SW:TOR VS WoW

Star Wars - The Old Republic vs World of Warcraft

Some of you may have been wondering where I have been and why I have not updated the blog lately. Well the simple answer is I decided to give Star Wars - The Old Republic a try. I am only roughly halfway through the leveling progress of the game but I want to give my thoughts about how SWTOR stacks up against WoW to say what I felt SWTOR has gotten right that WoW doesn't and what WoW has gotten right that SWTOR did not.  Is it fair for me to judge the game this early in my leveling process (I am 31), I can't say, and I intended to do a blog when I finish my characters storyline but more about all that in closing.

Let me say at the start before you ask who am I to judge the two games other then just another gamer. No one really. I am about 80% done with a degree in Game Art and Design (ironically my adviser called me today to start talking about my estimated graduation date) and I currently work as a mobile game and application developer. I am sure there are smarter gamers out there then myself (no doubt with better grammar and spelling)who are more qualified but if you come to my blog it is to get my opinion. You may have noticed I try to sprinkle actual game developer terms into my blog to make readers a little more savvy about WoW design.

Next important thing to say is a lot of people ask if it is fair to compare current WoW to release SWTOR. People in the SWTOR camp like to say it is only fair to compare SWTOR to day one WoW and not current WoW. As a game designer I am going to call out the fallacy in that logic now. You don't compare a current car to a ford model T. To think that SWTOR was developed in a vacuum, or any MMO now, devoid of the lessons learned by the Blizzard WoW team is insane. SWTOR borrows heavily from what works in WoW and overlooked some of what worked while it takes a stab at fixing some of what doesn't work in WoW.

Lastly let me say I am not a WoW fan boy. I know having to say so immediately devalues my opinon because it is like saying I am not racist and then saying  a racist joke but I will try to keep this post as fair handed in it's remarks as I can.

What SWTOR got right:

Story telling through dialogue-

Let me say out right that the voice acting for each quest is a nice change of pace. I really enjoy the way the main story line plays out. But this is not the end all solution to getting your players immersed in the game because at times the dialogue gets burden some. Around level 20 I started using the space bar to skip through some of the side quests while saying out loud "Let me guess, rebels doing rebelie stuff, kill em... yeah fate of empire... control planet..." Additionally the voice files take up a great deal of the install space of the game and SWTOR is not a small install.

Having that dialogue box pop up and being able to directly interact with your main quest line outside of the simple accept button is nice. I also enjoy how comments determine your light side v dark side alignment. I really wish that the voice acting had been left to just the main quest story lines and some of the more important side stories (like the Revainites) and that side quests were text boxes.

Space Combat:

Do you like Star Fox? I like Star Fox, do a barrel roll... Seriously I really enjoy breaking the sometimes tedious nature of questing by going and doing the space combat based quests. They are fun, usually take less then 5 minutes because they are win/fail determined off a timer. Also Bioware was smart and made them decent XP but not enough to grind your way to 50 doing only space missions. I guess you could if you like uber grinds... Disagea fans... Upgrading your ships is also not a massive money sink which means you can continue to complete these quests and upgrade your ship to feel like a boss on little income.

Minions... I mean companions and crafting:

I really enjoy, especially after you pick up more then one companion, that all your crafting is done by your companions as well as mat farming. Now granted Bioware offset this by making things take longer then the near instant cast crafting and looting in WoW but you can easily continue to quest while your companion runs off to get special materials for crafting or crafts 5 of an item for you.  I was never a big fan of the hours that can get dumped into WoW to be a serious crafter of some items.

Also with crafting comes the fact that it is actually easy to start crafting items you will use in a couple of levels instead of items that seem too many levels below you. No matter how actively I try to keep a profession up to my level in WoW I always seem to be making items I can barely use. A perfect example of the crafting issues in WoW is with Nurishment. I skin every mob I kill, even farm sometimes, craft every leather into an item trying to powerlevel my leatherworking and still I am stuck in a hump where it is hard to get items my level crafted without the money sink of the AH. This is not an issue for wealthier players but for new players or cheap skates like myself it becomes an issue.

PVP player equalizing:

This is a hard to come up with the offical word for... but it is a simple concept to understand. There seems to be, and I could be wrong, some normalization going on between player skills in the PVP format. For example it seems a level 15 hits as hard as a level 50 on a level 50 but only in the PVP environments. This opens a larger pool of players to pull from and reduces twinking. There does seem to be some issue of higher level players gear getting them into overpowered positions and overcoming this system but it has been rare in the few games I have played.

What SWTOR got wrong:

Questing:

But I said I liked the quest dialogue system and the main story line quality, I did indeed. Where SWTOR starts to get to me is the side questing and if you intend to finish the story line you have to do side quests as the main quests do not give you sufficient experience to be able to move along in the story-line without doing them. This is a catch 22 in the design phase of the game because you want players to do your side quests so you make the xp from them a requirement to progress otherwise players will not do them. That does not mean you have to make them so god awful repetitive in nature.

Does WoW have a lot of fetch, kill, and escort quests? Sure but WoW breaks those up with the occasional vehicle based quest, masquerader style quest (pretending to be an enemy NPC), and goofy mechanic quests (the Katamari quest in Uldum). But SWTOR is basically a giant fetch and kill quest driven game... hell most fetch quests are loot fetch and not find item. I have seen one escort quest that automatically completed when I found the NPC to escort. I didn't have to take them anywhere even though the quest text said "escort".

Most MMOs are all kill based questing as it is the backbone of the system but a good design hides that by inventive game design. SWTOR does a poor job of this. I know before I get a quest that it is going to be kill 15/20/30 "random name" rebels.

Expansive zones filled with... nothing:

This was a common problem during vanilla WoW but having zones as big and nice, and they are pretty to look at, as SWTOR has there isn't much excuse that 30 mins of a one hour play time is going to be spent on my hover bike flying to quest spots. Tatoine was criminal of this failure, I know I flew over more sand then I did actual fighting. Any student of MMOs today should see the zone compression that has happened in WoW, of which I mean near every corner of a zone is packed with quest related content, and learn from it not regress as SWTOR has.

No Auto Attack:

This is a personal preference to me not a design failure because several MMOs with no auto-attack are popular and people make their fair cases against auto attack. For me as the player auto attack keeps combat fast and furious filling that time between player input attacks. Sometimes combat crawled to a stop for my character as I waited for attacks to have enough energy. In the games defense there is a filler attack for my character that costs no energy but it requires button mashing and sets off global cool down so I still have that second delay between my mash attack and my next attack.  Doesn't break the game just makes its combat feel less visceral to me.

Mob Elite System and Companion Dependency:

When I first found out about the tiered mob elite system I thought it was cool because it allowed developers to place mobs into the game that players would always require groups for no matter their gear. Then I started playing the game and realized that 75% of the mobs are the silver level mob and 10% seem to be the elite level mob. As a pure dps character I can kill the gold level mobs but not with out my companion and when my companion's AI fails me I usually find myself dead. This is frustrating beyond no end, at first it is fun because you feel you have to think about every engagement but then you realize you are stopping and thinking about EVERY engagement. As a designer there needs to be a level or curve of mob difficulty. Players need low difficulty creep to chew through for enjoyment and higher difficulty mobs to make them think. These harder mobs should be sprinkled in among the easier mobs. Not how it has been for me in SWTOR, I often have to hold my breath while fighting a gold level mob two levels lower then I am and hope my companion doesn't do anything stupid (like start shooting another mob pack mid fight!?!!?!). Additionally as a pure DPS I have to stop and heal through the eating equivalent between every pull. This cause the game flow to crawl.

Class homogenization:

Ever notice how Ghostcrawler hates this? Seems to try to fight it at every post? Look at SWTOR and see why. Every class has stuns, CC, knockbacks, and there is really no difference between them. There is nothing to distinguish classes out side of their base archtype of melee dps, caster dps, healer, and tank. This could be said of WoW but I would point out in WoW that there is a difference in play style between a frost mage and a fire mage. When you fight one in PVP you do fight in different styles.  At level 31 I literary think I have three interrupts, three stuns, and one knockback.  There is no distinction between the three stuns other then a slight cool down and duration difference. In WoW there is certainly a difference between a paladin stun and a rogue stun and really outside of stunlock rogues no class has more then one longer cooldown stun. You plan for a player when you see their class. In SWTOR you approach every enemy the same.

What I am ambivalent about

LFG system/No LFG system:

First let me say STWOR has a LF PVP system similar to WoW but no LFG system. Sometimes I miss it and other times I don't. There can be a case made for how LFG breaks communities and reinforces isolation among the community base. I agree this is true but as a bit of an introvert myself I like the ability to just auto-form up a group and do an instance from time to time. Currently I haven't been able to do a single instance because no one seems to use the note system in the /who system and you can only really see groups forming in the central city, which I only visit for the occasional crafting train up.

Gear System:

Do I like the orange system? I don't know really. It is very similar to the transmorph system in WoW and Bioware might have even announced it before transmorph in WoW. But what makes it different is you have to work to upgrade your orange equipment via socketing like JCing. I like the idea of getting a set of armor you like and keeping it and upgrading it. There is decent choice but at the same time you really have about three to four looks to choose from for each class. I have seen player complaint about high end gear all being essentially identical which saddens me.

In Conclusion:

Would I suggest SWTOR?

Sure. The story arch for each class type is awesome. And the overall content could get better with maturation and they can overcome some of their design issues in time. It is not a bad game or a bad MMO, infact it is probably the 2nd best MMO I have every played and a great attempt.

I like WoW.... Can SWTOR replace it for me?

Probably not. If you are new to MMOs I think SWTOR can fill that spot in your heart but if you are a fan of WoW you will come back to it.

Am I going to come back to WoW and finish the loremaster challenge?

Yep. I hope to hit 50 before my free trail ends for SWTOR, do a blog on my final thoughts, and likely cancel my SWTOR subscription. I did not go into the game knowing I would quit it after ending the story line. I actually considered canceling my WoW sub when first getting light sabers and a space ship had a certain nostalgia effect to it. But that wore off... luckily for me before I started paying for two online games and pissing off my wife.