To the Anonymous Insider

QFT

This game was awesome until the end of August, 2011.

The build after totally WoW-ified it.

I still have to laugh about the "Insider" claiming it is less WoW-like.

I wonder if it really just Georg Zoeller spouting sour grapes.

Hi. I'm a freelance journalist who happens to be investigating these rumors. As much as I hate to inform everyone, everything this man has posted is legit. And I now fear for this man's life.

The people that wanted to play KOTOR 3, GOT to play KOTOR 3 and left. Many others were forced into a linear leveling experience that was nothing more than an interactive movie with no MMO or end game at the end. Who is left are the players that wanted to play an MMO, although many like myself wanted an MMO (NOT KOTOR 3) and got to the end, yes the end, and there was nothing.

The story was great. The voice acting was great, but I hated that it was voice acted at all. I CAN READ, THANK YOU. I WANT to read. Same difference between a movie and a book, the book is ALWAYS better, you get to imagine the voices yourself, make them into your own character, your own version.

One of the biggest mistakes was the on rails class questing system. I am not saying it was not a cool experience, it was, but it was like playing a single player game and this huge investment into exclusive class story/quest lines was at the expense of storylines and quests that everyone can do. This on rails exclusive class system with nothing else available took out a large chunk of what could have made an open world where you get to roam around and do what quests you want to do.

You were also all but forced to do every, single, quest. ALL of the Bonus series', simply because you needed the XP. XP was pretty scarce to find, and this is coming from a veteran EQ2, AOC, WOW, RIFT player. It is as if they made all the quests, then got out their calculator and divided the total xp to get to 50 by the number of quests in the game, total. Terrible.

If you want more story you have to start over, and play a different class. This is counter to the point of an MMO, persistence for the sake of progression of your character. I dont want to play every single class to get ANY more story.

I got my BH to 50 and it wasn't the fantastic leveling experience many claim. It was a lonely experience. I even leveled with good friends and it was a PITA to organize all three of us to go here and there and then find out that so and so has to get to this point in their class quest to pick up this other quest so everyone can progress together at the same time. Much time was spent on our own part of the map doing small class quests to get to bosses where we all trudged to each others boss to help. Very single player and tedious.

Open world and quest system that everyone regardless of class can access, not on rails exclusive storylines that force you to abandon your character and start over to experience other content.
Gameplay, not Voice acting
MMO, not tacked on multiplayer. (it is as if none of the developers ever played an MMO, SOOO many basic features missing, still missing.)

What point?? WoW has a system that gives them a much better overall UI.

If you choose not to use it, thats your fault.

It's like me saying WoW story is better because I choose not to do SW:ToR story

“If I’d listened to customers, I’d have given them a faster horse.” - Henry Ford

We got a horse...in spaaaace!

The leveling process is a joke. The reason it doesnt feel like a grind is because you level up to fast and dont have to worry about gear. You can kill NPC,s with gear 10-15 levels lower than you are. You get so much XP for the missions and they are so easy and fast to complete and the map gives you the location to goto to complete it. No thinking involed just follow the rail.

Will agree the endgame sucks because you only have one path in endgame. There is nothing else to do at endgame but PVP or OPS/FP.

So which would you ratherhave - an easy leveling process or a ridiculously stupid grind? Is there a middle ground that would be better?

Well, first of all this "anonymous BioWare employee" post has so many factual errors in it that its credibility goes from zero (the infamous "anonymous insider" thing redux) to sharply negative territory the moment it talks about BioWare opening up the forums to the public only a few months before the game went live.

Seriously?

I've been trol... erm, POSTING... on some version of an official SWTOR forum since October 2008, when BioWare first officially announced that SWTOR was in development. And people (myself included) were jonesng for a BioWare Old Republic MMO on the BioWare forums for years before that.

Yeah, there were always the KOTOR-3-as-single-player grognards, but ultimately the choice for how this game was designed rests with BioWare. THEY kept this game under TIGHT wraps for years, with iron-box secrecy over their vaunted iteration process. The ONLY thing they shared with the community was odes on how great the Hero Engine was to work with, and how easy it was to rapidly cook up prototypes for internal testing.

Even when the game was in Beta, we testers were warning BioWare that the game was very linear, and that "endgame" content might be a bit thin.

What we DIDN'T find out was how badly the game would bog down under heavy populations in concentrated areas. We had to take it on faith that the Hero Engine coupled with the Complex Event Processor software add-on would actually work as well as they were saying it would.

It didn't.

It worked well enough in Beta, but in the post-Launch environment, with the much-heavier player load, it does not.

That's not the players' fault.

So now BioWare's playing catch-up. We've got mission terminals instead of NPC quest-givers in the Black Hole District, and few seem to miss the NPC quest-givers for the dailies. Denova is coming; it will be interesting to see if BioWare broadens its approach to world design to make them seem less like an on-a-rail experience and more of an open-ended exploratory experience. I figure it will have all the usual "signpost" quests leading players from Quest Hub "A" to Quest Hub "B," but I'm also hoping for a world big enough to allow players to feel like there's more "white space" around the questing zones than has been the case in previous worlds.

But the sky-is-falling prognostications predicting SWTOR's imminent demise? Please. Such things strike me as the spewings of rabid, ravenous fans who are too close to their product for objectivity.

This article is also bogus and "BS". The so-called "source" does not even have this article and I could write in as a BW employee and do this as well. This whole article is complete crap. They tried there best making it look from a real source but it isn't.

Grinding is not "harder." "Tedious" is not "harder."

The "middle ground" I am looking for is challenging combat.

The thing is, the character classes themselves introduce some huge variables in how 'hard' a quest may be to finish. I myself found that a murderously-difficult quest for my Consular Shadow (such as the climactic fight at the end of the Alderaan Consular story) was faceroll-easy for my Consular Sage.