I personally don't believe there's any hope left for this game. I wanted Pazaak, swoop racing, and a great space game at launch, and they could have delivered if holding to a stringent release date wasn't such a priority. Truth be told, it probably would have been better for the overall reception if they had managed to spend more time on the details, rather than releasing in a state of unfinishedness, turning F2P, and hoping they could fill in the gaps as they proceed.

Man, it still gets me. I wanted to like it so much, but there's relatively nothing to do aside from questing and instanced PvP, which I think we can all recognize as important core features in a themepark, but that there needs to be more for players to justify subscription, or long term activity.

To make this game matter in 2013 it needs

- housing system, housing zones

- space combat revamp, add a space sim/trading/mining part with customizable ships

- get rid of exhaustion zomes and corridor/maze design, game lacks open world feeling

- revamp textures and engine features

- add minigames

- open world pvp objectives

- better. quests.

- revamp mob A.I.

- add day/night changes on planets

I doubt very much that TOR can afford to even rent 2013.

A few years ago the people in charge of the purse strings should have had the common sense to say no. Sadly they didn't and this game turned into the shambling frankenstein's monster we know today that eats money and creative resources like candy. I fail to see how they can turn the game around now that they have far less money resources and time to utlize the same ridiculous framework they've created.

The creative team had some big dreams. Unfortunately they were the same kind of dreams that built Mad King Ludwig's castle.

Originally posted by xpowderx

I miss my Powertech. The issue with SWTOR is too much theme park. You play through it once and your done. I agree with Mike on the point that Bioware needs to constantly add expansions. If SWTOR had more of a open world/worlds the need for a expansion would be less.

Would be nice to see Bioware expand on PVP. PVP in SWTOR is quite fun! It is SWTOR's real strong point. Towards my end of my SWTOR experience I only logged in to pvp.

CRIMSON ELITE

 

 

 

Class balance is about as bad as I've seen it in any MMO. Huttball is a ton of fun though. 

I'm sort of confused by the themepark remarks I've seen in this thread. What exactly were people expecting from Bioware? They make linear story-driven games. They gave us a linear story-driven MMO. They were never going to make a game with depth and complexity like SWG. They need some more fluff features like ship customization, guild ships, mini-games etc. but I don't see where SWTOR, a one year old game, is lacking realative to other themepark styled MMOs.

Originally posted by Burntvet

Originally posted by Dihoru
Guess Bioware/EAturd paid you guys off for some more positive publicity.

 

It really does make one wonder, how massively over-positive articles like this seem to pop up with surprising regularity here.

Or maybe MikeB is just one of the people who likes SWTOR.  Even mediocre games usually have their fans.

Several problems with your column. 

1) You cannot have large scale open world PvP with the current Hero engine.  It reduces too many players to unacceptably low FPS, creating a slide-show and it's not fun for anyone. Furthermore, they have to have objectives to fight over that can't be done by 1 person in 10 seconds and finally they would have to address the swapping of kills that was common.  It's way too much for this slimmed down development team to tackle.  

2) They've added faction grinding and same-gender romances on a new planet for $10 charge.  Color me unimpressed.  Expanding the class stories would require MASSIVE expenditures because of the voice acting. They bet the farm on voice acting, and it's proving not to be worth it in a theme-park setting.  Perhaps in a sandbox version it might have paid off.

3) The game is, and will remain, a single-player theme-park game that has some multi-player aspects such as warzones and some raids.  

Finally, when was the last time a game closed about 90% of its servers, suffered this much reduction in players, gone F2P within 6 months of launch, and came back to "win"?  

I'll just wait for a decent sand-box game to come around.  I think developers have learned that WoW was a 1-time kind of thing and that the best models are something similar to EvE because they require much less on-going funding and players stick around longer.

Originally posted by Burntvet

Originally posted by Dihoru
Guess Bioware/EAturd paid you guys off for some more positive publicity.

 

It really does make one wonder, how massively over-positive articles like this seem to pop up with surprising regularity here.

Maybe people are getting tired of the same old Bioware/EA hate.  SW TOR is a good game.

I recently played through a one-month subscription via buying the boxed game, and I played it more than any MMO in that time frame since WoW back in '06. I love the game. That being said... its free-to-play model is SEVERELY lacking and very restrictive, and I'd love for BioWare to look at other F2P models (most notably LotRO/Turbine's) and make adjustments accordingly. The main thing, I guess, would be to institute an in-game way of gaining Cartel Coins (a la LotRO's ability, via achievements, to earn Turbine Points). This would increase replay-ability whilst waiting for expansions, as well as encourage more F2P players to give it a shot. Like LotRO, I would gladly resubscribe occasionally, and I'm sure I would be the only one, but BW has to meet the F2P player halfway.

Graphically, I have NO issues with the game, as I upgraded my specs back in November (nothing overly-expensive), and the game runs absolutely fine (aside from some graphical issues that has nothing to do with specs, and everything to do with the game's engine/programming).