Star Wars: The Old Republic release date announced!

[Jazzba]

At the beggining, the PvE content will be based on "Flashpoints", which are like instances and dungeons in WoW, the only difference being that Flashpoints are for groups of 4 people.

At higher levels, Flashpoints can accomodate more people, and that is something like Heroic Dungeons.

I am sure there will be raids and stuff in the upcoming patches, though, when people get used to game mechanics and the classes they are playing.

[Abyiss]

Are there raids n stuff? (Think they have like a super gay name)

The raids are called "operations" and I believe they are 15 person instances.

[Skymunken]

Ah yes! Operations! Sound like UBRS runnin'

[Goza]

So, I'm in the weekend beta, and this is the game running on max settings:



Uh...

[Huntresa]

So, I'm in the weekend beta, and this is the game running on max settings:



Uh...

Very brown guy, they got spraytan in space?

[Goza]

So, apparently most of the official screenshots are in fact photoshapped bullshots, so I'll post some actual ingame shots if anyone still cares about this game.

Notice the absolute fugly user interface, designed by Bioware's new intern (former janitor).

[Goza]

...moar...

[Goza]

...and some moar, from Space Stations that seem to serve as hubs to fly to other planets.

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

But is it fun?

[Goza]

But is it fun?

It's not a trainwreck, but it's a perfect example of "why should I play this" game as it's basically a WoW clone with lasers, but it completely lacks the polish that makes WoW a good game. Apart from the story missions, everything I saw is inferior to WoW. So, why play the lesser game?

I played ~6-8 hours as a Sith Inquisitor, got to level 8 or 9 (basically finished the story introduction and left the first planet/zone).

• Every dialogue in the game is voice acted. When you click a questgiver, the game goes into cutscene mode with the typical Bioware/MassEffect dialogue wheel.
• Most of the dialogue options you have are a sham, they have no effect on the outcome of the dialogue. 2x I had a real choice regarding mission outcome. Sometimes your options can give you light/dark side points (seem to be a prerequisite to wear certain armor). However, those usually come kinda "wtf", as I thought I chose the dark side dialogue option but then the game rewarded me with light side points.
• The user interface of the game is terrible and fugly. It's atrocious. It makes you wanna quit the game.
• Quests are 99% "kill X things", "fetch X from Y and bring it to Z". Well, I can live with that. But don't expect something new. Quest rewards are apparently not shown before finishing the quest. UI makes it hard to see how difficult a quest is.
• Mobs: So far I only encountered 08/15 mobs that don't have any special abilities at all. The UI makes it hard to see how dangerous a mob is. Mob placement is uninspiring, basically randomly thrown around maps.
• The Sith Inquisitor starting zone is terrible. You basically are sent into ruin after ruin after ruin collecting some idiotic ruin items. You feel like Indiana Jones.
• Grouping: OK, so I wanted to group with someone to finish a group quest. I get some "You cannot group with this person as he is in a different quest phase; please reset your quest phase" error. Didnt find reset button (thx horrible UI). As every story mission is phased, this might become a common problem.
• The world design is bad. It has absolutely no sense of scale, as if the character designers didnt coordinate their work with the environmental designers. The major architectural feature of the Sith start hub town are some staircases. If you compare your char to the staircase, each stair would be like 50cm high. Bads like that kill immersion.
• The game has serious texture and aliasing issues. Textures are low res and ugly. I have no clue why there are such terrible aliasing artifacts. Look at sw23.png I attached earlier. I havent seen stuff like that since PS1. The gfx options didnt let me activate AA, but I just read you can override it in your gfx driver.
• Skills: I didn't get any interesting skills yet. Char specializations start at lvl10 which I didnt reach. I had 2 melee attacks (one uses force, my resource), a force nuke, a force channel, an AOE pushback stun, a force snare, a grp buff and dmg snare.
• I experienced no lag at all. I don't know how crowded my server was thou.
• You seem to be able to queue up attack commands, as in KOTOR. I however didn't see a UI element for that queue, it "just works".
• Apparently every zone/planet in the game on a server can/will be instanced on demand. As in: You'll have Orgrimmar1, Orgrimmar2, OrgrimmarX and Barrens1, Barrens2, BarrensX etc. If you want to see your friends, you'll manually have to switch over to their BarrensX to play with them, like in Tabula Rasa. Wtf.

I assume it'll be an OK game for a month, until you have seen all the story content. It kinda plays like an ugly KOTOR.

I'm not gonna get it thou, it's just a too generic clone. There was absolutely nothing in the game that made me go "oh, nice!".

[Huntresa]

But is it fun?

It's not a trainwreck, but it's a perfect example of "why should I play this" game as it's basically a WoW clone with lasers, but it completely lacks the polish that makes WoW a good game. Apart from the story missions, everything I saw is inferior to WoW. So, why play the lesser game?

I played ~6-8 hours as a Sith Inquisitor, got to level 8 or 9 (basically finished the story introduction and left the first planet/zone).

• Every dialogue in the game is voice acted. When you click a questgiver, the game goes into cutscene mode with the typical Bioware/MassEffect dialogue wheel.
• Most of the dialogue options you have are a sham, they have no effect on the outcome of the dialogue. 2x I had a real choice regarding mission outcome. Sometimes your options can give you light/dark side points (seem to be a prerequisite to wear certain armor). However, those usually come kinda "wtf", as I thought I chose the dark side dialogue option but then the game rewarded me with light side points.
• The user interface of the game is terrible and fugly. It's atrocious. It makes you wanna quit the game.
• Quests are 99% "kill X things", "fetch X from Y and bring it to Z". Well, I can live with that. But don't expect something new. Quest rewards are apparently not shown before finishing the quest. UI makes it hard to see how difficult a quest is.
• Mobs: So far I only encountered 08/15 mobs that don't have any special abilities at all. The UI makes it hard to see how dangerous a mob is. Mob placement is uninspiring, basically randomly thrown around maps.
• The Sith Inquisitor starting zone is terrible. You basically are sent into ruin after ruin after ruin collecting some idiotic ruin items. You feel like Indiana Jones.
• Grouping: OK, so I wanted to group with someone to finish a group quest. I get some "You cannot group with this person as he is in a different quest phase; please reset your quest phase" error. Didnt find reset button (thx horrible UI). As every story mission is phased, this might become a common problem.
• The world design is bad. It has absolutely no sense of scale, as if the character designers didnt coordinate their work with the environmental designers. The major architectural feature of the Sith start hub town are some staircases. If you compare your char to the staircase, each stair would be like 50cm high. Bads like that kill immersion.
• The game has serious texture and aliasing issues. Textures are low res and ugly. I have no clue why there are such terrible aliasing artifacts. Look at sw23.png I attached earlier. I havent seen stuff like that since PS1. The gfx options didnt let me activate AA, but I just read you can override it in your gfx driver.
• Skills: I didn't get any interesting skills yet. Char specializations start at lvl10 which I didnt reach. I had 2 melee attacks (one uses force, my resource), a force nuke, a force channel, an AOE pushback stun, a force snare, a grp buff and dmg snare.
• I experienced no lag at all. I don't know how crowded my server was thou.
• You seem to be able to queue up attack commands, as in KOTOR. I however didn't see a UI element for that queue, it "just works".
• Apparently every zone/planet in the game on a server can/will be instanced on demand. As in: You'll have Orgrimmar1, Orgrimmar2, OrgrimmarX and Barrens1, Barrens2, BarrensX etc. If you want to see your friends, you'll manually have to switch over to their BarrensX to play with them, like in Tabula Rasa. Wtf.

I assume it'll be an OK game for a month, until you have seen all the story content. It kinda plays like an ugly KOTOR.

I'm not gonna get it thou, it's just a too generic clone. There was absolutely nothing in the game that made me go "oh, nice!".

Havent they been developing this game some time, like years, and the cost have been huge... How can they fail so then ?

[Abyiss]

Thanks for that Goza, this just reaferms my dession that TOR looks very generic, and if you want to play a mmo thats not WOW, try WildStar. Looks much more orignal and challenging.

[Goza]

Havent they been developing this game some time, like years, and the cost have been huge... How can they fail so then ?

Yes, I wondered, too. One should assume with time & money like that, a simple "copy WoW but put Darth Vader in it" should look more polished than that.

[Abyiss]

Allthe money went on voice acting and quest NPC interaction.

[delling]

Well, let's not forget that WoW was in development for years too! MMOs take years to make, full stop.

It looks really, really bad though. Wonder how they fucked up that badly with the textures. Hard to believe they didn't have the man hours/money to do it correctly, but maybe they've been slapped with the famous 'you gotta launch this now or we're pulling the plug' card. Happens to most MMOs because it's simply infeasible to develop a game for 5 years without any kind of return. Ironically, it's the same card that usually ends up making an MMO shit and unmemorable.