Biowares will be Biowares.
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SW:TOR
- Thread starter Grunker
- Start date
Biowares will be Biowares.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
Yep. Never underestimate the power of Oo-mox.
Excidium
P. banal
That stuff was probably mostly done even before release. At least the companion was already on the game files months ago.
Excidium
P. banal
But, yeah, he was even listed as a companion for all characters on some of the TOR databases, back then I thought he was one of the "secret" stuff they have in the game, like the pink lightsaber crystal.
fizzelopeguss
Arcane
"
On top of the homogeneous colors, a lot of areas in the game also have homogeneous architecture. It can be agonizing running around the Sith Academy where you’re charging down one long, techno-lit corridor after another"
This, oh god this. And they send you back and forth through that shit multiple times.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,676
Shamus continues his beatdown of SWTOR: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=16580
Remember back when Star Wars the Old Republic was still new, and there was a bit of a debate about whether it was The New Awesome, or a poor execution of a fundamentally flawed design? Often there were comparisons drawn between SWTOR and Guild Wars 2, which was interesting since the latter game wasn’t (and still isn’t) yet released. Now that I’ve played both games, I think I get why.
On Twitter, I took SWTOR to task for not having a mouselook-toggle. If you want to look around, you have to hold either mouse button while you move the mouse. There is no setting or option that will let you click to switch between “looking around” mode and “clicking on stuff” mode. Some people thought I was being petty for complaining about this, but it’s an important aspect of the game and it goes way beyond “my hand gets tired holding the button down all the time”. By making the interface default to a mouse-pointer mode, the game is telling you that the normal interaction is to click buttons and menus. This isn’t just about how the game plays, but about what kind of game you’re playing in the first place. Or to put it more accurately, it tells you how the designers intended for you to interact with the game.
The interface of Sim City has clicking menus and placing objects with the mouse. You press your mouse button in order to press an on-screen button in order to perform an action. There’s a layer of abstraction at work that keeps the game at arm’s length. The interface of Doom 3 has you looking around and moving directly, without the middleman of on-screen buttons. You don’t bring up your PDA to decide who to attack, you just look at him and pull the trigger.
Neither experience is invalid. The menu-clicking one is more abstract and distant, and is more appropriate for strategy situations where you’re making granular, long-term decisions or choosing from a large list of possibilities. The action interface is better for fast-paced gameplay where you’re making many moment-to-moment decisions that shape the course of a single encounter.
In SWTOR, the game is at the bottom, and the visuals are just window dressing. Ugly window dressing, if you believe what some people are saying.
Even if you use hotkeys to activate those powers at the bottom instead of using the mouse, that bar is still the center of the gameplay. You need to manage your cooldowns, and trigger your powers in the most efficient order. You don’t choose target by aiming at them, you choose them by selecting them with the mouse or by pressing TAB.
In a game like Jedi Knight, Force Unleashed, or Republic Commando, you don’t spend all your time looking at your health bar and ammo count at the bottom. You spend it looking at the world in front of you. In fact, designers go out of their way to add as much information to the world as they can so you don’t need to look down very often. When you get shot the view kicks, your character cries out, and there’s a red flash to indicate the severity of the hit. In some games there’s even a directional arrow to go with it, so you know which direction the damage is coming from. Youknow you’ve been shot, and you should have a pretty good idea of how hard you were hit. All without needing to look away from the game.
In an online game, this is replaced with a health bar at the bottom, which you monitor during the process of clicking on things. You know your enemy is about to die when you see his bar get low.
As you go around the world, you’ll run into various types of enemies, like this guy:
Farkus here has the same character model as other mooks in the area. If you look closely, you can see a little silver pip to the right of his name, indicating he’s a special. But beyond that? Nothing. What level is he? What kind of foe is he? I made the mistake of attacking this guy to find out, and was dead within seconds. After it was over, I was mad that the game didn’t tell me what I was looking at. But the game did. I just wasn’t looking at the game.
I was looking at the window dressing and mistaking it for the game. The game is at the bottom.
The reason I died is because of the other guy. The guy standing to the left of Dev Farkus.
Let’s just ignore that he’s the same color as the environment. Actually, let’s not ignore that. It’s stupid. And don’t make an argument that this is ‘camouflage’ for the sake of realism, because I will beat you over the head with the other ten thousand oddities, absurdities, and contrivances that make up this area. This is not a sudden, dramatic shift towards gritty simulation of warfare, this is the result of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V game design and one-note art direction.
ANYWAY.
If you’re looking at the middle of the screen, the guy standing up doesn’t look like anything special. He’s wearing the same armor as most of the rest of the guys in this zone. But if you’re looking at the game, then you’ll see that the guy on the left is:
NOW we can see he’s a badass. We can see his level. We can see he’s an elite. We can even see he’s a melee-based foe. Take a shot at Farkus and this guy will wreck your day.
In a game like Borderlands, you can spot an elite right away: They’re huge. They have OMG GLOWING EYES LOOK OUT! They often have distinctive armor or combat taunts. You don’t need to check your dashboard and tab through a cluster of foes to know who the troublemakers are, because that information is already in front of you. In fact:
Note that the Skag on the right isn’t highlighted, but you can still tell he’s the dangerous one. On top of this crucial little datum, you can see your weapon, what foes you’re dealing with, their relative strength, and which ones are elites, all without taking your eyes off the action. Compare this to an online game like SWTOR, where you could go through an entire battle with the top 90% of your screen blacked out and still have great odds of surviving.
Despite its pretense at action, SWTOR is very much an old-school MMO. It’s a fussy little game about babysitting abilities on your hotbar, watching cooldown timers, and monitoring health bars as they go up and down. In the early days of online gaming, this was a necessity. Most people were on dial-up. By making a game built around a hotbar, they could make a game that was much more tolerant of low framerates and terrible network latency. Online games were basically a new kind of chatroom. You camped in a single spot for hours, beating down the same cluster of mobs as they respawned every few minutes.
But we’re about a decade past those technological limitations. An online game is free to move towards more action-oriented gameplay if that’s what they want.
This is where the Guild Wars 2 comparisons come in. A lot of people are eager for online games to evolve into something more like regular games. They want a tight experience with solid mechanics. They want a third-person action game with a connected world, not a third-generation Everquest knock-off. The superhero games have been at the forefront of this, but now we’re seeing some quasi-medieval fantasy games like Tera and Guild Wars 2 try their hand at turning the looting & leveling games into action games.
SWTOR occupies such a strange spot on the spectrum. It arguably looks more action-oriented than World of Warcraft, but in terms of actual gameplay mechanics and focus it’s cut from the same cloth. It might even be a step back. I don’t know. Some of it is fast paced, but other parts aren’t, and I’m not even sure if the developer understood what they were doing. It’s entirely possible they thought that making a game more “action oriented” meant adding explosions and speeding up the cooldown timers.
As I mentioned in our recent hangout: I’m a fan of single-player action / roleplaying hybrids, especially ones that offer a lot of exploration. Randy is almost exclusively a PvP player, to the point where he almost never bothers with single player games. Josh likes a little bit of everything, including hardcore number-crunchy games like Crusader Kings 2. We’re three totally different types of players, and yet we’re all excited for Guild Wars 2 after playing the beta. In fact, I stopped playing the beta for a while because I didn’t want to spoil too much of the game before it was really finished.
Again, this doesn’t mean Guild Wars 2 is unambiguously better. The point I’m making is that Guild Wars 2 has a very deliberate identity and set of design principles that push online gaming in a new direction, while SWTOR is a muddled Frankenstein’s Monster of established MMO gameplay conventions. Its parts are stitched together from existing successful games and they don’t always seem to satisfy. This is a game that does things because that’s how we’ve always done things.
Two hundred million is a lot of bucks. I wouldn’t buy a new car without making sure the driving felt just right. Game designers really ought to make sure they have a game prototype that feels right before they start shoving sacks of money into the game-o-tron.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
He is right though about the superhero MMOs (= Champions and DCU) being in the forefront of the "GW2 direction" of mobile and action-oriented gameplay. When my brother (avid GW fan since Factions) first explained GW2 to me, my reaction wasn't "ooh how new and exciting" but "seen this stuff in Champions, what does it do differently?"
All of the bitching about TOR here is pretty much valid.
But still... I had two-three months of fun playing it. Longer than I had fun with WoW.
Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for stories sometimes and concerning storytelling, TOR is the top of the MMO area. And yes, it is mostly because of the spoken dialog. I don't like reading text walls and always skipped those in any other MMO.
In SWTOR, I actually listened to what the NPCs had to say.
Also, the quests in WoW were always awful. Kill 10 things of this, collect 20 things of that... bah.
Maybe it's just in the starting areas, but it turned me off immediatly.
In SW:TOR, you also do this, but as optional side missions. You still do it, of course, who would want to miss XP, but you actually have a goal, a story behind it all. Some kind of sense that you are not just grinding.
Maybe if that could be combined with WoW somehow...
But still... I had two-three months of fun playing it. Longer than I had fun with WoW.
Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for stories sometimes and concerning storytelling, TOR is the top of the MMO area. And yes, it is mostly because of the spoken dialog. I don't like reading text walls and always skipped those in any other MMO.
In SWTOR, I actually listened to what the NPCs had to say.
Also, the quests in WoW were always awful. Kill 10 things of this, collect 20 things of that... bah.
Maybe it's just in the starting areas, but it turned me off immediatly.
In SW:TOR, you also do this, but as optional side missions. You still do it, of course, who would want to miss XP, but you actually have a goal, a story behind it all. Some kind of sense that you are not just grinding.
Maybe if that could be combined with WoW somehow...
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Wow, are you seriously suggesting this is not the case in SW:TOR?
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2005
- Messages
- 4,641
No offense, but why exactly would you play an MMO for the story? There are a lot of good single player games that provide awesome storyfag experiences.
I don't play MMOs because they're too time consuming, but I always thought that the coolest MMOs are those which aren't static like WoW and its clones, but allow players to create the story of the world themselves (faction wars, possibility to conquer territory, producing stuff etc.). Games like EVE or Ultima Online and some browser games I used to play (Star Wars Combine). Just my 2 cents.
Some months ago someone here posted a story about an EVE online player who infiltrated a powerful guild, gained the trust of its leader and assasinated him, operating under orders from another powerful guild.
If I played MMOs, that's the stuff I'd want to experience, not some crappy half-baked singeplayer story in a static world.
I don't play MMOs because they're too time consuming, but I always thought that the coolest MMOs are those which aren't static like WoW and its clones, but allow players to create the story of the world themselves (faction wars, possibility to conquer territory, producing stuff etc.). Games like EVE or Ultima Online and some browser games I used to play (Star Wars Combine). Just my 2 cents.
Some months ago someone here posted a story about an EVE online player who infiltrated a powerful guild, gained the trust of its leader and assasinated him, operating under orders from another powerful guild.
If I played MMOs, that's the stuff I'd want to experience, not some crappy half-baked singeplayer story in a static world.
Republic of Rome MMO with political and management mechanics instead of monster slaying, now there's an MMO I would play.
DraQ
Arcane
TheEntitledOne
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2012
- Messages
- 4,077
MMOs with story and crappy gameplay or crappy single player games with mmo style gameplay, what's better and why?
DISCUSS!
DISCUSS!
Wow, are you seriously suggesting this is not the case in SW:TOR?
Did you read even further? But just in case you did, I will tell it again: Yes, this is definitely not the case with most quests in SW:TOR. Sure, there are quests like those, some optional quests you'll probably skip either way as level progression is simply so fast that it would be silly to make all quests in your current region. But the main quest lines and longer side-quest lines are far better than "kill X of A" and "fetch Y of B". They just include such stuff within a main quest, optionally, to give you more to do. And in most cases, fulfilling a "Kill 10 soldiers" while "Rescuing the princess" is something you'd do anyway as the soldiers simply stand in your way.
Maybe this changes after lvl ~35 (this is what I played to with most characters), but I doubt it.
I would play an MMO for the story if I already played all the other story-driven RPGs out there. And I did.
But that is besides the point.
The point is that the story motivates you to go on playing. I certainly didn't play for such a long time because the gameplay is so awesome, as already pointed out, it isn't. It's solid. If I had to click through walls of text to do the quests, like you do in WoW, I would have quit before the first month was over. In SW:TOR you have something that keeps you motivated, at least for longer than normal in an MMO.
That is the best kind of story, of course. The ones the player develops for himself. Like you do in Minecraft, or other open-world games.
The problem is just that with EVE, such an experience would take years to get. And I don't have that amount of time to spend on a single game. That's just nuts. Not more nuts than playing WoW for 10 years straight, but nuts anyway.
And I'm perfectly sane!
hoverdog
dog that is hovering, Wastelands Interactive
You're posting on the Codex.
38 studios tells a different story.
Hmm, okay... Perfectly sane within certain bounds?
Condiments
Educated
While I agree with your overall reasoning that MMOs should strive to provide more context for what you do, SWTOR's approach to this problem was overwrought. I too was initially excited by all the production that went into trying to make the set-up to quests more interesting, rather than the bland "go to quest hub, absorb and finish quests until a connecting quest leads you to next quest hub" theme park style MMO. Each planet had its own over-arching narrative that coincided with your class story giving each area more flair.
The problem is after a time the production sheen wares off. Areas start to feel far too restrictive and formulaic in their progression and are often broken off into predictable parts that you visit in sequence. The sheer amount of dialogue that you experience everywhere begins to slow the pace down too much. Too often I would smash my spacebar to get through the boring dialogue about some inane problem that they speak about for five minutes. This can be a very tedious if you go out into the field and finish your quest log and come back only to met with minutes of dialogue you have to listen through time and time again. Its fresh initially, but most quest lines don't amount too much beyond the main planet and class ones. You also had to finish those boring sidequests in order for your character to level properly for the next substantial story sequences. I often would want to see the next portion of the agent storyline(which was actually more than okay considering Bioware's standards), but would be stuck trudging through over an hour of filler before my level was sufficient.
The transparent structure of the game shattered any pretense of exploration, where player agency was relegated to being shuffled one area to the next. WoW, especially in its latest iterations, was very similar in design(theme park), but there was still more freedom and player interaction going on. I barely interacted with anyone at all except my friends and I barely encountered anyone of the opposite faction. One of my favorite parts of leveling on PvP servers is the spontaneous battles that would occur between players. A scuffle between two characters could draw a significant portion of zone into a skirmish, giving leveling a certain tension that you lose with such rigidly designed games.
I think the story context for quests is a good idea, but they should leave the high production values(cinematics, voiced dialogue) for personal quests, and important quest lines. It gives these types of events their due importance without dragging down the overall pace of the game.
Norfleet
Moderator
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2005
- Messages
- 12,250
Story? In an MMO? Surely you jest. Plot in MMOs ranks below even plot in porn. I can't really think of any MMO I have ever even looked at or touched, much less actually played, where I gave a crap about the plot, as opposed to figuring out how to crush my enemies beneath my shiny black boot, and wondering if even following the storyline was a good idea or a footbullet (It's about 50-50, sometimes you're supposed to follow the plot for the reward items, sometimes you're supposed to intentionally derail and grind the plot).
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