SWTOR: The Bad

Clearly it can't all be good and you might have guessed that I have some...lengthy criticisms given how much of the not good came through from the previous post. As usual, these aren't in any particular order. Also, like I said in the last post, this stuff didn't get published until well after I'd written it and since I don't play any longer I won't necessarily know if they've fixed any of this stuff. Granted, the game is now free to play now but that isn't enough to get me to spend more time with it yet.

Lack of Meaningful Choices
There are a couple oddities worth mentioning with the voice acting and storytelling. First, if you play through with multiple characters or even go through the same dialogues with different choices, you start to see how thin the veneer of choice actually is. It's pretty clear that they put together scripts so that there were exceptionally few divergent points. In fact, a lot of the time your character's delivered lines for a given conversation differ at only one point. You can give them a pass for this if you like given the sheer volume of script that there is, but I think it falls a little short all things considered. It's as if they ticked off all the boxes for "absolute minimum needed to go live" and shipped that. If you hype story as the fourth pillar of your new blockbuster, I think you kind of have to deliver a little more than that.

*MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD* As a trooper you encounter a particular operative a couple times in the early game. A few levels later you're on a station with a bunch of hostages held by The Bads(TM). This same operative helps you onto the station to deal with the situation. As the mission unfolds you're presented with the "decision" to vent the lower decks spacing this poor operative or rescuing the operative and leaving the hundreds of hostages to their doom. These situations arise all the time in Mass Effect but in that game it usually comes with additional trappings--either a personal relationship with the individual or understanding a larger galactic need the significance of the hostages. The writers on those projects convey decisions with weight. When the operative is so un-memorable I can't remember her name or whether the hostages were useful in any way I think it works a lot less well. It becomes even worse if you're a gamer and know that a lot of compelling end-game gear is keyed to being either full light side or full dark side. In Mass Effect I would often choose renegade options when I thought they fit the character I played but armed with this information I always picked the light side choices in SWTOR even when they were lame.

Short Content
All told you can get through a single character's story line and most of the soloable content in about four weeks of reasonable playtime. Anyone who's played these kinds of games before can get a few levels every couple hours until the last few levels--the leveling curve is awfully kind. Furthermore, because things are usually in hubs that send you to the same areas, you tend to not spend a lot of time in any one place. When you finish in one area there's a breadcrumb quest to get you to the next. This seems like a Good Thing(TM) given the more streamlining "modern" MMOGs, but we'll revisit some of the downsides of this design soon.

To make matters worse, additional characters largely go through the same content unless you roll on the other side. My best guess is that around 20% of a character's active game time is spent on class-specific quests so re-rolling on the same side means doing most of the same stuff. The game is also frustratingly linear since aside from the starter zones, there is typically ONE zone in which to quest for a given level band. That means that successive playthroughs will have you doing most of the same stuff in roughly the same order in exactly the same places you've already been. WoW, for all of its shortcomings, usually had other places to go if, for instance, you absolutely couldn't stand Silverpine.

Questionable Endgame
So you've hit 50. Awesome, now what? If you've played mostly solo like most people, that means solo grinding daily missions. These can be handled pretty easily in a couple hours per character. I ran through these on three characters until it didn't make a lot of sense to do them anymore--that's a lot of the same boring missions. The stuff you'll get is OK but not exceptional in any way and is easily overshadowed by the gear you'll pull out of instances.

If you do instances, you'll be doing a lot of instances. As has been en vogue for a while now, some subset of the normal level-appropriate instances have a hard mode that scale to max level and are generally harder. I can't recall with certainty if they add additional bosses but I also didn't see them all, either. Also en vogue, hard mode instances drop tokens that you can turn in for gear at an extremely unfavorable rate. If you liked the instances and had a reasonable regular group this wasn't so bad. If you (like me) disliked the instances and didn't have a reasonable regular group, this was terribly disappointing.

You and seven or fifteen your close personal friends could instead chose to raid. I understand that this was a much better way to gear out your character (though for what I couldn't tell you) since the drops/tokens were far more frequent and generally completed much more expediently. I can't say for sure, however, since I never ran them having neither seven nor fifteen close personal friends who stuck with the game.

I also can't talk about PvP because I didn't find it enjoyable enough to pursue. It is notable that the open-world version of PvP on Ilum, the top end zone was horrifically broken when the first wave of people were capping and looking for something to do. As a large number of the play callers at Bioware that did SWTOR are ex-Mythic people, they really ought to have done better.

Annoyances
Lots of games have these; MMOs usually in spades. What makes SW:TOR's especially awful is that they get in the way of gameplay in ways that you can't easily ignore. It's as if they wanted to hang onto terrible MMO tropes out of a misguided sense of nostalgia. Whatever the reasoning, these things need to die a fiery death:

Mail works instantly everywhere except for auctions--the one thing that I really want to be instant. Extra demerits for sending me mail saying that my auction has sold and then updating its contents at a much later time in the same mail. I'm fairly certain I lost cash-money by deleting a seemingly worthless notification mail.

Mail is available just about everywhere in the world except the one place I really want to receive it: my ship. I get my mail on my phone in meatspace. I don't think it'd be a stretch to have it delivered to my ship in a universe full of hyperspace travel and laser guns.

Travel points aren't named the same as recall points as the areas you're in. This makes it especially difficult to determine where you're supposed to go to deliver the fobnob to Dr. Cranky.

You can't make a complete crafter on one character. You need two gathering skills and one production skill and one random skill that isn't otherwise helpful that feeds you blueprints--pick three. Whereas I'm on record as saying that this can be helpful in long-lived games because it can increase the sense of community, in a game like SW:TOR with maybe two months of content, it just annoys me.

You can fast travel from anywhere in the world to the fleet once a day with a fleet pass. You occasionally encounter a shuttle that can take you from a designated area, usually a quest hub, to one particular instance. However! That same shuttle can't pick you up in the field to go to the instance you're going to--that would clearly be too easy.

There doesn't seem to be any consistency between instance lengths. Some of them like Esseles are very short. Some of them like Taral V are exceptionally long. Some of these you revisit multiple times as hard-modes at 50 but not always the long ones. This leads to...

There are some very long runs post-wipe. It's bad enough we just got worked by whatever bug or questionable mechanic you just foisted upon me. Don't make me run eight minutes back so I can try again. That's just inconsiderate.

I like hard content (really). What I don't like is when the mechanic is stupidly opaque or an insta-kill if you miss your fire dance by a step. Most raiders expect to learn through death but no one else likes that. If it isn't something that most people can pick up in a couple tries, it might be too obscure or too difficult.

Guys--it's the 21st century. We can do better than this.

Lack of Customization
So you got to 50 and you did your instance grind and now you've got all your fancy gear. Guess what? You now look like everyone else who plays your class that did the same. You might not have the ultra-uber cool white or magenta crystals for your blaster/saber but if you're best in slot you otherwise all look the same. Pair this with the very limited palette of voices, builds, and faces and you get an end-game that is seemingly full of clones.

This already isn't fine and good but a lot of the fashion is also incredibly bad. I thought LoTRO had the Worst Hats In All of MMO-dom(TM) but apparently SWTOR needed to do one better. The top end gear (at least when I played) all looked pretty bad except (maybe) the Trooper gear. Special nod goes to the Jedi Consular whose gear looked especially cringe-worthy.

A New Hope
One of my big hopes for the game was that they'd take the Jedi and Sith ideals and show the greys. Some of the writing in this regard is very good. MOAR SPOILERS If you take the right conversation choices with Lord Scourge, it's pretty clear that he's a dyed-in-the-wool Sith but also an honorable opponent. You might not agree with his philosophy but he had a point: it was all going to shit if the Emperor wasn't destroyed and you (the strapping hero) would put an end to him. I thought it was some of the better writing in the game...until you get near the end and he starts to be a 2D cutout; a caricature of a bad guy in a good spot trying to prevent the universe from ending.

In actuality the game polarizes characters' actions because the majority of decision points are also polarized: you're either kissing babies or kicking puppies; there's not a lot of middle ground. I think that's unfortunate. I think it's doubly unfortunate because other aspects of the game design punish characters who try to walk a middle ground, end-game gear being the most notable example. You kind of expect to see more Jolee Bindos and Magnetos. The Jedi code is pretty strict but heralds Mace Fucking Windu who created a fighting style that walks in the shadow of The Dark Side(TM). Where'd that stuff go?

Parting Thoughts
As of this writing, it's been a good couple months close to a year since I last played so these thoughts may not be as cogent as they probably should be. (For context, I've also moved nearly 2000 miles away and have started a new job.) While I don't regret my time spent in game OR the expensive Ultimate Collector's Super Saiyan Edition(TM) I bought, I have to say I'm disappointed that it couldn't really hold my attention for more than a couple months. I saw a lot of what the game had to offer, but much like Rift, it just didn't have any real staying power.

You've probably heard this from me before, but it bears repeating again:

Kel's First Law of MMOGs:
A game that's easy to pick up is also easy to put down.

I'm on record as saying that SW:TOR was everything I expected and nothing that I hoped and I think that's about the best note I can leave it on.

SWTOR: The Good

I have a love/hate relationship with SW:TOR. Some of it is very good. Some of it is very bad. A lot of it is very meh. This is a gathering of my thoughts having now played three characters to cap--take that for what it is. I might also point out that most of this was written in March of 2012 when I was still actually playing. You might note that it is now well after that March so some of this stuff may be outdated. I will, however, stick to my comments about the game's future given crap like this.

Storytelling
I'm on record as agreeing with Yahtzee--Bioware doesn't get points for good writing anymore. I might be convinced to make an exception this time for their sheer audacity to not only insist that story is a necessary and missing part of modern MMOs, but to also bet the bank on it. Given that almost no one bothers to read the text in most quest pop-ups, this can't have been an easy sell. I think it works out OK for the most part barring some interface issues, and I think they've done a good job of weaving a tale worth watching. I'm especially appreciative of how they've taken many of the same elements and woven them together across classes--pretty cool. Their story implementation is, like most things, a double-edged sword and we'll revisit this topic in a later post.

Voiceovers
I was pretty skeptical of the "every line spoken" thing, but in practice it works out pretty well. Overall the voice acting is pretty good, but this is expected for a game from the studio that brought you KOTOR, the Mass Effects, and the Dragon Ages. As with all voice acting, there's no real accounting for taste. I, for instance, couldn't stand the female Jedi Knight voice--I didn't think it fit. On the other hand, I couldn't consider playing a male Trooper since the female trooper is voiced by Jennifer Hale (of Commander Shepard fame, among other fantastic roles). I think this helps bring the player closer to the game which while I personally didn't find terribly useful, I can appreciate what they were going for.

Reasonably Meets Expectations
Like it has for the last bajillion Internet Years(TM), WoW sets the standard for what we expect on the whole for an MMO. SW:TOR does a pretty good job of meeting these, if in an extremely unpolished way. I thought Rift did a tremendously better job of this and I will probably still hold that up as the gold standard of launches until The Industry(TM)(R)(esq) proves me wrong. SW:TOR meets expectations, I suppose, if you're old and crotchety like I am and don't really expect much. You've got a crafting system which we'll delve into in the next section, your typical healer/tank/dps trinity, and a UI that most of the time delivers what you need even if it does so without any gusto or panache.

A New Take on Crafting
Crafting in SW:TOR is in the form of crew skills. You basically get three picks, only one of which can be a "maker" skill with the other two typically support gathering skills. Of these two gathering skills, only one of them provides things that can be found in the world. The other requires skilling up while sometimes producing resources. Naturally, those resources are the ones you need to make interesting items. The mechanic is also pretty intersting. As your crew grows (more or less as you gain levels) you get more and more companions that you can send off on crafting missions. These can either be gathering missions where they (potentially) return with something useful, or "build things" missions where they (again potentially) return a crafted item. As the levels get higher, the wait gets longer but it's generally OK because you can only really have one companion with you at a time and most people roll exclusively with one companion for a long period of time.

What I like about this system is that it takes away one of the worst things about crafting: not being able to adventure while you're doing so. I can be out in the field sending my companions off to make a cool thing which is then delivered to my inventory when it's completed. That's pretty useful. It's still gated on time but, generally speaking, it's not all that difficult to keep crafting levels up with your adventuring levels so long as you're not completely broke. It's all still gated on time, but I'm not forced to watch the (very slow) bar move like a lot of games. I like that.

Stylized Characters
Love it or hate it, WoW is very stylized which has worked tremendously in their favor. SW:TOR too is stylized though I suspect for different reasons. You can, if you're patient, come up with some very attractive characters and that's time well-spent because you'll see a lot of yourself in cutscenes. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable hairstyles (44 choices and nothing really that great) and maybe more than four body types, but I can see why they might have done that. The downside is that a lot of the characters look a lot a like. It's weird seeing your doppleganger in any game (Rift for all of its good points was terrible for this), but it's especially glaring when not only do they look the same, but they also sound the same in an up-close cutscene delivering some of the dialog.

There's also a point to be made about the gear visualizations. We rather expect a Jedi Knight to look a lot like Ben Kenobi roaming the desert in his brown robe and hooded face. Likewise we expect our troopers to look a lot like the guys from the Clone Wars; good or bad. The game delivers pretty well on these looks. This, like most of their decisions is also a double-edged sword since if you don't like the look the designers have pre-ordained for your choice of class, then you're kind of out of luck. This is especially true about the hats which we'll discuss in more detail later.

...And That's Kind of It
I like that they tried different stuff--I really do, but I also think that they could have done much, much better with a nine digit budget. This goes doubly so considering how many of my former MMO-vet co-workers worked on that project.

A Wanderer Again

I've been in the Boston area now for just over three years. In that time I've worked with some very good people and a small number of not good people (I leave determining which is which as an exercise for the reader). I'll miss the cool people for certain. The rest of the state can sod off. And now, on to Texas.

2011 In Review

In what is becoming a somewhat unintended tradition, here is 2011 in review. I'm still in the same place for now the third consecutive year which is a record of some sort. Otherwise, a pretty uneventful year, really but that's not necessarily a bad thing. On to the gaming!

Rift: *****
This is what I want to see out of a new MMO studio: a well realized world with interesting encounters and a lot of player-friendly features. The UI is top notch and the launch was exceptional and I may have already talked about it some. The only major downsides were that there really was only two months or so of content and I didn't have a reliable crew. I'll give them a pass for the latter, but the former really is inexcusable. I'm told now by people who still play that they've consolidated servers--never a good sign. I enjoyed my time there, however, and it stands as a shining example of how you launch an MMO.

Mount & Blade Warband: ***
A reasonable graphical refinement of the original Mount & Blade with some fun new gameplay additions. Otherwise, they've slowed down the campaign and not fixed a bunch of the terrible game play issues. It does become tedious after a while but I haven't yet felt the need to mod it. Really pretty disappointing if I'm honest.

Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword: **
More of a commercial mod with the original engine, they've managed to take all the really broken things and make them worse while also taking out some of the things that made the original game great. One of the notable additions is firearms which is absolutely great if you can get your guys to hit (and one shot) their targets--not real great when the opponent does so to you. I suspect that this is much cooler if you know the fiction it's based on but I don't.

Dragon Age: Awakening: ***
A pretty reasonable expansion for Dragon Age--enjoyable but with a couple pretty jarring flaws. You can import your old character from Dragon Age: Origins in Mass Effect style which is great...unless your character died at which point no one (yourself included) seems to be aware of it. No really notable characters (I can barely remember any of them, TBH) and while the story was good, as Yahtzee likes to point out, Bioware doesn't get points for that anymore.

Dragon Age 2: ***
Mixed bag here. On the one hand, it's a pretty good standalone RPG with a very good storytelling presentation (even if the story itself wasn't up to Bioware standards). On the other hand, it had to follow Dragon Age: Origins which IMO was hands down better. DA2 was set in the same world but with totally different characters and only the vaguest of tie-ins with the original Anders notwithstanding. It also broke up the world into terribly disjoint areas which you moved between with very little attachment. The characters were interesting but really lacked the standout Shale or HK-47 that we've come to expect though Merrill and Aveline get honorable mention.

Serious Sam III: ****
I am an unabashed Serious Sam fan since the original when working on my first title people kept saying "you can't just make a shooter where you shoot monsters". Since then they've made exactly a game where all you do is shoot monsters, usually a pile of them. The environments are detailed, the monsters are ugly, the levels are unbelievably well designed, and the one-liners are on point. Sam Stone is a better Duke Nukem than the Duke himself. While I don't usually like to review games I haven't finished yet, unless it takes an uncharacteristic turn for the worse, I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: ***
And this would be why I haven't finished it yet. I'm on record as wanting this game to succeed because if it doesn't, it probably marks the end of the big-budget MMOs--the kinds of games that I really like. Unfortunately, I think it falls short despite poaching a lot of people who should know better from a former employer (formerly Mythic Entertainment). SWTOR's approach to story telling is largely instanced and is probably the logical extension from LoTRO's method which is nice but the high points are pretty spread out probably due to the sheer volume of content. The voicing is also a nice addition but that comes with good and bad (female jedi knight & male jedi consular: painful). On the downside, there are a LOT of bugs, the game hurts (a lot) for a lack of multi-specs and customizable UI, and minus the thin per-class quest line there is almost zero replayability per faction. I can't shake the feeling that they needed another 6 months to sort out some of the rough edges and if I'm honest, I think I would have preferred to get KOTOR 3 instead. We'll see what the end game's like, but I suspect I'm going to be disappointed.