Eurogamer re-reviews SWTOR

Some of the stuff in the review is nonsense. He played the Agent story and thinks GW2's is better?

lol.

BUT.

There are a lot of cogent points he makes, and he does actually give the game credit for its strengths. I would also play the hell out of an Imperial Agent-centric single-player game, but that's beside the point. And the number of people trying to get help from higher-level players to be able to only play their class stories speaks to the non-class content being well worse than the class content. (But we've known that for ages. A lot of criticisms in the review are things we've known for ages.)

Their F2P system is honest-to-god toxic to the desire to subscribe. There are little things that they'll remind you you're not getting (like credit boxes), little things they'll remind you they're bleeding you extra for (credit increase from vendors) and big things they won't tell you about like quickbars. If you never open the cartel shop, you'd never know you were supposed to buy those when you ran out of space. Their gameplay was never their strong suit, and they make it intentionally worse - in many cases for no discernible reason.

And in light of that I don't object to the 4/10. See, here's the thing. Game reviewers are under huge pressure to give very swingy scores. A 7 on a big title will get people calling for their deaths. Sometimes this even goes as far as a 8.7 being synonymous with "crap." The review's assessment is "too much of it is mediocre-to-bad but there's really cool stuff inside and it's worth looking into." That doesn't seem incongruous with an honest 4.

I'm a subscriber, but dang, the restriction on medical probes sounds terrible. Why punish free players so much when you're actually trying to reach out to new customers? You can't force people to pay for a subscription. You're supposed to tempt them.

I'll use that famous analogy from an EA executive talking about the Gap when he was explaining how F2P works. He said you can walk into a Gap store for free and even try some things on and browse, but if you want something you have to buy it.

But in this case, it sounds like you can't even walk into the store. You have to wait in line to get in. If you want to bypass the line you have to pay a couple bucks. Then once you get into the store, certain sections are not accessible unless you pay a few more bucks. If you want to try on some clothes, that's another small fee. And if you actually do want to buy something, there's additional restrictions on what you can and cannot buy, and probably yet another line to wait in at the check out. On top of that, the customer service in general is poor.

You know what I would say if I went to a place like that?

See ya.

I said this in another thread, but basically, the single player portion of the game (i.e. the class quests) are the game's strength. Grouping for PvP or flashpoints, especially at end games, are its weakness.

It feels like a single player game because it is really obvious that's where BioWare spent most of their time and energy developing. Remember back before the game launched and all we heard about was STORY! THE FOURTH PILLAR! ALSO, STORY! Level up a character and this becomes extremely apparent.

I don't enjoy being 50. I do enjoy leveling up new characters. That's the difference.

Most MMOs don't have any revive on location feature. In terms of newcomers to TOR, it will look very much like a fancy new temptation.

lol, was that an actual review or just a sad attempt at comedy by the writer? Seems every other sentence he desperately tried some clever insult to the game akin to a bad Family Guy joke

"This [playing a Sniper] is worse than that time I watched the Naked Gun"

Also, how does the same game, with some random additions and improvements (albeit, very few for a year old game) get downrated by half? Yeah, that makes sense.

I rate this review a 2/5.

I started skimming after his comments on story. Nothing else hit me as just plain wrong. I definitely feel the score is in the right range.

Reviews are opinions and that guy's entitled to his. I agree with him on the Free to Play restrictions and I don't on the rest. I'm enjoying SWTOR so reviews are irreverent at this point.
Going back and RE-reviewing a game and lowering the score feels strange, especially when nothing that was in the game when it was an 8/10 has been removed. The re-review certainly doesn't read like a review; its long on opinion and short on description of the game's functionality.
If I'd never played SWTOR, I doubt reading this re-review would give me enough information to form my own opinion, and I think that's because it spends too much time telling me someone else's.

If TOR is a 4/10, GW2 should be a 3/10 because it´s even slightly more pointless gameplay.

But the graphics are better, so probably both are a 4/10

Well I just think they need to put more social systems in the game.

4/10 it's not the game
the game is 8/10 (waiting for world pvp and SSSP)
but 4/10 is the f2p