Star Wars: The Old Republic release date announced!

[Goza]

My main concern with the UI is that it's so terribly fugly, not that it's unusable. It gives me eye cancer looking at it.

The font is terrible. The various overlays are terrible. Most icons are bad. Like it's been painted by a programmer and not a graphic artist.

[Decay]

My main concern with the UI is that it's so terribly fugly, not that it's unusable. It gives me eye cancer looking at it.

The font is terrible. The various overlays are terrible. Most icons are bad. Like it's been painted by a programmer and not a graphic artist.

Yeah, I'm not too concerned about those things, personal preference I guess. I happen to heavily modify my UI when I can anyway, which I'm hoping will be possible in ToR too.

[Decay]

Oh yeah, another thing I forgot to add, is that in most cases of being subjected to CCs or stuns, it is very hard to tell what exactly it is that is incapacitating you. The reason is that when you gain a debuff, there is no distinctive sign telling you that you've been afflicted. The only thing informing you of this is an extremely small debuff icon on top of your health bar, which by the way also gives no real information when you mouse over it, except for saying that you are stunned.
This also reminds me of how poorly designed the nameplates/healthbars are, but I won't get into details with that just now.

So there's another thing which needs to be fixed for PvP. Spells need to be more distinctive and recognizable, like in WoW you always know instantly whether you're polymorphed, feared or whatever, though the difference between most stuns in WoW is also minimal, which is the reason that I use the LoseControl addon.

How information is fed to the player is extremely important, and it seems like nobody has got to the point yet, where they can afford to put resources into it, and actually get it right. Which is a terrible shame! Just imagine how much better even WoW could be if you were only ever fed the most relevant information on your UI at any one point, perhaps a UI that adapted to your environment.

But I digress, these are just some of my thoughts. It's nice to write these things down so that I don't forget to spam BioWare with them, hoping that they'll listen.

Here's a random video I just watched, take a look at this and see if you can tell what I'm talking about.
[ Invalid YouTube link ]

[Intrinsic]

Unorganized thoughts incoming.

I found the beta weekend extremely enjoyable. Went a Sith Inquisitor(Assassin) and found the questing, heroic areas and flashpoints to be awesome. The levelling experience is by far greater than it is in WoW, the fact that each quest has its own voice animated storyline is superb. I love how some areas (mostly class based) are 'instance' zones, where only yourself or group members(if available) are available to quest. Even the zone you are in is dedicated to multiple mini servers to reduce overpopulation, although this was annoying at times when I was questing with Chris. If either of us logged out and in we were now in seperate zones and had to teleport to join back up.

The combat is a tad clunky, gcd is too slow and you can't see debuffs for the life of you. However, the combat animations for melee are awesome, especially for the assassin. Overload kicks ass. Some abilities are even retard proof, if a mob is behind you and you're obviously facing the wrong way to attack, the system turns you around for you.

Doing quests, flashpoints and heroic areas is a lot of fun as a group, the conversations have a voting system where you choose which option you want to pick and you roll on it, highest wins. This brought up a funny moment on the first Sith flashpoint where 3 of us voted to kill some science captain dude and the guy that won the roll spared his life because he claimed to be a mormon.

The companion system is great, conversation choices during quests can alter your relationship with your companion. You don't learn the professions yourself but instead have your companion learn them. Profs such as treasure Hunting and Diplomacy have missions available to them in which the companion undergoes for you and returns within a stated time with rewards should he/she be successful. However crafting prof wait times are annoying, took my bitch companion 5 minutes to make 5 hilts for a lightsaber and during that time you don't have a companion so questing is more difficult. That is until you get a 2nd companion, then all is well. There is one bug atm where I can hear the voices of other peoples companions form 14312524623 miles away clear as day. Annoying.

So far I rate this game highly, the graphics grow on you and the questing environment more than handidly makes up for it.

P.S Fuck pvp

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

Has anyone got a clue about the endgame?

I have heard from several people that the lvling/question experience is awesome, but I still havent heard of anything in the game that can keep it alive when you have completed the quests?

Is this an mmo that ends with the quests?

Its pretty clever that they only allow people to play beta for a weekend, so people dont get far enough to see if the game gets stale fast.

The guys I know in the original beta hasnt really found any endgame content.

[Huntresa]

Has anyone got a clue about the endgame?

I have heard from several people that the lvling/question experience is awesome, but I still havent heard of anything in the game that can keep it alive when you have completed the quests?

Is this an mmo that ends with the quests?

There is some raid footage on youtuibe i think

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

as in the 5 man flashpoints?

[Huntresa]

2nd seems to be 10man i think.

[Decay]

Seems like opinions vary greatly on this game, regardless it might be an idea for the IE leadership to consider creating a ToR sister guild, eh?

Also agree mostly with what you said Intrinsic, except for the last sentence!

The companions make life a lot easier, another thing which on first look I thought I would hate, but ended up loving.

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

There is fears of the guild dying with each new game, Rift didnt kill it, and I doubt this will.

[Kawe / Dave]

One thing I'd disagree with Intrinsic on would be about the questing/levelling, at least the early stuff, being better than WoW's. The chatscenes a la Bioware are cool (I'm one of the people who enjoys those in all the bioware things, at least most of the time), but the questing itself lacked entirely any kind of the more inventive quests you'd get in wow like "you are now huge! stomp armies!", or any of the cool phased stuff - I don't think phasing exists in swtor aside from little mini, walled-off-if-you're-the-wrong-class instances. It's just all 'go here kill these' and 'go there click that object'. The chat scenes definitely help out and make things more interesting, but the act of questing itself is the same as in vanilla wow - for the 10 levels I experienced.


Out-of-fucking-nowhere award goes to Graxlos for:

There is fears of the guild dying with each new game, Rift didnt kill it, and I doubt this will.

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

It was directed at Decayus SWTOR GUILD comment, and yeah it might have been a bit OT, we could surely have a Swtor branch.

[Decay]

Intrinsic mentioned the animations being cool, which I do agree with on the most part, but again, in PvP the jumping is an extremely important aspect, both mechanic and animation-wise and I think it fails in both of those aspects. At least for the Sith Inquisitor, and I imagine the jump is mechanically the same for all classes, as in WoW. The animation itself might look better on some than others, but it just didn't feel fluid to me at all.
Most other animations like running and character/gear models are awesome however, and I often found myself thinking "Yeah, I look badass!", which can only be a good thing.

Yeah Kawe that's a good point, but if I recall correctly WoW didn't have any of those kinds of quests in vanilla either. I imagine it's just a luxury that Blizzard was able to afford only after the huge success of the original game.
It is possible that BioWare don't want to put resources into stuff like that just yet, or possibly the engine itself along with the word just make it unfeasible.

Also, just pre-ordered my copy, so I'm hoping to see some of you guys online on release!

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

More like it was something they came up with after years of development, but SWTOR should be standing on the shoulders of WOW and elaborating on the things that worked well in wow.

No point starting over.

[Kawe / Dave]

You really should avoid the urge to compare to vanilla WoW 'because that's how WoW was at release', because vanilla wow doesn't exist anymore. SWTOR isn't competing with vanilla, it's competing with Mists of Pandaria. Standing on the shoulders of WoW is a good way to put what any new mmo release of the same style should be doing. That's what WoW did with EQ - took what was there, and improved upon it, and released a product that was ahead of the existing offering.

Of course, WoW had the luxury of being the only thing doing that at the time, and for whatever combined set of reasons Blizz managed to get their 5 years to develop it whilst also not falling behind the curve of EQ's own improvements/additions. Blizzard have shown they are acutely aware of the desire of other developers and publishers to do to WoW what WoW did to EQ, probably a great deal more so than SOE was of Blizzard. This awareness, combined with the huge success of WoW, the money from that and their merger with Activision, means the situation that existed that allowed Blizzard to create a product that didn't get leapfrogged by the incumbent during development is either very difficult to replicate or just can't happen - at least while Blizzard doesn't run into something that due to aging tech is simply impossible.

The result of this is what we see time and again with new MMO releases since WoW - that by the time they release, WoW has iterated its game mechanics, features and its general style of play enough that it has leapfrogged the new MMO's own innovations. Those that it hasn't, tend to either then be added in afterwards - like queueing battlegrounds from anywhere, from Warhammer online - or skipped, in either case letting the new MMO just act as a guinea pig for new ideas that seemed riskier.

SWTOR clearly falls into this pattern pretty neatly, too - similar mechanics, but lacking some of the newer additions to WoW that are made more easily possible by having an existing already working game and playerbase, such as LFD. Quest design, too, fits the usual thing of being the same as the WoW of a couple of years ago, e.g. when SWTOR was developing them. What makes SWTOR interesting to follow is that the huge license, budget, big name developer and marketing should see it through to perhaps a better measure of success than has been enjoyed by other releases.