Personally I stopped playing Star Wars: The Old Republic a couple weeks after I started playing it. The game was actually pretty interesting but ultimately I decided I was burned out on the 'run around between quest hubs' style of game. Especially the running part. But some of you might not be so burned out on running around and might want to give the game a shot since it did feel reasonably slick...
They're apparently running a free weekend deal where anyone who doesn't have an account can sign up and play for free this weekend. I seem to recall it took years for World of Warcraft to start giving away free trial accounts so I'm not sure what that bodes for SW:TOR. Maybe it means free trials are just great deals? It doesn't cost them much to offer (they have to build the web pages and such but each individual account has no marginal cost) and it might get some people to actually buy the game after the trial. It certainly feels like a great way for people who are playing to try to snare some of their friends into playing as well.
Maybe it's worth checking out? The download is pretty substantial but it could be worth checking out if you haven't yet. Free is a decent price!
Showing posts with label Star Wars: The Old Republic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Wars: The Old Republic. Show all posts
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Friday, December 30, 2011
Star Wars: The Old Republic Initial Thoughts
I got started on the game yesterday and played for about 6 hours after work. I'm pretty sure that's more time spent in one sitting than I played Final Fantasy XIV and Star Trek Online combined. Time will tell if it manages to keep my attention but for now my reaction to the game is positive and I think a lot of the people I played World of Warcraft with would like this game too. Here are my first few thoughts about the game...
Looting monsters in the game is done very well. Final Fantasy XI had the best looting system in an MMO that I've played (you didn't have to loot any corpses as the stuff just appeared in your inventory or in your group's loot pool for rolling) but SWTOR is a close second. The closest comparison is WoW where a monster with loot would have a little sparkle appear on its corpse. Right click on it to open the loot window and then click on the loot. Someone made a mod to remove the last stage so you just had to right click the corpse and you'd automatically take the loot. Blizzard eventually added that option to the client. SWTOR comes with that option as well, and a second one beside it in the option menu: autoloot all nearby corpses on right click! AE down a bunch of dudes? One click will loot all the corpses instead of needing to click each one individually! I think back to farming Dire Maul for librams to get the Insane in the Membrane achievement and wish so badly that this option existed in WoW.
There are a couple other good things about loot, too. In WoW you know a corpse has loot when it sparkles but the sparkle was designed to be pretty unobtrusive and therefore could sometimes be missed. SWTOR punches you in the face with the knowledge that loot exists by making a giant pillar of light shine out of any corpse containing loot. The cool part of that is the pillar of light is coloured based on the quality of loot on the corpse. There's no way you'll ever miss a magical item now! I can remember playing my hunter in WoW and having to walk up to every corpse in case it had good stuff... In SWTOR that isn't going to happen. If I don't feel like looting everyone that's fine since I'll always be able to tell when a corpse has good loot from a distance. The other great thing with loot is you can send your 'pet' on a trash run where she'll take all of your vendor trash items from your inventory and run off to vendor them for you. Talk about convenient! I again wish I had that option when farming in Dire Maul.
I like how the control system is customizable and can be made pretty much identical to WoW. One of the worst parts of playing a new game is relearning how to move around in the world. Final Fantasy XI was particularly bad for this but really any change at all takes time to overcome. (I remember playing Ocarina of Time and Dead Rising 2 at the same time and dying a lot when switching between games since they aimed differently.) At any rate in SWTOR I can walk forward by holding down both mouse buttons. I can steer with the mouse. I can strafe with A and D. Jump with the space bar. Just like I moved around in WoW! (The only downside is my character refuses to do a flip when I jump.)
A neat thing with rotating the camera is it made the sound come through different parts of my headphones depending on where I was looking. Maybe I'm just really out of touch but it made me smile when I discovered it.
The game actually feels polished. It's certainly not as smooth as a WoW expansion launch would be, for example, but it feels like this is actually a product ready for sale. (Contrasted with Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Magic Online v2 none of which felt like a product that had even been tested let alone ready for sale.)
The voices actually help a lot with immersion.
My character has a nice butt. This seems silly, I know, but the game is played in 3rd person view and you spend most of the time watching your character run around from behind.
I don't know if I can resolve the tension between the gamer part of me that wants to twink out my dark side points and the moral part of me which doesn't want to do evil things. At one point I was given a prisoner as a guide, and was given a shock collar control so I can shock her if she gets out of line. She was being snarky to some dude I was killing which I think is awesome. But I knew that if I was nice to her I'd probably gain light side points so I kept choosing the option to shock her which gave dark side points. She didn't understand why I was torturing her for no good reason and I don't understand it either. Maybe I'm just not cut out for being evil...
The difficulty seems a tad on the easy side so far. I wandered into a quest hub for level 7s when I was level 4 and was able to clean it out without much trouble. Well, I had to use my self-heal button after every fight... (Which in and of itself is awesome. Out of combat I can channel a heal on myself which fills me up in a few seconds. No need for bandages here!) Everything, that is, except the two group quests which murdered me. I came back and 2-manned one of them at level 8 with another level 8 and did the other one when I was level 10 with a pair of level 7s.
I still don't know anything about what the end game is going to be like. I don't know that I care. The game is certainly fun and I'm really liking the cutscenes and such so playing this as a short term game seems entirely reasonable. Diablo 3 is coming out presumably in the next month or two so I'd be switching to that anyway. So the endgame is pretty much irrelevant!
Looting monsters in the game is done very well. Final Fantasy XI had the best looting system in an MMO that I've played (you didn't have to loot any corpses as the stuff just appeared in your inventory or in your group's loot pool for rolling) but SWTOR is a close second. The closest comparison is WoW where a monster with loot would have a little sparkle appear on its corpse. Right click on it to open the loot window and then click on the loot. Someone made a mod to remove the last stage so you just had to right click the corpse and you'd automatically take the loot. Blizzard eventually added that option to the client. SWTOR comes with that option as well, and a second one beside it in the option menu: autoloot all nearby corpses on right click! AE down a bunch of dudes? One click will loot all the corpses instead of needing to click each one individually! I think back to farming Dire Maul for librams to get the Insane in the Membrane achievement and wish so badly that this option existed in WoW.
There are a couple other good things about loot, too. In WoW you know a corpse has loot when it sparkles but the sparkle was designed to be pretty unobtrusive and therefore could sometimes be missed. SWTOR punches you in the face with the knowledge that loot exists by making a giant pillar of light shine out of any corpse containing loot. The cool part of that is the pillar of light is coloured based on the quality of loot on the corpse. There's no way you'll ever miss a magical item now! I can remember playing my hunter in WoW and having to walk up to every corpse in case it had good stuff... In SWTOR that isn't going to happen. If I don't feel like looting everyone that's fine since I'll always be able to tell when a corpse has good loot from a distance. The other great thing with loot is you can send your 'pet' on a trash run where she'll take all of your vendor trash items from your inventory and run off to vendor them for you. Talk about convenient! I again wish I had that option when farming in Dire Maul.
I like how the control system is customizable and can be made pretty much identical to WoW. One of the worst parts of playing a new game is relearning how to move around in the world. Final Fantasy XI was particularly bad for this but really any change at all takes time to overcome. (I remember playing Ocarina of Time and Dead Rising 2 at the same time and dying a lot when switching between games since they aimed differently.) At any rate in SWTOR I can walk forward by holding down both mouse buttons. I can steer with the mouse. I can strafe with A and D. Jump with the space bar. Just like I moved around in WoW! (The only downside is my character refuses to do a flip when I jump.)
A neat thing with rotating the camera is it made the sound come through different parts of my headphones depending on where I was looking. Maybe I'm just really out of touch but it made me smile when I discovered it.
The game actually feels polished. It's certainly not as smooth as a WoW expansion launch would be, for example, but it feels like this is actually a product ready for sale. (Contrasted with Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Magic Online v2 none of which felt like a product that had even been tested let alone ready for sale.)
The voices actually help a lot with immersion.
My character has a nice butt. This seems silly, I know, but the game is played in 3rd person view and you spend most of the time watching your character run around from behind.
I don't know if I can resolve the tension between the gamer part of me that wants to twink out my dark side points and the moral part of me which doesn't want to do evil things. At one point I was given a prisoner as a guide, and was given a shock collar control so I can shock her if she gets out of line. She was being snarky to some dude I was killing which I think is awesome. But I knew that if I was nice to her I'd probably gain light side points so I kept choosing the option to shock her which gave dark side points. She didn't understand why I was torturing her for no good reason and I don't understand it either. Maybe I'm just not cut out for being evil...
The difficulty seems a tad on the easy side so far. I wandered into a quest hub for level 7s when I was level 4 and was able to clean it out without much trouble. Well, I had to use my self-heal button after every fight... (Which in and of itself is awesome. Out of combat I can channel a heal on myself which fills me up in a few seconds. No need for bandages here!) Everything, that is, except the two group quests which murdered me. I came back and 2-manned one of them at level 8 with another level 8 and did the other one when I was level 10 with a pair of level 7s.
I still don't know anything about what the end game is going to be like. I don't know that I care. The game is certainly fun and I'm really liking the cutscenes and such so playing this as a short term game seems entirely reasonable. Diablo 3 is coming out presumably in the next month or two so I'd be switching to that anyway. So the endgame is pretty much irrelevant!
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Star Wars The Old Republic: Defenestrator!
Getting setup with an account and getting the software for SWTOR took a bit longer than I would have liked yesterday. I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised with how long it took to download and patch the files after buying it online. What was annoying is how the client wouldn't let me even start downloading files until I'd finished signing up for an account. Including a bunch of stupid 'security' questions! It didn't help that Chrome was throwing a hissy fit the whole time about invalid HTTPS certificates. (It turns out my system clock was reset to Jan 2010 and Chrome was _not_ happy about people trying to provide security from the future.)
At any rate I finally got patched up and able to log in just before I went to bed. I didn't create a character or anything; I just checked to see what the server picking window looked like and then went to bed. It gave name, population, type, and time zone. I'm pretty sure I want a light, PvE, east coast server but there were a bunch of them. I found a server status page on their website with the same information and there are still plenty of servers that fit my criteria so I need to pick one based on name. And what a choice that is turning out to be! The server names in this game are insane. Final Fantasy XI used summoned monsters as the names for their servers. Final Fantasy XIV used towns from the various games as their names. World of Warcraft used all sorts of Warcraft based lore as their names. Star Wars? It seems to just be crazy words thrown together!
What is a Firaxan Shark? Who is The Fatman? (As an aside, I googled 'The Fatman' to try to find out who that might be in the Star Wars universe and ended up on a pretty neat philosophy website...) Why haven't more people signed up to play on Drooga's Pleasure Barge?
Maybe Star Wars just has crazier lore than Warcraft. I don't know. What I do know is I want to throw people out of windows so I'm going to create a character on The Defenestrator. Why not! (Unless I get home and have an email from the Old Man telling me to play somewhere else.) (EDIT: We're playing as sith. My character's name is Polemical.)
At any rate I finally got patched up and able to log in just before I went to bed. I didn't create a character or anything; I just checked to see what the server picking window looked like and then went to bed. It gave name, population, type, and time zone. I'm pretty sure I want a light, PvE, east coast server but there were a bunch of them. I found a server status page on their website with the same information and there are still plenty of servers that fit my criteria so I need to pick one based on name. And what a choice that is turning out to be! The server names in this game are insane. Final Fantasy XI used summoned monsters as the names for their servers. Final Fantasy XIV used towns from the various games as their names. World of Warcraft used all sorts of Warcraft based lore as their names. Star Wars? It seems to just be crazy words thrown together!
What is a Firaxan Shark? Who is The Fatman? (As an aside, I googled 'The Fatman' to try to find out who that might be in the Star Wars universe and ended up on a pretty neat philosophy website...) Why haven't more people signed up to play on Drooga's Pleasure Barge?
Maybe Star Wars just has crazier lore than Warcraft. I don't know. What I do know is I want to throw people out of windows so I'm going to create a character on The Defenestrator. Why not! (Unless I get home and have an email from the Old Man telling me to play somewhere else.) (EDIT: We're playing as sith. My character's name is Polemical.)
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Star Wars: The Old Republic Launch
Today is the official launch of the new Star Wars MMO: The Old Republic. I'm not currently playing this game - though I am considering starting up - and I wanted to get a feel for how the launch was going. I did a quick Google search for 'SWTOR login queues' and found a 13 page thread on their forums. That's not so bad... I read it a bit and found that it was only 13 pages long because it was closed by a moderator. The moderator directed people to post in the official 'queue complaint' thread. (It's easier to ignore whiners when they're all in one spot!)
I went to check out the official thread and it turned out they'd actually hit the forum limit on posts in a thread and had to start up a second one. Which is currently up to 415 pages. And is growing faster than I can keep up. For the most part it seems to be pretty standard MMO-launch trolling. I paid for my free month and need access now... I'm already level XX and don't want to re-roll on another server... People are botting to stay connected so they don't get stuck back in the queue... I want more PVP-RP servers... Bioware is the devil... Bioware is awesome, noobs are the devil... Etc... I'm pretty sure I've gotten involved in this sort of thread for things in the past and it makes me weep for myself. And then I find a post that I'm sure is wrong and feel a need to make an account and reply! And then I weep some more...
From what I've been able to gather a lot of the problems are arising from the way Bioware chose to help out hardcore players. They let people sign up quite a while in advance to create guilds. These guilds would then be assigned a server during the early access period and the people who signed up would then get to create characters on those servers to play with their guilds. On the surface that sounds like a good idea. Having to arrange what server to make your characters on is a real pain. Even with FFXI when we played earlier this year it was tricky making sure everyone was on the same server. If I could have just filled out a web form and sent some email invites to my friends to guarantee they join the right server and automatically join a guild? That's pretty sweet!
The problem that's arisen is Bioware didn't properly divide up those guilds. They created a bunch of servers for the early access period and sent all the guilds to those servers. That makes sense, since the people likely to sign up early for a guild are also likely to be the people who pre-ordered well in advance. So you need the guilds set up during the early access period if you're going to get any benefit from the sign-ups at all. Then the game launched for real and they needed more servers. So they put up a bunch of new servers. From what I can gather those servers don't get any guilds on them because they were all assigned to the first wave of servers. This creates two big problems...
First of all anyone joining now who signed up for a guild is locked into one of the first servers. Bioware needed to make more servers because the existing ones were filling up but they're now funneling new players onto those servers so they can play with their guild. Clearly this is a good idea for those guilds but it means already full servers are getting filled up even fuller. This is causing huge queues for anyone on those servers.
Secondly all of the hardcore people are all on that subset of servers which I imagine is going to hurt the communities on the newly created servers. They're going to be populated by people with no existing ties to anyone who got early access to the game or who were keen enough to start a guild before the game launched. This isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing but having spent the last 4 years playing World of Warcraft on a low-pop backwater server I can see why people would want to avoid getting into that situation. It's harder to find enough people whose schedules sync up and who are on equivalent skill levels to enjoy doing endgame content together. It was really hard to find pvp teams, for example, and nearly impossible to find enough people to raid with who weren't either bad or mean.
Of course, as someone with no existing ties to anyone hardcore into SW:TOR and who has no real intention on getting tied up in endgame stuff this actually seems like a good deal for me. Many people who are trying to play now have to wait 3+ hours to log in to their servers while there are servers up with no queues at all. I was on the fence last week on if I wanted to give it a shot or not but I'm definitely going to do so now. Especially since the Old Man said he'd play too!
I don't think my laptop can handle the game so I'm going to have to finally get around to fixing my desktop. I'm also going to be in New Brunswick from the 22nd to the 27th and I imagine there will be board games to play! So I'm thinking I'll probably try to buy the parts I need on the 27th when I get back to Toronto and then start playing on some low population server on the 27th or 28th.
I went to check out the official thread and it turned out they'd actually hit the forum limit on posts in a thread and had to start up a second one. Which is currently up to 415 pages. And is growing faster than I can keep up. For the most part it seems to be pretty standard MMO-launch trolling. I paid for my free month and need access now... I'm already level XX and don't want to re-roll on another server... People are botting to stay connected so they don't get stuck back in the queue... I want more PVP-RP servers... Bioware is the devil... Bioware is awesome, noobs are the devil... Etc... I'm pretty sure I've gotten involved in this sort of thread for things in the past and it makes me weep for myself. And then I find a post that I'm sure is wrong and feel a need to make an account and reply! And then I weep some more...
From what I've been able to gather a lot of the problems are arising from the way Bioware chose to help out hardcore players. They let people sign up quite a while in advance to create guilds. These guilds would then be assigned a server during the early access period and the people who signed up would then get to create characters on those servers to play with their guilds. On the surface that sounds like a good idea. Having to arrange what server to make your characters on is a real pain. Even with FFXI when we played earlier this year it was tricky making sure everyone was on the same server. If I could have just filled out a web form and sent some email invites to my friends to guarantee they join the right server and automatically join a guild? That's pretty sweet!
The problem that's arisen is Bioware didn't properly divide up those guilds. They created a bunch of servers for the early access period and sent all the guilds to those servers. That makes sense, since the people likely to sign up early for a guild are also likely to be the people who pre-ordered well in advance. So you need the guilds set up during the early access period if you're going to get any benefit from the sign-ups at all. Then the game launched for real and they needed more servers. So they put up a bunch of new servers. From what I can gather those servers don't get any guilds on them because they were all assigned to the first wave of servers. This creates two big problems...
First of all anyone joining now who signed up for a guild is locked into one of the first servers. Bioware needed to make more servers because the existing ones were filling up but they're now funneling new players onto those servers so they can play with their guild. Clearly this is a good idea for those guilds but it means already full servers are getting filled up even fuller. This is causing huge queues for anyone on those servers.
Secondly all of the hardcore people are all on that subset of servers which I imagine is going to hurt the communities on the newly created servers. They're going to be populated by people with no existing ties to anyone who got early access to the game or who were keen enough to start a guild before the game launched. This isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing but having spent the last 4 years playing World of Warcraft on a low-pop backwater server I can see why people would want to avoid getting into that situation. It's harder to find enough people whose schedules sync up and who are on equivalent skill levels to enjoy doing endgame content together. It was really hard to find pvp teams, for example, and nearly impossible to find enough people to raid with who weren't either bad or mean.
Of course, as someone with no existing ties to anyone hardcore into SW:TOR and who has no real intention on getting tied up in endgame stuff this actually seems like a good deal for me. Many people who are trying to play now have to wait 3+ hours to log in to their servers while there are servers up with no queues at all. I was on the fence last week on if I wanted to give it a shot or not but I'm definitely going to do so now. Especially since the Old Man said he'd play too!
I don't think my laptop can handle the game so I'm going to have to finally get around to fixing my desktop. I'm also going to be in New Brunswick from the 22nd to the 27th and I imagine there will be board games to play! So I'm thinking I'll probably try to buy the parts I need on the 27th when I get back to Toronto and then start playing on some low population server on the 27th or 28th.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Star Wars: The Old Republic
In somewhat recent times (the last couple years) I paid extra money for the collector's edition of a couple of new MMORPGs. In both cases (Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy IV) doing so got me early access to the servers. To the laggy and buggy servers. In both cases I stopped playing the game before they opened the doors to the general public which one would assume would only make things even laggier.
Star Wars: The Old Republic entered their pre-launch launch period in the last couple days and I am not a part of them. I've been tricked too many times to play an MMO at launch and just been frustrated by it to the point where I didn't really even consider playing the game.
I haven't read a whole lot about it, but from what I have heard the launch seems to be relatively smoothly. To be fair they have heavily restricted the number of people who got early access to the game. Instead of it being everyone who paid extra it's everyone they feel like letting have access with some murky preference given to the order people preordered the game. So it's still entirely possible that while they can handle the number of people they've let in so far that it'll all crash and burn when they let the unwashed masses in on the 20th.
That said, what I've been reading has certainly piqued my interest. People complain that it's just World of Warcraft with lightsabers, voice acting, and cutscenes. But I played WoW for 6 years so clearly I enjoy the gameplay at least somewhat. I like good voice acting and cutscenes. Lightsabers are cool. And if playing all the Final Fantasy games shows anything at all it shows that I like playing the same basic game with some flavour and mechanical differences...
I'm still wary and waiting to reserve judgment until after the game launches for real to see how the servers hold up but I'm thinking of giving the game a shot after I get back from New Brunswick. So the question is... Is anyone else I know playing the game? Planning on playing the game? Willing to give it a shot if I do? Let me know!
Star Wars: The Old Republic entered their pre-launch launch period in the last couple days and I am not a part of them. I've been tricked too many times to play an MMO at launch and just been frustrated by it to the point where I didn't really even consider playing the game.
I haven't read a whole lot about it, but from what I have heard the launch seems to be relatively smoothly. To be fair they have heavily restricted the number of people who got early access to the game. Instead of it being everyone who paid extra it's everyone they feel like letting have access with some murky preference given to the order people preordered the game. So it's still entirely possible that while they can handle the number of people they've let in so far that it'll all crash and burn when they let the unwashed masses in on the 20th.
That said, what I've been reading has certainly piqued my interest. People complain that it's just World of Warcraft with lightsabers, voice acting, and cutscenes. But I played WoW for 6 years so clearly I enjoy the gameplay at least somewhat. I like good voice acting and cutscenes. Lightsabers are cool. And if playing all the Final Fantasy games shows anything at all it shows that I like playing the same basic game with some flavour and mechanical differences...
I'm still wary and waiting to reserve judgment until after the game launches for real to see how the servers hold up but I'm thinking of giving the game a shot after I get back from New Brunswick. So the question is... Is anyone else I know playing the game? Planning on playing the game? Willing to give it a shot if I do? Let me know!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)