Hello faithful readers! No, we have not died. In fact, I just got home (in California) and settled in for a long winters nap (18 days until next semester starts!). Graev and I started playing SWTOR yesterday. We played most of the day and reached level 14. I’ll give you guys a quick rundown of what we have experienced thus far, but I already have some separate posts thought up on subjects ranging from issues I have already discovered in the game’s design to areas I think are brilliant.
We both decided to play Jedi. I am a Jedi Knight Guardian (tank) and Graev is a Jedi Consular Sage (nuker). Playing the Jedi starting area was a very different experience from what I played on the Sith Empire side of things. The Jedi starting area takes much, much longer to get through than any other starting area I have played. It takes even longer when you’re doing two story missions for you character and someone else in the group. We spent 2.5x the time anyone else in our guild spent in the starting area, yet came out exactly at level 10.
We spent a little time after the starting area exploring the Fleet space station. We both picked up our crafting skills. I went with Synthweaving, Archeology, and Underworld Trading. Graev went with Artificing, Archeology, and Treasure Hunting. We’re essentially able to craft for each other and not have to rely on anyone else, except for stims.
Right now we’re on Coruscant. We’re working our way through a lot of these quests. I don’t know how I feel about this planet. It’s an amazing capital city. The scope is amazing — it looks like the movies with traffic flying everywhere and buildings being enormous. The city -is- the planet, vice versa. I shouldn’t have been surprised then that it felt like we were questing and hunting in our capital city. I think we’re about to move to the next planet soon, which will be a nice change of pace. I’m more of a Tatooine guy, which I think will be the 3rd planet.
Both of our story quests were decent on the starting planet, but since reaching Coruscant have fizzled out a bit. Graev’s story took a huge turn for the uninteresting, and mine is now beginning to reach “meh” status. Mine was AMAZING on the starting zone, though. Hopefully they both pick up as time goes on.
To sum it up, mostly positive experiences so far in SWTOR. The majority of my problems right now are lag on my 4 year old backup comp that has issues running the game.  When I pull myself away from the game tonight, I’ll write up my thoughts more on specific features/mechanics.
One of the complaints I have been reading about is how static the world feels. The background NPC’s dont move around, they dont speak unless you have a quest or some interaction with them. The mobs just stand in the same spots. Basically the complaint has been hard to feel part of the immersion due to the planets apart from starting areas are very cut and paste in design and static in life.
thoughts? I am not in the game so i cant say myself, interested in hearing others thoughts here. this would annoy me.
Romble it is static as you mention and there’s certain “Cryptic MMO” feel to some of that design. But overall it’s been growing on me and some of the classes are a lot of fun right away (especially Smuggler).
I’m still pretty much treating it as a SP Bioware Game with an MMO bonus.
It’s like any other themepark MMO. The mobs are stationary/static and the worlds are prefabricated and static.
Immersion, however, is great. I feel like I’m in Coruscant. I feel like I’m on Hutta. I feel like I’m in the Star Wars universe. Immersion is definitely top notch.
I hope your more detailed write up is more positive because right now this is sounding like another 3 month-er.
Can’t comment on in game things when you’re enduring 500 person 1h queues.
I love the game too. Agreed on the immersion, but I must say it’s even more than immersion. I love how the game brings character into MMO. I really enjoyed making decisions on how my character will respond to the interactions, ‘choose your own adventure’ style. I felt involved. Even though I knew that in most of the scenarios there was only one outcome, I still felt my character was himself (ie. he wasn’t just a bog-standard automaton).
Then the missions (quests) have a fantastic storyline. WoW generally had a theme throughout the game of Cataclysm, but didn’t have a continuous story or context that SWTOR has, and it makes the missions (aka. storyline) really interesting. There are even plot twists, which WoW never had.
Gameplay is polished, settings have humour (the Cantina on Ord Mantell has a number of jokes like a wookie playing a board game against a protocol droid whose arms have been ripped off), and … well so much. It’s bloody great.
Tatooine is a bit farther down the line. I found the Sage story pretty interesting but that’s all I can really say without spoilers.
My first complaint is how pathetic this launch has been. My account is still not activated despite getting the emails and entering the codes. It has been two days and I have not heard back from customer service. I won’t even get started on my complaints about the game because I was going to wait to see what they changed since beta.
I found the Jedi storylines the worst of the entire character classes so it doesnt suprise me you think its bad. Honestly the Imperial Agent or Smuggler Storylines are far superior.
Ya 3rd planet keen is Taris, 4th is Nar Shaddaa and then 5th is Tatooine.
The bounty hunter story is good so far at level 13. I had a ton of fun running the Black Talon flashpoint, the story made it feel way more different than the usual low level dungeon in most games.
for some reason I thought you both lived in Canada : p. I’m a Bay Area nor-cal guy myself.
I saw Graev in Coresant, but he was a Jedi Shadow..not SAGE. and he didn’t reply to my tells. (yes.. he has the right Guild Tag on)
Graev is a sage, so it couldn’t have been him.
it was him. Yes He was a sage.. I thought i saw Shadow.
He often closes his chat box. I get on him about it all the time. Sorry about that. He wasn’t trying to snub you. 🙂
I actually hate questing nowadays, i recently leveled a toon in Wow by just doing instances for example… not a single quest apart from getting out of the start area.
Somehow in SWTOR it doesn’t feel like i’m questing, i’m just playing the game and living my own story. Even the sidequests are interesting enough (most of the time) to not bother me as Wow’s quest did at the end.
While the Wow quests are a bit more creative and many quests in SWTOR are still “kill X stuff” & “Gather Y things”, it feels like you can affect how these mini-stories go and make the galaxy a worse or better place.
I’m only level 21 but i’m loving this after many years of Wow (since open beta)
I’ve tried quite a few MMO’s in meantime (Rift, Aion, WAR, LoTR, STO, DCUO) of which none could entertain me longer then a week and the week aint over yet, but i got a good feeling about SWTOR so far!
Oh, I thought he’s experimenting w/ a BOTs program 😛 j/k.
I agree that SWTOR quests doesn’t feel like quests. Most of them feel like a story line. I do dread having to reroll. Especially if I find that my Shadow doesn’t work out and wants to try Sage……
I’ve been playing since Friday. I am enjoying it. Last night I had a blast with my wife on the mission that takes you from the (Smuggler) starter area to Coruscant (somehow a social skills mission turned into a 3-1/2 hour, multipart encounter with high-level bosses).
I am impressed that everything seems to work (except for the scavenging piles, of which only about 1/4 work). As an ex-SWG there are lots of things I could bitch about, but really, it’s a different game, and fun.
It is definitely not a social game, yet. I assume that they will work on this over time. But I think the most telling point is that you can’t even sit down on chairs in the cantinas.
The companion system seems to work well. I only have one so for; it will be interesting to see what it’s like to manage five combat. I like being able to send them out to gather resources, and mine seems perfectly competant in combat.
The servers have been packed, and I hope that part of tonight’s downtime is to bring A LOT more online.
We’ll see what it’s like in a couple months. I am looking forward to ships, but they are going to need to add some more player created content options for my long term buy in.