Originally posted by Teiman

 

My first char was a assasin elyos.

My second char was a chanter asmodeus.

My third character has been a gladiator elyos.

My 4th character has been a sorcerer asmodeus.

After all these changes...  I may like more the asmos areas.  I don't know why to be honest. 

And my favorite character has ben... the chanter.  Sure, soloing whas somewhat lacking at level 19. But grouping was da bomb. 

My problem is that after all this characters, I think I have already played this game. The first 20 levels..     Is tortage all again. 

I want a button to instacreate a level 21, lol. the first levels are cute and fun and all, but I don't want to play these levels again.

Saving the pig was fun.  Tryiing to help that dude that love a kobold was fun.  Searching the mother of that dude on the fortress was somewhat sad, interesting.   I have already done these quest, I don't want to make these quest again.  

I want to play what the game has to offer 25+, and the PvP. 

But after playing a bit of PVP ... I fear some classes will *DOMINATE*.    Take the sorcer, its a nuke guy with CC.  A nuke guy. With CC.  A nuker... with CC.  It has like 4 CC skils.  FOURTH.  Man,  a nuker with 4 cc skills.  I can totally see a single sorcer killing a whole team.  I am not a good PVP player, I am mostly bad... .I shine in good teams. I am good pvp player in good pvp teams.  But I don't know If the PVP of aion will be for me.

Also...   gliding is fun.  But even wen you get a really high heigh... is like limited.  Is like the game is totally scared to give you unlimited flight.   And the cooldown is lame.  You open the flags, close it accidentally, and you cant open it again?

And I don't like the new players from CBT3.  These people are not as good as the CBT2 players for some reason. Honestly.. these people look like WoW players.   Any game full of WoW players will feel like playing WoW. I don't want to play with WoW player.  I know how bad this sounds... sorry guys.. but  most of you have a newbie and anti-RP attitude, the community don't feel as friendly wen there are WoW players all around.   I am honest here.

 

 

This is one reason I no longer beta test games that I want to play.  Burnout seems to set in really quick when you have already done everything and seen everything for the most part before the game even launches.

Honestly, nothing.  No more intellectual property knock-offs.  Game developers have always flubbed IP's, and its not entirely their fault.  Most IPs are restrictive with iconic characters, places, and events.  Throwing gamers into these sorts of situations there are bound to be problems.

It is the largest issue for me with LoTRO, for example.  I actually enjoyed the game quite a bit but the bastardization of the lore kept my enjoyment way way down.  SWG another one that suffered because of its IP and warhammer doesn't really capture the feel of the whole thing.  DDO as well... Most of the pen and paper people I know have soundly rejected changes to the rulesets made over the past few years and are secure in their 2nd edition or 2.5 rulesets.  Eberron, as a setting, is weak and brings the entire thing down.

I want to see more creativity from our developers.  Dungeons and Dragons has always been a general guideline to assist people with the creating of their own worlds... using the rulesets they could have (turbine) created an entirely new world for gamers.  The Old Republic, I hope will not be strangled by the Lucas Arts involvement with the IP.  Luckily it is an era that is not entirely fleshed out which provides the developers with much leeway.  Had Turbine gone with something along the lines of Middle Earth Online and set it during the 4th age, again they could have avoided all the hassles of timeline and allowed for the players to have been an important part of the world's lore going forward.

Originally posted by admriker4

Originally posted by zazz

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

Originally posted by hubertgrove

Originally posted by zazz

I dont think story is the problem or what is being meant here , its being governed by a story making the game linear that is a big problem.

Agreed - and it's a story that the player cannot change. The player must proceed through it, otherwise there's no game.

How is that different than every other MMOs on the market?

There's always a progressive element in this genre; it's what defines a game as an MMORPG.

If Bioware are going to replace "grind 10000 mobs" or "do 1000 quests to kill 10 x boars" with "complete a long-winded questline" are the end-game oriented players really going to care?

They'll rush through it just as fast as they typically rush through the grinding/questing to get to max level and begin their raiding/PvP. Bioware have already said the game would have these things.

Perhaps a few will whine because it's not bottable, or can't be done semi-afk in large groups .. but I doubt many people (or the developers) will be sympathetic to their viewpoint.

And for the rest of us; the ones who enjoy the journey more than the destination .. it's a HUGE improvement over current MMO mechanics. If they also add in player housing and support for roleplaying, it'll be my dream game.

 

Thats the point mate its not your journey its theres be design, carefully masked by linear options, yes it will be fun but will it having last appeal i doubt it.

 

See people are mistaken by Story Driven, Story Arcs, Story and last which i think your mistaken by is LORE.

 

Regardless i think people want to fall in love with there characters and become someone in that world. not to have to keep roilling different toons and classes every few weeks cause they ran out of content.

 

 

 

this is my chief complaint as well.

seems like Bioware is selling this story feature as a means to make the game enjoyable to replay it. Umm thats a feature that belongs in single player games.

This is an mmo where your ideally suposed to stick to 1 maybe 2 toons and develop them for years and years.

I suspect we can look to and blame WoW for this warped way of thinking of mmo's. Because games like wow are linear theme parks, people run out of content. So what do they do, why they re-roll another toon. In WoW it was boring to repeat quests in goldshire, westfall, etc. So Bioware comes up with a storyline that gives you different options hence replayability is more entertaining.

The problem though is its still linear, its still forced on the player to progress, and its concept is based entirely on beating the game and starting over. These concepts are more akin to KOTOR 1 but not an MMO.

I dont want a game where the best feature is to finish the theme park linear quests and then reroll a new toon.  This is a huuuuge flaw in TOR and might be its downfall. Yes it will prolly be a blast that first month or two but it doesnt sound like the next MMO I will play for years

Don't know about you but haven't seen an mmo yet (apart from SWG before they took the feature away from the players) where you actually were encouraged not to play alts.  Games like Warhammer, EQ, EQ2, WOW, etc have such a quick curve to get you to the end game with such a small amount of content that you either create alts or quit the game.

I think it might be a downfall for you, but knowing full well that apart from faction differences having completely different quest lines for the classes will make the game far more appealing to people that enjoy rpgs.  Your complaint about linearity is flawed.  There is no MMO that is not linear.  Sure, like eve, they can throw up smoke and mirrors but the end goal of every mmo is to reach the endgame get the expensive and/or rare gear and walk around talking about how you are more elite than the person next to you.

We have 0 inkling of what the endgame in The Old Republic will entail but if it keeps the mouth breathing shooter crowd out of the game then it is that much better.

Personally I like the way that the graphics for the game are coming along, as of the last video posted.  Was a little worried that it might be one of those games that require a significant computer upgrade however with the more stylized graphics not only are they able to differntiate themselves from other games they will hopefully be able to take a page from Blizzards book and have their game adequately playable on a wide variety of system configurations.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

In the real world things break, or they become obsolete. This means you have to replace those things, so you need to make more money, spend more money, and the economy goes round and round like that.

An example that is familiar to everyone would be the Television. Televisions last a long time, but eventually they break. Or, like recently, they becoome obsolete. Now you need  a new digital TV to replace the old analog TV.

In games, without breakage or obsolescence you get inflation. It also wrecks level balance.

You start out low level, hoping and wishing you would get a +1 sword of pwnage. When you finally get one, it is a wonderful thing, and you are wtf! pwning everything that moves.

But as the game goes on, +1 swords of pwnage are everywhere. Max level players toss them out and hand them to newbs that just logged in to the game for the first time. Here ya go, have a +1 sword of pwnage! Now, the player levels, does a few quests, and what do they get as a reward? The +1sword of pwnage. But that's crap now, because I got that when I first logged on to the game. But if the devs now make the reward a +2 sword of pwnage, it screws up the balance of the quest. And now the game is totally out of wack.

So, to stop powerful items coming into the hands of newbs, you can do a couple of things. First you can Bind On Pick up, or Bind on Equip. The first person to pick up the iitem, OR the first person to equip the item, is the only oone that can use it.

But, this is bad for trading, and bad for crafting. Obviously I can't sell you something that is bound to me only.

The other way to go is obselence. You just ramp everything up. Yo make the mobs tougher. Now you need a +2 sword of pwnage to kill them, and the +1 sword of pwnage is yesterdays item of power, now it's just junk. But that's difficult to keep up with, and eventually kinda ridiculous with everyone needing a +1,000 sword of pwnage.

Or, you can have item decay. Just like in the real world, things get old, and they break and need to be replaced. Good for crafters, becasue they can repair and craft items to replace the old ones.

But, players often get upset because they worked so hard for their +1 sword of pwnage, and now it's broken.

Which one do you like better?

 

Well, for starters, there will be inflation for any and every game system.  It is entirely and completely unavoidable.  And here is why:

With any economy there has to be a limited amount of currency available at any given time.  Otherwise it is devalued.  For example, in the US over hte past year the treasury flooded the market with some 250 billion newly printed dollars (without taking any currency out of play), devaluing every single dollar currently in the market, around the world, by about $.18.  In game economies there is 0 limit to the amount of money available.  When you go out and do 10-12 quests then return the quest giver always gives you the reward (an item with a set value and or a set amount of currency).  The real world does not work this way, look at the state of California which currently is giving out IOU's in lieu of pay, or some townships in Pennsylvania that are using scrip notes because the municipalities are currently bankrupt.  How many people would continue playing a game where the reward was a promise of payment sometime in the future.  BOP items, BOE items, and repair are nothing more than timesinks.  You have to go out of your way to get repairs, grind cash to pay for repairs, and run through content umpteen thousands of times to get multiple characters geared.  Timesinks equate to people playing just that much longer, and the game company getting that much more money for doing a minimal amount of work.

Now, secondly, everything does become obsolete as you level in any game system.  The +1 sword of ownage that you alluded to in your post becomes obsolete within a couple of levels.  There are no max level characters in many games running around with the same gear that they first logged into the game with (unless of course you are decked out in heirloom items in wow but those do not make for very good endgame gears lol).

Personally, lotro was halfway interesting the first month or two of release but there are just way too many breaks with lore for my taste.  I understand that it is a game first but there are certain things that I cannot overlook while continuing to have fun. 

Originally posted by Kremlik

Much like AoC, a change of head could be not 'the end' but a 'reboot'

Now 'techically' Bioware own WAR and the Warhammer Fantasy IP - it's no shock that EA chose to do this 'merge' after LoTD - It's opening the door for a chance to 'reboot' the game. With this 'what if?' IF BW came along and listed what they wanted to change in the game to keep it running with the next 'live expanson'/Retail Expanson, would anyone anyactally considering returning/continuing?

BioWare, imo, make great games based around story.  One of the reasons I thought that they could have taken over SWG years ago was because the game lacked all story elements and with the platform pre-made I think they would have been abel to formulate a grand epic storyline.  WAR is, for all intents and purposes, a complete game.  They have the story elements, the core gameplay experience, all complete (just a little rough around the edges) so that if BioWare did become involved it would just feel like added weight tacked onto what is already there.  Then, of course, all current content would need vast reworking to coincide with whatever bioware wanted to work in.

So, basically, no.  BioWare for all their talent would be a detriment to WAR, unless they built an entire expansion that was, in most ways, insulated against the rest of the game.

Originally posted by SSSJKiNg

 

 

I am just wondering since I didn't start playing MMO's until after WoW.  What game was the most famous before WoW.

In the US it was EQ by a slim margin over UO.  For the rest of the world, however, it was Lineage with multi-millions of subscribers.

Originally posted by Jefferson81

This game will be very fun for up to three months depending on how much and how often you play it but then it will lose it's appeal.

I don't think that SW:TOR will be THE online game that you spend all your free time in.

So a online game for the casual player, well thats nice.

 

 

 

To be perfectly fair, every mmo starts losing its shine after about 2 months.  Look.  Every single mmo that has come out has had no hook, nothing to really entice people to keep coming back.  At least those that aren't ocd, acheivement whores, or loot whores.  The ONLY thing that attracts me to a game are the people.  I know that I detest wow with a passion but the woman I am currently dating has been playing for a year + so guess what game I am playing now lol.  I very well expect BioWare to give me that hook that every single mmo has been missing... depth to the story, a reason behind the story.  I know I played through BG and BG2 umpteen times as multiple classes, Mass Effect I played through 3 different times, Jade Empire a couple times, NWN... shit I still play that thing lol.

I know that as it sits right now I will play through at least sith, bounty hunter, and smuggler story lines and maybe even jedi.  I full well expect that right there will be 5-6 months of game time.  Depending on the other classes and the pace with which they are able to keep the content coming I could see playing it for close to a year... be even longer if I get the girl I am dating (and IF we are still together at the time) to play as well lol. 

Originally posted by Netzoko

It blows my mind how out of touch developers are with the MMO base. With literally the biggest IP in the world, their focus is NOT what gamers have hated about mmos for years. No no, they will contiune to shovel the bullshit, but will now have STORY!

Are you kidding me? The level of absurdity is making my brain swell. People hate classes, they hate levels, they hate watered-down gameplay and grind. Does BioWare plan on address these -universal- complaints? Fuck no, to them the problem with MMOs is story? My mind is utterly blown. From forum to forum across the internet, followers are asking the same basic questions. Whats pvp like? Whats pve like? How are the classes? What is the item system like? Yet over and over, every single dev blog and release is about story. I just can't wrap my head around the unsurpassable amount of ignorance by the dev teams. You would think that seeing the failings of supposed "blockbuster" MMOs like Aoc and WAR would send a message, but no. Alas we continue to be insulted by developers who ignore the -KEY- issues people have with the genre, and instead focus on something utterly worthless.

Newsflash jackasses, your customers arn't upset with lack of story, they are upset with the cookie cutter MMO template that money grubing bandwagoners like you continue to reiterate and expect to sell.

Wow.... can you really be serious or is your attempt at sarcasm just very very bad.  A great many gamers, myself included, are quite pleased with the shift to story.  MMO's have been very light on story... so much so, that the only reason to read a quest's info is to figure exactly how much to kill of what and where that is.  Having some sort of storyline to play through will make for a much richer gaming experience.  I hope you do realize there are a large number of us that grew up on rpgs rather than quake and unreal tournament.

Pretty good post.... the sandbox part I think you nailed right.  There have to be some toys in a sandbox otherwise its just a big box of sand lol.  You cant even make a sandcastle without a bucket and plenty of water hehe.

As far as launch dates go... well I think you may have been a bit too forgiving.  As a programmer myself we have deadlines that must be met and it is the project manager's job to make sure that those dates are set realistically and that they are met.  If the dev team is unable to make their deadlines they need to be replaced with people far more competent.  Either that or a real project manager that knows what the hell he/she is doing.

I dig things like this myself.... as I would imagine all acheivement whores would lol :)

History is filled with vile and violent acts by one group of people on another group.  Unless you want to rewrite history you are bound to tick off one group or another lol.  Like the American Revolution themed game... how are you going to get a game developed and released where one ethnic group actually enslaves another group?  And if you just don't include slavery then you are not playing a historically based game at all.  The same thing with Rome and Japan.  There was a great deal of raping, pillaging, plundering, and enslavement of people that went on.  Again you are bound to offend someone, or make a game set in a psuedo time period that is a vanilla representation of the time period.

Caveman time frame sounds nifty, but really.  You want a game where you run off to hunt with a few friends on one day, then sit around and pick fleas and ticks off each other for a week?  I do realize that some revisionists have tried to say how harsh and brutal the hunter gatherer society was but generally speaking they worked about 1/10th of the time that we currently do and were, in many ways, a helluva lot healthier than we are.  Sure they died young but its not really the quantity of life we get but the quality that should matter and watching my 78 year old father slowly waste away is pretty frickin pathetic.

There has been a wild west mmo in the works for several years now, but you do realize that historically speaking it wasn't nearly as cool as hollywood likes to make it sound right?  Every day was not filled with gunfights at the OK Corral.

Basically an historical mmo would be the Sims Online with different costumes, and we all know how well that game faired.

The sum of an mmo is not just the game mechanics or even the game itself.  A good deal of it is the people that you play with.  Personally I just got back into WOW because of a chick I recently started dating and have a real good time with her in the game.  If it weren't for her I wouldn't have resubbed and wouldn't be playing any mmo's right now lol.  The same thing went for SWG.  I played that for far longer than I ever would have if it weren't for the relationships and friendships I had made in that game.

Maybe it's not for you to decide for your friend what he should or should not be playing?

quest grinding.... depends on how well its handled really.  There are 2 ways of progressing in an mmo... kill stuff, or do stuff for other people.  You can take the quests away but then you and everyone else in the game are nothing more than a bunch of homicidal maniacs because you don't even have a reason for going out and killing stuff.  The entire basis for mmos is somewhat flawed but I don't have any ideas for anything better.

Originally posted by Ichben

Hello guys and gals,

I run a World of Warcraft yahoo group: games.groups.yahoo.com/group/World_of_Warcraft_WoW/

Recently, a member of the group used the term "Huntard" in a message she posted in the group. Some people in the group didn't have a problem with the word(like myself), others found it offensive stating it is derogatory, demeaning and disrespectful. One person in the group said "...that word means: a retarded hunter. I don't see any difference between calling a person retarded because he didn't do something right or calling him a nigger because someone thought he was lazy (one connotation of that word). It is derogatory, demeaning and disrespectful."

What are you thoughts on this issue? Are people like me who find the term harmless being inconsiderate and insensitive to other people's feelings? Or do you think the term "Huntard" is harmless and not meant to be rude or mean to people who have special needs and disabilities.

I am currently conducting a poll within the group to get an idea of who finds it offensive and who does not. The results of the poll will tell me what to do next. Anyway, I'd like your thoughts on this issue if you don't mind.

Ichben Einberliner

 

The only people that take offense to terms like huntard etc... well... are huntards.  Its very simple :)

Originally posted by Master_Razor

This is a word that gets tossed around a lot here and I don't think it's entirely clear what people mean when they say it. From what I've read the two most popular definitions of this word are:

A mindless repetitive task.

and

A tiresome, boring repetitve task.

So is something a grind just because it's repetitive, or does it have to feel like drudgery to really be a "grind"? If it's the former, it means that grinding is a common part of MMOs that we're never going to see disolve away completely. If it's the latter, then the term grind is subjective, and only certain parts of certain games will be considered grinds to certain people.

When I think of the word grind I think of a mundane, boring, repetitive task that feels more like work than playing a game. I don't mind if something is repetitive, in fact every once in a while I seek out something that is mindless so I can just relax and veg out for a while. But I don't like a game to feel like work.

So what do you think?

For myself the "grind" is any mindless, repetitive task that takes away from the immersion factor of a game and that serves as nothing but a treadmill to the next minor power increase or item upgrade.  MMORPG's., for myself, are supposed to be stories where we (the players) take on the role of the major players.  Could you imagine reading the Lord of the Rings and every other paragraph is filled with Frodo goes to kill 100 spiders because Bounder Billy stubbed his toe?  Normally these are nothing more than an attempt to fill in empty space with shallow meaningless excuses for content in an effort to get people to subscribe longer.

This was one thing I liked about SWG.  They didn't try to hide the fact that you were grinding.  You didn't have to run all over poorly laid out clogged cities to get your next quest.  You just went to a mission terminal and took the two or so that paid the most money.  Ran out killed the lair, and ran back and did it again.  Everyone, including myself cried about the lack of content in SWG.  In fact, it has just as much if not more content than any other mmo because of those random mission generators.  If you think talking to NPC A is any different than talking to NPC Z on the far side of an ingame city then you are simply deluding yourself :)

Originally posted by Elikal

You know, I am a Star Wars fan/geek for almost 30 years and a roleplayer for also a very long time. For me the idea to play a Jedi in a virtual RP setting like a MMO is like a dream. A dream SWG had never fulfilled.

Somehow, following the SWTOR forums has saddened me. While there are sure some good and insightful people, a lot seem to be of a way... Somehow I wish you could limit Jedi class only to people with an intelligent and character test. Before you laugh it off, yeah its some odd nerdosity, but, it makes me cringe when I think what type of jerks will play that class. Ok, they will play other classes, too, but it only really matters with Jedi.

For me, Jedi are one of the best fiction inventions, they are no mere action heroes like thousands of others from thousands of other fiction. Like a Star Trek officer, the idea of a Jedi is some inspiring dream of humans bettering themselves. In ancient times humanity transported ethics via heroic tales, of people overcoming obstacles inside or outside of themselves. And such a thing were Jedi for me. The deeper you delve with all the novels and games, the more you can learn of other points of view, and sure while Star Wars isnt a Holy Book it sure contains some ethical questions. To me thus playing Jedi has to have meaning. And it cringe and sigh at the thought what kind of jerks will play Jedi as action heroes, as killing machines who "hunt Sith" like trophies.

Why does it always have to come down to this, which side kills more? Would not the Jedi class in a story-driven game be the one, big chance to make something better, something greater? Deep inside I hope they will impose limits to Jedi which sort of prevent jerks for playing Jedi. A Jedi must act like one, and be more than a soldier, more than just one more killing "bad guys" - action-hero.

 

Of course for Bioware I am afraid it will pay off more easier to just make Jedi another action melee soldier for the hyper hyper kids and leave those few folks with old fashioned ideas to their dreaming.

Sorry for the rambling, I am sure 99% of folks will just wonder what that guy here the heck is talking about...

This is one of those things that cannot be helped.  IF, like myself, you have been a fan for 30+ years then I am sure you have had your experiences in pnp role playing games as well.  Think of the Paladin as originally envisioned in the AD&D 2nd edition rulesets.  Then think of how many people roll up paladins in any number of mmo games then throw away all of the core principles that provide the foundation for the paladin class.  Or how about the Barbarian?  In every mmorpg that has come out they have had these iconic classes that are far deeper than a set of abilities yet that is all that they become.

Look at SWG.  During the earliest days of the game I remember sitting and chatting in the cantina as I was getting ready to log for the night when someone would come in and be totally out of sorts.  Come to find it was because they accidentally killed a Jawa and were sure that they would have to delete and start over because they would have no way of unlocking a jedi slot.  When SOE got tired of people being, supposedly, oh so close to unlocking but not they went and catered to the lowest common denominator and the game became little more than who can grind out as many profs as fast as possible to unlock jedi.  Then, instead of playing the game, they started their little fight clubs to max out their jedi with 0 risk.

But this is also one of hte strengths of the MMO.  You don't have to play with them.  Don't have to guild with them, party with them or even recognize their existence.  If swg is any example then I would wager more than half the people that roll up a jedi should be forced into the sith category lol.  At least I hope that there will be mechanisms in the game to try and steer people towards playing their characters with a certain mentality.  Of course this would be met with a good deal of whining and the like from those that want to be all powerful uber good jedi lol. 

I think the game will definitely be interesting and am looking forward to playing it.  Hopefully it will be out sometime relatively soon rather than waiting for 2012 or some such nonsense lol.

SWG was a great but very flawed game.  They, at SOE, never had a handle on the game and it just spiraled completely out of their control as time went on.  The CU and the NGE did nothing to alleviate the issues with the game and just compounded their problems.  Would I like to see an SWG2?  As much as I would have liked to have seen a UO2.  But, in both cases, the teams that are there now are not the teams that created those two games and I do not think that those current teams have either the talent nor the vision to be able to create either of those :)

With that said I am happy so far with what I have read about TOR and will play it when it finally gets released.  Hopefully they will choose good beta testers and they will release a game that is worthy of BioWare.:)

It's far from uber lol, but I really don't think its any worse than any other of the trivial games that are out there.  What, op, do you think is a good mmo that is currently out there or on its way? :)