Star Wars: The Old Republic

Brad_Wardell · 2012-01-03T16:20:42.000Z

Just curious, is anyone else here playing with their kids?

I have two sons who are part of our guild who I go questing with. I tellya, one of the best experiences.

gurugeorge · 2012-01-03T16:53:11.000Z

rei:

The INI doesn’t work for ATI. I just turn morphological on via RadeonPro.

Just for reference, running Vista 64 bit on a DualCore E7200 2.43Ghz cranked up to 3.8Ghz with Arctic air cooler, 8G ram, and an ATI HD5770 vidcard, I get the fastest settings with all-maxed in-game graphics (at around 60fps at 1280x1024) with these settings in CCC (found by a combination of forum trawling and experiment):-

All default except:-

4xAA:- forced (n/a in game)

16xAF:- forced (“high” in game - not sure if there’s a contradiction here but I’m not spoiling my "magic formula! :) )

Catalyst AI (I think this is an important one for some reason):- Texture Filtering Quality to Performance, untick “enable surface format optimization”

Wait for vertical refresh:- Quality, always on, forced (off in-game)

OpenGL settings (shouldn’t make any difference but appears to, in tandem with forced Vsync):- Triple buffering ON (ticked)

YMMV

rossm · 2012-01-03T17:04:33.000Z

Brad Wardell:

Just curious, is anyone else here playing with their kids?

I have two sons who are part of our guild who I go questing with. I tellya, one of the best experiences.

Playing with my fiance. It is enjoyable. We aren’t in a guild though.

We get ahead of each other a lot, and one person will play an alt while the other catches up. Making groups is a lot easier than doing it from scratch though. Most heroic missions we can do by ourselves, too.

idrisz · 2012-01-03T17:04:55.000Z

Dejin:

On a semi-related note, is anyone else weirded out at taking all these drugs in game? I don’t mind the health packs, but I feel weird drugging my character up on stimulants. Somehow Potions in fantasy games don’t bother me, but this does.

you are a user!!!

Nesrie · 2012-01-03T17:19:29.000Z

Dejin:

On a semi-related note, is anyone else weirded out at taking all these drugs in game? I don’t mind the health packs, but I feel weird drugging my character up on stimulants. Somehow Potions in fantasy games don’t bother me, but this does.

I am waiting for some parent association to freak out over this. It’s a teen rating but drug use isn’t listed. Seriously though, I too feel the two seem different even though the results are the same.

Dejin · 2012-01-03T17:31:20.000Z

idrisz:

you are a user!!!

That was pretty amusing idrisz!

Union_Carbide · 2012-01-03T17:33:46.000Z

Dejin:

On a semi-related note, is anyone else weirded out at taking all these drugs in game? I don’t mind the health packs, but I feel weird drugging my character up on stimulants. Somehow Potions in fantasy games don’t bother me, but this does.

It was a lot worse in SWG. A typical play session for my character involved:
[ol]
[li]Go watch strippers in the cantina
[/li][li]Inject 3 or 4 different stims
[/li][li]Trip balls
[/li][li]Fight Rancors in her underwear (whether she was fighting rancors while wearing only underwear, or the rancors that were in her underwear, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader)
[/li][/ol]
After the combat drugs wore off she’d vomit for 20 minutes straight, then start it all over again.

Chaplin · 2012-01-03T17:41:05.000Z

rossm:

Playing with my fiance. It is enjoyable. We aren’t in a guild though.

We get ahead of each other a lot, and one person will play an alt while the other catches up. Making groups is a lot easier than doing it from scratch though. Most heroic missions we can do by ourselves, too.

Wait. What? My girlfriend is interested in Old Republic, but I worry the story focus or recent trend in casual MMO’s will make it so playing it together will be somewhere between counterproductive to breaking the experience.

Can you play this one as a duo then and still enjoy the story while also not find questing ridiculously easy (because MMO’s seem to be built as solo experiences/difficulty with only raids offered as a multi person challenge buried way past any point we would be playing)?

Kadath · 2012-01-03T17:49:27.000Z

rossm:

There’s a patch tomorrow I believe, and this is among the fixes.

I hope it will remember which damn channels I want and my other preferences that it loses each time I log…

Dejin · 2012-01-03T17:50:21.000Z

Union Carbide:

It was a lot worse in SWG. A typical play session for my character involved:
[ol]
[li]Go watch strippers in the cantina
[/li][li]Inject 3 or 4 different stims
[/li][li]Trip balls
[/li][li]Fight Rancors in her underwear (whether she was fighting rancors while wearing only underwear, or the rancors that were in her underwear, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader)
[/li][/ol]
After the combat drugs wore off she’d vomit for 20 minutes straight, then start it all over again.

:-)

45

Dejin · 2012-01-03T17:51:08.000Z

Kadath:

I hope it will remember which damn channels I want and my other preferences that it loses each time I log…

No sign of a fix for the Guild Chat bug last time I checked.

Dejin · 2012-01-03T17:52:28.000Z

Chaplin:

Wait. What? My girlfriend is interested in Old Republic, but I worry the story focus or recent trend in casual MMO’s will make it so playing it together will be somewhere between counterproductive to breaking the experience.

Can you play this one as a duo then and still enjoy the story while also not find questing ridiculously easy (because MMO’s seem to be built as solo experiences/difficulty with only raids offered as a multi person challenge buried way past any point we would be playing)?

You could skip the companions during questing. That should almost half your combat power, so the two of you together would only be slightly more overpowered than a typical solo player using a companion.

rossm · 2012-01-03T17:55:19.000Z

Chaplin:

Wait. What? My girlfriend is interested in Old Republic, but I worry the story focus or recent trend in casual MMO’s will make it so playing it together will be somewhere between counterproductive to breaking the experience.

Can you play this one as a duo then and still enjoy the story while also not find questing ridiculously easy (because MMO’s seem to be built as solo experiences/difficulty with only raids offered as a multi person challenge buried way past any point we would be playing)?

The story isn’t a problem. The game facilitates grouping while doing quests. You actually get social points for talking to npcs with other players.

As for the difficulty, I don’t see it as a problem. The game (and mmos in general) are more about time than difficulty, and It’s quicker with 2 people. If you do all of the quests you end up so overleveled that everything is easy anyway.

We play in the same room, so sometimes we do quests together and sometimes we do them separate. We group up for heroic quests, bonus series, flashpoints, etc.

rossm · 2012-01-03T17:56:02.000Z

Kadath:

I hope it will remember which damn channels I want and my other preferences that it loses each time I log…

Don’t count on it for the near future.

Union_Carbide · 2012-01-03T18:31:47.000Z

Chaplin:

Can you play this one as a duo then and still enjoy the story while also not find questing ridiculously easy (because MMO’s seem to be built as solo experiences/difficulty with only raids offered as a multi person challenge buried way past any point we would be playing)?

One thing that should be mentioned is that if you aren’t playing the same class, you can both go into each others’ story mission instances. They’re only restricted to a single player of their intended class, they can otherwise have a full group.

You won’t be able to actively participate in their story conversations, but you’ll be able to watch them at least.

idrisz · 2012-01-03T18:34:39.000Z

you can watch your sith inquisitor buddy turn into

awesomeness

DARTH IMPERIALUS.

Reldan · 2012-01-03T18:45:57.000Z

When doing Vector’s companion quests I have noticed that while he’s talking in front of me, he’s also standing in the background next to Kaliyo doing random shipboard tasks. Very strange.

MichaelD · 2012-01-03T18:50:47.000Z

Reldan:

When doing Vector’s companion quests I have noticed that while he’s talking in front of me, he’s also standing in the background next to Kaliyo doing random shipboard tasks. Very strange.

Multitasking.

theborbes · 2012-01-03T21:30:54.000Z

So… I know lots of people are digging this but I’m finding it very hard to stay interested in coruscant.

I don’t know if calling an MMO repetitive is fair criticism since it relies on it to a degree, but I find the design really bad. Example, running through a large, barren senate chamber to turn in a quest. It’s like 5 minutes of running with no value. Nothing on the way, no real reason why this space exists.

I really liked the idea of having an alignment within a faction. Being a light side Jedi in the sith empire was fun… At first.

So, big question is… Does it get better? Is it worth struggling through coruscant in order to get to a zone that’s actually fun to explore?

MrPerson · 2012-01-03T21:34:40.000Z

theborbes:

I don’t know if calling an MMO repetitive is fair criticism since it relies on it to a degree, but I find the design really bad. Example, running through a large, barren senate chamber to turn in a quest. It’s like 5 minutes of running with no value. Nothing on the way, no real reason why this space exists.

The pointless running around is one amongst several awful design choices.