Since about January my main MMO has been Star Wars: The Old Republic. It is likely roughly tied with Lord of the Rings Online for the game that I actively played for the longest stretch. I subbed up the day of launch in December 2011, and stayed subbed until the 5.2 patch after Iokath was released, which I believe was in April 2017. That is nearly six solid years subbed up and logging in, which for me is a hell of a long run on any game. I love the Star Wars setting, and I love the variety of outcomes you can get on different playthroughs of SWTOR due to each class having a different 1-50 story, and dialogue choices. For most that that time I was happy as a clam, or a pig in mud, or whatever your favorite animal based euphemism for contentment may be. Unfortunately, Bioware seemed to completely lose their way around 2016 with the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne, and to my tastes it took a really long time for the game to recover.
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| Shown here is a map of one part of Corellia, and the kind of content I was accustomed to until Knights of the Fallen Empire came out. The map on the left is the zone I am currently exploring, which has a ton of nooks and crannies, places that serve no purpose save to enhance immersion like a bar with a working juke box, and perhaps a dozen quests. This is itself just one zone of a larger planet, which has five areas of roughly the same size. The switch from this style of expansive explorable content to the tiny zones with little to see of the "Knight's of" expansions, cerca 2016, felt like a major downgrade to me. It took years for the developers to get back to this style of worldbuilding. |
I had a lot of issues with the game during the "Knights of" era. My biggest gripe was the switch from open world areas, that felt like actual planets, to a really linear storyline that played like a visual novel and a MMO had a love child. That isn't to say that the expansions didn't have some engaging stories in them. There are actually excellent on your first playthrough, and I enjoyed them quite a bit when they first came out. Both Knights of expansions contain polished content with high production values, and feel very cinematic the first time you see them. However, they offer very little new on subsequent playthroughs. Choices offered turn out to be largely flavor once you have tried out several of them, and Empire and Republic characters get completely identical stories. In addition there are very few open world exploration zones, and even in those few little really worth discovering. Perhaps worst of all, the moment-to-moment gameplay consists largely of cutscenes interspersed with some of the most bland and repetitive fights SWTOR has to offer. Tons of nearly identical corridors are stuffed with mobs that you have to take down to progress to the next cutscene.
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| This is the view out of the republic spaceport on Corellia. It's likely one of the least attractive planets in the game, and I still think it's an impressive sight. This also is a tiny section of the map above. Even back in 2011 SWTOR was considered an ugly game by many, and nowadays the graphics are often considered almost laughably bad. Maybe it's because I grew up in the Atari / Nintendo era, but I have always found these criticisms completely baffling. For a game that runs well on a toaster, I think the graphics are quite impressive. |
So in KotET and KotFE, we got expansions that for me were strong at first glance but rapidly became really boring on repeated playthroughs. This was in sharp contrast to the rest of the game where high replayability was a major strength. Overall, the gameplay in KoTET and KotFE ended up feeling like a major downgrade compared to the game up until that point. For me that was compounded by the gearing system of the 5.0 era. Until 5.0 end game instances and PvP rewarded points that you could save up and use to eventually buy the gear set of your choice, like pretty much every other MMO. However, Bioware seemed to think this was letting players gear up too quickly at the cap. Seemingly in an attempt to try and stretch out the endgame, SWTOR switched to a "command crates" system where you were rewarded crates yielding gear completely at random. The odds of any given crate having a piece of gear that was an upgrade you needed got lower and lower the closer you were to a full set at a given item level. It was incredibly frustrating to open several crates in a row and get vendor trash out of all of them.
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| As in most MMOs, the true endgame is fashion for players that aren't heavily into raiding or PvP, and SWTOR (often called "space Barbie" by players who have their tongues only slightly in their cheeks) is no different. In fact, it's arguable better than most because in addition to your character there is a whole group of NPCs that you can also dress up. Shown here is the squad of the current character I am playing, most of whom only have slight changes to their default gear (a helmet here, a pair of boots there). Any humanoid companion is completely customizable, with six equipment slots to swap in and out in addition to various choices for their head. |
Added to storyline that I found overly repetitive and a gearing system I hated, the pace of new content releases also started to slow to a crawl. By Spring 2017 the only thing keeping me in the game was the hope that a new area coming out in April would be a return to form for the studio. Unfortunately, when it finally was released the new area ended up being Iokath. To this day Iokath is probably the area of the game I enjoy the least on a normal 1-to-cap playthrough, and I cancelled my sub about a month after it came out. After that, watching from the sidelines I saw what started as a slight content drought start to approach the Chilean desert of true maintenance mode.
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| Even companions like M1-4X here, that don't wear equipment, have some customization options if you go hunting for them. To get this paint job, I had to add two-factor authentication to my account and fly out to a space station at the edge of the galaxy to find the vendor that sold it. |
After Iokath, no new explorable areas would be added until December 2018, nearly two years later. Even that new area, Ossus*, only contained about four hours of new content. Perhaps a week of evenings if you got serious about it and maxed out your local reputation with dailies. Stories in the gaming press of personnel assigned to SWTOR and financial resources that the game brought in being funneled into failed projects like Anthem did nothing to make me question my lack of loyalty. For me, it only confirmed that I was right to walk away when I did.
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| Flying in to Ossus to take screenshots. By the time Ossus came out it late 2018, I think Bioware had finally gotten the message that players really like having new areas worth exploring. Even a very slickly presented story isn't enough by itself to keep most players engaged, especially if it's essentially the exact same story every time you play it. |
All of this kept me out of the game until Onslaught was released in late 2019. By then it looked like enough new content, Ossus, Dantooine, and two new planets with Onslaught, had been added for it to be worth sticking my head in again. I enjoyed Onslaught quite a bit, but it still only kept me entertained for a few months. I considered coming back for Legacy of the Sith, but that turned out to be more like a nice patch than an actual expansion, with two or three hours of content for most players and not so much as a new daily area when it first launched. For the last three years I have been keeping an eye on the game**, waiting for enough new content to come out for it to be worth subbing. I would say as of the last big patch the game is finally there, and I think I'll be settling in for a while (eight months and counting).
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| Once you land on Ossus you find an interesting set of zones with a unique orange sand on black basalt aesthetic, and a story that plays very differently depending on whether you are aligned with the Empire or the Republic. Though not as large as most launch era planets, it does feel like a proper new area that is rewarding to explore. |
Based on what I've seen since I came back in January, I would say that the team has finally found their new groove. There are a good bit of new content and activities to talk about. It's not all peaches and kittens, but on the balance the current game is better to my tastes than it has been in years. I thought that was what I sat down to write about, but my lead in completely got away from me. More on the current game in the next post!
*Thought short, I did eventually find out that Ossus is excellent with a cool aesthetic and a fun little story. That's actually a good synopsis of the modern team's development style. They don't put out much content, but what they do release is well done and tends to feel like a solid addition to the game.
**By "keeping an eye on the game," I mainly mean reading Shintar's excellent Going Commando. She covers SWTOR really thoroughly, and has a generally sunny take on the game that I enjoy.
This ties in very well with the post I wrote a couple of days ago about loyalty to a game and the idea of one game being able to provide everything you need. I played SWtoR for a few months some years back and blogged about it a bit. I enjoyed it - I played for well over a hundred hours - but in all that time I only played one character into the 50s and another into the 30s and the main reason I ended up moving on to other games was the sheer amount of story that just never stopped coming.
ReplyDeleteI found the endless voice-acted dialog quite overwhelming, particularly because even playing just one character I never really knew who any of the people I was talking to were or why I was supposed to care about them. I found it very much a case of "more is way too much" and the knowledge that this was just the tip of an iceberg, that there were maybe a dozen more classes, each with its own equally verbose, complicated, confusing storyline, was anything but a positive point.
I imagine that if I was much more of a Stars War fan than I am and if it was twenty years ago, this sheer weight of content would have seemed far more appealing to me but today, reading your post, I can't help thinking the pared-down version with a much tighter storyline you only need to do once and then move on sounds quite appealing.
I often think about going back and playing SWtoR again but mostly what puts me off is the story. I'm a lot more willing to spend time watching cut scenes and clicking on dialog options than I once was but I just don't think the Star Wars setting works for me. It's always seemed oddly light, lacking in substance, not ephemeral but insubstantial somehow, as though all the scenery is painted flats with empty space behind. That applies to the movies, the comics, every version I've encountered and SW: toR had the same foggy sense of irreality. Again, I think that's most likely a function of there just being far too much of it, combined with my not being *that* interested to begin with.
I still would like to go back and have another bash it sometime, though. I wonder if it's possible to start at the point where you stopped? I'd be quite interested to try that.
I seem to remember that you actually quite liked the story when you tried it, Bhag! I recall being quite surprised by that since you were never a big fan of story in MMOs, but you seemed pleasantly surprised by it yourself. The other things I remember is that the game defaulted you to really ugly graphics settings at the beginning, that you were intrigued by the housing, and found yourself getting distracted by some side quests. If I recall correctly, your main complaint was that the combat was so easy it was boring even you (something that has been fixed to some degree since then). You should definitely give it another try just to see what you think now... not that I'm biased or anything. 😉
DeleteAs for your question, you do have to level up to a certain point to access that feature but you can skip a lot of story if you want. There are jumps straight into the "Knights of" expansions, to Iokath afterwards, or to Ossus after that, which will autocomplete any previous main storylines on that character and send you right into the new stuff. I wouldn't personally recommend going that route, but if you want to experiment, why not!
I bet you're right about all of that. I deliberately didn't go back to read what I'd posted because what matters isn't so much what I thought at the time as what impression I have of the experience now. I can remember precisely nothing about any of the story in SW:tOR from when I played, so whatever I thought about it at the time has had no lasting impact. Then again, I have a terrible memory so that doesn't prove all that much.
DeleteI'm increasingly finding that referring back what I wrote years ago is not very useful in helping me with choices. I might want to make now. I seem like a stranger to myself in old posts, sometimes. Also, I seem to be relentlessly positive about almost every game I ever post about, which is nice to read but not always all that helpful in making comparisons. As I often say, I am very easily pleased - in the moment. In reflection, though, I tend to focus on the negatives a lot more.
There was one very specific problem for me with SW:tOR, though, that I ought to have mentioned in the comment above and that's that at the time I stopped playing I was also trying to listen to the cricket commentary on the radio and it became impossible to do both because of the huge amount of voiceover in the game. That was the main reason I stopped playing and I think it's why I now think of the story as being quite annoying. I no longer listen to the radio while I play games so perhaps I wouldn't have the same view of it any more...
If the issue is too much story, heading straight into the later content would certainly cut down on that. The stories are much more self contained in later content, especially from Knights of the Old Republic on. You could start at the beginning of that, and not need to know much at all about what came before it.
DeleteHowever, if the setting doesn't do it for you that's another matter. It's a purposeful mishmash of very breezy science fiction and fantasy settings. Definitely more Flash Gordon and Everquest/ DnD than Isaac Asimov and Tolkien. It's generally anything but hard science fiction.
However, for me the setting is a big part of the draw. It took up an enormous amount of my metal real-estate when I was a kid, and getting to run around in that setting is always a joy. Like any setting, it's also ultimately only as interesting as what you decide to do with it. For example, Rogue One and Andor are though provoking science fiction by nearly any standard, just like a lot of other Star Wars is a guilty pleasure at best :-)
Thanks for the shout-out!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I'll say for 5.0's gearing system is that I genuinely think it was incompetence rather than malice. I do think the devs intended for it to have a positive impact: No more confusing vendors, just open the boxes that magically appear in your bags! No more convoluted upgrade paths or elitism, everyone earns gear the same way! The problem was that players like goals, and if the reward for everything is just another roll of the dice, that's simply not compelling or satisfying at all. It was just shocking how blind they were to this, considering there was a precedent within the same game of how much people hated that kind of progression system and they just ignored it.
I would agree that the period around Iokath was a low point for the game in many ways. I just appreciated that they were trying to change gears again after KotFE/KotET and the disaster that was Galactic Command, and I was willing to give them a chance. It was kind of weird just how awkward their content releases were around that time, as if they'd literally lost everyone who knew how to do things well, whether it was building new planets or writing good story, and needed to work their way up again from scratch. There was clear improvement with each consecutive update though, and Ossus I still think was amazing. I always thought that reducing it to four hours of story was a bit reductive, as I had so much fun there doing dailies, hunting world bosses, collecting datacrons and lore etc.
I agree that they have been pretty good in the last couple of years when it comes to releasing new story and planetary areas, even if the group content side of it has suffered a bit. I'm curious to see what 7.6 will be like as it sounds like this might be the first major patch in more than two years that doesn't come with a new zone but will instead focus on new things to do on existing planets (not confirmed, but that's what the early tease sounded like).
Once I finally did get around to trying Ossus, I really enjoyed it. It's a fun area to explore, and the story plays very differently from the Empire and Republic perspectives. I really look forward to it on a normal playthrough now.
DeleteI feel like there is enough new stuff for solo players they can afford to focus on group content for the next big patch if they want to. For example, I haven't even done the lead in quest chains to most of the new daily areas yet, much less maxed out my rep with any of the new factions.