A massively popular setting, coupled with a developer that is generally regarded as one of the best at creating compelling RPG experiences, helped set some very high expectations for SWTOR. I was certainly extremely excited to finally get a chance to pick up a lightsaber and carve my way through this latest entry in the MMORPG space.
And yet I find myself disappointed with the end result.
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| You would think that this should make for a pretty awesome video game |
It's now been about one and a half months since I first stepped out of my arrival shuttle on Korriban as a Sith Inquisitor. During that time I have conspired and murdered my way through the ranks of the Sith hierarchy, I've made friends with such unlikely allies as a Force eating alien, a cocky pirate and a fallen Jedi apprentice. The galaxy has trembled before my meteoric rise to power and I've even had time to get me some sweet looking robes!
All in all it was a wild roller coaster ride all the way through my story.
Then my story ended and I found that there was no more track in place for my joyride and, with a sheepish expression that would make Wile E. Coyote proud, I was unceremoniously dumped into the harsh realities of infinite repetition of content.
Firstly I'd like to clear up that while I enjoy the storytelling in SWTOR, it has some really serious fundamental problems that I've previously discussed. I won't go into them again here, but let's just say that you can definitely feel that BioWare have tried to take a "normal" game length story and stretched it across a "MMO length" gaming experience.
Ultimately the story was what really compelled me to keep playing SWTOR, though. Even with all the problems that I've been bitching about, it's still engaging enough that I was interested in what was going to happen next, and I would even say that my journey towards the end of the game was more a trip to the end of my story rather than a trip to level 50, and I mean that as a compliment to BioWare.
I finished my Sith Inquisitor story sometime in the first week of January, shortly after I got to level 49.
It is now February 1 and my Sith Inquisitor is still level 49. He is also now permanently parked on the Imperial fleet right next to the mail box and GTN terminal and is only used for buying and selling goods to earn credits (I've already written a few posts about how to make money on the GTN by the way).
The only things that I can use him for is to grind out daily quests, flashpoints/raids or go PvP in the 3 different battlegrounds that SWTOR offer. The only point of those activities would be to improve my gear, which would enable me to... do these same activities a bit better. Yay.
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| Look closely and you'll be able to see the look of disgust on my Inquisitor's face as he realizes he's now relegated to being a glorified banking character |
It's not that the endgame of SWTOR is any *worse* than what you'll find in most other MMO's, but the contrast between the leveling experience and the endgame content makes it seem so much more uninteresting and bland.
One moment you're becoming a powerful lord of darkness and the next minute you're dumped into a round of "Hutball" PvP next to 10 other random people. The disconnect is incredibly jarring, and when you run out of story then you're only left with all the parts that make SWTOR feel like any other MMO that you've played in the last 5+ years.
Well, if playing through the story is an interesting experience then I guess you can at least just keep making alts and play through their stories, right? That should keep you going for at least 6-12 months, depending on how intensely you play.
The problem with that is the pacing of the story. Since the story is stretched so thin, you'll find yourself spending the majority of your time slogging through content that you've already played through the first time through the game. I'm currently playing a Sith Warrior and I've made it up to level 16, but I'm really finding it hard to motivate myself to play through all the same non-story quests that I already played as Sith Inquisitor. And it only gets worse when I think about having to grind space missions and PvP battlegrounds *again* in order to level up between planets.
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| Another round of Alderaan PvP... I wish I could just jump through that force field and kill myself... |
So what I'm left with is a game that fails to give me a reason to keep playing the character I've already dumped several hundred hours into, and is too slowly paced to make me want to go through the whole process again with a new character.
I would love if there was some feature that allowed you to get double XP if you already had one level 50 character or some other mechanic to enable you to more easily get to play through the story quests of other classes. But even so, it would not fix the biggest problem with SWTOR, which is the fact that the biggest draw of the game is a linear story that you inevitably get to the end of.
In the end I feel that SWTOR is a very interesting experiment in MMORPG design. It has invested completely in the idea that story can play a crucial part in the MMORPG experience and it has pulled that off somewhat successfully.
But it has also demonstrated the huge problem of basing a subscription funded game on a finite "A to B" experience. I think that I'll probably keep my subscription going for a while longer and see if I can get through the Sith Warrior story, but I suspect that I'll probably pull the plug on my subscription within a few months and then wait until the first expansion pack (provided that it will extend the current storylines).
I really wanted SWTOR to be "my next WoW", which is a game that I played pretty much without pause for almost 7 years. It's a shame that BioWare did not try to push the limits for MMO endgame content more, and that they did not spend more time on perfecting the pacing of the story experience.
I somewhat get the sense that BioWare thought that they could simply attach a story onto a tried and tested "standard" MMORPG design and then that would be enough to ensure great success.
To that I can only say, as Luke said to the Emperor; "Your overconfidence is your weakness" (Also the fact that you rely on an old cripple in a robot suit as your right hand man, it turned out).
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How is WoW any better at avoiding the same endgame content problem which you have outlined in your article?
ReplyDeleteIt's not. I stopped playing WoW in early 2011 shortly after I hit level 85 exactly because I could not stand the idea of more grinding of endgame content.
ReplyDeleteIn my book the WoW formula is no longer sufficient to make a great MMO. The idea of just repeating the same canned content over and over again once you get to the end of the game needs to be seriously reworked.
The game is still not released in China, but I just knew that the game is sinking in the West, subscription maybe a reason. Anyway, I probably will take a try when it's available in China.
ReplyDeleteLike this article! Spread it! :)
ReplyDeleteHi Ethan. I think you should definitely try it out. It's not a *bad* game in any way and getting 100+ hours of entertainment from it by playing one character from 1 to 49 is still alright if you compare it to a single player experience.
ReplyDeleteBut sadly I don't think it has much long lasting appeal and particularly it is really lacking in terms of innovating the genre and offering players a compelling reason to keep paying the subscription fee.
solution have a life outside of the mmo u play -_-
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm not sure how that's going to improve SWTOR... but okay. I'm kinda scared of all this fresh air and that big glowing disc in the sky that burns my white parchment-like skin, though...
ReplyDeleteGreat article. I agree completely. I leveled my Sith to 50 and completed the story. The drop off after the story is brutal. My feeling of beating Thanaton at the end was glorious and epic in feel but after the cut scenes ended i had a feeling of what next? The satisfaction quickly wore off and i felt sad. The difference between SWTOR and WOW for me is i actually became attached to my character and miss her a bit. I know there will be expansions and we will pick us that light saber and start throwing lightening again but what to do in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Chad!
ReplyDeleteYep, it's definitely a jolting shock when you run out of storyline and have to resort to PvP or PvE content grinding.
And I do agree that it's a great experience to play through the game if you're a Star Wars fan, but for me there's little point in playing the game any more until they release content that continues the story lines.
Good points. I played for one month and quit. Terribly disappointed. The content was good, but repetative. And at the end, it felt like I ate a sandwich without anything but dry bread. It lacks the interaction that an MMO creates and plays more like a single player game that can include others rather than a community game that could allow you to solo if needed. Bad form Bioware. Bad form.
ReplyDeleteI hope it'll turn around. WoW struggled in the beginning too, it sucked at first during vanilla. But give it time, SWTOR will turn around.
ReplyDeleteWell, now that SWTOR is going free to play maybe the game will get some kind of resurgence, but I'm skeptical that the designers know how to salvage the game.
ReplyDeleteMost of the upcoming things that I have read about have been more dungeons, more raids and more space missions and none of that is going to make me any more interested in playing the game again.
Your article seems like a bunch of whiny bitching to me. You say multiple times how you've put a few hundred hours into a character, only to be left wanting more content after that. That's fair, endgame stuff should be there, and be fun, but that doesn't mean you should expect a game to last forever. No game does. That's kinda the point of them... You could go buy any RPG right now and get the same type of experience, only shorter and without all the online stuff, oh and the content expansions, and whatever else Bioware decides to throw out. I get that grinding through a dozen characters gets old after a while, but trying to blame that on the game is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It's like beating a dead horse and then getting angry when it doesn't get back up and run faster than it used to. You're complaining about something that is inherent in all games, and trying to pass it off as a review of SW:TOR, and that's just plain wrong.
ReplyDeleteHi Chris.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment! I always appreciate feedback on my articles.
I do agree with you to a point.
For sure it is unfair to expect any game to keep your attention forever. Sooner or later you will get bored with what a game can offer and you will move on.
However, I do think that MMO's should have a far longer gaming life than all other games, simply because you are paying a monthly fee (or you were at the time I wrote this) and therefore I expect that the designers should create content that makes we want to keep playing for months and months.
I feel that SWTOR is kind of defeated by its own success.
It did so well in creating an interesting storyline that it feels very demotivating when you run out of storyline to play through.
If BioWare is okay with me pulling the plug of my subscribtion after I play through the story then I guess everyone is happy, but then they have not made a sustainable MMO.
I played WoW for almost 8 years before I grew bored of that, so I do not think it is unfair to expect an MMO to provide enough content to keep me engaged for at least 3-6 months.
Recently I've tried going back to SWTOR, but I find that the heavy handed way that the Free to play restrictions have been implemented makes it uninteresting for me to play again.
Except that it's not even tried and true MMO content. In other games I played, take EQ2 for example, even after I hit level cap there was still loads more to do. Quests that had never been picked up or finished (in swtor these are most definitely fewer), places still unseen and unexplored (which in swtor would be because those places have invisible barriers or dead zones), factions to work on (in swtor, conversations in quests pretty much take care of that by level 30), etc. I wasn't even a raider or PvPer, and I've never parked a max level character before.
ReplyDelete