For the millionth time, why so many players here say this is a single player game

"I do not see players. That means there are no other players anywhere else. That means it's a single player game."

See how that statement is wrong?

Are you that dense or are you just acting like it?

It's a MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ORPG.

Seriously, seeing 1 to 3 guys on my map is NOT MASSIVE.

Have you ever seen the launch of an non instanced MMO? I witnessed AION launch... that game was bustling with activity. That's what I miss playing ToR.

The thing with wow was, that you basically got 2 major maps = 1 continent each. Here you have smaller "planets" which got 1 map each.

The question now is, is it better to have 2 big continents or 17 smaller "continents"? For me personally, SWTOR does fit well with 17 smaller "continents" because it does play on planets and I prefer having 17 smaller, than 2 or 3 big ones, like at wow.

At wow it does work with 2 big continents in past or today 5, but at SWTOR it would not - atleast this is my opinion.

To complain about the taxi´s is a bit flawed, at wow you had gryphons or wyvern which you were taking mostly, before flying mounts were introduced.


If there is 1 thing what I miss from wow, then it is the vanilla pvp system with ranks and Armor for each rank. While the system was not perfect it is still the for me best MMO pvp system ever made and I hope that some day an MMO is able to kick out the flawed design issues of that system and introduces an improved system. 6 years are past now and no MMO did manage this yet, which is a real shame.


Edit:

Right now I got 113 people at Dromund Kaas, if this isnt MMO feeling than what is?

Ummm you mean those 100s of players where you do barely any interaction with, infact all they do during your leveling process is take your mobs.... all they are good for is group quests and isntances, oh WAIT that works perfectly on here too.

Again, wrong sub-genre of MMO for me to give a damn wether my quest zone is overpopulated because its nothing but a nusance in a theme-park mmo.

I encounter enemy players often on lvl 30+ planets and see enough allies to do group quests, that is all thats needed. but if you think inflated numbers over-saturating the zones is a good thing more power to you I guess.....

I agree with the op, although it had loading between zones Everquest was awesome and although I didnt play it a lot World of Warcraft did have smooth zoning down to a tee and the flying mounts where great where you could just fly over an entire continent and go where you wished. I think EA/BW took the easy route with instancing like so many mmos do now, poor technical show imo.

Were you in RIFT at launch? that was epic, hundreds of players all doing zone events. nothing like seeing several full raid groups charging across freemarch as death rifts open everywhere and bosses spawn all over the zone.

Or scarlet gorge, when a zone invasion boss spawned in the middle on a pvp server, at launch you have whole raids of pvp flagged people meeting in the middle of the zone, it was anarchy...

Ah, happy memories.

Swtor: 2 is company, 3s a crowd,...

I think it would be a large improvement to allow you to "recall" to other planets or even just your faction fleet. This would be on a cool down of course. You currently can only fast travel to points within the current planet your on.

This may lessen the RP importance of your ship but would save a lot of frustration. Most of the reason I do not use the GTN or run many flashpoints is due to the number of loading screens to get there and back again.

Sadly the big gaming companies have figured out how to repackage a single player rpg as an MMO and charge a monthly sub on top of the box price.

And judging by all the fanboi responses its an obvious $ucce$$.

No SWTOR will remain pay to play.You want to play it?Then pay for it.Free to play MMOs are not free. Thats a hook they use to get you into the game.You cant get content of this quality except with Bioware games.

Pay to play MMOS get more content than F2P.Thats a fact.F2P are lucky to get new content MAYBE once a year.

This is the atitude of f2p devs- well its free so , we will fix it when we get to it.This was the atitude of SWGemu folks.Hows that game doing?Yeah exactly.

No one is going to develop something of this scale and quality for free.Forget it.

Yeah but do they like those "theme park" MMOs because WoW brought a bunch of single player RPG players into the MMO genre and catered to the style they are used too or are they long time MMO'ers (who started with UO,EQ,AC,DAoC, or M59?) who simply think the theme park style is better than the original MMO formula?

The problem with the current MMO market is that a certain ideal or play style led to the creation of open persistent immersion oriented gaming called the MMORPG and then it was abandoned because one half MMO (called WoW) brought in more single player RPG and battle.net fans that were originally playing the MMO genre.

In the gaming industry you have games that are like such:

1. (Diablo) Chat lobby - instanced limited multi-player game all with limited immersion factor

2. (Dungeon Siege) Chat or match making lobby - instanced multiplayer game with deeper immersion than an action RPG.

3. (Guild Wars) Persistent massively multiplayer "hub" - instanced playing zones and quest areas - same immersion (character building, crafting, etc) factor as number 2.

4. (Lord of the Rings Online / SWtOR) Persistent massively multiplayer world - persistent MMP leveling areas but also with instance playing zones. These games have also begun to implement "phases" where the same exact location on the same exact sever is reproduced multiple times rather than letting the population mix in together. That is COMPLETELY ANTI-MMORPG.

5. (old school Dark Age of Camelot) Entire world persistent and massively multi-player. - Every questing and leveling zone open to everyone else on the server - As few loading screens as possible (any loading screen was mostly due to the limited technology at the time).

Note that these styles are not listed by their invention or release date. Only by depth and persistence world characteristics. I listed an example of each style but there may or may not be older examples as well.


Number 1 and 2 were around for years. A large group of people wanted an even deeper more immersive experience. The open world massively multiplayer persistent world was born in the likes of Ever Quest and Dark Age of Camelot. Very little instancing, very little "fast travel" or teleporting. All zones were open to everyone.

As you can see by the list of MMOs over time the shift has gone away from style number 5 and been slowly making it's way back towards number 1. The MMO genre is DE-EVOLVING. The majority of this anti-progress is thanks to WoW which brought in a bunch of single player RPG fanatics and battle.net players who didn't care about the immersion of the MMO genre they just wanted to play the new flavor of the month from Blizzard. As WoW started catering to these "I want a massively multiplayer lobby but I don't want to share my gaming world" people flocked to WoW, Blizzard more and more started catering to a style 1 or 2 game with instancing becoming more abundant. Because of it's large population other games and developers started to follow suit.

Long story short that's how you get to where we are today. People who know nothing about what an MMO was designed to be or should be using their massive population to destroy the genre or at least rewind it back to a less advanced and immersive stage of its development.

The reason the MMO industry is making this shift is not because the people who demanded an open persistent world with realistic travel times/ etc decided they didn't like their idea. It's because people who wouldn't like that formula to begin with started taking over the genre because of it's popularity increase with games like EQ and DAoC and then most famously WoW making headlines.

The problem is not that Micheal Jordan and Lebron James and Steve Nash decided they didn't like having to run up and down the court. The problem is that a larger audience, the NASCAR circuit, decided basketball was the new flavor of the month and moved in and protested until stock cars became a part of the game of basketball.