is the actual good part, the later parts of the game are filled with padding, grind, a shitton of usual MMO kill-quests, and comparatively very little amount of actual class and story content, that in the end gets chocked to oblivion under the mountains of filler. He also criticized the complete pointlessness of the crafting system, saying that even the most valuable crafted items are just bellow the more basic looted stuff at max level. The rest are just bitching about things that are ultimately necessary compromises for the sake of the MMO gameplay.
After this, my enthusiasm decreased enough to go into wait-and-see mode. I was fully prepared to buy it later in December, but I think I'll wait a month or two. By that time there should be enough player feedback to determine if the post-20 content is really as bad as this guy claims. And it seems there are other long time testers who agree with him completely.
To be honest, I can easily imagine EA trying to rush the game through the door, first giving a taste of the actual good part of it to the public, while not offering an actual long open beta to allow for a really educated decision. So yeah, after this, it looks suspiciously like the usual demo-tactic. Offer a glimpse of what's good about the game and don't show what's the rest of it is like.
This weekend test made me forget about the earlier bitching from various people in the beta about how lackluster the game actually is. Almost made the do a 1st day buy. Thankfully this post reminded me that with such an ambitious project and previous dark clouds gathering around it, it's very unwise to go out and buy it based on the first few days worth of content.
Doesn't really surprise me one bit, but i'll take it as it comes.
Edit: fail quote, but who cares.[/quote]
yeah this weekend thing is indeed extremely good marketing, thanks for this quote, I also actually thought this game could AT THE VERY LEAST bring back some wow memories but it surely doesnt look that way. I wonder why old top guilds like DnT and Afterlife are lining up for TOR tho.
I don't care if you love or hate WoW, but I think it's pretty sad if you're emotionally invested enough in a game to hate it.
he makes good points lol.
that being said , i enjoyed the weekend and will buy the game and well, i will find out for
myself whats after level 24
well, i'm probably a sucker.
You registered your Pre-Order code on 11.28.2011
i really enjoyed this weeked, even if i had play really sparse.
i will not play to much in endgame anyway to be disappointed, i hope diablo 3 is coming before i will reach max level .
I doubt that is true. Why make a MMO with a subscription free, but make everything past level 20 crappy so that no one decides to resub?
People forget to unsub or are lazy and avoid unsubbing It's a well known marketing effect that makes monthly rebills much more lucrative than straight retail sales.
interesting points we'll just have to play it and see what happens past level 20 but my playthrough with my sith marauder didnt feel like filler. Sure the planet of balmorra (where were the dark elfs ) felt abit meh, but after that you get to travel to naar shada which is very nice.
One thing I dont agree is losing the story as its so long, he just has to pay more attention. I havent played WoW but that seems to be one of the facts most WoW fanboys like to drag up, oh the story is so long, you lose focus of whats happening etc etc
But this game is so much more than just the main story, all the side quests really draw you in and while he may have valid points about playing in the betas we dont yet know if there are any differences between the betas and the final build and also what bioware has in store further up the games lifespan.
What I can say about this game is that although it isnt no where near perfect, I really enjoyed it and it has a nice foundation upon to which bioware can build something really massive. And thats what mmos are, they're always changing, evolving and so on.
I was sceptical of playing another mmo after eve online and star wars galaxies, those games reminded me of video games back in the late 80s and early 90s where there was no real story, you would just do something over and over again forever, but after playing SW TOR i really see some of the benefits of mmos.
But i digress as I've only scratched the surface of this huge game. Cant wait to scratch some more come december
Dont mess with God, he can impregnate your girlfriend/wife without taking his pants off!
I've played dozens of MMO's over the years including every major MMO since the 90's. I'm getting that same vibe I did when I played the open WoW beta many years ago. SWTOR just feels like it will be fun. There's just something there somewhere which tells me I will enjoy it. I have no clue about what end-game will be like. I also have no clue about how open-world pvp will be, which I happen to love. There's so many thing's I have clue about, but it seems like a well thought out game with great polish. My Spider-sense just keep telling me I have to pre-order it.
As a comparison I remember I was looking very much forward to AoC. After time moved on my gut-feeling kept telling me there was something wrong. I didn't want to listen to myself because I wanted AoC to succeed. I've been a Robert E. Howard fan since I was a little boy. The Hyborean world always had a special place in my heart. Even when I tried the beta and the beginner zone was awesome I still had that feeling something wasn't right. I kept telling myself I had to stop being paranoid because what I had seen was awesome. I bought the game and it turned out the only thing that was polished about AoC was the beginner zone. The rest was a mess it took a year to clean up. Sometimes you just know in your heart if you got a winner on your hands or not. I'm getting that feeling that SWTOR is the real-deal.
I had the same feeling during the wow-beta. I remember I didn't really want to like the game because I hated the kiddy-graphics, but despite my initial reactions I was having a blast. I played WoW for over a year before I realized it was getting stale and boring to me. A year is a hell of a long time to play a game. Even if you only play it for a month you will get amazing value for money compared to other games in my opinion.
gonna post a couple (many) screenshots i made (no UI, low compression, best quality possible @ 1mb/pic) and split them into planets (each spoiler contains 5-6 1mb pics, be advised)
Alderaan 1
Spoiler:
Alderaan 2
Spoiler:
Alderaan 3
Spoiler:
Alderaan 4
Spoiler:
wall of text to make it fit
wall of text to make it fit
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some good points in that long post, was looking for reasons to play or not to play it, as i kinda enjoyed, but grew more bored the more i played..
so past lvl 20, i lvled to 28, saw 5 planets , plenty of story and if i would tell that story takes hour to complete on a planet on swtor forums i would get flamed to oblivion , but its honest truth
First planet that have supposedly most story, still have barely 2 hours of it ? second planet have around same amount because it spans over long zone, and traveling alone takes time, third zone, apart last quest... you couldnt tell if it was story quests or random bullshit quests , and all together probably not even 2 hours, fourth planet, i was 24 lvl for 20-24 lvl planet when entering, so i decided ill skip, then i kinda enjoyed it a bit, did some quests, but eventually said ill skip it, managed to finish 70% of that zone story quests in half hour maybe, and leave the zone , tatooine or what that huge expansive desert planet is, story is going to total shit and i barely even care about , i end up doing 20 sidequests and 1 story quest taking 5 mins, and i repeat that another 2-3 times, and give up
while its natural for me to grow bored and unattached before beta ends because you feel nothing will matter, and all will be lost, but at same time it got more and more boring
i still might buy game, as i enjoyed it to some extent, but its mmo, time consuming drug, with monthly fee..
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Anyway it's beta test stuff the game wont look bad once all the bells and whistles are released with the game at launch.
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It's a well known marketing effect that makes monthly rebills much more lucrative than straight retail sales.
