I’ve been playing SWTOR since it came out, and while I’m having fun overall, the game manages to be so annoying at times I just have to cease playing for some hours…
I can excuse bugs (and this game has a lot, but much less than normal MMOs at launch), but just bad design really pisses me off…
First of all, Bioware: IT’S NOT FUN TO WALK, EVER!
The game spends an inordinate amount of time treating you like a carrier pigeon (go here, then go there, then go back to where you started)… This is normal on a MMO, to stretch out the play time, but the distances you have to travel in SWTOR are just too big, with nothing happening between locations… Yeah, of course, you can beat up everything you find between you and your destination, but that’s just killing something that you’ve already killed 10000 times, with no challenge in most cases… And if you take the roads (which should be safe transit, but aren’t), you take twice as long to reach anywhere because there’s always a bloody cliff or mountain in the way! Whoever designed the locations should be shot, to be honest…
On WoW, Cataclysm was the occasion to fix some of these kind of things (making the Barrens less “empty”, for example), because they acknowledged that it was boring… why couldn’t Bioware learn with Blizzard?
Sometimes I feel that the guys at Bioware just didn’t play WoW at all, which seems like a gross mistake, considering they’re competing with it and you should know where your competition stands… But considering some mistakes I see in the game all the time, they probably didn’t spend any decent amount of time on it…
For example, the security system… Secret questions with answers that you can’t misspell… For example, the question about your street address, that can be spelled in hundreds of different ways, and a space makes a difference! And God forbid you forget how you spelled any… you’re stuck phoning their helpdesk, where you have to talk to someone who has even worse English than you (I’m not a native speaker, so that’s a hassle anyway), paying an international call, all in the name of security…
It’s not my bank details, it’s a damn game! Couldn’t there be a form where you typed in your game key, or your phone number? Because that’s all they actually do by the phone, so what’s the point? It makes more sense asking you for your email and having you spell it out letter by letter?
And if you fork over for a security key, you still have the questions from time to time (according to the rep), so what’s the point of the security key?!
This is just bad design decisions (not game design, but helpdesk design)…
It’s a pity, to be honest, because the game is very interesting in a lot of things… the class storylines are very cool, and the general stories for the quests themselves are interesting and make for less repetitive gameplay than usual in this kind of games…
The lack of addons is also very annoying, not only because I want to replace that ugly, non-functional UI, but because I don’t have any idea on my performance without a damage meter… how can I experiment with skill rotations and whatnot if I don’t have any way to measure it? Still, that may be address in a later patch (fingers crossed)…
I’ll write some more when I finally get to level 50 and do all the Flashpoints (another very interesting concept, and mostly well executed), if I ever get there (takes forever to level from level 45 onwards, seems badly balanced in that regards, to be honest)…