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Star Wars: The Old Republic Adding Free-To-Play Option In November
EA and BioWare announced today that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be getting a free-to-play option later this year. Players using the F2P option will be able to reach the level cap and play through the full class stories, but their access will be limited for other parts of the game; they will only be able to play a certain number of Warzones (their PvP battlegrounds), Flashpoints (their instanced dungeons), and space missions each week. Access to travel functionality and the game's auction house will be limited as well. F2P players won't be able to participate in Operations, the end-game raids. Subscribers will retain access to all of these features. There will also be cosmetic items sold through the 'Cartel Market' using a virtual currency.
I'm not being sarcastic, I really am curious. There was a HUGE amount of hype around the release (the usual "WoW killer" stuff that seems to accompany any major MMO release these days). Reviews seemed generally positive. Everyone was talking about it for a week or two after release. But then I stopped hearing anything about it. Don't think I've heard anyone mention it for a while. Considering this was supposed to be the game that finally fixed Sony's Galaxies fiasco, I expected more enthusiasm.
I do like the free-to-play stuff, though. And this might lead me to try it out. I just hope they don't cripple it to the point where it's hard to get an idea of what the paid game looks like (like some MMO's do--some that have initials like "W.O.W.," maybe).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I didn't want yet another free-to-play mmo. Lord knows there are enough of those. I (and many others) just wanted KOTOR 3. Now that your little mmo has jumped the shark, can we haz?
I just wasn't impressed. I liked the voice acting, the 'universe' was alright. I just found the character development to be a bit lacking, the 'cities' to be stretched out solely for the sake of being stretched out and the architecture to be..well...boring. Cityscapes were boxes upon boxes upon boxes. Would I play it again for free with limited access...mebbe. Would I pay for it again if I got access to everything? Sure..for 5 bucks a month.
The problem with all of these subscription based MMOs is that everyone wants you to fork over 50-60 bucks and then pay 15 bucks a month for a subscription. That's just greed. Just because it worked for WoW does not mean that it needs to be the price point for every MMO ever made. If it had only been 5 bucks a month, I'd probably still be playing it, despite some of its flaws. I might have even gotten farther into it...*shrugs*. At 5 bucks a month, I'd probably still play WoW too. 15 bucks a month isn't really a lot of money, until you consider you might want to play 3 of them, with a family of 3 or 4.
Wasn't it hyped as the WoW killer?
My son loves the game but no way am i paying the price they want for it, bloody extortionate in this day and age
Hence the whole "free to play" thing, they are trying to salvage it.
There were multiple problems with it, but the big one is a lack of endgame. It was basically an online single player game. The questing was pretty good, and the story was way better than your normal MMO. However then you hit the top level and there was fuck-all to do. PvP was very bad, dungeons were poorly done and finding groups was problematic, there was just little reason to keep playing.
I bought it and enjoyed leveling, I'm not sorry I spent the money on it I was entertained. However there was nothing worth staying around for. Hence it has been dying off. Well that is particularly problematic to EA given how incredibly much was spent making it.
It only takes about 80 hours to level. Maybe 100 your first time through. If you do all of the group quests you'll hit 50 in the same 80-100 hours but have more leftovers to do at level cap.
But bioware worked very hard on the first 100-200 hours of gameplay. They completely under delivered on the next 800-1800, which is what you do with a leveled character before the next expansion. They had some content, but it was just inconvenient to get to, required you know things they didn't tell you (and it wasn't always clear what was intentional or not), and full of too many load screens and a lot of 'active travel' where you have to pay attention to getting your character from wherever it is to wherever it needs to be to actually play the game.
I've played SWTOR for a while. It is a pretty game and does a great job immersing you into the Star Wars universe. If you're really into story, the problem becomes that it really does feel like the most expensive single-player game you'll ever play. It is as if other players only exist to chat and trade with. It is very easy max out a character of each class to burn out the story lines, then there is nothing to do but grind away endgame gear for PVE or PVP. That is my biggest complaint is that levels 1..49 go by rather quickly (so quickly that it is barely worthwhile to equip properly) and all that is left is to grind and raid for prettier shineys.
The PVP Warzones were really neat and quite frankly the best PVP activity I've yet seen in an MMO. However there is presently a rash of cheating going on that BioWare is having difficulty combating.
The entertainment value wasn't worth the subscription price and naturally players have been leaving in droves. This exodus was exacerbated by the fact that BioWare did not have a tool to help find groups after 7 months of going live! Whereas most MMOs start with one nowadays. To make matters worse server populations were crashing and it took BioWare a considerable time to effect character transfers. The first waves of consolidation did breath new life into the game temporarily... but even those servers are in decline now.
There was some press release or statement from BioWare a number of weeks back that described subscription levels. At launch there were something like 1.5 million and in recent months had dropped to like 700k or so. 400k was stated as the minimum to retain profitability. Since then, I imagine, subscriptions continued to plummet and now they are offering F2P. Some might consider that desperation but in fairness I'd say that the true market value of the game is being established.
If you like Star Wars it really is worth a look. The F2P offering may actually be very attractive for Story players.
Wish EA/BioWare-Mythic would do the same for the 11 year old DAoC.
that being, no real diversity in where you level. It was worse in Star Wars. You could not even start a new character with a friend and play together unless you both chose the same type character, force user or non force user. Afterward you could meet up but then that is where the problem surfaces.
TL;DR - Game was release three patches too early and seemed to excel in having every bad feature WOW discarded, if not all games discarded. As if their design document was completed ten years ago and never changed.
Beyond the two starting worlds all progression through levels is always the same worlds, the same quests except for class specific quests. However the absolute worst part was the punitive travel. Oh I mean overly convoluted maps; especially palaces; where you had to run mostly empty areas around and around to meet a quest giver/target locked in the end of some crazed maze. For a game that provided you a star ship by level 15 they could never quite explain why you could not land where you wanted or worse, had to wait till 25 to buy a land speeder. Really? I have a star ship but no land craft?
The game did have some good highlights. The voice acting and stories were pretty good, but many were space bar skip them as it could become tedious and if you were on your second or third alt it was a bit much. The sounds of the game were pure star wars, the ships, the npcs, about everything looked right. The companion system was good but got a bit creepy with the romancing a computer avatar bit. Far too many players would dress their female companions, if not characters, in the absolute skimpiest outfits imaginable. Serious declaration of idiocy amongst the players.
Yet you were trapped in a world were far too many mobs were "strong" or had eight second stun attacks. Where your characters could do AWESOME moves and demonstrated AMAZING powers but only in cut scenes. I kid you not. Force users rending blast doors - only in a cut scene. By the time you were mid level you had so many abilities the game became an exercise in cool down management than playing for fun.
The game was released three patches to early. From a woefully unpolished interface to horrid zone loading times for many. Very bad and in some ways incredibly obvious exploits that rarely if ever went unpunished to an Auction House that was nearly unusable. Even mirror classes; each class had an exact copy on the other side, the effects were different; were not truly mirrored... and early raids were bug city, as in luck let you beat them more than skill.
A great idea saddled with poor execution and far too much investment in voice acting over content. Best of luck, but with Guild Wars 2 coming at the end of the month and WOW's next expansion in September their chance is basically over
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think what angered me most about it was that it purported to continue the KotOR storyline. Instead, it tramples all over it. Revan is a low level boss that drops pants, everyone and their mother is a Jedi or a Sith, and it pretty much retcons everything from KotOR 2 (my favorite game of all time, speaking of which the community restoration mod "The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod" went into its final release version about a week ago, definitely check that out). Maybe I was naive to expect something more along the lines of SWG in this day and age. Still, I was pretty upset.
SW:TOR would have been a pretty decent single player game. But I think many people are just plain tired of formulaic level based gameplay for MMOs. In single player games it's fine but when you want to play with your friends, things like levels, separate servers, separate factions all get in the way. They should make MMOs where if you know someone in real life that plays, there are no artificial barriers to grouping with them in game and having fun together.
is SWG. SWGEMU is in a playable state now, it will be perfect once they put in the faction missions.
That's about all there is to it. Single player game with online coop. Their grandiose dreams of taking a slice of the WoW pie were about 5 years too late.
The class story line is pretty much the only reason to play. It is a classic black and white Bioware storyline complete with all the standard plot elements and binary characters that have become the staple of recent Bioware RPG's.
Limitted access to flashpoints? Only the first one is anything like what was shown in the teasers, a story rich, choice rich, not endlessly long instance. The rest? One moral non-voiced choice in the middle, that is it for story telling.
Travel was never that hot to begin with, for F2P, you can make do without it.
Fewer space missions? Oh NO! Those were like the best part of the game!!! Not! The only value they had was that for people with an insane boredom treshold, they were a way to level up with ease. Just very very boring. Mind you, there are bots for them. Anyway, since the class story is the best thing about the game and you would miss that if you just auto-levelled to 50 and there is no end-game... I can't quite see the point.
Bioware screwed up. They already become something of a joke once they started releasing more RPG's because they all had the same story and the same support characters but that was okay in a 60 then 40 then 20 hour game. Then you can ignore that one support character gets upset if you don't kiss a kitten while saving the world, the other gets upset you don't kill said kitten while saving the world and the third says he has meaningful advice on saving the world but never actually gives it.
This can carry a single player story but a MMO that is supposed to have infinity playing hours? Not so much. Bioware and indeed many single player RPG's already suffer from dungeon creep. The Bard's tale was extreem in this. In the beginning you get 70% story and 30% dungeon, near the end you get 1% story and 999999% dungeon. 3 fucking levels of endless monster slaying without a single story advancement for the Bard's tale.
For SWTOR, actually getting from class story point to class story point is a very long slog. At one point I was already level 50 I was just passing all the side quests and getting really fed up with yet another dungeon crawl having to defeat mindless mobs randomly played along copy and paste hallways I had already defeated a thousand times before.
SWTOR for story is as if someone took Kotor and increased the non-skippable fights by a factor of 10 and at the same time increasing the "didn't I meet this side character before" by three.
Bioware has never made games with really good combat systems. This has been true since the Baldur Gates series where a wizzard has to take a nap after every fight to be of any use. Might be true to the table top game but in a computer game with endless dungeon's it just gets boring.
MMO's typically have trash mobs who come in groups, regular mobs who can be pulled alone or come in 2-3 groups, harder mobs that usually are alone or two and elites who represent mid bosses.
SWTOR contained far to many hard mobs. Hard isn't hard as in good AI but as in use every skill on your skill bar three times before they finally run out of hit points. THAT IS NOT FUN!
It is Quake all over again with its shamblers requiring 3 rockets to the face. Except it ain't 3, it is 30 with a lenghty reload cycle every 5th rocket. It isn't fun, exciting or a challenge, it is WORK!
The reason realistic military shooters are now completely dominating FPS is that other people apparently too got tired of emptying clip after clip into enemies. One shot, one kill is just more rewarding.
For MMO's the same goes, ONE high health mid boss is a nice challenge. An entire hallway filled with them, is not.
For me, I stopped with SWTOR when I saw yet another hallway with a ten or so single hard mobs and just didn't want to fucking do them just to get another cookie cutter story bit.
In the days of quake, the only way to make a hard monster was to make it have lots of hit points, same with Everquest. But single player games have advanced, MMO's often haven't. Even new games like TSW a
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
SWTOR has a lot of issues, some have been solved, some will be solved and, with F2P, I guess a few will be introduced. I'm currently playing. I don't know if I will through F2P.
What bugs me most is that they seem to have noticed the problems, but how they handle it is just so completely fucked up that it is hard to keep a straight face. Take the dwindling player numbers. The idea? Consolidate the servers. Good idea. Move the people back together on fewer servers, worked for a few others games as well.
The way it should be done IMO? Take a look at the server populations and lump those servers together that "fit", so you get a more or less equal population all over.
Their solution? Offer people the choice where to go. Now, let's ponder for a moment, where do people go when their main issue is a lack of others to play with? Bingo, the most populated server. Guess what happens? Right. You now have one server where you can't even complete your dailies at 4am due to people stepping on each other's toes and a few mediocre/low populated "target" servers where people feel they traded one barren desert for another one. Solution? Not really.
Dwindling player numbers. My solution? Offer free play time to former subscribers, have them come back and see whether they like it better now. Worked for a few games out there pretty well. Their solution? F2P. There is one reason why I dread that solution: Free-2-Play very easily seduces game makers to move the game towards a pay-2-win system. And I'm not the only one who avoid playing F2P games for exactly this reason. I don't want to pay just to be "allowed" into the interesting content. A monthly sub, fine. Everyone gets the same chance for a fixed amount of money. But sitting here and knowing that I am supposed to throw money at them again and again for a shot at some content is not quite what I enjoy. It isn't really enjoyable to me to know that my "success" in the game doesn't depend on me playing it but just on how much money I am willing to throw at the company making it.
And with EA, I kinda fear it will be P2W...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am sad, but not surprised (after seeing how sub numbers have fallen) to hear this. I'll continue to play SWTOR till it dies, as I really enjoy it. It just seems it will die sooner rather than later, and not have as much new content as I would hope.
Meh.