Hey all, just curious how many of you will be participating in the massive closed beta test this weekend. Bioware has lifted the non-disclosure agreement so I thought it would be fun to share our experiences here.

I'm thinking about signing up, but in any case I won't be participating this coming weekend. Honestly I can't afford to invest my time in an MMO right now, but it's so tempting... I'm afraid that if I'll play the beta, I'm going to be buying and playing the game asap.

HAHA I came here to make the exact same thread!

Yeah, im doin it today as well because I refuse to pay for the subscription fee when it inevitably comes.

I still woulda appreciated an Old Republic single player game more, and a battlefront 3 even more than that!

The amount of time they spent on this game must have been extensive at best.

Might their efforts be better directed towards a worthy game that could have used the extra polish. ~*cough*~Force Unleashed II~*cough*~

Still, ya take what you can get.

You don't know the difference between a developer and a publisher do you?

I took my trooper up to level 4 today..might play a bit more, but it doesn't really grab me. I've never really been attracted to MMOs.

You're all banned until you get me an invite.

I have gone to level 11 with the Jedi Knight and the Sith Inquisitor (I was in the beta two weeks ago as well). The Jedi Knight story line grabbed me quite a bit more than the Sith Inquisitor storyline.

I really like how the game meshes the concept of traditional MMO's with the Bioware formula. In games like WoW or Aion, you're given a quest by an npc through a text box that you may or may not take the time to read. In this game, you're given a quest by an npc who conveys emotion and personality. It just feels so much more engaging to me.

JLee, give the Jedi Knight class a try and see how you feel about that story line. Also, at first I didn't like the fact that I had to use a training lightsaber before I was able to earn a real one, but in retrospect, I quite enjoyed the sensation of having to earn my lightsaber and it made it that much more awesome once I received it.

I'm considering trying out the Bounty Hunter class before the beta ends tonight, but we'll see.

Sith Warrior is pretty good storyline too. As is Bounty Hunter

Might do that tonight - just hit level 5 with the trooper. How far along in the storyline should I go?

Am I the only one who's played this and found it extremely boring and cookie cutter? Nitpicks:

1. Graphical quality. It's hardly blowing me away, and there's other MMOs that do a better job. And they run better. Seriously, just turning shadows on drops my framerate by half or greater, and makes the game look like utter crap to boot. About the only thing that really looked decent in this game was the pre-rendered video and the trees.
2. The cutscenes are overblown and stupid. Not silly, just stupid. It's like they tried to be comical, but the timing is awful and they push it way too hard. After seeing the spit-shine polish of Mass Effect, maybe I'm spoiled, but I really cringed at some of the early scenes in the smuggler story.
3. The animations on top of those are poorly timed and way too showey. Yes, we get it, you're a smuggler.
4. I don't know what happened with the voice actors, but the female one is pretty bad. The NPCs weren't so bad. Again contrasting with Mass Effect.
5. The game's idea of a tutorial is to throw you into the game and expect you to view individual notes on the side. This is especially confusing when you realize there isn't really an auto-attack, and the cover system is introduced only when you're actually already getting shot at. Better read fast!
6. Mobs respawn so quickly that you feel like you didn't achieve anything. Perhaps it's because it's a starter area, but holy crap, it's like 30 seconds or less! And they have small aggro areas too, so if you just run away, prepared to get shot in the back.
7. The smuggler's conversation options seem highly ambiguous. Each choice doesn't always really define what's going to happen. Are you just being a smartass, or are you really turning that mission down?
8. The cover system seems thrown in, and the shooting aspect makes you feel like you should be able to strafe shots. However, that's not really how it works at all.
9. Speaking of cover, some shots that seem clearly to not be physically possible, are possible, while others that seem possible, are not.
10. The storyline seems contrived and not becoming of a smuggler. Your ship gets stolen right off the bat, but your only reaction is an exasperated yell "MY SHIP!" and a horrible look of astonishment. Seriously, the ship is like a smuggler's lifeblood, no? I think I'd be a bit more furious than that. And a bit more resourceful too.

And that was just after like 30 minutes. I'd have played longer, but the goddamn errors at the launcher and character creation didn't help things along.

1) I have everything max'd out. It runs fine, but I wasn't impressed either.
2) I didn't go smuggler, so I can't really say there.
3) See #2.
4) Heh, the voice actors are not great at all...some are far too dramatic.
5) Cover system? I didn't even learn about that...and when I tried to step behind cover, I got hit through the wall.
6) YES. WAY TOO FAST.
7) Same with the trooper and jedi lines - it's hard to tell exactly what result you're going to get with each option. Example, I had three choices as a Trooper - 1) agree with my fellow comrade in arms to shoot some dude, 2) interrogate some dude, or 3) kill him myself. #2 gave me dark side points...and ended up with the guy getting shot anyway. wtf.
8) Cover..yep, not familiar with that.
9) Yep.
10) Didn't do smuggler.

I didn't get any errors at all, neither in the launcher nor in character creation. I got my trooper up to level 5 or 6, and a jedi up to level 3...but I got so bored I decided to do something else.

I think I'm with you on the Mass Effect line..that game spoiled mediocre RPGs by being so awesome.

INFINITE LOOP

I'll resume my opinion in a few brief lines.

This game looks terrible.

This game feels NOTHING like Star Wars.

This game plays like a 2004 game.

This game makes sith sound like gay, european hair stylists.

This game tries to be Mass Effect. Tries to be WoW. Fails on all accounts.

This game, amongst other things (DA2) is rapidly killing my love for Bioware. Now more than ever, they seem completely out of touch with their fanbase. Money's their main drive now.

Hate to break it to ya, but Bioware's main drive has ALWAYS and WILL ALWAYS be money.

More like it seems EA finally got its management all into BioWare. There was inklings of it in Mass Effect 2, with the whole cerebus network crap, but this reeks of EA.

So It's bad is what I'm getting.
Star Wars lends itself to a good MMO, why the **** do people keep ****ing it up.

I liked galaxies, but obviously that was not good enough for anyone...

I guess i just generally hate mmorpg's. I just got Deus Ex off ebay along with bulletstorm so well see how they measure up, because after a weekend with tOR, im ready to give up mmorpg's alltogather.

I do have a LotR online account and if i ever want to play an atrocious mmo with an amazing well of lore and history to base it off of, i want it to be free...

Oh I know. Business is business.

But Bioware used to have a certain quality to their games, and a certain focus on their core fans. Since Mass Effect 2, they've been edging away from their core fanbase. They're making a grab for the casual, but they're leaving others behind in the dust. I'm one of them.

If their trend continues, I wont be buying bioware games anymore. Not because I wish to boycott them, but simply because they wont appeal to me anymore.

Every interview I read with their boss, Dr. Zemunchkin or whatever, I realise just how out of touch he is with his fanbase. No one wanted bloody multiplayer in mass effect. Who the hell really wants to see Star Wars turned into a mediocre World of Warcraft clone? Who would possibly think that reusing the same 4 dungeons and building a dead, empty city in Dragon Age 2 was a good idea?

As you say, money's always been the prime focus. But there was a time where they seemed to take their games more seriously, to take them for the pieces of art they were.

I dislike games that require a monthly fee. I understand they need to support server and bandwidth costs, but I can't help thinking something like $5/month is still plenty for that.

Actually, the bandwidth cost excuse is bogus in 2011. Back in the days of Everquest and Ultima Online, it rang true. Now, though, in this day and age, its just doesn't cost that much anymore. You can look up NCsoft and Blizzard's annual cost reports. Bandwidth is nothing more than a footnote. Its not even noteworthy enough to be part of the main chart.

And the upkeep of balance patches and new content is bull too.

Since when do we have to pay for them to fix our games? In any other genre, we expect to buy a complete product or get the bug fixes in free patches. Paying for patches would be unacceptable.

For content generation, any mmo does need new content to thrive, grow and prosper. But I personally would much prefer paid expansion packs where I have the choice content than lay down a monthly fee and have to settle for what's given. If you look at current mmo's a lot of those patches include crap you would never want. And you're paying around 180$ a year for content thats worth less in quality and quantity than a 50$ expansion.

That being said, 15$ a month remains cheap, even if unjustified. Any mmo player will play a minimum of what, 20-30 hours a month? Even if you played only 15 hours, it costs you the price of a cup of coffee per hour. Unless you're poor, it's practically meaningless.

It's been a great year for the Free to Play model, and I think its rapidly proving to be the future of MMO gaming.

Personally, I think Guild Wars 2 have right of it.

Time'll tell though.

For my part, I'll pass on SWTOR

This thread makes me

Okay.

Activision does not, nor are they required to, provide a detailed breakdown of their costs (they may not even be allowed to do so; service and licensing contracts often have non-disclosure requirements.) As a result, their filings do not actually say how much they specifically spend on bandwidth - as a footnote or otherwise.

According to Activision's SEC filings for CY 2009, the cost of sales for WoW were $212 million. It's not immediately clear how their accountants calculate costs of sales because there is no strict standard of which I am aware, but the annual report claims that they calculate amortized costs (such as corporate administration, software licensing, and product development) separately from the costs of sales. This indicates that the $212 million figure is dominated by server and bandwidth costs*. Although this is relatively small compared to the net revenues of WoW (~$1.2 bn) it is far from a "footnote."

I would have looked up the info for NCsoft but it's a Korean company and I really don't give a ****.

* This figure also includes manufacturing and distribution, but such costs must be a negligible portion of the total. There is no credible reason to believe that WoW's retail distribution costs exceed, for example, the total budget of a modern AAA game.

"It's not immediately clear" so "this indicates that" it "is dominated by server and bandwidth costs"?

C'mon dude, you're usually better than that.

Sometimes I think Jon'C argues just to argue, but atleast I'm feeling better about my '$5/month and still make a profit' guess.

Yes, it does.

As I said, it's not immediately clear how they calculate COGS. Do they include QA and minor content updates as a cost of selling a month of access to WoW? Do they roll that into their (amortized) product development costs? What about related products, like those key fobs? Activision does not give their shareholders direct answers to those questions.

What is clear is that Activision is a (semi-)public corporation, and they will therefore want to maximize investor confidence. This means they list the absolute maximum numbers of their expenses as revenue-generating (i.e. engineering) rather than cost-generating (i.e. making customers happy.) The idea is supported by their SEC filings, which state plainly that they separately record amortized costs from their costs of sales. (In this context an amortized cost would be some significant one-time capital expense, such as equipment or product development. The costs are spread out over a long time in order to reduce the impact on the company's financial status. You can't credibly amortize marginal costs, such as electricity and bandwidth.)

So, yes, it indicates that every year Activision spends well over $100 million, maybe over $200 million, just on the services and staff needed to keep WoW running. Jepman might be right about the cost of bandwidth, specifically, but he's wrong about there being no costs of supporting subscribers.

(N.B. "not immediately clear" does not mean that something is impossible to deduce. It just means you have to do some work to get there.)

In other words, he was right about bandwidth cost (which he specifically mentioned). I don't recall him stating that there are no costs involved in supporting subscribers; perhaps you could refresh my memory.

No, he might be right about bandwidth cost. What I have said is necessary (but not sufficient) to specifically disprove his claim about bandwidth.

Edit:

This discussion started when Jepman objected to Triscuit's remark about "server and bandwidth costs." Bandwidth isn't a concern as consumers understand it; corporations pay for a pipe, rather than paying for the amount of data they transmit. The individual cost of a subscriber in terms of bandwidth is (and always has been) negligible. My main objection is to Jepman's implicit argument that MMORPGs can be run inexpensively, which is false.

(Also to the idea that they list bandwidth costs in a SEC filing at all. They don't, and they never would. It's a trade secret.)

So... Anyway, SW:TOR....

I actually enjoyed it, the stories were really fun, I played a consular to level 17, bounty hunter to about 5, Smuggler to 9 and a sith warrior to 13.

I didn't mind the cover mechanic, and I think it's a bit unreasonable to think that simply crouching down behind something is going to negate all damage to a smuggler, even behind cover. Did you read the tool-tip?

[LEFT] Roll into the selected cover point. If no cover point is available, you will crouch in place. Taking cover enables the use of cover-only abilities, and so long as you remain down behind a cover object, most ranged attackers strike your cover instead. [/COLOR][/LEFT]
Most, not all ranged attackers will strike your cover, Bioware isn't going to give a class an over powered ability to camp somewhere and pick off enemies without taking any damage at all, it just will take a bit longer to kill a smuggler that's hiding, and AOE attacks will have almost no effect on cover.

The jedi consular was pretty fun IMO, combines the roles of caster DPS and healer, even specced into healing talents I could more then hold my own against enemies in PVP and questing.

The first flashpoint (dungeon) I did was pretty fun as well, first time I did I thought we finished, then the commander was all like, "Yeah, we got the ship back under control, but they have us in a tractor beam, go board their ship and disable it!" and then bam, three more bosses with a fun sith end boss that dropped a neat lightsaber for me.

I like how the weapons and chest armor has all the stats on mods, so if you find a new light saber or blaster that has awesome stats on it, but you like the look of your old gear, you can just rip the mods out of the new piece and install them in your old one and use the same item with the upgraded stats, you could pretty much use your level 2 green chest piece you looted from a cow in a raid, just by swapping out the stat mods. Of course I don't know what end game is like, armor sets might have bonus for complete sets, so ripping out the mods might not be a good idea.

Is it graphically the most awesome game ever? not really, it runs ok on most machines depending on how you tune your settings.

Is the combat pretty un-inspired and carbon copy of most mmo's out there (wow, I'm looking at you), Yeah.

does it have some bugs? yeah, every game is going to have some, a game is NEVER bug free, WoW has been fixing Vanish for 7 years now.

is it fun? To the casual gamer who wants a star wars MMO. Yes, yes it is. Every single class I played, I had fun playing, the story was fun enough that I wanted to ignore my other quests just to advance my story, I'm sure it'll get boring leveling the same class again if you re-roll on other servers to play with friends, but it's still fun to play though.

If you are expecting a lot of innovation, ground breaking, next generation, trend-setting, market dominating, WoW Killing best god damn game ever in the universe experiences, I'm sorry to tell you that you'll be disappointed. I realize that everyone will compare it to WoW, but truth be told, WoW was a one hit wonder and I doubt anything blizzard puts out in the future will ever be as successful as WoW and I think blizzard's Titan project won't even have nearly the same success. I'm sure it'll be successful, but it won't be their own WoW Kiler.

Nothing will be a WoW killer, and ToR uses a lot of WoW tropes, yeah. But why fix something that isn't broke, emulating WoW is a great way to give their game a shot in the arm at launch since people are familiar with the concepts, BioWare and EA have even come out and said this.. Yeah, they are looking to copy wow in some ways, anyone who ignores WoW is shooting themselves in the foot.

But ToR still stands on it's own as a fun game, that even though hard-core MMO players and Star Wars fanboys will say it sucks, there are going to be many others who'll LOVE this game.

If you loved KOTOR, you'll love this game, because the style and gameplay is very similar in feel to KOTOR, but with friends. I never got to play SWG, pre or post NGE, but the civil war era with jedi running over the place seems out of place, and you know everyone wants to play a Jedi. This game let me play a bad-ass sith warrior, and a benign jedi healer and not feel out of place in the star wars universe.

I for one, might cancel my WoW and switch to Tor, I had that much fun, even in the buggy beta weekends.

No, I didn't read the tool-tip, because when it was introduced to me, I WAS BEING SHOT AT. I didn't even know there WAS a cover system.

Also, I fully expect that if I am sitting behind a bigass wall, that they should not be able to hit me. Why? Because if they're standing behind a 1/2 inch steel pipe, I can't hit them! It says I'm out of line of sight! How's that fair? The whole idea behind a cover system isn't to reduce your damage, it's to nullify it. Yes, you can't get hit behind cover, that's the point (unless you're behind crappy cover). There's also a downside, which is how it is balanced in all other games: you aren't supposed to be able to safely shoot back. Period.



This is the sort of thing that exists in a lot of MMOs now, so I don't consider this special.



No. I'm sorry, there's nothing "ok" about this. WoW honestly looks better than this game in many instances, and it sure as hell runs better. This is a new MMO, this shouldn't be an issue.



Actually, I think it's the exact opposite. I think the only person this is going to appeal to is the die-hard Star Wars fan, who wants to hear the lore. The story for me was so uninteresting and bland for me (as a smuggler) that I honestly stopped caring before the first cutscene ended! I was like, oh, I'm some generic dumbass smuggler who lost his ship. That's pretty stupid! Why would a smuggler lose his most prized possession? Especially in such a blatantly stupid way! Seriously, I fully expected to go back to my ship and kick ass. I couldn't believe when my character just stood there going "Gee whiz, they just stole an incredibly important and expensive thing from me." And then some generic suggestion of revenge. Whoop de doo! I don't want revenge on the attackers, I want my goddamn ship back!

Not to mention there's a real problem with a story-focused MMO. All these cutscenes? Even if they were super-quality, they're still going to get old, and fast. You're required to see them all again if you redo anything, especially the character.

Then there's the problem of races. Every one of them looks incredibly humanoid. Not even a hairy-ass Wookiee to play as. Twi'lek is about as far out there as you could get, and they're still 2 arms, 2 legs, normal body proportions and thus share the same animations. The character customization is so limited I'm surprised they bothered.



That's exactly what I am expecting. I think that's what everyone's expecting. Why would I want to pay $15/m for anything less? Seriously, I've played my fair share of "ok" MMOs. Eve and Aion was about the only ones able to hold my interest for any length of time, and they still didn't do it for long. If they can't rock my socks off, why are they trying?



I can tell you right now what is going to happen. It's going to be the honeymoon switch. Switch to TOR, play for two months. See/experience most of the storyline, reach the full grind stage. Honeymoon period wears off, switch back to WoW. It's happened before to MMOs and it'll happen here too.

Oh, and I loved KOTOR. This is not KOTOR. This isn't even close to KOTOR. And if they tried to make it KOTOR, they're doing it wrong. Frankly, if it wasn't for the fact that they're copying WoW wholesale for some gameplay elements, TOR would be yet another Final Fantasy 14 mistake. Trying to make a single player game into an MMO. It just does not work.

God help any company whose business plan revolves around rocking your socks off.