From everything I read, I knew the story, dialogue, and characters would be good.  And they were even better than I expected.  Except the Jedi.  Not my thing.  Smuggler and Trooper stories were great, though.  So I'm more impressed with that aspect than I thought I would be.

But balancing that out, I was even more impatient with the usual questing mechanics than I thought I would be.  Still not %100 sure that isn't because I was trying to rush it so I could see more story, get my ship, and see other worlds, though.

$60 for a game I doubt I'll enjoy for more than a month (at very most, two, making the final price for two months $75) seems a bit pricey.  I'd pick this game up in a heartbeat for $20 (with free month of course), then I'd pay the $15 if I was still enjoying it in a month.  I might pay as much as $30 for the game.

But $60?  Hm, I want more than a month or two of enjoyment from a game for $60.

I admit I've been fairly sceptical throughout development - I didn't think the game would bad or anything, but during the weekend when I finally got to play the game I found myself surprised at how good the game really was and how much I was enjoying myself in spite of bugs. I'm already addicted and can hardly wait for december 15th.

I'm also happy to see people in the game being very positive as well, and the servers continuously being chock-full with people. I hope it's an indication that the game's retention rate will be high.

Only problem is I found several classes that I really liked and now I feel I have to play through all of them to not miss out.

Originally posted by Matt_UK

Though I do give everyone the right to bash me over the head with this popst in the future if my prediction of TOR being a very big sustained success for many years turns out to "new toy" syndrom but this the first MMO I've played since WoW that has that feel of quality and longevity. 

Are you saying you haven't played any other mmos since WoW? Because I think only someone who is completely new to mmos will find this game interesting.

I've been playing MMOs since UO back in 99 and I love this game (TOR)

I think you are wrong good sir.

Ive been in beta for a while now and I will not be getting the game.

Its an ok game but not what i am looking for in a MMO. If the game didnt have a sub I might pick it up but I honestly dont see it offering enough to justify me paying for a monthly sub.

I changed my mind, but only somewhat.  I enjoyed the story a lot.  Everything else was exactly as I expected.  

I was going to buy the game regardless, since many friends are playing.  At least now I will actually want to play, until the end of the story at least.  

I still don't think this game would be good for me in the long term.  SWTOR is definitely focused more on PvE than PvP, and that's not what I want.  

Originally posted by Axxar

I admit I've been fairly sceptical throughout development - I didn't think the game would bad or anything, but during the weekend when I finally got to play the game I found myself surprised at how good the game really was and how much I was enjoying myself in spite of bugs. I'm already addicted and can hardly wait for december 15th.

I'm also happy to see people in the game being very positive as well, and the servers continuously being chock-full with people. I hope it's an indication that the game's retention rate will be high.

Only problem is I found several classes that I really liked and now I feel I have to play through all of them to not miss out.

Hopefully EA/Bioware/Mythic (whoever is handling the servers) doesn't get too excited like WAR. Anybody who played that on release remembers how many servers they had, and how quickly it dopped, only to leave empty servers... 

I am so on the fence with this game.

It is a bad MMO, it has no innovations besides being fully voice acted, which is not very congruent with the genre anyway. It also takes some big steps backwards, the UI, the low-res graphics, the lack of any option but to go down the beaten path. It seems like the game is from 2006.

But it's just such a fun single player game!

What is holding me back is how much money it costs. A game like this should not have a monthly fee.

I have been up and down about the the game.  My initial reaction to it after the first beta weekend was fairly positive, however after having another weekend to play it, I found it to be uninspiring and lackluster to say the least.  I had a lot of hours to game this weekend, and I will *always* choose an MMO if I have a good one to play.  I ended up skipping it in favor of Battlefield 3, mostly because I kept finding myself bored in SWTOR.

Things that bothered me the most:

• World feels lifeless - no detail work to make it feel like a living place, static mobs, no day/night, no weather, no sense of 'home away from home', etc.  Whole game feels very plastic, contrived and sterile.
• Combat was strange - I didn't like all the cartoony mechanics such as the long leaps or tumbles into battle.  Did not like the way cover works on the smuggler where I see green ghosts of cover points.  
• Character animations are horrible, especially the running animation, and characters feel unsubstantial.
• This game takes hand-holding to an all new level.  One doesn't have to do much thinking to play it.  Even the speeder travel system shows/tells you where to go for your quests.
• VO quests were mostly fine, but they started getting on my nerves during standard questing.  Also, the VO appears to be the main focus of this game, and the gameplay in between  was just weak.  

I pre-ordered already, and I was planning to play it for a few months, but now I don't know.  I'm not the biggest fan of Rift, but I consider Rift to be a much more engaging experience than SWTOR.  I'll probably just get my MMO fix there for now, until The Secret World and GW2 come along next year. 

duplicate post

I finalized my pov. NOT SUBSCRIBING.

Love the pve,crafting seems OK,lack of 24/7 persistent world pvp as a major game element was the deciding factor(perhaps when you are a 50) I'm just not paying $60 plus $15/month to see what this aspect of the game might be.

Originally posted by jeremyjodes

You know it dawned on me some years ago, that you need to just enjoy life for what it is. in a 100 years all these words we have typed wont be remembered by anyone. we wont even be a memory. we will be some notch on a digital family tree that noone cares about.

So play the game write a book get out and have some sex. save a tree buy a dog. wake up and enjoy it. youth wont last forever man. all this will fade away like tears in the rain.

 

"Time... to die."

---

Originally posted by Xondar123

---

Originally posted by jeremyjodes
You know it dawned on me some years ago, that you need to just enjoy life for what it is. in a 100 years all these words we have typed wont be remembered by anyone. we wont even be a memory. we will be some notch on a digital family tree that noone cares about.
So play the game write a book get out and have some sex. save a tree buy a dog. wake up and enjoy it. youth wont last forever man. all this will fade away like tears in the rain.
 

---

"Time... to die."

---

This site is filled with themepark burnouts.  Which is fine, but it really gets old when they constantly bash themeparks and TOR specifically, non-stop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 4 weeks a month, 12 months a year.  If they can't find fan posts to pick apart and denegrate, then they're making their own topics, beating the dead horse till it reincarnates into the next big themepark game.

I've been beta testing for over 6 months.  I got my CE pre-order in July and am happy to keep it and look forward to enjoying release.  It's not the perfect game for me, but it fits me better than anything else out there.  Between it and my peaking interest in GW2, I'll have both a nice sci-fi and fantasy MMO to keep me entertained for a long time to come.

I still think swtor is just a generic nothing impressive wow clone, but I still had fun with it, I am probally going to buy the game just because I am so bored, I hope they remove the pvp earnable gear, and add some land control pvp, sort of stupid that with these 2 factions at war and there is no static land control ala daoc.

Originally posted by MindTrigger

• World feels lifeless - no detail work to make it feel like a living place, static mobs, no day/night, no weather, no sense of 'home away from home', etc.  Whole game feels very plastic, contrived and sterile.
• Combat was strange - I didn't like all the cartoony mechanics such as the long leaps or tumbles into battle.  Did not like the way cover works on the smuggler where I see green ghosts of cover points.  
• Character animations are horrible, especially the running animation, and characters feel unsubstantial.
• This game takes hand-holding to an all new level.  One doesn't have to do much thinking to play it.  Even the speeder travel system shows/tells you where to go for your quests.
• VO quests were mostly fine, but they started getting on my nerves during standard questing.  Also, the VO appears to be the main focus of this game, and the gameplay in between  was just weak.  

Same for me really, i didnt log in with any expectations or anything, after seeying the intro it looked really promising till you get into char costumisation and dropped in the most inspireless world ive ever been dropped in. VO were nice but dusnt make up for the lack of a real world feel imo

Originally posted by Siveria

I still think swtor is just a generic nothing impressive wow clone, but I still had fun with it, I am probally going to buy the game just because I am so bored, I hope they remove the pvp earnable gear, and add some land control pvp, sort of stupid that with these 2 factions at war and there is no static land control ala daoc.

Agreed. I'll just probably play it until something better comes out, or I get bored with THAT. GW2 anyone?

The following is only my opinion and how *I* define what is "fun" for me. Yours may differ.

This latest beta test weekend has me wondering if I will play the game after release. The beta test two weekends ago had me excited about the game. It is a strange feeling...

I think this weekend, I got a good look at the game with over 36 hours of playtime. I don't even feel like logging on again this evening, with almost 7 seven hours remaining of testing time. It is tough to say why...

The longevity of the game does not seem to hold much promise for me. 4 character types I won't be playing as I cannot bring myself to play the Empire side. It's just not me or what I find "fun". On the Republic side, the Smuggler and Trooper are just not my playstyle, so that leaves me with 2 base classes to start off with. The Jedi do have 4 advanced classes between them which I could have fun playing, so replayability is looking slim. That said, I have logged a lot of time with those classes already.

I really have no interest in "end game" as it is now, as raids and PvP are not my ideas of "fun", either. I don't know what Bioware has planned for the end game, other than that.

Crafting, to me, is a huge let down. In Biochem, I go to make med packs. It says I have enough materials to make, say, 10 med packs. I have to tell my companion to make them each, one at a time. So I run around Coruscant with my crafting window open because it only takes my companions 1 minute to craft 1 med pack. I am unable to craft a single item (that I know of) by myself. There really is not much here to keep me busy.

The storylines are interesting and good. Like a good book, I cannot wait to turn the page and see what happens next. But once experienced, will it be good a second time through? The lightside/darkside choices are old. "Padawans in love = darkside", "No choice to beat down some uppity slimebag", "any show of confidence or swagger is bad", "being humble to the max is the Jedi way." I'm more of a Jolee Bindo kind of guy and from what I've seen, there are not many choices for that route, or not many "rewards" for going that way, if there are. I could be wrong as I have not only gotten my Jedi to their ships (~level 16).

Space Combat I have seen and read many bad things on. My one experience with it was not so negative. I did not mind "the evil rails" they placed us on in a 3 dimensional canvas. My only complaint was my lack of directions. I either totally missed out on them, or they were not there. It took me until my escorted ship blew up that I found out, "Oh! I have to click on these ships to fire at them!" By then , it was too late. I was trying all kinds of buttons before then trying. The simplest way did not occur to me until too late. I am kind of slow with new things :)

Character customization was pretty short. There are more choices at character creation than many other MMOs, but I still saw other toons and could figure out where they were in their storylines. You cannot even change the color of your own clothes as far as I could tell. Of course, the character creation I think is best is City of Heroes, where one can literally spend hours making a rather unique character, should they so choose.

The worlds I visited (Typhon, Coruscant, Ord Mandrell) seemed empty and lifeless. There were, at most, 2 maybe three NPC beasts per world. No herbivore / carnivore / omnivore ecology. I don't think I saw one bird (though Typhone had a flying creature on the ground and attackable), let alone a small rabbit-like creature. There is no day/night cycle so the passage of time is non-existant. Weather was non-existant, also. When one gets a "We gotta hurry" quest, there is no sense of urgency. I think there is a Jedi on Typhon at the Jedi temple that is STILL holding a padawan in a hold. There is no NPC travel vetween player hubs. In other words, the only NPCs you'll meet on the road are the "killing kind". The worlds are huge, once off of the first planet. Fast travel seemed kind of gimped. You can use the bind points once every 30 minutes and taxi stations are only at one end of the zone, so too bad if you are at the other end. You finally get a "sprint" ability at level 14(?). That helps a little bit for long distances.

The combat was like every other MMO I have played thus far. Bind the abilities to the bar and press your rotation. The tab targeting was hit and miss, literally. Sometimes I targeted my next target right away. Other times, it took three, even four tries to get a target (ANY target) targeted. That combined with my never really getting my timing down (I blame myself on this one, not BW) just made combat a chore for me. Then again, I am not a combat-centric player. On my Jedi Shadow, I snuck through the "Faces" quest until there was a mob I could not get around. Wish there was a way to hide and throw something to make the NPC move out of the way at times. Oh well, I tried. lol

The companions are fun. I would like to see where those storylines go. So far, in ~16 levels, I have talked with my companions once (for each character). This is pretty slow going, in my opinion. Like most "pets" I have played with, they DO tend to get in the way... a LOT! I think I run maybe 60%/40% on clicking what I want and clicking on my companion. I hope this is a bug, and I reported it, but the companions tend to be chatter boxes, saying their one-liners quite a lot. Now, I don't know if it has something to do with how close other players are with their companions, but even in a solo instance I am getting chatter not only from MY companion, but from others as well. Luckily, not during the NPC convo, though :) Except in the Jedi Temple on Typhon... There I was getting NPC chatter throughout the whole Jedi Council convo. I think that may have been because everyone and their dog was standing outside the doors while the conversation was taking place, not actually IN the room itself.

Overall, I hope this game does well. It seems to have many aspects that players seem to like, I for one. But after this weekend, I am rethinking about getting this game. It just did not grab me like it did the last stress test weekend. I have no pre-order to cancel, as I do not do pre-orders, but I am seriously thinking about not getting the game at all, which is sad. I just don't feel the "pull to play" like I did 2 weeks ago. I really can't say what has changed...

 Yea I completely changed my opinion about ToR after playing extensively in beta..

At first I was like... I bet this game will be ok, decent and playable I cant wait.

Now I am like DROOL DROOL I cant wait for launch.. 

Best...... Sci-Fi.....MMO.....EVAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!!!!!!!!!

Changed my mind, not what it could have been, guess Ill wait till Jan 17th when ST:O goes free to play.

I'm still undecided.  Its a decent game, and the vocals make the most boring of 'kill x' quests more personal and bearable, but at this point, I don't really know if I should bother attempting to get into another MMO that appears to be focused on end-game raiding yet again!

Its like sheesh, do something different already...

Also, for Bioware to have blatantly come and said we're copying what WoW does best ~ they sure as all hell have failed miserably at that.  It feels more like what WoW was during its Vanilla years, than the more superior updates it has now.  Not that I play or enjoy WoW anymore either, but thats how I feel.

Maybe I'll just attempt to sell my CE on eBay soon...