I get it. WWII wasn't cool. The war, that is. Not the Nintendo console. They keep reminding me over here, because ABSOLUTELY EVERBODY takes personal credit for how it ended. "We won!" Yes, thanks very much. You showed us, each and everyone of you, personally. And since we're being so nice and patriotic, how about all of you also take the blame for your incredibly shitty football? There, I said it. 1966 was quite a while back, you know. Not as long as 1945, of course...
But regardless how much we totally kick your ass at football and don't even give a fuck about our matches against you, because we only care about our scores against Holland, the war was bad. I get that. But you guys had your revenge by sending James Blunt and Simon Cowell into the world. We're even, okay? Seriously, just give us a break.
I thought we were cool, England. I really thought these old scores had all been settled. And now this. More fucking Coronation Street.
Your whole team is centered around one dumb, ugly, overrated ogre.
Let me try and summarize the most recent plotline on that show: Hysterical Bitch A breaks up with Moronical Pub Owner B, who can't get over the loss of his relationship and, in his frustration, shags Evil Bitch from Hell C. And knocks her up. With twins. And since Hysterical Bitch A still doesn't want him back, Moronical Pub Owner B thinks, "Meh, fuck it" (again :P) and decides to get married to Evil Bitch from Hell C.
Life could be so simple for our happy B+C couple. But then she tragically loses the babies. Lucky kids - their potential life-long suffering on Coronation Street had ended before it even began. But being the evil bitch from hell that C is, she decides to make the best of her dead babies and blames it on Bs ex: Poor A! C claims she had lost the kids, because A pushed her down some stairs. So B gets all pissed off and pulls off the whole marriage thing, just to piss A off. And then, a few minutes after (!) they're married, A presents proof that C lost her babies all by herself and nobody pushed her. So B feels like shit for marrying C instead of believing A. And C feels like shit, because B hates her for lying - along with everybody else.
A, however, is something special: For the first time in the 2 years I have lived on this island, a character on that show is actually allowed to be happy: She moves to Barbados to hook up with Random Lameass Excuse Playboy to Dissolve Stupid Plotline D and never comes back to Coronation Street. There is still no happiness on that street - leave or be miserable until you die horribly. Still... give it another week or so and they'll probably find out that her plane had been shot down by the Vietcong.
We'll miss you!
But here's the kicker: One of the characters, Serious Dude from Failed Police Show E, is a rapist. As seen in one episode, where he pushes his unwilling girlfriend against the door and after the commercial break she's alone on the floor and crying. Coming from a country that shows full nude shower gel and vaginal soap commercials in between cartoon shows for kids, that whole scene wasn't as shocking to me as it could have been, but it got the message across: E is an asshole.
They met on the internet.
And as the predictable plotline around E drags on and the whole nation wants to see him brought to justice, there's Gullible Lesbian Haircut Chick F, who doesn't believe E is a rapist and makes out with him. And every single time it happens, people are watching excitedly. "Ooooo I bet he's gonna do it today!" F is a really, really annoying character and an incredibly lousy actress. And it's just a tv show. BUT COME ON! Right now, everyone is waiting for her to get raped, because she's an annoying cow and she kinda deserves it. Wow. What the fuck?!
I love this country and all the weird people around here. I really do. And I don't wanna make fun of a nation's love for a tv show, which is full of insanely stupid people with insanely stupid problems, which they only have, because they're too fucking dumb to solve them. But sometimes, dear England, you're just a little bit creepy. And coming from a German, this is probably saying a lot...
Star Trek Online has gone the way of every MMORPG out there that isn't WoW and finally went Free2Play, tempting lots of people to give it a first (or second) look. And it lures people with a pretty cool teaser:
Right. Discover strange new worlds, make first contact with freaky aliens, play something that looks and feels just like the tv show. Notice the guy sitting in his captain's chair, bits of his ship exploding everywhere around him while he's issuing orders, voice-acting and everything? That's a load of crap. If you're planning on trying out STO, you should lower your expectations to something like this:
I know what you're thinking, but this is not just another F2P rant. In fact, I love STO, warts and all. But those warts are hairy and the size of an average meat loaf. Allow me to elaborate:
Meeting exciting new life forms on STO means shooting them. Exploring strange new worlds means scanning 3 computer terminals. If you hate killing and scanning things, this game is not for you.
The F2P teaser video is, simply put, a very cruel form of false advertising. The actual game contains about 5 minutes worth of (lousy) voice acting - if that. And there's a war raging with the Klingons, at the Romulan front, with the Breen, the Undine and pretty much every other fucking alien species that has nothing to do with the Federation. And that's what this game is all about - War. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're in the mood for it, but the game is being advertised as something much bigger, much better. Don't believe any of that garbage.
'Sword-swinging night elf chick' is not in the race selection, but alien customization lets you go crazy.
But let's focus on the cool aspects of the game for a minute. You get your very own ship, you get your own crew and you can customize the crap out of everything. The selection of ships includes just about any vessel you have ever seen in the Star Trek films and tv shows, from a tiny Delta-flyer to the Enterprise D style Galaxy class starship seen in the final TNG episode, All Good Things.
You get to tinker with the material of the hull plating, the windows, put a bit of a paint job on it, choose a bridge and, most importantly, put a shit-ton of weapons on it.
You get to customize everything, from the paintjob, to the looks of the bridge.
This is the bit where many players get confused, to say the least. There are single beam arrays, double beam arrays, single and dual cannons and heavy cannons, torpedo launchers, mine launchers and turrets. And all of them are available in various flavours such as phaser beam arrays, plasma cannons and transphasic mine launchers. While they all make perfect sense and are relatively easy to understand, you won't get the hang of it until you actually take the time to read up on their individual strengths and weaknesses. For instance, heavy cannons do a metric shitload of damage, but they only hit what's directly in front of your ship, meaning your vessel has to be very agile in order to hit stuff. Beam arrays, on the other hand, are considerably weaker in the damage department, but they hit pretty much everything around your ship, meaning it doesn't really matter how good you are at navigating your big, fat cruiser around a nimble enemy.
One of the best things about STO is shooting stuff in space with other players and the ships they create.
Same goes for the individual types of beams, cannons and what have you. Phaser weapons can disable enemy subsystems (weapons, engines etc.), plasma deals additional damage over time and so on. So if you want the perfect ship to match your individual play style, there are tons of means and ways to customize things to your liking. But to be perfectly realistic: If you don't give a shit about any of that stuff and just put on your ship whatever fits, you will still get all the way to the level cap with relative ease, unless you're a complete moron. There are no DPS meters, 95% of the game can be done solo and no one will notice whether your ship is highly optimized or just a flying collection of random junk.
Fleet Actions are chaotic, but lots of fun.
Same goes for your bridge officers. Those are the guys you put on your away team to accompany you during ground-based missions. And they come in all shapes and sizes, from Klingons to Ferengi to Andorians, Betazoids, Vulcans, Trill... you get the idea. You may even obtain rare officers like your very own Holo-Doc, an android, a Breen wearing a stylish space suit or your very own liberated Borg drone. You may choose your officers for their looks and for the sake of simply creating the kind of crew you had always imagined during your wet Trek dreams, where you get to captain your very own ship. After all, this particular part of STO makes that dream come true. Since each and every officer also gets their own individual abilities and skills, some players simply pick them for those, rather than looks. And once again, if you really don't give a crap about their looks or their abilities, you can still play STO just fine and without running into any trouble later on. All up to you.
Once your ship and crew are all set, you'll get to take them on awesome story missions, which the game refers to as 'episodes'. These episodes usually come with an interesting storyline, which unfolds as you hunt down all kinds of baddies in exciting space battles and awkward ground battles. Unfortunately, this applies to pretty much every mission in the entire game. Sometimes you may travel back in time and fight some "classic" Klingons as seen in the original series, sometimes you fight ethereal, ghost-like baddies, which will scare the shit out of you. But no matter how interesting the actual setting and the bad guys' appearance, you will always resolve conflict through violence.
Who are you people and what the fuck are you doing on my Sickbay?
For the most part, this is still a pretty rewarding experience. You get to play the whole thing all by yourself, using only your bridge officers to help you. You may, of course, team up with other people to tackle a mission, but the game never forces you to do so. If you want to do things at your own pace, enjoy the storyline all by yourself and not try to keep up with a bunch of hyperactive 12 year olds, who can't be bothered to say anything in chat apart from the occasional "ogog!1", then STO is probably worth a try.
Those who spend some time customizing, outfitting and training their crew members will get the most fun out of the game. It's awesome when my Klingon tactical officer rips Borg drones to shreds with his mighty Bat'leth and it's just as fun watching my insanely fat, bearded Andorian chief engineer as he places mines, shield generators and other gadgets everywhere around the away team to aid them in battle.
Claire
Unfortunately, this sums up about 90% of the stuff you'll ever do on STO. And there's another problem: There simply aren't enough missions to get you all the way from level 1 to level 50 without annoying, grind-heavy gaps in between. My partner is experiencing that problem right now: She has played every episode available to her, reached level 14 that way and the level requirement for the next episode is 20. To bridge the gap she is forced to play through the atrocious, auto-generated exploration missions. Those usually work in 3 or 4 different scenarios:
- You approach a planet and its inhabitants request food, water, bits of technology or some other random generic crap you can create using your replicator. You give them what they want, everyone is happy. End of mission.
- You discover a station/ship/anomaly in the middle of nowhere and once you approach it, random enemy ships will attack you. You blow them up. End of mission.
- You discover even more anomalies in space. You scan 5 of them. End of mission.
- Your away team beams down to some random planet or a space station and either kills 5 groups of random aliens or scans 5 random objects - or kills aliens and scans objects. Since everything in these missions is generated at random, you often end up getting weird glitches such as invisible enemies attacking you from inside rocks, trees and mountains.
A Borg clone, a cat, creepy guy in space suit... looks like my away team is good to go!
Above-mentioned occasional glitches aside, these missions work out okay and they can be mildly entertaining for a while. They simply aren't great, they're highly repetitive and you really don't want to do that sort of thing non-stop for several levels. Most of all, how the fuck is this Star Trek? I wanna be worshipped by random aliens like they did with "The Picard", learn about their customs and weird quirks, play dress up to fit in with them and get involved in their affairs. I wanna do the shit you see on the tv shows. I wanna do the stuff that stupid teaser makes you think you get to do. But it never happens!
Space battles with hundreds of ships kicking your ass? Yeah, we got those covered.
In fact, you never even meet any of the important characters of the show. You get to read about what Worf, Picard, Janeway and other popular folks do 35 years after Nemesis, but you never see them ingame, because they couldn't afford their licenses. Instead you get to meet Q's son, Tom Paris' daughter, William Riker's clone "brother"... okay, you get to travel back in time to hang out with Bones and Scotty. I'm sure you can figure out why.
Despite all my bitching about lack of content and proper Trek-feeling, there is at least one ray of hope here, coming from the community itself: The Foundry. This handy little tool allows people to create their own missions. And if you're at least slightly familiar with die-hard Trek nerds and their fanfiction, then you'll know they're capable of cranking out some high quality stuff.
You're not a real man until you fly a galaxy class cruiser
Many of the user-made missions feature really cool stories. There's that tiny, insignificant settlement in the middle of nowhere, which is suffering from frequent Borg raids. At first glance, this makes absolutely no sense until you figure out that the head of the settlement deliberately lures the Borg right there, hoping for assimilation. I won't spoil the story by explaining why the fuck he would want that sort of thing to happen, but let's just say it's a really cool plot-twist and the user creating this adventure has put a lot of love and effort into it.
Other user-generated missions feature lots of dialoge, requiring you to make decisions and solve problems through diplomacy rather than violence. While fighting one's way through the much-feared walls of text isn't everybody's cup of tea, this is the sort of thing many fans of the Franchise have wanted from the game and since Cryptic didn't deliver, they're doing their part to alleviate the problem. Way to go!
STO isn't the ultimate Trek experience. I'm not sure if people would even play it if it wasn't for the setting. That said, the setting makes it incredibly fun, despite the obvious flaws and shortcomings. It's fun toasting an enemy ship with your mighty Galaxy Class' phaser lance or sneaking up on an unsuspecting baddie using a Defiant-style cloaking device on a small escort vessel. All the coolest ships and their features are there, from the very first classical TOS-Enterprise to multivector-vessels, that split into three parts and attack enemies from every possible angle. They're all present and fully functional and they're awesome to behold in massive fleet action missions, where lots of people team up against large waves of enemy ships.
If you don't care for any of that, then this game won't hold your interest, even when it's free to play. Dedicated players can probably get through all the episodes and all the way to the level cap in just about one week and that's that. There is very little replay value here, seeing as gameplay and missions won't drastically change whether you're a human tactical officer or an Andorian science officer. You can repeat a very small amount of actual endgame missions, which require you to team up with four other people in order to farm some pretty powerful item sets, but since every other bit of content on STO is piss-easy even with random green items, there is very little reason to do so.
In fact, items hardly matter in this game. Sure, there is purple gear, but these items usually just come with (literally!) 2-3 extra DPS and some 2% added crit chance, but that's as exciting as it gets. The real long-term motivation comes from finding those incredibly rare, unique bridge officers, the perfect setup for your ship, getting as close to that nerdy Star Trek fantasy of yours as somehow possible.
The slightly more complex items and skill trees aside, STO is easily one of the most casual-friendly MMOs out there. You get to do almost everything all by yourself and without having to team up with other people, items don't really matter and nobody gives a crap about the quality of your gear. That said, if you're looking for challenging raids and badass items to show off to all those casual maggots around you, this is probably not the right game for you.
Now, let me add a final word about the F2P aspect - the game is indeed fucking free! You get all the missions, all the items, all the "raids", the whole fucking content including the user-generated stuff and you pay absolutely NOTHING. 99% of the stuff you can spend real money on is fluff - a new bridge, the TNG uniforms, a Deanna Troi outfit (who the fuck would even WANT one of those??). Okay, so when you reach level 50, you will have to cough up a shit ton of the game's new meta currentcy, Dilithium, or spend some small amount of real money if you want one of the really cool ships that feature a cloaking device, phaser lance, ablative hull plating and the likes of those. Once again, you don't *need* any of those to beat any of the endgame missions. You can obtain the currency to buy them without paying anything. Or you go the easy way and cough up a tenner. Big deal! There's a whole lot of freeloaders whining about how they are "being forced to pay." FUCK YOU ASSHOLES!
Aw boohoo, I can't get a free cloaking device!
And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You pay absolutely nothing for the god damn client, the fleet actions, the episode updates or any other content. And then, when you've seen and done everything for free, you come to a point where you won't get an instant ship upgrade unless you pay a small amount of cash for the first and only time. Which is optional. And you're screaming ripoff. What the fuck is wrong with you?
Well then. Go and download the damn game already. Nothing to lose. And if you get stuck, just look around for my user handle (@Berserkerkitten) and ask for help. When I'm on there, I'm always happy to help noobs out with their missions. Live long and fucking prosper!
It's 3.30 in the morning as I am writing this first line of my latest blog post. Something equally scary and fascinating has happened today. In fact, it still is in the process of happening and I have not experienced anything like this since the day I was foolish enough to introduce my significant other, better known as The Clairebear, to Azeroth.
She came home from work at around 4pm today, launched SWTOR and has been on there ever since. Eating in front of the PC, neglecting Facebook and everything around herself and doing unspeakable things to my poor coffee mug. She's still on, because she 'just needs another half level to put on the new gear we found on that Flashpoint earlier.' She has been needing just another half level for her new lightsaber, her sprint ability, her next skill upgrade, just had to finish this one story mission really quick... you get the idea. Just one more. And maybe that one. Yeah, I'll be done in a bit.
Unlike me, Claire sports the right mindset for this kind of game. She's not analyzing, questioning and criticizing stuff the way I have done ever since it has become my job to do so. She quite obviously doesn't give a fuck. She simply enjoys the ride. I think I'm actually learning an important lesson here - I need to stop peeling at every game, taking it apart bit by bit, rating every individual component and finally judging the sum of its parts. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the pvp was about 8.3% better on WoW or whether the graphics are 20% away from meeting my expectations. Once you stop caring, is it actually fun?
Don't worry, I won't give you some crap about how I have seen the light or how awesome I suddenly think SWTOR is. The game does absolutely nothing for me, which I couldn't get from countless other MMOs and in terms of comfort, customization and pvp, I still think that WoW is clearly better. But Claire is having fun - and now that WoW offers about 2-3 hours of play time a week for our maxed-out, non-raiding arena characters, I'm glad that she's having so much fun in a galaxy far, far away and I'm more than happy to tag along with her. And I'll judge my games more carefully from now on.
We have recorded a little video, showing our characters as they run the first Republican Flashpoint - that thing WoW players know as an instance. We're way beyond the level requirement here, but the purpose of this film is not to show off some super close, epic, spectacular battles (don't worry, the fighting still looks pretty cool). Instead, we're trying to demonstrate how dialogue and decisions affect the overall feel and pace of the whole thing as opposed to, say, a regular instance on WoW.
In the unlikely event that you haven't already heard about how dialogue works in groups, let me explain it real quick: Every member of your party casts a virtual die whenever the group is supposed to talk or make a decision. Just like a loot roll, but for dialogue. The member with the highest result wins and gets to see their toon act and talk in the cutscene. The game automatically throws the dice for everyone whenever a dialogue option pops up. Don't worry - another player's actions will never affect your own character's alignment, no matter how good or evil their behaviour might be.
Claire is playing Keryx, the Jedi Sage. She's rather mean, insanely greedy, but for the most part, she's not a bad person. My character in the video is Rika, the Jedi Sentinel. She's your stereotypical goodie little two-shoes. "I don't need any money from you, the reward lies in the deed itself." Yeah, yeah, stop looking at me like that.
The two guys following us are our NPC companions.
Since Claire and I have very different ideas of our characters and their behaviour, their personalities tend to clash here and there. You can see that at the end of the video, where Claire demands a handsome reward for all our hard work, only to watch me turn down the money, saying we're not doing this for personal gain. She actually looked at me (IRL) and shouted, "I WANT MY DAMN MONEY!" when I did that, but virtual reality can only do so much. You might also catch her doing the occasional dance on a boss baddie's corpse. I'm expecting her eyes to turn an unhealthy red any day now.
You'll have to excuse the low video quality - I can only record so much gameplay with dialogue and sound before it completely clutters up my HD. You might also notice how I cram the camera all the way up my character's ass on some occasions. Unfortunately, that's something SWTOR does every once in a while when you run Fraps. God knows why.
Anyhow - here's the video. Enjoy.
When posting what I believed to be my last ever entry about SWTOR, there was one particular bit I said, which I thought was an absolute no-brainer until plenty of people disagreed with me: If you get ten minutes of dialogue prior to embarking on a glorious quest to kill 10 baddies, it doesn't make the actual quest any less unexciting, boring, dull, been there - done that.
"Only if you don't care - if you don't want to care", is what I've been told.
Ironically, when I had reaped the reward for my hard labour around SWTOR (AKA 'realized that class-guides require LOTS of effort for seriously underwhelming pay'), I have spent a fraction of it on, well, SWTOR. The Clairebear wanted to try it, she didn't want my press account and I'm not cheap enough to ask EA for another free key, so I had to bite the proverbial bullet and shelled out some cash for what's probably the most expensive MMORPG I ever had to pay for.
It was somewhere around 11pm when she was all set and dived into the game universe with her Jedi Consular. And she watched a metric shit ton of cut-scenes, which are still mostly boring and meaningless to me, explaining why she had to kill ten bad guys and loot five thingamajigs in some rather dramatic fashion - 'You *have* to do this, everyone depends on you!' yada, yada, yada.
It didn't take long and she was hooked. The fact she's been playing what's practically the exact same game for more than a half decade allowed her to jump right in without having to waste any time getting used to the controls, combat, interface... yes, it's still WoW in space. What's more important, though: She instantly bought the whole plot.
With every finished quest, every tiny stepstone on her way from being a mere Padawan to becoming a real Jedi and obtaining her first lightsaber, I could see her eyes light up whenever the characters praised her for her achievements. "They're talking about *me* there! I'm special!"
Maybe I have played, analyzed, dissected games for too long to appreciate that sort of thing. Maybe it's because I'm a cynical old bastard. Either way, that whole illusion is entirely lost on me. When some voice actor tells me I'm the first one to ever kill ten random baddies in such a glorious, heroic manner, I can't help but roll my eyes, thinking: 'Me and every other fucking idiot who played this tutorial till level 5.' The whole thing is an incredibly cheap, psychological hook: For finishing even the dumbest, dullest, most boring and meaningless tasks, the NPCs you interact with will praise you, as though you had just accomplished something great, something so big and special, mere words couldn't possibly describe how awesome you are. Sure, that feels better than looting 10 apples and killing 8 boars in Elwynn Forest and ignoring the text box above the reward window, but you have to be open-minded about it and play along.
I'm not gonna link this entry on Facebook. In fact, I sincerely hope the Clairebear won't even find it, because I adore her for enjoying all that phony, make-believe hero crap the game throws at her. Of course she knows that everyone around her is 'special' and that it's all just meaningless talk for the sake of getting people interested, but I guess there's no need to rub her nose in it. I guess it's a bit like watching a movie and ignoring the fact it's all actors, cardboard and ketchup and that Hollywood physics don't apply in real life. It's all about how much you want to believe it and enjoy the ride without questioning everything.
Ironically, when it comes to the setting, the lore and the terminology that goes with it all, she's even more ignorant than I am. I cringed when she constantly referred to her force powers as 'magic' or when she started talking about 'the dark force', but surprisingly enough, she picked up on the whole thing rather quickly, just by paying attention to the story. And this wrecks another point I have made in my last blog about this game - you can actually get some fun out of this and get sucked in by the story, even if you don't give a crap about Star Wars. Who would have thunk? Either way, it was 5am when she finished her first ever session on there.
Maybe I'll get into the whole thing some more now. It's one thing having to play a particular class and style 8-10 hours a day with your work mates. It's another being free to do whatever the fuck you want, whilst playing with your significant other. We'll see.
I like bragging about how I was part of 'the good old days', where we raided Molten Core with 40 people and we didn't actually spend hours memorizing every single boss strategy with the help of fan sites and youtube. In fact, back when we got started on MC, it was actually quite difficult, if not impossible, to get extensive raid guides.
I've been there. When it took for fucking ever, because people weren't fully T2-geared and knew the place in their sleep. And I like to talk about it. Because it fucking sucked.
Truth to be told, it's also the only raid I've successfully finished while it was actual, proper endgame content. Unless you wanna count shit like Baradin Hold. I didn't raid in BC or Wrath. Stuff got toned down from 40 to 25 people, they even added 10 people modes later, you no longer needed a DKP system. I probably missed out. But that's when the Clairebear started playing, then the whole family was on WoW, we started our little guild and didn't want to invite any strangers - long story short, you don't raid with 5 people.
For the most part, it didn't really bother me. We're on a pvp server, we're doing okay in the arena and resilience made pve gear relatively useless on our realm. So from a pvp point of view, we had the best possible gear - granted, we didn't really get high enough to earn the stuff that required a rating of 2200, but with the progressive casualization, even a mediocre arena rating had eventually stopped being a problem.
The one thing that bothered me is how, as a pvp-fanatic, a loyal soldier of one's respective faction, you got excluded from the story, the cool boss battles and some of the cooler-looking armor sets. If you want to raid, it's usually a good idea to be part of a raid guild and you'll want to farm good pve gear. I'm too lazy for both. I like my crappy little guild and I don't like running boring heroic dungeons over and over again to get raid access. My own fault, I know, and therefore I stayed away from raids.
And now there's the Raid Finder. It's hard to disagree with the people, who say that Deathwing feels like a bit of a joke, thanks to this new feature. It really isn't the most pleasant new feature, either. Basically, I followed 24 random players, who kept on calling each other noobs, cunts and morons and one guy kept asking to kick everyone below 30k DPS - which at that time would have been roughly 23 people. And that horde of flaming, bitching, whining idiots zerged their way through Deathwing's minions, his generals, even killed the mythical dragon, the one big evil that would bring the end of the world, just like that, just by the way, constantly flaming, insulting and whining as they hacked and slashed everything to bits.
It was grotesque, to say the least. There was very little sense of heroism there, no unity, not even an awful lot of tactics, the occasional "STOP DPS ON SKULL YOU CUNTS!!1" aside. And what do you know - the whole thing worked out and I even got two matching set-pieces out of the whole thing. I know, low-level raid finder crap with no pvp stats, but I really just want the whole thing for transmogrifying, anyway.
The whole thing was probably easier than Heroic Grim Batol in a random group. And from what I've read on Facebook, forums and in some magazines, I'm not the only one who felt pretty much no sense of success or achievement after it was all over. That said, the Raid Finder actually made WoW a little more fun for me and my guild mates.
I cannot hold it against anybody, who is upset with this new feature. There was a time where people actually had to put some effort into obtaining their raid gear and it took MUCH more than one lazy afternoon to show off half the god damn raid set. Sure, the more ambitious guilds out there still get to do the *real* raid, they get the real raid set with slightly better stats and the toughest of cookies out there get their heroic modes and the best, toughest, most difficult to obtain weapons and armor for it. But they have every right and reason to feel cheated. Because now lazy people such as myself get to see how it ends, we get to faceroll through the final boss battles AND we get the same cool gear. With crappier stats, sure, but it looks just as awesome, different colour palette or not.
We're all legends now. Titans. Marauding, flaming, 12 year old kids, who save the world. At least once per week. Poor Deathwing! No final boss deserves such a shabby end.
But despite all criticism, despite that feeling of guilt that occasionally crawls up on me when I show off my T-13 welfare crap for mogging, the game has actually improved for me and my guild. Because to us, what's the alternative? Disbanding and joining a bigger guild or seeing the 'endgame' 3 years later, when every moron can do it?
I salute you, Deathwing. You'll be known as the most meaningless, unimpressive final boss baddie in MMO history, a joke next the the likes of Arthas, Nefarian and maybe even Hogger. I don't believe you deserve such harsh treatment, just as I don't believe Cataclysm deserves all the hate it's getting. But for what it counts, I actually had a chance to see how it all ends, along with everybody else. And I get to look cool in my welfare Dragonplate. And that has to count for something, for as stale as the taste of this victory might have been. This one stubborn Berserkerkitten loves you, even though they forced a pussy mode upon you. ♥
My work with Star Wars: The old Republic is coming to an end. My article about the classes I was asked to play is due in a few days and with that out of the way, I'll resume business as usual in Azeroth. Blasphemy, I know.
The game is rightfully receiving one superb review score after another, though I am hoping for some of the longer-term reviews from sites such as Gamespot or IGN to highlight some of the game's weaknesses and to dare go below the insanely high average rating of 89%. Because, the fantastic storytelling and voice-acting aside, not only does SWTOR do absolutely nothing new or innovative - certain aspects of the game, such as the lame skill trees, boring combat system, hideous UI and frustrating pvp take the genre right back to the stone age and not a single step forward.
My main problem with the game is how, once you've reached the inevitable level cap, the whole experience becomes so incredibly much like every other MMORPG out there, I just don't have the motivation to keep on playing - and with nearly 3 months of free play time left on my press account, I could go nuts if I wanted to.
I just don't feel like repeating the same 3 battlegrounds... sorry, warzones, over and over again for purple gear. Yes, yes, WoW didn't even have battlegrounds when it came out, WoW this, WoW that, I don't give a fuck. It's 2012. And the pvp in SWTOR is shit, plain and simple. When the game puts you in a group of level 20s and you have to face a bunch of overgeared level 50s, all the stat-boosting and equalizing in the world won't make up for their wider selection of abilities and skills as well as added damage, resistance and healing from high level pvp gear. If you are forced to fight your own faction all the time, because everyone chose Empire and nobody wants to play Republic and there are no cross-server pvp-queues, then pvp gets even more shit. It's badly-balanced, it's unfair and the warzones simply aren't very enjoyable to play. I get up to 40 people on each side on WoW, I only get 10 people per team on SWTOR and it lags like fuck. Which is amazing, considering the game looks like it's a decade old. Sure, so does WoW, but at least that one doesn't run like crap.
Of course there's hard mode dungeons and daily quests, where I could farm tokens and other crap to get epic items, which allow me to do even harder stuff and... well, you know where this is going. Don't get me wrong - I am fully aware that the 'endgame' looks exactly like that in literally every fucking MMORPG out there. It's just that I've grown sick and tired of it years ago and I don't give a shit about the item treadmill now, just because I'm rolling for a lightsaber instead of some epic battleaxe.
Sure, I could go and roll another toon to experience their storyline, play all the way to level 50 again and by the time I have seen every bit of story there is, chances are there's gonna be a shitload of new content and new stuff to do. Problem is, in between every two small bits of story, the game feeds you boring, tasteless filler. Kill 10 of this, loot 5 of that. Bonus: Kill 30 Sand People. Bonus update: Kill another 20 Sand People. Fuck off!
Yes, sure, having companions is awesome. Discovering them all, enjoying their quirky personalities, chasing after your personal story mode nemesis, all of that is cool. But there is so much dreadfully boring "kill 20 Sand People" crap slowing down the already unexciting pace of the whole experience, I just can't see myself doing it all over again, awesome plot or not. And having to chase after 40 or so Datacrons on every character doesn't add to the fun. Might be fun the first time around, then it's just a time sink, especially when certain Datacrons can only be reached if you spend a huge amount of credits or team up with another player.
The skill trees are another dreadfully boring bit I just can't see myself getting used to. No matter which of the 3 trees I pick on my level 50 marauder, the changes in abilities, play style and rotation are so minimal, they could have skipped them altogether. And having to waste 2 or 3 points on skills, which otherwise only proc 33 or 50% of the time is no fun. What's worse, a huge part of my special attacks is so incredibly situational, it makes combat feel awkward and frustrating. For instance, one of my attacks can only be used on incapacitated targets, the next one only on slowed targets, yet another one works only right after a parried or dodged attack, one works when my target is below 20% health... the list goes on. Sure, other games have those attacks, but you don't usually get ALL OF THEM ON THE SAME CLASS! Sadly, they all do more or less the same amounts of damage, as well. That shit is unnecessarily complicated and simply not very clever.
SWTOR is the best MMORPG released in years - you'd have to be an idiot to deny that. But frankly, I don't give a crap about Star Wars, so the game's #1 selling point is completely lost on me. And beneath that shiny Sci-Fi surface, there is simply nothing left that I haven't already experienced a million times before. And it's boring me to death.
Oh and if you're looking for proper RP-Servers, where certain naming and chat behaviour guidelines are enforced... well, let's just say you might as well be playing WoW.
Now, if you're a huge fan of this game and you're having a good time, god bless you, keep playing and do both of us a favour: Refrain from boring both of us to death with pointless arguments about how the bonus quest storylines are really interesting or how SWTOR isn't meant to be a pvp game. I don't give a shit, how fascinating a story about killing 10 NPCs is, because at the end of the day, I still have to kill 10 fucking NPCs, over and over again. And yes, other MMOs do the same thing. Doesn't mean I have to like it. And just because one should consider the PvP in SWTOR an "added bonus" is no excuse for it to be so lackluster and shit.
