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.

Continued…

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.

It’s been a little over a month since the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have multiple characters at level 50, have seen all 4 empire stories, and the string of colds and flu that have been kicking my ass since the holidays is finally on its last legs, so it’s time for me to blare my thoughts about this game. I had originally intended to leave it to Mike, since he’s already written up a few thoughts, and I wrote up a beta impression, but my views have changed slightly and are different than his, so I changed my mind. I’m a woman, I’m allowed to do that, right?

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.

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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.

Continued…

Game Update 1.1 not only brought a new Flashpoint into Star Was: The Old Republic, it also allowed Bioware to respond to player concerns regarding PvP by placing level 50 characters into their own bracket for warzones.

For the most part the bolster system did a good job of levelling the playing field in warzones however it did not account for the expertise stat found on level 50 PvP gear. Higher level players already had access to a complete skill tree and set of abilities, it may have been a mistake to give them a gear advantage (even if only a slight advantage).

As a mid-level character, getting face rolled by full teams of 50′s in all PvP gear was  getting frustrating enough never mind being a fresh level 10 character hoping to try PvP out only to get obliterated. The barrier to entry was increasing with each new level 50 queuing for warzones and it was starting to get slightly out of hand.

On the other hand the inclusion of level 50 brackets has caused problems for some level 50 players on low population servers, leaving them with potentially lengthy queue times just to get into a match against anyone. As far as I can tell from chatting with a few people, the gear gap issue is also still an issue for fresh level 50s going up against better equipped characters. The RNG system behind loot bags probably is not helping this situation either with some players failing to receive a token for PvP gear despite purchasing a LOT of bags.

What’s your opinion?

Are you enjoying the lack of level 50 characters in your warzones? Or do you miss the challenge of taking on a vastly superior opposing force?

Let us know in the comments.

Last week BioWare released a video of Game Director James Ohlen talking about some upcoming changes to Star Wars: The Old Republic, one of which was the Legacy System.

Up until now, we knew that the the Legacy system would create a sort of family tree for your main and alt characters and they would gain some sort of benefits. I for one assumed the benefits would be non-combat such as cosmetic gear, titles, mounts or something along those lines, however in the video James clearly states that all characters will gain new abilities and powers.

Being someone that has never played an alt character and who doesn’t plan to, this Legacy System completely gimps players who choose to stick with a single character. The Legacy System almost forces players to start over with an alt in order to remain competitive with other players.

Since SWTOR is all about story and is the game’s main focus, it’s no wonder BioWare would put in place a system that puts a huge incentive for players to start over. However for those of us who are not alt-players, this system makes it pointless to continue playing as we would do so with a permanently gimped character.

What BioWare is trying to do is add replay value to a genre that quite frankly doesn’t need it. Incentivising players to start over should be the last thing any MMORPG should do as the game itself should be engaging enough for players to continue logging in even after completely the story. However when you create a game that has the same old game mechanics and endgame as every MMORPG of the last decade, getting players to start-over is probably the only way to keep your subscribers.

What is currently taking place on the planet of Illum is an absolute slaughter and travesty. Republic forces, vastly out numbered by Imperials, are being decimated with little to no hope of making any type of stand. With no hope of survival, Republic players are staying clear of Illum, turning it over to Imperials who now sit and wait for those unfortunate Republic players, unaware of the situation, to enter.

That’s the current state of the game for Star Wars: The Old Republic on the PvP world of Illum after the release of Patch 1.1. While the patch brought with it a new flashpoint and operation, more importantly it brought much needed changes to PvP.

Up until now Illum has been a merry-go-round where players, for the most part, would stay clear of each other in order to trade off objectives and farm rewards as quickly as possible. Patch 1.1 however introduced some incentives for players to actually kill each other, except BioWare forgot that Imperial players vaaaastly outnumber Republic players on nearly every server. So instead of a merry-go-round, we have a one sided slaughter where Imperial players are camping Republic respawn areas and hunting down new players when their location is revealed through the new Illum notification system.

But it doesn’t stop there. Imperial players are also farming NPC turrets, which respawn almost instantly, allowing them to rack up HUGE amounts of valor. WTF BioWare!?  PvP rewards for killing NPCs? (UPDATE: Seems this was reported falsely by players, turrets and NPCs do not provide valor)

I’m all for giving players incentives to kill each other and I’m still waiting for some in open PvP zones, but this seems like such a rookie mistake. Hasn’t anyone at BioWare played a PvP MMORPG before?  How about some safe zones or added incentive for the factions that’s outnumber to help bolster their numbers. Or maybe just a faction player cap and definitely no Valor for killing NPCs, that’s just plain idiotic.

If you’re interested in checking out the slaughter, below you can find a video that was recently uploaded by a Republic player.

UPDATE: BioWare has responded by adding a population cap to Illum and are working on correcting the issue where enemy players are able to enter the opposing faction’s safe zone without being killed.

Continued…

Star Wars: The Old Republic servers are now live with the first major content update; Rise of the Rakghouls. This update brings some welcome changes – anti-aliasing is finally available! – as well as some that just make me scratch my head and wonder what BioWare is thinking. Georg Zoeller stated that,

“The design intent for the game is that your choice of crafting profession should not become a requirement or ‘gating’ mechanism for participating in competitive content (PvP) and high end endgame challenges.”

Some raiding guilds had started requiring Biochem on their raiders, so they were nerfing biochem to prevent this. But I’m left wondering how sticking a requirement that people who use high end biochem stims and medpacks actually have to have biochem to use them is going to fix this problem. Doesn’t that just make it more likely guilds will require biochem? Wouldn’t it be better to just make other crafting skills worthwhile at the end game raiding level?

Commentary aside, Rise of the Rakghouls does introduce some content that looks pretty interesting. Four new bosses have been added to Karagga’s Palace, and there’s a new flashpoint: Kaon Under Siege. Now if BioWare would only introduce UI scaling and customization…

Read the official full patch notes, sans my pithy commentary, here.

When we left off a couple of weeks ago, I had just arrived with my baby Inquisitor Sorcerer on the planet of Dromund Kaas. The planet of milk and honey and giant frigging predators right outside the official Imperial Space Port.I think that the Sith Empire is taking this “let the weak perish” thing a bit too far, when you want to make even visiting your capital city an exercise in Darwinian jungle laws. Maybe all Sith lords are just complete adrenaline junkies that enjoy the rush of knowing that at any moment you take more than 5 steps outside the city walls there’s a good chance that something is going to try to shoot, bite or stab you in the face and neck area.

Also you would imagine that the capital planet of the Empire would have enough soldiers stationed to not have to rely on random passing strangers to keep the wheels turning.No really guys, I appreciate the chance to save the capital city of the Sith Empire from being destroyed by lightning storms, but you would imagine this is the kind of task that you maybe would not want to entrust to some fairly unproven “just-off-the-shuttle” hotshot that’s barely learned which way of the lightsaber you point away from your face (admittedly, that’s a mistake you normally only make once).

Anyways, after having saved the day I was able to make my way to the originally named Kaas City (Earth City, anyone?), which appeared to be suffering from some sort of outbreak that kept 90% of the population indoors.At least that’s what I must assume was happening, because I was jogging down huge roads and over large squares that were all but completely empty. For something that is supposed to be the hub of the entire Sith Empire it sure is deserted.Perhaps the citizens had stepped outside the city walls for a quick smoke and were promptly eaten/shot/stabbed/struck by lightning. Helps to keep congestion down, I guess.

Dromund Kaas offered me more chances to venture into yet more ancient Sith tombs. At this point I was starting to suffer from tomb raiding fatigue, or as we call it in the business: “Croft-Syndrome”.Really, if you’ve seen one old Sith tomb then you’ve seen them all, but as my master had previously demonstrated a penchant for frying people with Force lightning, I figured that I didn’t really have much say in the matter.
Eventually tombs were raided, schemes were carried out and my master was all round happy with my performance, to the point that she gave me my very own starship (honestly I would have been happy with a fruit basket, but thanks!).

By the way, let me just say that the moment you get your ship is wicked cool and it fills you with an appropriate kiddie level of “oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!” when you first step into the space dock and see it sitting there.

Continued…

The first major content update to Star Wars: The Old Republic, called “Kaon Under Siege”, is going live on servers on January 17th and will introduce players to a new flashpoint. Today BioWare released the official trailer for the update which you can view after the jump.

The Rakghoul plague has spread across several worlds and has made it’s way to the small world of Kaon where both Republic and Empire foruces will create an alliance in order to combat the spread of the plague.

The trailer seems to show the intro of the flashpoint with some gameplay later on, although brief. If you played BioWare’s original Star Wars RPG, Knights of the Old Republic, you’ll remember that it featured Rakghoul mutants as well, so it’s a bit of a throw back.

Check out the Kaon Under Siege trailer below.

Continued…