I’ve decided I’m not picking this up until EA sorts out their clusterfuck of a banning policy. If I have a question to ask on the official forums, I don’t want to lose all my games because some retarded autoban didn’t like a post I was quoted in.
From what I understand you won’t need Origin to play SWTOR, even if you originally preordered the game on Origin. The game itself runs through it’s own launcher, so you can bypass EAs platform all together. Even if you do get your Origin account banned, according to the SWTOR website you can still play.
Taken from the SWTOR FAQ:
“What will happen to my Star Wars: The Old Republic account if my Origin account is locked?
If for any reason you are locked out of your Origin account, you will still be able to log in to the game using the same email and password that you used to create your SWTOR account.”
MMO players generally play only 1 game, making it normally 15 $ a month. Lets say you buy a full price game every 4 months, which is quite reasonable, 60$. People who play just MMOs spend the same amount of money, or less, than the average gamer.
In reality though, there are a lot more situations than those two. However, assuming that all your assumptions are correct, your conclusion would be still wrong for cases like SWTOR, because you have to buy the game first. So for one year, it would go like this:
MMO-player: $50 game (includes 1 free month) + ($15 x 11 months) = $215
Non-MMO-player: $60 game x (12 months/4 months) = $180
Perhaps in the long haul the MMO gamer would end up spending less, but have you known many people who only played one MMO continuously for years and years?
I’m liking the big RPG story aspects. With WoW I don’t even read the quests now, I just look at the marker on the map and go to it.
Haha nice, QFT.
True, plus expansions, and micro transactions, and dual-boxing, etc.
As a matter of principal, I don’t buy in (no pun intended) to subscription-based models. I’m paying for a product, I want to be able to use it as long as I wish. That’s why I really hate this shift towards cloud storage and “always online” models, especially for Diablo III (not to hijack the thread) - no single player campaign without an internet connection? Bah! I can pull out Rise of the Triad, throw it on DosBox and play to my heart’s content, no ISP required, no chance of a server being down or worse, a company out of business no longer operating the servers required to play it.
The subscriptions are there to cover server costs, make the company money of course, and also to pay for the development costs. MMOs are constantly changing and having new features developed and expanded rather than having the company who created the game focus solely on developing new games.
And yes, that situation isn’t always true, an average gamer would buy a game more often than every 4 months, and MMO gamers would sometimes buy other games, but nonetheless, people who play primarily MMOs and people who play all types of games will generally spend the same amount of money on gaming.
Then don’t buy or play Diablo 3, go play Rise Of The Triad, now everyones happy.
Meanwhile i’ll be playing Diablo 3 because not having an internet connection this day and age is just weird, Don’t get me wrong an offline and lan mode would be great but there’s not one and wont be one so it’s time to get over it. Also I don’t think we have to worry about Blizzard going out of business.
After playing the beta, I absolutely love SWTOR. I pre-ordered the CE because I’m a total Star Wars nerd and I’ll actually get to play it for a while!
after playing KOTOR and KOTOR II I must say that this game looked promising for me when I saw it, I liked the idea of playing online. Then I noticed it was a MMORPG, looked at the website, saw I would have to pay a month suscription. The next thing I remember is a broken computer monitor and an axe in my hand.
Anyways. If I do buy it (thing that I doubt) I may play with bounty hunter, imperial agent or republic trooper. I just think that there have already been many “lol look I have force powers and a lightsaber that kills almost everyone who shoots me” Star wars games. Being able to have a Distance weaponry character Point of view (like SW Battlefront or Republic Commando) alongside the people who love having force powers and fight together in a battle where everybody counts to get a victory is something that I like.
This going to be worth playing once it goes F2P?
Yes, if you like Star Wars and you like MMOs. I think it was worth it even paid. I did quit after only a few months, but I get burned out on MMOs quick. I had about 3 or 4 characters, got a couple to about 30 and one to 43 or so, so that tells you how much of the content I got through when you consider there’s 4 classes and 8 advanced classes for each side, plus there’s a number of things you can only do at 50.
Anyways, it’s got a great soundtrack, great voice work, and probably the best story lines of any MMO. The gameplay is good and solid, but at its heart it’s pretty much just a WoW clone in terms of combat and skills (according to a veteran WoW player), so that may be a positive or a negative depending on how you look at it. For the art style and graphics quality it is a surprisingly demanding game to run though, so unless they’ve managed to improve it since I played, you’ll need a pretty good PC to run it maxed out.
I played this from day 1. I was looking for something to take me away from WoW. It did kind of succeed in that i gave it 3 months to convince me to keep playing. In all honesty the game did have great potential but it failed realy badly.
First thing that should be right above anything else in an MMO is the controls need to work. Which for most classes they didnt, huge lag delay and sometimes abilities not even activating at times, took them 2 1/2 months to sort that out.
Second the UI really needs certain things which werent there, UI scaling, Target of Target among other things. That took them atleast 4 - 5 months to bring into the game.
Third and the major part of an MMO is the endgame content. Not only were you fighting your UI and controls but buggy bosses aswell. Along with all that the PvP was always breaking in certain areas aswell as repeatable quests.
Unfortunatly the MMO community dont give developers that much time before they say, you had your chance but its just not good enough. Im not sure if thats because monthly subs are involved (that was certainly my reason) or some are just impatient.
My thoughts are the game could have been great and i would have played it for a long time i think. But it was released far too early. If EA had waited a little longer for certain things to have been corrected im pretty sure that quite a few more people would have stuck with it. Many of the points ive just mentioned and more were pointed out by the testers apparently but they pushed it out anyway.
Things need to work in an MMO to keep players going back to do the same bosses, but fighting bugs aswell as UI is just not acceptable.
I understand things take time to get right but certain things need to be right from day 1, it felt like an alpha release never mind a beta or even release.
The game did have many good points though. The questing was fun, the PvP was actually quite entertaining and coming from me thats a good thing becuase i dont usualy like PvP. The story lines for each class were nice to go through aswell, really opened up the lore of the game to everyone and the backgrounds of where all the different classes started and why. Crafting and companions were nice in this game too.
I did go back to the game after a few months to check out what had and hadnt been sorted but unfortunatly everyone that i knew on that particular server had left to play something else, obviously my real life freinds i knew about but others id met in the game had moved on aswell. So i cant give an accurate description of what state the game is in other than the fixes mentioned.
To sum it up, if all is sorted with the game which i know some things are now, like UI scaling and the bad contact with the character controls. Maybe if they keep working on it properly to fix the endgame it should be a pretty good F2P. Of course that is aslong as it isnt play to win with silly restrictions in certain things that would annoy you from the beggining. Personaly i blame EA for pushing it too quickly, as it could have been a really fun game.
^ Sounds like you only played about two hours of the beta.