5981

What happens in that case, for instance when you’re a light side sith warrior?

5982

If you’re playing a Jedi Knight it doesn’t really start getting good until mid-Coruscant. In general, most of the quests post-Coruscant are setup so that the quest turn ins don’t require a huge amount of going back, although that varies from quest to quest. There are some strange level designs thought that annoy me because they do seem to require more running about than they should. For example, I don’t understand why the space stations can’t have the elevator door take you directly to your ship instead of having yet another longish corridor that you have to run to to get to your ship hatch.

5983

Oh come on. It’s adding hours to your /playtime. You understand that it’s a well-nigh universal MMO design goal to prolong time to level cap, right? You have to admit they have about as much content as a MMO on a budget can reasonably hope for at launch, but of course they’re padding it as much as they can with travel time, too.

5984

It does get bettter. Later planets make it easy to set a bind point near most of the quest-givers, so when you’re done you can zip back instantly. And most planets are much more interesting to begin with. Coruscant is safe and sterile. As my new consular’s companion noted when entering the Senate: “Strange place. Why need so much space for so few people?”

5985

There are many ways to prolong the time to level cap. Injecting travel time is one of the least inspired and most tedious.

Also, the budget comment? Hilarious.

In terms of quantity of content, once you get over the voice acting it’s not really all that impressive. The stories are cool, but the execution is a relentless repetition of kill ten rats.

5986

Not understanding the Coruscant comments. I agree with the general point that sometimes the planets outstay their welcome, but in terms of flow they work better than almost any MMO I’ve ever experienced, especially Coruscant. You have your class quest, plus the main quest for the area, and as you move through the area doing those two quests you come across local quest givers. If you do all the quests in the area, you retrace your steps back to the beginning of the zone, handing in the quests in reverse order as you go. Simples. The map is extremely helpful in this regard (especially the fact that you can move with it transparent and get your overall orientation).

OTOH, if one is looking for a more “wander around randomly and see what happens” type of gameplay (like Bethesda, say), then you aren’t going to “get” the quest flow in this game, which is very definitely on rails, but none the worse for what it is.

As to the lots of walking around thing - try ACTUALLY WALKING across Tattoine (especially if, like me, you’re so useless at making and managing your money you can’t afford speeder training or a speeder yet). I did a bit of that the other day. Wonderfully immersive.

I love walking in games. I used to walk around in LOTRO a lot too - ahh, the country air, the atmospheric music! :)

Another point: the walking thing reminds me of the big problem with the superhero MMOs. Genre-wise, they can’t afford to not give you travel powers (“mount”) very early on. Yet that’s precisely what makes their game worlds seem “small” to players who are accustomed to using shanks’ pony for the first half of an MMO (when actually the superhero MMO zones are fairly normal-sized - I remember a test someone did on the Champions Online forums comparing CO’s Millennium City with one of the WoW continents (across), and MC turned out to be not that much smaller as a zone than the WoW one, yet it seems small because you can zip about in it really fast as a superhero with a travel power, from the moment you first encounter it). Maybe that’s the reason only crazy folks like Cryptic have tried to make superhero MMOs - other developers are just too sensible, realising that they’re just making a rod for their own back :)

5987

There are better games for this play style out there. Star Wars, and many of the modern MMOs, is just not catering to the let’s go see what happens crowd. The Datacrons kind of cater to that, but sandbox players would be advised to wait for other games… maybe GW2.

5988

I’m a bit surprised at this because the trend for years now has been to get away from this. WoW has even implemented a way (for some quests) of turning them in where you stand as soon as you complete them.

All the wasted time in MMOs bothers me more and more. I don’t have the patience for grinding unless you catch me on the right day in the right mood.

5989

I didn’t see a followup on this (I may have missed it) but apparently the suspensions for farming nodes on Ilum was a real thing:

“Second, a smaller number of accounts were warned or temporarily suspended for exploiting loot containers on Ilum. To be completely clear, while players may choose to travel to Ilum earlier than the recommended level (40+) and may loot containers if they can get to them, in the cases of those customers that were warned or temporarily suspended, they were systematically and repeatedly looting containers in very high numbers resulting in the game economy becoming unbalanced.”

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=120099

So, yeah, I guess their customer service really is just that awful. Remember folks, you can loot chests, but loot too many and you’ll be suspended…

5990

Coruscant is the worst force-forsaken planet in the game. It is something to be endured to get to the good stuff.

5991

Possibly, I can’t off-hand thing of a planet I liked less. I’m not sure it’s worse than Typhon. Ord Mantell as kind of fun though, so Coruscant may be the worst for Smugglers and Troopers.

I do feel like the Jedi Knight story started to dig it’s hooks into me somewhere midway through Coruscant. It still hasn’t let go, although I preferred Chapter One to Chapter Two.

5992

Taris is the worst planet I’ve seen Empire side. I felt like a Captain Planet villain the whole time…

5993

I love Taris. Basically, its one big loveletter to KOTOR and some of stories there are heartbreaking.

Nar Shadar on the other hand is a mean,evil, good for nothing extremely boring planet that needs to be taken out.

Actually, I think the further ahead one gets, the less development time it seems that each planet has gotten. Some of the little tricks, immersion adders and so forth that were there on the first few planets, are missing on the latter ones.

I’m still enjoying the game, but I’ll probably not resub since I’m not in it for the grinding, and I fear I’m running out of class story soon (lvl29) which would make the game into any other mmo.

And no, I cant go through Curoscant a 5th time with a new character to get a new story.

anyways, fun game, for a month or possibly two.

5994

Nope, you’re just reaching the end of Chapter 1. Still plenty more class story ahead.

5995

Oh? So Chapter 2 is already there? I could have sworn it wasnt, but nice! thanks!

5996

it takes 30-45min to get together a group from nagging people in general (due to an utter lack of a lfg system) then another 15-30min to slog through trash-filled hallways to get to the entrance.

5997

Nah, on my server it takes 10-15 minutes to get a group together at max, and most people can get there pretty easily.

We don’t need no stinkin’ dungeon teleporter gimmick in the game.

5998

Besides there is kind of a teleporter to the dungeon entrance, it’s the Fast Pass to the Fleet ability. The hard part is getting back to wherever you were after finishing the dungeon.

5999

Fast Pass to the Fleet? Where do I get/activate that?

6000

It’s a free ability all characters get at some point relatively early in the game – maybe low teens (?). If you don’t see it on your toolbar, check for it in the Abilities window under the “General” tab.

The main downside is it has an incredibly long cooldown, however, if you’ve got a security key (either physical or smartphone) you can buy consumable Fleet Passes at the Security Key vendor. They are fairly expensive until you get high level though, IIRC they run for 1k a pop. I try to use my free long cooldown Transport to the Fleet first, but have a few consumable passes in case I need them.

I might be getting all these names a bit wrong, so search around a bit. I’d fire up the game and double check, but it’s down for maintenance.