Not Spaceghost
Spaceghost
Warning: long as fuck post incoming
This goes back a few months really but since it's an MMO I don't think it's fair to write about it until you've given every aspect of the game a fair shot.
I initially jumped into SWTOR after Wildstar failed to grab my attention and originally I jokingly downloaded it as a "lol everyone said this was supposed to be horrible I'll look at it and get a good chuckle out of it" type thing, since it was F2P after all.
Boy was I wrong, it only took me about 2 hours to realize that there was something here I had wrongly been ignoring for over 2 years now. I can't speak for how this game was at launch, but what I've been playing since May is a lot of fun. All that business about how the game blew it's 200mil budget on voice acting is completely worth it if you ask me, even just accepting a normal quest is a little dialogue convo where you feel like you're engaging with the story line in a more meaningful way than "accept quest". It doesn't amount to much most of the time but it does help you get into character more if that's your thing.
The game always seems to go out of its way to add more flavor and superfluous things into the environment which is something I absolutely adore. So many times I'll be doing a dungeon or something and I'll look out the windows of the space station or starship I'm in and see a full fledged battle going on out side. It's little touches like that that didn't really need to be there but are.
Within these environments you'll find an odd thing for an MMO interactive objects you can use in combat like the explodable canisters you can interact with to create a smoke screen (CC), electrical bursts (Damage), toxic gas (DoT), or of course a big boom (knock down massive damage). It's just really fun to see a door explode see a bunch of droids rush at you but out of the corner of your eye you see a nice red canister sitting right next to them, so you pop it and watch robot bits fly.
Speaking of combat, the thing that I noticed about SWTOR right off the bat was how rare it was to be fighting a single enemy, most of your battles even while soloing are against packs, it's exciting and keeps things fresh. It also feels more demanding since you've really gotta know your way around your abilities to survive at times, knowing how to approach a pull, what to CC what to kill first and what companion to use.
The companion system is something I thought I would utterly despise at first because I hate "pet classes" in MMOs and the companion system essentially makes everyone a pet class. However companions are a lot of fun, because they're gained through story progress each have a personality and are generally really low maintenance, they just kind of do their own thing in combat and it's rare to need to micro manage them, keeping their gear up to date isn't even that difficult, just throw them quest reward greens or whatever scraps you find along the way and they'll perform decently (until max level where you'll probably want to get them legit gear).
The story is what this games big draw is, now I'm not generally the worlds biggest story dude in games, but this one was a lot of fun. It gave you motivations for where you had to go next and a nice little over arching set of objectives in addition to the planetary quest line objectives. But it's exciting to be sent out on a mission across the galaxy and wind up on a planet for a specific purpose. Having finished both the Jedi Knight story and the Jedi Consular one it was super cool being on the same planet on my second character but for a completely different reason. Also it was also cool seeing themes that carry over between the stories but have more emphasis on one than the other, it really gives you this feeling of an interconnected story that's developing all around you and each person is just going on their own path, really neat stuff.
There is just so much stuff in this game, Galactic Starfighter is basically a star wars themed War Thunder built right into this game. The space ship missions while not very deep / not much content there are a fun little rail shooter mini game you can do to pass the time. You can spend your time following through on your companions story lines building rep with them, doing dailies for money, all sorts of dungeons. Then there are the raids in this game, story mode is really fun, it's just easy enough that you can pug is but just challenging enough that you have to know the fights and what you're doing. The encounter design in this game is really unique, with fights that feel more like long events, and some slightly more traditional ones.
Crew skills are fun, they're basically the professions of this game but they're managed from your crew window, you basically put your companions to work, send them on gathering missions, on other errands, or put them to work crafting stuff. What's cool is having high levels in certain professions unlocks shortcuts during dungeons. Like if you have high level scavenging, you can fix this laser drill that opens up a cave leading you directly to the boss ignoring 8 or so trash pulls.
Speaking of the dungeons, they're amazing. I think the first one sets the tone perfectly for what you should expect out of them. They're like a mini mission built into the game. Where you fly to a specific location, sent there by the republic, the jedi order or whoever, and it has its own mini story line, there are conversations to uncover what is going on here, choices to make and nice cutscenes. You know the opening sequence of KOTOR1 where you wake up on the ship without your memory and you go through like a 30 minute long sequence trying to escape and running into enemies and allies along the way? Think of that and make it less like a tutorial and you've got the basic idea for how these dungeons operate, they're a lot of fun.
One of the more unique fights I saw was this one encounter that required you to sneak around a small city in a certain time limit, divide your group up into teams of 2 and you would each split up and take out an objective then meet sneak past the super powered guard droids and escape infiltrate the boss chamber.
Finally pvp, for those of you that played WoW this games pvp reminds me a lot of early Cataclysm era pvp with WotLK era numbers, but in a good way, healers are stong so you've got to gang up on them to finish em, CC is everywhere but not RNG and mostly short so you need to plan around it, and some classes have insane burst at their disposal which really makes 1v1s tense. There is also very minimal self healing outside of certain long defensive cool downs for most classes that don't have a healing talent, which is great because when damage is done it sticks, it feels good.
One of the bigger criticisms were that your choices don't matter but that's not something I found at all, characters I spared when I could have killed them came back to help me later on, or characters I killed were mentioned mournfully by their friends. Having unrealistic expectations of one characters actions deeply impacting the world in an MMORPG is probably the root of this, but honestly I think the choices help you feel more like you're in control of who your character is than anything, which is really nice.
The biggest issues I take with this game is how empty it can feel and how long it takes for the classes to feel "complete". As for the emptiness, I don't mean it in a there are no players sense, but in a "LOOK AT THIS HUGE FIELD WITH 12 MOBS IN IT" sense. A lot of the open areas are huge as hell but don't feel very populated, the game really shines in starship / space station environments with corridors and stuff.
As for the classes taking forever to feel complete, well it's tricky, a lot of classes don't have a good rotation going for them until they get their level 45 talent which means for a lot of the game you're playing your character and thinking "man something is missing here", because talents affect a lot of your rotation. Since the game has no auto attack it can make things feel weirder until you get all of your skills, or at least the bulk of them. Hell the Jedi Knight doesn't even get the iconic "saber throw" until level 36 and force push till like 28. So that can make characters feel weird, especially since once you get all your skills the combat dynamic changes a lot, most classes don't really a spam attack but rather a series of attacks you do, it's cool as melee because it feels like you're putting together a string of slashes into a big combo with a pay off at the end.
Another issue I have is that the game is a little bit buggy, mods die standing up, getting stuck in geometry happens occasionally your UI can disappear between load screens. The game gives you ways to deal with the bugs but they're still there and keep the game from feeling really polished, though I'd still say it is one of the more polished MMO's I've played.
My final issue with it, well I don't know how much of an issue it is, is that there is no compatibility for UI mods, while damage meters and DPS tracking are available through desktop programs you have to run in the background I kind of like that I know everyone has the same limitations, not to mention the built in UI editor is really powerful. Still though it is lacking some rather basic features like, having your debuffs against a boss be highlighted, simple methods for DoT / Proc tracking and the ability to hide portraits in your unit frames.
Also the game isn't cross server, which affects queue times for PvE content at times but I kind of like it for pvp, having familiar faces, knowing the pros from the scrubs in each warzone is nice. You end up getting to know the hard core pvpers are forming friendships with them or rivalries with imp scum you see on the other side. It creates community by just making you play with the same bunch of people all the time. It's nice, you end up feeling like you have to respect everyone or get screwed over later whenever you're looking for a group in general chat on the fleet.
Honestly, this game blew me away, I haven't felt this attached to an MMO in a long time it's the first MMO since I started (stopped) playing WoW that I've even bothered to level cap on...and I've done so twice in SWTOR. I started out as a F2P but ended up subbing around level 38, because I was just having such a great time.
As a long time fan of KOTOR I can see how this game was not the game fans of those games were expecting, but as a fan of KOTOR and MMOs I think SWTOR is great.
So yeah, what do you guys think of SWTOR? Did you hate it originally? I'm curious as to what it was like at first to make everyone hate it so much. I have a theory that it was just people expecting the game to be not an MMO and just KOTOR. Or people giving up around level 30.
This goes back a few months really but since it's an MMO I don't think it's fair to write about it until you've given every aspect of the game a fair shot.
I initially jumped into SWTOR after Wildstar failed to grab my attention and originally I jokingly downloaded it as a "lol everyone said this was supposed to be horrible I'll look at it and get a good chuckle out of it" type thing, since it was F2P after all.
Boy was I wrong, it only took me about 2 hours to realize that there was something here I had wrongly been ignoring for over 2 years now. I can't speak for how this game was at launch, but what I've been playing since May is a lot of fun. All that business about how the game blew it's 200mil budget on voice acting is completely worth it if you ask me, even just accepting a normal quest is a little dialogue convo where you feel like you're engaging with the story line in a more meaningful way than "accept quest". It doesn't amount to much most of the time but it does help you get into character more if that's your thing.
The game always seems to go out of its way to add more flavor and superfluous things into the environment which is something I absolutely adore. So many times I'll be doing a dungeon or something and I'll look out the windows of the space station or starship I'm in and see a full fledged battle going on out side. It's little touches like that that didn't really need to be there but are.
Within these environments you'll find an odd thing for an MMO interactive objects you can use in combat like the explodable canisters you can interact with to create a smoke screen (CC), electrical bursts (Damage), toxic gas (DoT), or of course a big boom (knock down massive damage). It's just really fun to see a door explode see a bunch of droids rush at you but out of the corner of your eye you see a nice red canister sitting right next to them, so you pop it and watch robot bits fly.
Speaking of combat, the thing that I noticed about SWTOR right off the bat was how rare it was to be fighting a single enemy, most of your battles even while soloing are against packs, it's exciting and keeps things fresh. It also feels more demanding since you've really gotta know your way around your abilities to survive at times, knowing how to approach a pull, what to CC what to kill first and what companion to use.
The companion system is something I thought I would utterly despise at first because I hate "pet classes" in MMOs and the companion system essentially makes everyone a pet class. However companions are a lot of fun, because they're gained through story progress each have a personality and are generally really low maintenance, they just kind of do their own thing in combat and it's rare to need to micro manage them, keeping their gear up to date isn't even that difficult, just throw them quest reward greens or whatever scraps you find along the way and they'll perform decently (until max level where you'll probably want to get them legit gear).
The story is what this games big draw is, now I'm not generally the worlds biggest story dude in games, but this one was a lot of fun. It gave you motivations for where you had to go next and a nice little over arching set of objectives in addition to the planetary quest line objectives. But it's exciting to be sent out on a mission across the galaxy and wind up on a planet for a specific purpose. Having finished both the Jedi Knight story and the Jedi Consular one it was super cool being on the same planet on my second character but for a completely different reason. Also it was also cool seeing themes that carry over between the stories but have more emphasis on one than the other, it really gives you this feeling of an interconnected story that's developing all around you and each person is just going on their own path, really neat stuff.
There is just so much stuff in this game, Galactic Starfighter is basically a star wars themed War Thunder built right into this game. The space ship missions while not very deep / not much content there are a fun little rail shooter mini game you can do to pass the time. You can spend your time following through on your companions story lines building rep with them, doing dailies for money, all sorts of dungeons. Then there are the raids in this game, story mode is really fun, it's just easy enough that you can pug is but just challenging enough that you have to know the fights and what you're doing. The encounter design in this game is really unique, with fights that feel more like long events, and some slightly more traditional ones.
Crew skills are fun, they're basically the professions of this game but they're managed from your crew window, you basically put your companions to work, send them on gathering missions, on other errands, or put them to work crafting stuff. What's cool is having high levels in certain professions unlocks shortcuts during dungeons. Like if you have high level scavenging, you can fix this laser drill that opens up a cave leading you directly to the boss ignoring 8 or so trash pulls.
Speaking of the dungeons, they're amazing. I think the first one sets the tone perfectly for what you should expect out of them. They're like a mini mission built into the game. Where you fly to a specific location, sent there by the republic, the jedi order or whoever, and it has its own mini story line, there are conversations to uncover what is going on here, choices to make and nice cutscenes. You know the opening sequence of KOTOR1 where you wake up on the ship without your memory and you go through like a 30 minute long sequence trying to escape and running into enemies and allies along the way? Think of that and make it less like a tutorial and you've got the basic idea for how these dungeons operate, they're a lot of fun.
One of the more unique fights I saw was this one encounter that required you to sneak around a small city in a certain time limit, divide your group up into teams of 2 and you would each split up and take out an objective then meet sneak past the super powered guard droids and escape infiltrate the boss chamber.
Finally pvp, for those of you that played WoW this games pvp reminds me a lot of early Cataclysm era pvp with WotLK era numbers, but in a good way, healers are stong so you've got to gang up on them to finish em, CC is everywhere but not RNG and mostly short so you need to plan around it, and some classes have insane burst at their disposal which really makes 1v1s tense. There is also very minimal self healing outside of certain long defensive cool downs for most classes that don't have a healing talent, which is great because when damage is done it sticks, it feels good.
One of the bigger criticisms were that your choices don't matter but that's not something I found at all, characters I spared when I could have killed them came back to help me later on, or characters I killed were mentioned mournfully by their friends. Having unrealistic expectations of one characters actions deeply impacting the world in an MMORPG is probably the root of this, but honestly I think the choices help you feel more like you're in control of who your character is than anything, which is really nice.
The biggest issues I take with this game is how empty it can feel and how long it takes for the classes to feel "complete". As for the emptiness, I don't mean it in a there are no players sense, but in a "LOOK AT THIS HUGE FIELD WITH 12 MOBS IN IT" sense. A lot of the open areas are huge as hell but don't feel very populated, the game really shines in starship / space station environments with corridors and stuff.
As for the classes taking forever to feel complete, well it's tricky, a lot of classes don't have a good rotation going for them until they get their level 45 talent which means for a lot of the game you're playing your character and thinking "man something is missing here", because talents affect a lot of your rotation. Since the game has no auto attack it can make things feel weirder until you get all of your skills, or at least the bulk of them. Hell the Jedi Knight doesn't even get the iconic "saber throw" until level 36 and force push till like 28. So that can make characters feel weird, especially since once you get all your skills the combat dynamic changes a lot, most classes don't really a spam attack but rather a series of attacks you do, it's cool as melee because it feels like you're putting together a string of slashes into a big combo with a pay off at the end.
Another issue I have is that the game is a little bit buggy, mods die standing up, getting stuck in geometry happens occasionally your UI can disappear between load screens. The game gives you ways to deal with the bugs but they're still there and keep the game from feeling really polished, though I'd still say it is one of the more polished MMO's I've played.
My final issue with it, well I don't know how much of an issue it is, is that there is no compatibility for UI mods, while damage meters and DPS tracking are available through desktop programs you have to run in the background I kind of like that I know everyone has the same limitations, not to mention the built in UI editor is really powerful. Still though it is lacking some rather basic features like, having your debuffs against a boss be highlighted, simple methods for DoT / Proc tracking and the ability to hide portraits in your unit frames.
Also the game isn't cross server, which affects queue times for PvE content at times but I kind of like it for pvp, having familiar faces, knowing the pros from the scrubs in each warzone is nice. You end up getting to know the hard core pvpers are forming friendships with them or rivalries with imp scum you see on the other side. It creates community by just making you play with the same bunch of people all the time. It's nice, you end up feeling like you have to respect everyone or get screwed over later whenever you're looking for a group in general chat on the fleet.
Honestly, this game blew me away, I haven't felt this attached to an MMO in a long time it's the first MMO since I started (stopped) playing WoW that I've even bothered to level cap on...and I've done so twice in SWTOR. I started out as a F2P but ended up subbing around level 38, because I was just having such a great time.
As a long time fan of KOTOR I can see how this game was not the game fans of those games were expecting, but as a fan of KOTOR and MMOs I think SWTOR is great.
So yeah, what do you guys think of SWTOR? Did you hate it originally? I'm curious as to what it was like at first to make everyone hate it so much. I have a theory that it was just people expecting the game to be not an MMO and just KOTOR. Or people giving up around level 30.
