Friday, April 13, 2012

Quit SWTOR. Sucked Then, Sucks Now, Will Suck in 1.2 PT.2


Alright, just to let you guys know, this will probably be one of my last post about SWTOR...

I know. I just love giving my very biased opinion about SWTOR because it's everything I feel is wrong with the MMO genre wrapped up in a big ball of hype and failure-to-deliver. I don't believe I have hated a game this much since...All Points Bulletins. In a way, they are actually very similar.

APB and SWTOR that is. They were both published by EA, both lacked real content, both were hub games and both focused more on advertising than the horrible, broken gameplay.

Maybe I liked Bioware so much  I expected too much? Not sure!

Moving on!


So...by now if you STILL have forced yourself to play SWTOR, you probably have noticed the huge drop in server population unless however, you are on one of the few populated servers. And when I say "few", I literally mean that. If you stroll by the forums, the "loyal" Bioware fans however will make you believe otherwise.

I say this because most of them will consistently deny that most servers are either very empty or near death. They deny it to the point that if you were to show them any evidence of this server population deficiency (let's say the evidence is people on the forums begging for server merges, TORStatus.com and screenshots of empty fleets), they will persist with denial. Usually, citing that they see no issue with population. But...

...I'm sure that has nothing to do with the fact the ones claiming there is no problem are usually on the two or three populated servers.


Anyhoo...Let's talk about how linear SWTOR is!

Now, I understand that a video game can only offer so much as far as exploration goes... But in SWTOR, it's almost as if they just cut the idea of adventure out completely.

First, Bioware claimed all this unique story, decisions matter blah blah blah. I will tell you that, not only are the "class" stories not "unique" because most of the stories (if not all) revolve around the same plot (Hunt this guy down, Stop this super weapon, Hunt this guy down)and they only count for about 10% of the missions. The rest of the missions are all the same for EVERYONE on your faction.


No, it isn't like alot of other MMOs where you have some type of option as to where you might want to do missions... unless you just completely skip those around your level. This is because you follow an invisible path that takes you from quest hub to quest hub, planet to planet etc. If you've played Rift and Warhammer you will know what I mean. Ironically, people from the Warhammer team helped with SWTOR...go figure.

The linearity of SWTOR is so bad that it made it VERY hard for me to make alts after 50. It's worse than a grind. It feels like TORTURE. I know, I know! "But on the SWTOR forum, people say they love making alts!" Yeah, that's because most people that have a bunch of alts still aren't level 50, barely play the game and/or are loyal to anything Bioware does. Probably even working for Bioware.

 I actually had to skip most of the missions on my alt and do PvP for levels just to  get through the tedious grind. PvP was a little better but after doing 100's of matches of the same three maps, I am sure you can imagine that also gets old too.

Transition!


Oh man...end game/ normal content. Wow, not only was it broken, it was broken with the most stupid things I have ever seen in a game. And what made it worse, it's almost as if none of it was tested!

OH WAIT!...It probably wasn't because Bioware didn't allow players to have pre-made max level characters in beta nor did they allow it in this new 1.2 patch (which is why it is failure already; No ranked warzones, overpowered tank assassin class, matches usually unbalanced).

You had things like tons of mobs coming out of no where, couldn't delete missions to the point you HAD to do them, you die when you zone in to a instance after a wipe, bosses spawn that didn't reset, boss mechanics not working properly, companions not working properly, getting stuck on your ship etc etc. Some of these issues had work arounds, most didn't.  It was almost as if I we were playing a beta SWTOR still.   It was so frustrating, people would vent in guild chat, in general chat, on the forums, on my sleep, on my blog...well, you get the picture.

Another problem I have with SWTOR is the lifelessness. When every mob seems like it's just sitting there, waiting for you to kill it, there is no thrill in that. It's boring. Not only that, but ALL the mobs are usually spread out in the same format /pattern almost as if they just copy and pasted them up and down. Then having to dig your way through a tunnel of enemies only to have to dig yourself back through them...ugh.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good read. I agree with you. SWTOR is in a horrible state and it isn't fun. The interesting thing about that is you can't really patch in fun easily. This patch proves that.

Anonymous said...

Great! You've made my day. Apparently EA decided not to release the game in all European Union countries. I'm from Romania and can't download the game from Origin. Other Romanians decided that this is ok for them and managed to get a copy of the game from Amazon etc. They don't care that EA gives a rats' tail on them...

But I've taken it personally :-) And my way of "punishing" EA is to never play a game from them again. They don't care about me, I don't care about them.

However I'm a huge SW fan, ever since 30 years ago, so was kind of said that I don't play the game.

You've told me (along with many others on many forums) that the game sucks! So I'm glad now, that I didn't spend money in the first place.

Guess EA did me a favor, afterall :)

EA... lern to treat your potential customers well... you do not respect us, no matter where we're from, we do not respect you and hope you go bankrupt. Cheers!

Anonymous said...

Couldn't agree more. It's obvious, at least to me, that EA/Bioware phoned it in with SWTOR. I can't find two nice things to say about the game in its current state.

The customer support forums tell me I'm far from alone.

There are simply too many examples of their complete disregard for even TRYING for it to be just first MMO jitters or whatever people want to say to defend this horrible game.

A supposed former employee once wrote that all the company seems to care about is the voice acting, it shows. There's not much game to be found, well, not good game at least.

Here's a sad one; my stepson and I had more fun playing Perfect World International than we did with SWTOR. Loads more.

We didn't care about 30 days free time for level 50s only, it was that they thought anyone would want to come back to the "game" when 5 seconds tells you nothing the community wanted fixed was even touched and more things were broken, including classes.

There's just no excuse big enough to compensate for all the things they've ignored.

EA seems to corrupt everything it touches. Too bad it got its greasy stumps on a company that used to mean something.

Bioware should just shutter and let their good people (if any remain) find a company that tries to put out a real product and performs actual testing before shoving it out the door.

I don't care what company puts a game out. I just want that game to be worth my time and money by providing more entertainment than broken ideas that should have been fixed before release. In SWTOR the ratio is just too far gone. It's like they're trying to sink the thing.

Anonymous said...

I keep hoping it will go free to play soon. I may log back in if it's free, when my other MMO's have low pop - but my thought here is this: It isn't star wars , it's 4,000 years before Star Wars - doesn't that deeply depress anybody else that Princess Leia and Darth Talon are 4k years away from being born?

And the Music isn't star wars - it's 1930-1940's World War 2 period music. Isn't that deeply depressing to listen to *Every Day*? The clothing is from looted corpses and really looks tacky - every stitch.

No in-game character customization? No long hairstyles for females? Your special armor is what you wear, no matter what it looks like, and you don't have any choice how you look?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? This game is not fun. This game is not complete.

Space sucks. Rail games suck. The characters look like cartoons, I prefer realism.

Realism Bioware has demonstrated before, is absent here. I hate 5 minute cut scenes piled into mission quests. Just let me speed level dam it.

How many extra hours of voice acting does this game have? Why does everything look so depressing in this game? Why is everybody so corrupt in the game(I mean everybody, every npc).

The world they created there sucks, and you find yourself wishing you could time warp to the time of Luke Skywalker in a New York minute. Very depressing game, inside and out.

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