So breaking away from my usual posts for a second, lets talk
Star Wars the Old Republic. I have been a faithful subscriber since day one and
while I’m not a veteran MMO player (I played SWG for a couple of months, Terra
for around three months, Guild Wars 2 for three months, and just started stopped WoW
this past month) I can say there are some positives going for TOR and some negatives.
One thing that seems to be a unison opinion of the internet is that the one
thing TOR really delivered on was the leveling experience. Every quest has
complete voiced over cut scenes that help make the grinding up to max lvl a
little more bearable. Your specific class quest is also usually entertaining. I
have lvled a Smuggler, Sage, Commando, Guardian, and Sniper up to the lvl cap and
overall I had fun with their individual class quests (except with the Sage). The
low lvl pvp is also a very fun part of lvling. I won’t talk about max lvl pvp
because it’s completely broken at the moment making it very hard for fresh 50’s
to even stand a chance in pvp but since your stats are raised to a reasonable amount
in low lvl pvp, it’s very enjoyable and even. That is unfortunately where the
positives run out as the rest of the game seems much like an afterthought.
See it is obvious that Bioware wanted to show off their
storytelling in this MMO because they pretty much marketed the game as “The
best story driven MMO”. I will give them that point because compared to Terra
and WoW, TOR is light years ahead in
the entertainment department from lvl 1-49. Now I don’t know about you but the
reason I wanted to play an MMO was for the endgame raids that require careful
planning and coordination. While there is somewhat a lot of endgame content,
the problems that arise are:
- The lack of challenge in 90% of the instances and ops
- The horrible idea to have completely modable gear that you can reverse engineer and then craft and sell
- The lack of mini games to keep people from racing around the fleet for hours on end
So my first point is by far the most frustrating one of the
bunch. Disregarding the new ops, Terror from Beyond, every other ops and
flashpoint in the game is a complete joke to take part in. It is painfully obvious that Bioware is catering
too much to the unskilled, role-playing players because over the past months
they have made every instance easier when they were laughably easy to begin
with. The HM Flashpoints are so easy now that you can two man each one even w/o
companions and still be able to get through them (most of them). Since they
make the game easier for those who don’t research proper rotations and gearing,
it leaves no room for these players to improve thus creating servers where 80%
of the players still haven’t cleared EC HM (the ops that comes before TfB). For
f$#^s sake the guild I am in has already cleared TfB 16 man HM and it has only
been out for less than a month.
Ugh so the next point brings up the endgame gear. All the
endgame gear (almost all of it (at least the ones that really matter)) are completely
modable which means you can take out the armorings, mods, and enhancements and
if you have the proper crew skill, you can reverse engineer these parts and
sell them. This pretty much breaks endgame because if you are wealthy enough or
have a very good guild, you can get completely geared up w/o running any of the
ops. Since we already cleared TfB and also one shotted The Terror from Beyond final
boss, it seems like a waste to go in anymore. We have already learned most of
the max lvl mods and armorings so we just have to wait until most of the guild receives
their share.
The last point is something that I thought Bioware would of
included in a MMO where you might be sitting around for long periods of time;
minigames. The Knights of the Old Republic had many different side and mini
games that made the overall experience of those games much more enjoyable. The
two events I enjoyed the most were swoop bike racing and Pazaak. Why oh why did
they not include these two things in their OLD REPUBLIC MMO…? It seems like a
sure fan favorite if people can watch other players racing while having the
option to possible bet on the winners. The same goes for Pazaak; while waiting
for a queue you could play against someone in your party. It just seems like a
no brainer to include something that you can do instead of sitting on the fleet
all day waiting for a queue pop.
Overall I am still subscribed because for what the game gets
right I still enjoy it. Healing is very fun in this game while Smuggler,
Sniper, and Sage dps is also very enjoyable. Bioware unfortunately is just very
inexperienced in maintaining an MMO and unless they fix the problems with the
game, I might end up leaving it for say WoW or GW2.
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Here is a video of our first downing of The Terror from Beyond on 16 Man HM:
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