Star Wars: The Old Republic

Dejin · 2011-11-13T14:27:11.000Z

Andrew:

It’ll be interesting to see if
a) they manage to pull off class balance
b) people actually believe they are balanced
Culture in MMOs can be weird, and people can be obsessed with which class is the “best” even if they are about the same.

Is there actually an MMO where people believe it is balanced? I always assume human nature says everyone complains that the other classes are better, and if they’re holding their own or doing better than holding their own, it’s because they have skillz, not because the classes are balanced right.

Nephrinn · 2011-11-13T14:34:02.000Z

Blackadar pretty much told us what we already know: its a WoW clone with a Star Wars theme. If you go into it knowing that, you’ll probably come away with a positive impression.

The big thing holding it up is the story. If they can hide the mundane quest system with an interesting enough story, then I think it will do well. So far, it appears that they’ve achieved that.

WoW + KOTOR/Mass Effect equals a win in in my book.

Marcus · 2011-11-13T15:21:24.000Z

Nephrinn:

WoW + KOTOR/Mass Effect equals a win in in my book.

That’s a fucking win in my book!

Murbella · 2011-11-13T16:10:22.000Z

SWTOR is a mmorpg and thus will share many common mechanics with other games in the genre. If you’re expecting it to be a flight sim, a fps or any genre other than a mmorpg, you’re going to be disappointed.

Without Nda’ing much, i’d think of it as a kotor mod of a mass effect mmorpg. I can’t really explain it that much, but that is just how it feels to me.

I will say this though, a lot of the people in beta have just played the starter area (kind of an intro to the game), so none of us really know what will happen down the road. Well, unless they played A TON i guess…

Desslock · 2011-11-13T16:45:36.000Z

Was going to try a little in this test, but took me a long time to download and get ready this afternoon. Then I saw that there were queues of 80+ people. Never had to wait in a queue to play a game before, so back to Skyrim.

Marcin · 2011-11-13T17:37:46.000Z

… 80+ and you gave up?

Pretty sure I started out as 3124.

Desslock · 2011-11-13T17:44:16.000Z

Marcin:

… 80+ and you gave up?

Pretty sure I started out as 3124.

Jesus.

Marcin · 2011-11-13T17:57:48.000Z

That’s only like 20 minutes or so. Today it was down to 124, which was about 2-3 minutes, and just now I got in w/o a wait.

Just saying.

Brettmcd · 2011-11-13T19:06:55.000Z

Ive played it a lot, and it feels way too much like playing a single player rpg. Not sure why I would want to pay every month a fee to be able to do that when I could just go play Mass Effect or KOTOR.

garin · 2011-11-13T19:20:42.000Z

Brettmcd:

Ive played it a lot, and it feels way too much like playing a single player rpg. Not sure why I would want to pay every month a fee to be able to do that when I could just go play Mass Effect or KOTOR.

Presumably because you’ve already played Mass Effect and KOTOR.

Brettmcd · 2011-11-13T19:25:07.000Z

garin:

Presumably because you’ve already played Mass Effect and KOTOR.

There are a ton of single player rpgs out there that wont charge me a monthly fee for the priviledge of playing them.

Mazuo · 2011-11-13T19:33:22.000Z

TOR provides a lot of opportunity to play with others. I’m personally looking very forward to it with my friends.

Wallapuctus · 2011-11-13T20:31:22.000Z

Brett, try Dark Souls! It’s my RPG of the year.

Dawn_Falcon · 2011-11-13T22:18:40.000Z

Wallapuctus:

Brett, try Dark Souls! It’s my RPG of the year.

I’m not sure even Brett is that masochistic.

I’ve satisfied my curiosity about it by watching some of my students play it. Dying with /remarkable/ speed, heh.

Marcin · 2011-11-13T22:32:02.000Z

Marcin:

Er guys, isn’t the NDA still up? :) Or at least one more week until the massive stress test, I suppose.

I will use the loophole and talk about my potential future purchases instead. I wasn’t considering SWTOR among them at all, now I am. Only considering it though, I just don’t have the time plus there’s ALL this F2P stuff out there now. But yeah, something happened to change my stance all of a sudden. cough

I am now back to my original plan.

However, I am going to see if I can find a deal on a KOTOR I & II pack and play the crap out of those.

Murbella · 2011-11-13T22:35:49.000Z

Don’t forget to download that restoration pack for kotor II. Sadly i forget the name, but there was a thread about it a while back.

Blackadar · 2011-11-14T05:10:21.000Z

Murbella:

Don’t forget to download that restoration pack for kotor II. Sadly i forget the name, but there was a thread about it a while back.

Do a search on Qt3, keyword restoration and my name and it’ll come up, but also you can Google Darth Stoney’s Restoration Mod. It’s pretty good.

Blackadar · 2011-11-14T05:26:34.000Z

Nephrim:

WoW + KOTOR/Mass Effect equals a win in in my book.

Marcus:

That’s a fucking win in my book!

You know what? I thought the same thing. At least from what I saw, SW:ToR was less than the sum of its parts. Reflecting on my experiences, it didn’t feel like WoW or ME to me. It felt like I was doing an playing a game focusing on only the optional KOTOR quests with a bunch of other people wandering around.

If you look at the 4 archtypes of MMO players (Socializers, Killers, Achievers and Explorers), I’m solidly an explorer. There never was a moment that I went, “hmmm, what’s over that hill?” because I felt like I was always on rails. My secondary traits are split between achiever and socializer. Beyond the normal questing, I didn’t feel like I was achieving much. It’s hard to when you look exactly like the guy standing next to you…and the guy standing next to him…and the guy standing next to him. And as far as the social aspects, well…there really weren’t many. Flashpoints are instances and heroic quests are group quests. There are no Rifts or rift-style events, no public quests and since everyone is basically playing a single-player MMO during questing, there wasn’t any need for group questing. Just me and my bot. Whoopie.

It’s certainly not a bad MMO and I’ll probably give it a shot during the next beta to see if my impressions change. YMMV.

Mike_Cathcart · 2011-11-14T06:25:41.000Z

Thanks, BA, that may have saved me a purchase. I was considering preordering to play with some friends but I think I’m going to wait it out for a couple of months and see what people think of it then. I can play other stuff with those guys :)

Gedd · 2011-11-14T06:33:44.000Z

It’s somewhat public knowledge that there were some nasty queues over the weekend, or at least on Friday night (it was on at least one of the dev’s twitter feed). I’d really like to bend the NDA here a little, but instead I’ll just say this…keep firmly in mind that this is beta, not release. Hypothetically speaking, if I had a new, highly anticipated but untested playground, I might only start out letting a few kids in to the playground so I could observe and make sure the playground was doing ok and there weren’t any pieces of equipment that weren’t working correctly. Once I was sure things were ok, I might let a few more kids in, and observe again for a while. I’d probably keep doing that until things were operating at capacity.