I cracked and had a play of that SWTOR thing that everybody is on about and I’ve struggled to write down my thoughts so far, but I think I can sum it up with the following:
It has the great graphics, good combat and great polish. Probably best in class for all of them in fact. But you have to follow each of those with the words “for an MMO”. It’s polished, but nowhere near the polish of most AAA titles. The graphics are great, but not on a par with the state of the art elsewhere from even a few years ago (I include style as well as technical state of the art there). They have a slightly cartoon style that really doesn’t work for me as it’s just not stylised enough and so the characters just look a bit plain, dull and primitive. The combat is great for an MMO, but really boring compared to the faster paced combat that needs more actual skill in most other games. I am done justifying MMOs having worse anything “because they are an MMO” or even any game because they are just massive and complex. If you can’t get the polish up to a really high standard in your game it is too big (Bethesda, I’m looking at you) then you have failed to balance your game development and are saying “we care more about quantity than quality”. Bioware almost got it right here, but there’s still too many niggly things to be fully there. I suspect that they can pull it off after a few months of patching though if they don’t get all carried away, but I’m not sure they will fix the ones that have the most effect on me like noticing when your ship takes off that on some planets it disappears a second too early. Every time I see it I notice it, and am reminded about quality.
So if those areas are probably the best that MMOs have managed I think that leaves me with two areas that I care about. The first has to be the story and so far I’m not too disappointed. I’m playing a Male Sith Warrior and it’s a fun journey that so far has stayed away from the trap of making me the most important person in the universe, which is never going to work in an MMO. I’m just really powerful and being a bit keen to make my mark on the universe so far. Maybe if I finish Act 1 it will change, but I hope not. I have no problem with becoming the most important new Sith or something, but if all the classes end up as the most important person in the universe then that’s just not going to work. The big issue is the awful voice acting for the class. It’s just really bad acting that lacks any skill of delivery and always comes over as just a random statement of a madman, which is OK when he’s going all Sith, but when he’s having a normal conversation he just comes over as insane. Other classes are probably better.
Companions are fun, although they fall into the trap of ripping off the other Star Wars content a bit too much. The Sith Warrior gets a non-force using Ashoka clone as the first person, and the Jedi seem to predictably get an Astromech clone (although I’ve not played the class yet so I could be totally off base). Then you keep seeing the usual lack of vision/handy visual points of reference (delete as appropriate) forshadowing of ship design. Or droid design. Or building design.
This is all part of the horrible and insanely stagnant levels of progress in the Universe. Knowing that in a few thousand years time nothing will have really changed is a bit depressing. The ships will look a bit different, and the power will be spread out differently, but generally everything will be exactly the same. A few quests mention people doing something called “research”, but I’m not sure the people who are doing it really understand what it is as everything will look about the same come the time of the real canon.
Lastly there is the joke that is crafting. I’m going to ignore the question as to if anything you make is actually useful because you level so fast that I’m not bothering looking for the best gear yet. Crafting is performed by your companions, and there are three different slots that you can train as a character. These can be one crafting and two gathering, or three gathering I believe and you basically just say to your minion “go treasure hunt for me”, or “make me a red lightsaber crystal”. They then go off for an amount of time from a few minutes to half an hour depending on the level and come back with what you asked them to do. Nicely if they are creating something you see them at a workbench in your ship. All well and good so far, except that nasty time mechanic from Farmville has crept into another game (Assassin’s Creed and STO being the other annoying ones for me) and again they don’t even get the time spent/played vs reward mechanic that was the point of the mechanic in the first place. This has the result of being annoying for the first few (character) levels, but then you get your second companion and you can then send them off without effecting your combat efficiency.
The joke comes from the gathering abilities that send off your companion to find a box. This box will contain items and/or money. For instance Treasure Hunting may return a piece of armour or some credits. Slicing on the other hand will always return credits. Bioware have actually put in a mechanic for crafting that reduces crafting to “Pay X for a return of X +- Y”. A very meta joke, but all it means is that you run spare companions slicing as you play and your credits will always drift up. You are nuts not to as, taking my character for example, I have two spare companions I can send out and make me a bit of cash. It’s nowhere as good as before they nerfed it , and it doesn’t compete with mission rewards but before I tried it I was always cash starved and now I’m not, partially because it’s not been level dependent and I’ve been sending off my companions to run top level missions while I’m still only in my early 20s (it took a few days play to level up slicing to unlock the highest level). In the process they have distilled the process of crafting down to the most basic level and removed the curtain behind which the machine hid and I don’t like it.
My general impression of the game is positive though, and I’ve enjoyed my time in there. I’ve not yet logged on this year which may be telling and I really don’t see it as an MMO, but rather as a more expensive single player game with some nice friends to chat to in a window that isn’t going to be worth paying a monthly fee for, especially when Mass Effect 3 is sitting on my desk in a few months. It will be interesting to chart the cost of DLC for that against SWTOR and see who comes out best for value against hours played. One thing is for sure is that if I don’t feel like playing for half my subscription period (as it is now, and isn’t unusual) it really started to make SWTOR look bad value. It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s just the thought of wasting money.
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