Too Linear?

[Uncle Julian]

First time into the beta was this past weekend, and I really enjoyed it except for a feeling of being confined where ever I was. I made a Consular and got to level 15. Apart from the starting/home world, I was able to explore the space station (I forget name, the one that had the Esseles flashpoint and Hammer Station) as well as making it to Coruscant.

The only other MMO's I've played are WoW, and Everquest. To me, both of those games gave me a true sense of "hugeness" and openness, where you could literally walk for an hour in one direction while finding new places. However I felt a little confined in each map or location that I was in while playing TOR, almost as if I was in a large instance (Yes, I know the worlds are their own instance, but for a whole planet it seems kind of small). I remember doing the bonus Guild quests to kill all the guild people on Coruscant and it wasn't really open at all, just a few rooms connected to each other by two seperate routes...hardly what I would call open.

Maybe this is the model that Bioware is going for, which is perfectly fine as it's their game. And maybe it is actually different with other planets or locations which I didn't get to experience. But I felt like I didn't have much freedom to explore or find secret or hidden places.

Did anyone else feel this way?

[Dasani]

The game is extremely linear, yes. It's an unfortunate side effect of combining single player RPG quality storytelling with MMO mechanics.

Normally in a game like this, such as in the KOTOR games, you had the freedom to basically visit planets in any order you wanted and the enemies scaled to your level so it was always a viable option. But it can't be done that way in a MMO for obvious reasons. So the only way to have a truly interesting story is to follow a specific route through the planets.

It doesn't give you much "freedom" per se in which planets you choose to level up on, but you'll end up seeing every area of all the planets anyway and you can always freely explore them once you are there and look for hidden and secret things. There are actually some hidden things to find while exploring in this game which will benefit your character. Just explore the planets while you're on em.

Besides, the route you take through the planets makes sense if you pay attention to your class story. You have a reason to visit each of these planets and you are ordered to do so by your superior and given specific objects. You aren't just a free rogue running around the universe doing whatever you want, you belong to a military organization with superiors telling you what to do. Only smugglers and bounty hunters aren't part of this group with clear cut superiors, but they have their own agendas and reasoning. I haven't played any of the smuggler storyline so I couldn't tell ya, but the bounty hunter is all about The Great Hunt, so that is what is laying out their overall objectives for them.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

It's a nice twist in my opinion, sure it's not the open world I hoped for, but the fun I had in the dungeons with the "Roll for the dialog options" was damn epic. If someone wanted to make an evil decision, the whole group has to go with it! They might add a bit more exploring later in major patchs/hopefully expansions. I'd like to explore a bit more of Coruscant, my favorite place in the Star Wars universe. It works for me. I don't mind paying the little fee every month for good entertainment.

[dokono]

Some branching would've been nice. I can see multiple play-throughs getting boring, but that's true with any MMO. I thought for sure they would've put in a few story choices that result in different questing zones, though, considering Bioware should know how painful alting in a linear MMO is and their usual "control the outcome of the universe" take on single-player RPGs.

Edit: I hated what they did with Coruscant, actually. Looks incredibly uniform in comparison to how I imagined it. The whole world's a freaking space-age megalopolis and they chose to stick with one look for every part of the zone. Seemed like a missed opportunity to me.

[Cyrila]

While BioWare seems to have always had this open-world-but-not-quite going in most of their games, they have really tried to open it up in SWTOR. Class quests are linear and rightly so, but apart from that once you get off the starter planets and onto larger worlds like Alderaan and Tatooine you come to realize just how vast some of these worlds are. Perhaps what causes your feeling of being confined comes partly from the worldmap splitting each area into zones with no way to zoom out, making it feel like you're going between instances?
Besides from that, exploration actually gets rewarded in the form of datacrons contrary to some MMOs that don't reward exploration at all.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

Edit: I hated what they did with Coruscant, actually. Looks incredibly uniform in comparison to how I imagined it. The whole world's a freaking space-age megalopolis and they chose to stick with one look for every part of the zone. Seemed like a missed opportunity to me.

Yea, this is one of the zones I wish would at least have one huge center map for us to exlpore, like a hang out spot. Something it is suppose to be, a city for the Jedis. Cept the only hangout is the fleet it seems =[ Missed opportunity indeed.

[moaradin]

The game gets more open as you progress through the game. The later planets are giant.

[Atelniar]

Storytelling-wise, it is far less linear than WoW has ever been. That's pretty much a fact. As long as you understand that all quests in WoW are the same in the end and you can not really respond to them with dialogue or doing something evil/good beyond how you are directed. That the end result of the story in TOR may end up at the same place no matter how you proceed may be so, I haven't really tried it yet.

The reason you may feel TOR to be too linear is that it focuses so much more on storytelling than metagaming like WoW does. Answer me this: how, if in any way, does the storyline of your WoW-character change based on race/class? WoW only feels like a sandbox game, it really isn't. Apart from the fact that you can pick what quests to do.

Keeping all this in mind I have to play it first, but TOR can't be so bad that I don't find some enjoyment out of it from what I know. While WoW has become so uninspiring that I want to delete it off my computer in part, but that's because I know WoW can be so much better than what it has been the last five months.

Overall I think you have to keep in mind that while TOR looks a lot like WoW and other MMO's it has one thing none of them has. A dynamic quest dialogue which makes the story a lot less linear. Even if it feels as if you get directed through the game more. That however covers up the simplistic questing, which is a good thing. They can work on making the questing in itself less simplistic though and if they manage that it may turn out to be a very good game if they nail end content and PvP.

I look forward to see for myself just how linear it feels when playing though. :3

A lot of MMO-design is about creating an illusion of something. WoW wants to create an illusion of being open and free when it is as linear as it can get. There is so much to do, however, and so many quests that the linear story of WoW pales for a while. But if you have played the game for about 7 years you end up realizing that it is just like running through a fairly linear shooter. It just doesn't feel like it to begin with. TOR on the other hand want to create the illusion of an epic story arch about your own character which feels unique even if you in the end turn up to be one of many who ended up at the same bus station. The choices you made under the way may have been somewhat different though. You can probably cut off the head of a person someone else spared, etc, etc.

[Jukex]

Just about all of the worlds From Tatooine and on are absolutely huge. They are so wide open it is pretty breathtaking.

[Deleted]

ToR is far less linear than WoW, considering you actually have multiple ways to complete almost every quest present in the game. As for the environmnents being linear...again, comparing them to WoW is futile since flying mounts pretty much shattered the illusion and showed just how small the game world actually was. I never realised just how close the Scarlet Monastery was to Hearthglen before Cataclysm, for example - which was a real disappointment.

Besides, unlike WoW we're not forced to fawn over major lore characters. That in itself is reason enough to cheer after having Thrall forced in our faces for the duration of Cataclysm. Being able to spare or kill specific quest targets is a massively refreshing change of pace.

[Deleted]

I dont see how they could have done it any different, without adding another 6 months to release date. It didnt bother me at all, I like single player RPGs so it felt pretty natural to me.

[Deleted]

Sorry, but there's 2 Major misconceptions in this thread.

If you tried to "go explore" in wow at low levels, you ended up walking from redridge mountains to burning steppes or ashenvale to felwood or tirisfal glades to western plaguelands. Please explain to me how any of that would be classed as viable non-linear leveling? There are leveling plans posted online, and there might be a couple of choices for people, but you really have to go out of your way to do it.

Example: You are Human and finishing duskwood, you can go on to STV (which is right next door to you) or you can go to desolace. Which is going to happen?

So no, there is little or no freedom for leveling in WoW, or Rift, or Aion or almost any MMO out there.

Now as for reroll value, If you level another character (for the purposes of this, lets say of same faction in all cases, as different factions will change the experiment wildly for all games), then in Rift, you have 100% identical leveling experience, for Aion almost the same experience, for WoW if it's the same race, you can make artificial decision, like that listed above, to go out of your way to level elsewhere (get a warlock to make the journey a little less painful), but many people actually do the same quests in order to speed up the process. If you pick a different race, then you can get a different experience in 1-60, but you are still then doing exactly the same quests in outlands, northrend and cataclysm.

In SWTOR, each class has their own story and shares a number of world quests, each character is voiced differently and you can chose whether to go light/dark/neutral and get a wholly different set of responses from dialogues.

You come across to me as having been spoiled by games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and are now expecting an MMO to provide the same experience, but I can guarantee you, WoW (especially the expansions) has not given you any of the freedom of leveling you think you are experiencing. I have leveled to 80 5 characters (one a DK, the only I took to 85) and others to 70 that I could not take further.

[Prag]

I have a strange feeling that all these people saying "linear" don't actually know what it means - they just saw it on some shitty review and ran with it.

@OP, you're entitled to your opinion. You should know that yours is ignorant to the big picture, though. The reality is the game hasn't even launched and there's already a TON of explorable space, it's just not all on 1-3 continents like it is with WoW so yeah, you can't just "walk" for hours.

Instead, you get on your spaceship and fly to other planets...

[Jukex]

I have a strange feeling that all these people saying "linear" don't actually know what it means - they just saw it on some shitty review and ran with it.

@OP, you're entitled to your opinion. You should know that yours is ignorant to the big picture, though. The reality is the game hasn't even launched and there's already a TON of explorable space, it's just not all on 1-3 continents like it is with WoW so yeah, you can't just "walk" for hours.

Instead, you get on your spaceship and fly to other planets...

Exactly. You get the huge open world immersion experience but also have a more efficient means of going from place to place via your own personal spaceship. It's really pretty fantastic.

[Drihan]

I really don't get how people can say that SWTOR is linear. There are so many conversation options to choose from, that define which quests opens up and what happens in them. I felt it was very much like how WoW is now; quests are centered around X area until you complete X quest, which will lead you to X area to do X quest and so on. It was very fluid, in my opinion. Given, I only played to lvl 15 because I didn't want to ruin the entire story on my SW, but I have a feeling they go on like that through the entire lvling/questing experience.

[quras]

I have a strange feeling that all these people saying "linear" don't actually know what it means - they just saw it on some shitty review and ran with it.

@OP, you're entitled to your opinion. You should know that yours is ignorant to the big picture, though. The reality is the game hasn't even launched and there's already a TON of explorable space, it's just not all on 1-3 continents like it is with WoW so yeah, you can't just "walk" for hours.

Instead, you get on your spaceship and fly to other planets...

I think you're pretty spot on here.

I think people read "linear" and just start a post without actually putting in much thought or getting beyond a 3 day beta weekend and making it to maybe the first 2-3 planets.

And then they say "linear" as if it was this terrible thing that no one has ever played before in other MMO games.

Sure if BW had strung all the planets landscapes together it would run very similar to say WOW. You could run for quite a while before reaching a so called "end"

But this is SW and going from plant to plant is a main theme. So they broke up some of the land to simulate planets and it's done pretty well.

The linear argument just holds so little weight not only when looking at it in comparison to other MMO games but especially considering how well SW played and felt.

[Hulari]

I had 14 level 85s in wow. You don't get any more linear than leveling from 60-85 in wow anywhere else. I was sick to the back teeth and knew every zone like the back of my hand and was able to pick up and do quests without even bothering to look at the quest text.

TOR has linear experiences, you're following your very own class quest and progressing on with it. The low level areas are small and don't give you much freedom because you're learning about the game, experiencing new things. Once you complete your class quest, get your own spaceship and fly off to the new planets you will be amazed at how big they really are.

[Deleted]

and also the more you progress in the game, the more freedom you have

[0wn3d]

The game is extremely linear, yes. It's an unfortunate side effect of combining single player RPG quality storytelling with MMO mechanics.

Normally in a game like this, such as in the KOTOR games, you had the freedom to basically visit planets in any order you wanted and the enemies scaled to your level so it was always a viable option. But it can't be done that way in a MMO for obvious reasons. So the only way to have a truly interesting story is to follow a specific route through the planets.

It doesn't give you much "freedom" per se in which planets you choose to level up on, but you'll end up seeing every area of all the planets anyway and you can always freely explore them once you are there and look for hidden and secret things. There are actually some hidden things to find while exploring in this game which will benefit your character. Just explore the planets while you're on em.

Besides, the route you take through the planets makes sense if you pay attention to your class story. You have a reason to visit each of these planets and you are ordered to do so by your superior and given specific objects. You aren't just a free rogue running around the universe doing whatever you want, you belong to a military organization with superiors telling you what to do. Only smugglers and bounty hunters aren't part of this group with clear cut superiors, but they have their own agendas and reasoning. I haven't played any of the smuggler storyline so I couldn't tell ya, but the bounty hunter is all about The Great Hunt, so that is what is laying out their overall objectives for them.

What are these obvious reasons? As far as I know GW2 will have scaling like this.

[Ghosty]

The class story is what makes things linear, but you can completely bypass the side quests on a particular planet if you wish to move to another area. I was in the Labor Day beta weekend and did most of Taris (the planet after Corusant), so this time through over the past weekend I skipped all of Taris barring the class quests and moved on to Nar Shaddar with no negative effects considering that I had pretty much leveled past Taris anyway.