My thoughts after playing the Imperial Agent story to level 36. If Bioware would've made just this story a single player game, SWIA (Star Wars Imperial Agent) they would've had a 70 hours RPG. The plot is one of the best in gaming ever, there were already 2 plot\decision points that i know i'll look back years from now as some of the best in gaming ever, incredibly deep in interesting side quests, mini games, crafting system. I can't wait to see how it develops, understand what the hell is going on and do things that needs to be done (it would've been much easier to explain if I could add spoilers). SWIA would've passed the 90 average game score easily, personally so far I would've put it with witcher 2 and Dragon Age Origins as the best single player RPG of the past few years.
Instead they put it as 1/8 of a full blown MMO, making people compare it to WOW, judge it's grouping, social aspect, end game, PVP, balancing. These are all valid, MMO players and pure social gamers, who wouldn't dream of picking up a single player RPG title, are targeted audience of this game. But it blows my mind that people can play for hours\review the game\judge\buy\subscribe\quit\
However, what we have here is a situation that is nothing like anything that happened before in gaming, the amount of content you can miss by playing other classes or activities is crazy. Can you imagine reviewing a game while skipping 70 hours of single player RPG in it? Now multiply this number by each class not played.
This is a major change of game making by Bioware, putting this much into 8 different single player stories and having the game judged as an MMO. If it works, I think this is nothing short of a milestone in gaming, a scope, plot depth and deep world with things to do like nothing that was done before.
I really hope this will be the direction of the industry and not a failed project, because of all the critics and blogs who are complaining about grouping, users complaining about UI options, PVP critics or any other minor aspects of what was done here, a gaming world bigger and deeper than anything ever done before.
On a personal playing level, as far as i'm concerned, the MMO aspect show great potential, but it doesn't really matter, they gave me 6 months of gaming of the best kind, deep, engaging and fun RPG-ing. If they'll add and improve in the future and keep me entertained for 6 more months, good for them (and for me of course), if not i'll move on remembering SWTOR as an amazing gaming accomplishment I hope will be repeated by others in the future.
I hope this game will be a huge success and influence many games in the following years and that it won't not fall because of this or that minor aspect in the grand scheme of things. This is the type of gaming i want to see as much as possible in the future. Give me a huge fun virtual world with incredible plot and subplots, characters and top notch RPG gaming and I'm a happy gamer. Not to mention all the MMO aspects, grouping, socializing, competing that is in there as well.
When you have a story too big to fit in a movie, you create a trilogy or a TV series.
When you have a story too big to fit in book you create a series of books.
When you have a story too big to fit in a game, you should create a subscription based game or MMO, this has never been done until now. Great work Bioware.
If this is where the gaming industry is going, we'll all benefit from much more epic and engaging gaming experience.
Each class does not have 70 hours of unique content. $200 million does not get you 560 hours of content. That would be absurd.
ReplyDeleteClasses within the same faction share the vast majority of missions with each other, with only a small percent of missions being unique, class-specific content.
@Anynymous
DeleteYou bring up a very interesting point, how many gaming hours are there in SWTOR? How do you even define the length of a game with multiple optional activities? Instead of a quick reply to what I think is a huge topic, I will address this in a new post tomorrow.
Fun and good games are subjective terms, but I believe I can and will prove objectively that the scope of SWTOR is bigger than anything ever done before in the industry.
I played the game until lvl 50, and basically for me its a game over when I get to 50 :( As a single player game it was interesting, but as a MMO it fails for me. Having played WoW since it opened I take a few things as granted in a MMO that it have to have if it wants me to stay as a subscriber (atleast a WoW clone like SWTOR is):
ReplyDelete- Mods (my WoW interface have nothing of the original ui)
- Macros
- LFG/LFR (I was dormant for almost a year until they got LFR in WoW :))
- Atleast as good graphics as WoW (which is old already), I hate all these bland looking games with no colors. SWTOR had really boring graphics, and even while looking aging they tax my high end graphics card.
- Unnecessary travelling, I think someone clocked how much time he spent on different parts of the levelling process and found 70 percent had been spent on it.
- Too much instancing, I barely saw other ppl while doing questing.
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If you played it to level 50 and found it interesting, you pretty much proved my point that as a single player game it has a lot of content. Just by playing again to level 50, you can double your play time without repeating anything.
ReplyDeleteMods is a topic by itself, I had a love\hate relationship with mods in WOW, what can't be argued is that features as part of the game are better than requiring mods and already Bioware said and even showed a preview of the new customizable UI changes coming soon.
Macros, LFG\LFR: Wow patch 1.1.0: http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_1.1.0 November 4th 2004. Over 7 years ago. They had a bit longer to add features, let's wait to see how SWTOR catch up, while we enjoy such an incredibly long and interesting leveling experience. My point is that SWTOR needs few features to catch up to WOW pure MMO aspect, but it's so much more in gaming depth that these are minor fixable issues.
Graphic is a matter of taste I guess, personally I had a really hard time getting used to the cartoonish WOW graphic coming from Ever Quest 1\2, but that's just me and everyone's taste is different.
Unnecessary traveling: sorry, but this is just not true. You get a daily pass to the fleet from anywhere, you get an instant travel (WOW's hearth stone) bound anywhere at the zone, not just in one place, you got 6-8 flight paths in every zone and you got a ship that can go to any zone instantly. Traveling is really minimized.
Instancing for class quest is a great way to let your actions change the world. Blizzard solved this by phasing, resulting in people not meeting when they are at the same point in the world, which is a real problem if you want to do something with someone or help in a quest. If you have a better idea I'm sure there are gaming companies who would love to hire you :)