Originally posted by Axehilt

This game doesn't support playing 12.8 hours a day for two straight months!?!?!?!?!?

Worst game ever. Thankfully you were on the internet within minutes registering your disgust throughout the world.

 That gave me a pretty good laugh. Luckily I don't look like that, or it would of been a one two punch to my ego lol.

Originally posted by Grimaxe

Ok I'm sorry but to be able to get 2 lvl 50's, a 30 and whatever else doesn't take 20 hours.  I'm a casual player, and for the most part most players are, I've yet to get to lvl 50 (39) guardian atm.  I play an hour or 2 most days.

 

If you have that much time, you need a job/hobby/girlfriend/bofriend/school to get a job etc...

Maybe you could go play single player games, and stop trying to turn the mmo genre casual?

Originally posted by Blackbrrd

720+ hours of gameplay before you got bored? That's a years worth of gaming for me, so it sounds like SWTOR is a great game according to this review.

Yep.  Sounds like all they have to do put together some serious guild and endgame options, and the game will grow.

Compare this to games that have huge content holes or very little content at all(DCUO, STO) and yet STILL have a pathetic endgame.

Or even compare it to Rift, which has an adequate but shorter trip to 50, and I assume a better end game BY NOW but less replayability...

And TOR has just begun... to live...

Edit:  Yep, 720 hours is certainly an exaggeration.  I'd bet closer to 2-300.

I don´t think TOR is one of the games that you should put that many hours in that short period.

2 hours a day is fine enough but you probably should have had another game to put the rest of the time in.

TOR is just like KOTOR either a game you play a bit at a time or chanses are that you become bored and quit. How much time you need to put into a game for it to be as fun as possible differs from game to game, in OPs case Lineage 2 might be a better choice than TOR.

I don´t think you even can make a game that is really fun for both casuals and hardcore players even though a Wow addicted friend insists that Wow have done just that...

Originally posted by Loke666

I don´t think you even can make a game that is really fun for both casuals and hardcore players even though a Wow addicted friend insists that Wow have done just that...

For me, WoW CAN keep me going for many hours at a time, but I've never subbed more than 3 months in a row.  Seems like the gameplay is fun, but when I consider the question "do I want to 'LIVE' in Azeroth?" I find that I really really don't.

I want to live in Middle Earth, where I've been since '09.

At some point, I'll probably get to that question in TOR.  But I haven't, yet.

Originally posted by Loke666

I don´t think TOR is one of the games that you should put that many hours in that short period.

2 hours a day is fine enough but you probably should have had another game to put the rest of the time in.

TOR is just like KOTOR either a game you play a bit at a time or chanses are that you become bored and quit. How much time you need to put into a game for it to be as fun as possible differs from game to game, in OPs case Lineage 2 might be a better choice than TOR.

I don´t think you even can make a game that is really fun for both casuals and hardcore players even though a Wow addicted friend insists that Wow have done just that...

I agree. I think that casuals need their games and hardcores need theirs. So what if hardcore games don't get millions of subs? At what point did a game have to be a blockbuster to be considered a success at all?  What happened to the art, the magic, the love? It's all about how can we rip these kids off for 60 bucks and then maybe get an extra month of subs out of them before the game starts to hemorrhage? It's strange to me that on consoles you can find any type of game, and no one seems to be arguing that they should appeal to all player types. Maybe the MMO industry can take a step back and see that there are DEDICATED hardcore players who don't jump ship every few months. 

Originally posted by Grimaxe

 

 

If you have that much time, you need a job/hobby/girlfriend/bofriend/school to get a job etc...

Uh, videogames ARE a hobby.

Originally posted by warmaster670

Originally posted by Grimaxe

 

 

If you have that much time, you need a job/hobby/girlfriend/bofriend/school to get a job etc...

Uh, videogames ARE a hobby.

Pfffft see casuals don't even know what video games are.

Originally posted by stormseekaz

Just a reminer, Ive /played swtor on all my characters combined for something in the 30-40 day range. Thats a good 720+ hours of gameplay. So if anyone is giving you a complete review of the game in its entirety, its me. Yes I am unemployed and yes I game all day, I started swtor on December 15th.

720 hours! since launch?

man... that's a lot of time.Sorry but this falls under the "I play all the time and for some reasons mmo's can't keep up with me" column.

Granted, SWToR doesn't really allow for an open ended "end game" but qutie frankly that sounsd like you got more than your money's worth.

Originally posted by TruthXHurts

Originally posted by Grimaxe

Ok I'm sorry but to be able to get 2 lvl 50's, a 30 and whatever else doesn't take 20 hours.  I'm a casual player, and for the most part most players are, I've yet to get to lvl 50 (39) guardian atm.  I play an hour or 2 most days.

 

If you have that much time, you need a job/hobby/girlfriend/bofriend/school to get a job etc...

Maybe you could go play single player games, and stop trying to turn the mmo genre casual?

uh, the mmo genre is already casual.

Originally posted by stormseekaz

Call me a content locust, but I played enough of Swtor to burn myself out on it. I did not spacebar through any of the dialogue for the guardian, and I spacebar'ed through the commando dialogue for everything except story quest.

Voice overs are great for the first character but once you've seen it, theres no reason to watch it over again. This game is very very good level 1-49. At level 50 it "hits the invisible brick wall" or "takes a nose dive"

Here are some of my issues with the game and why I unsubbed:

HERO Engine: locked in terrible performance

My computer has a q6600 2.4ghz CPU overclocked to 3.0ghz, and dual GTX460's. I played Faxion Online for a good month, got a character to max level on that game. It is one of the only 3 games that use the Hero engine. Guess what? The game ran fantastic when there were no players around, but as soon as other people come by, your CPU load goes through the roof. The issues that made Faxion Online perform terrible are the exact same issues I am dealing with in SWTOR. The only way to cure the performance issues with SWTOR is to switch engines. And as far as I know that rarely happens in any mmorpg. I read that Bioware actually chose the HERO engine because of its benefits in the development process. Herp derp? Really? You picked a single thread based engine with one of the worst performance:computer-power ratios known to man... because it was good for the developmental process?

Here are some examples of how terribly coded the engine/game is. The less players there are on a planet, the higher my Framerate seems to rise. And I am not talking about players on my screen. I'm talking about looking up at the number on the top left that shows how many players are on the planet. In the middle of the night when there are no players on any planets I seem to get the best client performance, regardless of if there are players in my vascinity or not.

Another example is OPS. Have you ever wondered why you lag more then usual in Warzones? It's because your in an OPS group. Simply being in an OPS group creates alot of CPU load and slows your framerate. The bigger the OPS group, the worse it gets. My guildmates and I hypothesize that it is the fact that being in an OPS group makes your client track every other members quests as well. That is why when you're in Ilum and a assault point changes factions, you get a terrible framerate spike. If you would like to test this effect yourself. Take your guild to Ilum. Roam around and possibly get into some large group fights ungrouped. Now join an OPS group of 15+ players. Your framerate will see a significant drop. Even my guildmaster who has a beast rig with an i9 CPU felt FPS drops.

Another example is to move forward and spam the inventory or social tab key. Your game will crawl at 1-2 FPS simply by opening and closing a window.

I have built new computers for games in the past, but SWTOR is not good enough of a game to warrant me going from a solid gaming rig to a state of the art expensive rig.

End game Content and Gear

Bioware made a huge booboo with their end game content. They gave players the PVP gear way, way too fast. I took my lv 50 commando from all lv 45-49 gear on a thursday to a full set of Centurion/Champion peices on the following Teusday. Thats a full Tier 1 and Tier 2 combo set in 5 or so days of play.

My lv 50 guardian skipped any Tier 1 and TIer 2 pvp gear completely by just getting a Champion set so quickly. I even specced him Defense spec and purchased the tanking gear to focus on PVE.

Bioware gave everyone Tier 1 - Tier 2 PVP gear incredibly fast, and Tier 1 - Tier 2 PVE gear takes far more time to obtain. It is easier and better to just farm up Tier 2 PVP gear and use it in PVE instead of farming the Tier 1 PVE set.

So how do they address this issue? Give everyone PVE and PVP gear even faster.

Regardless of the gear, it just feels like there is no real end goal at lv 50. I'll give you some examples:

Age of Conan has Keeps - People at max level compete over keeps that their guild can own. It gives a player a sense of purpose in end game. You can get all the awesome gear in the world but what is the end purpose of that, to help your guild obtain a Keep.

Eden Eternal has Territory Wars - Guilds just like in AoC can compete over territories that give their guild power. This gives a purpose to people who are grinding out gear or striving to make their character as strong as possible.

DAoC has Relics/keeps - Its been so long since I played DAoC that I don't remember how the faction posession system works, but I think you get the point.

World of Warcraft has Arenas - All the gear and effort you put into your character can help you get an edge in Arena matches or rated battlegrounds. This gives the player a sense of something to fight for after they have obtained every peice of uber gear possible.

Ilum appears to be along the lines of this category, but taking control of it never meant anything worth while. It can completely bounce back and forth between factions several times in an hour. There is no incentive to try to march on the enemies base. The only area worth occupying is the central assault position.

One thing the game could really benefit from is a PvPvE environment, such as Arathi Basin. If Ilum had dota/LoL style "minions" marching toward eachothers bases, that would make it a much slower process and also more rewarding for the players to march to the enemies base. There are just so many examples of Tug-of-war style PVP game mechanics out now that it baffles me Bioware came up with such a terrible attempt at it. I guess thats a good analogy for Ilum:

Ilum is a game of tug-of-war that has no rope. But it has candy sprinkled on the ground between both teams.

Faction Balance

The Sith empire grossly outnumbers the Republic. This is fine for warzones, but in Ilum its just terrible. Rallying your guild up to fight for Ilum does no good. For example on my server Ilum on average will have about 2-10 Repubs and 5-30 empire at any given time of day on average. So how do we counter this? My guild summons up more Repubs, so it becomes a 15 vs 15 fight. What happens next? The 15 Empire players tell their guildmates that "Ilum is hot" or "active" and they bring 15 more. But my guild doesn't have 15 extra peolpe to bring. So regardless of how many Republic reinforcements come to even the odds in Ilum, an equally proportionate number of Empire players will hear "ilum is hot" and come.

What has Bioware done to address this? Nothing. They don't give a rats arse about Republic players in Ilum. Hell, they gave so little of a crap about faction imbalance that they gave the overpopulated side near-instant Warzone que's. So empire can fight empire in Huttball even if the server is 10% republic, 90% empire.

The game is very PVE'centric. So I don't put too much blame on people rolling imperial. They are the cooler faction, their gear looks cooler, their spells are lightning, as opposed to a spray of pebbles and ground debris. I chose Republic because I always like to play the underdog faction. I am normally an above average PVPer, so when I play on the overpopulated faction it feel no challenge and no fun. But the Ilum population imbalance isn't challenging, its futile. No faction will win a world pvp battle with 3:1 population imbalance, with similar geared players.

____________________________________________________________________

Now all the things I listed above are ofcourse PVP based, not PVE. So some might say well SWTOR is a PVE game. If that is the case then it is a wonderful awesome single player level 1-49 PVE game. There are so many "dungeon" type areas that are instanced that it becomes very difficult to just run into random players. Tatooine and Hoth are gigantic planets, but because of that and the server population, it becomes very difficult to run into others. The only truly social area in the games are the Imperial and Republic Fleets. However, these areas unfortunately have the "Barrens Chat"

Just a reminer, Ive /played swtor on all my characters combined for something in the 30-40 day range. Thats a good 720+ hours of gameplay. So if anyone is giving you a complete review of the game in its entirety, its me. Yes I am unemployed and yes I game all day, I started swtor on December 15th.

As soon as I got my 2nd lv 50 geared out in PVP gear thats when I really hit the brick wall hard. I got an overwhelming sense of nothing to look forward to. I know for a fact that Bioware is going to follow WoW's item/expansion method. So anything I obtain will just be nerfed by green loot in the next expansion.

Darkfall held me for 6 months, Eden Eternal 6 months, Cataclysm 2-3 months, Champions Online 1 month, Rift 1 month, SWTOR 1.5 months....

I can always tell when I'm becoming bored with an MMORPG and it's on its last leg, when I start browsing MMORPG for new games. I started doing that about 5 days ago, and I knew my SWTOR enjoyment was going no where but down hill. Luckily I found out TERA and TSW are coming in April and if I preorder TERA I can get into the beta early. And then Age of Conan just gave me a free month of subscription play for returning vets, so now I'm quite happy and confident in my unsubbing of SWTOR.

Since the game is star wars I'm sure it will always have a large population. But after about 1-2 weeks of playing the "OMG Im a jedi" "this lightsaber is awesome!" thrill loses its flare.  I am a SWG vet too btw if your wondering.  And I prefer Sandboxes.

Thanks for reading, sorry for the wall of text effect.

can i has your gold?

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by TruthXHurts

Originally posted by Grimaxe

Ok I'm sorry but to be able to get 2 lvl 50's, a 30 and whatever else doesn't take 20 hours.  I'm a casual player, and for the most part most players are, I've yet to get to lvl 50 (39) guardian atm.  I play an hour or 2 most days.

 

If you have that much time, you need a job/hobby/girlfriend/bofriend/school to get a job etc...

Maybe you could go play single player games, and stop trying to turn the mmo genre casual?

uh, the mmo genre is already casual.

You would love that to be true, but I play hardcore MMO's still. Sorry they aren't all shiny like the turds that the AAA companies put on yoru plate, but they are fun, and are by no means casual. 

You got 720 hours of gameplay for box price + one month sub? At my current rate of play, I'll have to pay them for ~24 months to equal that. Looks like my future with TOR is quite bright!

I have played a lot of games way longer than 720 hours.

10000 hours for tactics arena online. (This was my first gaming obsession and I was in a really popular clan as a leader.)

2000 hours for Civ 3.

1000 hours for SoaSE.

2000 hours for Warring Factions.

Other games usually capped out at 500 or less, mainly because they were too similar to Civ, such as Galciv2.

I logged about 1k hours in GW as well. But I did buy all the expansion packs.

I played about 80 hours of ATITD and I would have put in at least 800 total but I quit to work on my own game. I wasn't burned out or anything.

I honestly hope that SWTOR is the best casual player game ever made, and it keeps you all entertained for years to come. That being said. SWTOR isn't gettign any of my money and neither is any other casual MMO. If they want in my pockets they have to step it up.

Originally posted by TruthXHurts

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by TruthXHurts

Originally posted by Grimaxe

Ok I'm sorry but to be able to get 2 lvl 50's, a 30 and whatever else doesn't take 20 hours.  I'm a casual player, and for the most part most players are, I've yet to get to lvl 50 (39) guardian atm.  I play an hour or 2 most days.

 

If you have that much time, you need a job/hobby/girlfriend/bofriend/school to get a job etc...

Maybe you could go play single player games, and stop trying to turn the mmo genre casual?

uh, the mmo genre is already casual.

You would love that to be true, but I play hardcore MMO's still. Sorry they aren't all shiny like the turds that the AAA companies put on yoru plate, but they are fun, and are by no means casual. 

Being a long time player of Lineage 2 (4 1/2 years) , when it was launched by the way, I"m very familiar with what constitutes a hardcore game.

But if you you look at many if not most of the games that have been released in the past years they are all pretty casual compared to earlier games.

Originally posted by TruthXHurts

I honestly hope that SWTOR is the best casual player game ever made, and it keeps you all entertained for years to come. That being said. SWTOR isn't gettign any of my money and neither is any other casual MMO. If they want in my pockets they have to step it up.

Just as long as you're not in the next thread complaining about a lack of AAA Sandboxes and failing to "connect the dots".

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by TruthXHurts

I honestly hope that SWTOR is the best casual player game ever made, and it keeps you all entertained for years to come. That being said. SWTOR isn't gettign any of my money and neither is any other casual MMO. If they want in my pockets they have to step it up.

Just as long as you're not in the next thread complaining about a lack of AAA Sandboxes and failing to "connect the dots".

No I really don't think AAA and sandbox will ever be the norm. AAA means dumbed down, LCD, Marketing machine. I have style and taste, and that's something that the AAA's lack. I will be happy to play games made in a garage somewhere. I'm just hopeful that the games I enjoy make enough money to keep operating.

I've got my eye on Archeage, and I hope it points us in the right directions.

Sorry it didn't work out for you. Honestly though, 720 hours in 2 months? Don't take this personally, but you might want to re-examine your priorities in life. 12 hours a day gaming, can't be very healthy, like at all.

Best of luck to you.

Originally posted by Cuathon

I have played a lot of games way longer than 720 hours.

10000 hours for tactics arena online. (This was my first gaming obsession and I was in a really popular clan as a leader.) = 416.67 days played

2000 hours for Civ 3. = 83 days played

1000 hours for SoaSE. = 41.67 days played

2000 hours for Warring Factions. = 83 days played

Other games usually capped out at 500 or less, mainly because they were too similar to Civ, such as Galciv2. - other games, really?

I logged about 1k hours in GW as well. But I did buy all the expansion packs. = 41.6 days played

I played about 80 hours of ATITD and I would have put in at least 800 total but I quit to work on my own game. I wasn't burned out or anything.

All total,  not counting your "other games" column you've spent 1.83 years of your real life playing games?

WOW.

Gonna tell my wife so she no longer acuses me of being a gaming fanatic.