… for me.
I’m not saying SWTOR is a bad game and I’m not saying GW2 is better, I just see myself playing GW2 more when it comes out. It might be because I haven’t played GW2 and SWTOR was easy to “beat”, but there are a few things I can see GW2 doing better than SWTOR. Those things are what I consider fun.
Even though I only paid 1 month for SWTOR and I’m not currently playing it, I find myself hoping to play it again in the future. Some of the things I thought were cool before release turned out to be duds when I actually started playing the game. Some of the things were:
1. A hands off crafting system that sounded very dynamic and full of possibilities. When I actually started crafting it was fun because I hate crafting. When I finally hit 400 on all my crafting skills, I was pissed I wasted all that money crafting for useless junk.
2. Ilum sounded like the next coming of DAoC. It turned out to be a ghost town, at least on my server. I’m not much of a daily grinding person and I’m not much of a person wanting to waste my time planet hoping just to find an empty planet. Maybe if BioWare made it easier to get to Ilum, I would think of trying World PvP, but as it stands now, no thank you. The load screens are just too long and they zap precious game time away.
3. Outlaw’s Den is a joke. Again, why would I travel to Tatooine for over 10 minutes, just to get to nothing special? Outlaw’s Den is at the edge of the map with no reasonably close travel point. It has taken me about 15 mins to get from Fleet to Outlaw’s. Trust me, it’s not my computer or connection. I have a 6 core- 12mb ram computer, and a solid Internet connection.
When you do get to Outlaw’s, there is no point in being there. BioWare nerfed everything they said that was fun about it on day 1. There is no carrot for players to go kill each other there. It’s a desert in a desert. I hope they fix it someday because it was one of those things I was excited about Pre-release.
4. The world is on rails with blinders. Yeah you have datacrons and things to explore, but you NEED to go from point A to point B no matter what. People complained Guild Wars 1 didn’t have a jump function and there were invisible walls everywhere, but even with a jump function in SWTOR, you are more grounded to a path.
Planet after planet, you have to go in the same pattern. It was like they just painted over the same map with new walls to crash into. Planet X you go left at the tree. Planet Y you go right at the rock. In the end you are traveling to a new spaceport destine to bring you to the same planet with a new pallet of colors.
5. And the biggest thing that bothers me is the AI. It reminds me of the Red Light district in Aachen Germany. You walk down the narrow street waiting to shoot your wad at whores standing like mannequins in windows. If you don’t tap on their glass and wave money at them, they won’t attack you or move for that matter.
Mobs in SWTOR just stand on the edges of the maps or roadways doing nothing. They don’t path, they hardly move, and they just seem like archery range targets. The narrow maps of planets that are set in cities makes this more prominent. You can defiantly see the “Red Light District” effect on those planets.
It might sound bad that I’m picking apart SWTOR, but I still like the game. I find it fun to play. Minus the monotonous gameplay, boring environment, and tedious PvP, the game is worth playing for a month or 2.
I’m looking forward to the future of the game, though. I feel BioWare can make SWTOR a success. I feel they have the want, to want to make a great MMO. They just need a bit more time to figure out it’s not 2005 anymore. ArenaNet on the other hand, they know how the genre works and how ravenous the fans are.
I’m not saying I’m going to love everything about GW2, I’m just as excited about it as I was SWTOR before that game released. Even though I pointed out the linearness and stupid AI before releases. The thing is, I can’t find as much wrong with GW2 as I did SWTOR during the same timeframe prerelease. The videos of GW2 splashing the interwebz are a lot better than the ones I saw for SWTOR at release.
I’m not talking about art style or game features, I’m talking about the guts of the game. Things like: how it plays, how the world is, and how the AI is alive. I would hit the same points for GW2 as I did for SWTOR, but that would be unfair considering I haven’t played GW2 at all. I would like to talk about a couple things I find exciting though.
1. I’ve watched video after video trying to pick apart the AI in GW2, but it looks fantastic. I even started playing GW1 to see what I could expect from ArenaNet even if they never updated their AI. To say the least, GW1 has a great AI. They don’t have any special attacks, but each mob has something different and they move around the world. If ANet doesn’t lock mobs down the way SWTOR does, GW2 will seem very much alive.
2. World vs World PvP seems awesome. I have the fear WvW will turn into the GW Ilum, but I doubt it. ANet is taking steps to keep WvW fresh, easy to get into, and full of purpose. I think the change of competition every 7 days, the world rewards for playing WvW, and how simple it is to just fight, will keep people in WvW.
Think of the possibilities:
A. You are pitted against a dead server… 7 days later you no longer have to play them.
B. You are pitted against a hugely populated, PvP heavy server… 7 days later they are no more.
C. You only have 1 hour to play a night. You push a button and you are instantly in the Mists. You don’t have to spend precious minutes in load screen after load screen. You pop in. You pop to the closest travel point to the fight and you pop some heads off.
3. Recently I found out about the cross server chat function and the multi guild function. I love the idea of: Bring the person not the character recruited. You can be multi guilded because your account is in a guild not your character. I see where this could become a problem with hardcore guilds that want you to play only for them, but I’m not going to join that type of guild so it doesn’t affect me.
I don’t know how many times my guild became dead after only a month of playing and I’m stuck in a ghost guild and screwed looking for a new guild. With this feature I can flip flop guilds at the push of a button. I see myself joining several guilds, just so I can chat with people at different times. Why didn’t anybody think of this earlier?
4. Even though I dislike microtransaction games instead of pay to play, I think GW2 hit the nail on the head with their system. I don’t feel like I have to play GW2 everyday to get my money’s worth. I feel like I can play when I feel like it and if I do want to fund the game, they have several items in the cash shop I wouldn’t mind buying to help them. It feels like I’m tipping them for what they do not paying taxes.
I’ve tried to play F2P games over the years and I dislike them with a passion. I always feel like they are forcing me to pay. They have that damn icon flashing in your UI annoying the piss out of you. So far, GW2 seems very hands off with their cash shop forcing. Everything in it is very reasonable and if I don’t want to pay real money, I can save up game money instead. I like having options.
5. The world itself is beautiful. It’s open. It’s free and it’s alive. From what I’ve seen, ANet has removed most of the hidden walls and opened the world up for exploration. Something you won’t find in GW1 or SWTOR. It’s not just because they added a jump function, it’s because you are not stuck in repetitive hallways of content. It’s a world unrestricted from instance hoping like in WAR, GW1, and SWTOR. Finally a world that can compete with WoW and Rift.
Of course, this is all prerelease hype. I haven’t played that game and I haven’t seen it first hand on a monitor. Just like the developers, I can only speculate how great they game will be when the servers go live. Just like SWTOR though, Guild Wars 2 will not fail. It will find the people that like it, don’t like it, and some that don’t care. I think I’ll be one of the ones that likes the game. Well, at least for a month or 2, but that is not a big deal because it’s not like I’m paying for it monthly.