'tis the Season in MMOs...
The holiday doldrums set in a week early (or so it feels to me). In WoW, we knew our guild leader would be gone Saturday, but he was the only one I was aware of. He tried to get a group together Friday night. That almost worked, but with our primary healers unresponsive or absent, current raid content was out of the question and we just knocked out Blackwing Lair, the old 40-man raid with about six people (easily) before I headed off. Saturday was disappointing as I think there were only three other raiders online at the usual start time (ironically, including said guild leader). I had hoped he'd be the only one missing at, at the worst, we could struggle through something or even take a partial team into LFR or take on the easy Alizabel and Morchok quick-like. Then when Guild Wars time rolled around Sunday night, I was the only person online. No progress. I expect Christmas night to be as bad or worst and New Years just as bad.
So... it feels like we'll be rebuilding our groups out of the shattered remains of this year come next. Bleh.
At least I've had SWTOR to play around with myself, I guess?
I don't run into queue times at all hours, but during peak hours I see 30-40 minute waits to get in. I literally did run a heroic dungeon in WoW while waiting once over the weekend. I've been primarily running my Imperial Agent, sometimes with someone, but mostly by myself.
Hutta plays out okay. Running errands, sabotage, manipulation, and betrayal in the name of the Empire to get a hutt's backing for the coming conflict. I adopted the approach of an agent who's fairly loyal to the Empire, though not blindly so. If I can assist people while doing my work, great, but the mission generally comes first. The numbers are different now, but when I looked I had something like 1350 light side points accumulated and 500 dark side - neutral leaning toward good.
Dromund Kaas is the heart of the Empire. So here I got to see some of the interplay between the "normal" officers of the Empire and the Sith of the Dark Council. There is some resentment that Sith get such deference. Here I chose the path of Operative (stealth, close combat, access to healing) over Marksman (long-ranged combat with portable cover shields). It may be silly, but the deciding factor may have been the satisfying shink-thunk of close-in shiv attacks. So there's a slave rebellion on Dromund Kaas, plenty of beasties in the jungles, and a couple traitorous Sith Lords trying to open the world up for invasion, plenty for an intelligence agent to work against.
For the agent, Dromund Kaas wraps up with a major terrorist attack and being assigned a ship and code name to be sent out into the galaxy after the group responsible - which seems to be internal to the Empire. So far.
That's some summary of plot and experience. So how does it play?
About like it did a few weeks ago. There's a lot of standard-but-solid behavior in movement and attacks. The lack of auto-attack still seems a little strange to me, but I'm getting used to it readily enough. There's a Sprint skill at level 14 or so that makes running around a litlte less agonizing (and 'mounts' toward level 25, I think). Each world has a handful of Heroic missions - these are not only group-based (they have a number associated with them for the suggested group size), but they also reset daily so you can do them repeatedly. That's something I didn't realize before.
I love the Agent ship. It has a nice, sleek feel to it outside and relatively comfortable inside. That makes sense as it's supposed to resemble a yacht more than a warship. The space combat missions are a bit simplistic - on-rail shooters where each mission follows the exact same pattern - but I've done the three I have access to a few times each and I actually like them so far. It's something totally different you can do. And having a ship means being able to travel to just about any other world. I imagine my butt would be kicked on those I'm not level-ready for, but it seems to be an option. On the down side, it's a bit clunky to go to a space port, zone into the hangar, board your ship, go to the galaxy map and select a destination, leave your ship, and leave the hangar all to get from one world to another. And while you can board a group member's ship, leaving it seems to put you into your class hangar rather than theirs.
Companions are useful. You appear limited to one combat companion, but that makes (Heroic 2) missions generally doable and sometimes (Heroic 2+) ones. Some combinations are awesome and some don't seem quite so... Bounty Hunters can tank or DPS and they get a companion who can heal - good combination. Agents get someone who can tank for them decently (if careful, at least), so that's good. But Troopers get... another trooper. 'course, this is short-term as you eventually get something like five or more combat companions to choose from, but at level 18 I'm still on my first. Of course, they probably aren't as good as a real player, but I was able to heal my companion through a really tough boss fight that would have creamed me otherwise.
I saw my first Flashpoint twice over the weekend. The "dungeons" of the game, they seem to be geared for groups of 4 and drop some potentially nice things. I got to run through it once more or less my way, rallying a ship to the cause and carrying them through a tough situation. Then I got to see it a more dark side way and walked onto the bridge to find people dead and a lieutenant running the ship. Big difference in that, though the overall story arc of the events played out about the same. I'm still not sure what I think of running those repeatedly - it's neat to see changes, but what's the "real" storyline? I suppose that's the downside to any story-heavy MMO. Even non-story-heavy ones to some degree. I also picked up a long coat I really like from in there.
I've still seen some relatively minor graphics glitches. There's the occasional character's lips not moving while they're talking in-scene. There's companions that repeatedly falling into an unconscious pose or walk into the occasional object. I've seen one or two issues where some stray polygon was doing something funky. But overall it's been fairly solid. I haven't noticed any real lag in the game and the only disconnects I've seen appear to be not the fault of the game - but more on that rant later.
It's the little, tiny touches that seem to win me over or annoy me, though. That limit of waist-deep water bugs me even though I can't say swimming would add much. From what I've seen, characters turn their head toward their target whereas GW seems to have a set looking-to-the-side-slightly angle and I can control head-turn manually in WoW. Jumps appear a little exaggerated - which looks sort of awkward in SWTOR even though WoW isn't much better (it's just arguably less noticeable given the more cartoony appearance style). Resolutions appear pretty good. I haven't really felt crowded with the various instances of areas even on each server - good while questing, but it makes major hubs seem a bit empty to me.
I'm still undecided on whether I like or dislike the crew skills. It's less satisfying to watch a companion scan a junk pile than to do it myself, but it's nice that we can both do so at once. Sending crew away on missions to collect resources or whatever makes me feel more productive when running around doing things that don't require them, but I find myself wishing I could feel a little bit more involved in those missions. I've been doing armstech crafting, but 90% of what I can make seems worse than what I have - especially the items that can't accept mods. So armstech hasn't been really useful to me other than leveling it up some (about 82/400 currently), so I don't know what to think of that.
One of the two friends I have contact with in the game briefly tossed around the idea of starting a guild. Then found you need something like 5 signatures to do so. And if you don't know that many people, well... I guess we don't need a guild, eh?
Overall, I'm still enjoying seeing how it plays out. The story is still the edge and I still hold the believe that it'll hit a wall at max level andthe game will hold less appeal, but leveling does slow down so it may take a while to get there.
Annoyingly, my home internet has been problematic since late last night. It works fine for browsing and the like, but the periodic packet loss dumps me from anything that requires a stable connection like MMOs, remote desktop connections, and to some extent MUCKs. Grrr. I got up early this morning to get in one more heroic dungeon run in WoW, zoned in to a group on the last boss and thought "okay, this'll be quick" only to get disconnected in the middle of the fight. Twice. Then I apologized and bowed out, because that sucks for them as much as me. If this is still going on when I get home tonight, I guess I'm going to have to call support.
So... it feels like we'll be rebuilding our groups out of the shattered remains of this year come next. Bleh.
At least I've had SWTOR to play around with myself, I guess?
I don't run into queue times at all hours, but during peak hours I see 30-40 minute waits to get in. I literally did run a heroic dungeon in WoW while waiting once over the weekend. I've been primarily running my Imperial Agent, sometimes with someone, but mostly by myself.
Hutta plays out okay. Running errands, sabotage, manipulation, and betrayal in the name of the Empire to get a hutt's backing for the coming conflict. I adopted the approach of an agent who's fairly loyal to the Empire, though not blindly so. If I can assist people while doing my work, great, but the mission generally comes first. The numbers are different now, but when I looked I had something like 1350 light side points accumulated and 500 dark side - neutral leaning toward good.
Dromund Kaas is the heart of the Empire. So here I got to see some of the interplay between the "normal" officers of the Empire and the Sith of the Dark Council. There is some resentment that Sith get such deference. Here I chose the path of Operative (stealth, close combat, access to healing) over Marksman (long-ranged combat with portable cover shields). It may be silly, but the deciding factor may have been the satisfying shink-thunk of close-in shiv attacks. So there's a slave rebellion on Dromund Kaas, plenty of beasties in the jungles, and a couple traitorous Sith Lords trying to open the world up for invasion, plenty for an intelligence agent to work against.
For the agent, Dromund Kaas wraps up with a major terrorist attack and being assigned a ship and code name to be sent out into the galaxy after the group responsible - which seems to be internal to the Empire. So far.
That's some summary of plot and experience. So how does it play?
About like it did a few weeks ago. There's a lot of standard-but-solid behavior in movement and attacks. The lack of auto-attack still seems a little strange to me, but I'm getting used to it readily enough. There's a Sprint skill at level 14 or so that makes running around a litlte less agonizing (and 'mounts' toward level 25, I think). Each world has a handful of Heroic missions - these are not only group-based (they have a number associated with them for the suggested group size), but they also reset daily so you can do them repeatedly. That's something I didn't realize before.
I love the Agent ship. It has a nice, sleek feel to it outside and relatively comfortable inside. That makes sense as it's supposed to resemble a yacht more than a warship. The space combat missions are a bit simplistic - on-rail shooters where each mission follows the exact same pattern - but I've done the three I have access to a few times each and I actually like them so far. It's something totally different you can do. And having a ship means being able to travel to just about any other world. I imagine my butt would be kicked on those I'm not level-ready for, but it seems to be an option. On the down side, it's a bit clunky to go to a space port, zone into the hangar, board your ship, go to the galaxy map and select a destination, leave your ship, and leave the hangar all to get from one world to another. And while you can board a group member's ship, leaving it seems to put you into your class hangar rather than theirs.
Companions are useful. You appear limited to one combat companion, but that makes (Heroic 2) missions generally doable and sometimes (Heroic 2+) ones. Some combinations are awesome and some don't seem quite so... Bounty Hunters can tank or DPS and they get a companion who can heal - good combination. Agents get someone who can tank for them decently (if careful, at least), so that's good. But Troopers get... another trooper. 'course, this is short-term as you eventually get something like five or more combat companions to choose from, but at level 18 I'm still on my first. Of course, they probably aren't as good as a real player, but I was able to heal my companion through a really tough boss fight that would have creamed me otherwise.
I saw my first Flashpoint twice over the weekend. The "dungeons" of the game, they seem to be geared for groups of 4 and drop some potentially nice things. I got to run through it once more or less my way, rallying a ship to the cause and carrying them through a tough situation. Then I got to see it a more dark side way and walked onto the bridge to find people dead and a lieutenant running the ship. Big difference in that, though the overall story arc of the events played out about the same. I'm still not sure what I think of running those repeatedly - it's neat to see changes, but what's the "real" storyline? I suppose that's the downside to any story-heavy MMO. Even non-story-heavy ones to some degree. I also picked up a long coat I really like from in there.
I've still seen some relatively minor graphics glitches. There's the occasional character's lips not moving while they're talking in-scene. There's companions that repeatedly falling into an unconscious pose or walk into the occasional object. I've seen one or two issues where some stray polygon was doing something funky. But overall it's been fairly solid. I haven't noticed any real lag in the game and the only disconnects I've seen appear to be not the fault of the game - but more on that rant later.
It's the little, tiny touches that seem to win me over or annoy me, though. That limit of waist-deep water bugs me even though I can't say swimming would add much. From what I've seen, characters turn their head toward their target whereas GW seems to have a set looking-to-the-side-slightly angle and I can control head-turn manually in WoW. Jumps appear a little exaggerated - which looks sort of awkward in SWTOR even though WoW isn't much better (it's just arguably less noticeable given the more cartoony appearance style). Resolutions appear pretty good. I haven't really felt crowded with the various instances of areas even on each server - good while questing, but it makes major hubs seem a bit empty to me.
I'm still undecided on whether I like or dislike the crew skills. It's less satisfying to watch a companion scan a junk pile than to do it myself, but it's nice that we can both do so at once. Sending crew away on missions to collect resources or whatever makes me feel more productive when running around doing things that don't require them, but I find myself wishing I could feel a little bit more involved in those missions. I've been doing armstech crafting, but 90% of what I can make seems worse than what I have - especially the items that can't accept mods. So armstech hasn't been really useful to me other than leveling it up some (about 82/400 currently), so I don't know what to think of that.
One of the two friends I have contact with in the game briefly tossed around the idea of starting a guild. Then found you need something like 5 signatures to do so. And if you don't know that many people, well... I guess we don't need a guild, eh?
Overall, I'm still enjoying seeing how it plays out. The story is still the edge and I still hold the believe that it'll hit a wall at max level andthe game will hold less appeal, but leveling does slow down so it may take a while to get there.
Annoyingly, my home internet has been problematic since late last night. It works fine for browsing and the like, but the periodic packet loss dumps me from anything that requires a stable connection like MMOs, remote desktop connections, and to some extent MUCKs. Grrr. I got up early this morning to get in one more heroic dungeon run in WoW, zoned in to a group on the last boss and thought "okay, this'll be quick" only to get disconnected in the middle of the fight. Twice. Then I apologized and bowed out, because that sucks for them as much as me. If this is still going on when I get home tonight, I guess I'm going to have to call support.
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