My SW:TOR Review Of What I've Seen So Far
Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2011 5:06 pm
I know not everyone here plans to play SW:TOR when it comes out, but I thought I would give my review of the game from what I've experienced so far (I've only gotten to level 13).
First off I'll start with the storyline. For the first time in my brief MMO career, I actually have a vested interest in the things my character is doing and why I should be doing them. Yes, I'm one of those people in WoW and CoH that just clicks accept blindly and goes off to do whatever it is I need to be doing. The only quest text from WoW I can remember actively reading and being interested in is the Silverpine questlines and the Quel'dalar one. Now, I attribute my being interested in the SW:TOR storylines mainly to there being no quest text whatsoever. For me this is a huge plus. The game is fully voice acted so I get the pleasure of actually watching my character converse with the quest giver as they tell me their story and why they need me to go do whatever it is they want me to do.
Occasionally within the player options you're given, I sometimes wish there were more than 2-3 options because the next choice I'm given isn't really one I wanted to pick, but, overall, I think they've done a really good job with the selection choices and you can always esc key out of the dialogue and restart it if it didn't go the way you wanted it to. While you're questing, some of your options will also earn you light side or dark side points (regardless of whether you're Republic or Empire). A couple of quick examples of things that earned me dark side points were bringing one man's head to his wife because she encouraged him to betray a Hutt, and one quest had me kill a boy's father so the mother could get her son back and send him to Sith training school.
The only thing I dislike about the alignment system so far is that it seems to be a bad thing to be neutral (which my current bounty hunter so happens to be because my morals keep getting in the way of making her a bad person >_>). By choosing either light or dark side, you get to earn specialty gear and such later on down the road and I'm not sure yet if there are equivalents for weirdos like me that happen to be neutral. Granted, I have done very little research on the game and haven't gotten past level 13 yet so...yeah.
There's a whole thread over on MMO-C nitpicking the UI (really wish I could find a way to make my screenshots from the game show up =/). I don't want to get into it too much--it's a beta and from what I've seen, they plan to make it more customizable at launch. My main gripe is that there's not a scale slider and that, at default, it's pretty large and a little clunky at times. I'd also like to see the addition of target of target, actual health values displayed on my bar, a macro system as clicking and healing isn't all that efficient, a better (or maybe more intuitive) way to monitor buffs/debuffs and DoTs, and perhaps the ability to shrink my map some. I like that the map turns transparent when I start running with it open, but it's still large and still takes up a ton of screen real estate, especially if I need to stop for any reason. I dunno, I'm just one of those people that tends to have their map open as they're traveling and in WoW, I like how it shrinks down to a manageable size (same with CoH) so I can still have it open as I travel about.
Next: Flashpoints! Flashpoints are 4 man dungeons in the game and I don't think I've ever had so much fun in a dungeon. Your entire party needs to be engaged to complete Flashpoints as there is a developing story/reason for why you're there. It's pretty neat to see everyone in the party taking part in the conversations with the NPCs (even if most of the answers/choices are, essentially, the same). I'm not entirely sure what the replay value of these more than a couple of times becomes, however, as we only did the initial Flashpoint twice last night. One thing that I also found kind of neat about the Flashpoint the boyfriend, myself, and one of our RL friends did was that since we couldn't get ahold of our friend who had a sith sorcerer (a healer), we used my companion as the fourth person in our group and had her heal while I off-healed on my mercenary (DPS bounty hunters have some healing capacity so we're like off-healers).
The combat in SW:TOR feels very smooth as well which is surprising since there's no auto-attack. CoH has no auto-attack either and there's points, especially at low levels, where the fighting feels very clunky as you sit around waiting for abilities to come off CD. SW:TOR doesn't seem to suffer from this, or, at least, not on the bounty hunter. You get a couple of quick recharging, spammable abilities that don't make you really notice the lack of an auto-attack. It helps, somewhat, that right-clicking an enemy auto-fires my number 1 key ability. The only problem with this is that I then think I'm auto-attacking and occasionally forget to start queueing my other abilities. >_> But that's just a stupid problem with myself moreso than the way the game works, I think. I also love that I can fire any of my abilities that don't have cast times while I'm on the run. One other side thing that I also kind of like is that if I happen to aggro something as I'm running through a zone, my character pulls out her blaster and starts aiming at whatever she's pissed off. CoH does something similar where it auto turns you to face the enemy you're currently attacking--I've found that overall it's both a blessing and a curse if you like to move your camera around, but it keeps pivoting you to face the enemy. SW:TOR doesn't seem to do this though (at least from what I've noticed) and I've had my character staring at me (so to speak) while she shoots an enemy.
Graphics, animation, etc: I personally think the graphics look pretty damn amazing. Being a beta, everything's still a little buggy though so things like lips not always moving, or teeth clipping through lips still happens during cut scenes. The game's also not fond of tabbing in and out as it seems to cause it to have to reload/re-render everything around me when I do. The animations for the game also feel pretty smooth, although watching my Chiss run and jump looks a little odd on occasion, but I attribute that having spent a lot of time watching the broken runs of WoW's poor models. Also, this is the first MMO where I absolutely love having the music playing in the background. I hate leaving WoW's music on as I find it too distracting (especially since I tend to have music/movies/TV running in the background as I'm playing anyway), but due to the nature of SW:TOR, I don't think I'll be doing this. I was muting vent constantly yesterday just so I could hear what my quest givers were saying. XD
I'm sure I've missed something in there, but I have to start getting ready for work. Overall I was pretty skeptical of the game and wasn't sure I would quit WoW for it, but after only about a day and a half of playing (I've been in 2 beta weekends but haven't actually had the time to fully enjoy both weekends), I'm totally hooked. I haven't really been playing much of WoW recently anyway, and this just sort of confirms my boredom for it.
First off I'll start with the storyline. For the first time in my brief MMO career, I actually have a vested interest in the things my character is doing and why I should be doing them. Yes, I'm one of those people in WoW and CoH that just clicks accept blindly and goes off to do whatever it is I need to be doing. The only quest text from WoW I can remember actively reading and being interested in is the Silverpine questlines and the Quel'dalar one. Now, I attribute my being interested in the SW:TOR storylines mainly to there being no quest text whatsoever. For me this is a huge plus. The game is fully voice acted so I get the pleasure of actually watching my character converse with the quest giver as they tell me their story and why they need me to go do whatever it is they want me to do.
Occasionally within the player options you're given, I sometimes wish there were more than 2-3 options because the next choice I'm given isn't really one I wanted to pick, but, overall, I think they've done a really good job with the selection choices and you can always esc key out of the dialogue and restart it if it didn't go the way you wanted it to. While you're questing, some of your options will also earn you light side or dark side points (regardless of whether you're Republic or Empire). A couple of quick examples of things that earned me dark side points were bringing one man's head to his wife because she encouraged him to betray a Hutt, and one quest had me kill a boy's father so the mother could get her son back and send him to Sith training school.
The only thing I dislike about the alignment system so far is that it seems to be a bad thing to be neutral (which my current bounty hunter so happens to be because my morals keep getting in the way of making her a bad person >_>). By choosing either light or dark side, you get to earn specialty gear and such later on down the road and I'm not sure yet if there are equivalents for weirdos like me that happen to be neutral. Granted, I have done very little research on the game and haven't gotten past level 13 yet so...yeah.
There's a whole thread over on MMO-C nitpicking the UI (really wish I could find a way to make my screenshots from the game show up =/). I don't want to get into it too much--it's a beta and from what I've seen, they plan to make it more customizable at launch. My main gripe is that there's not a scale slider and that, at default, it's pretty large and a little clunky at times. I'd also like to see the addition of target of target, actual health values displayed on my bar, a macro system as clicking and healing isn't all that efficient, a better (or maybe more intuitive) way to monitor buffs/debuffs and DoTs, and perhaps the ability to shrink my map some. I like that the map turns transparent when I start running with it open, but it's still large and still takes up a ton of screen real estate, especially if I need to stop for any reason. I dunno, I'm just one of those people that tends to have their map open as they're traveling and in WoW, I like how it shrinks down to a manageable size (same with CoH) so I can still have it open as I travel about.
Next: Flashpoints! Flashpoints are 4 man dungeons in the game and I don't think I've ever had so much fun in a dungeon. Your entire party needs to be engaged to complete Flashpoints as there is a developing story/reason for why you're there. It's pretty neat to see everyone in the party taking part in the conversations with the NPCs (even if most of the answers/choices are, essentially, the same). I'm not entirely sure what the replay value of these more than a couple of times becomes, however, as we only did the initial Flashpoint twice last night. One thing that I also found kind of neat about the Flashpoint the boyfriend, myself, and one of our RL friends did was that since we couldn't get ahold of our friend who had a sith sorcerer (a healer), we used my companion as the fourth person in our group and had her heal while I off-healed on my mercenary (DPS bounty hunters have some healing capacity so we're like off-healers).
The combat in SW:TOR feels very smooth as well which is surprising since there's no auto-attack. CoH has no auto-attack either and there's points, especially at low levels, where the fighting feels very clunky as you sit around waiting for abilities to come off CD. SW:TOR doesn't seem to suffer from this, or, at least, not on the bounty hunter. You get a couple of quick recharging, spammable abilities that don't make you really notice the lack of an auto-attack. It helps, somewhat, that right-clicking an enemy auto-fires my number 1 key ability. The only problem with this is that I then think I'm auto-attacking and occasionally forget to start queueing my other abilities. >_> But that's just a stupid problem with myself moreso than the way the game works, I think. I also love that I can fire any of my abilities that don't have cast times while I'm on the run. One other side thing that I also kind of like is that if I happen to aggro something as I'm running through a zone, my character pulls out her blaster and starts aiming at whatever she's pissed off. CoH does something similar where it auto turns you to face the enemy you're currently attacking--I've found that overall it's both a blessing and a curse if you like to move your camera around, but it keeps pivoting you to face the enemy. SW:TOR doesn't seem to do this though (at least from what I've noticed) and I've had my character staring at me (so to speak) while she shoots an enemy.
Graphics, animation, etc: I personally think the graphics look pretty damn amazing. Being a beta, everything's still a little buggy though so things like lips not always moving, or teeth clipping through lips still happens during cut scenes. The game's also not fond of tabbing in and out as it seems to cause it to have to reload/re-render everything around me when I do. The animations for the game also feel pretty smooth, although watching my Chiss run and jump looks a little odd on occasion, but I attribute that having spent a lot of time watching the broken runs of WoW's poor models. Also, this is the first MMO where I absolutely love having the music playing in the background. I hate leaving WoW's music on as I find it too distracting (especially since I tend to have music/movies/TV running in the background as I'm playing anyway), but due to the nature of SW:TOR, I don't think I'll be doing this. I was muting vent constantly yesterday just so I could hear what my quest givers were saying. XD
I'm sure I've missed something in there, but I have to start getting ready for work. Overall I was pretty skeptical of the game and wasn't sure I would quit WoW for it, but after only about a day and a half of playing (I've been in 2 beta weekends but haven't actually had the time to fully enjoy both weekends), I'm totally hooked. I haven't really been playing much of WoW recently anyway, and this just sort of confirms my boredom for it.
Covers what's been kicking around my head, really. The real question is whether BioWare will be able to maintain this level of quality once people hit the end game level.
And since every character gets a companion, every class feels a bit like a WoW hunter. 
