Found it quite boring like Ravyn.

I prefer actual MMOs, not RPGs turned into MMOs.

 

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I am enjoying it. No surprises that it is linear as that is the norm in all games today. The story is extremely good though which I expected coming from Bioware.

 

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Yeah I pretty much posted the same in my review on the swtor forums.

http://vnboards.ign.com/sw_the_old_republic_general_board/b23436/115820696/p1/?0

It does well as a single player story-driven RPG, but not so much as a groundbreaking MMO.

 

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No surprise, WoW started the trend of the "Single player MMORPG" by making quest grinding the standard. Its part of why I've been ignoring MMORPGs, 80 levels of boredom then raiding as an endgame is just not appealing to me. They then extended this by moving towards the "single serving friend" method of grouping (the dungeon finder).

I'm obviously in the minority in wanting to play *with* others, with the game providing the social glue to make that happen. The usual response to that is "nothing is stopping you from grouping!" to which my response is "well, good luck with that..." I don't count the dungeon finder either, because that just ended up being a group of people too busy to communicate in any way other than to say "GOGOGOGOGOG" anyway.

Grouping is just one of those "features". People like to have the "option", but totally ignore it. PvP is the same. People will tend to ignore a game that has absolutely no PvP, but not participate in what PvP a game does offer.

At the end of the day, if I want a single player experience, I'll just go play Skyrim, or KOTOR etc. What can I say, I miss the days where people actually talked to other people aside from tossing snide jokes out in trade and chuck norris jokes.

Actually a lot of things stop you from grouping: like linear questing, harsh level disparities, and zoning to name a few mechanics.

 

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Very true. I've never liked games that had 8 instances of an area either. AoC was awesome for this. And by awesome, I mean completely 4th wall shattering bad. PvP was all about running away and switching your instance so that someone who was 40 levels higher than you couldn't camp you.

Even in WoW when you were playing with a friend, quests could be a pita. All you had to do was accidentally not pick one up, or not complete the quest (hey, it happens when you are rolling through hundreds of quests that are all the same) and you get to do it again.

That says nothing about quests that are just not group friendly (collect x quests mainly).

Also the pace is just not friendly to grouping either. People hate downtime, but the "gogogogogogogog" just limits communication harshly. When you have to hit a key every second to continue a DPS rotation, and you spend the rest of the time running as quickly as possible to the next batch of mobs, its just a ruthless pace.

I used to think I hated downtime until I played Lineage 2 and was given the special treat of being able to grind for hours with never stopping to rest. Thats a special kind of pain haha.

It's even worse in swtor because it isn't like you have a half dozen chains to work on at once, you have a generally two: a class-based story and the main storyline in whatever town/planet you are at.

It makes for a cool story to progress through, coupled with phasing mechanics that make the world change around you, but good luck teaming up with someone.

Even if you played with a friend, you can't select the same class, or you can't do the class storyline together.

So then you pick different classes, and help each other with your storylines. The whole thing is just not engineered for grouping anymore.

 

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i like the questing leveliing, but that's because i was a ranger in daoc and no one wanted to group with me 1-50, but as soon as i hit 50 everyone wanted me in the group to either be their bait or to scout. and when you're forced to be on a waiting list to level up because your class isn't ideal for an aoe grinding fest, you learn to hate that sort of leveling and everyone involved in it. daoc would have been 90000000x better if you could level through pvp alone. that would have made pvp classes fun all the way through the game.

 

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I grew up with DAoC, sometimes playing 16 hours straight to get to a competitive level for RvR and I guess I dont see what the difference was in the leveling compared to SWToR with the exception that DAoC didnt "guide" you like many modern MMO's tend to with the "arrows" and "pointers" but it was linear in it's own way. You followed the directions of previous quest givers to proceed both in the game storyline and your class storyline. Although less refined, even DAoC/EQ/AC/ et all were "linear".
You knew you had to go through certain "dungeons" to get good gear. In those days you were guided to them by the quest line, you just were not told exactly where the dungeon was with a green pointer to the entrance.
Other than the premise of 3 realms against each other in an open area for PvP every other MMO since (with maybe the exception of MMO'sdesigned specifically around PvP) has used a differing but, same to within themselves, PvP premise (capture the flag one team against the other).

So, I guess I dont understand all the bashing going on. I think many of us are just getting older and wiser to the genre. The days of DAoC/EQ1 and UO were the first days of graphical MMO's and as such were the next new greatest thing for computers since pockets on shirts.

 

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There were a lot of issues with the way DAOC did PvE / PvP. Archers were a broken class for a *long* time, and should never have existed in the form they were in (nor should stealth). There should be no such thing as a "PvP class". I do feel it points out an interesting facet of grouping and composition in general though. If any haphazard group will do just as well, then homogenization has made the game bland. If not, some are bound to be less than optimal.

At any rate the fault was with the game, and not with the groups. Nothing sucked more than having a "sniper" archer who would only melee because he didn't have arrows in your group. "I'm maxing stealth for the 35 bg!" Yeah, awesome guy you are a real credit to the group. To be fair, that was the choice they made.

I think a few tweaks would have made the grouping situation more livable in general, but so much of it people just brought on themselves. I'd be sitting there in a group, and there would literally be a full group worth of people trying to get into the group I was in.





If you can't see the difference between a solo quest grinding MMO and a camp grinding group MMO, I'm not sure we're going to be able to see eye to eye on that one. Its a pretty glaring / gigantic difference.





I'd argue that people are not getting wiser to the genre in general. The genre is about addiction not fun. Its about monotonously repeating recycled content for hundreds of hours simply because there is a reward attached. People often confuse this for fun, but the minute the reward disappears the behavior stops, revealing the actual motivation in play.