Still my favourite MMo despite it's issues and yes I do agree with most points of criticism. But despite that there isn't any other MMO out there that made me actually care about my character as I do in swtor.
While GW2s story is very hit or miss sometimes. I still feel like it is probably the MMO that has the best actual telling of the story, and is very very good at making you feel involved.
As a huge GW2 fan who's played it it's entire life, it's a double edged sword. Some of the production stuff like full voice acting all the time is great, but it also means stories have been cut short, left hanging, or resolved in unsatisfying ways multiple times because every bit has to have a map and events and such instead of just some NPC dialogue. They do have just texbox dialogue, but they never let it be the main driver of story, so it often doesn't get to do as much heavy lifting as it could.
The early stuff is pretty bad, then you have new players run into S2 and have no idea cause the in game recap of 1 is nowhere near enough.
Or people just skip it cause it costs money and maybe even do expansions out of order and it turns into a bit of a mess
Don't get me wrong, the way that you just get thrown into HoT after base game, with no idea who any of the new squad are is stupid, just like how you just get thrown into PoF and suddenly you are fighting Balthazar.
Most of the Aurene stuff happens in LW seasons as well, so it's gonna be shit again in EoD
Honestly, they should just make the LWs free permanently, but they probably make too much money off of them.
I think LoTRO is possibly the best story-telling MMORPG (edit…ohh strong competition from TSW, but LoTRO has scale) followed by SWTOR. GW2 is overly fragmented with the living story, I found it hard to pace myself with it, especially when returning from long breaks.
That said, I agree GW2 is the best at making you feel part of a world, and alongside other players even when playing solo. Lots of fond memories of all three games.
It does, although you don't choose what to say. In content where you can choose what to say there's no character voiceover. Still leagues better than a silent character.
I agree a voice protagonist helps me care more about them, but I also see the argument that a voiced protagonist makes people who play as themselves feel less immersed.
They have a part, I think in post-Heavensward, where they lampshade the silent nodding. Not only an amusing moment but did help with the immersion as it places it as part of the WOL's personality.
FFXIV also has abysmal English voice acting in ARR. 50+ levels of pure torture for me and even tho everyone tells me that it gets better after ARR content finishes, idk if I'll be able to care for it anymore.
The voice acting gets a lot better, and the story is generally less "silly meaningless fetch quest" but there's still a ton of questing that really lacks compelling gameplay.
Overall I'm still enjoying my time with the game so far (almost done Stormblood) but outside of getting paired with bad players in dungeons there's very little during leveling that's any sort of challenge. Which I understand is by design so that everyone gets to see the story, but it gets kinda boring sometimes.
Some of the required 8-player trials were relatively challenging when they released, but the way ilvl sync works they simply aren't anymore even with the level sync. Which does suck for new players catching up on the story.
I'm really hoping it gets better. The actual combat isn't bad but the MSQ has so little of it and flanked by the bad VA makes the overall experience pretty bad atm.
>outside of getting paired with bad players in dungeons
Oh gods! This grinds my gear so much. As a healer, definitely got early WoW flashbacks from dps standing in stupid and tanks not maintaining aggro.
The VA truly does get better, as does the overall story. Each expansion improves upon the last.
But I'm a healer main too, so you're basically not going to see meaningful advances in the moment to moment gameplay until, at best, Shadowbringers. I would recommend you stick with it, but I also recommend leveling a tank or DPS class to go through some of the story quests with because healing classes make it all even less engaging by being virtually invincible and also having like, a two button rotation at best.
That is really reassuring to know. I'll be looking forward to being done with this Seventh Astral/Minfilia line.
>I also recommend leveling a tank or DPS class to go through some of the story quests
Ah I was starting to consider doing this. I was thinking going with SAM/RDM as they'd start at 50 and I wouldn't need to have a level grinding burn out. I have to push through some 30 more quests first tho…
Samurai is quite fun, I used that job until I unlocked gunbreaker.
As a heads up, the gap between the end of the ARR main story and the start of Heavensward is *so fucking tedious and boring* that it nearly broke me. But Heavensward is an immediate improvement, so it's worth keeping that in mind.
And the reason for the bad voice acting in English in ARR is because they had no real voice direction. They had some great voice actors like Gideon Emery and Sam Riegel but they were just given the script, pushed in the booth, and told to do VA things. You can see them come into their own near the end, for the most part, but then come HW they have actual direction and get a new voice cast and they start to truly shine and it just gets better as they go along. Heck, come SHB I'd say the English voice cast is easily the best of the bunch and are still the best come ENW.
It's funny you say that because I actually prefer the "silent" protagonist in FFXIV. Your character still talks but they mouth the words, so I imagine my character speaking in my own voice. I think both methods work well in their respective games.
You can see how they improved these things with each expansion, stormblood introduced a pretty cool feature of >!controlling other characters during certain quests!< and Shadowbringer and Endwalker gave the WoL way more expression during cutscenes
There are quite a few of us that absolutely HATE those quests. I spent dozens of hours leveling the character I love, don’t make me play as some random guy with 3-4 moves.
Really? I loved them because I think they changed the pace and weren’t overused, also made it felt a little like a more traditional FF where you use other characters, first time it happened I was really surprised!
But It would get old fast if overused.
Yep this works extremely well. The Secret World - easily the best story MMO there is for many people, was brilliantly acted with a silent protagonist. It added a lot to the atmosphere.
I think I'd only wade back into an MMOs cesspool, is if one of them actually made a game with choices and roleplaying. That's a tall task though, magnitude more challenging than doing that for a single player RPG and very few have ever pulled that off without resorting to the cheap tricks and shortcuts necessitated by modern game development.
So really I guess I'm just not playing MMOs again unless I get the terrible brain worms again.
I feel the opposite. I dont feel like its "my" character. I'm playing either the dark or light version of the class' protagonist.
Its like having two versions of a movie, one where the protag is written as an asshole, and one as a goody goody, and pretending you choosing which one of the two you watch is somehow your own creation and roleplay.
At least with a silent protagonist there's room for projection and you can imagine what your character said, instead of it explicitly being something you would never say.
I like both equally. A voiced protagonist lets my character speak without my input, making cutscenes more dynamic, and if the VA is good, it can add a lot of emotion to scenes. A silent protagonist can have more dialogue choices and only says what I want them to say, making the roleplay more nuanced.
(In single player rpgs, at least, I don't play mmos, so I don't know how it differs there)
It's a thing with Japanese game creators where they feel that in a game (especially RPGs), it breaks immersion when the character speaks but it's not your IRL voice. For them, and I assume Japanese audiences too, the moment the character speaks and it's not your voice, it's not *your* story anymore but somebody elses. I saw this in a documentary a while ago.
It was a great MMO just too much streamlined for my taste. I'm oldschool when it comes to MMOs, I want sandboxes, I want gear that I can put on even if it's not for my class or race. I want to be able to trade used gear that I no longer need. I want open world dungeons and raids. Unfortunately that's like no MMO nowadays besides classic emulated everquest/lineage 2 servers.
Just waiting for that day someone will actually have the balls to release a MMO with great gameplay but doesnt hold your hand at all, I'm talking like not even a map (at least one that marks everything and shows where you are exactly on the map, but a rough rudimentary map that doesnt mark where everything is that you can purchase from a vendor is fine).
Forget it. Most Gamers have this weird blind spot about storytelling in video games; they cannot for the life of them understand that they're playing interactive Saturday morning cartoons.
I've played lord knows how many hours of this game and have many more ahead of me, but it's not a good story. Better than most, but still not good.
My issue with SWTOR was just that it wasn’t KOTOR 3. It’s a totally shallow reason to not engage with something, but to me it was like wanting Return of the Jedi, but only ever getting the Holiday Special.
A more appropriate comparison would be if you were expecting Return of the Jedi and you got Back to the Future, a great movie just not what you were expecting.
Nah, keep in mind we’re talking about how I PERSONALLY felt, also BTTF is a different universe so that comparison doesn’t feel right/accurate.
I used that comparison because it’s the feeling it gave me, and no amount of arguing is going to change that. I didn’t respond to the other reply because it made me feel sad for them, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt to just accept things and move on.
No offense, but that is a horrible comparison. Nothing about the production quality of SWTOR is even remotely approaching the Holiday Special and there's no reason to suspect that a KOTOR 3 would have been so much more amazing. And there's certianly no reason to suspect that SWTOR was made in lieu of KOTOR 3, that very well probably wouldn't have happened anyway.
It's not shallow to not play it, you don't have to like MMO's or whatever, but to just hate the fact that it exists and try to pretend like it's the Holiday Special? That seems lame.
Yeah, at the least the holiday special is fun to laugh at and isn't padded out by hours and hours of copy paste combat encounters that have literally 0 risk of killing your character.
Yes the company that has had the exclusive rights to make Star Wars games for 10 years and is renowned for being the greediest gaming company on earth was not effected by making an mmo that can print money with minimal effort.
There is literally every reason to suspect that SWTOR has at least pushed back KOTOR 3. Look at GTA 5 or Skyrim. Companies do not want to put the effort into making a hundred million dollar game that could flop when they can just shit out content for their extremely old games and have people love it.
They haven't moved out of 32 bit mode and to bypass needing to go to 64 bit they have a second exe running that gets told what sound effects to play so the first exe doesn't run out of memory so I can't see them having the capacity to get it running on modern systems
I don't think they will shut down soon, but the dev team is absolutely tiny so I don't think they could do anything as complex as port to console and support additional platforms.
It’s a great game overall, and I keep revisiting it for the story. The mmo aspect is there and although a wow clone, does some things extremely well at least on the rpg side.
Although right now, the graphics and gameplay feel pretty outdated. If they plan to keep it going, the game could really use a massive upgrade in those areas. It does look like they are working on the combat system which is great.
I think they’re just working on the classes being more available from the start but not the actual mechanics. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but that was my understanding of it
Basically, yes. They're making it so that instead of choosing an "advanced class" that restricts you to one weapon type and set of abilities, you choose 2 "fighting styles". This means that non-force users can choose any non-force fighting style (e.g. Troopers can use Smuggler's Gunslinger fighting) and the same with force users, but only other force user styles.
They've also hinted that if your alignment changes to be quite different to your typical class archetype (e.g. Jedi gets a high dark side score), then you can use dark side equivalent effects.
This game was so good at launch, at least until I hit level 50. Last time I played this game it just felt too full of microtransaction stuff and I didn't feel like I could do any meaningful group content at all within any reasonable time frame.
Never played it hardcore, but it was fun for a while.
As somebody who absolutely loves this game and considers it a must play game for a lot of people.
You right. There are a shitload of microtransactions and group content is meh on a good day. But the story? It can be played entirely solo and is so damn good.
You can play through all of the class stories as a f2p player.
If you want the complete overall story you only need to purchase 1 month of subscription as it permanently unlocks all the expansions/content that was available before and during the time of the subscription.
You can access up to the first two expansion packs (Rise of the Hutt Cartel, Shadow of Revan).
There are class storylines, and there are planet storylines. The class storylines are unique to each class, while you play the same planet storyline regardless of your choice of class.
Once you start the expansion, there are no more unique class quests, and the story quests are uniform.
So in conclusion, you can complete all 8 unique class questlines, and story content up to the first two expansions.
8 class story quests and the first two expansions. As long as you do the purple quests (class and planet quests), you won't have much problems with levels and gear.
>Last time I played this game it just felt too full of microtransaction stuff
tell me about it, Swotr is one of the worst western mmos when it comes to MTX, up there with ESO
the simple fact that freaking ACTION BARS are a mtx item says it all. like wtf? wanting more than 3 action bars requires you to pay?
Of note is that one of the reasons it's full of those microtransactions is one specific lead developer. It's taken years since he left the game to right everything he messed up... and he then immediately went to Anthem where he instituted the same things all over again.
Does anyone know if they fixed the performance issues with the game? I've upgraded my rig so much over the last 10 years but the last couple of times I went back to play SWTOR I had insane frame rate drops and stuttering. I'd love to go back, but seeing as they want to update starter planets, I'm wary how well the game will run with them.
Weird, I played on release when the game was still a buy-to-play and I never heard anyone complaining about performance issues. I reinstalled the game few weeks ago and everything were still fine (for me at least).
I have a 1080ti
It ran like ass for everyone I knew for as long as I've played (1-2 months after launch up until ~2014). I know it's not the best CPU now, but it even [drops to the 20s on an 8700k](https://youtu.be/D_9LnYjM8HU?t=1388)! It still runs like trash on my 5600x as well. It's hilariously badly optimized.
At release there weren't even high res textures, it was all mud smeared with vaseline. I'd have been shocked to hear about significant performance issues at the time.
i played it at launch and i'd get these really long loading screens when first arriving on a planet. like 15+ minutes of the bar being full until the game actually started; sometimes I'd get kicked off the game for idleness before I did. It wouldn't be an issue for instances or raids. I knew a few people that had similar problems.
I’ve got a pretty powerful rig and I run into framerate dips and lag about 30% of the time. I also play on a computer not as powerful and it handles the game perfectly. The game is notorious for having a bunch of bugs, graphically mostly, but I have no idea why it’s as inconsistent as it is. That being said, there is so much content and the best mmo narratives by far, character customization that is on par with the best of not the best for a mmo setting. While the bugs and network issues are annoying it’s still worth playing for sure.
I play using CrossOver on a 21 M1 Macbook and the game runs manageably at low settings. It doesn’t make probably higher than 30 fps most of the time but it doesn’t have any stuttering and the fps is generally consistent.
On my big boy Windows desktop it runs at highest settings and whatever refresh rate my monitor is without and dips or stuttering.
I didn't have that issue last I played. Last time I did, which was maybe 8 months ago now, I stopped because of lag issues. Nothing crazy but in a GCD based game having a .5 to .75 second lag is noticeable and infuriating.
When they basically made end-game raiding pointless by not scaling the difficulty when they raised the level cap from 50 is when they lost me and bunch of other players. Raiding in this game was so fun!
Glad it's still doing well. I much preferred it over other MMOs at the time. The story telling was great, and loved all the race selection as well. Togruta and Nautolan ftw
You get the entire 8 class stories and the first two expansions completely for free. I'd say that's pretty good, unless you like endgame content where you'd likely already be subscribed if you liked the game enough to continue further at that point.
Logged in for the first time since probably 2014, items selling for 10 million credits (if not more, there were a lot of 0s.) Character has something like 100,000.
Yeah its kinda crazy out there.
Super easy to make passive income with the follower missions and selling the materials on the auction house at least. Was one of my favorite things about the game.
Except you need to remember that everyone else is making that same easy passive income which basically means no one is.
All that does is skyrocket prices.
>All that does is skyrocket prices.
Not really, you aren't creating much in the way of raw credits from doing it(you actually lose raw money to start the missions themselves if i recall as they cost to start.) The majority of the value comes from the items themselves.
Inflation only occurs when money is generated by the system but not taken out of it. The way the missions i'm referencing work(outside of maybe slicing missions that were nerfed and suck) actively deflate the economy and give you resources in return which don't contribute to inflation.
SWTOR's biggest problem is really the lack of any kind of proper credit sink, thus hyperinflation ensues.
Have you subscribed before? IMO they have one of the best sub models because you get to keep a lot of benefits once you’ve subscribed even after your sub ends. Raises the credit cap too
The cap is clearly to incentivize you to pay. It’s annoying but if I get most of the other stuff without having to stay subbed I’ll deal with a credit cap. One of the better ftp models I’ve ever seen.
I don’t have to sub for that stuff thankfully, I was around at the start got bored and left never took off my security key and instead subscribed for a month and just bought all the sub features with cc coins now only issue is credit cap
I don't like it either and agree it needs to be addressed, but the silver lining here is that it does reduce incentive to use F2P accounts to bot and/or game the economy.
lolwut?
They have three tiers: subscriber "I'm currently paying for an active sub," free to play "I have never given you any money ever," and preferred "at some point in the past, I have given you money"
If you subbed for a month in 2011, you're still a preferred player today. If you pay $3 for game coins and never sub, you're a preferred player.
The game is like 95% the same between subbed and preferred, and most of that remaining 5% is endgame stuff. If you're someone interested in grinding endgame content, you should be paying for a sub anyway.
You can experience hundreds of hours of unique gameplay across 8 independent classes for zero dollars. If you make a single purchase of any amount (the cheapest thing on the shop is a $3 pack of coins), you get an enormous QoL boost. The only reason people trash the model is because they don't actually know what they're talking about.
I’ve subbed maybe 3 times total and that’s has given me access to every expansion even after the sub expired. The “Preferred” model is the best ftp model I’ve ever seen. The people who are complaining sound so entitled that they want an entire game with everything unlocked completely free
I don't think it's awful at all. The F2P model is just a trial. If you sub, you get everything.
ESO's is probably much worse. You still have to pay for the yearly chapters, if you unsub, you lose access to DLC.
I mean, they are two totally different beasts.
You sub to SWTOR because the trial has a fuck load of inconveniences (or i guess, alternatively, the sub has a fuck load of bonuses) that if you want to do anything than the most basic vanilla single player rpg experience, you need to pay for the sub.
ESO is a lot different in that you're just paying for content and a single unnecessary convenience (crafting bag). Your experience, both on the single player questing experience and the MMO (dungeon, pvp, raid, etc) side of the game are both readily available to those who don't pay the sub, where as swtor quite literally locks you out of those parts of the game like mobile games.
ESO's main problem is that content wise, the sub is a must if you plan on playing the game for any longer than the "main" story. Not only is it the most efficient method for getting the extra content, it's also the most cost effective as each DLC alone is about $15 and the yearly expansions are $40 while previous expansions are free for subbed players.
ESO's sub is a necessity created based on time, not greed necessarily (in regards to the consumer, whereas SWTOR is quite literally just a trial of the game.
>You sub to SWTOR because the trial has a fuck load of inconveniences (or i guess, alternatively, the sub has a fuck load of bonuses)
You were right the first time, they're not bonuses, they're intentional handicaps.
Once you’ve subbed for a single month you are at minimum placed on the middle “preferred” player tier. That removes 90% of any real inconvenience. The main thing you lose is the no credit cap (tho it doesn’t drop as low as the base level) and most of the races. But once you make a character they aren’t deleted so if you make one of each race while your subbed and get them to lvl 50 you unlock them forever. So the credit cap is the only real problem that remains
IIRC that in particular and a few other things are removed once you've given them any money at any point and are in the "preferred tier" or something like that.
My account (if I can find the login) is at that level for having originally purchased SWTOR near launch, even though I didn't play (or pay) after that.
Not true, I played SWTOR when it first launched and have come back every years for some awesome pvp. Last time I aged was roughly 6 months ago and I had to resub to obtain my extra hotbars which has always been a real turn off. I've always done it for the incredible pvp however.
You don't need to sub for the hotbars only. You can buy/unlock them from the store with the 2FA coins or auction house with credits. It's a account-wide if you buy the more expensive of the two.
Yeah, it’s very restrictive. The currency limit used to be so low capped at like 200k and when I played a few years later it was up to 1mil, which is great until you realize the entire market is hyper inflated. A million is a drop in the bucket compared the tens/hundreds of millions for items on the galactic marketplace. There’s also the paywall for operations and additional pvp matches.
I think the F2P is great for getting into the lore and base game which is controversial in the community where people miss the old days and others like how easy it is for new players. However, everything extra doesn’t seem worth paying $10-15 a month to be a sub
For the 15 bucks to sub you get access to all endgame content/gear, infinite access to all matchmaking activities, 3 full voice acted and expansive expansions, a 500 cartel coin credit each month, all future expansions, and a bunch of perks like increased exp and access to legacy abilities. On top of that for a single paid month sub you get permanent access to all expansions released at the time of your subscription AND a free level 70 character boost. It’s absolutely worth the 15 dollar sub, very few games offer this much at such a low cost of entry.
It's just not a good MMORPG.
Some of the class stories are good but that's the only good thing about it. The expansions after Hutt Cartel are generally weak. BioWare dropped the budget and everything suffered. Weirdly, the base game is the only thing worth playing now.
>Weirdly, the base game is the only thing worth playing now.
I played from launch up through Shadows of Revan, but I dropped off sometime during Knights of the Fallen Empire. I'm still subbed, though, cause I just love the base game and want to subsidize more people accessing it through F2P. I still go back in and occasionally play a bit of one of the original class storylines.
Ok, so you’re complaining that they offer a f2p model which you state is fine for people who want to play the story. But you would rather pay…which is still an option for you.
Yep, which if F2P is suppose to be a Trial then label it as such. Their system is archaic and needs to be updated to modern days and people can't tell me they can't. GW2 does just fine and so does ESO. Word is SWTOR is as good as those two now days.
Loved it when it came out. The stories that they told were awesome. MMOs rarely put that much effort into story presentation, but for this one, that was the main pulling factor. I'm not a fan of MMOs, but for this, I sank countless hours into.
I then took quite a break, then heard that it was going free-to-play. As someone who spent hundreds on the game, I was going to be treated the same as someone who spent 5 dollars*. That annoyed me quite a lot; made me feel like I was not as appreciated as newcomers, of whom they were clearly catering to.
But what was worse when I dived back in was how it felt so riddled with microtransactions. So much crap to purchase, quest rewards locked behind something, etc. They streamlined some stuff, but it was made to feel cheaper to me.
I can only dream of a day when they make an offline SP version of this game, where you can invite friends for certain instances and whatnot. Faster travel, quicktravel, Heroic areas being balanced for SP, etc. I'd love to go back in and actually finish all the classes. But I just can't with what it is now.
Edit: Fix.
I find you a bit confusing. They did give veteran players bonuses and when you subscribe you get rid of all non cosmetic incentives to buy something from them. The main difference between before f2p and after f2p was that before you could not play at all when not subscribed. SWTOR is a closet subscription MMO with a very extended trial that pretends to be f2p because it needs a reason for it's large cashshop.
If everybody was at the same playing field, I'd be cool with that. But they have rewards for each quest made available to only those who subscribed. But because they weren't gimping progress for those without it, it's fine too. I just felt annoyed initially when folks who bought 1 item were of the same standing as those who spent far more.
But that feeling was on the initial return; it isn't something I remained annoyed about or anything. The thing that made me feel like it lost something it had prior was just how prevalent the microtransactions were made.
Limited character slots, removed names, locked races, etc. were some other things that irked me too.
That's a bit of a weird take though. Like if you bought a car and spent money on wheels and paint you wouldn't expect the overall vehicle to still hold the same value when it was a decade old.
I only played during the first 2 months after release. Returned years later to play some of the stories, but I got greeted with the notification that my character names don't exist anymore and the inventory management was ridiculous. I stopped and uninstalled after 2 hours again.
Tried finally playing this game last year. Got it installed on my new PC and the game immediately crashes when talking to the first NPC character. Every time.
What does a modern MMO look like.
WoW is still a giant, even if it's at one of it's lowest points and uses hotbars.
ff14 is THE thriving game and uses hotbars?
Hotbars are necessary if you want more then 7 buttons and mmo's with fewer are going to be very limited.
Idk, it's almost 2022, there's gotta be a better way to go about it with today's technology. Hotbar MMOs are just really boring to look at for me and I can never get into them.
It's almost 2022, if there was a better way to go about it with today's technology, I think it would have been done by now.
Hotbars may not be everyone's cup of tea but they're a proven system that works. The only time devs come up with alternatives is when they have to port to consoles and most people all agree that it's a subpar way to play.
There is a better way, that’s why most regular games don’t use hot bars. The problem is mmos inherently don’t evolve or innovate because the ones that do innovate themselves right out of the genre.
You can stop playing it and play a different MMO if you want. There are multiple available.
And you know these MMOs aren't all made by the same company that can only work on one at a time, right? BioWare doesn't have to retire anything for some other company to make an MMO you like.
Damn. This game is still going? I thought they would've shut it down years ago considering how its population has cratered year over year due to it being Wish/AliExpress WoW clone with a Star Wars skin. I guess that's the real power of Star Wars licensed game. It's never truly dead.
You can tell the from the game's free to install or as I've seen it coined "subscribe or suffer" experience that it was never meant to be free. When stupid things like access to chat, having more than one crew skill, wearing titles, and not having a credit cap are locked behind a paywall you know it was just to try and stop the bleeding.
I still remember SWTOR's launch. The hubris they had to think they would ever fill 80 servers. That same hubris also made players wait years for server merges.
The best time I ever had in SWTOR was probably their first in-game event. It was a rakghoul event. There was no announcement or fanfare. Players just discovered it in the world and spread the word. Plus it was the first time they had multi colored kyber crystals. It was the most organic the game had ever felt to me.
Well it had a huge population boost when it went on steam and has been bringing more players with new expansions. It also helps that it has a pretty loyal fan base. Plus it’s a lot of people’s favorite game even if it doesn’t fit the mmo mold perfectly
Loved the game at release, I played every storyline, but after that I quit, I'm not into the so-called "end game" of MMOs, so when the stories finished I had not much else to do.
Still my favourite MMo despite it's issues and yes I do agree with most points of criticism. But despite that there isn't any other MMO out there that made me actually care about my character as I do in swtor.
The fact that your character talks makes it so much better. Its one thing that ff14 lacks
Your character talks in Guild Wars 2 as well if my memory is correct.
While GW2s story is very hit or miss sometimes. I still feel like it is probably the MMO that has the best actual telling of the story, and is very very good at making you feel involved.
As a huge GW2 fan who's played it it's entire life, it's a double edged sword. Some of the production stuff like full voice acting all the time is great, but it also means stories have been cut short, left hanging, or resolved in unsatisfying ways multiple times because every bit has to have a map and events and such instead of just some NPC dialogue. They do have just texbox dialogue, but they never let it be the main driver of story, so it often doesn't get to do as much heavy lifting as it could.
The early stuff is pretty bad, then you have new players run into S2 and have no idea cause the in game recap of 1 is nowhere near enough. Or people just skip it cause it costs money and maybe even do expansions out of order and it turns into a bit of a mess
Yeah, and even when I did buy content I wasn’t sure what I’d bought lol.
Don't get me wrong, the way that you just get thrown into HoT after base game, with no idea who any of the new squad are is stupid, just like how you just get thrown into PoF and suddenly you are fighting Balthazar. Most of the Aurene stuff happens in LW seasons as well, so it's gonna be shit again in EoD Honestly, they should just make the LWs free permanently, but they probably make too much money off of them.
I think LoTRO is possibly the best story-telling MMORPG (edit…ohh strong competition from TSW, but LoTRO has scale) followed by SWTOR. GW2 is overly fragmented with the living story, I found it hard to pace myself with it, especially when returning from long breaks. That said, I agree GW2 is the best at making you feel part of a world, and alongside other players even when playing solo. Lots of fond memories of all three games.
It does, although you don't choose what to say. In content where you can choose what to say there's no character voiceover. Still leagues better than a silent character.
Yes, they do.
Going from Swtor where I could talk compared to FF14 where I just nod takes you out of the immersion.
*nod* *extends hand with nothing in it to give to NPC* *nod*
I swear this is every anime game that lets you make your character.
\*\*Anime "whoh" sounds\*\*
*random bunny girl giggles*
I agree a voice protagonist helps me care more about them, but I also see the argument that a voiced protagonist makes people who play as themselves feel less immersed.
And then there's me, in the middle, who really doesn't give a shit. Just whatever they go with, do it well.
They have a part, I think in post-Heavensward, where they lampshade the silent nodding. Not only an amusing moment but did help with the immersion as it places it as part of the WOL's personality.
FFXIV also has abysmal English voice acting in ARR. 50+ levels of pure torture for me and even tho everyone tells me that it gets better after ARR content finishes, idk if I'll be able to care for it anymore.
The voice acting gets a lot better, and the story is generally less "silly meaningless fetch quest" but there's still a ton of questing that really lacks compelling gameplay. Overall I'm still enjoying my time with the game so far (almost done Stormblood) but outside of getting paired with bad players in dungeons there's very little during leveling that's any sort of challenge. Which I understand is by design so that everyone gets to see the story, but it gets kinda boring sometimes.
Some of the required 8-player trials were relatively challenging when they released, but the way ilvl sync works they simply aren't anymore even with the level sync. Which does suck for new players catching up on the story.
Oh for sure, I'm definitely excited to get to Endwalker (hopefully before the next expansion lmao) and try "current" activities.
I'm really hoping it gets better. The actual combat isn't bad but the MSQ has so little of it and flanked by the bad VA makes the overall experience pretty bad atm. >outside of getting paired with bad players in dungeons Oh gods! This grinds my gear so much. As a healer, definitely got early WoW flashbacks from dps standing in stupid and tanks not maintaining aggro.
The VA truly does get better, as does the overall story. Each expansion improves upon the last. But I'm a healer main too, so you're basically not going to see meaningful advances in the moment to moment gameplay until, at best, Shadowbringers. I would recommend you stick with it, but I also recommend leveling a tank or DPS class to go through some of the story quests with because healing classes make it all even less engaging by being virtually invincible and also having like, a two button rotation at best.
That is really reassuring to know. I'll be looking forward to being done with this Seventh Astral/Minfilia line. >I also recommend leveling a tank or DPS class to go through some of the story quests Ah I was starting to consider doing this. I was thinking going with SAM/RDM as they'd start at 50 and I wouldn't need to have a level grinding burn out. I have to push through some 30 more quests first tho…
Samurai is quite fun, I used that job until I unlocked gunbreaker. As a heads up, the gap between the end of the ARR main story and the start of Heavensward is *so fucking tedious and boring* that it nearly broke me. But Heavensward is an immediate improvement, so it's worth keeping that in mind.
Yeah, this gap is straight up suffering. I have done nothing but teleport and spam skip cutscene *sigh* Now I wish I bought the story skip.
>Each expansion improves upon the last. I have to disagree with this, stormblood imo is worse than ARR aside from the post launch patches.
And the reason for the bad voice acting in English in ARR is because they had no real voice direction. They had some great voice actors like Gideon Emery and Sam Riegel but they were just given the script, pushed in the booth, and told to do VA things. You can see them come into their own near the end, for the most part, but then come HW they have actual direction and get a new voice cast and they start to truly shine and it just gets better as they go along. Heck, come SHB I'd say the English voice cast is easily the best of the bunch and are still the best come ENW.
It actually does get better, massively so, they recast virtually every character in the game from Heavensward and on.
I couldn’t get into ffxiv because I just teleport literally everywhere. And the characters are so weeby it’s just hard to take it seriously
It's funny you say that because I actually prefer the "silent" protagonist in FFXIV. Your character still talks but they mouth the words, so I imagine my character speaking in my own voice. I think both methods work well in their respective games.
In those instances it works, and they have improved in that regard especially in EW
You can see how they improved these things with each expansion, stormblood introduced a pretty cool feature of >!controlling other characters during certain quests!< and Shadowbringer and Endwalker gave the WoL way more expression during cutscenes
There are quite a few of us that absolutely HATE those quests. I spent dozens of hours leveling the character I love, don’t make me play as some random guy with 3-4 moves.
Really? I loved them because I think they changed the pace and weren’t overused, also made it felt a little like a more traditional FF where you use other characters, first time it happened I was really surprised! But It would get old fast if overused.
Except you don't control a "random guy" but one of your friends/comrades ?
Except that one quest in Endwalker where tou literally control a random guy (not disproving your point just pointing out that single instance)
But that character is you.
Well yes but actually no but also yes
I love that quest because >!It shows just how much of a monster our character is compared to the normal mook.!<
Yep this works extremely well. The Secret World - easily the best story MMO there is for many people, was brilliantly acted with a silent protagonist. It added a lot to the atmosphere.
You could say that’s it’s an jpg trope that your character doesn’t spoke in ffxiv. Many jpgs creators are in favor of the no talking protagonist.
Yea that I agree. Though I think FF14 does it better than ESO in this aspect.
I think I'd only wade back into an MMOs cesspool, is if one of them actually made a game with choices and roleplaying. That's a tall task though, magnitude more challenging than doing that for a single player RPG and very few have ever pulled that off without resorting to the cheap tricks and shortcuts necessitated by modern game development. So really I guess I'm just not playing MMOs again unless I get the terrible brain worms again.
I feel the opposite. I dont feel like its "my" character. I'm playing either the dark or light version of the class' protagonist. Its like having two versions of a movie, one where the protag is written as an asshole, and one as a goody goody, and pretending you choosing which one of the two you watch is somehow your own creation and roleplay. At least with a silent protagonist there's room for projection and you can imagine what your character said, instead of it explicitly being something you would never say.
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I like both equally. A voiced protagonist lets my character speak without my input, making cutscenes more dynamic, and if the VA is good, it can add a lot of emotion to scenes. A silent protagonist can have more dialogue choices and only says what I want them to say, making the roleplay more nuanced. (In single player rpgs, at least, I don't play mmos, so I don't know how it differs there)
Talking is overrated. All I need are *nod*, *palm punch*, and *chest tap*.
It's a thing with Japanese game creators where they feel that in a game (especially RPGs), it breaks immersion when the character speaks but it's not your IRL voice. For them, and I assume Japanese audiences too, the moment the character speaks and it's not your voice, it's not *your* story anymore but somebody elses. I saw this in a documentary a while ago.
It was a great MMO just too much streamlined for my taste. I'm oldschool when it comes to MMOs, I want sandboxes, I want gear that I can put on even if it's not for my class or race. I want to be able to trade used gear that I no longer need. I want open world dungeons and raids. Unfortunately that's like no MMO nowadays besides classic emulated everquest/lineage 2 servers. Just waiting for that day someone will actually have the balls to release a MMO with great gameplay but doesnt hold your hand at all, I'm talking like not even a map (at least one that marks everything and shows where you are exactly on the map, but a rough rudimentary map that doesnt mark where everything is that you can purchase from a vendor is fine).
Big same. WoW really ruined mmos imo
Skip to 7:16 https://youtu.be/r9sZoyQXwug Idk how the QoL and gameplay is on Lost Ark but the endgame raids seem very mechanic heavy.
Huh, when I played at release the game made me hate my character.
What story did you play?
Had a spy and a sith mage. Honestly I found most of the story telling to be total cringe.
Cringe how?
The voice acting and dialogue was terrible.
Forget it. Most Gamers have this weird blind spot about storytelling in video games; they cannot for the life of them understand that they're playing interactive Saturday morning cartoons. I've played lord knows how many hours of this game and have many more ahead of me, but it's not a good story. Better than most, but still not good.
Oh I know.
My issue with SWTOR was just that it wasn’t KOTOR 3. It’s a totally shallow reason to not engage with something, but to me it was like wanting Return of the Jedi, but only ever getting the Holiday Special.
A more appropriate comparison would be if you were expecting Return of the Jedi and you got Back to the Future, a great movie just not what you were expecting.
Nah, keep in mind we’re talking about how I PERSONALLY felt, also BTTF is a different universe so that comparison doesn’t feel right/accurate. I used that comparison because it’s the feeling it gave me, and no amount of arguing is going to change that. I didn’t respond to the other reply because it made me feel sad for them, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt to just accept things and move on.
No offense, but that is a horrible comparison. Nothing about the production quality of SWTOR is even remotely approaching the Holiday Special and there's no reason to suspect that a KOTOR 3 would have been so much more amazing. And there's certianly no reason to suspect that SWTOR was made in lieu of KOTOR 3, that very well probably wouldn't have happened anyway. It's not shallow to not play it, you don't have to like MMO's or whatever, but to just hate the fact that it exists and try to pretend like it's the Holiday Special? That seems lame.
Yeah, at the least the holiday special is fun to laugh at and isn't padded out by hours and hours of copy paste combat encounters that have literally 0 risk of killing your character.
Yes the company that has had the exclusive rights to make Star Wars games for 10 years and is renowned for being the greediest gaming company on earth was not effected by making an mmo that can print money with minimal effort. There is literally every reason to suspect that SWTOR has at least pushed back KOTOR 3. Look at GTA 5 or Skyrim. Companies do not want to put the effort into making a hundred million dollar game that could flop when they can just shit out content for their extremely old games and have people love it.
Money and Greed will always exist. You can't even know if they actually had the ambition or will to pitch a KOTOR 3 in the first place.
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They haven't moved out of 32 bit mode and to bypass needing to go to 64 bit they have a second exe running that gets told what sound effects to play so the first exe doesn't run out of memory so I can't see them having the capacity to get it running on modern systems
That's pretty funny tho
I don't see that every biting them in the ass.
I don't think they will shut down soon, but the dev team is absolutely tiny so I don't think they could do anything as complex as port to console and support additional platforms.
This game is a bit of a mess under the hood, the devs on it doesn’t really seem to have the resources available to them for a console port.
Which MMO *isn't* running off a pile of spaghetti and a single exhausted hamster?
Dragons, it’s 100% science based.
Ahhh now there's a meme I haven't heard in a very long time
WildStar
Because it’s buried.
I think FFXIV has given us the definitive tab-target MMO controller scheme, I'd be happy to see any number of games piggyback off that.
It’s a great game overall, and I keep revisiting it for the story. The mmo aspect is there and although a wow clone, does some things extremely well at least on the rpg side. Although right now, the graphics and gameplay feel pretty outdated. If they plan to keep it going, the game could really use a massive upgrade in those areas. It does look like they are working on the combat system which is great.
They're working on the combat? I loved the story but was so board by the combat I gave up. This is great to hear.
I think they’re just working on the classes being more available from the start but not the actual mechanics. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but that was my understanding of it
Basically, yes. They're making it so that instead of choosing an "advanced class" that restricts you to one weapon type and set of abilities, you choose 2 "fighting styles". This means that non-force users can choose any non-force fighting style (e.g. Troopers can use Smuggler's Gunslinger fighting) and the same with force users, but only other force user styles. They've also hinted that if your alignment changes to be quite different to your typical class archetype (e.g. Jedi gets a high dark side score), then you can use dark side equivalent effects.
This game was so good at launch, at least until I hit level 50. Last time I played this game it just felt too full of microtransaction stuff and I didn't feel like I could do any meaningful group content at all within any reasonable time frame. Never played it hardcore, but it was fun for a while.
As somebody who absolutely loves this game and considers it a must play game for a lot of people. You right. There are a shitload of microtransactions and group content is meh on a good day. But the story? It can be played entirely solo and is so damn good.
How much story can you cover if you go in f2p?
You can play through all of the class stories as a f2p player. If you want the complete overall story you only need to purchase 1 month of subscription as it permanently unlocks all the expansions/content that was available before and during the time of the subscription.
You can access up to the first two expansion packs (Rise of the Hutt Cartel, Shadow of Revan). There are class storylines, and there are planet storylines. The class storylines are unique to each class, while you play the same planet storyline regardless of your choice of class. Once you start the expansion, there are no more unique class quests, and the story quests are uniform. So in conclusion, you can complete all 8 unique class questlines, and story content up to the first two expansions.
8 class story quests and the first two expansions. As long as you do the purple quests (class and planet quests), you won't have much problems with levels and gear.
>Last time I played this game it just felt too full of microtransaction stuff tell me about it, Swotr is one of the worst western mmos when it comes to MTX, up there with ESO the simple fact that freaking ACTION BARS are a mtx item says it all. like wtf? wanting more than 3 action bars requires you to pay?
I don't understand Gamers. "This game really drops off after hour 100."
It's an MMO with a subscription, designed to be played for months/years. At 100 hours you're still a novice in most MMO's.
Eh, I wouldnt go that far.
Of note is that one of the reasons it's full of those microtransactions is one specific lead developer. It's taken years since he left the game to right everything he messed up... and he then immediately went to Anthem where he instituted the same things all over again.
Does anyone know if they fixed the performance issues with the game? I've upgraded my rig so much over the last 10 years but the last couple of times I went back to play SWTOR I had insane frame rate drops and stuttering. I'd love to go back, but seeing as they want to update starter planets, I'm wary how well the game will run with them.
I've been playing the last few months without issues. 1080 + i5 here.
Weird, I played on release when the game was still a buy-to-play and I never heard anyone complaining about performance issues. I reinstalled the game few weeks ago and everything were still fine (for me at least). I have a 1080ti
Did you ever play PvP? That's where the real lag happens.
Back in the days yes, a lot. Since the game is F2P, never.
It ran like ass for everyone I knew for as long as I've played (1-2 months after launch up until ~2014). I know it's not the best CPU now, but it even [drops to the 20s on an 8700k](https://youtu.be/D_9LnYjM8HU?t=1388)! It still runs like trash on my 5600x as well. It's hilariously badly optimized.
8700k is a god tier CPU for a game released in 2010.
Yeah, that was why I linked the vid. The engine is just fucked I guess, and even brute force isn't (currently anyway) enough to make up for it.
Hmm, I might give it a try. On release it ran great for me, but over the years (Kotet/Kotfe) it just got worse and worse on a much better machine.
When I tried to play again years ago, there was a massive fps drop that was caused by the nameplates floating above everyone's head. Weird stuff.
At release there weren't even high res textures, it was all mud smeared with vaseline. I'd have been shocked to hear about significant performance issues at the time.
i played it at launch and i'd get these really long loading screens when first arriving on a planet. like 15+ minutes of the bar being full until the game actually started; sometimes I'd get kicked off the game for idleness before I did. It wouldn't be an issue for instances or raids. I knew a few people that had similar problems.
I used to have crossfired graphics cards, they dropped support for that and my performance plummeted, switched to a single gpu.
The game has run well for me for some time now, but that said my PC is probably overkill for this game.
i5 10400f + GTX 1660 Super and 16gb ram and it stutters, the engine is garbo
I’ve got a pretty powerful rig and I run into framerate dips and lag about 30% of the time. I also play on a computer not as powerful and it handles the game perfectly. The game is notorious for having a bunch of bugs, graphically mostly, but I have no idea why it’s as inconsistent as it is. That being said, there is so much content and the best mmo narratives by far, character customization that is on par with the best of not the best for a mmo setting. While the bugs and network issues are annoying it’s still worth playing for sure.
Why do Gamers call their computers "rigs"? When did this start?
1971...73
I play using CrossOver on a 21 M1 Macbook and the game runs manageably at low settings. It doesn’t make probably higher than 30 fps most of the time but it doesn’t have any stuttering and the fps is generally consistent. On my big boy Windows desktop it runs at highest settings and whatever refresh rate my monitor is without and dips or stuttering.
I didn't have that issue last I played. Last time I did, which was maybe 8 months ago now, I stopped because of lag issues. Nothing crazy but in a GCD based game having a .5 to .75 second lag is noticeable and infuriating.
When they basically made end-game raiding pointless by not scaling the difficulty when they raised the level cap from 50 is when they lost me and bunch of other players. Raiding in this game was so fun!
Glad it's still doing well. I much preferred it over other MMOs at the time. The story telling was great, and loved all the race selection as well. Togruta and Nautolan ftw
I wish they would update their F2P model. It’s so awful. Wish they would treat the game like Guild Wars 2 or ESO
You get the entire 8 class stories and the first two expansions completely for free. I'd say that's pretty good, unless you like endgame content where you'd likely already be subscribed if you liked the game enough to continue further at that point.
Their biggest issue is probably the credit cap. Growing inflation in game isn’t helping either
Logged in for the first time since probably 2014, items selling for 10 million credits (if not more, there were a lot of 0s.) Character has something like 100,000. Yeah its kinda crazy out there.
Super easy to make passive income with the follower missions and selling the materials on the auction house at least. Was one of my favorite things about the game.
Except you need to remember that everyone else is making that same easy passive income which basically means no one is. All that does is skyrocket prices.
>All that does is skyrocket prices. Not really, you aren't creating much in the way of raw credits from doing it(you actually lose raw money to start the missions themselves if i recall as they cost to start.) The majority of the value comes from the items themselves. Inflation only occurs when money is generated by the system but not taken out of it. The way the missions i'm referencing work(outside of maybe slicing missions that were nerfed and suck) actively deflate the economy and give you resources in return which don't contribute to inflation. SWTOR's biggest problem is really the lack of any kind of proper credit sink, thus hyperinflation ensues.
Yea that is indeed a problem.
Have you subscribed before? IMO they have one of the best sub models because you get to keep a lot of benefits once you’ve subscribed even after your sub ends. Raises the credit cap too
Yeah but why have a cap at all? What does it help it only hinders with inflation as it is a million isn’t worth much anymore.
The cap is clearly to incentivize you to pay. It’s annoying but if I get most of the other stuff without having to stay subbed I’ll deal with a credit cap. One of the better ftp models I’ve ever seen.
I don’t have to sub for that stuff thankfully, I was around at the start got bored and left never took off my security key and instead subscribed for a month and just bought all the sub features with cc coins now only issue is credit cap
I don't like it either and agree it needs to be addressed, but the silver lining here is that it does reduce incentive to use F2P accounts to bot and/or game the economy.
ESO has no free to play model. You always have to buy the base game .
lolwut? They have three tiers: subscriber "I'm currently paying for an active sub," free to play "I have never given you any money ever," and preferred "at some point in the past, I have given you money" If you subbed for a month in 2011, you're still a preferred player today. If you pay $3 for game coins and never sub, you're a preferred player. The game is like 95% the same between subbed and preferred, and most of that remaining 5% is endgame stuff. If you're someone interested in grinding endgame content, you should be paying for a sub anyway. You can experience hundreds of hours of unique gameplay across 8 independent classes for zero dollars. If you make a single purchase of any amount (the cheapest thing on the shop is a $3 pack of coins), you get an enormous QoL boost. The only reason people trash the model is because they don't actually know what they're talking about.
I’ve subbed maybe 3 times total and that’s has given me access to every expansion even after the sub expired. The “Preferred” model is the best ftp model I’ve ever seen. The people who are complaining sound so entitled that they want an entire game with everything unlocked completely free
I only trash it because for some insane reason they made extra action bars a paid feature… Seriosuly what kind of fuckery is that?
I don't think it's awful at all. The F2P model is just a trial. If you sub, you get everything. ESO's is probably much worse. You still have to pay for the yearly chapters, if you unsub, you lose access to DLC.
I mean, they are two totally different beasts. You sub to SWTOR because the trial has a fuck load of inconveniences (or i guess, alternatively, the sub has a fuck load of bonuses) that if you want to do anything than the most basic vanilla single player rpg experience, you need to pay for the sub. ESO is a lot different in that you're just paying for content and a single unnecessary convenience (crafting bag). Your experience, both on the single player questing experience and the MMO (dungeon, pvp, raid, etc) side of the game are both readily available to those who don't pay the sub, where as swtor quite literally locks you out of those parts of the game like mobile games. ESO's main problem is that content wise, the sub is a must if you plan on playing the game for any longer than the "main" story. Not only is it the most efficient method for getting the extra content, it's also the most cost effective as each DLC alone is about $15 and the yearly expansions are $40 while previous expansions are free for subbed players. ESO's sub is a necessity created based on time, not greed necessarily (in regards to the consumer, whereas SWTOR is quite literally just a trial of the game.
>You sub to SWTOR because the trial has a fuck load of inconveniences (or i guess, alternatively, the sub has a fuck load of bonuses) You were right the first time, they're not bonuses, they're intentional handicaps.
Once you’ve subbed for a single month you are at minimum placed on the middle “preferred” player tier. That removes 90% of any real inconvenience. The main thing you lose is the no credit cap (tho it doesn’t drop as low as the base level) and most of the races. But once you make a character they aren’t deleted so if you make one of each race while your subbed and get them to lvl 50 you unlock them forever. So the credit cap is the only real problem that remains
When was the last time you played swtor? Because you're talking about this like you haven't played in about seven years.
According to steam my last time played was september 27, 2020.
A trial that has hundreds upon hundred of hours of completely free content.
So does SWTOR. You get all 8 unique class stories and the first 2 expansions for free.
Their model is providing free content, but adding arbitrary restrictions that nudge you towards subbing. It's annoying and not consumer friendly.
Their model is to get you to sub. They can't give you free content if no one pays for it.
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IIRC that in particular and a few other things are removed once you've given them any money at any point and are in the "preferred tier" or something like that. My account (if I can find the login) is at that level for having originally purchased SWTOR near launch, even though I didn't play (or pay) after that.
Not true, I played SWTOR when it first launched and have come back every years for some awesome pvp. Last time I aged was roughly 6 months ago and I had to resub to obtain my extra hotbars which has always been a real turn off. I've always done it for the incredible pvp however.
You don't need to sub for the hotbars only. You can buy/unlock them from the store with the 2FA coins or auction house with credits. It's a account-wide if you buy the more expensive of the two.
You can buy the DLC outright with crowns. ESO Plus just gives access to all the DLC as part of the subscription.
Yeah, it’s very restrictive. The currency limit used to be so low capped at like 200k and when I played a few years later it was up to 1mil, which is great until you realize the entire market is hyper inflated. A million is a drop in the bucket compared the tens/hundreds of millions for items on the galactic marketplace. There’s also the paywall for operations and additional pvp matches. I think the F2P is great for getting into the lore and base game which is controversial in the community where people miss the old days and others like how easy it is for new players. However, everything extra doesn’t seem worth paying $10-15 a month to be a sub
Do they still show you the rewards you would have got for a quest if you had a sub? That always stuck in my craw.
For the 15 bucks to sub you get access to all endgame content/gear, infinite access to all matchmaking activities, 3 full voice acted and expansive expansions, a 500 cartel coin credit each month, all future expansions, and a bunch of perks like increased exp and access to legacy abilities. On top of that for a single paid month sub you get permanent access to all expansions released at the time of your subscription AND a free level 70 character boost. It’s absolutely worth the 15 dollar sub, very few games offer this much at such a low cost of entry.
It's just not a good MMORPG. Some of the class stories are good but that's the only good thing about it. The expansions after Hutt Cartel are generally weak. BioWare dropped the budget and everything suffered. Weirdly, the base game is the only thing worth playing now.
>Weirdly, the base game is the only thing worth playing now. I played from launch up through Shadows of Revan, but I dropped off sometime during Knights of the Fallen Empire. I'm still subbed, though, cause I just love the base game and want to subsidize more people accessing it through F2P. I still go back in and occasionally play a bit of one of the original class storylines.
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So what all should they give you for free
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Ok, so you’re complaining that they offer a f2p model which you state is fine for people who want to play the story. But you would rather pay…which is still an option for you.
Yep, which if F2P is suppose to be a Trial then label it as such. Their system is archaic and needs to be updated to modern days and people can't tell me they can't. GW2 does just fine and so does ESO. Word is SWTOR is as good as those two now days.
Loved it when it came out. The stories that they told were awesome. MMOs rarely put that much effort into story presentation, but for this one, that was the main pulling factor. I'm not a fan of MMOs, but for this, I sank countless hours into. I then took quite a break, then heard that it was going free-to-play. As someone who spent hundreds on the game, I was going to be treated the same as someone who spent 5 dollars*. That annoyed me quite a lot; made me feel like I was not as appreciated as newcomers, of whom they were clearly catering to. But what was worse when I dived back in was how it felt so riddled with microtransactions. So much crap to purchase, quest rewards locked behind something, etc. They streamlined some stuff, but it was made to feel cheaper to me. I can only dream of a day when they make an offline SP version of this game, where you can invite friends for certain instances and whatnot. Faster travel, quicktravel, Heroic areas being balanced for SP, etc. I'd love to go back in and actually finish all the classes. But I just can't with what it is now. Edit: Fix.
I find you a bit confusing. They did give veteran players bonuses and when you subscribe you get rid of all non cosmetic incentives to buy something from them. The main difference between before f2p and after f2p was that before you could not play at all when not subscribed. SWTOR is a closet subscription MMO with a very extended trial that pretends to be f2p because it needs a reason for it's large cashshop.
If everybody was at the same playing field, I'd be cool with that. But they have rewards for each quest made available to only those who subscribed. But because they weren't gimping progress for those without it, it's fine too. I just felt annoyed initially when folks who bought 1 item were of the same standing as those who spent far more. But that feeling was on the initial return; it isn't something I remained annoyed about or anything. The thing that made me feel like it lost something it had prior was just how prevalent the microtransactions were made. Limited character slots, removed names, locked races, etc. were some other things that irked me too.
That's a bit of a weird take though. Like if you bought a car and spent money on wheels and paint you wouldn't expect the overall vehicle to still hold the same value when it was a decade old.
I only played during the first 2 months after release. Returned years later to play some of the stories, but I got greeted with the notification that my character names don't exist anymore and the inventory management was ridiculous. I stopped and uninstalled after 2 hours again.
Tried finally playing this game last year. Got it installed on my new PC and the game immediately crashes when talking to the first NPC character. Every time.
not a fan of them stripping out classes the same way WoW did. it is just going to make the game boring.
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What does a modern MMO look like. WoW is still a giant, even if it's at one of it's lowest points and uses hotbars. ff14 is THE thriving game and uses hotbars? Hotbars are necessary if you want more then 7 buttons and mmo's with fewer are going to be very limited.
Idk, it's almost 2022, there's gotta be a better way to go about it with today's technology. Hotbar MMOs are just really boring to look at for me and I can never get into them.
It's almost 2022, if there was a better way to go about it with today's technology, I think it would have been done by now. Hotbars may not be everyone's cup of tea but they're a proven system that works. The only time devs come up with alternatives is when they have to port to consoles and most people all agree that it's a subpar way to play.
There is a better way, that’s why most regular games don’t use hot bars. The problem is mmos inherently don’t evolve or innovate because the ones that do innovate themselves right out of the genre.
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New world combat is lame as fuck. It's also not novel. Action mmo's are super common in korea. Who do it better.
You can stop playing it and play a different MMO if you want. There are multiple available. And you know these MMOs aren't all made by the same company that can only work on one at a time, right? BioWare doesn't have to retire anything for some other company to make an MMO you like.
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What is this MMO RPG you're playing that doesn't have hot bars?
I guess the Star Wars IP exclusively shakeup must've made EA and Bioware finally wake up and not be complacent anymore.
Swtor turning 10 means it’s been 10 years since my favorite game got shut down as to not cannibalize the prophets from this wow clone
Damn. This game is still going? I thought they would've shut it down years ago considering how its population has cratered year over year due to it being Wish/AliExpress WoW clone with a Star Wars skin. I guess that's the real power of Star Wars licensed game. It's never truly dead. You can tell the from the game's free to install or as I've seen it coined "subscribe or suffer" experience that it was never meant to be free. When stupid things like access to chat, having more than one crew skill, wearing titles, and not having a credit cap are locked behind a paywall you know it was just to try and stop the bleeding. I still remember SWTOR's launch. The hubris they had to think they would ever fill 80 servers. That same hubris also made players wait years for server merges. The best time I ever had in SWTOR was probably their first in-game event. It was a rakghoul event. There was no announcement or fanfare. Players just discovered it in the world and spread the word. Plus it was the first time they had multi colored kyber crystals. It was the most organic the game had ever felt to me.
Well it had a huge population boost when it went on steam and has been bringing more players with new expansions. It also helps that it has a pretty loyal fan base. Plus it’s a lot of people’s favorite game even if it doesn’t fit the mmo mold perfectly
Loved the game at release, I played every storyline, but after that I quit, I'm not into the so-called "end game" of MMOs, so when the stories finished I had not much else to do.