Both games have great introductions that can hook you in while also serving as a tutorial. But the story in SWTOR keeps going, pulling you right along with it, giving you the rewards necessary that you never have to stop and just level up. And that’s just the class and world stories. Once you consider Flashpoints (which add a whole new layer to the story) and PvP, you have quite a few avenues for leveling up.

GW2 wasn’t quite so streamlined. On my first character (a Charr Warrior), I finished the Plains of Ashford, fully mapped out The Black Citadel, and got through my personal story line to the point where it wanted me to go to the Diessa Plateau. I was level 18 by this point, and Diessa Plateau was classified as a 15-25 level area.

The first mobs I ran into were level 23. I got my furry cat butt handed to me quickly. This was an experience that just never happened in SWTOR. Granted, in SWTOR, the series of quests keeps you on a narrow path, but if you follow that path, you level up at the same pace as the content.

In GW2, I really needed about five more levels to continue on the ‘story’ (the personal storyline quest gave way to “Explore the Diessa Plateau,” so I’m not sure how much to call that story as much as an intermission in which you should level up).

So kudos to the SWTOR team for making the leveling process as painless as possible (by seamlessly progressing it at the same rate as the story).

NOTE: Remember the love many (though not all) had for the x12 xp event last fall? It was for this reason. It was a way to play through the class-unique storylines without having to do any ancillary leveling.

I almost feel this goes without saying as SWTOR easily has the most engrossing, entertaining, and detailed character-driven story in any MMO I’ve played (though that’s a small list, this is a very common sentiment with even veteran MMO gamers).

I’ve only come to appreciate the scope of it more after playing GW2. The initial quests in SWTOR have you performing feats thought impossible by many, doing things that no one else could, and in general being epic. Though a lot of the quests are “Kill X bad guys,” you’re still typically dealing with threats considered grave or immense.

Compare that to GW2, where your initial quests are helping repair crops, clear out spiders in the orchard, or return the cows back to their pens. You’re basically a farm hand equipped like a soldier. In SWTOR, you’re actually doing a soldier’s work.

It’s that sense of being important and amazing right off the bat that makes SWTOR really pull you in when you first start playing. And it keeps up all the way to the end of Chapter 3 and in Shadow of Revan (in Makeb, I just feel like a mercenary hired by the Republic/Empire).

Let me preface this with saying I have not tried the Ranked Arenas in GW2, as I don’t feel like I was even close to the level necessary to compete there. So this is more or less comparing the Practice matches against the closest thing to practice matches in SWTOR: regular Warzones.

The matchmaking system in SWTOR is vastly superior, if for only one reason: it doesn’t start a game until the teams are full. Sure, this means waiting around in a queue for a minute or two. But at least the teams are full when you play; you’re not doing some horrid 2v4 game. I feel structure is of the utmpots importance when you’re dealing with PvP matches, and SWTOR at least has that.

Also, in SWTOR, we have a slew of different game types. We have bomb assault, pseudo-slayer, 2 different territories games (with varying mechanics), the single-life deathmatches, and, of course, Huuuuuuuttbaaaaaall. In GW2, they have one main type of PvP, territories (though about half a dozen maps for it), and another type that’s restricted to custom games.

Variety is the spice of life, and no more so than in PvP. Couple the already existing number of game types the devs have made for us with the thread asking for ideas for future PvP game types (dear devs: please sound off on that thread, even if it’s fluff information), and SWTOR PvP is clearly superior in terms of structure. Now, we just need a Capture the Flag map.

This one is a little funny, because SWTOR’s Outfit Designer isn’t out yet, but I have tooled around with it on the PTS, and I will say it is better. Why? Because it lets you craft your look and then never have to worry about it again. And then you can craft more looks, and have a little closet of outfits your toon can swap to at any time.

In GW2, they took the other approach: rather than slotting gear that only affects appearance, you can ‘transmute’ an existing piece of gear, Gear A, with another piece, Gear B, so that the finished item has the stats of Gear A and the looks of Gear B. The issue there? If you’re leveling, once you find a better piece of gear, you lose your look again.

No joke here: the Outfit Designer in SWTOR actually has me excited to level characters again. Though it’s a small QoL thing, the idea that I can just equip whatever gives me the best stats and don’t have to worry about looks has me jazzed up. I think it’ll make leveling that much more painless.

I came to SWTOR from another MMO, Dungeons and Dragons Online. That game had pretty brutal consequences for dying (given the current industry standards), so coming to SWTOR was like coming into a warm home after being out in a blizzard. The fact that you can either resurrect in the field at no cost, or simply warp back to a safe point for no cost, is a massive QoL thing for PvE questing and leveling. Especially for someone with kids, as they can, and often do, pull you away from the computer at a moment’s notice, which leads to in-game death. Not having to “start over” when that happens is huge.

In GW2, it’s not as bad as DDO, but nowhere as good as SWTOR. You have to go back to a safe point (no in-field resurrection), and it costs you some coin. It wasn’t very much coin, but it still cost you. Maybe it was one of the ways they wanted to take money out of the economy? But regardless, dying was already aggravating enough, but to get charged a fee for it, too? Bleh. And then having to run back to your quest area? Double bleh.

I’ve heard enough people that like no GCD that I’m not prepared to unequivocally state that the use of the GCD is objectively superior game design. But I like it more. To me, it seems to create a cleaner game environment, whether PvE or PvP. It’s much easier to evaluate an attack if nearly all attacks have to respect the GCD, and rotations seem less…spammy with the GCD.

GW2 did not use the GCD. The only thing that saved it from being super spammy was that one ability on your hotbar was your auto-attack, so you didn’t have to mash that. It definitely made timing things more difficult, because you had to use animation cues to let you know when to make your next keystroke.

But because the damage and effects of attacks were based on the animations completing, and attacks still had cooldowns, lack of a GCD doesn’t make combat faster, just more chaotic and difficult to follow. DDO also had no GCD, and it was a feature I truly loved in SWTOR. After playing without it again, I gotta say, in my mind, it’s the right call.

SWTOR lets you move anything anywhere, change the size of stuff, how many slots to a hotbar, how many slots to a row/column, etc. You name it, and chances are great you can change it, save it, even share it with friends (via emailing the xml file).

In GW2, there’s not much in the way of tweaking the UI. Not that you really need to as it’s such a simple, bare-bones UI. Still, one of the things I like to do in SWTOR is move my hotbars closer to the center of the screen, so it’s easier for me to keep an eye on enemies and my cooldowns at the same time.

This one is a smaller issue, but one that kept coming up while I was playing GW2 with my wife. If I attacked and killed a mob before she got a chance to land a blow on it (usually because she was attacking a different mob), she wouldn’t get any xp for the mob I killed, even though we’re in the same party. This just doesn’t happen in SWTOR, which is a nice QoL perk for playing with a friend while leveling.

This one was almost too much for me to resist. The fact that you can spend a measly $40 ($10 on the weekend I bought it because they were doing a 75% off sale to hype the expansion) one time and play the game for as long as it exists is simply amazing.

They keep the game going the same way SWTOR does: microtransactions in the cash shop, of which most everything is customization stuff, or little QoL buffs like XP pots.

As I mentioned before, the first MMO I played was DDO, a game which was about to die, but came back with strength because of its F2P model. I never subbed for DDO like I have for SWTOR (when I first started SWTOR, almost 3 years ago exactly, there were only subs), but I can say with full surety that I spent more money on DDO in the two years that I played it than I have on SWTOR in three years.

Why? Because there was no sub for DDO. In SWTOR, anytime I want to buy Cartel Coins, I remind myself that I already drop $180 per year on this game. Buying coins? Most of the time, it’s too much. I’ll just wait for my monthly stipend (though every once in a while, I get too impatient).

But with DDO? There was never that barrier. Every time they had their Turbine Points sale, I was there, credit card in hand. Because why not? I wasn’t spending other money on the game. Also, DDO’s F2P model was a bit different.

In SWTOR, you get access to the whole story line, but are missing a ton of QoL amenities, as well as being restricted to only sampling end game content (PvP, Ops, Flashpoints). Then, you can get some of those QoL restrictions removed for coins, and you can get weekly passes for the end game…but you can never have the “full” game without a subscription. In my case, for example, even if I dropped the cash to get all the amenities unlocked, I’d still have to drop ~$10 a month just to PvP, since I do that most, and I do it every week. How long would that $5 a month saved have to build up to make up for unlocking all amenities on all my characters?

In DDO, you can actually unlock the whole game without subbing. Just like SWTOR, there are some QoL amenities you don’t start with, but you can unlock them all. But unlike SWTOR, rather than getting the whole game for free, you really just get the first chunk of it. Then you need to start unlocking adventure modules for more quests (the closest analogue in SWTOR would be if F2P just got you your homeworld and capital world, but then you had to pay to permanently unlock each world after that, but doing so would unlock all quests on that world), including all the raids (in SWTOR, that would the ability to permanently unlock Ops, FPs, and PvP).

That’s part of what took so much money from me for DDO: I unlocked the whole game. I loved the idea that I could come and go as I pleased; that there was no subscription making me feel guilty if I took some time off. Yet, despite that perk, I wasn’t missing out on anything a subscriber got outside of a couple of edge-case perks. Heck, I could even go back now, three years after quitting, and still enjoy the entirety of the game as I knew it…without having to drop another dime.

Yet, the sub is cheaper. So why would I rather be sub-less? Logic doesn’t play well into this, but it’s the idea that there’s “waste” if I don’t play on my sub. Many people love the idea that they “own” rather than “rent” the game, even if it doesn’t quite work that way (can’t keep playing if the servers shut down, right?).

Microtransactions are a sneaky thing. Put enough good stuff on the cash market, and people will buy it. I think Bioware already discovered that it makes more money than a sub model does, and I really wish they would make a sub-less model a viable option for even a “hard-core” player.

I won’t lie: this is one of the reasons I wanted to try GW2 in the first place. I’ve championed the idea of equalizing all gear for SWTOR PvP in terms of gear rating for a while now. The idea that anything other than skill vs skill could determine the outcome of a PvP match or encounter leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and always has.

GW2’s system did not disappoint. It’s pretty awesome that at level 3, very shortly after rolling your toon, you can jump into ‘endgame’ PvP. The system is simple, too. First, you get bumped up to level 80 (level cap). Then, all the abilities you get at level cap are unlocked, and you can choose your utilities (called skills and traits). You even get to choose the sigils, runes, and amulet you use, which, if you wanted a SWTOR analogue, would be like simply getting your choice of armorings, mods, enhancements, earpieces, implants, and relics (all with the best rating).

Imagine how much faster the queues would be if at level 10, you could go to the “PvP Training Zone”, get bolstered to 60, obtain all your abilities from a special PvP Trainer and hotkey them how you wished, get all your gear for free from the special PvP Quartermaster (gear that gives the same stats as the best PvE gear in the game, so there’s no gear discrepancy on no need for Expertise, removing the Bolster-Expertise nightmare), and enter the same queues as capped characters for the rest of your time on that character.

It solves all the ability-“have” and –“have not” issues in the mid tier. It creates a consistent PvP experience for all levels, so you don’t do levels 10-29 thinking mercs are gods then get to 30-59, or 60, and start getting rolled by melee toons that actually have their abilities. And it creates a much larger PvP population by consolidating all the levels.

Obviously, the mechanics would have to be ironed out (especially for Open World PvP), but I think a simple PvP tab on your character sheet, where you customize your PvP gear and it stays that way for future use, covers most of the problems. As for the abilities, either do PvP hotbars (think like the cover hotbar) that replace your normal hotbars in PvP zones, or (and I think this is better) simply allow players to put abilities they don’t normally have yet on their hotbar (they’d be grayed out in non-PvP areas).

This would create a PvP system that’s quick and easy to get into, and new players don’t have to worry about getting crushed by a gear gap regardless of what level they start. It also does away the unintuitive mess that is bolster + expertise. Just a home run move, in my mind.

I did not know about this one until I started playing GW2, but this is cool. You know how, back when, players used to ask for a Mentor/Mentee system all the time? You know, a way for people to run their higher level (even level capped) toons with lower level players and not just steamroll everything while also reducing xp gains to crap? That’s what this is.

It’s basically a reverse bolster. You keep your abilities and gear, but your overall stats shrink to current level of the content. Imagine, you have your favorite Jedi Knight at level 60, and your friend starts playing the game. He wants you to play with him, but you don’t like alts and want to play your Jedi Knight. That’s okay. You show up to Tython, and your stats drop to level 3 numbers in the Gnarls, level 10 numbers by the time you reach The Forge.

It’s even easier for the rest of the game, because whole worlds have level ranges, creating very obvious ‘de-leveling zones.’ Going to Tatooine? Get dropped to level 28 stats. Balmorra? Level 44 stats, or level 50 if you’re walking into Section X. And get this! It could even apply in those low level Ops, keeping them somewhat challenging forever!

The Heart Quests and Event Quests were a really cool design of GW2. Basically, imagine that those side quest givers don’t require you to actually talk to them. Instead, their quests involved the game elements around them (not on the other end of the map), and when you got within a certain distance of them and/or the quest elements, you automatically began contributing towards completing that quest. That’s the Heart Quests.

Bob the Imperial wants you to kill a dozen Balmorran rebels by the Okara Droid Factory? Well, you don’t actually have to talk with Bob to begin helping him—simply killing those rebels when you see them progresses Bob’s quest, and when it’s finished, Bob rewards you for helping him. It’s nice because it creates a seamlessness between exploring the map and questing on said map.

Also, the Event Quest idea was really cool. Instead of a quest waiting for you to pick it up and do it, it’s a quest that simply spawns at some point on the map. If you’re nearby, you can do it. Like the Heart Quests, you don’t actually talk to anyone to gain it. You just get a notification that it appeared and an indicator on your map, and you determine your own level of involvement.

Bob the Imperial would show up every so often outside the Okara Droid Factory and broadcast to all nearby Imperials and Freelancers under Imperial contracts that a nest of rebels was discovered and needed to be routed. Any nearby forces are requested to help. Go there, help, get rewarded by Bob.

The really cool part of the Event Quests is that EVERYONE contributes towards their completion, and everyone gets rewarded when they complete, so it’s not just your own efforts towards your own completion. There is a reward tier system based off how much you help. If you showed up at the very end, you might only get a Bronze tier reward. But contribute for most of the event, and you get a Gold tier reward.

What I really liked about it was that it was a way to get players to play together, even if they weren’t partied up. What better way to get an introvert into an MMO?

In GW2, no one ‘claims’ a mob by landing the first hit on it. When a mob dies, everyone that did damage to it gains xp and it counts towards any goals that entail killing said mob.

This was really nice for those Heart Quests that involve killing stuff, because even if the instance is full, you’re still mowing through the quest, and are still enticed and rewarded for helping out your fellow players, even if they’re not in your party. So, when you had to kill monsters to finish the quest, it didn’t matter if that player over there hit it first, you can still jump in, help burn the mob down, and it counts for both yours and his/her quest, and you both get the xp. No drama over “Ninja-ing” mobs.

Crafting materials in the field were also not “Ninja-able”. Basically, if a crafting node spawned and you harvested it, the node would vanish off your screen only. Anyone else could still see the node and harvest it. Again, no one was getting bent out of shape because someone else beat them to the node, which was nice.

I know Bioware has a firm stance on this, but I want to reiterate that it is the wrong stance. Having non-human characters doesn’t make us feel any less connected to the character, any less invested in it. The Charr were such a race in GW2 (I mean, you ran on all fours), yet I had no issues getting into the story and the character.

If Bioware made the argument that there are development cost issues with a non-humanoid shape, or humanoid-light shape if you will, especially in regards to getting armors to fit them correctly, I’d buy that. But the idea that they can only be sidekicks because we can’t identify with a species that doesn’t look like us? It’s pretty backwards thinking, especially for Bioware.

In GW2, each species has a very distinct culture that it comes from. The Charr have this sort of steampunk meets Mongol horde feel. The Sylvari are what you get if the Na’vi from Avatar were actually made out of the trees they connected to. And the humans…well, they were pretty stock fantasy humans, though with a darker theme (their kingdoms in decline, being lost to outside threats like The Charr). It really made the world feel genuine.

Compare that to SWTOR, where every Bounty Hunter is the same regardless of species. Now, in fairness to SWTOR, we get our big differentiation between the classes (unlike GW2, where a Sylvari Thief and Sylvari Elementalist can have pretty much the same story). But what has always bugged me about SWTOR is, as you travel to all the different worlds, the native cultures all feel kind of the same. Even the architecture looks very similar between worlds. Now some of that is because you’re in warzones, where the structures are simply bases set up by your faction. But, when the civilian architecture looks the same across the galaxy, it feels less than authentic.

So I can probably forgive SWTOR for this as we’re about to get a better Outfit Designer, but GW2’s dye system is light years beyond SWTOR’s. I get that SWTOR needed to monetize the system, but they could have done it in a MUCH better system.

In GW2, when you go to the dye tab, each piece of gear has a little colored square for each dye-able region. Simply click on the color you want, and then click on the gear’s square that corresponds to the region on that gear you want to dye. Voila. Now, GW2’s system is free. And who doesn’t like free?

But if it needed to be monetized, it wouldn’t be hard. Instead of the single dye slot per piece of gear we currently have and the horde of clown-shoes looking dyes that pollute the GTN, give a piece of gear a dye slot for each dye-able region (atm, only primary area and secondary area, but could be expanded for later pieces of gear). Then, destroy the concepts of dye combinations and primary vs secondary dyes, turning all dyes into a single color dye that can go into any dye slot.

Dyes are still sold on the Cartel Market, with some colors being craftable. Sure, there wouldn’t be a ton of room to innovate new dyes like there is right now (ie hey guys, we finally released Pink/White!), but given the simplicity and customization of the dye system, the amount of normal “dye packs” sold would skyrocket, especially if it wasn’t so rare to hit a black or white dye.

Or, you know, just sell the dyes directly on the CM for a reasonable cost.

This is a small one, but one I liked. In SWTOR, if you aggro a monster, you’re in combat. In GW2, you can aggro a monster, but aren’t considered in combat until it hits you. Why do I like this? It means you have a system where enemy mobs behave in regards to you, but it doesn’t automatically force you into combat—a crucial function if you ever wanted bots in warzones (eh) or wanted to do a Horde mode a la Gears of Wars 2 (can I get a hell yeah!).