I wanted to make a separate post to address some of the specific games mentioned, many of which I've played to one degree or another, with some thoughts on each.
SWTOR - If I was to replay an MMO, it would be this one. Heck, I still have it installed on my hard drive. I preordered the biggest, most limited edition....this was the tail end of "Old BioWare" and I was a BW fanboy, a KotOR I & II nut, I read all the Old Republic era comics, etc. I played this on release, Sith side with two friends, I healed, one tank, one Deeps. It was a blast. From Dec 11 to Feb 12 it was awesome. I'm glad I got to see it at release, with the buggy Fleet bases and the ludicrous PvP imbalance on Ilum. So many Sith spawn camped the rebel camp, players would be vaporised the instant they respawned, automated defenses were annihaliated.
The main selling point was the class storylines, sadly these fell to the wayside in the expansions since, in fairness, writing eight quest lines is hard, time consuming and expensive, so they just write one and give the player a neutral name like "outlander". The class stories were great tho. The Imperial Agent in particular was brilliant and I would honestly recommend anyone who hasn't played the game, play it, even just F2P for the Agent storyline and move on (it can be done F2P). There were originally five endings, but one never made it to release and one was since cut. There are still three endings tho, one of which is based on actions in Act I, one based on Act II, and the last act where it's decided. All the other classes are literally a light/dark choice at the very end.
It was a great MMO, the "cinematic" storytelling, the phases, the planetary progression, the legacy stuff (essentially being able to share perks between all chars on an account) and great multiplayer experience made it really fun. But it lacked content at the end game and BioWare made some game killing decisions at the most crucial time. The playerbase started hemhoragging in Feb 2012, 3 months after release. My friends went too, but I luckily found a cool guild and had my only guild progression raiding experience in an MMO for the next 3 months. What happened tho, was BW were too slow to respond to fleeing players.
They basically had a) too many performance issues (Fleet at release was like 10FPS at peak times) b) too many servers/shards c) not enough content for the level 50s and lastly and most crucially d) when the players started leaving, having done all the content and ready to move on, they did nothing. For three months, not a word. Any player who wasn't level 10 or level 50 could hardly find a team for a flashpoint/dungeon. Eventually, they would merge servers which both killed my guild but alleviated the dwindling playerbase.
If they had responded sooner, or had fewer, more capable servers, I think SWTOR would have been in a different place now. They also didn't expect the population imbalance, with Sith outnumbering Pubs (republic) quite significantly, making PvP one sided. Ilum, the open world PvP was pretty bad, not just because of the thing I mentioned above, but there was literally no point or reward to go there.
SWTOR to many said everything that needed saying about MMOs. If BioWare, (formerly) one of the preeminent RPG makers of the era, with $300mill of EA money and the Star Wars license could not make a WoW beater, no one could....except....
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ESO - I haven't spent nearly so much time with this one. I have maxed out one character, only through exploration, dungeons and finding the Skyshards. I haven't done *any* story missions, at all. The gameplay is fine, the classes are fine, the performance and visuals are fine, but the tragedy here is that it's a decade too late. I maintain to this day that back in 2003-2004, the biggest game IPs were Elder Scrolls (on the back of Morrowind) and Warcraft (WC3 was the best RTS of the day). Both franchises had massive fanbases, troves of lore and worlds ideal for adventure, but WoW made the leap first, with the promise to us WC3 players that we would be one of our factions "heroes" only on the ground level. If Elder Scrolls had had an MMO in 2004, I think it could have been what WoW became.
ESO is fine. It has scaling too, so everywhere you go enemies are scaled to you. You can even team a lvl 1 with a 50 and it can work. The lvl 1 lacks only in choice and some effectiveness, but gear wise, there's no difference. It is very different from other MMOs in that the core "loop" is like 4-5 seconds. Literally. Spells, abilities, movement, all happen in that time frame. It's really off-putting to me, but it's a deliberate design choice. Buffs, Debuffs, HoTs, DoTs, all need reapplying within 5ish seconds so it's a constant button mash. I'd play this again with someone, but not alone.
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DC UO. A bad MMO with some good bits in it. You could be a superhero or villain, you had powers and got to beat up mooks. There were dungeons and some team content, but it lacked...I don't know, the X Factor. I actually paid $200 for a lifetime sub that I still have to this day. Waste of money.
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Age of Conan. This one I kinda find tragic. It actually had all the ingredients of a great game. It was also unique that it was very mature, with blood, nudity and violence. Combat being twitch based likely put some people off. I put in my hours on this one but it was mostly solo. If I had to guess why it failed, I would suggest a few things. First, 3 factions for a game without a huge playerbase is utterly stupid. It meant that no faction had any players to team with, ever. All towns outside max level and Tortuga were deserted. Second, I don't know if Conan was a strong enough license, but may be wrong there. Three, Fucking Tortuga. When I tought "I fancy a second character, what shall I roll with?", made my slim-waisted, max chest slider, dark skinned maiden and FUCKING TORTUGA. I played it once in the beta, once on live and I wasn't going thru the whole thing a third time. At least in SWTOR there were two starting planets for each two classes, and each class had a unique storyline.
I never got to see much team content. I actually tried RPing, the one and only time I did, it was interesting but not enough to keep me playing when the main game couldn't. I believe it still has an active RP community, and lends itself well to it. PvP was shit, everything else was MMO standard fare. Overall, right ingredients, put together badly.
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