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Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic 

Reviews & Impressions  » Voice- Yes, Story- Not so Much, and... Let Me Off the Theme Park!!!

5 posts found

Novice Member

Joined: 11/07/08
Posts: 37

OP  1/10/12 12:33:15 PM#1

Story as a pillar? Have you ever played another MMO, Team Bioware? Every MMO I've played may not have been voiced, but line for line had more text/story per quest than the rote TOR "go do this, and get bonus quest to kill 15-50 mobs" at every stranger represented by an NPC. Lotro quests had a good 4x the volume of story associated with the typical quest, by my estimate.


And yes, quest-givers in TOR are strangers, every NPC is another stranger in a long list of strangers. The charm and depth of Star Wars (or any story other than perhaps Conan the Barbaian) is the ensemble cast that progresses character development and adds an environment we can engage as players in a story.


Here, there's no Leia, no Han, no Chewie, just one stranger after another doling out the next mundane quest. Now, they could have and could still give us that ensemble cast via our crew characters, and the rare times they speak up start to have that affect, but they are so rare as to be absent, and we're rating the game on how it is today, right? I'm sorry, but the Story element is not something TOR can claim as a strength. Voice, yes, Story, no way.


Aside, their customer service is in crisis mode, they don't respond anywhere near their quoted standard (24 hours), and in my multiple experiences is 3 to 5 weeks, or never. They have their forums in crisis mode, fire fighting, with Polls, Search, and even viewing your own posts disabled, providing zero value as a resource to players. They have limited forum categories, ignoring MMO 101, so that the outcome is that any posts made by players are buried on page 50 in 30 minutes regardless of which few forums you post in, including Customer Service Forum. There are no forums for servers, so finding guilds in your server is nearly impossible, and there's likewise no forums for such things as Suggestions/Feedback, Website/Forums Feedback, Companions, UI Discussion, or even Quests/Mission Discussion... A travesty of service value and competency in managing an MMO.


Let's talk sound for a minute. On most worlds, it's so quiet you're nodding off and all you hear is "schlop schlop" of your footsteps half the game or the buzz of a speeder the other half. Every once in a while sound blares to life during combat and it startles me awake. This lead me to load up the Tor CE soundtrack CD for the commute to the office to see what I was missing during the silence of gameplay. I kid you not, upon arriving home that evening the CD went in the garbage bin. What a colossal piece of trite commercial vapor. You'd think they'd have a fair opportunity to create some thematic music pieces to set the theme for each unique world. Nope, just trite garbage. I DL'd the soundtracks for the Homeworld game's instead, turned off in-game music so it wouldn't on rare occasions conflict with Homeworld, and gameplay during the long grinds improved quite a bit.


Finally, as a player for some time through testing, you just want off the theme park sometimes, and every planet/environment is just another theme park, whether on the rails of a planet or another, or space combat. For goodness sakes, an MMO can't be all theme park, it's so confining you want to scream.


Novice Member

Joined: 10/19/07
Posts: 186

1/10/12 12:34:38 PM#2

someone please use a lightsaber to cut through that wall of text O_o


Apprentice Member

Joined: 2/07/06
Posts: 339

How can you kill someone who has no life?

1/10/12 12:35:31 PM#3



Novice Member

Joined: 11/07/08
Posts: 37

OP  1/10/12 12:37:55 PM#4

Sorry, that's a prob with these forums and iPads.  It wasn't a wall of text when entered.  Had to hop on a real PC to fix it.


Novice Member

Joined: 11/07/08
Posts: 37

OP  1/10/12 6:22:36 PM#5

I've given a lot of feedback to Bioware going back to early testing, and reading some of the threads here, am reminded of a fundamental issue I shared some time ago that I think is now biting Bioware hard with Live upon us. It's not helped with a lack of server-specific forums to help real people find good guilds.


The issue based on some hard truths.

1 - we're at the highest or most fundamental level human beings... People.

2 - for many, many reasons I could go on for pages about, it's quite challenging for adult players to find a good guild, a home, almost impossible.


Given those two truths, at the end of the day, we want to enjoy the game with nice people without hassles and drama. Good luck with that with most guilds!


What does Bioware do? With a game that by design, the average player will want to play many classes - if not all 8 and with diff LS DS configs it could be more? They made it so you'd not only have to search for and hassle with one guild community, and it's people and com tools, but bifurcated it into a mandatory need to find and hassle with one guild for each set of classes.


For adults, that is far beyond the realm of reasonableness, and only seves to bifurcate, confound, and add hassle to an already insurmountable "job" of community searches and expectations management. It's frankly absurd. Add again the lack of Search and server-specific forums for at least the short term, it's nothing short of a complete failure for human beings to successfully engage the Tor community beyond a single player game. Strategic failure.