Why are all the planets so linear?

umm all those links are talking about questing and story... we are talking about the map and worlds.

ill agree the story lines in wow was liner BUT if you wanted to get off the path and run to the left you could and you could continue to do so for a long time, you could explore and see all kinds of things. you cant do that in this game. that is what we are talking about in this thread.

yea it shows yall don't read what people are posting. you see one word and jump to conclusions


umm this for me so far feels nothing like an MMO...at all!! I havnt had to interact with a single person so far. I dont think anyone has said anything about cutting the story, BUT i have said in other threads that the stories have sucked so far and that the voice acting is atrocious so if stories are what Bioware dos best then *** mate?? why/how did they fail so horribly with this game?? (im talking about their stories right here)

well in SWG we had player cities and it was amazing!!! you also had points of interest. in wow you had nifty lil things to find and if you were a hunter you had rare pets to collect. for explorers its all about nifty lil things like a statue of some great worrier that is tucked away in the side of a cliff that no one would normally see or finding a rare pet in an isolated lil grove. some people don't really care about power leveling and getting to the top level as fast as you can, some people like to deviate from the path and see what else the world has to offer.

i have no clue what this person is saying...its not making any since at all to me B^( from what i can tell they are saying that since this game is story based it has to go somewhere and that somewhere is a strait line.. so im asking this....... WHY?? why must i follow a line?? why cant i deviate from the path?? how would that hurt the story??

In a way i kinda agree with ya... i think they fired the wrong people, the people they should have fired were the ones responsible for telling the developers what to do and what not to do..i hope the person that decided to not have any non human playable races got fired first!!! then the person who decided to make the planets small and linear and basically a hallways... then the person who approved the voiceacting then the voice actors B^P i almost hate the voice acting more than not being able to deviate from the path. i say they should get rid of the higher ups that are making these stupid stupid decisions and keep the peeons that are just doing what the dumb dumbs are telling them to do.


i have a toon for every class and have played a little of every class.. the reason i haven't continued to play every class much further than a few levels is due to the boring storyline and the fact that i cant deviate from the path set infront of me..and also the horrible voice acting gets old and very annoying very fast!!!

the only other MMO that did this (having a very linear map) was the Planet Kashyyyk in SWG but i understand why they did it for that planet

Dark Souls is pretty close. That big tree you see in the Firelink Shrine is a place you can visit. You can even go down it (The Great Hollow) and come out to Ash Lake, look straight ahead and see so many trees of the same size. You can look up (while underground) and see clouds in the sky. Later in Tomb of the Giants, you can find a spot where you'll see the top of The Great Hollow and look down to see those exact same clouds and yes, The Great Hollow is that frigging big. That's just one example from that game.

I could say Morrowind too because hey, you really could go anywhere you saw, it was a real sandbox game. Saints Row: The Third counts too. The first three Breath of Fire games, etc.

Ok, let's compare apples with apples. The initial zones of two MMORPG.

The first one will be TOR.

The second one will be ''that certain game''

Starting zones of TOR.
Tython
Ord Mantell
Korriban
Nal Hutta

Starting zones of ''that certain game'' (never played Horde in ''that certain game'')
Elwynn Forrest-Westfall
Teldrassil-Darkshore
Dun Morogh-Loch Modan
Azuremethyst Isle-Bloodmist Isle

Tython : a relatively open valley for the most part, but the mountains to the West are very corridor-like
Ord Mantell : several wide areas, but a lot of indoor fight (by definition very unopen) and a lot of very thight areas on the coast
Korriban : Horribly unopen IMO, altough very atmospheric.To be honest, most of it is fighting is in tombs
Nal Hutta : the swamp is quite open.

Elwynn-Westfall : with the exception of a small lake to the North, perfectly open
Teldrassil Darkshore : Darkshore is a bit hard to navigate at time because of ti's North South flow, altough it was adressed in CATA.
Dun Morogh-Loch Modan : The lake was a navigation obstacle, but changed in CATA. Ironically, despite being mountains, only an handful of mountain paths.
Azure-Blood : some mountains with dubious paths, and one annoying final zone, quite open now.

Also, people, I would like to point out an anoying thing.

Whatever the way you think about it, WOW is much less linear than TOR.

In TOR, you are basically forced to go on every single planet, and in the same order despite permutations

In WOW, leveling in dungeons is quite possible. AND there is at the very least a choice of zones to go. If you start from the scratch, you can level on Kalimdor or Azeroth. You can perfectly well do Elwynn then Westfall, or Elwynn then Redridge. The only instance of a zone you are positively forced to do are starting zones in BC and MOP. And even there, after those zones, you have choise (Zangar or Terrokar ?) (Four Winds or Kassarang ?)

Having the choice between two zones make a game LOOKs way less linear.

Yes and no, because there were asynchronous paths of advancement in the story.

Exactly. Even a spaceship corridor game become less linear when you can CHOOSE the corridors.

But that's the thing. It wasn't personalized, and most of the players didn't care about what happened. A majority rarely quested outside of T1. I finished both the Empire and the Da'wi (every single chapter, every single quest), and I can say up and down the streets in how compelling Mythic wrote it (especially in Chapter 3 High Pass/Talabecland) but no one will sympathize. It wasn't the draw of the game.

Yeah, there's no asynchronous paths of advancement here, but that allows there to be a threaded class story that is personalized to the player. Asynchronous leveling opportunities mean people skip content. They miss out. The relative speed of leveling up is already high enough that this is already an issue.

Cool. You replied to my post without at least trying to understand it. I did not say flying mounts in Azeroth were a good thing. I did NOT say that it had them at launch. I did -NOT- say that I want them in TOR either.

If you read the comment I quoted, or the previous one(it was a part of conversation with Nala), you would've noticed that she asked about MMO that lets you fly to anywhere you want and I answered with WoW as an example. I do not play WoW. I do not like it and Blizz makes me hate it even more ever since WotLK's endgame with every next idea that rapes the WarCraft lore.

I don't want to be rude, but please, read the whole post before commenting on it, so you don't end up in same situation next time.

To anyone who has played both games the difference is clear and stark. The "other game" offers exploration, free (to a high degree) roaming to gather mats, player choice of path to approach quests as well as multiple possible quest areas to level, day / night cycles, weather, multitudes of critters that move about, and so on.

The freedom is a key element in the game experience and makes replayablity much greater.