Additional footage credit to Swtorista, who you can find at swtorista.com/. Essential viewing for prospective players! The excellent progression chart was created by twitter.com/alortania.
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Thank you for dedicating time to doing this game justice while showing genuine concern. As a star wars fan and SWTOR fan, I applaud this. I sadly stopped playing when the newest expansion dropped for similar reasons mentioned in video and this was after falling in love at the start of the pandemic after discovering its wealth of legacy content. This legacy content sours through repitition and now as a die hard fan who completed 99% of the raiding at he highest level, i feel fucked over. You said it perfectly, they released an expansion with basically no content.
I started SWTOR with Early Access; the reason the game is getting minimal effort is that it's never been very popular. They lost about 80% of the initial players in the first few months. Now many of these were fans of Star Wars Galaxies MMO that DIED because people got bored of the total lack of content and people who were fans wanted SWTOR to be a revamped version of that DEAD game. I almost got banned once for yelling at somebody who would log in and spend hours crying and whining about how SWTOR wasn't like Galaxies and there were many people like this. After losing so much of the initial fan-base BioWare lost interest in the game. They've put minimal effort into it since then. They change a few things here and there but as you mentioned new content is not very extensive. Especially when you get to see huge new parts of the world in each Guild Wars expansion. I should maybe note that BW told us many times that SWTOR would not be like Galaxies at all and yet these Galaxy fans were enraged that it wasn't Galaxies II.
Well when it first came out, it actually had some really great raids and ALMOST-BUT-NOT-QUITE-GOOD pvp. It just didn't have enough time to finalize some things (animation locks being one of the biggest), so end game ended up being (almost entirely) abandoned quickly.
"Faced with doing this gearing, I'd rather do another origin story." Basically the way I've felt about this game since I capped my first character back in December 2011.
gear will become obsolete anyway with new levels added with new update. its like a reset really. i've given up maxing out gear, because of that. so yes, from time to time i delete my max level chars, and i start over with new one. and to mix thing up i play an ultimate end game in swtor, dress up.
I was disappointed when I found out class stories end at the base game. When the game released I thought the class stories would continue through each expansion. I wanted to experience the story from the perspective of class stories.
@@continuallyblessed44 they were meant to. But the games population crashed. Between the engine being crap and unfinished, causing delays in developing content. As well as other big games releasing or updating shortly after this released. It all resulted in EA shipping funding. They put most of Bioware's resources into dragonage and mass effect. The only reason they keep this going. Is to keep their only remaining star wars license. Which, is actually free-use. Since Disney retconned the old republic Era. They can milk star wars fans with minimal investment.
@@continuallyblessed44 The expansions would have benefited greatly from at least having a Jedi/Tech class split. All the spooky Force stuff with Valkorion is just so unfitting for non-Force users and the Hutt Cartel stuff is way more fitting for smugglers and agents than it is for the effective ruler of the Sith Empire.
@@keldor8302 But we don't have to care what Disney does, retconning doesn't change things in our eyes, only for non-gamers. Plus Aspyr are already doing the remaster of KotoR 1/2 so... old era isn't all that abandoned. Clearly folks want that as opposed to anything else.
@@FriezaReturns00001 I think you're missing the context of my statement. By Disney retconning old republic but permitting EA/Bioware to retain the star wars license for swtor. It gives Bioware free reign to do whatever they want. As it is essentially their universe. Part of the reason adding content in the beginning was slow. Aside from the shit engine. Was getting approval from LucasArts to move forward. Because anything they did in-game needed to be cannon. That's no longer the case. And since EA lost all the other Star Wars licenses. They need to hole onto this and release content and make some semblance of profit. If for nothing else than to maintain ownership of the one star wars license they have left. Later, if/when they get around to it. They can relaunch the game like FFXIV did. Or do an engine overhaul to remaster it. In order to bring people back. We should very much care about the licensing situation.
Biggest problem with swtor - no new mmo content. Once you finish the story - content you play is exact same fare we did 7 years ago. Same operations, almost same flash points, same heroics, same daily areas. New gear grind is redoing the same thing we did during 6.0. Again.
This. This is why after patch 7.0, I hardly log in anymore. I'm not re-grinding my toons to upgrade my gear to worse quality than I already got. Again.
I was so excited for swtor 7.0, but then it turns out the "expansion" was just 20 minutes of story and 1 hour of walking around killing mobs, and the final boss of what is really just an update rather than a proper expansion has been broken since 7.0 launched. In February. That's nearly 4 months ago now.
I've played SWTOR as my primary MMO for years now, but after getting through ARR in FFXIV, I just can't go back except to hang out with friends. There is a lot to do, but you will always be running the exact same content with little to no change. SWTOR has always been great at creating treadmills for players to go on, but it is consistently terrible at giving you motivating reasons to run on it. the content you run will basically never change, the gear stopped having unique appearances years ago (the only worthwhile new designs are all exclusively put on the in-game market), there isn't any unique mounts or weapons to grind out in content (except for a few select examples in old content and you will need a large group running the highest difficulty content regularly to get them). Pretty much everything that motivates me to do things in FF is lacking here: mounts, emotes, outfits, relic weapons, unique questlines, hairstyles, exciting new content, etc. Just do your dailies/weeklies, get currency, rinse, repeat. And to top off the unchanging content over the years, SWTOR doesn't do class redesigns/innovations like FF and other games. They either change basically nothing about the class and simply slap 5 extra levels on it, or in legacy of the sith's case, actively reduce ability variety and dumb down class design, without giving anything new to replace it.
Well technically, this is the fault in incoherrent systems originally put in to halt off F2P players such as credits caps which should've been removed a long time ago but that's the main reason I don't enter the game as often I was used to doing. Indeed it's true probably only for the dabbler MMORPG gamer to avoid this, not long term ones who've already invested into it -- however a primarily prboblem I always seen coming back tothe game is nobody to play with. I just don't have anyone in these type of games to stick with it consistently, I USED TO at some point but IRL issues made them disappear again and I'm just stuck in this no mans land of bein unable to run those old Operations even though they'll just be upscaled in HP values, not change of mechanics which is unfortunaite becuase just nobody is willing to remove their egos and have new gamers run those old Operations. I'm not asking to run two new Operations from current, but it feels like folks on this game in guilds are way too stuck in the clique mindset so I just give up and run Flashpoints most of the time with a rare ocassion of public events. Also keep in mind this complaint is something I've also ran into with Black Desert Online just no proper alternatives to entry. Who knows, likely the case that they could just shut the servers off then it's generally speaking a waste of money for everyone that did buy it when it was listed as such then laster subbed. Because you can't commit to game preservations on live-service titles.
@@moon1night7 Yeah, lol'd hard on this statement too. FF content is basically 'Do linear story, complete dng, procede to story, complete trial, procede to story, complete raid, then watch more cutscenes'. PvP was basically dead until recently too. I love both SWTOR and FF, they're my fav MMOs right now, but SWTOR actually gives a lot more different content, like galactic starfighter, frequent events, stronghold managemnt (yes FF has this too, but decoration options are a lot less cooler than in SWTOR and good luck buying yourself a big plot of land). Still, i can endure this for amazing raiding experience FF provides.
I know it's not a dead game, but SW:TOR could have been so much more than this. It had the Star Wars IP, Bioware's talent coming out of Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origins, it was part of the beloved KOTOR universe, and it had a 500M$ development and marketing budget... and yet the game crumbled under design and technical issues and tanked in less than a year. Unbelievable. It's difficult to not view SW:TOR as a failure. Typical EA to have thought they could out-WoW WoW just by throwing more money at it, instead of doing something original. If they chose Arenanet's approach of innovation instead of making a WoW clone with a tacked on Bioware story, I wonder if things would have been different.
it was more than this, I would say the golden age of the game is behind them now. the game was fantastic at launch, it was great in the first expansion too and the one after that.
@@AethyrPrime SWTOR had zero chance at keeping pace with the WoW end game model using their customized hero engine. It glitched too much in ops and pvp. And it was apparently too difficult to manipulate because every week they fixed KP or EV, it seemed to bug out another boss. And here we are 10 later, and they still haven't ironed out y-axis issues.
If SWTOR would put even a fraction of the effort that XIV or WoW does into content creation, it would be my preferred MMO. Sadly, bioware seems to treat it like a stepchild
It's not really a fair comparison. Swtor had a ton of content planned back at launch, but EA was banking on it being nothing short of a serious, direct competitor to WoW. When that didn't happen, the team and its budget were severely gutted. Swtors cash shop is the only reason it gets what's little support it still receives. It's self sustaining, but EA, which outright owns and ultimately controls Bioware has never gotten fully behind it, resource wise, since launch. The game is essentially on life support.
I definitely feel like once the Class stories end, you really lose the RPG aspect of the game. I still liked the stories after the class based stories ended, the characters, voice acting, and aesthetic is all their, but I feel like it became less of an RPG and more of a traditional, non-player led story.
Been playing SWTOR on and off since day 1, I have always loved this game and always will. Yeah its endgame has never been great, but I agree there is enough there to keep you interested if you are a die-hard Star Wars fan with a love of the old republic era. I personally just play the game for more of a story/RP experience. I love getting the unlocks, upgrading my stronghold, and experiencing as much of the galaxy as possible. It's at that point that I think the game succeeds. I just wish it did have a more solid endgame for the people who really need it to stay invested.
I agree, have also been playing since day 1, and this game was never about the end game, and personally I like the fact that you can work on stuff, and then walk away for a little while. It doesnt need to be like WoW etc. It is what it is.
@@Audio041194 that answer is easy: resources ($$$). it's a straight cost/benefit analysis. it's just easier and less of a gamble to retain SW nerds with RP since the vast majority of the player base are there for the IP's pull. It's a lot easier, less expensive, and less of a gamble to churn out new (and reskinned) gear on the CM while pushing legacy content (old Operations, FPs, WZs) via new meta games (conquest, dailies, weeklies) than designing completely new maps/worlds. you also have to factor in the idea that BW's strength has always been its RP in the sense of character choices with AI companions. they leaned hard into that once they realized just how bad they were at WoW-style end game (Operations, FPs, PvP...basically all with a horribly inferrior game engine).
Yeah I have quite the amount of hours myself. Played since closed beta and had all achievements at the time when I quit. Reason I quit. EA does not give a single fuck about their customers. The code generator I have ran out of battery and I could not log in to get it changed in any way short of calling to their customer service, WHICH IS IN THE US and I am EU based. No way to email and no way to get a chat. Their customer service sucks donkey balls and I couldn't even cancel my subscription because of this, to the point I had to time it and transfer money OUT of my account for when it was supposed to be paid. While I love Star Wars, I can truly with my hand on my heart say FUCK EA. They will never again get my money.
Reality: I placed a Ticket concerning a character of mine being broken. CS checked my character, agreed there was an issue. It would be fixed in a future Patch. I asked when is that Patch, and I really need my character fixed as soon as possible. I was told "If you send another ticket concerning this issue, YOU WILL BE PUT ON PERMA IGNORE for CUSTOMER SERVICE!". (Cancelled my Sub, and stopped playing) The issue isn't End Game .. THE Issue is Electronic Assholes ( Electronic Arts ).
That sounds weird even for a company people hate as much as EA; I don't think I've ever seen anyone get outright told they will be put on "perma ignore" for sending tickets, and some people I've talked to were ticket machines. Is there perhaps some part of the story being omitted here?
What are you leaving out? I've sent dozens of tickets for the same issue several times, never heard anything of the sort from EA. Also, if you're guilty of something that would cause a ban, they'd ban your account, not your ability to file a ticket. Troll.
I won't try to speak for anyone else, but it's definitely the story that keeps me coming back, not the endgame. The last time I raided competitively was when Dread Fortress and Dread Palace were recent. I remember the absolute highs of our first Brontes NiM kill. I haven't come back for Legacy of the Sith yet, but previously, I just made sure to get my full sets and tacticals that I wanted (which we now just have to earn again in a different way). Then, I would just hop on occasionally when I got the urge, move all my gear, delete a character, and remake them, just to play through their story again. Since the game's launch in 2011, I think I've remade my Sith Juggernaut main 7 times, and played through the Sith Warrior story 10 times total. I make outfits for every story arc my character goes through. It's a testament to how compelling the core class stories of the game are. The expansions are great content, but I don't find they have quite the same replayability. The funny, and telling, thing is that the main barrier getting me to pick up Legacy of the Sith is planning a new character, because I know that's exactly what I'll be doing. Not hopping in on my main for a 2 hour story, and then grinding to earn back the gear I already had, but in a different format, with some slight tweaks.
Nice to read - I do the same myself!! 😊👍 My first class back in the start was inquisitor- I’ve played the base story differently + 15 different times - still have 7-8 of the characters still. I’ve played all classes as “good”/“bad”, aligning differently with different classes (imp agents with or not ja…) etc. I too resub now and then and play the base stories - maybe macab or revan story. But I always stop about that point.
The original storylines are great, humor, lewdness, the ability to be evil or good. Great stuff. Then like with everything else in the world these days, wokeness and PC garbage took hold of the storytelling, choices and options.... Kinda bleh and lacking the humor and innuendo present in the origins.
After they scrapped/shortened the end of the whole Hidden Empire expansions, this is sadly just how things seem to go now. It creates a game that can be fun to come back for a month every few years, but it's definitely not a long term player game.
The game has become stupid. there is no cohesion in the storyline anymore either. I have a main that follow the story, but after patch 7.0 I haven't even finished the last part. Because I can't even remember what has actually happened up until now, and there is no way to replay it, unless starting a new toon and grinding it alll the way again. -Hell, no.
"Electronic Arts really needs to work out what they want from this game." They have. Look at the cartel market. The in-game shop and it's obvious. Loot boxes, armor sets, weapons, tertiary companions, stronghold decorations galore! There is always new stuff coming to the cartel market in a constant, regular flow. That is *clearly* where the money is going when it comes to development in this game. It's also the reason why the in-game economy has tanked and hyperinflation is rampant, because you basically see a small handful of super rich players who have billions upon billions of credits buying and selling everything at prices that they themselves dictate, and Bioware refuses to address the problem.
I imagine because from EA's point of view it's not a problem. With items going for hundreds of millions to billions of credits, it motivates players to pay cash in the Cartel Market. Sad and frustrating, but it is what it is.
The only reason SWTOR survived for so long was due to being SW themed, the population always spikes when some new Star Wars movie / series starts up, but dies down almost just as quick. 7.0 killed the population though, my guild had an average of 20-25 people online per day, now we mostly mark it to 10.
@@Kenion2k that and there being any alternatives to compete with it long term. Battlefront 1 & 2 flopped, Squadrons is very pretty but plays terribly, and JFO is fine, I personally didn't like it but enough people did, but it's a linear RPG and not a live service with constant updates. Were a true competitor MMO to arrive that put SWTOR to shame, that's what would do it in.
Lol, it's where the money goes because it's where the money comes from. Without the CM, Swtor would have shut down many years ago. Nowhere near enough players to sustain the game without feeding whales. Inflation in the game is caused by the low number of players and the ease of making credits in the game. I've made about 700,000,000 credits in about a month (crafting is an easy way to make credits anyone can do) since I came back to the game without spending a dime beyond my sub. Took about 4 months to make 10,000,000 back in the 2.x era, which I ground out just for the wealthy title. Bioware has addressed the issue. They've made credits incredibly easy to grind for compared to how much time it used to take and crafting is far easier now as well. Finally, it's a video game. You have to look at it as time invested. Credits are just a game mechanic, they aren't really money. Takes about half the time to grind out 1,000,000,000 credits for an item then it took to grind out 10,000,000 when the item went for 10,000,000.
@@johncreel5048 Which is precisely the point? That's not good gameplay. That's not fun. Games like SWTOR thrive on a variety of content and by extension, reasons to play that content. For comparison look at World of Warcraft: You might run a dungeon because there's a particular item piece that serves as an upgrade, or you want one for transmogging your outfit. Or maybe there's a pet or mount that drops. To keep a game like WoW or SWTOR healthy, you need reasons to keep people playing. And that's content. Not grinding for credits or cracking open their wallets to buy shit from the store. CM may be keeping the lights on at Bioware Austin as far as SWTOR is concerned? But it shouldn't be is the point. Compelling story, fun endgame activities, farming and crafting decorations rather than farming credits to buy them off the GTN. Legacy of the Sith was a joke of an "expansion" and doesn't even deserve to be called as such. It was a minor content patch at best. One new planet that is so linear as to be undeserving of being named such as compared to worlds you could get lost exploring like Nar Shaddaa or Alderaan, and one flashpoint. That's not a major content update. That's not an expansion. And yet they had the balls to tout it as such to the players. The point is, EA and Bioware's heads are in the wrong place when it comes to their MMO. I so wanted LotS to be good and it was shit. I don't want a hyperinflated economy or a cartel market. I want fun, compelling reasons to keep me playing the game. I want content. And so do many others. And that's why the game is on life support.
More me musing on what makes an MMO 'mainable'. SWTOR just doesn't really cut it, and that's seemingly down to how little content they're able to make for this games. Really makes you wonder what EA are up to, and what BioWare Austin could do if they have more resources.
The game was a dead duck before launch as the engine they picked can't do the things they wanted to do and they had no-one on staff experienced enough to make the changes needed. The game wasn't ready and when people got to end game they just quit as it was a mess. Open world PVP would lag so they had to disable it, the PVP was actually solid but they didn't take advantage of it (it can't be hard to create new huttball maps) and the Operation was bugged so it was random if you could finish it. By March you couldn't even get a group together for PVP on the server I was on as there wasn't enough people online as Republic. Almost every time they have released new content it is bugged and they seemingly have no QC beyond the PTS which nobody uses. I forget which Operation it was (I think the Revan one) but it released just before Christmas and it was bugged so it would randomly not let you access the last fight. They went on break for about a month for Christmas before they came back and patched it. The only reason they bother to still release content for it at all is to hopefully funnel people to buy something from the cash shop. It's a real shame as this had a lot of potential from a story perspective.
Recently saw a video from a guy called "Neverknowsbest" on how to save the MMO genre once and for all. He talked about how most MMO players are like locust swarms, consuming content faster than developers can create it, which I think is a very apt description. That said, this is not a defense of swtor. Having played the game myself on and off since it came out, I completely agree with everything you said. What swtor's endgame lacks is worthwhile content and new content, not repeating old content to upgrade your gear just for the sake of it. There is no motivation to keep going, but there is motivation to start a new character because of the narrative and roleplaying. SWTOR is like a singleplayer game that tries to be an MMO and because of that, it doesn't really excel in either of the two. Also all the cool shit you should get by playing the game is sold on the Cartel Market. The game's economy is also super inflated on the GTN, so good luck buying anything decent if you're a new player. Legacy of the Sith also did more damage than good to the game, what with the UI changes, class overhauls and lack of content. Overall this game has a huge identity crisis and will continue to if nothing major changes. The only reason it has survived this long is because of A. The great narratives. B. Going F2P and heavily monetize its content. C. Because it is Star Wars.
There was a rumor milling around the playerbase (maybe less than half but still out there) that when KotFE came out BW was shifting the focus from MMO to online RPG with a more single player ideal. Many of believed perhaps it was due to the IP licensing that BW wanted to get out from a SW mmo and into one they owned based on Dragon Age or Mass Effect. That was several years ago, but I still have to wonder if that's always been a problem which is why Lucasfilm has decided to rescind the exclusivity contract with EA. With the KOTOR remake being done by another studio, I have to wonder if the recent rumors of another SW mmo in the works have some truth behind them because if so, then swtor's days are numbered. I love this game and have since I played it in beta. I main it because I have friends who still play and we have some social events that keep us interested. WoW, for me, relies too heavily on add-ons to make it playable so I've never seen it as having main game potential...I don't want to run 20 to 30 other programs just to play a single game. I play FFXIV on the side of swtor because I like the story, but as a writer it has some flaws that I personally cannot make it my main game either. It's frustrating when a game had so much and still had so much potential yet we're (as in veteran players) not seeing it.
Lets not be too smart about it. Many players including me had it as a main MMO for years. Class stories are still da best, but there was a lot of good content even after them. EA got a billion dollar cash out of it. It is far from a failed MMO.
"I don't care about gearing my character in this game". - Exactly how most swtor players feel. It's funny, because your mindset and philosophy about how to engage with this game is what I've been doing since it came out in 2011. I play this game on and off. Never engaged with the endgame really and mostly played it as a singleplayer story driven RPG. That's also why I have like 12 alts. This game should always have been KOTOR 3 with co-op instead of an MMO.
They only thing we can do now is hope that Aspyr once they finished KotoR remaster 1/2 they find some way to get the KotoR 3 going since the IP is no longer stuck behind the paywallification that is Electronic Arts. So other studios can make games now.
it's kind of weird. I felt like the base (1.0) SWTOR, which required much more interaction between players (e.g., traditional MMO), was also the best single player game (by way of the more meaningful class stories). 1.0 also had the most (ironically) difficult raids/Ops. They were more challenging because every week was a new NiM level boss bug.
when I stopped at 4.0, the squeaky wheel was whining about wanting the solo bot for ops so they could do the "story" instead of enter the VERY LOW bar to do the normal difficulty level.
"This game should always have been KOTOR 3 with co-op instead of an MMO." Absolutely, but it wasn't because KOTOR 3 with co-op doesn't have monetization potential like an MMO does. Swiping whales are ruining many games for the rest of us as companies pivot to take advantage of them. Thankfully Respawn is still producing some solid Star Wars content. Bioware has proven to be a shell of its former self
Unfortunately, as soon as this game launched and EA realized that it wasn't the big money maker they wanted, they dropped this game hard. Has never been more than a side dish since.
"In an earnings call to investors in October 2019, Electronic Arts announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic was closing in on a billion dollars in lifetime revenue, making it a huge financial success based on the reported $200 million development budget."
Let's be honest here, EA bought SWTOR and milked the cash cow dry without ever putting back into it properly. As long as they can make money off of it, they feel no need to really give it a budget. EA has a long history of taking successful games and turning them into crap while giving just enough to keep players spending (Looking at you Sims). They did the same with SWTOR. There is a core of writers/devs that love the game and do their best and we appreciate their efforts, but they're making the game on a budget consisting of a bag of rice and some string. It's incredibly sad. The game also seriously limited itself in design. To add in other classes would require redesigning the game from the ground up, including every space port and fleet ship to add in docking places for the other classes, re-recording dialogue for every planetary mission to add in the new voices for new classes, etc, etc. They'd be better off making a whole new game from scratch and building in that flexibility from the start, but I don't see EA investing that much into it.
@@Xero_Kaiser I would disagree with that statement. It of course depends on what you seek in a MMO. It is in a sorry state now for "old" players. But it still has a ton of content for new players. Class stories are amazing. And the game is free up till Shadow of Revan storyline. Even without class stories F2P players can go for Starfighter, some fun flashpoints, PVP, space missions (arcade game like) and more. It is still the best MMORPG for more single-player RPG oriented people. Now... I am probably aiming towards ESO. But I have over seven years in SWTOR. Can I really complain about SWTOR then?
@@viysnjor4811 For the most part, thats true. Michael’s reporting that BioWare Austin is recovering from Anthem seems accurate to the lack of development polish SWTOR has been getting.
@@viysnjor4811 Yeah, I think you can really see that what's there is pretty good quality, all things considered, but they just lack the resources to do more stuff.
@@Nephalem2002 Except it's not? To get more in depth with my comment, SWTOR's devs created a WoW clone and they're having a hard time creating something that isn't a WoW Clone. They've gotten off on a decent start with the Combat Styles but it's still very much a WoW Clone. The biggest difference is there's an actual narrative in the story. So I feel they're too afraid of what might happen if they deviate from developing the game to be like WoW.
Raise your hand if you are surprised that EA ruined another game. They are trying to make SWTOR into something it will never be instead of playing up to its storytelling strengths. I was having a great time in SWTOR and spent a lot of money on pretty clothes, and then I went on the PTR to test the new "expansion". When I saw that they were ignoring the player feedback that said stuff like, "hey, the new UI hurts my eyes", I dropped the game like a hot potato and didn't even download the patch.
well the problem is they started with an MMO and turned it into a Single player game while still trying to appeal to MMO fans... the game is stock in a place they cannot get out of without completely redesigning the game... still trying to use MMO mechanics in a single player RPG game is just a recipe for disaster.
Yes, because that old, clunky, frame rate killing UI was soooo much better. Also, the UI change is pretty small once you get past character creation. A few combined windows and some changes to match the new leveling scheme. That's it.
@@johncreel5048 You got no idea what you're talking about. You probably got the "fixed" edition - meaning you jumped in later on when the biggest issue got solved. While the UI looks terrible in general, it had an optical illusionary effect. This was clearly evident when you opened an empty inventory, especially a completely empty cargo hold. It was nauseating. Many people dropped the game because of it. It was a pretty easy fix to do too, ease up on the black box color or put a pattern in it... yet it took months for them to do that after release. When the feedback had been there for months already.
This game survives off of the non MMO type stuff. That being the cash shop. And the playerbase (especially on Star Forge) is primarily people who are creative types who prefer roleplay and designing cool strongholds/creating cool narratives for their characters. Yes, its an MMO. Yes it still has Ranked and Raiding...but at the end of the day both of those fanbases are very small sadly. I am predominantly a PvPer/RPer for the most part, and the roleplay is far more important to me than getting my gold or plat flair. I got my gold flair two seasons ago and realized the toxicity of the tiny ranked community wasn't worth by comparison to a fairly kind (tho yes there's still drama) RP community.
This is because SWTOR has been in maintenance mode for years now. It was deemed not profitable enough and thus the funding was severely cut back. Whether we like it or not, financial success is key for a long-term live service game like an MMORPG.
EA: Cut investment and focus on monetizing. Also be assholes to the players on the forums. Players: "Fuck this shit I'm out." EA: "This isn't profitable enough so we'll cut investment." Players: "Fuck this shit I'm out." EA: Surprised Pikachu face.
It's made a billion or more dollar so far last I heard of it. I blame both the management who royally fucked up the game development (A wow killer with fully voiced quets > F2P > Subscribe for story > Whatever the fuck it is now) as well as the space barbie players who just do not let the game just die. They just have to keep spending cartel coins to 'look cool'.
As someone who started like a week ago, I've been enjoying the shit out of it. You don't experience any of the end game problems if you're not at end game yet.
It really should be treated as a single player game first, like FF14 does. They thought of doing a good single player narrative first and then added MMO features
some parts are, but still it is frustrating when you do missions or get missions that you can do on your own .. while you have the level for it.. also the level cap on planets you return is pretty stupid too because you never feel like you get anymore powerful if you come back to an area where been before because you get a level cap! that's reason i stopped playing after level 40 or 30 on the planet where you needed a level 20 or something (with the level cap at 20) .. ;) but i have to agree still good game loved the story, also loved some of kotor lore that i played .. also a point for me was that you as Sith never get more from the Revanites a quest or a conclusion after decide not to kill them!
Sadly, for years now SWTOR has been reduced to a microtransaction machine with occasional sprinkling of content. It's honestly surprising they're still beating that dead horse.
Great video series and very fair feedback. I think most SWTOR players would really like to see EA give the Bioware team a bigger budget and let them focus more on story content and less on systems. The game has a lot of great QoL features, is very accessible, all the endgame content is still relevant (around 60'ish operation/raid bosses) and of course the fully-voiced story is really great. The end game operations/raids are a lot of fun and land somewhere in between WoW and FF in that they aren't nearly the "dance fights" as in FF but the game does not have a million add-on's like WoW. The corresponding difficulty is at high end is maybe a bit lower than Mythic WoW or Ultimate FF but the difficulty curve still covers a pretty wide range and has similar accessibility to FF, which is really nice. I also really recommend players check out the Jedi Knight, Sith Warrior and Imperial Agent origin stories as they are particularly popular among many players. Also interesting timing to this video since an announcement came the same day as this video releasing that the new operation and daily area (originally intended to launch with 7.0 in February) will go through its last PTS cycle soon and will launch in mid-summer.
Bioware had a great direction for the game, even post class storylines. But EA truly screwed the pooch on this game, and pretty much all it's good for now is role players. EA has the strongest IP in existence for games, yet they never really give it the resources it needs to truly shine.
This was the best video you've made on SWTOR. Bioware is a joke. They're making the bare minimum and selling it as the same type of content we had years ago. The game is fun. But it's certainly no contender in the space of the current era and they will continue to do nothing about that. They should have just stuck with chapter released story and potentially a similair system to ESO selling story DLC via the in-game cash shop. SWTOR is a single player game with multiplayer features. Do not play this game thinking it will have great endgame that feels very rewarding. It doesn't. If you're a star wars fan and haven't played yet, then do it. Edit: 18:14 Bioware actually removed our channel from their "Content Creator" program because we criticised something.
You can't say Bioware is a joke. that's not fair. it's all EA's fault for "wanting more". they wanted a second MMO and that failed, they pulled all the devs off this game, I think around 10 people work on this game now. compared to the team that was there in 2011.
I hope it never ends love playing as an Old Republic Commando and there's so much lore that's been helping me write a book about Havoc Squad and my adventures as a Trooper.
The whole thing about just grinding up your number that keeps getting reset reminds me of Destiny 2. When the progression feels so exposed and explicit, the feeling of marching on a treadmill to a beat becomes more evident and the enjoyment dies as you begin to question why.
I mean at least in destiny 2 you can work at getting cool guns to keep and use for at least a couple years, if they try the sunset again, or forever if they don’t. I have to raise the light of my guns but I already have the guns I love unless cool new ones get made.
@@TemLightKiBlade At this point it looks like they're "Soft-Sunsetting" by way of introducing Origin Traits but other than that they don't seem to be willing to try sunsetting again. That plus the changes to light level cap increases (Only +10 per non Expac-release season) the whole 'treadmill' is over before you can blink now, especially if you're the kind of person who goes to pinnacle cap every season.
I'm kind of amazed that SWTOR is still chugging along. This was the first video game that I ever actively followed the development for. There was so much potential and they squandered it. Right now I just want it to die so that *maybe* we can get a new, proper Star Wars MMO that fans deserve.
SWOTR is not for the main MMO audience, but for the main RPG audience who enjoy sci-fi settings and who want the choice of playing either solo or together - things that games like KOTOR don't allow, since they are solo only experiences and when you're done, you're done, there's nothing more to do. Plus, every single main or secondary quest is voice acted in this game (although you can skip that part for dailies and heroics by taking them from a terminal). So I would say SWOTR really is the ultimate sci-fi RPG experience and is really worth a try. And for those who enjoy reading lore and discovering interesting stuff, you'd be surprised of how much content you can discover for your Codex.
SWtOR is a game I really wish I could play as my primary MMO. I love Star Wars. The Old Republic is my favourite Star Wars era. The class stories we got from the beginning perfectly encapsulate the class fantasy, which each one paying homage to legacy characters from the Star Wars franchise as a whole. What little story content we do get has been incredible. Even with Bioware not being the same company we used to love they still pull it off. But beyond that content, all there is to keep anyone engaged is just too damn grindy. The main reason I quit World of Warcraft is that it had started to feel more like a job I wasn't being paid IRL to do, rather than the epic adventure the setting has the potential to offer. Yeah... there's some grindy stuff in FFXIV, which is my main MMO right now... but with every job I level up there is a whole story with a whole set of lore to add to what I know of the setting... of the world. Even the gathering and crafting professions offer that... which is something I have never before seen in an MMO. I don't feel all that pressured to get to max gear level just to experience the content when the story and the lore is most important to me. I'm so impressed with FFXIV's lore that it inspired me to start diving into other Final Fantasy titles... seeing as how all of them, despite being in different worlds with different stories and different characters have much of their lore in common... well beyond every game having characters named Cid, Biggs and Wedge. Anyway... absolutely YES... Swtorista is one of the absolute best content creators for anyone trying to understand or get better at SWtOR. Since I go through long periods of not playing the game since I mostly only go back when there are major additions to the story content, I've found her videos and her website a valuable source for getting up to speed.
SWTOR was my favorite mmo. Played in beta, played at launch, and at every expac launch, I was there some years I never even let my sub end between expacs. I was having a great time. But this last year I started playing FF14 and got to experience what their new expac launch experience was like. 40-hour main storyline, 8 dungeons, 3 major boss fights with 2 of those having hard modes available to play as soon as you finished the main storyline. 5 new daily areas, probably around 100 sidequests that are mostly all story-driven. Boatloads of new gear and armor to collect either just because it looks good or because you want upgrades. Within weeks of the launch of the update they launched their new raid series, and a few weeks later hard mode version of that raid. A few months later 6.1 several hour-long main storylines. 24-man raid along with its storyline, new hard mode boss fight, and a good amount of other things I've forgotten, like the PVP rework and new game mode. After seeing what another story-driven MMO can do in its launch I really wonder what is going on over at Bioware. After so many years of great game development, something has gone very wrong. 7.0 came out with one dungeon and an hour and a half-long storyline. The next biggest change was the class reworks. Some good stuff in there, but nowhere near the amount you should expect in a major update. I hope this game gets better, I hope they make a comeback. In the meantime, I'm now a resident of Eorzea.
I was forced to quit this game when I lost my guild leader rank and guild when my subscription ended accidentally. Apparently EA punishes you with a sneaky build in mechanic when your player status changes from sub to f2p by stripping your guild leader rank and randomly assigning another member of the guild who is still subbed and ignoring guild ranking system. Unfortunately the random member who got the guild leader rank assigned was inactive shutting me out of my own guild bank containing most resources and credits. I tried explaining the situation to EA and even re-subbing the same day but EA wouldn't help me out as they said they couldn't do anything. Not long after I decided to quit as 3-4 years of work was lost because my credit card info was outdated.
I'm highly considering dusting off my SWTOR account (assuming it still exists) just to play the story again. The voice acting in the game has always been absolutely superb.
I was kind of surprised when I started looking up voice actors/actresses how many BIG NAME voice actors are in this game. The biggest two I recognized are Tara Strong and Grey DeLisle Griffin, who both voice countless iconic cartoon show and animated game characters. Grey voices the female BH (I knew she was my favorite PC voice for a reason) and Tara voices a few companions and NPCs.
@@dwell7315 There's also Jennifer Hale who voices the female Republic Trooper, too. She's probably best known for voicing female Commander Shepard from Mass Effect.
One thing that wasn't brought up is the real world experience of gearing in this game. My actual experience is that if you aren't already at the highest available item level in swtor for the group content you are doing, you will not be accepted in the group. Its insane that say master flashpoints drop 322 item level gear up to 326, but if you try to play it at 322 item level, you will possibly get booted from your group. Playing the content reveals why. The content is balanced toward the high end. Basically, you need 326 level gear to run the content that drops 326 level gear. Its insane and frankly a set up for failure. I experienced this when I came back to this game for the new expansion. The endgame is the worst this time around I have seen in a long time. I used to raid before my kids came a long and had more time. I wouldn't even think of gearing up for that now.
would you go into a mythic plus lvl 20 with ilvl 200 gear? then why fuck would you fo into a Master mode Flashpoint in 322 gear!!!!! Master Mode is the highest flash point level, the are hard for a reason. if you cant do them, stick to Vets and using the LFG tool
Been replaying SWTOR over the past 6 months. Started a couple of story classes once again with the new combat style system and still enjoying the game. But I do understand that for those who want to main this game and have already done this so many times, there is little to no reason to stick with until the next patch. But I feel that older players are scaring away new players with the focus on how there is little gameplay for them currently. There are so many events, quests both for solo and group content that would literally take years for a new player to reach what the older players already completed. I wished more people showed how great this game can still be for new players and maybe with better numbers there could be an incentive to EA to invest more in its future.
SWTOR is a comfort game for me. It was the first MMO I ever really played (I was very much a "why would I pay a sub for a game I already bought? person back in the day) but as I was a fan of BioWare and Star Wars at the time I really had no choice but to play it. I rolled on Ebon Hawk and liked it enough. Then when they had the update where you could take Republic races to Empire characters and vice versa I rushed a Miraluka Jedi to play as one on Empire. Found a great RP guild. Met a lot of people, a lot of friends, did ops together, learned to tank. Just a lot of fun. Weekly RP events, hanging out in vent and teamspeak. But then guild drama happened and things fell apart. But I kept playing it all the way through Shadow of Revan. I left before KOTFE but came back in time for it, finished that, messed around, left. My friends list started being more and more of a ghost town and eventually the only things I recognized about my server were Club Imperial dancers on the fleet. I stopped playing the game. I moved on. To WoW. To 14. To Guild Wars. Hell, I tried TERA and WildStar and a bunch of other games thanks to SWTOR. And as much as I enjoy 14 it just isn't the same for me. Every so often (typically when they have a double xp event) I take the trip into SWTOR again. Make a new character. Go through the story. And it's just nice. It's comforting. It feels like going home for the holidays and having a nice blanket and cocoa. I may not play it like I did ten years ago, but I'll be sad if it finally shuts down for good. And it's sad to basically see it barely clinging to life. But I'll always have a place in my heart for SWTOR and I'll always remember my Miraluka Assassin.
The content that came out in 2011 when it was first released is still the best the game has 11 years later. It’s a BioWare game; story and player choice is Swtor’s biggest strength, and that strength isn’t very cohesive with daily/weekly content. The shaky relationship between the devs and the community over the forum controversy hasn’t helped. I still think that all of the origins are still really solid, but the fact that those origins don’t really continue past that 2011 endpoint sucks.
The original concept of Star Wars Galaxies is probably the game we all wanted. 1. Vast open worlds where players could put their player housing almost anywhere there was level land. 2. Player housing that could be decorated any way the player wanted. You could put your armor, weapons or even fish you caught on display. 3. With the Jump to Light Speed expansion you could fly your ship from planet to planet. You could have multiple players in the ship with friends firing your guns. You could even decorate some ships just like you could your player housing. I could stand in the ballroom of my luxury yacht ship and look out the window to see my friend flying by in his ship. 4. There was faction warfare you could (voluntarily) participate in. 5. There were benefits to being social. Players that were entertainers could perform and give buffs to other players. This promoted meeting other people. I made friends that I still have today. 6. The crafting system was both vast and highly profitable. The quality of your crafted items were determined by the quality of materials which was constantly changing throughout the galaxy. Crafted equipment could be experimented on to improve quality. Dye could be added to armor and clothing to change it's color. The downfall of Star Wars Galaxies was the poorly designed Jedi system (which probably should've been left out of the game), the poor balance of classes and the "New Game Experience" which was basically an attempt to make the game more like WoW.
This analysis rings very true for me. SWTOR is one of the biggest series I've done and that was because I was so engaged by the story. Then I hit the end-game and at that point I found myself struggling to be interested or invested any more. I suppose that my advice would be similar to Bellular's in that the story/ies is/are worth checking out, but I'd recommend bailing after you've had your fill of said story content.
SWTOR's original release was amazing. Eight different stories and a bunch of really cool worlds to explore. The Shadow of Revan, the Eternal Throne and the Fallen Empire expansions all have great stories. SWTOR is a great story-driven game. If you remove some of the MMO tropes, SWTOR would be a great single player game. When you are alone, playing through the story, it feels like you are playing KOTOR. I love this. I wish the game would lean even more heavily into story based content. Not just story driven but diversified story driven content. I wish they would make content for each class like they did originally. It would not be that difficult to create a couple of large zones and then fill them up with class-based quests. I know it is easier and cheaper to focus on one or two storylines per expansion but such expansions have far less overall re-playability.
Never understood why they changed gearing, with my progression guild we played until post SoR when we were hit by a massive raid content drought. I think it's cool to offer alternative gearing solutions for non raiders but it shouldn't replace it entirely. The problem here is the lack of meaningful end game content and that is an issue swtor has had for years, it's more of a single player theme park and then you move on. It's just sad because the game has so much potential but EA continues to squander it.
As an end-game (but casual) raider from SWTOR, my guild just moved over to ff14 for exactly these reasons. For years, the content EA has released has been the absolute minimum necessary to drag people along. But we stuck with it because we loved the world. The gearing this time around made it impossible for casual guild members that only play for a few hours a week to move beyond the PVP gearing level to the true end game gearing level short of spending 6 months grinding and going weeks between new pieces of gear that are worth upgrading. It does not help that Nightmare modes are the only way of getting the level of gear your average raider will need to complete most Hard Modes beyond the basic ones that have been around for YEARS. This has led many groups to cheese just a couple first boss nightmare bosses for months for our raid team to get back to the gear level needed to TRY progressing against the hard mode bosses we were working on in December. It took 3 months of this for the guild I was in to fall apart and we all decided to move to a different game and most of us had been in game since launch.
Yup. I completely agree. It's a nice side game, but the game never saw the content cadence support it deserves to break it with the big ones. ESO is right there showing them what it could be, but EA still doesn't commit fully.
I love this game, it's probably the most fun I've had in an MMO, really close tie to WoW. It just needs more support from the devs, or maybe a sequel, honestly. The actual devs have made great stuff.
I remember this game as a pretty good one in the first two or three years, the moment it went free to play... welp, it's clear EA left it to rot. A pity tho, the game was hella fun, but like other comments have said, once you play the lvl50 main story with the 8 classes, you're pretty much done with the game.
OMG I remember all the hype for SWTOR before launch, I thought it was going to be the greatest game ever, and I will play it forever 🤣. What's funny I haven't really paid much attention to FF14, and it became my favourite mmo
"Electronic Arts needs to work out what they want from this game." They already have. It's money. Money money money money. And more money. Just look at the monetisation avenues. Then look at everything else ie. the effort put into the stuff players care about. "If it's going to be a property-competitive MMORPG... they need to make investments." They won't. The cynical revamp to character playstyle and the minimum-viable-product release philosophy of the update(shamelessly branded as an expansion because hey look, another five levels), is tailored to newcomers who have not experienced the game's past first-hand. It's just increasing reliance on the backlog of existing content to prop up the trickle of the new. The 6.0 cycle at least had some semblance to the pre-4.0-5.0 era with two non-instanced worlds added. Compare that with this new update; even the tie-in dailies don't come included at launch. Critical issues with the new flashpoints remain unfixed without using cheese. The flippin' list of collated issues longer than the update's patch notes sums up how this game is basically sunsetting, but no one is going to say it. Sure it's not dead, but this showing kills confidence in its mid-term future.
Shortly after your first SW:ToR video I installed the game again. Started it. Saw the UI. Click through all the stuff. Quit the game. Uninstalled. I was ready to enjoy a good story. The UI screamed mobile game and monetization. No thanks. I have enough singleplayer RPGs I can finish or replay again. Kinda sad because I feel the game should be right up my alley. I just can't be bothere with it at current time.
If Swtor is Kotor 3 in terms of story, then boy the bar is VERY low. Comparing Swtor and Kotor in terms of storytelling, characters and the plot, even taking every class, is simply... Just no. As someone who spend hours on Kotor games, and made a essay for school about Kreia, I say Swtor can't even lick the boots of Kotor writers.
This game has type of content no other game can possibly have. Considering that, the amount of fully voiced and animated content is insane. Bitching about lacking content is just stupid, whoever thinks its not enough, go make it! Or just play your 2003 anime style games and enjoy
Regarding gearing, thanks to legacy binding, I'm able to have a single set of armor for all my characters. One. I just move it from my legacy vault to the character I'm going to play and put it all back in the vault just before I log out. Sharing one set of gear hasn't made much difference in the Operations I run in. So the only extensive difference in gear between my characters is the weapons for Force users versus Tech users. Even then, every character which uses a one-handed light saber uses the exact same saber. I do this with saber staff, one-handed blaster, blaster rifle, focus, etc. It has cuts down on the cost of gearing so much that I spend most of my resources on customizing those items that can't be used on more than one character. Even tacticals can be shared. And the classes I use are optimized; for stealth, every tech-using character takes Operative (Lethality) and every force-using character takes Shadow (Serenity). Which means I'm at the "dress-up" stage where I create new characters with a unique visual flavor..Female Drow sorcerer, Maori bounty hunter, Wakanda warrior who fights with a spear, blind samurai armed with a katana, psychotic Spartan from ancient Greece. Having already completed all the stories, this all means that I've realized I'm a Grey Jedi at heart.
Game has so much potential. Class story experience are so great, still now after all these years. But the system built around the main stories to keep player engaged.. is.. to put it simple: *meh*
*Also: Galactic Starfights is so much fun. Especially if you specced AOE on your gunship and snipe 50% more more HP of a group of enemy starships with 1 shot:) As I've said, SWTOR got so much unused potential, sad how the game continues to develop into a direction which doesn't motivate players to play more..
This is what happens when you rush drop a game that is outdated as soon as it releases. Now it is stuck with a skeleton crew working solely on microtransaction cosmetics, a horrendously ugly UI, abysmal engine, and indefinite content drought. The only thing that is considered "good" is the class stories then once you get to the DLC stories you begin to hear mixed things and feel how soulless it is.
Excellent point on taking damage in GSF - I hate that game mode, because by the time I notice I've taken damage, I'm one hit from death... or already dead. Watching it in this video does not even begin to convey how minimal the feedback is while you're playing. It is truly a surprise when I die, because I had no idea I was taking hits.
SWTOR was my 1st MMO ever and I still love it. But nowdays I keep just coming back for some pvp, which is the most fun content for me on this game right now. It is really a shame that EA did stop investing on this game. I'm sure it could have way more content, quality content, that is. and primarily more story, which, in my opinion, is the core of this game and its best feature, being at the level of FFXIV, imo. It saddens me to see this game slowly dying, while it could be growing... If only EA was willing to invest more resources... I'm sure it would pay off. I don't understand EA. they are always backing off from good games and opportunities.
I loved swtor, was playing it on and off since launch. Sadly, this game has greatly declined in quality since the major changes they did in the last expansion, changing around a lot of things and hurting the experience. Add in that they've been greatly pushing away from the main selling point that made swtor somewhat profitable, and the game is just no longer fun to play. I don't feel like lvling up alts anymore (since the class stories stopped being a thing), I haven't even finished the story of the new expansion and have no real interest in finishing it, and even ops, my bread and butter of this game are just unappealing to me. Quite frankly, I feel like this game had such promise but faltered and failed, to where if they release a swtor 2, I would not be surprised.
The wild thing about the current state of endgame is that it's not like this has been the status quo for years or something, it was literally the most recent expansion that completely overhauled the game to make it worse. From the gearing, customization, and class identity the recent expansion massively slashed the quality of the endgame of SWTOR.
I hadn't played for a few years and convinced my girlfriend to check it out against with me. She had never played it and had only recently seen some of the Star Wars movies, so here are our two perspectives from trying to play SWTOR in 2022 as a free to play MMO with a new character. We spent a ton of time in character creation, trying to make characters that would have similar enough origins that we could start together and go through the story together. I didn't notice it immediately because I had played previously and must have spent some money, but I had a decent amount of options for species and such. However, she had a bunch of pay walls for most of the species and we ended up settling on some pretty vanilla characters to compensate. Ran into our first bug in the intro, but were able to group up immediately after. That's when I remembered why I stopped playing, which was the gameplay. The combat was like a floaty version of WoW, with similar resources, skills, progression. Some of the classes even shared a ton of similarities with WoW classes, with some abilities just lifted straight out of WoW and renamed. I understand there are limitations to the combat system given the Hero Engine that was forced on the devs and the competition, but Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Online is also in the Hero Engine and actually has a very different combat system than WoW and SWTOR. It was one of the main reasons that made me lose interest in the game, because it just feels so artificial. Like you can only fire the laser in this particular way every few seconds, even though you can still fire a laser a different way during that time. That's something that they can't fix, and I'm lost on this tangent here, but that hit me pretty quickly. However, my girlfriend hadn't played WoW or any MMOs, she plays Apex Legends, and she was just kinda experiencing it and not having a ton of fun but was willing to keep going. Made it to an area with a mailbox and both of us got like a ton of mail. I got a ton more because of the age of my account, including some more powerful armor. But also I started running out of inventory space. And I started running out of room on my action bar. No big deal, just add another action bar- and it's behind a pay wall. That is correct, you only have one action bar on screen unless you pay money for more. You of course also can't expand your inventory without paying money, and there were tiny microtransactions in just every part of the UI. And we both quit and uninstalled the game. Which is disappointing, because we didn't even get to any good story beats, which I know the game has. It's really sad that the greate storylines and characters are trapped behind a horrible combat system and a billion minor inconveniences created just for the purpose of wringing money out of players.
what happened? simple, free to play happened, the gutting of the UI to piecemeal sell it back to you for money happened, paying them real money to equip fuckin dungeon gear happened. No reason to play SWTOR outside of the class stories, then just uninstall.
After returning from a five year hiatus it was incredibly underwhelming. It seems soulless and nothing like i used to enjoy. I quit after two months and went to ff14
As a founder. I have often said they should have just scrapped the mmo and focused on a sprpg. It plays like one anyways. I have had absolutely no reason to play with anyone. And tbh it feels sad. They should have just made it a kotor 3
SWTOR, for all the insane budget they put into it, needed a "Realm Reborn" treatment that it never got. There's a decent amount of high quality content, but the cost to produce additional content is also very, very high and time consuming. That wasn't well thought out for a genre that lives and dies on the ability to keep releasing new things to keep players interested. The game had some success, but it was a fraction of the success EA wanted. They spent half a billion to release a game that was supposed to go on to make billions off subscription fees, like WoW did. But there was little reason to keep a sub fee going once you got through the class quests. The game continues to limp forward making some revenue, but I cannot imagine EA will take the chance of spending any real money on this, and that's the only thing that would propel it to be anything more than it's always been - a decent Star Wars RPG dressed up as an MMO.
Gather around kids, let papa founder tell you the ancient story of the great forum ban 😝 long ago when this game was still in beta, many along myself have offered constructive criticisms about the game. But the dev's did not want to hear it and thus began the great forum purge. Many was striked down, many had left in fear, but most found themselves in GW2 because of it. The remaining along side with me, have continued to with swtor till the game came out. At first the game didntnapear out of the ordinary but soon gamers found themselves wanting more as they consumed content like they're at a all you can eat. But as more and more content came out and is consumed, the more it is apparent that things are lacking and left hollowed. Over the years the dev's have pushed numerous changes from class abilities to completely reworking things altogether. Even now in legacy of the sith expansion the content offered is miniscule but unfortunately with the massive money lost over the years, they have downsized the team altogether. Their biggest appeal of voice over for all content has been replaced for thenmostmpart with just speechless text much like KOTR. Some of us have been left wondering, had theynlisten to us, perhaps it would've saved a lot of people time and money. Had they not locked classes behind character story arch or even abilities to class altogether, things may have been better off. It just took too long for them to rectify these mistakes.
I'd honestly just love the ability to rush through this game and just play for the story. I couldn't care less for the MMO aspect. I want my damage to feel meaty. I'd gladly pay for a separate server that allowed you to 'rush' through combat for casual players that just want the story.
I played this game for 9 years. I was in it for the story. I played everything there was to play, except the nightmare lvl ops. Created maybe 30 characters. Spent hundreds of dollars. Then...the battlepass system was implemented. And I dropped out after a month. 1 month was enough to let me forget the past exceptional 9 years. When the game screams at you to log in every day and grind... that just kills the fun.
EA likes easy money. If the game is already providing a strong revenue stream with minimal effort, their attitude seems to be, "Well, we don't need to reinvest in it."
swtor sucks in so many ways that I can't even imagine.. It has potential but it has always been that way. not to mention the restrictions and the "taxes" in game, ridiculous.
They've drip-feeding us content for years. I've been playing since the beta and the recycling, the rehashing of content, it's beyond old and exhausting. SWTOR has been going on for ten years. The story has been fun, but a good story ultimately ends and with the recent micro update to the story, it's clear they're just wanting to stretch this out for as long as they can. We ruled the galaxy. What more meaningful things can they do? At one time, I would've said they should keep SWTOR going but we've passed that time. It's time to move on and I have. I can recommend SWTOR as well, but only to play for free. It's not worth spending money on and I know because I have. Never bought cartel coins though; I just subscribed. With this update, I unsubscribed and I'm not looking back.
Always seen Swotor as a sigle player game, i jump in do the main story with classes i havent done and then i am done for sometime. Its a very good single player mmorpg.
The best way to play SWTOR: get a group of 1-4 people together, pay for the subscription and enjoy everything, all the stories, dungeons and raids. Once you've "finished" all those, maybe roll some alts to get the origin stories done (they are 100% worth it). Feel free to continue tickling your completionism until you get bored and just unsub and move on. Don't hang out until you get frustrated. I have fond memories of SWTOR and i'm happy to come back with a friend or two, especially if they're newbies.
A counterpoint: Maybe this is okay, to have a game on the market that you don't really play that much. Just come back here and there, not a game with a real endgame unless you really want that grind. It's not the game that's advertised, and that sucks, but taken as it actually is, if they advertised it that way, I feel like it would kind of be... fine?
@Oscar Alvarenga I just wonder how much they have to get signed off on from Disney or whoever manages the continuity etc. stuff and if just the back and forth waiting for emails or approvals also stifles what they are even willing to waste time on or attempt. If they do need sign offs from the IP holder, it kinda sucks, cause if they were doing better I bet they'd have an easier time there too.
@@Kasaaz Well I don't personally think it matters at any rate; Aspyr media is doing the KoToR 1/2 remaster so they'll lkely give us the KoToR 3 before long since SWTOR was never KoToR to begin with. And we can just ignore Disney since what they are doing is for non-KoToR gamers, just a matter of waiting until Aspyr handles what happens next. Plus we seem to have forgotten this; the IP is free to everyone again, so folks are emaking SW games now. At some point KoToR 3 is going to be on the table and we can kinda forget SWTOR!
Like a lot of other people commenting in the feed here over the past couple of days, SWTOR was my first MMO. I played almost from when the game launched; though I did not start early enough to be eligible for founder's status. I joined the game when it was about half-way through the 1.0 patches, back before the large Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion that came with 2.0. I consistently played a Jedi Guardian tank, with a heavy emphasis on pvp and open world pvp ~ that was in fact a thing back then, with Thorazan in the Dune Sea being infamous for massive, spontaneous battles. I played consistently up until dev decisions effectively deleted open world pvp from the game, which was my particular content niche~ I would log into the game with my buddies and we would spend the evening trying to protect pub bases and quest areas from max-level imps looking to grief. Once that atmosphere vanished from the game, I started playing sporadically. I would still log in to run warzones, but the shift in focus for warzones from the large 8v8 ranked matches and 8v8 regulars to more bland 4v4 matches lacking much in the way of depth turned the pvp scene into something akin to boring for me; however, more recent 8v8 maps have been really fun to play~ not to mention sorely needed, especially since Hypergate was for the longest time the only "new" 8v8 map. To date my gameplay history with SWTOR a bit more, my Jedi Guardian, as of 8.0, was still decked out in the original War Hero/Ranked War Hero pvp gear that everyone was grinding up prior to 2.0~ modified with color dyes to make it a bit more unique. The gear and skill changes that came with 8.0 though were a bit too much of a hard sell for me, especially since the 8.0 gear system completely departs from the system that the game has had for many years now. It prompted me to try out other games and I ventured into FF14 like a lot of other people who have commented on this feed. In FF14, I found excellent story telling and tank gameplay that makes me feel like I am being spoiled (referring to the Paladin's gameplay here), and I have frankly had no eyes for SWTOR ever since. FF14 doesn't have SWTOR's pvp history; however, the quality of the story telling and the pve content makes that into a casual after thought for me. FF14 for me does what SWTOR did well, just better~ and I have yet to feel like I have run into any of the flaws that have troubled SWTOR. I frankly wish that SWTOR had FF14's quality of story telling~ and for a time the game did quite well in that regard with the Eternal Empire story arcs. Those were new and inventive stories that took the SWTOR world in interesting and wild new directions~ all of which made me play the game as I now play FF14. Unfortunately though, with the conclusion of the war between the Alliance and the Eternal Throne, the story writers have since walked away from the world of possibilities that they opened up with the Eternal Alliance and have forced the story in an awkward way back into an old Pub vs Imp dichotomy, while resurrecting a foe who was long since defeated during the Ilum arc, back before 2.0 ever was a thing.
So, this game never should have released as a MMO…but rather they should have invested their resources in making 1 or more single player Old Republic games.
Sadly, I don't think either EA or BioWare really knew what they were doing when making this, which is probably why it feels like a Single-Player game with tacked on multiplayer most of the time. It's a shame, because it had potential at the beginning, but it didn't take them long to drop the ball.
I think one of the biggest strenghts of SWTOR is that besides some side content in KotFE *everything* is voice acted. That's a huge positive in a story game and the reason I quit FF in less than a week. But what's after the story has never been particularly good, tho I've heard good things about the Iokath raid.
This is something I have learned about MMO players...the only thing that matters is their gear path's. Not what setting they are in, what the story is or anything else, it's who drops what and how can we stop mere mortals from obtaining it. It's kinda stupid, and catering to only stupid people like that is why a lot of MMO's fail.
So I have to correct you. I was told by a SWTOR developer, 75% of the player base only has one character. It was said on a podcast and multiple content creators were there. This is an example of folks thinking that a certain play style is representative of all. Now I would also make an assumption, based on that statistic that the majority of the player base is free to play. You can only have two characters if you're free to play.
They really set themselves up to fail from the start with SWTOR. The sheer amount of money that went into this game is still insane even today. And it was on the back of fully voice acted *everything* and where all of the competitors only had to create 1 discrete story to level through, they gave themselves 8 times the work from the get go. After that you knew they would never be able to offer that continuation in any sort of meaningful amount of content and if they did every other facet would suffer because of it. Their ambition was the selling point at launch, and ultimately, their downfall in the end. With rumors of new Star Wars MMO's from Ubisoft and Zenimax floating around it's hard to see a future where SWTOR survives outside of a maintenance mode, let alone begins to flourish again.
Swtor level questing is the best in any mmo. The sad state of things is that 20 years after EQ the best quest system developed yet was based on two endings to each quest whether you decided to help some random npc or punch him in the nuts.
A while back EA moved people from SWTOR to help with Anthem and the expansion at that time showed that lack of people. I am not sure that after Anthem failed whether people got moved back to SWTOR or something else happened to them.
Polite suggestion from long-time SWTOR player - the 8 origin stories are very fun, well programmed, fully voice-acted, and can be played totally for free. It is absolutely the best 8=pack of single-player RPGs, especially for the (free) price point. There are problems with the MM part of the MMORPG, though operations and flashpoints are amazing the first time you do them with a decent party of other players.
if you want more, you have to grind ridiculous achievements for casion coins, or pay real money to unlock shit again. I went back after they went free to play and realized half my bars were missing. >.> then I forgot my account password and it was like ice skating uphill to try and get them to reset it until I gave up.
Swotor is such an amazing game which is pretty badly managed in my opinion. Alot of the changes in the years werent really good but i still had my most memorable mmo moments in that mmo. I remember PvP with my guild huttenball which was a blast, Creating my own PUG raid and spending the whole day figuring out the Bosses and in the end even managing an full clear. and lastly the Story is really good i enjoyed playing alts and seeing there take on some events. But for some weird reason the management is taking it in a weird direction.
you forgot to mention the crafting system, you can create and upgrade your gear through that method as well, currently too many nutters are scalping the life out the crafting components. This makes finding the needed gear and components on the GTN very hard.
Star Wars the Old Republic is about story, and not about gear or pvp. I have never played this video game for anything else but the story. I have deleted over 20 characters just to see the different story's in different ways. It has been the only star wars game I love because of the story telling. If they change things and go in a different direction then I don't plan to play it anymore. Warcraft changed so much to the point where I stopped playing that video game years ago. There biggest mistake was removing the skill tree. That's was my nail on the coffin for Warcraft. When you have something that was never broken, and worked for so many years don't try to change things to fix it. Would you risk your billions your making just off of subs to pull a small % of other people into the game? I wouldn't if the formula worked 5 years later.
Gear Grind never made sense in this Game because they Reset the Gear by New Level Charcter. Instead of getting better Critical Hit Chance from Level 50 to 50+ the Critical Hit Chance decreased. So you always Farm New Gear to gain Your Original Critical Hit Chance.
Swtor is a game you play to fly in space, shoot blasters, explore the worlds on a speeder, and use lightsabers, everything else is just there if you get bored with the other. I recommend playing space combat pvp with HALO evolved soundtrack...it enhances the experience 10 fold.
I only play space barbie in this game. That is all that is left for me as well as just burning through billions of credits. Since practically the entire guild i was a member in left for FF14 and i am one of 5 people left playing this game. It truly is very hard to stop playing a game you've sunk years into.
Additional footage credit to Swtorista, who you can find at swtorista.com/. Essential viewing for prospective players! The excellent progression chart was created by twitter.com/alortania.
any updates on your gw2 journey ? or did you stoped playing ?
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Thank you for dedicating time to doing this game justice while showing genuine concern. As a star wars fan and SWTOR fan, I applaud this. I sadly stopped playing when the newest expansion dropped for similar reasons mentioned in video and this was after falling in love at the start of the pandemic after discovering its wealth of legacy content. This legacy content sours through repitition and now as a die hard fan who completed 99% of the raiding at he highest level, i feel fucked over. You said it perfectly, they released an expansion with basically no content.
I started SWTOR with Early Access; the reason the game is getting minimal effort is that it's never been very popular. They lost about 80% of the initial players in the first few months. Now many of these were fans of Star Wars Galaxies MMO that DIED because people got bored of the total lack of content and people who were fans wanted SWTOR to be a revamped version of that DEAD game. I almost got banned once for yelling at somebody who would log in and spend hours crying and whining about how SWTOR wasn't like Galaxies and there were many people like this. After losing so much of the initial fan-base BioWare lost interest in the game. They've put minimal effort into it since then. They change a few things here and there but as you mentioned new content is not very extensive. Especially when you get to see huge new parts of the world in each Guild Wars expansion. I should maybe note that BW told us many times that SWTOR would not be like Galaxies at all and yet these Galaxy fans were enraged that it wasn't Galaxies II.
SWOTR has never felt like it has a real "endgame" IMO. For me, the value was always in playing through the many stories, then playing dress-up.
Playing pretty princess dress up with your characters is the true endgame.
Playing dress up by trying to snipe a gacha reward that costs $60
This
Same. The journey was the goal... not the endgame.
Well when it first came out, it actually had some really great raids and ALMOST-BUT-NOT-QUITE-GOOD pvp. It just didn't have enough time to finalize some things (animation locks being one of the biggest), so end game ended up being (almost entirely) abandoned quickly.
"Faced with doing this gearing, I'd rather do another origin story."
Basically the way I've felt about this game since I capped my first character back in December 2011.
All I did was level up new classes and then I quit when I had them all capped.
yep
gear will become obsolete anyway with new levels added with new update. its like a reset really. i've given up maxing out gear, because of that. so yes, from time to time i delete my max level chars, and i start over with new one. and to mix thing up i play an ultimate end game in swtor, dress up.
I love the kotet/kotfe storylines. But the origin and world stories are really where swtor seems to shine.
In other words if you've finished all the class stories there's not much here to keep you there (how SWTOR has been for years).
I was disappointed when I found out class stories end at the base game. When the game released I thought the class stories would continue through each expansion. I wanted to experience the story from the perspective of class stories.
@@continuallyblessed44 they were meant to. But the games population crashed. Between the engine being crap and unfinished, causing delays in developing content. As well as other big games releasing or updating shortly after this released. It all resulted in EA shipping funding. They put most of Bioware's resources into dragonage and mass effect. The only reason they keep this going. Is to keep their only remaining star wars license. Which, is actually free-use. Since Disney retconned the old republic Era. They can milk star wars fans with minimal investment.
@@continuallyblessed44 The expansions would have benefited greatly from at least having a Jedi/Tech class split. All the spooky Force stuff with Valkorion is just so unfitting for non-Force users and the Hutt Cartel stuff is way more fitting for smugglers and agents than it is for the effective ruler of the Sith Empire.
@@keldor8302 But we don't have to care what Disney does, retconning doesn't change things in our eyes, only for non-gamers. Plus Aspyr are already doing the remaster of KotoR 1/2 so... old era isn't all that abandoned. Clearly folks want that as opposed to anything else.
@@FriezaReturns00001 I think you're missing the context of my statement. By Disney retconning old republic but permitting EA/Bioware to retain the star wars license for swtor. It gives Bioware free reign to do whatever they want. As it is essentially their universe. Part of the reason adding content in the beginning was slow. Aside from the shit engine. Was getting approval from LucasArts to move forward. Because anything they did in-game needed to be cannon. That's no longer the case. And since EA lost all the other Star Wars licenses. They need to hole onto this and release content and make some semblance of profit. If for nothing else than to maintain ownership of the one star wars license they have left. Later, if/when they get around to it. They can relaunch the game like FFXIV did. Or do an engine overhaul to remaster it. In order to bring people back. We should very much care about the licensing situation.
Biggest problem with swtor - no new mmo content. Once you finish the story - content you play is exact same fare we did 7 years ago. Same operations, almost same flash points, same heroics, same daily areas.
New gear grind is redoing the same thing we did during 6.0. Again.
This. This is why after patch 7.0, I hardly log in anymore. I'm not re-grinding my toons to upgrade my gear to worse quality than I already got. Again.
I was so excited for swtor 7.0, but then it turns out the "expansion" was just 20 minutes of story and 1 hour of walking around killing mobs, and the final boss of what is really just an update rather than a proper expansion has been broken since 7.0 launched. In February. That's nearly 4 months ago now.
I've played SWTOR as my primary MMO for years now, but after getting through ARR in FFXIV, I just can't go back except to hang out with friends. There is a lot to do, but you will always be running the exact same content with little to no change.
SWTOR has always been great at creating treadmills for players to go on, but it is consistently terrible at giving you motivating reasons to run on it. the content you run will basically never change, the gear stopped having unique appearances years ago (the only worthwhile new designs are all exclusively put on the in-game market), there isn't any unique mounts or weapons to grind out in content (except for a few select examples in old content and you will need a large group running the highest difficulty content regularly to get them).
Pretty much everything that motivates me to do things in FF is lacking here: mounts, emotes, outfits, relic weapons, unique questlines, hairstyles, exciting new content, etc. Just do your dailies/weeklies, get currency, rinse, repeat.
And to top off the unchanging content over the years, SWTOR doesn't do class redesigns/innovations like FF and other games. They either change basically nothing about the class and simply slap 5 extra levels on it, or in legacy of the sith's case, actively reduce ability variety and dumb down class design, without giving anything new to replace it.
Well technically, this is the fault in incoherrent systems originally put in to halt off F2P players such as credits caps which should've been removed a long time ago but that's the main reason I don't enter the game as often I was used to doing. Indeed it's true probably only for the dabbler MMORPG gamer to avoid this, not long term ones who've already invested into it -- however a primarily prboblem I always seen coming back tothe game is nobody to play with.
I just don't have anyone in these type of games to stick with it consistently, I USED TO at some point but IRL issues made them disappear again and I'm just stuck in this no mans land of bein unable to run those old Operations even though they'll just be upscaled in HP values, not change of mechanics which is unfortunaite becuase just nobody is willing to remove their egos and have new gamers run those old Operations. I'm not asking to run two new Operations from current, but it feels like folks on this game in guilds are way too stuck in the clique mindset so I just give up and run Flashpoints most of the time with a rare ocassion of public events. Also keep in mind this complaint is something I've also ran into with Black Desert Online just no proper alternatives to entry.
Who knows, likely the case that they could just shut the servers off then it's generally speaking a waste of money for everyone that did buy it when it was listed as such then laster subbed. Because you can't commit to game preservations on live-service titles.
Running same content doesnt happen in FF? okay bud
@@moon1night7 Yeah, lol'd hard on this statement too. FF content is basically 'Do linear story, complete dng, procede to story, complete trial, procede to story, complete raid, then watch more cutscenes'. PvP was basically dead until recently too. I love both SWTOR and FF, they're my fav MMOs right now, but SWTOR actually gives a lot more different content, like galactic starfighter, frequent events, stronghold managemnt (yes FF has this too, but decoration options are a lot less cooler than in SWTOR and good luck buying yourself a big plot of land). Still, i can endure this for amazing raiding experience FF provides.
@@willprox440 Agreed, atleast in SWTOR you don't have to base getting a house on luck or rng. Just credits and your golden.
IMO, SWTOR has gone downhill since they switched over to F2P. I still stuck around for a while, but eventually I kind of just moved away.
I know it's not a dead game, but SW:TOR could have been so much more than this. It had the Star Wars IP, Bioware's talent coming out of Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age Origins, it was part of the beloved KOTOR universe, and it had a 500M$ development and marketing budget... and yet the game crumbled under design and technical issues and tanked in less than a year. Unbelievable. It's difficult to not view SW:TOR as a failure. Typical EA to have thought they could out-WoW WoW just by throwing more money at it, instead of doing something original. If they chose Arenanet's approach of innovation instead of making a WoW clone with a tacked on Bioware story, I wonder if things would have been different.
it was more than this, I would say the golden age of the game is behind them now. the game was fantastic at launch, it was great in the first expansion too and the one after that.
I believe the vast majority of the problems plaguing the game are all rooted in the early adoption of the hero engine.
it is over 10 years old and player count is up. I consider that a massive success as an MMO.
@@AethyrPrime SWTOR had zero chance at keeping pace with the WoW end game model using their customized hero engine. It glitched too much in ops and pvp. And it was apparently too difficult to manipulate because every week they fixed KP or EV, it seemed to bug out another boss. And here we are 10 later, and they still haven't ironed out y-axis issues.
If SWTOR would put even a fraction of the effort that XIV or WoW does into content creation, it would be my preferred MMO. Sadly, bioware seems to treat it like a stepchild
More like an excuse to sell cosmetics.
It's not really a fair comparison.
Swtor had a ton of content planned back at launch, but EA was banking on it being nothing short of a serious, direct competitor to WoW. When that didn't happen, the team and its budget were severely gutted.
Swtors cash shop is the only reason it gets what's little support it still receives. It's self sustaining, but EA, which outright owns and ultimately controls Bioware has never gotten fully behind it, resource wise, since launch.
The game is essentially on life support.
true, it has such a great base game , love the art style , stories, shame there next to no money being put into the game anymore.
wow ? you mean content every 2-3 years ? can't be that bad surely.
Bioware/EA is a bunch of idiots. When my sub runs out in mid-june, I'm gone, and finally released from the EA-monster.
I definitely feel like once the Class stories end, you really lose the RPG aspect of the game.
I still liked the stories after the class based stories ended, the characters, voice acting, and aesthetic is all their, but I feel like it became less of an RPG and more of a traditional, non-player led story.
Been playing SWTOR on and off since day 1, I have always loved this game and always will. Yeah its endgame has never been great, but I agree there is enough there to keep you interested if you are a die-hard Star Wars fan with a love of the old republic era. I personally just play the game for more of a story/RP experience. I love getting the unlocks, upgrading my stronghold, and experiencing as much of the galaxy as possible. It's at that point that I think the game succeeds. I just wish it did have a more solid endgame for the people who really need it to stay invested.
I agree, have also been playing since day 1, and this game was never about the end game, and personally I like the fact that you can work on stuff, and then walk away for a little while. It doesnt need to be like WoW etc. It is what it is.
I do wonder why they don't make the expansions bigger. Amount of material to work with isn't in short supply.
It was alot harder to play solo at launch, resources nodes were broken, ect. It is too bad the game got sold years ago to another company.
@@Audio041194 that answer is easy: resources ($$$). it's a straight cost/benefit analysis. it's just easier and less of a gamble to retain SW nerds with RP since the vast majority of the player base are there for the IP's pull. It's a lot easier, less expensive, and less of a gamble to churn out new (and reskinned) gear on the CM while pushing legacy content (old Operations, FPs, WZs) via new meta games (conquest, dailies, weeklies) than designing completely new maps/worlds. you also have to factor in the idea that BW's strength has always been its RP in the sense of character choices with AI companions. they leaned hard into that once they realized just how bad they were at WoW-style end game (Operations, FPs, PvP...basically all with a horribly inferrior game engine).
Yeah I have quite the amount of hours myself.
Played since closed beta and had all achievements at the time when I quit.
Reason I quit.
EA does not give a single fuck about their customers.
The code generator I have ran out of battery and I could not log in to get it changed in any way short of calling to their customer service, WHICH IS IN THE US and I am EU based.
No way to email and no way to get a chat.
Their customer service sucks donkey balls and I couldn't even cancel my subscription because of this, to the point I had to time it and transfer money OUT of my account for when it was supposed to be paid.
While I love Star Wars, I can truly with my hand on my heart say FUCK EA.
They will never again get my money.
Reality: I placed a Ticket concerning a character of mine being broken. CS checked my character, agreed there was an issue. It would be fixed in a future Patch. I asked when is that Patch, and I really need my character fixed as soon as possible. I was told "If you send another ticket concerning this issue, YOU WILL BE PUT ON PERMA IGNORE for CUSTOMER SERVICE!". (Cancelled my Sub, and stopped playing) The issue isn't End Game .. THE Issue is Electronic Assholes ( Electronic Arts ).
Wow, i thought blizzards copy paste responses were bad, but that's just yikes.
Fucking wow.
That sounds weird even for a company people hate as much as EA; I don't think I've ever seen anyone get outright told they will be put on "perma ignore" for sending tickets, and some people I've talked to were ticket machines. Is there perhaps some part of the story being omitted here?
@@maxwellsterling Who would do that? Get on the internet and lie?
What are you leaving out? I've sent dozens of tickets for the same issue several times, never heard anything of the sort from EA. Also, if you're guilty of something that would cause a ban, they'd ban your account, not your ability to file a ticket. Troll.
I won't try to speak for anyone else, but it's definitely the story that keeps me coming back, not the endgame. The last time I raided competitively was when Dread Fortress and Dread Palace were recent. I remember the absolute highs of our first Brontes NiM kill. I haven't come back for Legacy of the Sith yet, but previously, I just made sure to get my full sets and tacticals that I wanted (which we now just have to earn again in a different way). Then, I would just hop on occasionally when I got the urge, move all my gear, delete a character, and remake them, just to play through their story again. Since the game's launch in 2011, I think I've remade my Sith Juggernaut main 7 times, and played through the Sith Warrior story 10 times total. I make outfits for every story arc my character goes through. It's a testament to how compelling the core class stories of the game are. The expansions are great content, but I don't find they have quite the same replayability. The funny, and telling, thing is that the main barrier getting me to pick up Legacy of the Sith is planning a new character, because I know that's exactly what I'll be doing. Not hopping in on my main for a 2 hour story, and then grinding to earn back the gear I already had, but in a different format, with some slight tweaks.
Nice to read - I do the same myself!! 😊👍
My first class back in the start was inquisitor- I’ve played the base story differently + 15 different times - still have 7-8 of the characters still. I’ve played all classes as “good”/“bad”, aligning differently with different classes (imp agents with or not ja…) etc.
I too resub now and then and play the base stories - maybe macab or revan story. But I always stop about that point.
The original storylines are great, humor, lewdness, the ability to be evil or good. Great stuff.
Then like with everything else in the world these days, wokeness and PC garbage took hold of the storytelling, choices and options.... Kinda bleh and lacking the humor and innuendo present in the origins.
@@crazycoolclips Did it? I heard swtor was more of a bastion for people who cannot stand the disney stuff.
After they scrapped/shortened the end of the whole Hidden Empire expansions, this is sadly just how things seem to go now. It creates a game that can be fun to come back for a month every few years, but it's definitely not a long term player game.
The game has become stupid. there is no cohesion in the storyline anymore either. I have a main that follow the story, but after patch 7.0 I haven't even finished the last part. Because I can't even remember what has actually happened up until now, and there is no way to replay it, unless starting a new toon and grinding it alll the way again. -Hell, no.
@@Ulvetann im pretty sure all the content in the game is brought up as hey this new group of people want to take over and we can't have that lmao
"Electronic Arts really needs to work out what they want from this game."
They have. Look at the cartel market. The in-game shop and it's obvious. Loot boxes, armor sets, weapons, tertiary companions, stronghold decorations galore! There is always new stuff coming to the cartel market in a constant, regular flow. That is *clearly* where the money is going when it comes to development in this game. It's also the reason why the in-game economy has tanked and hyperinflation is rampant, because you basically see a small handful of super rich players who have billions upon billions of credits buying and selling everything at prices that they themselves dictate, and Bioware refuses to address the problem.
I imagine because from EA's point of view it's not a problem. With items going for hundreds of millions to billions of credits, it motivates players to pay cash in the Cartel Market. Sad and frustrating, but it is what it is.
The only reason SWTOR survived for so long was due to being SW themed, the population always spikes when some new Star Wars movie / series starts up, but dies down almost just as quick. 7.0 killed the population though, my guild had an average of 20-25 people online per day, now we mostly mark it to 10.
@@Kenion2k that and there being any alternatives to compete with it long term. Battlefront 1 & 2 flopped, Squadrons is very pretty but plays terribly, and JFO is fine, I personally didn't like it but enough people did, but it's a linear RPG and not a live service with constant updates.
Were a true competitor MMO to arrive that put SWTOR to shame, that's what would do it in.
Lol, it's where the money goes because it's where the money comes from. Without the CM, Swtor would have shut down many years ago. Nowhere near enough players to sustain the game without feeding whales.
Inflation in the game is caused by the low number of players and the ease of making credits in the game. I've made about 700,000,000 credits in about a month (crafting is an easy way to make credits anyone can do) since I came back to the game without spending a dime beyond my sub. Took about 4 months to make 10,000,000 back in the 2.x era, which I ground out just for the wealthy title. Bioware has addressed the issue. They've made credits incredibly easy to grind for compared to how much time it used to take and crafting is far easier now as well.
Finally, it's a video game. You have to look at it as time invested. Credits are just a game mechanic, they aren't really money. Takes about half the time to grind out 1,000,000,000 credits for an item then it took to grind out 10,000,000 when the item went for 10,000,000.
@@johncreel5048 Which is precisely the point? That's not good gameplay. That's not fun. Games like SWTOR thrive on a variety of content and by extension, reasons to play that content.
For comparison look at World of Warcraft: You might run a dungeon because there's a particular item piece that serves as an upgrade, or you want one for transmogging your outfit. Or maybe there's a pet or mount that drops.
To keep a game like WoW or SWTOR healthy, you need reasons to keep people playing. And that's content. Not grinding for credits or cracking open their wallets to buy shit from the store.
CM may be keeping the lights on at Bioware Austin as far as SWTOR is concerned? But it shouldn't be is the point. Compelling story, fun endgame activities, farming and crafting decorations rather than farming credits to buy them off the GTN.
Legacy of the Sith was a joke of an "expansion" and doesn't even deserve to be called as such. It was a minor content patch at best. One new planet that is so linear as to be undeserving of being named such as compared to worlds you could get lost exploring like Nar Shaddaa or Alderaan, and one flashpoint. That's not a major content update. That's not an expansion. And yet they had the balls to tout it as such to the players.
The point is, EA and Bioware's heads are in the wrong place when it comes to their MMO. I so wanted LotS to be good and it was shit. I don't want a hyperinflated economy or a cartel market. I want fun, compelling reasons to keep me playing the game. I want content. And so do many others. And that's why the game is on life support.
More me musing on what makes an MMO 'mainable'. SWTOR just doesn't really cut it, and that's seemingly down to how little content they're able to make for this games. Really makes you wonder what EA are up to, and what BioWare Austin could do if they have more resources.
The game was a dead duck before launch as the engine they picked can't do the things they wanted to do and they had no-one on staff experienced enough to make the changes needed. The game wasn't ready and when people got to end game they just quit as it was a mess. Open world PVP would lag so they had to disable it, the PVP was actually solid but they didn't take advantage of it (it can't be hard to create new huttball maps) and the Operation was bugged so it was random if you could finish it. By March you couldn't even get a group together for PVP on the server I was on as there wasn't enough people online as Republic. Almost every time they have released new content it is bugged and they seemingly have no QC beyond the PTS which nobody uses. I forget which Operation it was (I think the Revan one) but it released just before Christmas and it was bugged so it would randomly not let you access the last fight. They went on break for about a month for Christmas before they came back and patched it. The only reason they bother to still release content for it at all is to hopefully funnel people to buy something from the cash shop. It's a real shame as this had a lot of potential from a story perspective.
Recently saw a video from a guy called "Neverknowsbest" on how to save the MMO genre once and for all. He talked about how most MMO players are like locust swarms, consuming content faster than developers can create it, which I think is a very apt description.
That said, this is not a defense of swtor. Having played the game myself on and off since it came out, I completely agree with everything you said. What swtor's endgame lacks is worthwhile content and new content, not repeating old content to upgrade your gear just for the sake of it. There is no motivation to keep going, but there is motivation to start a new character because of the narrative and roleplaying. SWTOR is like a singleplayer game that tries to be an MMO and because of that, it doesn't really excel in either of the two. Also all the cool shit you should get by playing the game is sold on the Cartel Market. The game's economy is also super inflated on the GTN, so good luck buying anything decent if you're a new player. Legacy of the Sith also did more damage than good to the game, what with the UI changes, class overhauls and lack of content. Overall this game has a huge identity crisis and will continue to if nothing major changes.
The only reason it has survived this long is because of
A. The great narratives.
B. Going F2P and heavily monetize its content.
C. Because it is Star Wars.
There was a rumor milling around the playerbase (maybe less than half but still out there) that when KotFE came out BW was shifting the focus from MMO to online RPG with a more single player ideal. Many of believed perhaps it was due to the IP licensing that BW wanted to get out from a SW mmo and into one they owned based on Dragon Age or Mass Effect. That was several years ago, but I still have to wonder if that's always been a problem which is why Lucasfilm has decided to rescind the exclusivity contract with EA. With the KOTOR remake being done by another studio, I have to wonder if the recent rumors of another SW mmo in the works have some truth behind them because if so, then swtor's days are numbered.
I love this game and have since I played it in beta. I main it because I have friends who still play and we have some social events that keep us interested. WoW, for me, relies too heavily on add-ons to make it playable so I've never seen it as having main game potential...I don't want to run 20 to 30 other programs just to play a single game. I play FFXIV on the side of swtor because I like the story, but as a writer it has some flaws that I personally cannot make it my main game either. It's frustrating when a game had so much and still had so much potential yet we're (as in veteran players) not seeing it.
Lets not be too smart about it. Many players including me had it as a main MMO for years. Class stories are still da best, but there was a lot of good content even after them. EA got a billion dollar cash out of it. It is far from a failed MMO.
"I don't care about gearing my character in this game".
- Exactly how most swtor players feel.
It's funny, because your mindset and philosophy about how to engage with this game is what I've been doing since it came out in 2011. I play this game on and off. Never engaged with the endgame really and mostly played it as a singleplayer story driven RPG. That's also why I have like 12 alts. This game should always have been KOTOR 3 with co-op instead of an MMO.
They only thing we can do now is hope that Aspyr once they finished KotoR remaster 1/2 they find some way to get the KotoR 3 going since the IP is no longer stuck behind the paywallification that is Electronic Arts. So other studios can make games now.
Same. I've done world bosses whenever I feel like and there's groups forming in the chat but nothing more.
it's kind of weird. I felt like the base (1.0) SWTOR, which required much more interaction between players (e.g., traditional MMO), was also the best single player game (by way of the more meaningful class stories). 1.0 also had the most (ironically) difficult raids/Ops. They were more challenging because every week was a new NiM level boss bug.
when I stopped at 4.0, the squeaky wheel was whining about wanting the solo bot for ops so they could do the "story" instead of enter the VERY LOW bar to do the normal difficulty level.
"This game should always have been KOTOR 3 with co-op instead of an MMO." Absolutely, but it wasn't because KOTOR 3 with co-op doesn't have monetization potential like an MMO does. Swiping whales are ruining many games for the rest of us as companies pivot to take advantage of them.
Thankfully Respawn is still producing some solid Star Wars content. Bioware has proven to be a shell of its former self
Unfortunately, as soon as this game launched and EA realized that it wasn't the big money maker they wanted, they dropped this game hard. Has never been more than a side dish since.
"In an earnings call to investors in October 2019, Electronic Arts announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic was closing in on a billion dollars in lifetime revenue, making it a huge financial success based on the reported $200 million development budget."
Don't quote me on this but I think EA got Bioware after SWTOR was already out so they kind of already had the data beforehand.
@@lukashavel7690 If anything, that just makes the sorry state SWTOR been in for most of it's life even worse.
Let's be honest here, EA bought SWTOR and milked the cash cow dry without ever putting back into it properly. As long as they can make money off of it, they feel no need to really give it a budget. EA has a long history of taking successful games and turning them into crap while giving just enough to keep players spending (Looking at you Sims). They did the same with SWTOR. There is a core of writers/devs that love the game and do their best and we appreciate their efforts, but they're making the game on a budget consisting of a bag of rice and some string. It's incredibly sad.
The game also seriously limited itself in design. To add in other classes would require redesigning the game from the ground up, including every space port and fleet ship to add in docking places for the other classes, re-recording dialogue for every planetary mission to add in the new voices for new classes, etc, etc. They'd be better off making a whole new game from scratch and building in that flexibility from the start, but I don't see EA investing that much into it.
@@Xero_Kaiser I would disagree with that statement. It of course depends on what you seek in a MMO. It is in a sorry state now for "old" players. But it still has a ton of content for new players. Class stories are amazing. And the game is free up till Shadow of Revan storyline. Even without class stories F2P players can go for Starfighter, some fun flashpoints, PVP, space missions (arcade game like) and more. It is still the best MMORPG for more single-player RPG oriented people. Now... I am probably aiming towards ESO. But I have over seven years in SWTOR. Can I really complain about SWTOR then?
Honestly want more character specific story quests
I feel like BioWare is too afraid to step out of WoW’s shadow and really take this MMO up a notch.
My guess is EA just isn't giving them any funding anymore, it seems to be on life support.
@@viysnjor4811 For the most part, thats true. Michael’s reporting that BioWare Austin is recovering from Anthem seems accurate to the lack of development polish SWTOR has been getting.
@@viysnjor4811 Yeah, I think you can really see that what's there is pretty good quality, all things considered, but they just lack the resources to do more stuff.
I mean WOW is dead.
There’s no shadow anymore
@@Nephalem2002 Except it's not? To get more in depth with my comment, SWTOR's devs created a WoW clone and they're having a hard time creating something that isn't a WoW Clone. They've gotten off on a decent start with the Combat Styles but it's still very much a WoW Clone. The biggest difference is there's an actual narrative in the story. So I feel they're too afraid of what might happen if they deviate from developing the game to be like WoW.
Raise your hand if you are surprised that EA ruined another game. They are trying to make SWTOR into something it will never be instead of playing up to its storytelling strengths.
I was having a great time in SWTOR and spent a lot of money on pretty clothes, and then I went on the PTR to test the new "expansion". When I saw that they were ignoring the player feedback that said stuff like, "hey, the new UI hurts my eyes", I dropped the game like a hot potato and didn't even download the patch.
well the problem is they started with an MMO and turned it into a Single player game while still trying to appeal to MMO fans... the game is stock in a place they cannot get out of without completely redesigning the game... still trying to use MMO mechanics in a single player RPG game is just a recipe for disaster.
This game was ruined a year after it came out.
Yes, because that old, clunky, frame rate killing UI was soooo much better. Also, the UI change is pretty small once you get past character creation. A few combined windows and some changes to match the new leveling scheme. That's it.
@@johncreel5048 You got no idea what you're talking about. You probably got the "fixed" edition - meaning you jumped in later on when the biggest issue got solved.
While the UI looks terrible in general, it had an optical illusionary effect.
This was clearly evident when you opened an empty inventory, especially a completely empty cargo hold.
It was nauseating. Many people dropped the game because of it.
It was a pretty easy fix to do too, ease up on the black box color or put a pattern in it... yet it took months for them to do that after release. When the feedback had been there for months already.
This game survives off of the non MMO type stuff. That being the cash shop. And the playerbase (especially on Star Forge) is primarily people who are creative types who prefer roleplay and designing cool strongholds/creating cool narratives for their characters. Yes, its an MMO. Yes it still has Ranked and Raiding...but at the end of the day both of those fanbases are very small sadly. I am predominantly a PvPer/RPer for the most part, and the roleplay is far more important to me than getting my gold or plat flair. I got my gold flair two seasons ago and realized the toxicity of the tiny ranked community wasn't worth by comparison to a fairly kind (tho yes there's still drama) RP community.
This is because SWTOR has been in maintenance mode for years now. It was deemed not profitable enough and thus the funding was severely cut back. Whether we like it or not, financial success is key for a long-term live service game like an MMORPG.
EA: Cut investment and focus on monetizing. Also be assholes to the players on the forums.
Players: "Fuck this shit I'm out."
EA: "This isn't profitable enough so we'll cut investment."
Players: "Fuck this shit I'm out."
EA: Surprised Pikachu face.
It's made a billion or more dollar so far last I heard of it. I blame both the management who royally fucked up the game development (A wow killer with fully voiced quets > F2P > Subscribe for story > Whatever the fuck it is now) as well as the space barbie players who just do not let the game just die. They just have to keep spending cartel coins to 'look cool'.
SWTOR is PERFECT for anyone who hasn't played before or played in a long time as a single-player RPG. That's how it should be treated in my opinion.
As someone who started like a week ago, I've been enjoying the shit out of it. You don't experience any of the end game problems if you're not at end game yet.
It really should be treated as a single player game first, like FF14 does. They thought of doing a good single player narrative first and then added MMO features
some parts are, but still it is frustrating when you do missions or get missions that you can do on your own .. while you have the level for it.. also the level cap on planets you return is pretty stupid too because you never feel like you get anymore powerful if you come back to an area where been before because you get a level cap! that's reason i stopped playing after level 40 or 30 on the planet where you needed a level 20 or something (with the level cap at 20) .. ;) but i have to agree still good game loved the story, also loved some of kotor lore that i played .. also a point for me was that you as Sith never get more from the Revanites a quest or a conclusion after decide not to kill them!
Sadly, for years now SWTOR has been reduced to a microtransaction machine with occasional sprinkling of content. It's honestly surprising they're still beating that dead horse.
Great video series and very fair feedback. I think most SWTOR players would really like to see EA give the Bioware team a bigger budget and let them focus more on story content and less on systems. The game has a lot of great QoL features, is very accessible, all the endgame content is still relevant (around 60'ish operation/raid bosses) and of course the fully-voiced story is really great.
The end game operations/raids are a lot of fun and land somewhere in between WoW and FF in that they aren't nearly the "dance fights" as in FF but the game does not have a million add-on's like WoW. The corresponding difficulty is at high end is maybe a bit lower than Mythic WoW or Ultimate FF but the difficulty curve still covers a pretty wide range and has similar accessibility to FF, which is really nice.
I also really recommend players check out the Jedi Knight, Sith Warrior and Imperial Agent origin stories as they are particularly popular among many players.
Also interesting timing to this video since an announcement came the same day as this video releasing that the new operation and daily area (originally intended to launch with 7.0 in February) will go through its last PTS cycle soon and will launch in mid-summer.
OMG it's Merlyn.
Bioware had a great direction for the game, even post class storylines. But EA truly screwed the pooch on this game, and pretty much all it's good for now is role players. EA has the strongest IP in existence for games, yet they never really give it the resources it needs to truly shine.
Typical EA. Monetize as much as possible while putting in the least possible effort and resources.
This was the best video you've made on SWTOR. Bioware is a joke.
They're making the bare minimum and selling it as the same type of content we had years ago. The game is fun. But it's certainly no contender in the space of the current era and they will continue to do nothing about that. They should have just stuck with chapter released story and potentially a similair system to ESO selling story DLC via the in-game cash shop.
SWTOR is a single player game with multiplayer features. Do not play this game thinking it will have great endgame that feels very rewarding. It doesn't.
If you're a star wars fan and haven't played yet, then do it.
Edit: 18:14 Bioware actually removed our channel from their "Content Creator" program because we criticised something.
Love you bro
You can't say Bioware is a joke. that's not fair. it's all EA's fault for "wanting more". they wanted a second MMO and that failed, they pulled all the devs off this game, I think around 10 people work on this game now. compared to the team that was there in 2011.
@@ingolf82 Disagree. Bioware is just as bad as EA at this point. They get no pass.
@@ingolf82 nah bro BioWare is very much too blame. Not the same company you remember from decades ago
I hope it never ends love playing as an Old Republic Commando and there's so much lore that's been helping me write a book about Havoc Squad and my adventures as a Trooper.
Its such a pity what they did with this.
Fuck it and R.I.P.
May EA burn in hell for giving away the chance to make this a decent mmorpg.
Bioware created it ea and lucasarts were publishers
it is a decent mmo , but it has so much more potential that the company kills and it’s sad
The whole thing about just grinding up your number that keeps getting reset reminds me of Destiny 2. When the progression feels so exposed and explicit, the feeling of marching on a treadmill to a beat becomes more evident and the enjoyment dies as you begin to question why.
I mean at least in destiny 2 you can work at getting cool guns to keep and use for at least a couple years, if they try the sunset again, or forever if they don’t. I have to raise the light of my guns but I already have the guns I love unless cool new ones get made.
@@TemLightKiBlade At this point it looks like they're "Soft-Sunsetting" by way of introducing Origin Traits but other than that they don't seem to be willing to try sunsetting again. That plus the changes to light level cap increases (Only +10 per non Expac-release season) the whole 'treadmill' is over before you can blink now, especially if you're the kind of person who goes to pinnacle cap every season.
I'm kind of amazed that SWTOR is still chugging along. This was the first video game that I ever actively followed the development for. There was so much potential and they squandered it. Right now I just want it to die so that *maybe* we can get a new, proper Star Wars MMO that fans deserve.
SWOTR is not for the main MMO audience, but for the main RPG audience who enjoy sci-fi settings and who want the choice of playing either solo or together - things that games like KOTOR don't allow, since they are solo only experiences and when you're done, you're done, there's nothing more to do. Plus, every single main or secondary quest is voice acted in this game (although you can skip that part for dailies and heroics by taking them from a terminal). So I would say SWOTR really is the ultimate sci-fi RPG experience and is really worth a try. And for those who enjoy reading lore and discovering interesting stuff, you'd be surprised of how much content you can discover for your Codex.
SWtOR is a game I really wish I could play as my primary MMO. I love Star Wars. The Old Republic is my favourite Star Wars era. The class stories we got from the beginning perfectly encapsulate the class fantasy, which each one paying homage to legacy characters from the Star Wars franchise as a whole.
What little story content we do get has been incredible. Even with Bioware not being the same company we used to love they still pull it off.
But beyond that content, all there is to keep anyone engaged is just too damn grindy. The main reason I quit World of Warcraft is that it had started to feel more like a job I wasn't being paid IRL to do, rather than the epic adventure the setting has the potential to offer.
Yeah... there's some grindy stuff in FFXIV, which is my main MMO right now... but with every job I level up there is a whole story with a whole set of lore to add to what I know of the setting... of the world. Even the gathering and crafting professions offer that... which is something I have never before seen in an MMO. I don't feel all that pressured to get to max gear level just to experience the content when the story and the lore is most important to me.
I'm so impressed with FFXIV's lore that it inspired me to start diving into other Final Fantasy titles... seeing as how all of them, despite being in different worlds with different stories and different characters have much of their lore in common... well beyond every game having characters named Cid, Biggs and Wedge.
Anyway... absolutely YES... Swtorista is one of the absolute best content creators for anyone trying to understand or get better at SWtOR. Since I go through long periods of not playing the game since I mostly only go back when there are major additions to the story content, I've found her videos and her website a valuable source for getting up to speed.
SWTOR was my favorite mmo. Played in beta, played at launch, and at every expac launch, I was there some years I never even let my sub end between expacs. I was having a great time. But this last year I started playing FF14 and got to experience what their new expac launch experience was like. 40-hour main storyline, 8 dungeons, 3 major boss fights with 2 of those having hard modes available to play as soon as you finished the main storyline. 5 new daily areas, probably around 100 sidequests that are mostly all story-driven. Boatloads of new gear and armor to collect either just because it looks good or because you want upgrades. Within weeks of the launch of the update they launched their new raid series, and a few weeks later hard mode version of that raid. A few months later 6.1 several hour-long main storylines. 24-man raid along with its storyline, new hard mode boss fight, and a good amount of other things I've forgotten, like the PVP rework and new game mode.
After seeing what another story-driven MMO can do in its launch I really wonder what is going on over at Bioware. After so many years of great game development, something has gone very wrong. 7.0 came out with one dungeon and an hour and a half-long storyline. The next biggest change was the class reworks. Some good stuff in there, but nowhere near the amount you should expect in a major update. I hope this game gets better, I hope they make a comeback. In the meantime, I'm now a resident of Eorzea.
EA slashed their budget to maximize profits. That's what happened.
I was forced to quit this game when I lost my guild leader rank and guild when my subscription ended accidentally. Apparently EA punishes you with a sneaky build in mechanic when your player status changes from sub to f2p by stripping your guild leader rank and randomly assigning another member of the guild who is still subbed and ignoring guild ranking system. Unfortunately the random member who got the guild leader rank assigned was inactive shutting me out of my own guild bank containing most resources and credits. I tried explaining the situation to EA and even re-subbing the same day but EA wouldn't help me out as they said they couldn't do anything. Not long after I decided to quit as 3-4 years of work was lost because my credit card info was outdated.
Scumbags...
I'm highly considering dusting off my SWTOR account (assuming it still exists) just to play the story again. The voice acting in the game has always been absolutely superb.
I was kind of surprised when I started looking up voice actors/actresses how many BIG NAME voice actors are in this game. The biggest two I recognized are Tara Strong and Grey DeLisle Griffin, who both voice countless iconic cartoon show and animated game characters. Grey voices the female BH (I knew she was my favorite PC voice for a reason) and Tara voices a few companions and NPCs.
@@dwell7315 There's also Jennifer Hale who voices the female Republic Trooper, too. She's probably best known for voicing female Commander Shepard from Mass Effect.
@@Spectacular_Insanity And Bastila Shan in KOTOR.
@@dwell7315 Nolan North (better known as Uncharted's Nathan Drake) voices the male Jedi Consular.
One thing that wasn't brought up is the real world experience of gearing in this game. My actual experience is that if you aren't already at the highest available item level in swtor for the group content you are doing, you will not be accepted in the group. Its insane that say master flashpoints drop 322 item level gear up to 326, but if you try to play it at 322 item level, you will possibly get booted from your group. Playing the content reveals why. The content is balanced toward the high end. Basically, you need 326 level gear to run the content that drops 326 level gear. Its insane and frankly a set up for failure. I experienced this when I came back to this game for the new expansion. The endgame is the worst this time around I have seen in a long time. I used to raid before my kids came a long and had more time. I wouldn't even think of gearing up for that now.
would you go into a mythic plus lvl 20 with ilvl 200 gear? then why fuck would you fo into a Master mode Flashpoint in 322 gear!!!!! Master Mode is the highest flash point level, the are hard for a reason. if you cant do them, stick to Vets and using the LFG tool
Been replaying SWTOR over the past 6 months. Started a couple of story classes once again with the new combat style system and still enjoying the game. But I do understand that for those who want to main this game and have already done this so many times, there is little to no reason to stick with until the next patch.
But I feel that older players are scaring away new players with the focus on how there is little gameplay for them currently.
There are so many events, quests both for solo and group content that would literally take years for a new player to reach what the older players already completed.
I wished more people showed how great this game can still be for new players and maybe with better numbers there could be an incentive to EA to invest more in its future.
SWTOR is a comfort game for me. It was the first MMO I ever really played (I was very much a "why would I pay a sub for a game I already bought? person back in the day) but as I was a fan of BioWare and Star Wars at the time I really had no choice but to play it. I rolled on Ebon Hawk and liked it enough. Then when they had the update where you could take Republic races to Empire characters and vice versa I rushed a Miraluka Jedi to play as one on Empire. Found a great RP guild. Met a lot of people, a lot of friends, did ops together, learned to tank. Just a lot of fun. Weekly RP events, hanging out in vent and teamspeak. But then guild drama happened and things fell apart. But I kept playing it all the way through Shadow of Revan.
I left before KOTFE but came back in time for it, finished that, messed around, left. My friends list started being more and more of a ghost town and eventually the only things I recognized about my server were Club Imperial dancers on the fleet. I stopped playing the game. I moved on. To WoW. To 14. To Guild Wars. Hell, I tried TERA and WildStar and a bunch of other games thanks to SWTOR. And as much as I enjoy 14 it just isn't the same for me.
Every so often (typically when they have a double xp event) I take the trip into SWTOR again. Make a new character. Go through the story. And it's just nice. It's comforting. It feels like going home for the holidays and having a nice blanket and cocoa. I may not play it like I did ten years ago, but I'll be sad if it finally shuts down for good. And it's sad to basically see it barely clinging to life. But I'll always have a place in my heart for SWTOR and I'll always remember my Miraluka Assassin.
Thanks for sharing this, shit made sad asl. I hope they can reboot this MMO somehow
SWTOR is really a great KOTOR game in MMO clothes.
I think we all knew this was the inevitable conclusion to the swtor arc.
The content that came out in 2011 when it was first released is still the best the game has 11 years later. It’s a BioWare game; story and player choice is Swtor’s biggest strength, and that strength isn’t very cohesive with daily/weekly content. The shaky relationship between the devs and the community over the forum controversy hasn’t helped. I still think that all of the origins are still really solid, but the fact that those origins don’t really continue past that 2011 endpoint sucks.
The original concept of Star Wars Galaxies is probably the game we all wanted.
1. Vast open worlds where players could put their player housing almost anywhere there was level land.
2. Player housing that could be decorated any way the player wanted. You could put your armor, weapons or even fish you caught on display.
3. With the Jump to Light Speed expansion you could fly your ship from planet to planet. You could have multiple players in the ship with friends firing your guns. You could even decorate some ships just like you could your player housing. I could stand in the ballroom of my luxury yacht ship and look out the window to see my friend flying by in his ship.
4. There was faction warfare you could (voluntarily) participate in.
5. There were benefits to being social. Players that were entertainers could perform and give buffs to other players. This promoted meeting other people. I made friends that I still have today.
6. The crafting system was both vast and highly profitable. The quality of your crafted items were determined by the quality of materials which was constantly changing throughout the galaxy. Crafted equipment could be experimented on to improve quality. Dye could be added to armor and clothing to change it's color.
The downfall of Star Wars Galaxies was the poorly designed Jedi system (which probably should've been left out of the game), the poor balance of classes and the "New Game Experience" which was basically an attempt to make the game more like WoW.
This analysis rings very true for me. SWTOR is one of the biggest series I've done and that was because I was so engaged by the story. Then I hit the end-game and at that point I found myself struggling to be interested or invested any more.
I suppose that my advice would be similar to Bellular's in that the story/ies is/are worth checking out, but I'd recommend bailing after you've had your fill of said story content.
SWTOR's original release was amazing. Eight different stories and a bunch of really cool worlds to explore.
The Shadow of Revan, the Eternal Throne and the Fallen Empire expansions all have great stories.
SWTOR is a great story-driven game.
If you remove some of the MMO tropes, SWTOR would be a great single player game. When you are alone, playing through the story, it feels like you are playing KOTOR. I love this. I wish the game would lean even more heavily into story based content. Not just story driven but diversified story driven content. I wish they would make content for each class like they did originally. It would not be that difficult to create a couple of large zones and then fill them up with class-based quests. I know it is easier and cheaper to focus on one or two storylines per expansion but such expansions have far less overall re-playability.
Never understood why they changed gearing, with my progression guild we played until post SoR when we were hit by a massive raid content drought. I think it's cool to offer alternative gearing solutions for non raiders but it shouldn't replace it entirely. The problem here is the lack of meaningful end game content and that is an issue swtor has had for years, it's more of a single player theme park and then you move on. It's just sad because the game has so much potential but EA continues to squander it.
As an end-game (but casual) raider from SWTOR, my guild just moved over to ff14 for exactly these reasons. For years, the content EA has released has been the absolute minimum necessary to drag people along. But we stuck with it because we loved the world. The gearing this time around made it impossible for casual guild members that only play for a few hours a week to move beyond the PVP gearing level to the true end game gearing level short of spending 6 months grinding and going weeks between new pieces of gear that are worth upgrading. It does not help that Nightmare modes are the only way of getting the level of gear your average raider will need to complete most Hard Modes beyond the basic ones that have been around for YEARS. This has led many groups to cheese just a couple first boss nightmare bosses for months for our raid team to get back to the gear level needed to TRY progressing against the hard mode bosses we were working on in December. It took 3 months of this for the guild I was in to fall apart and we all decided to move to a different game and most of us had been in game since launch.
Yup. I completely agree.
It's a nice side game, but the game never saw the content cadence support it deserves to break it with the big ones.
ESO is right there showing them what it could be, but EA still doesn't commit fully.
I love this game, it's probably the most fun I've had in an MMO, really close tie to WoW. It just needs more support from the devs, or maybe a sequel, honestly. The actual devs have made great stuff.
I remember this game as a pretty good one in the first two or three years, the moment it went free to play... welp, it's clear EA left it to rot. A pity tho, the game was hella fun, but like other comments have said, once you play the lvl50 main story with the 8 classes, you're pretty much done with the game.
OMG I remember all the hype for SWTOR before launch, I thought it was going to be the greatest game ever, and I will play it forever 🤣.
What's funny I haven't really paid much attention to FF14, and it became my favourite mmo
To be fair, at launch you had all 8 stories which was amazing. They kind of stagnated over the years.
Game could've been good. But EA always wants it's money yesterday and SWTOR never stood a chance to finish what it could've been.
"Electronic Arts needs to work out what they want from this game."
They already have. It's money. Money money money money. And more money. Just look at the monetisation avenues. Then look at everything else ie. the effort put into the stuff players care about.
"If it's going to be a property-competitive MMORPG... they need to make investments."
They won't. The cynical revamp to character playstyle and the minimum-viable-product release philosophy of the update(shamelessly branded as an expansion because hey look, another five levels), is tailored to newcomers who have not experienced the game's past first-hand. It's just increasing reliance on the backlog of existing content to prop up the trickle of the new. The 6.0 cycle at least had some semblance to the pre-4.0-5.0 era with two non-instanced worlds added. Compare that with this new update; even the tie-in dailies don't come included at launch. Critical issues with the new flashpoints remain unfixed without using cheese. The flippin' list of collated issues longer than the update's patch notes sums up how this game is basically sunsetting, but no one is going to say it. Sure it's not dead, but this showing kills confidence in its mid-term future.
Shortly after your first SW:ToR video I installed the game again. Started it. Saw the UI. Click through all the stuff. Quit the game. Uninstalled. I was ready to enjoy a good story. The UI screamed mobile game and monetization. No thanks.
I have enough singleplayer RPGs I can finish or replay again. Kinda sad because I feel the game should be right up my alley. I just can't be bothere with it at current time.
I will say: Theres different UI versions that you can pick from, above the Lock for the Bars is a button that lets you switch UI versions
I play SWTOR as if it was KOTOR 3 The story is all, everything else feels tacked on.
The Jedi Knight story really feels like the Kotor 3 we never got.
If Swtor is Kotor 3 in terms of story, then boy the bar is VERY low. Comparing Swtor and Kotor in terms of storytelling, characters and the plot, even taking every class, is simply... Just no. As someone who spend hours on Kotor games, and made a essay for school about Kreia, I say Swtor can't even lick the boots of Kotor writers.
@@erlandir9121 True, but the swtor Jedi Knight story is still the closest we'll ever get to a kotor 3. It has the most ties to Revan and the Exile.
same for me!
This game has type of content no other game can possibly have. Considering that, the amount of fully voiced and animated content is insane. Bitching about lacking content is just stupid, whoever thinks its not enough, go make it! Or just play your 2003 anime style games and enjoy
Valid complaints aren't bitching, but you are
Regarding gearing, thanks to legacy binding, I'm able to have a single set of armor for all my characters. One. I just move it from my legacy vault to the character I'm going to play and put it all back in the vault just before I log out. Sharing one set of gear hasn't made much difference in the Operations I run in. So the only extensive difference in gear between my characters is the weapons for Force users versus Tech users. Even then, every character which uses a one-handed light saber uses the exact same saber. I do this with saber staff, one-handed blaster, blaster rifle, focus, etc. It has cuts down on the cost of gearing so much that I spend most of my resources on customizing those items that can't be used on more than one character. Even tacticals can be shared.
And the classes I use are optimized; for stealth, every tech-using character takes Operative (Lethality) and every force-using character takes Shadow (Serenity). Which means I'm at the "dress-up" stage where I create new characters with a unique visual flavor..Female Drow sorcerer, Maori bounty hunter, Wakanda warrior who fights with a spear, blind samurai armed with a katana, psychotic Spartan from ancient Greece. Having already completed all the stories, this all means that I've realized I'm a Grey Jedi at heart.
Game has so much potential. Class story experience are so great, still now after all these years.
But the system built around the main stories to keep player engaged.. is.. to put it simple: *meh*
*Also: Galactic Starfights is so much fun. Especially if you specced AOE on your gunship and snipe 50% more more HP of a group of enemy starships with 1 shot:)
As I've said, SWTOR got so much unused potential, sad how the game continues to develop into a direction which doesn't motivate players to play more..
Looking forward to your take on ESO (which I am currently playing again after dumping WoW)
This is what happens when you rush drop a game that is outdated as soon as it releases. Now it is stuck with a skeleton crew working solely on microtransaction cosmetics, a horrendously ugly UI, abysmal engine, and indefinite content drought. The only thing that is considered "good" is the class stories then once you get to the DLC stories you begin to hear mixed things and feel how soulless it is.
Excellent point on taking damage in GSF - I hate that game mode, because by the time I notice I've taken damage, I'm one hit from death... or already dead. Watching it in this video does not even begin to convey how minimal the feedback is while you're playing. It is truly a surprise when I die, because I had no idea I was taking hits.
SWTOR was my 1st MMO ever and I still love it. But nowdays I keep just coming back for some pvp, which is the most fun content for me on this game right now. It is really a shame that EA did stop investing on this game. I'm sure it could have way more content, quality content, that is. and primarily more story, which, in my opinion, is the core of this game and its best feature, being at the level of FFXIV, imo. It saddens me to see this game slowly dying, while it could be growing... If only EA was willing to invest more resources... I'm sure it would pay off. I don't understand EA. they are always backing off from good games and opportunities.
I loved swtor, was playing it on and off since launch. Sadly, this game has greatly declined in quality since the major changes they did in the last expansion, changing around a lot of things and hurting the experience. Add in that they've been greatly pushing away from the main selling point that made swtor somewhat profitable, and the game is just no longer fun to play. I don't feel like lvling up alts anymore (since the class stories stopped being a thing), I haven't even finished the story of the new expansion and have no real interest in finishing it, and even ops, my bread and butter of this game are just unappealing to me. Quite frankly, I feel like this game had such promise but faltered and failed, to where if they release a swtor 2, I would not be surprised.
The wild thing about the current state of endgame is that it's not like this has been the status quo for years or something, it was literally the most recent expansion that completely overhauled the game to make it worse. From the gearing, customization, and class identity the recent expansion massively slashed the quality of the endgame of SWTOR.
I hadn't played for a few years and convinced my girlfriend to check it out against with me. She had never played it and had only recently seen some of the Star Wars movies, so here are our two perspectives from trying to play SWTOR in 2022 as a free to play MMO with a new character. We spent a ton of time in character creation, trying to make characters that would have similar enough origins that we could start together and go through the story together. I didn't notice it immediately because I had played previously and must have spent some money, but I had a decent amount of options for species and such. However, she had a bunch of pay walls for most of the species and we ended up settling on some pretty vanilla characters to compensate. Ran into our first bug in the intro, but were able to group up immediately after. That's when I remembered why I stopped playing, which was the gameplay. The combat was like a floaty version of WoW, with similar resources, skills, progression. Some of the classes even shared a ton of similarities with WoW classes, with some abilities just lifted straight out of WoW and renamed. I understand there are limitations to the combat system given the Hero Engine that was forced on the devs and the competition, but Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Online is also in the Hero Engine and actually has a very different combat system than WoW and SWTOR. It was one of the main reasons that made me lose interest in the game, because it just feels so artificial. Like you can only fire the laser in this particular way every few seconds, even though you can still fire a laser a different way during that time. That's something that they can't fix, and I'm lost on this tangent here, but that hit me pretty quickly. However, my girlfriend hadn't played WoW or any MMOs, she plays Apex Legends, and she was just kinda experiencing it and not having a ton of fun but was willing to keep going. Made it to an area with a mailbox and both of us got like a ton of mail. I got a ton more because of the age of my account, including some more powerful armor. But also I started running out of inventory space. And I started running out of room on my action bar. No big deal, just add another action bar- and it's behind a pay wall. That is correct, you only have one action bar on screen unless you pay money for more. You of course also can't expand your inventory without paying money, and there were tiny microtransactions in just every part of the UI. And we both quit and uninstalled the game. Which is disappointing, because we didn't even get to any good story beats, which I know the game has. It's really sad that the greate storylines and characters are trapped behind a horrible combat system and a billion minor inconveniences created just for the purpose of wringing money out of players.
what happened? simple, free to play happened, the gutting of the UI to piecemeal sell it back to you for money happened, paying them real money to equip fuckin dungeon gear happened.
No reason to play SWTOR outside of the class stories, then just uninstall.
Why would you uninstall that makes it so annoying to check the latest story releases whenever it happens.
After returning from a five year hiatus it was incredibly underwhelming.
It seems soulless and nothing like i used to enjoy.
I quit after two months and went to ff14
As a founder. I have often said they should have just scrapped the mmo and focused on a sprpg. It plays like one anyways. I have had absolutely no reason to play with anyone. And tbh it feels sad. They should have just made it a kotor 3
SWTOR, for all the insane budget they put into it, needed a "Realm Reborn" treatment that it never got. There's a decent amount of high quality content, but the cost to produce additional content is also very, very high and time consuming. That wasn't well thought out for a genre that lives and dies on the ability to keep releasing new things to keep players interested. The game had some success, but it was a fraction of the success EA wanted. They spent half a billion to release a game that was supposed to go on to make billions off subscription fees, like WoW did. But there was little reason to keep a sub fee going once you got through the class quests.
The game continues to limp forward making some revenue, but I cannot imagine EA will take the chance of spending any real money on this, and that's the only thing that would propel it to be anything more than it's always been - a decent Star Wars RPG dressed up as an MMO.
Gather around kids, let papa founder tell you the ancient story of the great forum ban 😝 long ago when this game was still in beta, many along myself have offered constructive criticisms about the game. But the dev's did not want to hear it and thus began the great forum purge. Many was striked down, many had left in fear, but most found themselves in GW2 because of it. The remaining along side with me, have continued to with swtor till the game came out. At first the game didntnapear out of the ordinary but soon gamers found themselves wanting more as they consumed content like they're at a all you can eat. But as more and more content came out and is consumed, the more it is apparent that things are lacking and left hollowed. Over the years the dev's have pushed numerous changes from class abilities to completely reworking things altogether. Even now in legacy of the sith expansion the content offered is miniscule but unfortunately with the massive money lost over the years, they have downsized the team altogether. Their biggest appeal of voice over for all content has been replaced for thenmostmpart with just speechless text much like KOTR. Some of us have been left wondering, had theynlisten to us, perhaps it would've saved a lot of people time and money. Had they not locked classes behind character story arch or even abilities to class altogether, things may have been better off. It just took too long for them to rectify these mistakes.
I'd honestly just love the ability to rush through this game and just play for the story. I couldn't care less for the MMO aspect. I want my damage to feel meaty. I'd gladly pay for a separate server that allowed you to 'rush' through combat for casual players that just want the story.
I played this game for 9 years. I was in it for the story. I played everything there was to play, except the nightmare lvl ops. Created maybe 30 characters. Spent hundreds of dollars. Then...the battlepass system was implemented. And I dropped out after a month. 1 month was enough to let me forget the past exceptional 9 years.
When the game screams at you to log in every day and grind... that just kills the fun.
EA likes easy money. If the game is already providing a strong revenue stream with minimal effort, their attitude seems to be, "Well, we don't need to reinvest in it."
swtor sucks in so many ways that I can't even imagine..
It has potential but it has always been that way.
not to mention the restrictions and the "taxes" in game, ridiculous.
They've drip-feeding us content for years. I've been playing since the beta and the recycling, the rehashing of content, it's beyond old and exhausting. SWTOR has been going on for ten years. The story has been fun, but a good story ultimately ends and with the recent micro update to the story, it's clear they're just wanting to stretch this out for as long as they can. We ruled the galaxy. What more meaningful things can they do? At one time, I would've said they should keep SWTOR going but we've passed that time. It's time to move on and I have. I can recommend SWTOR as well, but only to play for free. It's not worth spending money on and I know because I have. Never bought cartel coins though; I just subscribed. With this update, I unsubscribed and I'm not looking back.
Always seen Swotor as a sigle player game, i jump in do the main story with classes i havent done and then i am done for sometime.
Its a very good single player mmorpg.
The best way to play SWTOR: get a group of 1-4 people together, pay for the subscription and enjoy everything, all the stories, dungeons and raids. Once you've "finished" all those, maybe roll some alts to get the origin stories done (they are 100% worth it). Feel free to continue tickling your completionism until you get bored and just unsub and move on. Don't hang out until you get frustrated. I have fond memories of SWTOR and i'm happy to come back with a friend or two, especially if they're newbies.
A counterpoint: Maybe this is okay, to have a game on the market that you don't really play that much. Just come back here and there, not a game with a real endgame unless you really want that grind. It's not the game that's advertised, and that sucks, but taken as it actually is, if they advertised it that way, I feel like it would kind of be... fine?
Whether this is a viable business model is a different question.
@Oscar Alvarenga I just wonder how much they have to get signed off on from Disney or whoever manages the continuity etc. stuff and if just the back and forth waiting for emails or approvals also stifles what they are even willing to waste time on or attempt. If they do need sign offs from the IP holder, it kinda sucks, cause if they were doing better I bet they'd have an easier time there too.
@@Kasaaz Well I don't personally think it matters at any rate; Aspyr media is doing the KoToR 1/2 remaster so they'll lkely give us the KoToR 3 before long since SWTOR was never KoToR to begin with. And we can just ignore Disney since what they are doing is for non-KoToR gamers, just a matter of waiting until Aspyr handles what happens next.
Plus we seem to have forgotten this; the IP is free to everyone again, so folks are emaking SW games now. At some point KoToR 3 is going to be on the table and we can kinda forget SWTOR!
Like a lot of other people commenting in the feed here over the past couple of days, SWTOR was my first MMO. I played almost from when the game launched; though I did not start early enough to be eligible for founder's status. I joined the game when it was about half-way through the 1.0 patches, back before the large Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion that came with 2.0. I consistently played a Jedi Guardian tank, with a heavy emphasis on pvp and open world pvp ~ that was in fact a thing back then, with Thorazan in the Dune Sea being infamous for massive, spontaneous battles. I played consistently up until dev decisions effectively deleted open world pvp from the game, which was my particular content niche~ I would log into the game with my buddies and we would spend the evening trying to protect pub bases and quest areas from max-level imps looking to grief. Once that atmosphere vanished from the game, I started playing sporadically. I would still log in to run warzones, but the shift in focus for warzones from the large 8v8 ranked matches and 8v8 regulars to more bland 4v4 matches lacking much in the way of depth turned the pvp scene into something akin to boring for me; however, more recent 8v8 maps have been really fun to play~ not to mention sorely needed, especially since Hypergate was for the longest time the only "new" 8v8 map. To date my gameplay history with SWTOR a bit more, my Jedi Guardian, as of 8.0, was still decked out in the original War Hero/Ranked War Hero pvp gear that everyone was grinding up prior to 2.0~ modified with color dyes to make it a bit more unique. The gear and skill changes that came with 8.0 though were a bit too much of a hard sell for me, especially since the 8.0 gear system completely departs from the system that the game has had for many years now. It prompted me to try out other games and I ventured into FF14 like a lot of other people who have commented on this feed. In FF14, I found excellent story telling and tank gameplay that makes me feel like I am being spoiled (referring to the Paladin's gameplay here), and I have frankly had no eyes for SWTOR ever since. FF14 doesn't have SWTOR's pvp history; however, the quality of the story telling and the pve content makes that into a casual after thought for me. FF14 for me does what SWTOR did well, just better~ and I have yet to feel like I have run into any of the flaws that have troubled SWTOR. I frankly wish that SWTOR had FF14's quality of story telling~ and for a time the game did quite well in that regard with the Eternal Empire story arcs. Those were new and inventive stories that took the SWTOR world in interesting and wild new directions~ all of which made me play the game as I now play FF14. Unfortunately though, with the conclusion of the war between the Alliance and the Eternal Throne, the story writers have since walked away from the world of possibilities that they opened up with the Eternal Alliance and have forced the story in an awkward way back into an old Pub vs Imp dichotomy, while resurrecting a foe who was long since defeated during the Ilum arc, back before 2.0 ever was a thing.
So, this game never should have released as a MMO…but rather they should have invested their resources in making 1 or more single player Old Republic games.
I mean in a way it was supposed to release as an RPG. A lot of the story for the unreleased KOTOR 3 is in the Jedi Knights story on SWTOR
Sadly, I don't think either EA or BioWare really knew what they were doing when making this, which is probably why it feels like a Single-Player game with tacked on multiplayer most of the time. It's a shame, because it had potential at the beginning, but it didn't take them long to drop the ball.
I think one of the biggest strenghts of SWTOR is that besides some side content in KotFE *everything* is voice acted. That's a huge positive in a story game and the reason I quit FF in less than a week. But what's after the story has never been particularly good, tho I've heard good things about the Iokath raid.
This is something I have learned about MMO players...the only thing that matters is their gear path's. Not what setting they are in, what the story is or anything else, it's who drops what and how can we stop mere mortals from obtaining it. It's kinda stupid, and catering to only stupid people like that is why a lot of MMO's fail.
That's the RPG part of MMORPG. But if you don't like gearing there's always (a) not doing it or (b) VRChat.
So I have to correct you. I was told by a SWTOR developer, 75% of the player base only has one character. It was said on a podcast and multiple content creators were there. This is an example of folks thinking that a certain play style is representative of all.
Now I would also make an assumption, based on that statistic that the majority of the player base is free to play. You can only have two characters if you're free to play.
They really set themselves up to fail from the start with SWTOR. The sheer amount of money that went into this game is still insane even today. And it was on the back of fully voice acted *everything* and where all of the competitors only had to create 1 discrete story to level through, they gave themselves 8 times the work from the get go. After that you knew they would never be able to offer that continuation in any sort of meaningful amount of content and if they did every other facet would suffer because of it. Their ambition was the selling point at launch, and ultimately, their downfall in the end. With rumors of new Star Wars MMO's from Ubisoft and Zenimax floating around it's hard to see a future where SWTOR survives outside of a maintenance mode, let alone begins to flourish again.
I don't care about Dungeons/Raids, I prefer solo content. I play to be the Protagonist of my own story.
Swtor level questing is the best in any mmo. The sad state of things is that 20 years after EQ the best quest system developed yet was based on two endings to each quest whether you decided to help some random npc or punch him in the nuts.
A while back EA moved people from SWTOR to help with Anthem and the expansion at that time showed that lack of people. I am not sure that after Anthem failed whether people got moved back to SWTOR or something else happened to them.
Considering how much money they originally dumped into this game you'd figure they'd do a better job trying to keep it going for as long as possible
Polite suggestion from long-time SWTOR player - the 8 origin stories are very fun, well programmed, fully voice-acted, and can be played totally for free. It is absolutely the best 8=pack of single-player RPGs, especially for the (free) price point. There are problems with the MM part of the MMORPG, though operations and flashpoints are amazing the first time you do them with a decent party of other players.
SWTOR is practically unplayable as a F2P, purely due to having ONE hotbar, and the bloated number of skills.
if you want more, you have to grind ridiculous achievements for casion coins, or pay real money to unlock shit again. I went back after they went free to play and realized half my bars were missing. >.> then I forgot my account password and it was like ice skating uphill to try and get them to reset it until I gave up.
Swotor is such an amazing game which is pretty badly managed in my opinion. Alot of the changes in the years werent really good but i still had my most memorable mmo moments in that mmo.
I remember PvP with my guild huttenball which was a blast, Creating my own PUG raid and spending the whole day figuring out the Bosses and in the end even managing an full clear. and lastly the Story is really good i enjoyed playing alts and seeing there take on some events. But for some weird reason the management is taking it in a weird direction.
you forgot to mention the crafting system, you can create and upgrade your gear through that method as well, currently too many nutters are scalping the life out the crafting components. This makes finding the needed gear and components on the GTN very hard.
Star Wars the Old Republic is about story, and not about gear or pvp. I have never played this video game for anything else but the story. I have deleted over 20 characters just to see the different story's in different ways. It has been the only star wars game I love because of the story telling. If they change things and go in a different direction then I don't plan to play it anymore. Warcraft changed so much to the point where I stopped playing that video game years ago. There biggest mistake was removing the skill tree. That's was my nail on the coffin for Warcraft. When you have something that was never broken, and worked for so many years don't try to change things to fix it. Would you risk your billions your making just off of subs to pull a small % of other people into the game? I wouldn't if the formula worked 5 years later.
What does EA want from this game? To milk the mega whales that still spent $50+ a month on the game store for as long as possible.
2:03 when youre recording a bootleg movie in theatres and someone in the audience gets up to go to the bathroom
Gear Grind never made sense in this Game because they Reset the Gear by New Level Charcter. Instead of getting better Critical Hit Chance from Level 50 to 50+ the Critical Hit Chance decreased. So you always Farm New Gear to gain Your Original Critical Hit Chance.
Swtor is a game you play to fly in space, shoot blasters, explore the worlds on a speeder, and use lightsabers, everything else is just there if you get bored with the other. I recommend playing space combat pvp with HALO evolved soundtrack...it enhances the experience 10 fold.
I play space barbie. That is all that is left for me.
This is why I stopped playing SWTOR after more than 5 years...
I only play space barbie in this game. That is all that is left for me as well as just burning through billions of credits. Since practically the entire guild i was a member in left for FF14 and i am one of 5 people left playing this game. It truly is very hard to stop playing a game you've sunk years into.