A quick perusal of the SWTOR test boards this morning has me chuckling.

There are lots of people praising Bioware, etc. but I’m not interested in them.

And my computer is not to blame. I’ve played and tested a lot of MMOs (WOW, WAR, RIFT, etc.) and NEVER had lagging and ridiculous loading times even REMOTELY approaching the frustration I have experienced this week-end…  It doesn’t help either that it takes way too long before you get your first companion (contrary to previous Bioware games where you would start getting companions almost from the start), thus begining from the start to build a “rapport” and enjoy relationship building..    Granted, I tested only 4 classes, and didn’t get pass level 10 on any of them. But I didn’t get that immersive experience I was expecting. After 10 hours of playing any character, in ANY game, you should be in love with your character and the story. It took less than a few minutes of play for me to fall in love with all other previous Bioware games…   So, with a genuine sadness in my heart, I have cancelled my pre-order for the game.

I got my ship last night before it ended and I immediately ran to the spaceport. Having been a fan of SW space combat forever, I couldn’t wait. Let me tell you how disappointed I was when I did my first (and only) mission. A track shooter? Honestly? Are we playing Sega Genesis? I knew not to expect a full on simulator like the Xwing Series, But even Rogue Squadron and THe lightspeed expansion to you know what gave you free range in a small area.

The way the Jedi Knight character is approached makes it hard to get drawn into the story. I’m a big SW fan and from my point of view, the Jedi Knight is a quasi mythical being capable of striking fear (and destroying) small armies. Unfortunately, in SWTOR, the Jedi Knight is the person who has a hard time dealing with 4 thugs on the street. Seriously?… Criminals everywhere seem less than impressed with Jedi, like somehow Jedi’s are just ho-hum. In the real SW Universe, a Jedi would only need to fart in order to kill 4 thugs but, moreover, only suicidal criminals would want to face a Jedi in a fight….

However, despite being able to quick travel and use the speeders (which only got from A->B?) I got fed up with all the walking. Surely jedi should be able to use force speed at least, or the game should just allow more quick travel/speeders on call.

For my Jedi Knight character (I only reached level 6), there was only a handsful of dialogues during the 5 or so hours. Compared to KOTOR, which I loved, this is just too few. Was I really unfortunate here, or is that the general frequency?

I’ll make another thread for the other issues I had, but just to mention other thoughts:

The hands are physically abnormally big.

This one is leet.

Okay, maybe this is just me.. and it may be from the countless amount of hours I have played WoW but..

Does the fact that we cant change our AC make anyone else mad? Im a pretty committed gamer but I do get bored.. very easily and the thought of having to go through this slow leveling process SWtOR provides just to play the alternative choice for the same starting class seems absolutely ridiculous.

I can play a game only for so long doing the same thing over and over before I get extremely tired of it. The portion that I have played so far has been great and this is my only complaint at this point, well maybe the no auto attack but we can save that for another thread.

You know I work 40+ hours a week and have a spouse I like to spend time with and this keeps my play, and others with the same situation, extremely limited. I plan on playing a jedi and a ranged class but I LOVE to tank some days, I like to heal as well, even dps is really fun but my self and others certainly will not be able to do this without the option of switching AC’s.

I just feel that its a horrible direction to try to take the game, I would like to hear other people opinions as well on this subject.

Nerdblast incoming:

So, I understand the wish to give players the right to choose. I think the ability to lean light or dark regardless of the faction is amazing. I think the ability to craft and customize lightsabers is really cool.

But I’m slightly quailing at the thought of people continually pissing all over my favorite fiction by doing things like naming their toon BenAfleck and running around the Jedi Temple with a red lightsaber.

I know not much can be done about the name thing, but c’mon Bioware. Red lightsabers are for the Sith, initially because the Sith used synthetic crystals that harmonized in the red spectrum, and later became a staple of the order as the Jedi strongly discouraged their use. Even if your Republic faction Jedi is leaning towards the Dark Side of things, running around with a red lightsaber is like painting a sign on your chest that says “I <3 DARTH MALEK AND EAT BABIES”.

Please, please limit red crystals to the Sith faction and blue crystals to the Republic faction.
Please?

The only thing I was a little disappointed with — less race options than were available in SWG. One way to make up for it is make a variety of options like skin tone, etc., so people who want their character to be near-human (like Chalactan) can represent a near-human race (I saw the wide variety of skin tones during charactr creation, good job!)

Chalactans are from prequel trilogy. I think there should be a character creation option for Chalactan mark of illumination, and also identifying markers for other near-human races (I’m sure there are plenty here who are better at Star Wars lore than me that know of more identifying markers for different races).

Thanks for reading!

Yeah sry guys i am though.

All bioware games have erotic scenes.

The black sceen is kind of lame. Sure its not a big deal but maybe we could give it out as DLC for selling only to mature players?

First I loved the story lines and the voice acting was great. That being said is it just too much? When playing other MMO’s i’m not a big fan of most of the “story line” with which you have to quest thru. Some quest lines I will go ahead and read because i find whatever i’m told to do unusual or damned funny. But now we are flooded with a ton of dialogue which is very time consuming. I’m not always in a hurry and liked alot of the story that i listened too. I did find myself dazing away at some of it and i watched football until it came time for me to pick a choice and then I just went for dark side points.
Am I the only one that thinks this?

There are a number of game mechanics that lend themselves to being rude and an obstruction to other people’s gameplay and enjoyment of the game. I do not understand why (after 12-15 years of experience), the industry has not realized that a gameplay system that a player can abuse to be hurtful to another player’s game time will be abused in that fashion. Some examples of the things I experienced just in the 45 minutes I was online today before I got fed up and logged off in frustration:

1. People leaping into a group of mobs and using an AOE to tag them when I’m already engaged with them.
2. People walking right up to my quest objective and stealing it while I fight the NPCs that guarded that objective (leaving me to wait 5 minutes or more on a respawn). This happened to me twice in 2 minutes on the same objective because I tried switching instances to avoid waiting because of that particular brand of ******.
3. People stealing harvesting nodes when I’m fighting literally on top of it because I am engaged and can’t harvest it. This was after I got tired of people stealing my quests.
4. People running up to a Quest NPC spawn and tagging it out from under my group which had been sitting there for 5-10 minutes waiting for it to respawn. This person’s computer rendered the NPC before anyone in the group had and apparently thought it was fair game because he has no moral fiber whatsoever (and then he had the mental idiocy to actually badmouth the group in general chat). Had this jackhole not stolen the NPC, we had room for him in the group and I had already targeted him for an invite.

Society is horrible now, but it seems that the MMO community is full of just outright scum. Game companies need to make this part of their methodology when designing systems. All of the above 4 instances could have been coded around and weren’t because the game designers fail to take into account that one thing that can make or break their game whether or not they do a good job on content. That one thing is simple… everyone knows it. People are ******es.

Now that the explanation is out of the way, I put forth that if there is not something done about the above items before release you will find that a good number of players simply will not renew past their first month. That is not a threat, it is a fact. Hell, after the experiences I had during the weekend stress test with the people that were invited, I was seriously tempted to cancel my CE pre-order and give up online games in whole. Games are meant to be fun and stress relieving. I felt more stressed after this weekend than the servers and I didn’t even get to play that often because of the queues and server restarts.

Bioware, do something to tweak your systems to make it as close to impossible as you can for another player to ruin my experience (and that of other players). If you don’t, you risk a loss of revenue – and I am not just talking about mine.

That is my feedback and I hope Bioware does something based on it.

There are just way too many quests. I have played a few of the classes and honestly it’s starting to feel like a chore with all the quests. The worst part is you pick one up, and then two more pop up to be picked up. I feel like more there should be more focus put on the class quests and less on the side stuff. The class quests should reward more XP too. I’m sorry but I just don’t feel like a hero when I get a quest to kill some creature in a mountain and break its eggs.

Disclaimer: I will not be playing at launch; I have canceled my pre-orders, uninstalled the game, and will not be testing further. This post is MY OPINION and the reasons that I WILL NOT BE PLAYING; so for all you trolls out there, go cry somewhere else because I don’t care.

First of all, I have been in beta for OVER a year now, I have seen the good, the bad, and the really bad. I have played every class 30+ and in the Case of the Operator, Assassin, and Warrior I have played to 50. This game was my Star Wars wet dream! But sadly I don’t feel that this game is for me.

Let’s start with the fact that with all of the recent changes to the game, the countless beta builds, and what not. I have seen a continual dumbing down of the game. With the iteration of the crafting/mod system 2 builds back, I was EXTREMELY happy with it, but apparently this was not casual enough so we get the crap we have now.
The space combat system, I originally though was a joke, I thought it was some serious April fools trickery gone wrong; now I know that it is a joke and whom ever came up with this system hates your company and wants you to fail. An 18 year old gaming system has no business in a new game, I hate it.

Combat, I initially thought this looked great, but after playing this for a few months it’s the same old whack-a-mole garbage that is in every other MMO to date! Where is the innovation? Am I seriously asking for too much expecting something NEW in a NEW game???

Voice acting, this is in my opinion the only redeeming quality for TOR, but after doing it once I hit space bar over and over and over to skip through the same old quests on every planet after the starter that I have done with every other toon. This is not something that will pull me back into the game like a traditional RPG would. Honestly I wish there was a way to turn it off after completing the quests once.

PVP: PVP is honestly the only thing that keeps me coming back to MMO’s and I have played countless rounds of TOR pvp. I leveled my operative to 50 doing nothing but pvp after the first planet. Many of the classes rely on positioning so much that ANY amount of lag can completely destroy your chances. The crowd control spam us ungodly to the point that if you have any 2 classes capable of CC you are screwed because no matter what you do there is no way to get a hit off. Taking the away the ability for guilds to queue was flat out STUPID, I don’t care how you say it, this destroys any chance of real team play. I don’t even care if teams can only queue against other teams, removing this is by far the dumbest thing you all have done to date. PVP is about team work, and taking away the ability to actually run with a team is beyond ridiculous. I actually enjoyed Huttball a lot when I was able to run with a group of friends.

Also, something needs to be done immediately with PVP campers; those idiots who log in and never leave the starting zone yet get rewarded with a win or a loss.

One of my biggest issues with the game is that I have absolutely no decision whatsoever as to what my character, does, goes, looks like, etc. The game is SO linear that you basically go from A-Z with almost 0 deviations. Every tier has a specific look for your toon, specific weapons, specific ships, and specific zones. Even WoW had multiple starting zones with multiple paths to follow… So did Everquest, these games are 6 years old and 12 years old respectively. To put it short this game should have been set in the current timeline as everyone is a Clone of a Clone! I thought that even the look of my toon would be different than everyone else’s because of the crafting system but I apparently misread that.

So to put it short, I fell this game offers nothing new to hardcore mmo players, I feel that all player choice has been stripped from the game, and that Bioware has ignored its Core players to cater to the casual crowd. I have given countless feedback on what would make the game better, but all of my hopes for the game are gone. This close to development, I am irritated by the fact that I have wasted the past year trying to make this a better game, but all I see is the next big F2P hit. This is not a new mmo it’s a rehash and dumbing down of everything that came before it, and I am not going to jump on another fail boat. Good luck, I hope that I am wrong and that I can come back to the game in a few months and see the epic that I was hoping for, but I doubt it. You can remove me from your beta program as I will no longer be testing, I feel that everything that I have said has fallen on deaf ears and am frustrated watching another game with massive potential fail (See conan, warhammer, sto, co, dcuo, etc, etc, etc… I tested each of those and called their failure during beta.)

Graphics, graphics, graphics.

Inexcusably weak graphics in this game. Jedi Knight II was more realistic and it came out 9 years ago!!!

I feel like I’m playing Lego Star Wars.

The storyline is good, but the weak graphics ruin this game for me big time!

Oh well, back to Skyrim for the rest of the weekend