Swtor has nothing to fear from Wildstar!

This may sound shallow, but the look alone turned me off Wildstar big time.

It looks like a morning cartoon and if I can't look a games graphics without feeling uneasy I'll simply won't play it.

I never thought I'd say this, but it made me miss SWTOR's trees

My girlfriend and I gave wildstar a chance this weekend and after about 3 or 4 hours of playing it, we glanced at each other and both of us simultaneously said something like "meehhhh, no ..."

While the mechanics beeing nice and fast paced with the telegraph system, the game in my opinion lacks an immense amount of immersion without the cutscenes i got used to while playing TOR.

The major point which turned both of us in favor against it, is the style of characters, colors and the overall look and feel.
In comparison to the "Reduced Comic"-Style of TOR, Wildstars' Comic-Style is so overdone, to quote my girlfriend "This whole game looks like on a LSD Trip". Everything seems to be colored by a lunatic kid with neon crayons
With TOR's Charakter models already beeing something like all-genetically-enhanced superhumans / superaliens, the models of wildstar are totally out of control, super wide shoulders combined with a wasp like waist on a regular human male, simply akward.

The other point was the strange quest system with those oldskool quests texts and the lack of decisions (yeah, i do it <-> Forget it!). While the path quests were quite nice with all the jumping as explorer, the rest of the quest were again like "go there, bring that", and even as TOR follows the same pattern i feel a lot more involved with all those cutscenes.

The last point was the very laggy performance of the game, not fps wise but having issues with micro lags/hangers. Despite the game only beeing in open beta, overall graphics performance was quite good with my machine constantly running it with around 70-80 fps, but the those micro lags/hangers were akward (and i never ever had something similar in TOR since beta).

So after an overall playtime of around 6 hours we both were happy to fire up TOR

Same feel here. So much potential, but there is a real lack of story there to make you care about your character. Its very old school sand box that way.

But isn't that the very qualities the lingering SWTOR haters are demanding in an MMO?

IMO, they need to be careful what they wish for.

Anyway.... generally speaking no MMO need worry about another MMO, per se. Other MMOs don't kill an MMO... the death is generally self-inflicted. Even WoW really did not kill other MMOs... it simply gave players more choices and did so successfully. Did WoW stifle continued growth of other MMOs? ... Yep. Yet the MMOs that were live and thriving when WoW launched.... mostly still around today and the ones that are not.. they killed themselves.

That said, launching a new MMO in today's market carries a lot of risk. If Wildstar does no better at launch then ESO... then it's pre-slotted for an NCsoft forced shut down prematurely in it's planned life cycle.

Completely disagree with you on that one. SWTOR is excellent, but so is Elder Scrolls Online for very different reasons. My friends and I play both and are subbed to both. We swap off and on and play what we like when we like. Makes gaming less boring that way.

But no, I don't agree that SWTOR is way better than ESO.

I'll agree that NO MMO has anything to worry about from any other MMO. The 'rar rar go team' competition nonsense from requisite fan bases is ridiculous. Especially in this day and age of the F2P MMO market.

We can all play a myriad collection of games at the same time, after all. Being a ESO fan doesn't preclude you from being a TOR player at the same time. Being a Wildstar fan doesn't mean you can't be a fan of whatever other games are out there.

The whole 'us vs them' mentality is a hold-over from the days when MMOs were all of the Subscription model. That's no longer the case.

I have no idea what "wildstar" is, nor do I care.

Exactly.

I don't think it's shallow. If you spend 30+ hours a week staring at a computer screen it damn well look good. It's the same reason I could never play WoW, it just looked too cartoony to me. For me it was never about whether the gameplay was good or not. I want both gameplay and design to be good. But what's good for me isn't necessarily good for another so it's still a personal thing. Wild Star doesn't do it for me either so I'm not even going to do the beta.