Posts Tagged ‘SWTOR’

I’ve felt a bit meh in SWTOR after my Sith Inquisitor reached 50. To be honest, I was feeling a bit meh prior to that, but since she hit level cap I can’t escape the feeling that she’s “done”. I have alts of almost every other class, but don’t have the energy to start seriously levelling one. Part of the fact is that I know I’ll be playing alone for the most part. I think that Phil has become a bit bore with Star Wars, and since we rolled on a US server there aren’t a lot of guildies online when we play. There also won’t be a hope of doing ops with the guild due to the time difference. And being the antisocial bugger that I am, with the absolute worst luck in getting pugs filled with people who are knobs and asshats, or outright insane, I won’t be looking for groups. Meh.

SWTOR was worth the price of the box and the subscription fee for the storylines. In that sense, it’s probably one of the best MMOs that I’ve ever played; we devoured huge chunks of content just because we had to see what happened and how everything turned out. I’ve never done that in an MMO before. Aside from the story, it’s a solid game but it doesn’t have enough to differentiate itself from other MMOs to justify the sub. Story is all. I liked it, and it is a solid game, but so was Rift, Warcraft and many others that I’ve played.

The main irritation with Star Wars is Bioware’s inability to fix even small bugs. They do fix some, to be fair, but longstanding issues remain such as the inability to drop outlevelled quests. At 50 Ravven has 21/25 quests, and no room for the new dailies. These are all grey quests from earlier planets that I outlevelled (levelling is too fast), but was unable to drop. That’s a very basic thing. It is something that should have been fixed in beta, let alone having it still be a major issue. There are a metric ton of other smaller glitches and bugs, but that is the main one for me.

I still have an active subscription. I’ll give it another couple of weeks to see if I get excited about playing again. If not, I’ll need to cancel, and I’ll view it pretty much the same way that I do Rift: I loved the game, and I’ll no doubt get nostalgic for it, but it just isn’t enough to justify a sub when times are as hard as they are now. And that makes me a bit sad.

We’re still enjoying Star Wars, although both Phil and I seem to have terminal alt-itis. Our highest characters are 23, and I think we’ve created alts in every class, most around the 10-15 level presently. Some we level together and some are played separately. The RP server I rolled on was taken over by Russians, so we rerolled on a Republic-side alts on a server which seems fine although I think it will be a ghost town in a month or two. Imperial-side characters are on a US PVE server, Juyo.

The one thing I will say about SWTOR is that it feels like a single-player game. Due to the heavily sharded/instanced servers, you rarely see other players. There are usually a few people talking in general chat, but the cities seem almost empty, which feels odd. This feeling of deadness is compounded by the lack of animation of NPCs, and the lack of wildlife and critters. NPCs in cities stand still, and unless they are vendors or whatever, generally you can’t click on them. Some of them are animated as though they are having conversations, but you can’t hear anything. It feels extremely unfinished and odd, as though they are placeholders. There are no critters (squirrels, butterflies, birds, etc.) and the rare mobs you see just stand there waiting to be killed. There are no roving mobs as you see in other games.

The static world is quite strange. This is a superb game in terms of storylines and plot. It’s a ton of fun to play. But in terms of immersiveness in the environment, and feeling as though you are in a real world, it is quite sterile and quiet. I’m hoping that this is something that will be improved when some of the launch bugs have been worked out, as it would add immeasurably to the immersiveness of the game. I seem to remember that critters were even added to Darkfall, which I picture as a game wherein you are mainly concerned with ganking people and taking their stuff…if it was important there, it surely is essential in a game like SWTOR.

I don’t want to feel like a ghost drifting through a dead city.