TOR weekend opinions & experiences

Now that the NDA has apparently been lifted, here's a post I made on the TOR forums a while back.

Hi. Figured I'd try to write up some concise feedback to complement the in-game surveys.

Important to note: I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who prefers character-building over social aspects and tends to solo. I do not PVP nor am I interested in PVP in any way. I played the BH and Sith Warrior classes to 14 (speccing into powertech and juggernaut, respectively), got a smuggler to 8 (just into Coruscant), and did some puttering around with the other classes.

It may also be worth noting that I came into this test biased against the game; I'd canceled my preorder several weeks ago due to concerns about Origin and a general feeling of disinterest with regards to the combat in the game.

The computer I am testing on is approximately three years old, and was purchased as parts at the $1000 range. Any technical issues I list may be affected by this. (8gb DDR2 RAM, 2.5ghz dual core intel processor, ATI HD 4800 gfx)

Also: I am, in an attempt to comply with the directive not to suggest sweeping changes or the addition of features, simply going to state what I did and did not like about each part of the game. (Edit: Okay, I made a few suggestions. Sorry! I tried to keep them simple.) Take it as you will - I'm sure the developers have already considered a number of options for each of these; I'm just hoping my feedback can contribute to their decisions therein.

Systems
- The trouble I had getting the client to install and patch was ... Interesting. I'm glad I'm patient enough to read the forums, for the most part, or it would have been much more painful. Finding the right drivers (ATI 1.9 instead of 1.8),
- The character creation and selection screen was clear. Ample information was available about class roles, though more data about abilities could have been useful.
- Character customization was both interestingly useful (compare to other games I've played where only one or two options aren't hideous) and surprisingly sparse; in particular the inability to make [class] of [race] was inconvenient, as I find the more options the better (especially when they're all unambiguously humanoid in form and features)
- The 'Tutorial' popups were at first useful, but shortly became bothersome, especially at the rate they pop up. The ability to dismiss a specific tutorial without opening it would be nice. As it is, I found myself itching to disable them early on.
- As posted elsewhere on this forum, Zone Instances make grouping frankly difficult. The cooldown prevents people from using it as a cooldownless teleport home, but the fact that it does teleport you home makes it very inconvenient to use for any other purpose. If the concern is that people switching instances may inadvertently do so into danger and get themselves killed, have it spawn them at the nearest medical bay instead. The current implementation punishes attempts to form groups rather severely.
- Quest items need to scale with the number of people in the area. The simplest implementation of this is to have a static number which must always be active in the area, and have them spawn in a random other spot whenever one is used. (so you could predetermine ten 'spawn spots', and have three 'spawned items'; thus at any given time, three items exist, but each time one is used it respawns somewhere else.)
- The 'Quest Icon' on maps is small and simple enough that it's sometimes difficult to notice, even when you're looking for it. Making it green (the same green as that you get when you're supposed to go up stairs, for example) would be a very nice change.

Environment
When I first loaded the game, it seemed choppy, the graphics marred by a rugged edges. I took this in stride, and got used to it, but the choppiness (vertical tearing, poor framerate while turning the camera) is still jarring. Other than that, however, the environment is stunningly beautiful. This is perhaps the part of the game in which you have truly best succeeded - TOR makes you feel as though you are in the world of Star Wars, albeit one without weather or stellar cycles, and with apparently permanently stationary capital ships in the background. The 'sky' paintings are beautiful, but do not seem as well defined as the painterly objects (esp. mountains), which look fantastic.

A note here specifically about the foliage; I did not notice until quite some time playing that you seem to be using pivoting sprites to the best effect I've ever seen them used in a game. Until I carefully watched the grass, I'd assumed it was somehow rendering everything in three dimensions - such is the quality of the illusion that even watching it carefully it took a few seconds to figure out what you'd done. Kudos on that. (Esp. on the Sith capital.)

The environments look nice with and without shadows, though at times I find that the view can sometimes feel more onerous when overshadowed by tree masses.

NPCs
(Note: by NPCs I mean humanoid non-character entities)
Though TOR suffers from the archetypal 'standing around' NPCs that MMO players are by now well familiar with, the detail put into their standing emotes in cities and occasional conversations makes the cities feel reasonably alive. Players arriving by taxi or speeder bike helps this considerably. Unfortunately, enemy NPCs are not so carefully considered, and mostly stand around like idiots waiting for you to come and kill them, which somewhat breaks immersion. That said, I found the NPCs quite detailed as a rule, and the variety of attacks and gear (as well as the naming schemes which allow you to predict what they will do) they have at their disposal makes ... Disposing of them more entertaining than I had expected. Some randomization of gear textures among similar NPCs might be nice. (unless they are NPCs who would logically don homogeneous uniforms)

Creatures
(Note: by Creatures I mean non-humanoid non-character entities)
I love the variety in size and scale of these things. The occasional swarm of useless tiny things and perhaps a few swarms of neutral, useless critters might be nice for ambiance (non-SW example: ravens picking at a corpse which fly away when other creatures get near, bees tending to honey, etc.) but otherwise the creatures both feel very Star Wars and very varied, no mean feat.

PCs
(Note: by PCs I mean player characters)
PC models are quite nice (excellent texturing!), and the variety of animations they are capable of, both facial and otherwise, are impressive. Unfortunately the limitation of four possible frames (which we shall dub Wimp, Hero, Giant, and Tubby) gives players a strangely samey appearance despite the amazing variety of gear graphics I've seen. (a relative dearth of gear drops contributes to this particular issue, as though there are many different gear models, most players of a similar level will be wearing near-identical quest gear. Perhaps it would be possible to key gear texture to LS/DS points in missions in some way to further differentiate?)

Conversations
(Note: by Conversations I refer to non-CG ingame cutscenes, usually with dialog options.)
I love the work you've done here. With a few exceptions (some of the Sith missions in korriban had my temporarily watching a stone wall, and occasionally an NPC would appear to have missed their cue, and on one notable occasion an NPC decided to speak without moving her lips) the work portraying emotion is brilliant, and if a few of the LS/DS choices are a bit odd ("I want to kill A HUNDRED JEDI!" +100 light side points! for the Sith Inquisitor, given it makes a bit more sense in context) they're all the more entertaining for it.

My only real frustration here is the occasional issue where my character's chosen prompt seems to enact a dialogue only vaguely related to it. (e.g. something like "I trust you" becoming "You're the best there is, now go fight that army while I stand back here and watch.", which occasionally makes my character act jarringly different than I expect. (This may also be a symptom of my tendency to play ostensibly 'good' characters despite being a Sith Warrior helping his master, say, acquire a particularly effective torture device.)

Storylines
What I have experienced of the Sith Warrior and Bounty Hunter continually surprised me. My Bounty Hunter's missions were never simply 'kill this guy', but 'kill this guy with such and such huge complication which allows you to talk through it in entertaining ways', and of particular note were the final missions on Huttaa and the final bounty mission on Naar Shadaa. My Sith Warrior kept surprising me with entertaining light side options, and though his storyline was weaker the excellent contrast provided by his first Companion made the experience of leveling him truly enjoyable. I found the Smuggler storyline also very interesting, but was less enthused by the goody-goody and/or knowledge-seeking of the Jedi Order.

That said, I'm sure those particular story tracks appeal to quite a few people, so that's not a downside - more options are GOOD! If I liked all of the storylines for the same reasons, that would be an extremely bad sign.

The way in which different classes' storylines go to similar areas makes grouping not completely impossible, though the occasional jump in difficulty when a max-level elite is suddenly in your way is not always welcome.

Companions
Fantastic addition to the game, especially the ability to sell all of your junk and go on missions. I found Mako a little bland, probably because HER storyline seems to really only deviate from yours (and as such her individuality seems to really only deviate from yours, beyond disagreeing with your choices occasionally) once you get your starship. She's a nice complement to the BH's goals, but doesn't really shine as a character, at least by the point in the game I've gotten to. Vette... Is fantastic. A companion who disagrees with your every impulse, as a Sith, both to do evil and to honor authority, brought quite a few smiles to my face. She turns what could otherwise be a very bland and onerous character progression into a succession of awkward moments and attempts to rile everyone I could possibly make fun of. As a goody-goody sith, I positively cheered when I was given the option to remove Vette's shock collar, only to find she'd kept it on anyways, so far as I could see. (though I no longer received the option to Shock her. I'm not sure if this was just because no more options for that were scripted.) The Smuggler companion I found frankly boring; when a tendency to name ones' weapons is the most interesting thing I can say about a character, and even that tends to give him a personality somewhere between a naive child and a mirthless killer, I'm not really sure where to start.

Grouping
I tried grouping with a friend from start to level 10 or so. Worked reasonably well (Sith Warrior & Sith Inquisitor), each of us going our separate ways for class missions then returning afterwards, but the lack of incentive for helping each other in missions (class missions neither scale nor give particularly good XP in groups) made this feel less like grouping and more like occasional participation, like that awkward moment at the dinner table when you've come home after work or school and no one really knows how to start talking about their day.

...Extended over the entire time we grouped. It was strange, to say the least. An exercise in long-distance silent partnership.

That said, partying up for heroic quests was fun, and the way groups work together (stacked buffs, etc) is rather nice. Recasting the buffs gets strangely tedious, considering their long duration and short recast. They'd seem more fluid as class-specific auras, but I suppose then I couldn't derive secret joy out of anonymously buffing every idle player in the city.

Unfortunately, non-kill quests don't share objective counts with the rest of the group, making collection and looting quests rather onerous, especially with the "That guy needs four more and I just finished the quest" syndrome. Make groups feel like you're working together; not every group needs to feel like you're rival acolytes on Korriban.

Combat
From the videos you'd shown at various conventions, I'd assumed this was going to be the downfall of the game. I loved KOTOR's storylines, but the combat showcased in your videos looked (to my unenlightened eyes) samey and boring.

The key is RESOURCES. Every class has them. I had no idea they existed before I joined the Beta. Every class has to *manage* their resources in different ways (okay, yes, cross-faction class types have exactly the same resource called something else. That wasn't an issue for me.) This means that as a Sith Warrior, I need to balance my normal attacks with heavy hitters, think beforehand about how I'm going to approach something, and curse the Force whenever I run out of Rage. As a Bounty Hunter, I consider how fast to unload and on what targets, allocating quantities of rage to each enemy. The amount of thought that these resources mandate makes the relatively bland set of combat abilities (okay, I lie - the bounty hunter's aren't bland, they're glorious, I just wish I could use Death From Above twice as often.) much more engaging than the gameplay videos had hinted at.

User Interface
Some more customizability here would be nice. Being able to change the color of the panels (ex: to red) would be a start. WoW/WAR-type mutable API would be better, but vastly more difficult and time consuming to implement, so BELAY THAT SUGGESTION. You provide very nice data fields with just about any information I could possibly want. The default UI is slick, clean, fits into the universe, and gives us a one-stop-shop for information. I just wish it wouldn't sometimes completely fail to load character models, etc.

Conclusion
I've changed my opinion about the preorder. This game is worth the money if only for the storylines and the wonder of seeing a world that really lives and breathes the Star Wars mythos and feel. So that was good. Personal objective for this weekend testing accomplished. On a broader scale, however, I feel that TOR has a lot of potential and a lot of new ideas marred by the strange tendency to 'default' any ideas not explicitly different to (oh god, and here I say it) WOW 'norms'.

Now, to clarify - I very much like (and fear) WOW. It did many things right, but also implemented several solutions to issues which were harmful to the game as a whole. At this point in time, having a meaningful conversation about the future of MMOs while attempting specifically not to mention it is silly, not because it's the be-all end-all of MMOs, but because A) it took a bunch of good ideas and put them together, and B) its featureset has become the de facto 'norm' for MMOs due to its popularity.

That said, it has some issues. Items getting damaged and repaired, for example - what purpose does this serve? Is it a death penalty? A Gold Sink? It certainly doesn't cost a lot, and I succeeded in a few missions only by respawning incessantly, so it doesn't seem to accomplish either. Training skill levels? What for? Is it a gold sink? Making it extremely difficult to 'hit' enemies five levels higher is another example; why make higher level content more difficult than it needs to be for an adventurous low-level character who's wandering out of their depth? Eventually, enemies will simply do too much damage or take too long to kill; making them functionally invulnerable to your damage because of your level is unnecessary. A number of issues in TOR are like this - Questgivers standing still, my Juggernaut's skills look awfully similar in type and specifics to Warrior skills (interrupt with an 8 second cooldown? Intercept? Taunt?), and though I agree that these are all valuable tools to a tank, I feel as though separate functionality to showcase the 'Star Wars' feel would be nice.

In sum, you have made an excellent game that clearly distinguishes itself from the existing swath of MMOs by its setting, amazing environmental work, fantastic voice acting, quest composition and variety, writing, storylines, and companions. It has a few engine issues, but nothing that you won't be able to fix before launch. I would recommend, however, going through your featureset and saying to yourselves: "Why did we implement this like this? What was the logic behind this choice?" If the answer is "Because it's the norm" despite the fact that it's needlessly onerous or complicated, perhaps that feature needs rethinking.

And, finally, I would like to thank everyone involved in the SWTOR project for providing us all with some excellent memories, and (at least myself) with the opportunity to play as and alongside some excellent new characters.

Still working on this madness!

Pretty close to ready for open testing; granted, I've not had the pleasure of being able to thoroughly test the 9-player possibilities, and hero balance is likely catastrophic, but the game systems are mostly online.

Here's a picture of the map's current iteration from the top:

Hope to put this online - for better or for worse - soon!