Chapter One: OF COURSE it's the Endgame!

No game can launch with enough content.

Just wanted to point out that the OP (along with more than a few others), is very wrong on some basic assumptions.

The idea that the average player will spend more time at 50 then 1-49 is a distortion based on examination of (relatively) hardcore players.

I think the ship has sailed on making this a radically different kind of MMO, and that's fine. I'm not out to reinvent the wheel... here.

I'd just like to see the bulk of design, development, art, and all that lovely voice acting, go into the endgame where most of us are going to do most of our playing.

I'm a casual player. I haven't logged on in days. But when I do log on, I play my 50.

I acknowledged that some people might differ, but that I think most people play MMOs a good long while (at least the good ones), and progressing a character is the goal.

I also said, hey, sure you can just levels alts. I just have to wonder why you're not doing that in Dragon Age or Mass Effect since you have no need for a persistent world.

For the record, I love this game. This is what motivates me to post what I hope will be constructive criticism. This is a great game with much potential. That said…

Of course it’s the end game!

And to prove it to yourself, just ask yourself which will take up much, much more of your time: Getting from level 1 to 50 or the time you’ll spend at 50? Even as a confessed alt-aholic this is going to be easy for me. Most alt-aholics I know, myself included, still have a “main” that is pretty much the focus of their efforts. I log onto alts when there’s nothing to do on my main. Perhaps there are players who just solo, and rotate among a cadre of characters that are all treated equally, but I have to ask what these folks are doing in an MMO with a persistent world.

I suppose it’s possible, but I think for most of us, we play a main, and progressing that character is the goal.

Almost everything went into levels 1-50, and while there is a good deal of content at 50, there’s not nearly enough of it and it’s not nearly varied enough. I actually like space combat because, instead of comparing it to Rogue Squadron or (absurdly) X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, I’m comparing it to a Daily Quest, which is what it is. The alternative to space combat in another MMO would have been three more dailies, which would have been, well, you know: Go kill a dozen of these guys, or click these objects dispersed among these guys, or something equally banal. Compared to that, space combat is a triumph.

But the game needs many, many more ideas like this to keep people occupied at 50. Even space combat itself, if you didn’t change the game play mechanics at all, could simply use a lot more content. The same three missions with the same static objectives got old during week one. Now it’s just a chore, and not even a very profitable one.

Ditto on most dailies, which are stale and repetitive. I know you can’t make a Diablo-style world which will randomly assemble itself each time I log on since we all share the same world, but with a game as heavily instanced as this, surely you can do better than “Go kill these 15 static mobs. Yes, the same ones as yesterday!”

Crafting is another great indicator that most of the thought went into levels 1-50 and not 50 itself. Why? Because at 50 your trade is practically worthless.

I have a capped Artificer and Synthweaver, so maybe things are different elsewhere. You guys tell me. Here’s my beef, and I’m going to use artifice as the example here, but this applies equally well to synthweaving.

When I hit 50, I made sure I had the artifact recipe for the Guardian Lightsaber Hilt ready to go. The instant I hit 50, I slotted this bad-boy into my lightsaber, which made it rank 124.

This lasted me exactly one day.

By the end of day one as a 50, I had discovered the daily quests on Ilum, did them, and had enough badges to buy a rank 126 guardian hilt from the daily vendor, which of course I did. Why do I have this trade skill again? Is it for the crystals? Maybe, but I really only need one of those, and they’re also going to get replaced very, very soon by drops in hard modes and raids. Personally, I’ve already replaced the crystal I could craft with a Magenta one I had someone else cut, since my guild doesn’t have the endurance recipe yet. Every other recipe on the horizon is similarly useless since lightsabers are already starting to drop with better crystals than what can be crafted.

Is it the enhancements, the shields? Nope, they all suffer the same problems. I can replace anything I can craft with a single days worth of dailys, save perhaps the shield. I had to wait for my first raid right, on Normal, to replace that. Weigh that against the time it took for me to just proc the right recipe and it makes me wonder why I bothered.
And since everyone else is in the same boat too (they’ll have better items than craftables shortly after being 50), there’s no decent point for them to buy my wares on the GTN. So the answer isn’t “commerce” either.

The craftable lightsabers were automatically useless before I even had the ability to make them. They take ingredients from hard modes, but are lightsabers for a level 48. Am I supposed to blow a bunch of them up to proc an artifact variety? That just puts me back at the beginning, since even an artifact-quality versions of these sabers would be obsolete after week one as a 50. Near as I can tell, these recipes exist to tease me.

If my trade skill does nothing for me at 50, then it must have been for 1-49. If it’s just for 1-49, why bother? The bonus it confers to me while leveling isn’t that high, and this is not where we’re going to spend the overwhelming majority of our time anyway, so again, what’s the point?

My trade skill needs to confer some bonus to me at 50, even if it’s not straight-up gear. I get that if we put rank 200 artifacts in everyone’s recipe book then suddenly no one has a reason to do anything. To use everyone’s favorite/most hated comparison, in WoW, being a blacksmith didn’t mean I could make my tank the best gear in the game or that what I could craft at 50 would last terribly long (it wouldn’t). But it did mean I could add an extra socket to my bracers and gloves, and this is a genuine bonus that 1, will always be with me and useful and 2, differentiates my character from other warriors, which is another goal trade skills ought to have. If being an artificer makes me no different than being a synthweaver, why bother with either?

Frankly, this whole genre has some problems that it can’t seem to shake because “it’s always been done this way.” Leveling is an elongated tutorial that’s supposed to teach me how to play the game, and SWTOR just doesn’t do this. But, to be fair, no MMO I’ve played did either.

I’ll confess, I’m a space bar spammer. I just want my damn objectives so I can get back to combat, drops, exploration, the things that make up an MMORPG for me. Am I saying this to say “story is stupid”? No way. I’m telling you I don’t care at all about story (you heard me) so the following has greater impact.

The Bioware story presentation is great and I love it, and I don’t even care about these things. How can I mean this?

Even if you’re spamming over story as fast as you can, eventually you get to some moments that you just can’t pass. “Wait, what did he say about Kira? And why does she look so angry?” Suddenly, I’m sucked in, even if only for a bit, and only because I’m curious about Kira, my coolest companion.

But the bottom line is, even if you couldn’t care less about story, having the option to listen to it from an animated character beats the heck out of a block of text delivered by a statue. I think even the most hardnosed story hater would have to agree with this.

I’m not defending any of the actual stories in the game, their presentation, voice acting, animation, or any of that. I’m just saying, all things being equal, it beats text.

So... then why is this approach used exclusively for story and not for the game or teaching me how to play the game?

Story is great, but let’s get this straight: this is a video game. I’m not here for a story, I’m here for gaming. If you’d like to serve me some story along-side my gaming, great! That’s just cheese on my hamburger, and I love it. But this game is more like a grilled cheese sandwich with a Steak-Um inside. It’s still delicious, but it’s not a hamburger, which is kinda what I wanted for dinner tonight.

If you went to the movies to be told a story, and halfway through a Game-Boy popped up from your seat and said “You have to beat this Mario level before I’ll show you the rest of the movie,” you’d be mighty aggravated. The people in a movie theater are out for a story and the people logged on to an MMO are out for a game. Serve them story all you like, but the story needs to serve the game and not the other way around. If you want to hand me a free Game-Boy when I exit the theater, that's also great.

The audio presentation, which consumed a massive amount of this game’s resources, is used exclusively for story. And again, no matter where you want to rank story in your personal priority list, it’s not #1. That’s gaming by definition.

When it comes time to learn how to play, I’m in the Codex. Reading. How can this be? Why did no Jedi Master at the Temple have a quest in which he taught me the nature of “Threat”? What the heck is threat? Yeah, I know what threat is, but only because I’ve played a lot of MMOs before. Does that mean you should, as game designers, assume this knowledge for everyone? Only if the only players you want to attract are ones who already understand these concepts, and never anyone new.

And the NPC wouldn’t have to break any Fourth Walls to get the job done. You click on Master So-And-So, much like you would for the quests where you just kill a few training robots, only this time we’ll do one of those nice scripted sequences we currently waste on story you’ll only see once.

Did I say “waste”? Yes. I’m going to experience the story once. I’m going to play a long, long time. Where should the time go again?

So Master So-And-So says something like this:

“As you advance in your career you may fight along-side other Jedi or soldiers of the Republic, occasionally with several of you on the same, large target. Let’s face it, it’s the only way to stop some of the bigger threats out there; no single hero is going to get the job done, and we shouldn’t expect them to. Teamwork is almost always preferable.

“And, when on the battlefield with others and ganging up on a single, monstrous target, who will that target attack? Will it be you? Your friend? We don’t have to wait and see. Part of the skills of the Jedi Guardian is the ability to appear to be the biggest threat on the battlefield, while not necessarily being so. No, what she needs to be is the sturdiest target on the battlefield, so she can withstand the onslaught she’s about to try and keep coming.

“To this end, we have a number of abilities which make us appear much more threatening than our comrades-in-arms, which should keep the target or targets focused on us, which is our primary job. Our secondary job is surviving it.”

If this is anywhere in the game, it’s in the codex, and it’s probably not in there either. What we do get is a vague description that the role “tank” (“Tank? What?!”) is concerned with “protecting his group mates.” Then we get skills that say “causes a high amount of threat,” or “forces enemy to attack you for 6 seconds,” and we’re supposed to work it all out from there. For those of you, like me, who are old MMO hands, this may all sound insane, but please just try to think back. How did you learn this stuff? Either a friend taught you, or you read a web site. WoW certainly didn’t teach you how to tank or heal or when you should AoE vs. focus fire. You had to learn that stuff the long way. No one say “the hard way,” just the long and inexplicable way. If I have to go outside of your game to learn how to play your game, then your game is failing me as a new player.

What other genre of video game does this to you? When I play StarCraft, I don’t just get a new unit with a tooltip and a hearty “Good luck!” You can be sure that, if I just got a new unit, the very next level is going to feature it heavily. I’ll need to use it to win. In addition and even more importantly, an NPC is going to be along very shortly with some of that voice acting we’re all so fond of, and he’s going to explain to me what this unit does, what it’s good and bad against, and anything else I might need to know. It is everything, all knowledge about this unit and every situation I can possibly use it well in? No. But it’s something, and it’s certainly not next-to-nothing, a tooltip with a word in it no one had bothered to define for me yet. Minimally, I know what my new ability is and I have a decent description of what to do with it.

I’m just getting started here, but let me summarize a few things we have so far:

The game was crafted largely as a “Knights of the Old Republic” game. Yeah, it’s an MMO. I’m not saying it’s not. I’m saying it’s not enough of one. Too much went into 1-49, which we can almost call “the single player portion.” Meanwhile, game designers really need to wake up. Leveling is a relic from Dungeons and Dragons that works fine when six guys all agree to meet at the same table once a week. In 2012 and on the internet, it’s a relic that's holding us back. We do need a tutorial period to learn a game of this complexity, but that’s not the game. It’s how we learn our characters and how to play them. The bulk of the game is ahead, or should be.

Since 1-49 is a tutorial, make it one. Teach your new players how to play or you’ll have to be happy with never attracting anyone new to this genre. Yeah, some are going to come for your peerless ability to tell a story in an RPG. And when that’s done, then what? They’re adrift. They suddenly need a group and no one has taught them group mechanics. At all. Then old timers like me get pissed and throw them out of our hard mode.

The story in WoW sucked, not because it wasn’t well written. I wouldn’t actually know. It sucked because it didn’t impact my game experience one bit. It was just text I could ignore. Now I’m in love with Kira Carson, damn you people. How about we put a stimulus this powerful to work on gaming in addition to story telling?

Coming up next, your talent trees are dull and contain no real choices to make. The gear system is almost the greatest item system in an MMO, ever… then it says “Nah, never mind. I was just teasing.” Emulating WoW Is a great idea since it’s a great game with a huge audience. Emulating WoW 1.x – 2.x? Not so much.

Just wanted to point out that the OP (along with more than a few others), is very wrong on some basic assumptions.

The idea that the average player will spend more time at 50 then 1-49 is a distortion based on examination of (relatively) hardcore players.

The fact is the majority of players don't play that much. They're the casual players that probably don't even know that there's a forum and have no interest in going to it if they do. These are the players who play months (and even years) without hitting the level cap.

These are also the bread and butter of any MMO's customer base.

Now TOR is big enough to justify trying to satisfy some of the outliers. But their focus should always be on the story-based, leveling experience: firstly because that's where the money is, but just as importantly, because that's their main differentiator from generic-MMO #366.