Coming off of a stint in 2011’s RIFT, I’m finding myself disappointed with the sluggish patch schedule of SWTOR so far. I guess two content updates in four months is more or less on par with a bulk of the industry, but fair or not, SWTOR needs to step up its game in this department, especially in its first year when there are so many features that need including and so many bugs that need fixing.
But enough negativity — happy patch day (plus one)! Update 1.2 has landed on servers, and last night I got a little time to check it out. It’s been described as the miracle patch or the kitchen sink patch due to its wide range of features and the importance of BioWare delivering a huge update at the point where the game is no longer shiny and new.
What was I most excited about? Most definitely the Legacy System. It’s a big, big selling point of this patch, although I am let down that some parts of this system, like being able to buy stuff with your levels, are coming in future updates. Logging in with one current level 50, I was happy to see that I had accrued a few bonuses already: three sets of bonuses from companions I fully maxed out, a unity skill, the ability for my Bounty Hunter to use my Agent’s orbital strike, and a two-for-one buff that now combines my BH and Agent’s buff into one skill. All of that combined made me feel a bit stronger and better, and that’s the good part.
The bad is that so much of the Legacy system is locked behind doors made of mountains of credits. Maybe other players who have nothing to do other than farm level 50 dailies have stacks of cash, but I’m not flush, and so much of this patch — legacy unlocks, legacy gear, increased speeder prices — are ridiculously expensive. Shouldn’t the fact that we leveled up our legacy levels just give us these unlocks? Is the economy so borked that it needs massive money sinks like these?
I found it fascinating that there are four legacy skill unlocks that let you perform different hand-to-hand combat abilities. I’m wondering how long it will take before someone gets all four and then commits to leveling from 1 to 50 using nothing but punches.
My level 50 got a legacy item that I mailed to my lowbie and used it to unlock… a blue pistol. THAT was disappointing. Not even an orange item? Seriously? Fine, waste of a trip to Dromund Kaas.
Another big feature of the update was the UI customization, which is at once very flexible and very, very confusing. You log in to find all but your standard hotbar gone, and the only way to get it back is to go into the interface editor and muddle through overlapping colored patches. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not that bad and it is certainly nice to have — but it’s not intuitive at all.
Oh! I do like unifying colors to your chest piece. Very nice indeed. Bravo. My BH now has a white theme going on with her armor.
The rest of the update is pretty much off my immediate radar. Guild banking, new flashpoints or operations or warzones or whatever, it’s nothing I deal with on a day to day basis. I was very pleased to see so many bug fixes, and I noticed that one or two of my BH’s skills had better animations.
BioWare’s said that it’s going to try to get updates out faster from now on, and I sincerely hope that’s the case. The three most wanted features for me are:
- Instance finder
- Legacy individual unlocks
- More class story content post-50
The Legacy promotion that the studio is doing is pretty wild… cool in a way and also stupid, and as some have pointed out, probably a ploy to bolster numbers for an earnings report or something. The Massively team at PAX noted that the SWTOR booth was, even this far after launch, still swamped with visitors, so the popularity isn’t waning, but there’s a danger here that BioWare could be stumbling when it should be sprinting.
Bio Break 
To their credit, while they may seem lethargic with patch releases, this patch was *enormous*…so if they’re going to drop it all at once as opposed to small batches, it’s not so bad.
This is close to what the game should have been at launch.
But the Legacy system so far from what I’ve seen is a huge disappointment, not to mention a huge credit sink.
SWTOR had it’s chance. It’s now failed again. With Diablo 3 in a month and GW2 probably two months later, I really think SWTOR will be flailing come the end of the year.
I hated it when they said this, but SWTOR is just WoW with a Star Wars skin and voice acting. It’s not changing the game, and that’s what I’m really looking for, a game changer.
Bleh. I said it on Massively, and I’ll say it here (and not on the TOR forums, for they are a true cesspit): Bioware dropped the ball on this one, as far as I’m concerned. I have been playing since (pre)launch, I actively play 7 characters, none of whom are 50 yet, and the ONLY thing that interested me about this huge patch was the legacy system. I was looking forward to seeing what kind of goodies I would be getting and boy, did they ever deliver.
If you’re sitting on millions of credits, that is.
From the way they made it sound, this was the ideal system for altitis-sufferers. In a way, that’s still true, had I waited making any alts until after the patch hit. Maybe then I would have had a level 50 character with nothing to spend his/her credits on.
I feel cheated. And I’m not even getting any free play time. Thanks a lot, Bioware.
I have to second Lenn’s feeling cheated. The legacy system is completely oriented around convincing an otherwise bored—and rich—level-50 player to role an alt. It does little or nothing to encourage an altoholic with an already full stable of alts to continue. Even the “family tree” feature is overly limited, orienting around children and maybe grandchildren of your max-level character (which I suppose fits the Anakin Skywalker-centered idea behind the legacy system). My tree is completely flat.
Honestly, it just wasn’t enough to have me resub. More class story — that would tempt me, though I didn’t even finish one, because the one I really wanted to finish (Gunslinger), well, Devs have dubbed an “advanced class” that was purposely built to not have all the benefits the other classes have. Benefits needed to progress, since I, someone who only finds the easy setting enjoyable, couldn’t. Nice of them to tell me three months after I rolled one.
Sorry, I forgot something else that prevents me from resubbing. No macros. Ever. Devs have recently said that “macros are evil”. Sorry, no way for me to play the other classes I want to try without a macro system. *shrug* Being able to stack more than one skill on a button sure ruined EQ2, among other games, though. /sarcasm
ME3 will be the last EA game I ever purchase.
Okay, I have to admit – the family tree doing rivalries/allies horizontally, which makes the layout “flat” has got to be the most inane complaint I’ve seen on this system yet. It lays out the geneology that way because that’s the standard for geneology presentation. Other than the layout, how limited is it really? For something that’s pure fluff, I managed to lay out my Sith Warrior as the centerpoint, rivaled to my Agent who can’t stand the Sith running the empire, who is allied to my equally-light side bounty hunter. My Twi’lek Inquisitor is an adopted child to my Sith, with backstory to boot, and his brother is going to be my new bounty hunter. THAT’S overly limited? The only real limitation that I don’t like is that you can’t make networks – I couldn’t rival my Agent to both my Warrior and her adopted child. But given the ugliness of laying out something like that, I can live with it.
I’m pretty sure that in the long run the MMO market is doomed. No game will ever live up to what the players seem to expect these days. If a game doesn’t launch with every feature that every MMO has ever had in the last decade, it’s not complete. If it doesn’t manage to put out massive new content patches every month, it’s a failure. They’re all too easy now, handing everyone everything for no effort, and devs are slapping players in the face for attaching notable cost to the new features, ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
On a more helpful note, Syp: One of the default layouts provided is “Extended Quickbars” which probably gets you back to what you had before with about two clicks. Note the + on your main toolbar will now quickload interfaces.
Oh, and on a programming note: Not sure if you can control it, Syp, but the self-expanding comment box is HORRIBLE. If you click out of it while entering a comment it collapses, and won’t re-open when you go back in, nor can you scroll down to the bottom to try and keep entering text even with the 3-line box. Only way to get back to a functional state is to select everything in your comment, cut/paste and continue. It’s a pretty serious pain.
@Buhallin: I’ll admit it’s a relatively minor complaint compared to the slap in the face to non-maxers, broken PvP, etc.; but it’s hardly inane. The geneology layout is great, if you have have a progenitor with posterity. I would prefer a network, which as you yourself pointed out, fits some relationships better. The problem is I can’t have more than two non-parent/child relationships for any given character, I can’t have networks of characters. Everything hinges on a single primary toon, which is the root erroneous assumption that BioWare has in the first place. And yes, I have quite a bit of experience with graphic representations of organizational relationships. It may be fluff, but it’s crappy fluff that could have been implemented better, probably with less code.
And if they’d made it more robust than it is, you’d undoubtedly have had people screaming about why they wasted effort on that bit of meaningless fluff rather than getting Ranked Warzones fixed. It’s a nice fluff feature, and adds a bit of depth, but really didn’t need much more than than it is, IMHO.
I’m just getting really tired of the rush to personal affront that seems to define every MMO gamer these days, or at least the vocal ones in the community. Marketing freebie at someone who plays different than you? Offended. Completely original family tree that has a few limitations in the layout? Offended. Someone gets upset at an EVE bigwig making a twit of himself, the entire EVE player base rises up to defend their douchebag leader, because calling him a douchebag is offensive. Delay an incomplete feature? Offended. Launch an incomplete feature? Offended. New game isn’t sandboxy enough for you, or you’re tired of the combat system? Offended. Make everything too easy? Offended. Make it cost more than you have? Offended. No macros? Offended. And it’s all so very, very personal. There’s never just a decision by people trying to make a good game – it’s total fail, a slap in the face, a conspiracy by the great evil that is EA or SOE or Blizzard, an affront to the very human decency of their playerbases and in our respectful, well-reasoned response we demand Bioware devs all die in a fire!!11!!ONE!!1!
It would be really nice to just see people able to enjoy the games we play for a change. It gets very old not being able to converse about a game you play without being bombarded by people who hate it, and either still play it anyway or don’t, and are miserable for either choice, and can’t stand seeing anyone else enjoying something they think sucks.
And at the point, Rowan, when you feel the need to haul out “I can only have my characters related to two others, this is too limiting, I’m so disappointed!!” you’re well beyond the range of rational critique.
Rant done.
Now who’s offended? Great superlatives, by the way: “inane,” “beyond the range of rational critique.” Must mean you don’t agree.
Um, I’m not offended. Just disappointed in my favorite gaming studio. And so I explain why I take my money elsewhere.
@Buhallin
I suspect the MMO market will survive. Players have been bitching about, well, everything as long as I have played, and I have played a long time. The venom directed at Bioware is nothing compared to that directed at SOE after the CU and the NGE in Galaxies. Years later, people are still angry and, tbh, I don’t blame them. I got past those two debacles and continued to love SWG until the end, but I will never, ever, forgive LucasArts for killing the game. That is the thing about MMOs – you become invested in them and in the community around them. That is their greatest strength – and sometimes their biggest liability.
With respect to SWTOR, Bioware has only themselves to blame if player expectations were raised too high. Proclaim yourself the greatest innovation in gaming history evah, and you had better deliver. Otherwise, people are going to be disappointed and they will vent their frustrations just as loudly as Bioware tooted its own horn.
I’m not offended by it, just critiquing the response. Your view certainly isn’t a slap in my face, or an indication that you respect players more who might want to be able to make their main’s sister marry her own nephew.
And yes, I do think objecting to it is inane. Expanding it would have been relatively hard, if for no other reason than you’d have to include a pretty smart engine to prevent certain relationships because you know someone would throw a fit if the above were possible. So, we get a nifty fluff bit that you’re probably going to spend a grant total of 4 minutes looking at through your entire time in the game. Hauling it out as a sign that the Legacy system is so disappointing is just looking for something to take offense to. It’s not substantive, and it’s not realistic. For a genre so heavily dominated by “Will it improve my hit chance by 0.00012% or not?” statmongering, getting anything like this is actually pretty remarkable. So yes, I do consider it to be beyond the range of rational debate.
And that seems to characterize everything in SWTOR news this week. Bhagpuss bashes them for giving the free time at all, even though it’s more generous than most companies would be. Apparently, lowering the bar on the disruption you compensate your customers for is a sign of desperation, even though another company doing the same would be great customer service. Marketing ploys aimed at people other than you (or me) throw half the community into a blind frothing rage – but other marketing ploys aimed at other people who are just as different are fine. Rational, consistent arguments seem to be out to lunch this week.
Failing to see how throwing a bone to one segment of a *current* player base while managing, however inadvertently, to insult another segment of the same *current* player base is certainly unreasonable in my view. Assuming that a relatively minor complaint is a major source of heartburn is unreasonable. Unless, of course, you’re a troll, which becomes more and more obvious as I type this. The creative roleplayer in me thinks the family tree is too limiting for the story I want to tell about my stable of alts. In what way is that unreasonable, other than the fact that you think it not worth discussing? The extreme scenario you describe certainly isn’t any worse than the level of misogyny available to anyone playing a Sith Warrior with a female *slave* in tow. I have little opinion on the aspects of the patch that don’t affect me, since I have no 50s. So I focus on the perhaps trivial-to-you aspects that do affect me here and now. I frankly couldn’t give two shakes about whether PvP is broken, but I don’t think the PvPers are being irrational to have their current game expectations shattered by what may seem to others a reasonable development of the rules. You could ignore my comments and the comments of others who are unhappy with some of the decisions the folks BioWare have made, but instead you try to call us out as being inane, and beyond reason, because you have no better argument than that.
Have you played the Warrior storyline? Either you haven’t, or you really don’t have a clue what ‘misogyny’ means. Te fact that Vette, as a slave, is female does not make it misogynist. There is at no point anything even remotely related to the fact that she is female; the character could just as easily be male and it would change nothing through the main storyline (although I never took her collar off, so there may be something in her side quests). Hauling this out I have to think that you are, yet again, just digging for something to be offended by.
“So I focus on the perhaps trivial-to-you aspects that do affect me here and now.”
That’s why I think this is inane – because it DOESN’T affect you. At all. Ignoring costs you nothing. You don’t like it, then don’t use it. What do you lose in game if you don’t use it? Nothing. Draw it out on paper, with whatever relationships you want, and it has just as much impact as using the in-game builder. What you do in that screen has zero impact on anything throughout the rest of the game – you can’t even show it to anyone else without taking a screen shot and sending it to them.
But that’s what you feel the need to comment on. Be offended all you want – you obviously do it well – but I’m sticking with inane.
I would say that we as MMO gamers have become more impatient. Especially when it comes to subscription games. At least that is my view. With so many options, I just don’t have the desire to stick around for something that seems to be heading the wrong direction.
I’ve played through the story, gotten to the point where is flat dies on you. Legacy is just a massive grind in my opinion, with very little in the way of rewards that would tempt me to keep going. I already am an altoholic. I like to pvp, but the game was already a bit high on CC. To be honest, it was one of the more balanced pvp games I’ve ever played. Least until this last patch.
Just no patience to be strung out anymore. Too many other options on the table anymore.
Buhallin: You only validated my point. Thanks. BTW:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/03/the-bizarre-sexism-in-biowares-star-wars-the-old-republic/
That’s just one article of many. Not saying every player is misogynist, but neither is every player a closet incest RPer.
And I maintain the same point – nothing in there has anything to do with Vette being specifically female. You have done nothing to prove otheriwise, any more than the author of the article, who’d obviously never actually played the game at all. There’s nothing inherently mysoginistic in Vette being a slave – yes, the treatment of slaves by the empire is really bad, but it has nothing to do with them being women. Which, just so the big words can stop confusing you, is what the word means – hatred of women. If anything, Old Republic is exactly the opposite. Women occupy strong, powerful roles right alongside men at every point.
I honestly think it’s kinda sad that you’d pull that out to try and prove your point. It’s exactly the sort of ignorant, uninformed view of what gaming is that we should be fighting against. I’d think that you, as a self-professed roleplayer, would understand the separation between character and player better than most, and be a bit more sensitive about holding up a clueless big business reporter who thinks that playing Doom causes school shootings.
I love the new UI costumization… once I figured out how to use it that is 😛 it reminds me a great deal of Domino’s and now I havean exact copy of my old UI from WoW, which makes me super happy. 2 things I haven’t been able to figure out though is moving chat window and setting up keybinds to my mouse keys
incidentalyI mostly scrolled through the comments and not sure if anyone mentioned it yet, but thankfuly, they figured out that by limiting free month to lvl 50, they offended a great deal of their actual loyal player base, so its been adjusted. its either lvl 50 or legacy 6 and people have untill april 22 to reach either, to qualify. which basicaly covers altoholics and gives a bit of a cushion to those who don’t play as much.
Very good summary, thanks. Keep them coming!