Confused about the general opinion on this game

[Knegoff]

Hello,

I really want to try this game out with my friend but we dont really want to waste the 8£ that the game will cost us if its bad. I tried to get a general opinion by watching these forums, but everyones opinion are the exact opposite of eachother. If someone sats raiding is hard, the other person will satt its a faceroll. Aren't there any objective things that are good/bad with it?

[Deleted]

Not sure if they have a free trail yet, so i think the only way to find out is to try it unfortunatly.

[Deleted]

Honestly, trying to get a balanced opinion on these forums is harder than trying to get blood from a stone.

Personally I like it, I'll try to give you a few things I've noticed;

The questing is great if you get into the story, if you skip all the dialogue like many do then it will not be for you.

The crafting system is very 'hands off' in that you don't really need to do any of it yourself, personally I like it, but then I hate normal grindy mmo crafting systems.

The pvp is actually not bad imo, however there are only 3 warfronts so it may get a bit repetitive. Damage isn't too bursty unless you're really out geared (there is a current problem with 50s being put in the same games as low level characters but that is being fixed this week)

The flashpoints are generally a bit longer than in wow, with the shortest taking about 20 minutes and the long ones over an hour. The trash is extremely easy, however the bosses have nice mechanics and are a decent challenge.

Normal mode raiding is designed to be puggable and pretty much is, only the last boss in EV would cause any serious problems at the moment. On Nightmare it requires 8/16 people that know what they're doing, it's not as hard as wow hard modes but that's not surprising as it's the entry level raid.

Most bosses have anything from fairly to extremely strict enrage timers, so dps cannot slack. Even with 2 raid geared dps we still hit the enrage on a few of the flashpoint HM bosses (probably some tuning needed there though).

That's about all I can think of at the moment, it's not super different from wow but it's a fun enough game in my opinion. I'm sure a free trial will appear soon enough if you're willing to wait.

[Rawt]

Just to offer a different opinion from the above..

Honestly, trying to get a balanced opinion on these forums is harder than trying to get blood from a stone.

Personally I like it, I'll try to give you a few things I've noticed;

The questing is great if you get into the story, if you skip all the dialogue like many do then it will not be for you. Agreed, questing is great. Unfortunately, after 40+ levels of not only class quest dialogue, but every quest dialogue, it gets old. they should have saved dialogue and decisions for class story, and got rid of it for regular quests. either that, or limit it to 1 or 2 choices per convo, instead of the sometimes 5-6 it currently is.

The crafting system is very 'hands off' in that you don't really need to do any of it yourself, personally I like it, but then I hate normal grindy mmo crafting systems. While this may be a nice feature, there are times where i just want to craft things myself (which you cant), instead of waiting up to 2.5 hours for my companion to finish a mission, or craft an item (yes, i said 2.5 hours, and thats at max companion affection). Would have been great to be able to actually go on these crafting missions yourself. Hands off by choice is cool, hands off by design is not.

The pvp is actually not bad imo, however there are only 3 warfronts so it may get a bit repetitive. Damage isn't too bursty unless you're really out geared (there is a current problem with 50s being put in the same games as low level characters but that is being fixed this week). PVP is atrocious. There's no denying it. The 2 main warzones are the exact same concept as ones im sure youre familiar with from other MMOs. The other one, huttball, is 100% about fighting the terrain, and 0% about PVP. PVP in general suffers from big class imbalances, and horrible (absolutely horrible) ability delay.

The flashpoints are generally a bit longer than in wow, with the shortest taking about 20 minutes and the long ones over an hour. The trash is extremely easy, however the bosses have nice mechanics and are a decent challenge. Done most of the flashpoints but 1 or 2, the mechanics are pretty similar to everything else. Also, you MUST sit through all the conversations each time you run each flashpoint (you can, however, rapid fire your spacebar through the choices, but you have to wait on the other group members).

Normal mode raiding is designed to be puggable and pretty much is, only the last boss in EV would cause any serious problems at the moment. On Nightmare it requires 8/16 people that know what they're doing, it's not as hard as wow hard modes but that's not surprising as it's the entry level raid. Agreed 100%

Most bosses have anything from fairly to extremely strict enrage timers, so dps cannot slack. Even with 2 raid geared dps we still hit the enrage on a few of the flashpoint HM bosses (probably some tuning needed there though).

That's about all I can think of at the moment, it's not super different from wow but it's a fun enough game in my opinion. I'm sure a free trial will appear soon enough if you're willing to wait.

Now, having said all that, i was a huge fanboy of the game for years, preordered first day it was made available, and did 3 beta tests (where i actually looked for and submitted bugs), and ive decided to let my game card time (60 days, starts tomorrow) tick down and wait til the game gets fixed up.

It has the potential to be a solid 'mmo', but they need to seriously kick their fix team into overdrive.

[Hulari]

Best thing to do is to try it. I've been playing it for the last month since release. I'll give you some personal opinions.

Questing
Questing is okay. It has a nice story line but it still is a simple go collect this or retrieve this for me questing. You get bonus quests whilst adventuring off toward these objectives which more or less become a "Kill 15 of these." "Collect/Destory 10 of these." whilst in the general area of the quests you're doing which are nice and don't need to be handed in; just give some nice bonus EXP. As I hit level 40 onwards I found questing boring and tedious. Same quests over and over, the only thing that kept me going was the class story because I really wanted to follow it.

The Class quests are superb, probably the best part of the game for me. Awesome story line and some brilliant solo content that I found really enjoyable.

Voice Acting
It's good at first, but then it gets very tedious other than the actual Class Quest. Bioware could have gotten away with just voice acting the class quest and nothing else. I found as I got toward max level, and at max level most of the quest givers were aliens and used repeated alien languages all over. I ended up skipping all NPCs that used alien language because it was annoying to listen to constantly.

PvP
I found PvP annoying. The combat system isn't the best. I found abilities lagging out and I'd die long after I pressed an escape ability, whether it be force cloak, my trinket ability or any personal cooldowns because of this. I just didn't enjoy it at all because I couldn't use abilities how I felt they should be used.

PvE (Flashpoints)
These are okay, when you do them the first time. The story line after the first time gets tedious. If you're in a group and people don't skip I find myself spending the time alt-tabbed, as I am now as I type this. As has been said; combat is okay. Mobs are easy and bosses can be a challenge until you get the tactics under wraps. Then they're really easy but very long winded. Spending over an hour, listening to the same voice acting and the same content does get tedious fast. Once you've done it, you've done it.

PvE (Operations)
From what I've experienced they're very easy some are actually easier than hard-mode flashpoints and quicker too; albeit the easiest version but investing time and trying to do the harder difficulties is something I don't want to invest my time into like I did in WoW because of IRL commitments. If you want to do the harder versions then I'd say give it a go.

Overall. I'd say it is WoW with lightsabers. I was all for it whilst I was levelling, I loved the class quest and really got into the story. Then I hit max level and I had a choice of dailies or doing flashpoints to get gear to prepare for the operations. You can actually jump into the easy operations without doing any of the dailies or flashpoints and use the levelling gear or gear you crafted. If you want to progress into the harder versions then you'll have to do a bit of everything.

[Glorious Leader]

Apparently this game is such that you will either love it or hate. I will give you my personal thoughts as well:

PVE

The flashpoints are awesome in this game. I never geeked out so hard as when I ran boarding party and the foundry flash points. Even going back and running something like Colicoid wargames again is still fun. I have yet to hit the heroic lvl 50 ones yet but my friends and guildies have told me they are fairly challenging with strict enrage timers. The operations have 3 difficulties and vary from Normal (roughly analogous to LFR difficulty in warcraft), Hard mode (Normal in warcraft) and Nightmare (Heroic in warcraft). If you look up some videos online you can see some of the fights. IRAE AOD one of the few (only?) guilds to clear it in hard/nightmare? (unconfirmed atm) has an excellent video of the final boss boss SOA. This week (tmmrw) I believe more content is being added (additional bosses to kargaras palace and additional flash points) and in march even more content will be added (more flashpoints, more operations, new planet)

Questing:

The questing experience so far has been really varied to me. Some parts of it I absolutely love, like going through tatooine and hoth and even belsalvis currently. I also found at some points I hit some rather dull parts on Quesh and Taris for instance. The class quests are excellent and even some of the side quests really stand out. If you generally like the questing experience in games such as MASS EFFECT and DRAGON AGE you will most likely enjoy the experience in SWTOR.

Pvp

I've done limited pvp as I've lvld. The game really needs a 50 bracket, which i'm glad to hear is coming this patch. At the same time I love some of the Warzones. Huttball is fun when you get a co-ordinated team but its lame when all people do is fight in mid and don't bother to chase the ball.

Overall I think the game is definitely worth it for the long term. Its a great game now and the sky is the limit in terms of what they can push the game to. Give it a shot and if you don't like it don't resub. I also suspect a trial will be sooner rather than later especially if they want to grow the game.

[Deleted]

Ignoring all the whiners and people bashing the game who never tried it, you can pretty much sum TOR up in a sentence:

Its a good game with a few problems but a lot of potential.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Have we heard anything about updates yet? Will it be on an update setup similar to WoW now, or will it be more like Vanilla WoW?

Asking because I'm considering picking up ToR as a second MMO. Story-wise it's certainly the antithesis of WoW, but in mechanics it's not so different.

[Jayded1]

Its hard to get any real advice for these forumns. All I can say is if you like Bioware games you will like this. I hope that helps a little.

[NyghtFox]

You ever think why your confused about the general opinion of that game? Its because you read/start forums like these. Its highly unlikley your gonna get anything good here...do some research yourself and then decide for yourself is all i can say, dont not try it because of what others have said, make up your own mind.

[Logonov]

My impression from all the things ive heard is this is a game for those who love the feel of an adventure. If you love mindlessly killing things you may have tons of fun, but story could get in the way of your competitive nature. I'm a sucker for this sort of adventure appeal and will definitly give this game a go.

[Dannoson]

Some notes on races/classes in this game as opposed to WoW.

In WoW, everything was about Race: you picked it before your class (well, I guess they can be picked on the same page, but see next point); race determines what class you can be; there were only a few actual class quests (3 or 4, even including the ones where you find your trainer); no race could be on both sides; the primary focus throughout the whole Warcraft Universe was on the conflict between Orcs and Humans (those were the main factions in earlier Warcraft games. Yes both sides banded together to fight certain bosses, but that was a temporary truce, shaky at best, and they degenerated into fighting each other again once the threat was over), etc.

In SWTOR, the main focus is about class: most races are available on both sides (4 are faction specific, 2 on each side); race is not much of an issue (i.e. not brought up often, except perhaps on the Empire side. They are quite human-centric); voice-acting is tied to class, not race; and the class quests span the entirety of the leveling process (I'm guessing on this point. I don't have any 50's yet)

Edit: As for update process, I too would like to see how this progresses. Soon, the content patch 1.1 will go live, but that mostly fixes bugs. I'm looking forward to Expansions, where they raise the level cap, mostly to see how they add more class quests in.

[Screwy Maverick]

You ever think why your confused about the general opinion of that game? Its because you read/start forums like these. Its highly unlikley your gonna get anything good here...do some research yourself and then decide for yourself is all i can say, dont not try it because of what others have said, make up your own mind.

What research is he supposed to do that doesn't involve buying the game (Which is what he's deliberating)? The only way you can get an idea of what a game has to offer when no demo/trial is available, is by asking the people that play it how they feel.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Some notes on races/classes in this game as opposed to WoW.

In WoW, everything was about Race: you picked it before your class (well, I guess they can be picked on the same page, but see next point); race determines what class you can be; there were only a few actual class quests (3 or 4, even including the ones where you find your trainer); no race could be on both sides; the primary focus throughout the whole Warcraft Universe was on the conflict between Orcs and Humans (those were the main factions in earlier Warcraft games. Yes both sides banded together to fight certain bosses, but that was a temporary truce, shaky at best, and they degenerated into fighting each other again once the threat was over), etc.

In SWTOR, the main focus is about class: most races are available on both sides (4 are faction specific, 2 on each side); race is not much of an issue (i.e. not brought up often, except perhaps on the Empire side. They are quite human-centric); voice-acting is tied to class, not race; and the class quests span the entirety of the leveling process (I'm guessing on this point. I don't have any 50's yet)

Edit: As for update process, I too would like to see how this progresses. Soon, the content patch 1.1 will go live, but that mostly fixes bugs. I'm looking forward to Expansions, where they raise the level cap, mostly to see how they add more class quests in.

I'd love to see how they handle Expansions. Arguably they have a much larger base to gather lore and content from than WoW. Really after Pandaria Blizzard will have to start making up locations. While ToR has the entire Galaxy established in the various Star Wars material to use.

But the question is how they will handle it. Will each expansion bring 5 levels, 10 levels, or no levels? Will there be one planet, or two, or more? Will more races be added, or more classes? What will the driving storyline be?

[vizzle]

Have we heard anything about updates yet? Will it be on an update setup similar to WoW now, or will it be more like Vanilla WoW?

Asking because I'm considering picking up ToR as a second MMO. Story-wise it's certainly the antithesis of WoW, but in mechanics it's not so different.

Patch 1.1 is coming out today. New flashpoint, more bosses to the raid, changes to the endgame planet, and level 50 brackets. Next content patch comes out in March.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Patch 1.1 is coming out today. New flashpoint, more bosses to the raid, changes to the endgame planet, and level 50 brackets. Next content patch comes out in March.

Yeah, just read about 1.2

Certainly looks interesting. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about bugs, is the game horribly bugged (as in gamebreaking bugs) or just inconvenience bugged.

[Porimlys]

Well, like most games, some people like it and some people don't. It's good that you're doing research before you try it out, but what other people think of it doesn't always reflect how you will think about it. You might just have to wait for a free trial or derp around on a friends account.l

[vizzle]

Yeah, just read about 1.2

Certainly looks interesting. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about bugs, is the game horribly bugged (as in gamebreaking bugs) or just inconvenience bugged.

Nothing really gamebreaking, just princesses telling you that they won't eat from their plate because the beans are mixing with the rice.

[Beavis]

Yeah, just read about 1.2

Certainly looks interesting. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about bugs, is the game horribly bugged (as in gamebreaking bugs) or just inconvenience bugged.

People are really overstating the bugginess of the game. The game is significantly less buggy than say, Skyrim or WAR, but much buggier than WoW is today. I get the feeling that most people run across a few minor, but consistent bugs, such as the PvP group drop bug and then a few very vocal and understandably frustrated people have experienced major, game breaking bugs. So, this being a WoW site and their being some definite anti-SWTOR folk around, that reputation has been picked up on. Personally, I've yet to experience any significant bugs.

[Klutzington]

Hello,

I really want to try this game out with my friend but we dont really want to waste the 8£ that the game will cost us if its bad. I tried to get a general opinion by watching these forums, but everyones opinion are the exact opposite of eachother. If someone sats raiding is hard, the other person will satt its a faceroll. Aren't there any objective things that are good/bad with it?

8 Euros... or whatever that symbol is o.0.... is not much to "waste". SWTOR is a great game; now, this doesn't mean it's like WoW at all.. it has a different "feel." The engine is different... once you get used to it, it's great.