from:
http://www.boathammer.com/2012/01/done- ... -also.html
Done with TOR
I played for about three weeks, which is a week or two shorter than I thought I would. More on why I quit later...
The Old Republic is the best MMORPG ever made. That's ... not as impressive as it sounds. It's the best in the same way that the fastest man alive ran the hundred meters .02 seconds faster than anyone else.
The so-called "Fourth Pillar" -- story, was ... OK, I guess. What I really liked was the voice acting.
I found the moral choices occasionally irritating, like in previous BioWare games. A half-dozen times I feel like their "good" (light-side) choices favor sentimentality over actual morality.
Since I don't want to spoil (or explain) the Trooper story, I'll instead refer obliquely to the final choice in Mass Effect 2, which has similar issues. The last choice in Mass Effect 2 is between a morally distasteful option (though I wouldn't call it evil), and a morally "clean" option. However, on closer examination, the morally icky choice might save millions or billions of lives, clearly outweighing any distastefulness ... unless you are BioWare, where I guess respect for the dead is more important than the lives of the living.
The folks at BioWare should watch more Murder She Wrote. I didn't realize until I watched it again as an older adult, but in the show Jessica Fletcher is frequently placed in morally awkward (and difficult) situations, yet she always handles them impeccably. She would be a better Jedi than any that BioWare have constructed.
Every other major non-story system in the game is as-good or marginally better than the equivalent system in WoW (now the second best MMORPG ever made). I realize you can't radically improve every system in a new MMORPG, but it would be nice if, say, combat had enjoyed the same radical upgrade that story had, since combat is omnipresent. Instead combat is improved over WoW, but not greatly.
Space Combat is essentially a flash game -- an immensely enjoyable flash game.
The brand-newish elements that TOR added -- ships and companions -- are first-rate, I think.
You get great, usable gear all the time. You can travel almost anywhere very quickly. There are items (holochrons) that you can find that give permanent stat boosts. TOR often thinks it is a single-player game, and I find that incredibly endearing.
I would say the crafting is dramatically improved over WoW, but I have one major quibble, at least with Cybertech. In Cybertech, every three levels you get four new upgrade recipes with two researchable upgrades each. However, it's unusual to actually discover both upgrades before you get those three levels -- often it takes a massive effort just to unlock the first of the two, which is disappointing.
The reason I quit is the same reason I've mostly sworn off MMORPG's -- the combat. If an MMORPG is built around combat (and most of them are) then combat is the most important thing, and it must be thrilling. Solo combat in TOR is actually fairly variable, which was rarely true in WoW. But much improved is not improved enough. MMORPG-style target-and-hotkey combat is limited, and, if anyone is paying attention, never imitated by any single-player game -- the same single-player games that copy everything imaginable from MMORPG's and each other.
Ultimately, in MMORPG's, you get very good at combat by doing things like jamming keys, and running spreadsheets, and reading forums, and carefully monitoring skill rotations and cooldowns and procs, and watching youtube videos, and just playing forever so you can hit max level. In the games I prefer, like action games, or shooters, or pinball, you get better by playing -- and playing them is immensely fun.
There is no end to the MMORPG blogs that frequently ridicule people who are bad at MMORPG's. As I've said before, the people who are bad at MMORPG's are the only sane ones. Their mistake is treating MMORPG's like any normal, fun game -- you play the game, and you get better at it. Being good in modern MMORPG's requires avoiding fun, which is insane. And I have no interest in insanity.
Posted by boatorious at 8:12 AM