TOR a WOW Clone? I don't care.

[Sixcess]

They are doing something different. You know, the whole story/full voice cast thing. That's a pretty fucking big deal.

No, it's really not.

I'm fucking sick of seeing this being parroted like it's actually true. Like TOR is going to be the first MMO ever to have a story. It's bullshit, and generally it's spouted by a) Star Wars fanboys, b) Bioware fanboys, and c) people who have never actually played an MMO.

Existing MMOs do have stories. Of course they do. The full voice/moral choice thing isn't an innovation - Bioware have been doing it in single player games since forever - and the only reason it hasn't been done before in an MMO is because it's too much costly in time and money for too little return. Something which EA/Bioware are going to realise once they actually launch this thing and start talking about their update schedule.

 

[cassiebearRAWR]

The "WoW clone" argument and the fact that TOR's interface is very similar reminds me of a point Yahtzee made in his "Too Human" video about the bass ackwards controls and some metaphor about a submarine made of bread...

Point is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

[evilneko]

WoW is so generic, so plain vanilla, that you could call damn near any mumorpuger a WoW clone.

 

[Deathfyre]

Two things:

1. Fuck that. Dragon Age 2 was a good game. The only reason it's so lowly regarded is because it's the worst game Bioware's made which I will freely admit. And it's still better than 80% of the games out there. That just goes to show how great Bioware are at what they do.

2. PVP was my thing in WOW. It's most of what I did. I played a Paladin and a Death Knight (yes I am a massochist, thank you for asking!) and in general I really enjoyed it. I can understand if you didn't like it, and it's true that FUCKING ROGUES were way OP when I was on, but it was still a lot of fun for me and my friends.

1. No, let's not fuck that. Dragon Age 2 was not a good game. It was the worst thing Bioware's ever made, yes. But it was not better than 80% of 'the games out there'. It is far inferior to its most direct counterpart, the Mass Effect series. Even ME2, which was the most damning symptom of the EA virus that has infected Bioware, was better than DA2. Mass Effect 2 was Mass Effect for shooter players. DA2 was WOW for people without a constant internet connection.

Compare DA2 to Neverwinter Nights. Again, another Bioware title, another fantasy RPG. This one is from 2002, also. Two Thousand fucking Two. We're coming up on the decade mark for how long this game's been out. When you asked NWN what a Fireball spell did, it told you it was a ranged AOE spell that did some d6's per caster level. Not 'it shoots a blast of fire and hurts some people sometimes unless it hurts them less than normal or they're immune or it didn't feel like getting hurt or something'.

Let's not forget that feeling of walking down a hallway, walking into a room (DA2 now) and suddenly, enemies! 4 of them! Oh no, actually it's about 20. There is just a cap of 4 at a time, and they come in waves. So you get into a rhythm; every X seconds, you can fireball again, and right after fireball comes ice blast or whatever the fuck.

Holy Shitburgers, Batman! That's exactly like WOW! Fucking EXACTLY like WOW!

Compare: NWN you had spells per day. Prepared beforehand if you were a divine caster or a Wizard, spells per day of each spell level if you were a sorcerer or bard. If you blow every spell you have the first time something looks at you funny, you better have a good backup plan. You had to think, and that's the most repugnant part of DA2. No matter what class you are, you just had your bag of tricks, and every time you pulled something out you'd get another one in a few seconds. You don't have to make judgments, you just hurr durr nova everything, wait ten seconds, and do it again. If you were an archer, you used your fancy special arrow abilities, then waited for them to come back. Then you did it again. No thought, just push the buttons that make things happen and wait five seconds to do it again.

So fuck your Dragon Age.

Just as a reference here, NWN had to have the prepared spells, because it was a DnD game, no because they were forcing you to come up with grand strategies. If they were working with a fully new IP, there probably wouldn't have been that kind of limit. It probably would've been more like how KOTOR approached it, with a mana bar. Top down? Mana bar?... Yeah, Diablo clone would've been thrown around a lot.

And you didn't really coutner the point of it being better than 80% of games out there, but the worst game bioware's made... you just compared it to more bioware games. I didn't like either of the dragon age games, but I still liked them more than COD... so there's 80% of games since DA2's release right there.

 

[ComicsAreWeird]

I dont care either, The fact that it´s set in the star wars universe makes it automatically more interesting to me. That and the word "Bioware" attached to it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Saying WOW is an "Everquest Clone" is like saying Half-Life is a Doom clone. Just because two games are in the same genre doesn't mean one is a clone of the other. WoW had enough innovations that it was significantly different than Everquest at the time of its launch. So congrats. You just revealed to the world that you've never played, read, or heard a cent about Everquest.

... the same can't be said for TOR. EVERYTHING I have read has pretty much bluntly said it isn't doing anything new, besides this pretense on a "focus on story". If you want innovation, then just wait for GW2 instead of playing another feeble attempt by a publisher to get a piece of the WOW pie.

I played Everquest for 2.5 years. It's my favorite MMO of all time. I played WoW on and off for the better part of 5.5 years. It's an excellent all around MMO. If TOR is a "WoW clone"...if that's the standard we're using to apply the charge of "clone"...then yes, WoW is most definitively an Everquest clone. Jeff Kaplan was a huge Everquest fan and spoke openly of wanting to refine the Everquest experience while keeping the essence intact in WoW. So, you're talking out of your ass a bit, here.

TOR features the same companion gathering and massive dialogue drive exposition fests as Bioware's single player offerings...ME, KOTOR, and DA. All they've done is replace KOTOR's mission based single player gaming with the familiar framework of a MMO. You're still killing guys in corridors while Star Wars music plays. You're still selecting abilities off a hotbar. You still have NPC companions with you. You don't need to play with a single other soul if you don't care to. You can play the game like 8 different extra length KOTORS, and get roughly the same experience.

The old Bioware made excellent stories. Excellent. Better than almost anyone.

The new one makes Dragon Age 2.

You're aware that different teams work on these games, right? Dragon Age 2 was made by Bioware Edmonton. TOR is being developed by Bioware Austin. It's not the same five guys working on every game and getting progessively stupider.

 

[9thRequiem]

It's a bad thing because with a skilled development team, a major IP and a couple of hundred million dollars of development cash they could have at least tried to do something different, and they didn't.

Let's be clear about this - TOR is not like WoW in the sense that they're both MMOs. Tor is like WoW in the sense that it is like WoW, specifically. The visuals, the gear, the combat - it's all very similar. Blatantly so.

I've played other MMOs, and they look and play less like WoW than TOR does.

Basically this. It really didn't help that there was a lot of rhetoric that TOR was going to revolutionize the MMO experience, and reinvent the genre. It hasn't done that. At all. It's just picking one aspect that's already been done poorly, and doing it better. This isn't Half-Life vs Doom, this is Half-Life vs Half-Life with better lighting effects.

I have to wonder why this is a big deal if you're a fan of it. People are giving their own opinion that they're not interested, because they're burnt out on another, similar MMO. So what? Is it mandatory that everyone kneels down to it just because you think it's good?

 

[Susurrus]

SNIP

DnD is a GOOD system though. It actually makes very little sense, but it's an effective restriction on the powers of a wizard, without making them either run of the mill, or overpowered. Exactly the same as mana does. In fact, the ability to rest pretty much whenever still breaks Mages in BG2/NWN/NWN2, because you can instantly regain spells, and not enough places restrict rest. I understand why, but that's the truth.

Why is arbitrarily limiting a mage's power good? I'm glad you asked. Because then they can be extremely powerful, without breaking the game.

BG2 was best for this, or at least best for this for me, because I played it most, so knew how everything worked.

There's a red dragon you meet in the game at one point. He's fiendishly tough to kill in close combat, needing end-of-the-game quality weapons. He does massive damage, is a spell-caster, has resistance to spells, and has breath weapons on will.

So either you wait until the end of the game, when your fighters can take him on, or you wait until your wizards are moderately powerful, and the fight is trivial.

A combination of 6-7-8 spells of 4th and 5th level, and a SINGLE LVL 1 SPELL can kill him (there is an element of luck - you may actually have to cast more than one lvl 1 spell, but it's not actually necessary). Ok, here goes: Lower resistance * 3-4, depending on level, 2* greater malison (never sure if they stack, but what the hey). Chromatic orb. Done. Haste to improve casting time is not necessary, as potions of speed can do this for you.

Whereas in games like DA2 (and to a lesser extent Dragon Age), the very fact that your spells are available on a quick-loading timer means that they can't be too powerful, or they make the game pointlessly easy.



Anyway, that's actually by-the-by.

What I was actually writing about was to say that comparing Bioware games to other bioware games to prove it was the worst one of the lot was fine, as far as your opinion goes, but it loses quite a bit of credibility when you cite a game FROM A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GENRE THAT YOU MAY IN FACT HATE as the reason Bioware games are better than 80% other games. If you only play RPGs, then you may be right, I don't know. But your comparison is even more pointless than the poster you're criticizing's failure to address your point.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Basically this. It really didn't help that there was a lot of rhetoric that TOR was going to revolutionize the MMO experience, and reinvent the genre. It hasn't done that. At all. It's just picking one aspect that's already been done poorly, and doing it better. This isn't Half-Life vs Doom, this is Half-Life vs Half-Life with better lighting effects.

Whoa whoa whoa...whoa, tiger. Whoa. Who said that? I don't remember Bioware saying that. Maybe WAAAAY back in the beginning. For the last couple of years it's been nothing but "we're not fixing what ain't broken" and "we're not re-inventing the wheel here" and "you can have your Jedi tank use the force to make a SHIELD!". Arena.net are the guys promising the sun, the moon and the stars insomuch as "redefining MMOs" goes, and they're borrowing a lot of pretty timeworn concepts themselves. The TOR marketing has been stubbornly anachronistic. It's one of the things that almost turned me off the game completely...the marketing for it has just been garbage.

 

[2xDouble]

SW:TOR is not a bad game by any stretch. It's actually a quite good, if "traditional", MMO. The problem is, like far too many before it, The Old Republic does next to nothing to evolve the genre. It's not a bad game, but could have been better [http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/09/13/the-soapbox-why-mmo-combat-sucks-and-how-bioware-couldve-made/].

I'm going to repeat something Casey Schriner of G4tv's MMO Report show said on Feedback [http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/714063/feedback-supreme-court-games-ruling-and-shadows-of-the-damned-edition/] (G4's general discussion weekly) a few months ago:

People are going to buy SWTOR, and they're gonna see that it's a solid game[...] Then they're going to see what Guild Wars 2 is doing and they're going to be blown away.

Another example [http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/09/26/funcoms-craig-morrison-on-swtor-and-mmo-industry-advances/] (with slightly less bias):

The formula for an MMO is still pretty much the same, in terms of structure, as it was a decade ago, and that frustration at a perceived lack of progress is what fuels a deal of the complaints. [...]

I also think that those advances the veterans yearn for will come, and the genre will become more dynamic and community focused again, but maybe not in the near future, and almost certainly not with the upcoming generation of games

 

[DaWaffledude]

Yeah, and World of Warcraft is an Everquest clone.

Everquest was a great game, Warcraft is a great game, and TOR probably will be too.

What say all you on the whole "WOW with lightsabers" thing?

They could at least be accurate and say

"WoW with lightsabers and a decent story"

I'm looking forward to it. A Bioware game where each class's storyline takes at least twice as long as the original Knights of the Old Republic? And there are eight classes?

Do. Want.

Three times, actually.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Actually WoW IS, or at least WAS an Everquest clone. Saying it isn't/wasn't/won't ever be is a joke that you continously tell yourself at night. Blizzard even said that they took a LOT of things from Everquest, just as Everquest took a LOT of things from Ultima Online.

Aw heck no. I'm with you all the way on Everquest and WoW, but Ultima Online? Was a very different MMO. You could be a frickin' lumberjack, for heavens sake. A baker. A shoemaker. UO was a lot closer to what we consider a "sandbox MMO". Everquest is the familiar linear levels and loot formula that has persisted straight into the current and immediate next generation. It took very, very little from UO, whereas WoW lifted a substantial portion of their core design elements right out of Everquest and gave them a rigorous polish.

 

[Periodic]

It's going to be a terrible game and people are going to buy it because Bioware made it. Never mind that it is just a callous money grab, forcing people who just wanted KotOR 3 to pay 15 dollars a month for a generic MMO.

Even if the fanboys are clever enough to recognize that, they'll just blame EA and George Lucas and basically anybody other than their wunderkind Bioware, just like they did with that atrocity Dragon Age 2.

 

[Aean]

Being a WoW clone doesn't seem like a bad thing persay. I think the issue is that people who enjoy WoW will (mostly) play WoW and people who don't won't enjoy it because its near the same thing.

 

[manythings]

Yeah, and World of Warcraft is an Everquest clone.

Everquest was a great game, Warcraft is a great game, and TOR probably will be too.

What say all you on the whole "WOW with lightsabers" thing?

They could at least be accurate and say

"WoW with lightsabers and a decent story"

I'm looking forward to it. A Bioware game where each class's storyline takes at least twice as long as the original Knights of the Old Republic? And there are eight classes?

Do. Want.

Each chapter is longer than KotOR but I think TOR is the first chapter. That's just the story, after that are the flashpoints, PvP battlefields and Huttball.

 

[Rednog]

I've been playing WoW off and on since the beta, I'm burnt out on WoW, a reskin isn't going to make me want to play the same grind again. I want something refreshing from an MMO and a starwars theme just isn't going to cut it. I honestly had some hopes for it, then I saw the end game PvE videos and the PvP and I was like oh...a mechanic where you have to hide behind something to avoid the boss's attack...oh look that jedi is fighting exactly like a WoW warrior...etc.
And the whole oh look dialogue that is actually voiced... too bad that you'll maybe get pockets of anything actually meaty with the majority being oh we need to go clear this mystical place, go kill like 10 of X enemy. MMOs have story lines, hell WoW has how many quests/books/etc and people don't bother to read them. Why you ask, because you just can't write some unique and compelling thing for such an expansive game, sure you can make a few unique quests and story lines, but eventually you have to copy and paste generic mmo text to fill it all out.
And even then once you reach the level cap you won't care about quests you haven't done, you're going to be more interested in the raids and pvp, which you'll see the dialogue once for and never care again.

Also I'm hugely turned off by the whole releasing the game in limited quantities in addition to releasing it right on the cusp of the holiday.
Seriously, I don't want to have to drag my arse to the mall when it is packed to the brim with tons of people doing last minute shopping to find a game that may or may not be on the shelf, and if I somehow do get lucky and it is on the shelf, I get the luxury of standing in line for like 2 hours.

 

[sir.rutthed]

They are doing something different. You know, the whole story/full voice cast thing. That's a pretty fucking big deal.

No, it's really not.

I'm fucking sick of seeing this being parroted like it's actually true. Like TOR is going to be the first MMO ever to have a story. It's bullshit, and generally it's spouted by a) Star Wars fanboys, b) Bioware fanboys, and c) people who have never actually played an MMO.

Existing MMOs do have stories. Of course they do. The full voice/moral choice thing isn't an innovation - Bioware have been doing it in single player games since forever - and the only reason it hasn't been done before in an MMO is because it's too much costly in time and money for too little return. Something which EA/Bioware are going to realise once they actually launch this thing and start talking about their update schedule.

Other MMO's may have story, but in my experience storytelling in MMO's is absolutely terrible. I don't even know what the Hell was going on for the last 60 levels of WOW and by the end of my time with it I had 3 level 85 characters. The story was boring and uninvolved, and that's my understanding of storytelling in the genre as a whole. As for the voiceover bit, just because it's been done before in other genres doesn't mean it's not innovative. Think of the role playing aspects that have influenced shooters like choosing your loadouts, perks, and customizing your character in multiplayer. That's all pretty standard these days in shooters, but I remember when it was a big fucking deal even though RPG's had been doing it for over a decade by the time shooters started taking over.

 

[Fishyash]

It's stupid to call TOR a WoW clone. Or any MMO being called a WoW clone. WoW was not the first game to incorporate the particular style of gameplay, even if it is the most popular game with that system.

I dunno... I just don't like the idea of calling any hotkey MMO a 'WoW clone'.