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.