Does SWTOR Suck, or is it just me?

[fulle]

Hello Everyone,
So, my friends begged me to play TOR with them, and while the launch went smoothly, the graphics seem clean, and nothing feels horribly broken per say, I can't help but get the feeling that the game sucks. For me, it feels like a WoW clone that missed a lot of the important stuff in the cloning process.

Examples of missed stuff?

"Click to move"
- I can't tell you how annoyed I was that this was left out. I can surely bind NumLock to a mouse key as a work around, but "Click to move" not making it into the game was something I found immensely annoying.

No meaningful UI customization.
- Even without Mods, WoW and Guild Wars both allowed me to change a lot of things in the UI.... and TOR just doesn't. It's a real step backwards.

No macro support.

No mods.

No taking short cuts.
- If you try to stray off the beaten path, you'll soon realize you can't.

Weak character customization.
- There will eventually come a time, when you'll wonder if you're speaking, or if it's another player in your party

Poor combat responsiveness.
- you know when you get a bad mod, and nothing in your UI responds very quick and has a lot of latency. It's a feature in TOR now.

Lifeless mob and NPC spawning.
- I'm not sure how to explain this, but picture groups of 4 mobs standing next to each other, quite obviously waiting to be killed by a player character. Served up like little dishes for you. NPCs standing at static locations, that never move. Now, think of an NPC in Skyrim going about their day, moving from their home to their job location, chatting with other NPCs along the way, and returning home at night to sleep. I know that MMOs are going to have lifeless mob and NPC spawning to an extent, but for some reason in TOR it feels really jarring in how bad it is.

Class based quests
- Yeah, you're damn right I listed that as a negative. Linear class-based story quests... basically splitting up my guild so that we can't quest together? I HATE THIS. Sure, my Jedi Knight friend can tag along while I do my Consular quests. But the entire time he's probably thinking "OMG, I want to get back to doing MY quests! This sucks!" instead of "I'm happy I can get my quests done with my friend", which would be what he'd be thinking if his objectives were the same. Plus they're horribly easy and boring if done with 2 people.... leading to us not wanting to do anything but Flash Points with groups.
- TLDR, this BS ruins incentives for people to group together, and makes the game less of a social experience, which is bad.

The Classes are all awkward hybrids.
- OK, OK. Maybe not ALL the classes are hybrid abominations.... just most of them.

PvP level brackets are broken
- Yay, a level 15 can fight a level 50 and somewhat fight back!.... wait.... why are they in the same PvP bracket? I... don't understand. The 15 is still missing a LOT of core abilities.... uh. How wasn't this seen as the most idiotic thing ever?

I don't know. I really really want to like the game, and I'm sure that's not coming across at all.... but.... it just.... sucks.

Is it just me? Or are there a lot of other people out there feeling the same way?

 

[jaguarskx]

I would like to play SW:TOR, but I'm not really into online MMO games.

The sad thing is that this game really is not a MMO game, but you must pay $15 per month so that you can play the single player quest. $50 for game and one free month + $15 per month for 11 months means I need to dish out $215 for the 1st year to play the game. Sorry, but that's too rich for my blood.

Yeah, yeah I know you can buy 6 months in advance to get a small discount...

 

[michealrp]

That's the bulk of the issue. The game design is mainly single player quests / missions, with a multi player aspect. Things are a bit too contrained for a true mmo. You can't get a group of Jedi together and do the class quest, you have to travel all over the place to get into an instance. Travel times are horrid. I can see spending the money for a single player game, and I did. But I thought it would be more than it is really. I'm on the last planet of the quest line and almost 50. I've not got a subscription as I don't know if I'll even continue to play it once the quest line is out. I've not tried the pvp aspect but from what I'm reading, it's not that great either. Especially since there are no brackets really. I'm not sure if they've implemented the 50 level bracket or not, if they have, it's still poor as it's levels 1 - 49 in the same battle. That's nothing but a recipe for humilation for those that aren't high level in their bracket.

 

[leongrado]

Haha well when I first saw the trailer (no actual gameplay of course) I was like woah!! BEST GAME EVER. Then you see the gameplay videos..... Graphics look less appealing than WoW...

I'm looking forward to GW2. At least they show real gameplay in their trailer. Plus everyone who's played the game has said it was amazing!

 

[saltwaterdiode]

I also think SWTOR sucks. I cancelled my subscription and deleted it from my HD after playing it for 1 month. It was so laggy and buggy in general that I couldn't deal with it. PVP is important for me and coming from WOW I thought it worked really well. There was rarely any drop in frame rate, spells activated consistently with the amount of time they were suppose to and besides having some complaints about some of the classes being overpowered in pvp, like the rogue and the warlock, I enjoyed it. But in SWTOR, playing against level 50s and 4 fps was just unfair. I also think that the sith sorcerer is overpowered in pvp because a level 50 did 10,000 HP damage to me in 3 seconds with some lightning power. The sage has no such dps rate and it's suppose to be comparable to the sorcerer. This is serious issue for me since I really like pvp.

I also had complaints about the activation times having rolled a jedi sage. The whole point of a dps softie class is to do a lot of dps. If your activation times are listed as 1.5 seconds and it's really taking you 5 seconds then there's a problem. All the powers that weren't instant had this problem.

Another issue of mine is the complete lack of customer service. You can talk to GM in WOW. So yeah sometimes it took 3 hours if they were busy but you could talk to someone. Bioware has bad customer service because you open a ticket and they send an automated email back to you which you can read in game or through your personal email account. The ones I got back never mentioned that the activation time was an issue and they listed some things for me to do for latency which wasn't an issue of mine. After sending one email back they would list the problem as close or solved. I read on their forums that one guy sent 2 hours trying to get a hold of a person on the phone. This is absolutely inexcusable for me. It's just trashy to not provide good customer support.


I also experienced really low frame rate in carrick station. The screen would freeze for a second and if I'd be going down stairs I'd be high up in the air above the stairs and drop down to where they were when it unfroze. I'd be running the game at low settings and turning off shadows and at 1600 x 900 but still having all the same problems.

I was also struck by how much it resembled WOW in structure like the training npcs for force powers and the skill tree instead of the talents and having to choose to put your points into this type of jedi or another type and not being able to change that decision but being able to respec. I don't know, sigh, it's definitely borrowed a lot from blizzard. Yet, I liked that blizzard made their game accessible to lots of different systems out there and this definitely is not the case with SWTOR.

 

[michealrp]

I understand that a lot of companies are gearing their software for more top of the line systems, however a dual core E2200, oc'd to 3ghz isn't too terrible of a system. I'm running Win 7, 64bit and 4gb ram, a HD 5670 vid card. Neither are top of the line, but neither are horrid either. I play various games with this rig, World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online and Eve Online. None of them display the same lag or poor frame rate performance of SWTOR. I've even had to start using a 3rd party utility to keep the SWTOR memory leak in check. Without "Memory Cleaner", SWTOR sits at almost 90% memory utilization constantly. With it running in the background, memory is at 50 - 60%, cpu is at 40 - 70%. Even with much less resources in use, the frame rate is horrid and my gpu isn't even breaking a sweat. I honestly believe that a lot of it is the server inability to pass data effectively to the clients and BioWare's inability or unwillingness to deal with it and just "make do".

 

[AntiZig]

I'd like to chime in on this since I've noticed a bunch of guys blaming Bioware for lack of support or servers, etc.

I'm not surprised about this since, lets face it, Bioware is a single player developer. Yes they might have dabbled in multiplayer before, but are they really known for it? No, they make single player games. In fact, I'm more than sure that since Bioware hasn't had to support an MMO before that their support and servers are nowhere to match the companies that were in business for several years.

In retrospect, I'd consider that it might actually be EA who's handling servers and support while Bioware is tasked only with technical aspects of the game. I don't know for sure, this is just me taking a guess. But if it turns out to be true, I'm not surprised that EA is dropping the ball on this one as well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm speculating here, however, I don't want to believe that such respectable company as Bioware is dropping the ball so hard. On the other hand their choice of partnering up with EA might what's dragging them down. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the truth. Personally, I'm boycotting any EA games out there (I was very excited for SWTOR, as soon as I heard EA would be on the list, I turned away). If you look at EA history as a publisher thus far, they been pushing developers to release garbage after garbage. Back in the day, EA used to stand for good sports games and such, I have to say that is the case no longer. Today, I associate EA with bad support, bugged releases and terrible localizations.

 

[michealrp]

Honestly. if EA is handling the technical aspects of the game, including server setup / aministration and customer service instead of BioWare, it still makes BW just as guilty for partnering with them any way. Also, it's not the consumers problem, sorry to say, if BW is unable to support a product that they've put out on the market. That failure still falls squarely on their shoulders.

 

[Darkithanime]

I REALLY didn't like (hated) the first one from story to combat the only cool thing about it was all the planets you go to. wasnt suprised when this game didnt heighten my expextations.

with the type for battle system you don't feel like a Jedi just get the newest star wars Darkforces game republic commando and battlefront 2 and call it a day

ps jade empire was better 😛

 

[AntiZig]

don't even get me started on jade empire and how it deserves a sequel released yesterday. Moreover, if you mention jade empire to my friend who's a console gamer he will go ape *** about how bioware sux for not making the next jade empire. 😀 what can I say he's a die hard fan of some games, but not companies.

 

[leongrado]

Think Bioware should stick to single player. Storytelling is what they're good at and MMO's just don't utilize it enough. I think it'd been a lot more successful if you actually thought up some original concepts instead of copying and pasting from other MMO's.

 

[rahzero1]

Allot of the things you are asking for are things they know they need. You don't release an MMO at the point you see it being at the end of its life, you omit things that you can add later so you get an earlier release date and people get the satisfaction of a improving game. I have played every major mmo on its day of release or before since WOW and this is hands down the most polished game from the stand point of continuous high frame rate and content. The legacy system is something people are going to like or love and every word being spoken and every class having a highly detailed epic story is new. Space combat is also going to expand. And the companion system is unparallelled. Blizzards next mmo is not going to start where wow ended its going to be far more basic and then expand like WOW did based on player demands. No reason to put in mechanics without your actual player feed back, not beta testers, your star wars fans that never played an mmo before were not the majority of beta testers but they are proving to be a decent number of players. I say you can't evaluate an mmo for the first 6 months. If star wars was at this point six months in I would stay it was still on a good path other than the macro and ui which does need to be implemented soon. Also I've never had lag and play it religiously on the highest settings and running on a laptop. In fact its the only MMO I have played including WOW not to have serious lag at release, though I didn't play rift I have played the rest of the major releases.

 

[casualcolors]

Allot of the things you are asking for are things they know they need. You don't release an MMO at the point you see it being at the end of its life, you omit things that you can add later so you get an earlier release date and people get the satisfaction of a improving game. I have played every major mmo on its day of release or before since WOW and this is hands down the most polished game from the stand point of continuous high frame rate and content. The legacy system is something people are going to like or love and every word being spoken and every class having a highly detailed epic story is new. Space combat is also going to expand. And the companion system is unparallelled. Blizzards next mmo is not going to start where wow ended its going to be far more basic and then expand like WOW did based on player demands. No reason to put in mechanics without your actual player feed back, not beta testers, your star wars fans that never played an mmo before were not the majority of beta testers but they are proving to be a decent number of players. I say you can't evaluate an mmo for the first 6 months. If star wars was at this point six months in I would stay it was still on a good path other than the macro and ui which does need to be implemented soon. Also I've never had lag and play it religiously on the highest settings and running on a laptop. In fact its the only MMO I have played including WOW not to have serious lag at release, though I didn't play rift I have played the rest of the major releases.

I mean no offense by this, but you're going awfully far out of your way to make excuses for their own lazy execution. The implicit lack of imagination of a dev team that would withhold good content ideas simply for fear of not having new ideas down the road, is pathetic. Hopefully as a gaming community we can expect more than that from game developers.

 

[saltwaterdiode]

Allot of the things you are asking for are things they know they need. You don't release an MMO at the point you see it being at the end of its life, you omit things that you can add later so you get an earlier release date and people get the satisfaction of a improving game. I have played every major mmo on its day of release or before since WOW and this is hands down the most polished game from the stand point of continuous high frame rate and content. The legacy system is something people are going to like or love and every word being spoken and every class having a highly detailed epic story is new. Space combat is also going to expand. And the companion system is unparallelled. Blizzards next mmo is not going to start where wow ended its going to be far more basic and then expand like WOW did based on player demands. No reason to put in mechanics without your actual player feed back, not beta testers, your star wars fans that never played an mmo before were not the majority of beta testers but they are proving to be a decent number of players. I say you can't evaluate an mmo for the first 6 months. If star wars was at this point six months in I would stay it was still on a good path other than the macro and ui which does need to be implemented soon. Also I've never had lag and play it religiously on the highest settings and running on a laptop. In fact its the only MMO I have played including WOW not to have serious lag at release, though I didn't play rift I have played the rest of the major releases.

It's not lag that's the problem. It's unplayable drops in frame rates which are happening to people with intel i7 processors and 16 GB of RAM. I've never had a latency issue. Mine's been at or beneath 65 MS consistently. If you PVP it's a problem or if you are around a lot of other PCs anywhere. I am glad to hear you remind me how rough WOW was when it started out because I played it from the offset. But WOW from the beginning was playable with standard frame rates across a lot of systems.

I also don't remember feeling like the horde and alliance were terribly unbalanced in PVP. Maybe I am romanticizing it...

 

[Jprobes]

It's not lag that's the problem. It's unplayable drops in frame rates which are happening to people with intel i7 processors and 16 GB of RAM. I've never had a latency issue. Mine's been at or beneath 65 MS consistently. If you PVP it's a problem or if you are around a lot of other PCs anywhere. I am glad to hear you remind me how rough WOW was when it started out because I played it from the offset. But WOW from the beginning was playable with standard frame rates across a lot of systems.

I also don't remember feeling like the horde and alliance were terribly unbalanced in PVP. Maybe I am romanticizing it...

I'm currently running an I5-2500K @4.7Ghz w/ 8GB PC1600 & Gigabyte 570 Windforce 3 and I have yet to experience any issues in PVP or outside of it.

The biggest gripe I have about this game is the sound cutting out when you switch windows and the game is set to "Windowed Fullscreen"

Also, WoW was is still buggy, even to this day. (mainly object caching with AMD cards)

Google "WoW Error 132" and tell me that isn't some *** right there. I actually had to deal with one of those errors. I swapped out everything between the PSU and the Motherboard and it still persisted, over 2 expansions and numerous fresh installs. The only thing that cured it was a complete new rig and a new game client straight from Blizzards website.

The game engine for WoW has been updated several times over its life span. The original engine limited draw distance, didn't include AA, or support for widescreen displays.

Also early WoW up until 2.x version also had massive collision detection issues and suffered from a vast range of issues. Like not being able to loot corpses because the target was too far away.

Don't even get me started on the PVP problems WoW suffered from, mainly the print screen exploit. They ended up taking out the string line for print screen because when you spammed it in a PVP Instance, it would replicate server lag due to the inherent delay it cause in server response. Therefore flag carriers could run the flag or avoid being attacked by basically running around spamming the print screen command string macro and it would look like to the other people as if they were just mini-teleporting around the map making them impossible to attack. You would get constant out of r range messages all the way to the cap.

And then there was the 3 week bug where your raid lockout panel would automatically pop up out of nowhere causing you to de-target whatever you had targeted and in the process canceling the spell you had been casting.

To be honest, as a wow player from November 23rd 2004, ToR is much more polished and robust then WoW was at launch, even 9 months into its release when they finally released Warsong & Arathi Basin.

Though I do long for the days of 20man UBRS runs... =o)

EDIT: As for the romanticizing of WoW, its to be expected. But there was a giant discrepancy between Horde and Alliance (in the alliance favor). All but maybe 4-5 of the original servers were Alliance dominated, and when pvp was solely server based. It was difficult to find competitiveness across all servers, that was one of the main reasons why they decided on grouping servers into battle groups and allowing for cross server queuing when Burning Crusade was released.

 

[rahzero1]

Its not fear its marketing, if everything was awesome the same number of people would still complain its just the way it is, but now you direct the hate and fix it. If you think that its not this way your just crazy. And as far as the unbalance between the 2 sides I hope you mean the # of people because imps and reps are the same classes with same stats just named different with different animations.

 

[Dvskore]

It's you. SWTOR is a great game and I don't have any problems with it at all. Mods, macros and user interface customization will come in time. If you have played an MMO before then you would know these things, they have these things called updates. But hey, SWTOR isn't for everyone and WoW isn't a better game, not in the least. WoW is garbage compared to SWTOR, blah blah, it may have macros, mods and all that garbage but remember something, mods weren't available at launch either!

 

[saltwaterdiode]

Its not fear its marketing, if everything was awesome the same number of people would still complain its just the way it is, but now you direct the hate and fix it. If you think that its not this way your just crazy. And as far as the unbalance between the 2 sides I hope you mean the # of people because imps and reps are the same classes with same stats just named different with different animations.

I am not talking about the number of people on the 2 sides. The classes are not fairly balanced at all. If you think that you are living in a pipe dream and you have rolled all imperial characters. Just go through the swtor forums on dps class guides and you'll find proof.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=75519

The Sage dps class and the Sorcerer are suppose to be matched but there's no DPS spec for the sage that can do the amount of damage a sorc does. Plus there is a problem with activation times which they've admitted was an issue which severely limits the dps for all light armor classes on both factions. Disturbance is suppose to be a 1.5 second activation time and it's really 4 to 5 seconds. So you have all these dumb jedi knights running around who melee everything with no activation time and they are doing more dps than the sages and they where medium armor.

I had a sorc, with force lightning, do 10,000 damage to HP over 3 seconds in pvp. That's way more than my sage can do. I don't know about the other classes but there has been a lot of griping on the swtor forums on the republic side about the lack of fairness between factions.

 

[snazey]

this game is flat out TERRIBLE....BORING combat, unbracketed pvp, horrible pvp maps.....cookie cutter copies....other then sh!tball which is an abomination, cutsceens u cant skip while in groops, class quests that make u go across multiple maps just for a CUTSCEEN...disconection from other players...feals like a single player game with chat functions, no world pvp--seperate factions are so far seperated and guarded, u cant find them, HORRIBLE ability lags on spells that sometimes work, many spells that are completley useless, no ui cusomization, pointless to heal in pvp wz's due to healing nerf and when u die your right back in the fight anyway, this game is without a doubt the worst mmorpg ive ever played....ive played virtually all mmorpg's since diablo 1 and gw1 was released, the game is a discgrace to the word mmorpg.....the sold a game that doesnt work to many ppl. PACMAN>>SWTOR....SWTOR feals like a 1978 datsun with a REALLY NICE paint job and 3 flat tires, if u decide to buy this game..make sure to get some painkillers..ull need em

 

[wtd03]

Bioware would have been better off just finishing the story and creating KOTOR 3. An entire console generation has gone by and Kotor 3 still has not been made

 

[TiiX]

this game is flat out TERRIBLE....BORING combat, unbracketed pvp, horrible pvp maps.....cookie cutter copies....other then sh!tball which is an abomination, cutsceens u cant skip while in groops, class quests that make u go across multiple maps just for a CUTSCEEN...disconection from other players...feals like a single player game with chat functions, no world pvp--seperate factions are so far seperated and guarded, u cant find them, HORRIBLE ability lags on spells that sometimes work, many spells that are completley useless, no ui cusomization, pointless to heal in pvp wz's due to healing nerf and when u die your right back in the fight anyway, this game is without a doubt the worst mmorpg ive ever played....ive played virtually all mmorpg's since diablo 1 and gw1 was released, the game is a discgrace to the word mmorpg.....the sold a game that doesnt work to many ppl. PACMAN>>SWTOR....SWTOR feals like a 1978 datsun with a REALLY NICE paint job and 3 flat tires, if u decide to buy this game..make sure to get some painkillers..ull need em

1. The unbracketed PVP is mostly so that for example a lvl20-29+ dont have to wait for his lvl 10-19+ friend to get to lvl 20+ to be able to do pvp with him. Plus in PVP all characters stats and abilities are balanced to resemble a lvl 49. Also maps will be added in time, theres a map being added today.

2. The combat in SWTOR is like the combat in any other MMORPG except maybe something like Vindictus or Age of Conan. If not, you tell me whats different.

3. Ofcourse you're not gonna be able to skip conversations when in a group.. you're also awarded with Social points which you can buy stuff with by doing convos in a group.

4. When alone you actually CAN skip cutscenes... Just freakin press spacebar...

5. No world pvp? Really? theres world pvp on multiple planets in SWTOR... you just need to actually play and lvl up to get there...

6. UI Customization is coming in this or next patch.

7. If you can't find factions you probably didn't look close enough. Or better yet, turn on the quest tracker.

8. If ur abilities are lagging.. Get a new rig or internet.. There's also no useless spells that i've come across. All spells are useful at some point wether it's while questing, raiding or PVP.

Im gonna say like all other MMO players: It gets funnier in higher levels.
I bet you played the BETA when the game was full of bugs and wasn't even finished yet.

 

[envymert]

this game is flat out TERRIBLE....BORING combat, unbracketed pvp, horrible pvp maps.....cookie cutter copies....other then sh!tball which is an abomination, cutsceens u cant skip while in groops, class quests that make u go across multiple maps just for a CUTSCEEN...disconection from other players...feals like a single player game with chat functions, no world pvp--seperate factions are so far seperated and guarded, u cant find them, HORRIBLE ability lags on spells that sometimes work, many spells that are completley useless, no ui cusomization, pointless to heal in pvp wz's due to healing nerf and when u die your right back in the fight anyway, this game is without a doubt the worst mmorpg ive ever played....ive played virtually all mmorpg's since diablo 1 and gw1 was released, the game is a discgrace to the word mmorpg.....the sold a game that doesnt work to many ppl. PACMAN>>SWTOR....SWTOR feals like a 1978 datsun with a REALLY NICE paint job and 3 flat tires, if u decide to buy this game..make sure to get some painkillers..ull need em

After reading this I must say this is the reason I LOVE THE GAME. Look at this morons awful spelling and general lack of knowledge on alot of things, and I am happy to say that I am no Star Wars fan but I enjoy the game and the community is awesome. People in general chat are always quick to offer advice or help and it is leaps and bounds from the community in WoW. A few minor tweaks and it will be even better.

A few pointers .......
-cut scenes you cannot skip while in groops, first off nice spelling secondly in any MMO when grouped expect it to go slow. Multiplayer means people who wants the story want to listen/read a quest or are just slower than your pace.
-Horrible ability/spell lag. This has been fixed in the patch as it was a known issue.
-Many spells that are useless ...... I dont know of any please explain
-UI customization soon, or when the modding community releases them. WoW had no UI mods for months if not years.
-Pointless to heal in warzones due to healing nerf .......Healing is overpowered at the moment as 1 good healer in a warzone and that team wins.
-This guy says its the worst mmorpg he has ever played .....his first mmorpg was Diablo 1 , funny as diablo is not and never has been a MMO.
- The opinion of a moron like this will lead some people to not try it due to his nerd rage, people if your on the fence try it the game is fun and kids like these still play MMO's like WoW and Diablo.

 

[snazey]

^^ lol, anyone who likes this game isa scrub, swtor is the ultimate scrub game made for ppl who cant play ^^HE MAD

 

[envymert]

^^ lol, anyone who likes this game isa scrub, swtor is the ultimate scrub game made for ppl who cant play ^^HE MAD

nah just stating facts. ... my opinion is no better than yours, thats the reason I stated facts. Why don't you go play the MMO Diablo? I heard its pretty good....

 

[Jprobes]

^^ lol, anyone who likes this game isa scrub, swtor is the ultimate scrub game made for ppl who cant play ^^HE MAD

Have you thought about giving up gaming? From your above statement, reading a book is perhaps your only salvation from "scrubs" and the games they choose to play.

PS. l2updatevernacular, Scrub was so 2009.

 

[mahin1islam]

Is it just me? Or are there a lot of other people out there feeling the same way?

Yeah, i hated the game too. I'm waiting for Guild Wars 2, but I liked Rift. Terra sounds good too. you should give those a try.