Don’t get me wrong – Star Wars: The Old Republic gets a lot of things right. The voice acting, companions system, storylines, and combat are top-notch (although I’m pretty sure the Republic Trooper’s basic intro storyline was lifted from Die Hard 2). But there are a lot of things SWTOR gets wrong too – aspects of the game that very, very nearly break it.
- No way to disable auto-self-cast. If you use a healing ability or a buff and you don’t have a friendly target selected, the ability gets used on you. Period. This is merely frustrating in solo play – for instance, when you’re trying to heal a tank companion – but it’s nearly game-breaking in groups, since of the many ways MMOs have given us to heal people, “1) manually select heal target. 2) cast healing spell.” is the least efficient and most clumsy.
- Very limited ways to see your target’s target. This is largely a tank-focused complaint; it’s very difficult to see what your target has selected as its target. (It’s true that there’s a circle on the ground under your target’s target, but that becomes almost impossible to locate when you have more than three participants in a fight.) Not being able to tell what your target is targeting makes it exponentially more difficult to make sure you’re keeping aggro on everything – again, especially in large melees, when you can’t necessarily tell which direction each mob is facing.
- No way to rearrange the user interface. Largely a matter of preference, yes, but this makes my list because by default, the chat box overlaps the left-hand action bar on a widescreen monitor. Ugh.
- Poor event-collision detection. Here’s what I mean: during combat, you see that your tank companion is handily dealing with all of the creatures attacking you, so – since the quest calls for you to search the corpse at your feet – you decide to get that done with while your tank is finishing off the rest of the NPCs. You right-click the corpse, wait for the “Gathering…” bar to complete, and then, when it finishes, you get an error message: “Cannot perform this action while fighting.” The game doesn’t check when you start the action; it doesn’t check during the action; it only checks at the end of the action. This means that it’s not only possible but easy to waste quite a bit of time mistakenly gathering during combat because the game won’t tell you you can’t until the gathering “cast” is over. But this leads into…
- Prohibiting user actions during combat. User actions like gathering from nodes, opening chests, or interacting with quest objects. This comes very close to actively encouraging griefing and node-stealing – because if you’re fighting the mobs around a node and someone else decides to come and gather it, there’s literally nothing you can do about it except ask them to please not. The game will not let you let the tank deal with the mobs so you can pick up the Dielectric Stem or open the Security Chest.
- An Auction House system that borders on actively hostile to players. Want to buy something from the auction house? I hope you can guess which broad category BioWare’s decided to place it in, and then what narrow category it goes in within the broad category – because you can’t even search by name until you’ve selected a primary and a secondary category. This not only makes buying difficult, it makes selling difficult, because it adds unnecessary extra steps to the process of finding out what the current average price is. (It’s especially difficult for selling because very often the seller’s reaction is “I don’t know what the hell kind of item it is, I just want to see what I can get for it!”.)
- And finally, no same-sex romance options. Really, BioWare? You thought this would fly?
A final note, by the way: I’ve seen people saying “well, you can’t expect SWTOR to have all the features in it at launch that WOW has seven years in.” While I disagree – the state of gaming is the state of gaming regardless of whether the game was released in 2004 or this year, and you don’t judge a car company’s new line against the Model T – I’m not comparing these features with WOW, to be honest.
I’m comparing them with Rift.
And Rift got them right at launch, nearly a year before SWTOR shipped. (Even the last one! Check out Kira Thanos and Uriel Chuluun. ♥) This stuff is ridiculous, BioWare. Fix it.
Anything I’ve missed or forgotten? Leave a comment and remind me!
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Comment by Sarlalian — January 13, 2012 @ 2:58 PM
There are a couple more issues.
A) Ability lag. Annoying in PVE (I taunt the mob, 1 sec later the animation finishes and the taunt goes out (mabye)). But is game breaking in PVP. I get CC’d, I use my class trinket ability, I’m dead before the instant goes off.
http://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/ocjrw/can_someone_explain_like_im_5_what_the_ability/
Brief Summary From Redit below.
1. Player decides to use an “instant” ability
2. Player pushes button to tell SWTOR what to do
3. SWTOR sends information to server that player wants to use ability and begins animation of that ability
4. Server waits specified time for the ability before applying it to the enemy, then triggers the effect
5. SWTOR shows ability hitting the enemy just as the animation finishes
There is more to it than this. The GCD is being affected as well. For example: You have a move that requires the target being in a certain state (ie incapacitated). You see the target is incap, so you fire the instant ability. The animation plays. DURING your animation, the incap on the target ends. Your insta ability attempts to apply, but FAILS because the target “Does not meet requirements”. Your GCD STILL fires, preventing another move, you did the animation, but you applied 0 effect. Also, If the animation is LONGER than a GCD, you have to wait until the animation is over before using any other skill.
B) Complex PVP gear tokens. I still have no idea how they work. You evidently have low level tokens that you convert to higher level tokens and then you buy bags that have piece tokens so that you can buy the gear that you want. However it is random, so you may just never get that shoulder token you want.
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Comment by Jadissa — January 13, 2012 @ 3:55 PM
Fantastic post. I was completely flabbergasted about the lack of same-sex romance above all else. Rift’s AH is honestly really terrible too, though that may be because I’m used to WoW’s AH with lots of addons on top of it.
The user actions during combat thing drove me absolutely nuts when leveling, especially considering SWTOR actually seems to put decent items in chests.
Also, I loved the “Model T” comment at the end :)
Jadissa´s last [type]: 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge, Day 4
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Comment by Keith — January 13, 2012 @ 3:59 PM
W/r/t same sex romances: pretty sure that’s a LucasArts veto. BioWare has expressed interest in writing them, but the official Lucas position is “there’s no gays in Star Wars.”
I wish I was joking.
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Rivanlord Reply:
February 8th, 2012 at 10:20 PM
@Keith,
Unless you’re a droid….
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