Star Wars: The Old Republic Ranking: B
Note before I start: here, I’m reviewing the base game only (up to Corellia). I wanted to include the Knights expansions too, but I’ve decided to separate it since it’s just so different from the base game. I also absolutely despise the story arc they made for Revan and the Exile – besides being pretty rock-stupid, it’s completely unnecessary. Why is Revan even in this game? It takes place like a few centuries after the events of KotOR. Knowing me and my idiosyncratic urge to come up with head-canon explanations for bullshit, I’ll come up with something, but for now…
I had difficulty giving this game a rating. Sometimes I marveled at how much work the developers must have put into this game – the hundreds of thousands of fully voiced dialogue lines, the incredibly detailed environments that remain faithful to the source material, the storylines and NPCs interweaving through one another – I really felt the game brought the Star Wars universe to life.
Also, I never get tired of the Smuggler’s groin kick ability.
But actually playing the game wasn’t really all that fun aside from kicking fools in the groin. Besides my standard MMO gripes (which I tried to ignore when reviewing the game), my experience with the game just felt…bland, punctuated by occasional bouts of rage.
Let’s start with gameplay. In the “old” versions of the game, you spent far more time staring at your hotbar, paying attention to cooldowns and rotation, than you did actually looking at your character fighting an enemy. Enemies usually attacked via a set rotation too, meaning once you learned the rotation and understood what to do at what times (e.g. the boss will begin charging a high-damage move, so interrupt, then watch for that move again because its cooldown pretty much matches your interrupt’s cooldown), you just stared at your hotbar and pressed buttons. It’s not a very engaging combat system.
In the newer versions, you could set your companion to heal, which means you rarely die to regular content since your companion’s healing far outstrips any damage output the regular content can apply to you. That became more fun because I could play more casually, but after awhile my gameplay boiled back down to executing my rotation repeatedly, which contributed to the bland feeling. Combine that with the fact that enemies respawn quite quickly, making me fight numerous mobs, and battle quickly became boring tedium.
An optional activity you can do is hunt for datacrons, artifacts found in obscure or hard-to-reach places. These things give your account permanent bonuses, so they’re worth getting…but some of them require jumping puzzles, which I hate with the fiery intensity of no less than 9001 suns. But even these puzzles pale in comparison to one particular datacron on Tatooine. This thing is on a shelf that’s just out of jumping distance. To get onto the structure above it (so you can get down onto the shelf), you have to go to another structure on the other side of the map, wait for a wandering hot air balloon to get close, jump onto the balloon, wait for the balloon to reach the structure with the datacron, jump off, and make your way down to the shelf. The balloon takes ~30 minutes to get from one end to the other, so if you mess up at any point in this whole thing, you’ve wasted ~1 hour of real time. If the balloon disappears somewhere in this process (yes, this happens), you’ve wasted ~1 hour of real time. If the game decides to kick you off the balloon randomly (yes, this happens too), you’ve, you guessed it, wasted ~1 hour of real time.
I know datacrons are optional, but WHO THE FUCK thought this was a good idea? “Oh yeah I’m gonna make a thing that requires players to, at best, sit and do nothing on a goddamn balloon floating over endless desert for half an hour. Players will probably find that REALLY FUN! I’m a genius!”
There are a few datacrons on Corellia that aren’t as bad as this balloon one, but they still involve mostly waiting for things to get to you so you can jump on them, then more waiting until you get to your destination, then repeating the waiting if you mess up. My completionist streak drove me to endure all of this bullshit until I got every single datacron in the vanilla game, not counting the fleet one (which you need a group for) and the matrix shards (which don’t really do anything useful on their own).
Moving on, the free-to-play model is trash. When your game is marketed as free-to-play, it means that your game needs to be…well, free to play. If your game requires money to play, it’s not free-to-play. Here are 3 aspects of the game that are pretty solidly part of gameplay in SWTOR:
Really, any game in the genre includes these types of things as gameplay elements, meaning this game’s marketing as free-to-play is a blatant Bolshevist lie. Compare this to something like Elder Scrolls Online. It’s marketed as a game you have to pay money for. It’s up-front. It’s honest. There’s no “you have to pay money to play our free game” bullshit. Now ESO has some microtransactions that are pretty infuriating, but nowhere does the game say that it’s free. SWTOR says it’s free when it’s not. That’s the difference.
Finally…let’s talk about the storylines. The storylines in SWTOR tend to drag on, suggesting the writers were really stretching themselves when they tried to write a plot that had to encompass ~10 different planets. The Consular is an egregious example, where the first 4 planets have the exact same plot. There’s a mind-control plague affecting Jedi Masters that only you can treat for some reason and, lo and behold, these 4 Jedi Masters on these 4 planets have disappeared! What could be going on?! Hint: they all got the plague and you treat them one after another with an hours-long journey in-between each.
The Warrior has a segment toward the end where one of your companions tries to betray you. You overcome his (feeble) trap and…that’s it. You don’t get to kill him, or lock him up somewhere, or tell anyone not to trust him, or…anything. The game just continues on as if the betrayal never happened. Like seriously, this guy betrays a SITH LORD and…just continues being buddies with her afterward?
But even after I’ve ranted this much, I still don’t hate the game and playing it wasn’t painful. The world(s)-building is some of the best I’ve ever seen. Even Hoth, which features long stretches of just traveling through featureless ice, was beautiful – and let’s be honest, that’s what Hoth is supposed to be. It was also a nice touch to, for instance, hear Vette tell the Warrior about her past with some chick named Risha and then have Risha appear as a companion for the Smuggler, who then has a conversation with her about a girl named Vette she befriended in her past.
Note before I start: here, I’m reviewing the base game only (up to Corellia). I wanted to include the Knights expansions too, but I’ve decided to separate it since it’s just so different from the base game. I also absolutely despise the story arc they made for Revan and the Exile – besides being pretty rock-stupid, it’s completely unnecessary. Why is Revan even in this game? It takes place like a few centuries after the events of KotOR. Knowing me and my idiosyncratic urge to come up with head-canon explanations for bullshit, I’ll come up with something, but for now…
I had difficulty giving this game a rating. Sometimes I marveled at how much work the developers must have put into this game – the hundreds of thousands of fully voiced dialogue lines, the incredibly detailed environments that remain faithful to the source material, the storylines and NPCs interweaving through one another – I really felt the game brought the Star Wars universe to life.
Also, I never get tired of the Smuggler’s groin kick ability.
But actually playing the game wasn’t really all that fun aside from kicking fools in the groin. Besides my standard MMO gripes (which I tried to ignore when reviewing the game), my experience with the game just felt…bland, punctuated by occasional bouts of rage.
Let’s start with gameplay. In the “old” versions of the game, you spent far more time staring at your hotbar, paying attention to cooldowns and rotation, than you did actually looking at your character fighting an enemy. Enemies usually attacked via a set rotation too, meaning once you learned the rotation and understood what to do at what times (e.g. the boss will begin charging a high-damage move, so interrupt, then watch for that move again because its cooldown pretty much matches your interrupt’s cooldown), you just stared at your hotbar and pressed buttons. It’s not a very engaging combat system.
In the newer versions, you could set your companion to heal, which means you rarely die to regular content since your companion’s healing far outstrips any damage output the regular content can apply to you. That became more fun because I could play more casually, but after awhile my gameplay boiled back down to executing my rotation repeatedly, which contributed to the bland feeling. Combine that with the fact that enemies respawn quite quickly, making me fight numerous mobs, and battle quickly became boring tedium.
An optional activity you can do is hunt for datacrons, artifacts found in obscure or hard-to-reach places. These things give your account permanent bonuses, so they’re worth getting…but some of them require jumping puzzles, which I hate with the fiery intensity of no less than 9001 suns. But even these puzzles pale in comparison to one particular datacron on Tatooine. This thing is on a shelf that’s just out of jumping distance. To get onto the structure above it (so you can get down onto the shelf), you have to go to another structure on the other side of the map, wait for a wandering hot air balloon to get close, jump onto the balloon, wait for the balloon to reach the structure with the datacron, jump off, and make your way down to the shelf. The balloon takes ~30 minutes to get from one end to the other, so if you mess up at any point in this whole thing, you’ve wasted ~1 hour of real time. If the balloon disappears somewhere in this process (yes, this happens), you’ve wasted ~1 hour of real time. If the game decides to kick you off the balloon randomly (yes, this happens too), you’ve, you guessed it, wasted ~1 hour of real time.
I know datacrons are optional, but WHO THE FUCK thought this was a good idea? “Oh yeah I’m gonna make a thing that requires players to, at best, sit and do nothing on a goddamn balloon floating over endless desert for half an hour. Players will probably find that REALLY FUN! I’m a genius!”
There are a few datacrons on Corellia that aren’t as bad as this balloon one, but they still involve mostly waiting for things to get to you so you can jump on them, then more waiting until you get to your destination, then repeating the waiting if you mess up. My completionist streak drove me to endure all of this bullshit until I got every single datacron in the vanilla game, not counting the fleet one (which you need a group for) and the matrix shards (which don’t really do anything useful on their own).
Moving on, the free-to-play model is trash. When your game is marketed as free-to-play, it means that your game needs to be…well, free to play. If your game requires money to play, it’s not free-to-play. Here are 3 aspects of the game that are pretty solidly part of gameplay in SWTOR:
- In SWTOR, crafting requires multiple disciplines – some to do the crafting and others to obtain resources. F2P players can’t get more than one discipline without paying money, meaning this part of the game is absolutely locked behind a paywall.
- The highest gear tier in the game requires an “authorization” to equip…and these authorizations require real money.
- F2P players have a cap on how many credits they can hold at once, which doesn’t seem like a problem until you realize that many items cost more credits than the cap, meaning F2P players need to pay real money to raise the cap to buy these in-game items.
Really, any game in the genre includes these types of things as gameplay elements, meaning this game’s marketing as free-to-play is a blatant Bolshevist lie. Compare this to something like Elder Scrolls Online. It’s marketed as a game you have to pay money for. It’s up-front. It’s honest. There’s no “you have to pay money to play our free game” bullshit. Now ESO has some microtransactions that are pretty infuriating, but nowhere does the game say that it’s free. SWTOR says it’s free when it’s not. That’s the difference.
Finally…let’s talk about the storylines. The storylines in SWTOR tend to drag on, suggesting the writers were really stretching themselves when they tried to write a plot that had to encompass ~10 different planets. The Consular is an egregious example, where the first 4 planets have the exact same plot. There’s a mind-control plague affecting Jedi Masters that only you can treat for some reason and, lo and behold, these 4 Jedi Masters on these 4 planets have disappeared! What could be going on?! Hint: they all got the plague and you treat them one after another with an hours-long journey in-between each.
The Warrior has a segment toward the end where one of your companions tries to betray you. You overcome his (feeble) trap and…that’s it. You don’t get to kill him, or lock him up somewhere, or tell anyone not to trust him, or…anything. The game just continues on as if the betrayal never happened. Like seriously, this guy betrays a SITH LORD and…just continues being buddies with her afterward?
But even after I’ve ranted this much, I still don’t hate the game and playing it wasn’t painful. The world(s)-building is some of the best I’ve ever seen. Even Hoth, which features long stretches of just traveling through featureless ice, was beautiful – and let’s be honest, that’s what Hoth is supposed to be. It was also a nice touch to, for instance, hear Vette tell the Warrior about her past with some chick named Risha and then have Risha appear as a companion for the Smuggler, who then has a conversation with her about a girl named Vette she befriended in her past.