How SW:TOR is a major step BACKWARDS for MMOs

[Keava]

You know what? You don't have to play it! Amazing, isn't it?

If any of those reasons limits your Roleplaying (i can do bold statements too![sorry, i'll go get my coat]) then frankly you are a crappy roleplayer so go nitpick on something else like actual game mechanics, graphics, or whatever you kids find fancy this days.

I never liked the SWG, even pre-TheThingThatApparentlyRuinedIt, only fun part was having your own house.

Now for your 'points'.

1) "The game will be story-driven, and your choices will affect your destiny!" - Great, so that means each situation will boil down to one of three choices (aggressive, defensive, or passive, basically). You can either be a dick, a saint, or a gray blob in the middle. But what's more, it means your character is not YOUR character. It is one of a select handful of pre-made characters that you will rent. And when in these games has it ever really been the BEST idea to "mix and match," rather than go all one way or the other? SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

In other MMOs you don't usually even have that much freedom. All your dialogue options are limited to "Accept" and "Cancel". Yeah, that shows em your real character! Woo-hoo! Surely that is better, because no evil man in suits tell you what and how to say.... because you can't say anything!.

2) "The game will be fully voice-acted." - So you can't even decide what your character says or how he/she says it. The game will be giving you a script and voice. And, due to the expense of such projects, expect the selection of voices (if there are any) to be extremely limited. It might be that your character gets no voice at all (silent protagonist syndrome) which, to me, is better than being forced into a pre-made voice. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

To arms my brethren for our freedom has been on these very day threatened by the voice box! Seriously, it hurts you so much ? Mute it. You won't hear it. I for one enjoy that, i like hearing my character's voice, i loved listening to Shepard's talking in each of my countless ME playthroughs. It didn't took my freedom, it actually added to character.

3) "You can choose from one of these iconic professions!" - So all smugglers will be expected to behave in X way with personality Y, because that's how Han did it. All Bounty Hunters will be X, Y, and Z, because that's how Fett did it. This is exactly what the NGE did to RUIN SWG. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

That's a players choice. Could also say that every warrior is a dumb meatshield, every mage is pretentious ***** and every rogue is sneaky backstabber. Roleplaying is about person to person interaction in MMOs. You choose what you represent.

4) "You'll get companion characters to will add spice and variety to your gameplay!" - This one actually sounded GREAT... until we found out that EVERYONE gets the same companion based on his/her class. Yes, ALL smugglers will not just have A wookiee companion (like Han!), they'll have the SAME wookiee companion. You don't even get to pick the name. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

Brilliant feature for those that need a quick NPC help if all friends are offline. And no, the companion is not based on your class. Each class get's a selection of companions, depending on what type of supporting character you might find fancy. Wookie however is limited to Smugglers.

5) "You'll get your own ship, which you can use to travel or complete missions!" - Again, sounded great... until we found out that you get the same ship as everyone else in your class AND that all space missions play out like Starfox as rail- or arena-style episodes. You can't choose your ship, and you can't choose where it goes. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

Want various ships and unlimited space? Go play EVE, you have plenty to choose from there. It's not a space sim game. Space ship functions as your character's hub and way of travel between planets. It's a fancy prop the game could do without but they decided to implement it anyway. As for the combat-on-rail, i'm perfectly happy about it. Ever considered that plenty of players, especially MMO players, don't give a damn about your love for flight simulators? I want my MMO be a MMO, means i click around, i run around i bash my 12345 to use skills.

I'm really sorry AAA titles aren't created to fulfil wet dreams of single fan, but that's how market works. You are minority, face it and live with it or start making games yourself. There's been plenty of 'indie' titles over last years catering to 'hardcore' players. Guess what? They barely managed to get enough subscriptions to operate and plenty of them dies within first months.

 

[2xDouble]

Wait, wait, wait... the game is exactly the same as most RPG's and MMO's on the market and that's a step BACKWARDS? If anything, it's no movement forward or backward at all. Perhaps a jump to the left, and then a step to the right...

Besides. The only games that give the level of freedom he seems to want are the P&P RPG's (games like Dungeons and Dragons, in case you're not up on the acronyms).

 

[Erana]

Here's the problem: You don't like the general public's opinion, so you're trying to be a loud voice against it in order to try to make the general opinion more closely resemble your opinion.
Its like publicly voted ratings. Say, a movie is rated 8/10 by the general public. You feel like it should be a 5/10, but instead of actually voting a 5/10, you vote a 1/10 so that the average is lower than if you voted how you feel, so that your opinion will have a bit more weight.

Is SW:TOR really a backwards step for MMORPGs? No, its just the result of some game devs using a well-known license to try a different approach to the MMORPG conventions. What is there to cry out about? No one knows if it'll even survive its first year, let alone actually influence the genre. If this were Blizzard we were talking about, then I'd give this argument some weight, but chances are, if you ignore it, it will never affect you, and it may even just go away after a while.

 

[Charli]

I'll agree I don't think it's going to bomb the earth in a destructive crater of MMO greatness but let it release first. I love starwars, I love MMO's but somehow seeing the two combined puts me off.

And that's just me personally. I Like to play fantasy in MMO's. No so much Sci-fi.
Sci-Fi has enough stuff that you have to make sense of that makes acceptable to sit and watch it play out.

But Fantasy to me has this 'Who gives a shit I'm killin a dragon Yeehaw!' element to it. That has always tugged me to want to get in there and play the role.

I guess I just want to be a Holy Knight more than a Jedi. *shrug*

Star Wars, however, isn't science fiction, it's science fantasy, because it doesn't even attempt to use solid science to explain anything. How did Luke did from planet to planet in a single X-Wing? Who cares, it's science fantasy! How come lightsaber beams stop after a certain point? Science fantasy! Star Wars usually has more in common with fantasy, samurai films and Westerns then it does actual scifi.

And yet there are a million people out there at least who DO try to make sense of it.
To me it still sits in the sci-fi category, because really Fiction and Fantasy are inbred cousins of each other, It's just how much of it you can swallow that draws the thin line. Fantasy is guilty of doing this to itself as well. No sci-fi I've seen is without an element of fantasy, they all have to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with something.

I know the aspect of the force itself is a fantasy 'magic-esque' element but it does attempt to string it's own universal laws into the picture to of course make people accept/swallow it.

Yes Starwars likely sits on that fine line giggling to itself. But it isn't quite Fantasy enough for me to want to ignore all the laws going on around me and just enjoy it for what it is. I'm a very nitpicky person in that regard.

WoW however is cartoony, fantasyish and ridiculous enough for me to just shrug my shoulders and go with it on the pure excuse of; 'A wizard did it'.

 

[BoogieManFL]

So I won't being seeing you in TOR?

Also, not all your information is correct. Sadly, I came down with a rather severe case of who gives a shit today and I don't have the patience or desire to explain it to someone who appears to have already made up their mind anyway.

 

[Grey_Focks]

okay...works for me. I hate MMOs, always have, always will. Still going to get TOR, though, partially because of the reasons you listed. Story driven? Check. BioWare writing? Check. Good voice acting? (most likely) Check.

Really only concern is a concern I have for all MMOs that turns me off them in the first place....grinding. I just hope that because of the game's story driven nature, the grinding will actually feel like i'm doing something. Instead of "go kill X boars" I'm hoping for "Defend the spaceport from the stormtroopers! (or just kill X)"

 

[Cowabungaa]

And also apparently you can still play SWG in its old versions, in some umm..*cough*special ways *cough* private servers *cough*...

I know but, that's just not the same you know?

it would so much better if they just used microsoft sam's voice to say whatever you named your charecter.

Imagine a game like this:
The madness...it would be...amazing.

 

[veloper]

1) "The game will be story-driven, and your choices will affect your destiny!" - Great, so that means each situation will boil down to one of three choices (aggressive, defensive, or passive, basically). You can either be a dick, a saint, or a gray blob in the middle. But what's more, it means your character is not YOUR character. It is one of a select handful of pre-made characters that you will rent. And when in these games has it ever really been the BEST idea to "mix and match," rather than go all one way or the other? SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

That would still be 3 choices opposed to ZERO choices you get in other MMOs, where all you can do is complete the quests the one and only way intended.

2) "The game will be fully voice-acted." - So you can't even decide what your character says or how he/she says it. The game will be giving you a script and voice. And, due to the expense of such projects, expect the selection of voices (if there are any) to be extremely limited. It might be that your character gets no voice at all (silent protagonist syndrome) which, to me, is better than being forced into a pre-made voice. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

Meh. 99% of MMO players never say anything in character anyway. Everything said is OOC chat, so all that amounts to some amount of character dialogue for those players who are into that, opposed to none.

3) "You can choose from one of these iconic professions!" - So all smugglers will be expected to behave in X way with personality Y, because that's how Han did it. All Bounty Hunters will be X, Y, and Z, because that's how Fett did it. This is exactly what the NGE did to RUIN SWG. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

It's just a toon. A smuggler class is a smuggler. A bounty hunter is a bounty hunter. Other MMOs don't offer much personalization either. You can expect to customize your looks and pick some abilities. Typical MMO (and WRPG) stuff.

4) "You'll get companion characters to will add spice and variety to your gameplay!" - This one actually sounded GREAT... until we found out that EVERYONE gets the same companion based on his/her class. Yes, ALL smugglers will not just have A wookiee companion (like Han!), they'll have the SAME wookiee companion. You don't even get to pick the name. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

You could pick a different class I guess. It's not like other MMOs offer anything more substantial; you can have a mount in WOW owned by million other players

5) "You'll get your own ship, which you can use to travel or complete missions!" - Again, sounded great... until we found out that you get the same ship as everyone else in your class AND that all space missions play out like Starfox as rail- or arena-style episodes. You can't choose your ship, and you can't choose where it goes. SACRIFICES CHARACTER FREEDOM.

Wasted potential there if true, but again most MMOs just give you a toon and if you're lucky, a mount.

Any ONE of these could put a game on shaky ground... but to do all of them at once? This puts SW:TOR firmly in the realm of an action/adventure game that happens to have online co-op. It's not an MMORPG. It's just a big single-player rent-a-character game for which they'll be expected a subscription fee. BioWare has a lot of strengths. It is unfortunately bringing all of the wrong strengths to this MMO.

Which may be the smart thing to do, because nobody can beat Blizzard at their own game. Doing it differently might just have a small chance of succes. It's not like we need any more run of the mill MMOs anyway.

If it's worth the money depends on the quality and amount of new content. And if the game does turn out to suck for any reason, then we still won't loose any sleep over it.

 

[Blind Sight]

I'll agree I don't think it's going to bomb the earth in a destructive crater of MMO greatness but let it release first. I love starwars, I love MMO's but somehow seeing the two combined puts me off.

And that's just me personally. I Like to play fantasy in MMO's. No so much Sci-fi.
Sci-Fi has enough stuff that you have to make sense of that makes acceptable to sit and watch it play out.

But Fantasy to me has this 'Who gives a shit I'm killin a dragon Yeehaw!' element to it. That has always tugged me to want to get in there and play the role.

I guess I just want to be a Holy Knight more than a Jedi. *shrug*

Star Wars, however, isn't science fiction, it's science fantasy, because it doesn't even attempt to use solid science to explain anything. How did Luke did from planet to planet in a single X-Wing? Who cares, it's science fantasy! How come lightsaber beams stop after a certain point? Science fantasy! Star Wars usually has more in common with fantasy, samurai films and Westerns then it does actual scifi.

And yet there are a million people out there at least who DO try to make sense of it.
To me it still sits in the sci-fi category, because really Fiction and Fantasy are inbred cousins of each other, It's just how much of it you can swallow that draws the thin line. Fantasy is guilty of doing this to itself as well. No sci-fi I've seen is without an element of fantasy, they all have to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with something.

I know the aspect of the force itself is a fantasy 'magic-esque' element but it does attempt to string it's own universal laws into the picture to of course make people accept/swallow it.

Yes Starwars likely sits on that fine line giggling to itself. But it isn't quite Fantasy enough for me to want to ignore all the laws going on around me and just enjoy it for what it is. I'm a very nitpicky person in that regard.

WoW however is cartoony, fantasyish and ridiculous enough for me to just shrug my shoulders and go with it on the pure excuse of; 'A wizard did it'.

Well science fiction is, by definition, about the impact of technology and science on society. I just don't see that in the Star Wars universe, Star Wars has always seemed to be more about character interaction and development then anything else. And true, what a lot of people define as science fiction does have somewhat fantasy-like elements. Take the new Battlestar Galactica, for example. Even though it has a huge focus on the nature of robotics, it does have (spoilers) fantasy elements grounded in the concept of God interacting with mortals. It becomes more of a space opera then actual science fiction. It's hard to find actual science fiction, most of Asimov and Heinlein's early work can be defined as that. Someone like Peter Watts writes science fiction, as it's grounded in reality and actual technologies we're developing. As Rod Sterling put it: "science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible."

Which one sounds like it defines Star Wars better haha?

 

[Marowit]

If the launch a game, and it puts you on rails from start to the end of the game I'll be disappointed in it as an MMO. However, if it's fun I'll be satisfied with it as a co-op action RPG (akin to ME2 with friends). The caveat is that this won't keep my subscribing, and BioWare is going to need those subscription dollars...EA needs them to collect those subscription dollars.

It all comes down to how the game feels when we sit down to play it, and we can't know how that will be until it launches. I am still going to pick it up on launch day, but lasting MMOs aren't just designed around launch day.

 

[Nieroshai]

MAAAAYBE it's a MMOJRPG! A full star wars game with a story that coincidentally also has a massive multiplayer element.

 

[Krion_Vark]

Your point is not invalid, but I have to say, I'm tired of people proclaiming that complete player freedom and character customization is the one and only way that something counts as an RPG. It's a narrow viewpoint that really exists only to promote the Western RPG over the Japanese RPG. Both character customization and freedom as well as battle customization and freedom are RPG elements, and considering it is absolutely impossible for video games to fully emulate the tabletop RPGs on which they are based, it's extremely stupid to say that only one element is the "true spirit" of the RPG.

It may not fall into one little definition that some people have for what an MMO should be, or what said people think role-playing should be, but that hardly means it's objectively a step backward for MMOs. It simply means it's a different style than you like. RPGs are a genre full of variety: stop claiming the kinds you don't like are inherently less "RPG-like."

For some reason I am thinking of WoW now and their "freedom". It goes a little like this:
Whiny Little Kid: I want to be a troll Paladin WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Blizzard: But only Alliance can be Paladin.
WLK: BUT I WANT A TROLL PALADIN.
Blizzard: Fine we'll put in the blood elves into the next expansion.
WLK: BUT THAT'S NOT A TROLL PALADIN!!!

 

[garfoldsomeoneelse]

Okay, this is comparing apples to preconceived notions of oranges. Just because you're hearing ideas that sound bad on paper doesn't mean they can't be wonderfully implemented in-game, and until you've actually played the game, I'm afraid I can't really take your opinions seriously. I don't mean to sound like a fanboy, but it's hard to deny that BioWare is an incredibly competent company; if they want to try something new, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt before I start flinging shit.

 

[Catalyst6]

The Adventures of Captain Boldy-text!

OT: It sounds like you want to play Star Wars Galaxies again. But do you remember why that failed? It's because no one, save the *extreme* roleplayers* wants to play the potmaker when you can play a Jedi instead.

 

[MimeticLie]

Have you ever played a Bioware RPG before? Because most of the things you're whining about are the same things they've done before. And, incidentally, the same things I enjoy about their RPGs.

1. The choice system model is standard for games with RPG elements at the moment. I'm not terribly fond of it either, but it's what we've got. Still, having any choice at all is a step up above World of Warcraft and it's kin (full disclosure, I haven't played WoW since Burning Crusade. But there wasn't really any choice when it came to the story that I can recall).

2. On the subject of voice acting, did you read Yahtzee's Extra Punctuation about silent protagonists? He was quite right in pointing out that having the player be the sole silent character in a world of talkative NPCs seriously breaks immersion. Beyond that, though, what game can you possibly be thinking of that lets you "decide what your character says or how he/she says it"? If the game weren't voice acted, you'd still be limited to choosing pre-ordained options for conversations. You just wouldn't hear someone reading them.

3. There's nothing wrong with set classes. The issue with SWG was that the freeform profession system was one of the few things it had going for it. It was one of the game's most prominent and distinctive features. By taking it away, the devs made SWG into a completely different game. That's what sparked the backlash (that and the fact that they'd sold us an expansion pack the day before without mentioning the NGE).

4. This bothers me a bit as well, but considering the alternative is having shallow, Oblivion-style paper dolls, I'd rather have distinct characters even if everyone has the same friends.

5. What Bioware RPG has allowed you to go where ever you want in space? They've all had galaxy maps (with shooting bits thrown in the the case of KOTOR).

All in all, it seems like you wan't TOR to be a radically different game than it is. It always seemed to me that it was clearly a new KOTOR game, but in an MMO format. It seems far more productive to me to judge the game on its merits and flaws rather than wish that it was something else entirely.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Pfft. Considering the number of gamers who ever actually act "in-character" (read: very few) in MMOs, this move isn't unexpected.

Before someone pounces on me, yes, I'm aware that there are RP servers for some of those games.
Calling this a "Major step backward" for MMOs is short-sighted; most MMOs attempt to involve the character as little as they can in the story as possible.

Actually providing a story to play along with seems like a massive undertaking; especially when you consider how long a player has to play before they've become profitable enough to satisfy the company's shareholders (EA, in this case).