We have some exciting news for you today; no Blizzard didn’t announce the released date for Diablo 3 and no, neither did ArenaNet for GW2. MMOCrunch is moving to LoreHound.com!

It’s actually a reunion of sorts as the owner of LoreHound was one of our original staff writers here, iTZKooPA.  We are once again combining forces to form Voltron…I mean a new and improved LoreHound.com!

This will be our last update here on MMOCrunch and we will be shutting the site down permanently sometime early next week once LoreHound has been updated. So I invite all our readers to come over to LoreHound to continue to read our ramblings.

I was planning on writing a full review for SWTOR, but Pherephassa did such a great write-up on her SWTOR reivew, that I figured I’d skip mine and get straight to my likes and gripes. I’ll give you a hint, it’s going to be mostly gripes.

Undoubtedly the best part of game is the journey to endgame, after all this is what BioWare does best. Having said that, as a MMORPG player I found myself beginning to skip dialog as early as the mid teen levels and before I hit level 30 I was skipping it all with the exception of the main storyline. Even that I began to partial skip or you can say fast forward by the time I hit the early 40′s.  It’s not that I didn’t find it interesting, I just wanted to get on with things.

As a player who has never seriously crafted before, I actually enjoyed the crafting system in SWTOR. I didn’t have to waste my time grinding it out looking for resources or spending hours killing the same mobs, however while I enjoyed the mechanic of crafting, the entire system is broken since only a few professions can actually make any money.

For one, crafting is way to easy and fast. One of the main reasons I never pursue crafting is because of how much time it takes to master. In SWTOR I hit the max in all three of my crew skills within 3 weeks without really trying. Now nothing is wrong with the system itself, they just need to make the crafting time much much longer. While it took me 3 weeks to master all my crew skills, if you take the actual crafting time, it was probably only 3-4 days.  It should take at least 1 month of “crew skill time” to master a skill.

Secondly, they need to make craftable items better, not the best, but close. There should only be a handful of items that are better then the best crafted items and those items should be harder to get. Right now you can spend a few days in PvP or grinding flashpoints and obtain some of the best gear out there making crafted gear worthless.

Moving on to PvP which we all know is broken across the board, from open PvP to the PvP planet Illum to Warzones, it’s a mess. While Warzones recently got a lot better with the separation of level 50 characters, they still need to introduce at least one more bracket to divide 1-49. Open PvP and Illum need a full overhaul to become worth while since  currently there’s zero reason to participate in open PvP and nearly none on Illum as you can obtain the same rewards from warzones at an unmatched rate.

That leaves Operations and Flashpoints. Flashpoints are instanced, so of course I hate them, but they’re fun the first one or two times you run them. Unfortunately if you want better gear and don’t like PvP you’ll be running them over and over and over.  I can’t comment on Operations since I still haven’t do one, but I’d image they’re the same thing with more people.

My favorite moment of the entire game was on Tatooine waiting on top of a sandcrawer with Empire and Republic players alike waiting for a balloon that would take us to a datacron on top of another sandcrawer. As the balloon approached tensions began to rise to see if anyone would attack. We all jumped on the balloon and as it began to pull away from the sandcrawler you could just sense something was about it happen and then it did. Someone attacked and all hell broke lose.  Lucky my faction (Empire) was able to push off all the Republic players and we floated away as they sat and cursed at us.

That’s was SWTOR and nearly all theme-park MMO are missing, there’s no surprises, no tension of not knowing what’s going to happen next . The only tension is knowing you have to run Black Talon 8 more times until you have enough point to get the item you want.

If you look at SWTOR as strictly a single-player RGP, then I’d say it’s a great game, but unfortunately for BioWare they made a MMORPG. With the exception of Flashpoints, I grouped exactly two times during my entire journey from level 1-50.  Now that I’m at 50, I’m stuck with either a broken PvP system, running Flashpoints and Ops all day or starting a new alt. No thanks.

It seems BioWare created a MMOPRG where their biggest replay value is in restarting with a new character and while many players will, not as many are willing to pay a monthly fee to play what is basically a co-op RPG.

In my mind SWTOR is a complete dud and failure in term of gameplay, but in a good way. This marks the end of the theme-park MMORPG shit-fest that has taken over the genre for the last decade.  If an IP like Star Wars cannot compete with WoW, no IP using a theme-park design can. The next great MMORPG might not be pure sandbox, but it sure as hell won’t be a theme-park either. I feel like this is the turning point in the industry and we’ll once again seen innovation in MMORPGs and I can’t wait.

The good thing about being a public company is that they have to release their subscription and sales numbers, so while we can only guess how many subscribers games like RIFT and LOTRO have, we only have to wait for a quarterly report for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

It seems SWTOR did better than EA expected, the numbers are below then some interesting Q&As during the conference call.

• 2,000,000+ copies sold – 40% sold through Origin
• 1,700,000+ active subscribers – 1 million concurrent

Q: Are these 1.7 subscribers paying?
A: Active subscribers means anyone paying or in their trial period. Most of those 1.7m are paying at this point

Q: You’ve previously said you need about a half million subscribers to be profitable, is that still the case?
A: At 500,000 subscribers, we’d break even. At a million, we’d be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about. As it scales up from there, we’re talking about a nice profit. At this point with the successful launch, we can take the worst case scenarios off the table.

With well over a million pre-orders, I have to say these numbers are not at all surprising. What will be interesting to see is which direction these numbers go next quarter and how many players they will retain. Then I’ll have something to write about.

En Masse Entertainment has opened up pre-order sales on their website today for their upcoming MMORPG TERA, giving players three options to choose from, Standard $49.99, Collectors Editions Digital $59.99 and Collector’s Edition $69.99. Regardless of which you you select you’ll have access to all closed beta tests as well as a three day head start. The full beta schedule is below.

• Closed Beta Test 1: February 10 – 12
• Closed Beta Test 2: February 24 – 26
• Closed Beta Test 3: March 9 – 11
• Closed Beta Test 4: March 23 – 25
• Closed Beta Test 5: April 6 – 8
• Open Beta Test: April 19 – 22
• Head Start: April 28 – May 1

Players who pre-order will also received in-game items to help them get started, you can check out the details below.  I’m excited!  :)

Remember The Secret World beta registration? The strange Facebook application The Secret War that would supposedly grant the coveted closed beta access? That same one that failed to launch, and then after a big community fuss, seemingly vanished without further word? A recent post from Tarib, the senior community manager indicates that they are still hard at work on this fabled minigame.

“The plan is to get The Secret War into the next phase and fire it up fully. We sometimes felt ourselves a bit like some hidden society tried to prevent us from launching it but the way it currently looks we are getting really close now. We hope to have more information and details on this very soon.”

I’ll admit I have my doubts, but I am hoping so! I’ve been watching this game for years now, it looks like everything I’ve ever wanted in a game – if they can pull it off. So here’s to hoping they really mean it this time!

Today Trion announced Rift Lite, a new unlimited trial where players can play all they want up to level 20 at no charge. RIFT Lite will be available staring today as it will be releases along side the launch of patch 1.7 the  Carnival of the Ascended.

Really no surprise here, just about every MMORPG today is doing some sort of unlimited free trial, so it was only a matter of time for RIFT to join in. Now the real question is does this mean Trion is softening up to the possibility of going free-to-play?

My overall impressions of this game do remain positive, although in many ways it’s a muddle. BioWare is new at the MMO genre, and it very much shows. I generally think ‘balanced classes’ is an MMO myth, but there is very little of it in SWTOR; classes just play unevenly in both skillsets and companion acquisition, crafting is… well, I’ll just say it’s bolluxed. Patches and updates aren’t staying long enough on the test server, BioWare isn’t listening to the testers’ feedback, and has now displayed a pattern of knee-jerk over-nerfs that have seriously hit my enthusiasm for playing. I really have to wonder if anyone at BioWare has ever played an MMO at endgame, or participated in serious pvp.

And yet, my overall impression remains positive. I’m treating this game like it’s single player, or rather, like it’s a LAN. As a single player or LAN, it is a great game.

But on to the specifics.

CHARACTER GENERATION

There is nothing new here since the beta. At first glance, character generation is pretty spiffy. There are multiple ways to customize your character; hair, eye color, different heads, skin colors, tattoos and jewelry, honestly I’ve yet to see a clone of any of my characters (I currently have 6), and I don’t see copies of other players as I run around the game either. There’s really a broad variety of looks you can achieve (unless you’re a Chiss. They’re all blue. But Chiss are cool so does it really matter?), so that’s pretty cool.

Once you get beyond the first glimpse, however, chargen pales a bit. While I’ve never seen someone else with a clone of any of my characters, all of my characters look very similar to each other because there are so few options that I actually like. The tattoos and makeup share the same slider, so if I want that cool looking tattoo over the left eye, I’m stuck with no lipstick. The races with horns have the same problem – horns and hairstyles are on the same slider.

I’ll admit I’m picky. I can, have, and do spend hours on chargen, making my characters look just exactly so. The more options there are, the more time I’ll spend in chargen – I have actually timed out of the game during chargen many times. I’m vain. I spend VAST amounts of time in game looking for just the right outfits, and these days, I’m not likely to even play a game that doesn’t have a cosmetic system. But still, personal preferences aside, there are certain things that lose massive points with me, and different types of features sharing the same sliders is one of them. Is it really that difficult to make it so I can have lipstick and a tattoo, or three horns with pigtails instead of 5 horns? You can’t even use clipping as an argument, because there are hairstyles that clip with the heads! The Sith race in particular is guilty of this, many of the hairstyles clip with most of the Sith heads. I’ve tried many times, but just can’t find a Sith look that I like, due to hairstyle clipping, and shiny mouths because of misaligned jaws. It seems like if the hairstyle doesn’t clip with the head, there’s a glaring white line across the mouth where the jaws don’t properly sync.

But take that last with whatever salt you like. It drives me absolutely insane (to the point that I never ever take long hair on video game characters because it’s almost a certainty that long hair will clip with armor), but I’ve been assured by several people that it looks fine and I’m just super picky.

PROGRESSION

Character progression in Star Wars is pretty easy. Leveling is lightning fast. I’d thought WoW leveling was quick, but Star Wars has WoW beat by a landslide. There are multiple ways you can level, too, which makes it rather fun. You can wander around the world following the story quests, PvP, blow things up in your spaceship, and group in flashpoints and operations. There’s very little that you need that can’t be provided by solo questing … ok, I can’t think of anything I needed while leveling that I couldn’t get from questing.

The story quests are, for the most part, pretty fun. One thing that everyone can agree on is that BioWare does story, and in Star Wars, they did story. In most MMOs I move on once I hit the level to start in a new zone, but in Star Wars most of the time I don’t even notice the pace of leveling. In the places I did skip, I went back to finish up after I hit 50. Many of the quests have multiple endings as well, so there is some variety to be had when leveling alts. Some of it is minor – do you force the girl who has been adopted by bugs to return to her family, or let her stay – but it is also possible to make choices that determine the outcome of planetary conflicts. Honestly I’d assumed that most of the choices mattered very little and you’d wind up in the same place no matter which route you take, but last night while playing another pair of alts, my fiance and I managed to lose a war and cost the Empire the acquisition of one of the major planets. The Darth in charge of the war efforts wasn’t very pleased, but we threatened to kill him if he kept complaining and then just walked out. Now he sends us pissy letters in the mail. Which I’ll admit are pretty funny. I do like getting mails from the various NPCs you interact with in the world.

When it comes to PvP, Mike has already said much of what I’d say. Ilum sucks. The only thing I will add is that the 10-49 queued warzone brackets are pretty fun. It’s world and endgame PvP that sucks. I do have one complaint with the game in regards to pvp however – I absolutely despise pve nerfs because of pvp balance, and BioWare has done just that to one of the main classes I play. One of the burst dps classes is (surprise) bursting people to death, so it’s just – as of patch 1.1.1 – been nerfed into oblivion. Stealth burst dps classes always seem to have this problem, but even so, BioWare has nerfed them above and beyond even my jaded expectations.

Spaceship missions … you’ll either love these or hate them. They remind me of the good old days, when I blew up asterisks and other ascii-styled enemies on my atari 2600. It’s like Missile Command or Defender, or that old arcade sit-in Star Wars game, only the spaceships actually look like spaceships and the missiles aren’t just distorted lines!

I do all of my daily space ship missions most every day, and have an absolute blast. Many people complain that the ship flies on rails, but I’m just here to blow stuff up so that’s fine by me. My biggest complaint here is once I enter the mission I might as well have left the game. You can’t see the chat anymore, so it’s easy to miss messages that come in while you’re playing. But it’s fun, and a great way to make some quickie chump change. I also get gear for my companions; a run through my daily missions will net me enough commendations to buy a blue level 50 lockbox that will provide pretty decent stuff for the sidekicks.

UI

I hate the UI. I abhor the UI. I loathe and despise the UI. Seriously folks, I don’t think there’s any way to do justice to just how bad the Star Wars UI really is. It sucked in beta, and it still sucks. There’s no way to resize it, no way to move windows around, the windows you can have open are limited to 2 (in some cases, to 1!), you don’t get nearly enough hotbars, and it clips with itself!

The Galactic Trade Network (SWTOR’s auction house) is particularly onerous. It’s one of the windows that won’t allow other windows to open. And many of the things you’ll be looking for the most, like mods and enhancements for armor and weapons, and crafting schematics, don’t have an item compare. So if you’re crafting and looking for new recipes, you’ll either have to write down every one that you have and manually compare, have an eidetic memory, or suffer through a very lengthy process of opening the GTN window, closing it down so you can look at your crafting window, then opening the GTN again. The same goes with item modification; you can’t see what you’ve already got without closing down the GTN window and opening up your item window. There’s also no way to search the GTN for specific armor slots. Just want a belt? Sorry, you have to look at every chest, glove, helmet, wrist and leg piece as well.

Just bad, bad, bad design. I know, I know, they’ve promised modification in future patches, but until that magical unspecified day, the UI sucks so badly there’s just nothing more to really say about it.

CRAFTING

On the positive side, you can craft without having to actually craft. I wonder if the BioWare crafting motto was if you can’t make it fun, then make it painless? You send your crew members out to do your crafting, so once you get more than one of them, it’s easy to play the game and get your crafting done in the background. Heck, you can even craft while offline!

But that’s the only positive thing I have to say about SWTOR’s crafting. Which saddens me, because I generally love crafting.

There are three types of crew skills: crafting, missions, and gathering. Crafting makes things. All you need are the materials and the recipe. Then you send out your companion and wait. When using a mission skill, you pay a start up fee, then your minion goes out and collects rare materials. Gathering skills are exactly as they sound, they allow you to collect nodes throughout the world as you adventure, although you can also pay to send your companions out as though they’re mission skills. Two of them also allow you to harvest from the bodies of enemies that you kill.

It’s a great premise. You can craft and gather materials while doing other things, and even offline. Bioware wanted a system that rewarded crafters for the amount of time they sink into their crafts, and they by and large succeeded. In order to get the very best crafting recipes, crafters have to spend a fortune in both time and money creating items and deconstructing them, hoping for that magical success that will teach them an improved recipe.

It fails in execution, however, as very few of the crafts have any actual end game value. I will admit that this is very heavily debated by the playerbase, however. There are people who make millions selling crafted gear. I, however, see no benefit to it. During the leveling phase of the game, I level so quickly that it’s pointless for me to make anything for myself as I’ll be leveled beyond it by the time I make it. And on the same coin, I level so quickly I can’t be bothered to buy things crafted by other people. At the endgame – it’s easier to just use the commendations I get from dailies and drops from instances instead of craft. There is money to be made with crafting as not everyone is content with ‘good enough for now’, so long as you’re willing to sink vast quantities of time and money deconstructing hundreds of items to get the recipes you need.

Every time I make a new alt, I tell myself, ok this time I’m going to make what I need in advance, so I’ll have it. But thus far, each time, I just couldn’t be bothered to take the time collecting the rare materials needed for the gear that’s any good. At no point do I ever feel like I need gear upgrades beyond what I can pick up in instances and questing. Crafting is also a giant money sink, even beyond the normal.

If you want to have the very best gear at all times, or don’t mind putting in heavy hours evaluating the market and player trends in order to make money, then crafting might be for you. Normally, this is me. I love playing the market, and amassing a fortune in the games I play. In Star Wars, however, the ‘click and wait’ system makes me want to crawl into a hole and die.

CONCLUSION

Remember what I said in my beta preview? That opinion hasn’t changed much: ultimately, I am having fun playing Star Wars and will continue playing it for a while. It’s got a few more months of fun left, possibly more if they continue to add content and patch. Massive multiplayer content is where BioWare has largely dropped the ball, so if you’re looking for a standard BioWare single player game, with the added bonus of being able to play it with friends, then you’ll probably enjoy this game. Taken casually, this game is pretty solid.

If you’re a focused player, who likes to excel at what you do; whether it’s PvP, crafting, or raiding, you may want to give this game a pass, or at least wait another 6 months. BioWare is in its infancy in regards to MMOs, and I suspect it’s going to take a while before they learn enough to satisfy the hardcore crowds. I’m having fun playing it like a LAN game, but I’m already casting my eyes toward my next game. After 6 alts, there’s very little left for me to do.

Following in the footsteps of Everquest 2, the original online gaming crack, Everquest will be going free-to-play this March, only 2 months from now.

Everquest will give players many options to choose from including a premium subscription, Silver and Free membership levels, item unlockers and more.  New players will also receive a Welcome Pack containing items to help them get started.

Pretty exciting news for veteran EQ players and even people like me who’ve  never played EQ. With same themepark MMO games being released every few months, I might give EQ a try as long as D3 or GW2 doesn’t come out before it.

Last week I finally hit the level cap in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but didn’t have a chance to get to Illum until this weekend and holy crap does it suck.  Now if you’re already level 50 and have traveled to Illum, you probably already know what I’m about to say, but if you’re not, seriously take you time leveling, you don’t want to be on Illum.

To start, Illum the “PvP planet” isn’t even dedicated to PvP, half of it is PvE, which blew me away when I got there and I had to spend the next few hours completing more story missions. Yay!? =\

When I finished off those missions I finally made it to the other side of the planet where I was greeted with on-screen notification messages of players who were near certain control points. It seemed like there were a lot of notifications coming up, so I started to get excited that I was in for some good PvP action, however as I neared my first control point, I saw no one. I proceed to another point, controlled by the Republic (Im Empire) and again saw no one, so I figured I’d try to take it over.

To take over a control point, you have to destroy the enemy vehicles in the area, which by the way don’t attack you so after about a min, by myself, I took over the point. I though, ok, that was boring, what next? Finally a Republic player found me as I was leaving the control point and decisively thrashed me.  While I don’t like dying, at least it was something.

I continued to travel around from control point to control point for about 30 mins, seeing a few players here and there and getting my ass kicked a few more times until I finally found where everyone was. It seems about 100 players were lined up standing infront of a narrow bridge staring at each other. I hung out for about an hour getting some kills and valor points, however the lag was too much and I finally logged out in frustration.

Visting Illum has now fully convinced me no one working at BioWare has every played a PvP MMORPG. By far SWTOR has the worst PvP system I’ve every played and makes games like WoW look like the grand-master of PvP.

First, control points, which provide faction valor buffs, are almost meaningless. They’re so easy to take over, that if you do and leave, literally within a few mins you’ll lose it, which leaves the players with an empty feeling of accomplishment. Why bother when you’re just going to lose it 2 mins later?

Aside from those 5 control points, there’s absolutely nothing else on Illum, which is why players just sit there across from each other picking off overly aggressive players from time to time. The valor gained is also tiny compared to what you get in a warzone. In the hour I was there I probably gained 1000 valor points at most, which is pathetic considering I could have probably gain 4000 in the same amount of time had I joined warzones. However collecting points is not my main priority as I’ve grown to hate instanced PvP matches, so I’ll still take Illum over warzones.

Illum is a disaster when it come to PvP and if you do not agree, you are completely blinded by your love for Star Wars and BioWare. I’m sorry this is no an opinion, it is fact and unarguable.

BioWare has stated that in the month of February it will be releasing updates aimed to improve PvP, but at this point I’m convinced that improvements will not work. Illum needs to be completely scrapped, shutdown and remade from scratch if they want to have any decent PvP system at all.  Having completed the story and absolutely hating Illum, I’m left with nothing to do except Flashpoints and Operations.  I’ve yet to do any ops, so I guess that’s next for me.

In a word, simplicity. There’s something to be said about a game where the characters have only five abilities, one being passive, yet still provide layers of complexity and strategy.

The reason League of Legends is able to accomplish this is through their skill trees, rune system and item store, which allow players to completely customize each character without adding additional abilities. While players can spend hours tweaking their stats, when they get into the actual game it becomes very simple.

When comparing it to my character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have two hot bars filled with 24 abilities, then an additional two side bars with another 18 or so abilities, buffs, items and skills. I can’t remember the last time I played a MMORPG  where I had so many abilities as SWTOR. Full disclosure the only other two MMORPGs I played to the level cap were LoTRO and Warhammer Online, neither of which, from what I remember, came anywhere near SWTOR.

However I have played dozens of other MMO games to mid level and I can’t recall  filling up my hotbars by mid game in any of them. In comparison I had filled my two bottom bars and nearly another full side bar before I hit level 25. Then let’s not forget a fifth hotbar for companions.

However there’s a certain complexity that is expected when playing a MMORPG, much more than a MOBA game like League of Legends, but when is enough enough? Do we really need 40 abilities and items to select from while in combat?  Seems like overkill to me and while I don’t expect or even want a MMORPG with only 5 abilities, it wouldn’t hurt for MMO developers to take a look at what RiotGames is doing with League of Legends and perhaps simplify some things.

What do you think? Are MMO games going to far with the amount of skills and abilities players have access to or do you enjoy the complexity of it?