SWTOR: Catch-All

I've played Imperial Agent, Sith Inquisitor, and Jedi Knight to 50. Sith Warrior to 35, Bounty Hunter to very nearly the end of Act 1, smuggler and Jedi Consular to the end of Coruscant, and Trooper to the middle of Coruscant.

I think the Imperial Agent has been the most interesting, but it doesn't have as strong a set of companion characters as others do. Plus I was lucky that the character I decided to play when I created her was fully supported by the dialog, so it really felt like my story. JK had an interesting twist but it was entirely in a cut scene and had no consequences, which I think was a huge missed opportunity.

As far as Empire goes, I found it far more interesting being a principled person in a disagreeable society than a good person in a corrupt one. Plus the darkside options on Empire seemed more appropriate and less insane and out of place than the republic ones did. But ymmv.

I liked the agent. You can also:

1. Send companions to sell junk items in your inventory (hit N)

2. Check to see if there are other instances of your location (hit M to bring up map and it's in the lower right side) to refresh drops

3.All of the crafting skills and what they do are in the codex (maybe after talking with the crafting trainers). The codex is a bottom tab when looking at quests I believe.

juv3nal wrote:

2) the areas are so bloody big. even making full use of taxis, so much time is wasted walking around, especially to get to a trainer and buy/sell stuff.

So far, this is my only MAJOR complaint about this game. Areas are intentionally designed to be MASSIVE empty spaces and the quests constantly send you back and forth. Even a simple fetch quest takes 10 minutes of running.

And at times, they intentionally make you run, even if not necessary! E.g. in Kaas City, there are two lines of taxies that you constantly have to run between, but the path navigates through winding roads taking at least 3 minutes every time you go through. Why couldn't have they been connected?

juv3nal wrote:

A lesser gripe, because up to the point I reached I didn't feel it mattered all that much, is that the game is horrible at telling you what your crew (crafting?) skills are for.

My problem is that it is not apparent what your crew are good at until you actually pick a crew skill. But if you're curious what is possible with a crew skill, you can easily pick them up, talk to the trainer, filter "all" rather than "trainable" and look at all the recipes that the trainer can teach you. They are easy to dump as well. Just click a little 'x' next to them in the crew window.

juv3nal wrote:

Still, those gripes aside, it is a heck of a lot of generally enjoyable gaming to be had for the price of free.

Full-heartedly agree.

And at times, they intentionally make you run, even if not necessary! E.g. in Kaas City, there are two lines of taxies that you constantly have to run between, but the path navigates through winding roads taking at least 3 minutes every time you go through. Why couldn't have they been connected?

Oh, so it seems I am not crazy or at least there are 2 more of us now...

To a certain extent, I'd say a part of design in a lot of games is about wasting the player's time, the trick is disguising it well enough and knowing where the limits are.

Scratched wrote:

To a certain extent, I'd say a part of design in a lot of games is about wasting the player's time, the trick is disguising it well enough and knowing where the limits are.

This is definitely the case. That said, I think a lot of folks who have that impression of TOR do so because they're either new to MMOs, have forgotten what WoW/EQ/FFXI were at this point in the game's life cycle, or have forgotten that old school RPGs were heinous about this as well. Baldur's Gate immediately comes to mind; I regularly play that with my Kindle handy so I can read as I'm traversing new areas exploring while I wait for my party to either get attacked, or for them to walk across the screen.

AnimeJ wrote:

I think a lot of folks who have that impression of TOR do so because they're either new to MMOs, have forgotten what WoW/EQ/FFXI were at this point in the game's life cycle,

True, I am basically new to MMOs.

AnimeJ wrote:

or have forgotten that old school RPGs were heinous about this as well.

Not really. I remember that well enough, but I just expect things to have improved over time.

Plus for the case of SWTOR a lot of the environments are done intentionally due to lore and if that was changed there would be a thousand times more people upset over that than convenience.

ranalin wrote:

Plus for the case of SWTOR a lot of the environments are done intentionally due to lore and if that was changed there would be a thousand times more people upset over that than convenience.

I dunno. They just need more quick travel points. I know they feel compelled to make it make sense in the game world by sticking in a taxi stand, but it's not really necessary to "justify" everything like that IMO. Just have a terminal which throws up a map then cut to destination skipping the ride animation in between. I don't think that impacts lore at all, but of course it's not conducive to burning your players' time.

juv3nal wrote:

I don't think that impacts lore at all, but of course it's not conducive to burning your players' time.

actually it does, but i understand why some would want quicker travel.

ranalin wrote:
juv3nal wrote:

I don't think that impacts lore at all, but of course it's not conducive to burning your players' time.

actually it does

how? it's just an abstraction. it doesn't necessarily mean there was actually a terminal there with some sort of elided fast transit system. it's shorthand for saying you picked a location on a map and walked.

juv3nal wrote:
ranalin wrote:
juv3nal wrote:

I don't think that impacts lore at all, but of course it's not conducive to burning your players' time.

actually it does

how? it's just an abstraction. it doesn't necessarily mean there was actually a terminal there with some sort of elided fast transit system. it's shorthand for saying you picked a location on a map and walked.

There are valid reasons that travel should not be instant from a world building perspective. One of the things that really gives WoW a sense of a "place" is that you have to manually traverse a lot of the environment (and even when using flight paths you still *see* the environment). Also, fast travel in single player games (e.g. Fallout 3, Oblivion) is explained away as "well, you just went there, but time passed," which is a narrative challenge for MMOs since players are all in the same game world where time presumably passes at a constant rate for everybody.

Of course, none of that changes the fact that travel time sinks aren't fun, and fun is supposed to win. It's questionable whether travel timesinks are the right decision at this point, but there is something more to them than to simply slow the player down, and it's understandable that SWTOR went to its default of "do it like WoW" on this one.

I do not recall ever feeling like I was intentionally being walked to burn my play-time, in WoW. In SWTOR I constantly feel that way. Could be that I'm more cynical these days, and that my gaming time is more precious, but some of the design really raised my eyebrows. For example, the first imperial flashpoint--a cargo ship, that has the bridge the size of a small hangar! WTF? If this is a cargo vessel, why isn't that space filled with boxes? Anyways, that's just one of many size design related issues that rubbed me slightly wrong.

MoonDragon wrote:

I do not recall ever feeling like I was intentionally being walked to burn my play-time, in WoW. In SWTOR I constantly feel that way. Could be that I'm more cynical these days, and that my gaming time is more precious, but some of the design really raised my eyebrows. For example, the first imperial flashpoint--a cargo ship, that has the bridge the size of a small hangar! WTF? If this is a cargo vessel, why isn't that space filled with boxes? Anyways, that's just one of many size design related issues that rubbed me slightly wrong.

That is more a scale issue, not a size issue. I have the same problem with many MMOs which seem to think that you need to make each door large enough to fit a house through and each room big enough for a rugby game. Interestingly, I don't think wow suffers from that problem, most of it's player centric spaces seems scaled correctly.

Pex-Corrh wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

I do not recall ever feeling like I was intentionally being walked to burn my play-time, in WoW. In SWTOR I constantly feel that way. Could be that I'm more cynical these days, and that my gaming time is more precious, but some of the design really raised my eyebrows. For example, the first imperial flashpoint--a cargo ship, that has the bridge the size of a small hangar! WTF? If this is a cargo vessel, why isn't that space filled with boxes? Anyways, that's just one of many size design related issues that rubbed me slightly wrong.

That is more a scale issue, not a size issue. I have the same problem with many MMOs which seem to think that you need to make each door large enough to fit a house through and each room big enough for a rugby game. Interestingly, I don't think wow suffers from that problem, most of it's player centric spaces seems scaled correctly.

One word: camera.

Scale gets all strange in 3rd person games because of the camera. It's very hard to make something that looks like it's the right scale, but has room for the camera to float properly.

MoonDragon wrote:

I do not recall ever feeling like I was intentionally being walked to burn my play-time, in WoW. In SWTOR I constantly feel that way. Could be that I'm more cynical these days, and that my gaming time is more precious, but some of the design really raised my eyebrows. For example, the first imperial flashpoint--a cargo ship, that has the bridge the size of a small hangar! WTF? If this is a cargo vessel, why isn't that space filled with boxes? Anyways, that's just one of many size design related issues that rubbed me slightly wrong.

Just out of curiosity, when did you start playing? In vanilla WoW, you walked for your first 40 levels and there was a bare fraction of the fast travel points that there are now. SWTOR's travel is markedly better from that perspective, not to mention that there are far more fast travel points on top of the fact that your hearth stone equivalent can take you to any node on the planet.

I played WoW from the beginning. The thing is, WoW was interesting to explore. There was always something different and distracting every few hundred meters. Your quests were often near a quest hub, and when you were done with it, you were sent to the next quest hub.

In SWTOR the quests often keep sending me back and forth between hubs. Often times I find that the paths are intentionally extended just to make you walk an extra 3 minutes. Not to mention that the extra 3 minutes are NOT interesting to walk. It often feels that the quick travel hubs are put in as an appeasement, just so that the players don't quit in disgust.

Huh... I'm an MMO newbie and from what I could tell, the quests were usually designed to be in clusters. Land on a planet, get class quest and world quest and sidequests all of which point to one general location, rinse and repeat for two more clusters. There were sometimes deviations, and sometimes really annoying planet hopping for your class quest between major planets, but it never felt too terrible.

MoonDragon wrote:

I played WoW from the beginning. The thing is, WoW was interesting to explore. There was always something different and distracting every few hundred meters. Your quests were often near a quest hub, and when you were done with it, you were sent to the next quest hub.

In SWTOR the quests often keep sending me back and forth between hubs. Often times I find that the paths are intentionally extended just to make you walk an extra 3 minutes. Not to mention that the extra 3 minutes are NOT interesting to walk. It often feels that the quick travel hubs are put in as an appeasement, just so that the players don't quit in disgust.

Big question: When did you play WoW? The game got dramatically less annoying about travel as time went on, to the point that it's pretty finely oiled now. Original WoW had a ton of fetch quests / run here / run back there type quests, and way fewer options for fast travel. I feel like SWTOR's "running around factor" falls somewhere between the two: better than launch WoW, a bit worse than Cataclysm WoW.

Also in WoW's favor: Azeroth was a hell of a lot more colorful and interesting than the places you run around in SWTOR, which are all super lame to me. The first time I saw stuff in WoW, I often thought, well, "wow!" Everything in SWTOR looks so super generic, with its lame veneer of Star Warsiness smeared all over everything. This is part of why the game feels archaic to me, to be honest; I don't think the tech is bad, I just think I kind of hate the "Star Wars look." *

* This is obviously subjective and Star Wars geeks will likely feel otherwise.

gore wrote:

Big question: When did you play WoW?

As I already said, in the beginning. I started during the first month it came out. Then played for a while (a year or two) and quit. Then came back when the first big expansion came out (with the blue alien people). Stayed for a few months and didn't go back after that.

gore wrote:

Also in WoW's favor: Azeroth was a hell of a lot more colorful and interesting than the places you run around in SWTOR, which are all super lame to me. The first time I saw stuff in WoW, I often thought, well, "wow!" Everything in SWTOR looks so super generic, with its lame veneer of Star Warsiness smeared all over everything. This is part of why the game feels archaic to me, to be honest; I don't think the tech is bad, I just think I kind of hate the "Star Wars look."

This is exactly what I was getting at, above. Even if WoW may have forced me to walk for the sake of walking as much as SWTOR--which I don't think it did--the walking itself was generally a lot more interesting and didn't feel like a chore.

SWTOR on the other hand keeps making you walk through the same "imperial" hallways that you've been walking through for the last 3 planets. Over and over and over again.

kmzh wrote:

Huh... I'm an MMO newbie and from what I could tell, the quests were usually designed to be in clusters. Land on a planet, get class quest and world quest and sidequests all of which point to one general location, rinse and repeat for two more clusters. There were sometimes deviations, and sometimes really annoying planet hopping for your class quest between major planets, but it never felt too terrible.

That's the way I've felt about the TOR quest hubs since Beta. And let me tell you that travel was a HUGE issue in Beta. Ranalin can attest to this with me - the devs did a lot before the game launched to make it more accessible. Let's take your first "real" planet - Taris. Land in the starport, get a bunch of quests. Return to starport to turn in quests, storyline takes you to hub #2. Get quests at hub #2, return to hub to turn in, story line takes you to hub #3. And it's literally that way all the way up until you start to do dailies. If you're running around a lot, it's most likely because you are doing story line before doing hubs, or you're mixing them up. Say, for example - doing planet story parts 1 & 2 before finishing hub 1.

gore wrote:

Also in WoW's favor: Azeroth was a hell of a lot more colorful and interesting than the places you run around in SWTOR, which are all super lame to me. The first time I saw stuff in WoW, I often thought, well, "wow!" Everything in SWTOR looks so super generic, with its lame veneer of Star Warsiness smeared all over everything. This is part of why the game feels archaic to me, to be honest; I don't think the tech is bad, I just think I kind of hate the "Star Wars look." *

This is why I'm having a hard time bringing myself to play more TOR and halfway thinking about getting Pandaria even though I swore I was done with WOW after I got so tired of it last time. There is no real sense of exploring and seeing new things.

Whenever I'm wandering around in TOR and I find myself thinking that a world feels a bit bland I remind myself to look up and around, just to sit back and take things in. I think the first time I did it was when I was bogged down during my initial visit to Taris: ruins, rakghouls, grass, rakghouls, more ruins, rakghouls and, oh yeah, more rakghouls.

I was actually surprised by how good Taris looked when I wasn't staring at the usual mmo camera angle, when I instead panned the camera to look at the sky and skyline. Maybe that in itself is a failure of design, wasted effort on things that don't really matter, or that my taste simply sucks, but every world I've been on since, from Tython and Korriban to Corellia has impressed me whenever I've taken the time to look up.

About travel times, as others have pointed out if you follow the intended content progression they set up with the quest hubs then travel times don't seem too bad (Tatooine is pretty painful until you can buy a speeder), though there are certainly places where map design and travel routes seemed designed solely to waste the player's time: I could pay for a lifetime subscription if I had a dollar for every time I wondered why I was being funnelled through an orbital station prior to landing on a planet. To me it seems a very strange decision when you design a game in which unique class stories encourage people to play alts, and then throw in things that sap the desire to replay it.

spankyboy wrote:

I wondered why I was being funnelled through an orbital station prior to landing on a planet.

I think the primary reason the orbital stations exist is because BioWare doesn't seem to have had enough time to create spaceports for every planet. Also, on some planets a spaceport simply wouldn't make much sense - the lore being that the planet is too backwater, underfunded, or seemingly unimportant to warrant such an investment of resources.

namikaze wrote:
spankyboy wrote:

I wondered why I was being funnelled through an orbital station prior to landing on a planet.

I think the primary reason the orbital stations exist is because BioWare doesn't seem to have had enough time to create spaceports for every planet. Also, on some planets a spaceport simply wouldn't make much sense - the lore being that the planet is too backwater, underfunded, or seemingly unimportant to warrant such an investment of resources.

That's a good point, but if I had to choose between a few minutes of running across a map with a few loading screens in between and a bit of magic/hand waving to get me from my ship and onto the ground I'd probably choose the latter 9 times out of 10. Even better would be something on the holoterminal explaining how it happened, just get me on the ground and on with the game!

Just a quick question - if I'm grouped with another player who is not of the same class, is there any way I can join them on missions which send them to ships/space stations etc which are on the galaxy map as opposed to being on a planet ?

I'm trying to join my group mate on his final Sniper mission, and the station appears on my galaxy map, but when I try to travel there in my ship, it just says 'invalid travel destination'. We've tried all manner of combinations - starting missions or not, making him team leader etc. Does this only work if they are the same class ?

davet010 wrote:

Just a quick question - if I'm grouped with another player who is not of the same class, is there any way I can join them on missions which send them to ships/space stations etc which are on the galaxy map as opposed to being on a planet ?

I'm trying to join my group mate on his final Sniper mission, and the station appears on my galaxy map, but when I try to travel there in my ship, it just says 'invalid travel destination'. We've tried all manner of combinations - starting missions or not, making him team leader etc. Does this only work if they are the same class ?

I've never tried doing this so I don't know for sure, but can't you go onto your group members ships? What happens if you hop on his ship and then he warps to the destination?

Wembley wrote:
davet010 wrote:

Just a quick question - if I'm grouped with another player who is not of the same class, is there any way I can join them on missions which send them to ships/space stations etc which are on the galaxy map as opposed to being on a planet ?

I'm trying to join my group mate on his final Sniper mission, and the station appears on my galaxy map, but when I try to travel there in my ship, it just says 'invalid travel destination'. We've tried all manner of combinations - starting missions or not, making him team leader etc. Does this only work if they are the same class ?

I've never tried doing this so I don't know for sure, but can't you go onto your group members ships? What happens if you hop on his ship and then he warps to the destination?

I've done it; you have to be grouped and on their ship. Also, make sure that you have a way to quick travel back to the fleet, as you can get stuck on the planet/station etc.

On travel, I think that's your issue; even though travel is far less annoying than it was in WoW(I have many, many memories of spending far more time going back and forth to an area for onsey-twosey quests in WoW than I did in SWTOR), WoW's landscape looked better, felt better and was more interesting overall. Time to 40 where you got your first mount in WoW was definitely much higher than it was in SWTOR, and on top of that the barrier to entry for your fast ground mount in WoW was *much* higher than it is in SWTOR now, which is more in line with current rates in WoW.

Cheers mate, that did the trick.

You don't have to be on their ship in order to go to their class quest destinations. If you're grouped with them, the destination appears on your travel map as well. You can fly there, and when you exit you're back on your ship.