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So now Star Wars: The Old Republic comes along. Big name developers (Bioware, makers of such titles as Mass Effect and Dragon Age), massive budget, and even bigger IP. SWTOR really sucked me in with incredibly well done stories, voice acting, and cutscenes. I had a hard time stopping until I was level 50 and had finished my story line. However, for a lot of people, myself included, an MMO really gets judged by their lasting value. Do I feel the need or desire to log in everyday? Do I want to progress my character and get better and better? The simple answer is, eh.. not really.
When Rift has a bug, it gets fixed. Sometimes not as soon as I like, but it gets fixed and whats under the bug is a really good raid/encounter/game. However, I am not sure whats under the massive pile of bugs in SWTOR is actually a good game. There are so many little things that just annoy me.
I can’t search for an item name in the Auction House without first using a series of lagging drop down menus to select the category, sub-category, and type… really?
I can’t bind my mouse buttons.
In Fullscreen Windowed I can’t open anything behind it.
When you do Warzones you get Warzone Commendations. You can then buy 10 Mercenary Commendations with 30 Warzone Commendations. When you have 200 Mercenary Commendations and 200 Warzone Commendations (Remember you use Warzone Commendations to buy Mercenary Commendations) you can buy a Champion Gearbag which has Centurion Commendations in it. You can use the Centurion Commendations to buy Centurion Gear, the worst quality gear. But wait, there’s more! Once you hit Valor Rank 60 you can start getting Battlemaster gear bags, which give you Champion Commendations. With the Champion Commendations you can buy Champion quality gear. Having fun yet? The other exciting way to get Champion gear is to do dailies which give you the Champion Gearbags, that contain the Centurion Commendations. Along with those incredibly worthless Centurion Commendations you are giving the exciting 10% chance to get a Champion Gear Token for a specific piece of armor: “Champion Main-Hand Weapon Token”. Since it is completely random and does not see if you have the item already, you can start a collection of useless gear tokens. I have 7, yes seven, Champion Belt Tokens.
The PvE Commendation system is just as widly insane. So much so that I still don’t fully understand it.
There is only one working loot system for raids, which is an auto assigned round robin. Regardless of you needing the item or not, if an item drops for your class it will roll among all the players who can use the item and auto assign it. Our second week in raiding we had two sorcerers, one completely geared out for that tier of gear, the other with just questing blues. The geared out player did not need any of the items that could possible drop in the instance, but the system assigned every single Sorc item to him, instead of the under geared Sorc. When he made a GM ticket to have the items transferred to the under geared Sorc he was told he had already used his 3 allotted item transfers.
There are no Macros.
There are no Addons.
There is no Combat Log.
Every time you die in a Warzone there is about a 2% chance you won’t be able to respawn and you’ll be kicked for being afk.
Every time a patch is released there is about a 10% chance your server on their CDN will have corrupt data and force you to redownload the entire game.
Classes can need upward of 3 different builds, DPS, healer/tank, PvP. But there is no duel-spec, and resetting your skill tree ramps up to the 100k very quickly. If you were to buy 100k credits for SWTOR on Ebay it would cost $5. I respec about 6 times a week. That is hypothetically a cost of $120 a month (Not condoning buying in game currency for real world money. Just using it to make a point).
To learn crafting recipes of a higher quality you must create an item, then Reverse Engineer it. When you RE it you get a small portion of the materials back and roughly a 10% chance to learn the next tier of quality. Green to Blue, Blue to Purple. Then there is another layer where some items are named, and have a chance to teach you 1 of 4 recipes. The recipes will be identical except for the main stat, i.e. does it have Willpower, Strength, Cunning, or Aim? So a hardcore crafter can spend weeks crafting the Blue item, then REing it at a cost of millions of Credits. It does not detect if you already know the recipe, and you obviously can’t choose which one you learn. You may learn the one you want on the first try or you might learn the 3 you don’t need. Now here is the fun part because after the hundredth try it might taunt you with a message of “You already know that recipe”. It is always fun to see that. Really makes you warm and fuzzy in your belly.
I could go on like this for awhile but I guess my point is, when there is a bug or problem with Rift I feel confident that underneath there is a really good game. It makes it easy to ignore the bug for a few days until they fix it. In SWTOR there is so many problems, so many bugs, that I have no idea if underneath it all is a good game. Any problem in Rift, and again there are some, the same problem is in SWTOR yet a thousand times worse. The Devs never communicate, the community team isn’t really sure what a community actually is, forums themselves are organized in such a awful way it could have only been constructed by someone who has never played SWTOR, let alone any other MMO.
Both Rift and SWTOR copied a lot from other MMOs, like WoW and Everquest. They took the basic MMO model and they added some new, innovative and nifty ideas. Rift has the massive Soul system and the dynamic and random events throughout the world. But, when Trion made Rift that made sure the parts that they did copy worked, I mean hell if somebody already did it, it shouldn’t be all that hard to duplicate it.
I get the feeling that Trion is made up of real MMO gamers. People who have raided, and PvPed in past games, and they know what gamers want because they are themselves gamers. In SWTOR I get the feeling that the people who programmed the game have never played an MMO. It is as if they got a list of specs from the game designers and pumped out a piece of software. When people ask Bioware, why isn’t there a macro system or a combat log, I feel they genuinely do not understand why those things are so important to so many of MMO players. You can see the corporate outsourcing and control throughout the game of SWTOR. I can just imagine the countless budgeting meetings where people who have never played a MMO sit around and look at a list of features, like Macros, Addons, Combat Logs, and Duel Specs/Multiple Roles and they don’t understand why those are important, and they inevitably cut them because they cannot fathom their significance beyond a price tag. This corporate level control and micromanagement bleeds through into the game very heavily.
In conclusion,
Rift is a solid game with a great team behind it. The problems in Rift are address quickly and logically.
SWTOR is outsourced, disconnected, arrogant, and rushed. The questing was fun for a couple weeks though.
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