SWTOR

Sylas said:

they've added this a while ago mostly. pretty much all 1 group "dungeon" content has solo modes. either with NPCs in your party, story mode versions where its soloable (you + companion) or a super powerful droid that basically solo's it for you while healing you. which version of that soloability depends on the era and expansion it was released in.

The only thing that doesn't have this yet to my knowledge, though i could be mistaken, is the original raids from the vanilla version of the game, maybe even hutt raids. from Revan on i'm pretty sure there are story versions of raids that you solo.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure about raids post eternal empire stuff, but after hutt cartel any raid that was part of the story quest had a "story mode" where you could do it solo. There were a few raids here and there that had questlines tied to them but they weren't part of the main story and so there was no story mode available.

The story mode raids tended to be fairly short though, sometimes just a single fight

I think this move to Broadsword could actually benefit swtor, since bioware hasn't done much with it for years other than milking quite a good amount of revenue out of it to fund other projects reportedly. Standing stone games acquired and is regularly updating ddo and lotro with a pretty small team (smaller than broadsword + the ~40 employees moving there from bioware). I don't know much about broadsword so I can't say either way really, but all the doom and gloom and automatic assumptions of maintenance mode don't make sense to me, there's still a lot of potential and money to be made from swtor.

UO and AO are firmly maintenance mode and maybe some balance or seasonal events. I don’t have much hope.

Uriel said:

I think this move to Broadsword could actually benefit swtor, since bioware hasn't done much with it for years other than milking quite a good amount of revenue out of it to fund other projects reportedly. Standing stone games acquired and is regularly updating ddo and lotro with a pretty small team (smaller than broadsword + the ~40 employees moving there from bioware). I don't know much about broadsword so I can't say either way really, but all the doom and gloom and automatic assumptions of maintenance mode don't make sense to me, there's still a lot of potential and money to be made from swtor.

Click to expand...

they haven't released a typical expansion since eternal empire, but they have been drip feeding content pretty regularly. they even did a cinematic last year for the legacy of the sith update


also, because of the nature of swtor story telling, anytime they do an update they have to get all the voice actors back to record lines. i think it's easy to just say that swtor is resting on it's laurels and just focusing on seasonal content (with new companions each season, but they've just used pre-recorded alien speech) but a lot goes into each update. bioware probably didn't have much more than a skeleton crew running swtor, but i think they've been doing a lot more work than just keeping the lights on, you know?

That makes me want to go back and play SWTOR so bad now lol. Damn the cinematics were great, and Darth Malgus was awesome.

Kind of a shame, the 1-50 leveling experience in this game was one of the best times I've had in an MMO. Was ultra casually checking out Cata in WoW at the time, and a bunch of us just hopped over to SWTOR for early access. We blazed to 50 over start of winter break and it was just fantastic. Granted the raid was a buggy mess, but man those initial story and run throughs of the planets was a lot of fun.

I actually picked this up again right before the leak about Broadsword, doing a replay of sith warrior atm and the game is even better than I remembered. I guess they recently updated their servers to x64 or something, but it definitely seems a lot smoother performance wise than it used to and still looks very nice with graphics turned up. The new comabat style system they added in 7.0 is cool, they've seperated combat classes from origin stories (so a sith warrior could have the combat style of juggernaut, marauder, assassin or sorcerer (or the jedi/light side version even if you get to max lightside rep)). Same for tech classes but you don't even need light/dark side so you have 8 choices for each origin story right away. I haven't played the later stuff at all so I'm looking forward to that. The economy is very inflated atm, which is kinda nice if you're not trying to buy a bunch of cosmetics. I sold 1 decoration for 700m and can easily afford a bunch of unlocks and other random stuff now, with many billions worth of stuff in my bank I can sell still from old random cartel stuff I have.

Sylas said:

People always say that and honestly its a disservice to themselves and the game. People say 1-50 was great because they only experienced 1-50.

1-75 leveling/story experience is the best story/leveling experience in an mmo. 50-75 was just as good if not better, with a few caveats due solely to financial reasons* and not writing. All in all the first expansion (hutt 50-55) was the worst but it is still great sw story telling.

*The game went from 8 unique stories to 2 (imperial and republic stories in hutt) to a single story (revan and onward), and they introduced a lot of new npcs and there was a gap with no new content with your existing npcs (companions) due solely to voice actor issues. But they wrote around all of that and told an epic, continuous story full of nuance and satisfying plot development despite those challenges.

Click to expand...

No I've been to 75 as well, 1-50 still tops 50-75 by a good margin. Agree Hutt expansion was the worst, though. The Eternal Empire, Revan, etc I'd say was 75% pretty great, but it wasn't as consistently great as my 1-50 experience.

I will say I leveled initially as Imperial Agent, so perhaps that is why 50-75 does not quite hit the same level for me.

Just hit 80 on my IA yesterday right before bed. Time to finish this MSQ shit and figure out how to get gear.

moonarchia said:

Just hit 80 on my IA yesterday right before bed. Time to finish this MSQ shit and figure out how to get gear.

Click to expand...

So, MSQ is a lot longer than I thought. I did get through the one I was in. Vaylin was one hell of a freak. That's the kind of crazy you don't even let into your hotel room, and you bolt out of the city the instant they fall asleep.

Sylas said:

i mean everyone has their favorite story but i think the problem is Imperial Agent is so disconnected from the main story that it 50+ doesn't really make a lot of sense. Same issue with bounty hunter trooper smuggler etc. their stories are just side background stories to the overall arch of the series, so its weird when they are suddenly made into the hero.

the story of this game is basically the story of the Sith Emperor, much like you can say the story of star wars is the story of anakin skywalker, his rise, fall, and redemption. At least star wars 1-6. idk how the sequel trilogy played in I never watched them.

This game's story is best experienced via the Sith Warrior storyline as that is the main story, that and Jedi Knight to see the other side. Everyone else's story is just things also happening that take place during the time period.

Click to expand...

That makes sense, although I've obviously played through all the class stories and had at least 1 of them up to 75. But my main as an IA going through the Eternal Empire story line was a bit odd everyone lining up behind me. Still didn't like all of the post 50 main story, but most of it was pretty good.

Just uninstalled. It was fun while it lasted.

I think i logged in the first week of the season to get level 1 and claim the companion only to find out there wasn't a companion this time.

Did not log in since.

Should release it as on offline single player game.

GuardianX said:

Stuff like this makes me wonder what will happen with AI voiceover eventually.

Train an AI voice with each character you need to return or something.

Click to expand...

Shit. I look forward to it. The artist, developer, whatever, can program the voice to be exactly how they want it. Tuning the inflection points in the voice, the tone of the voice and the accent of the voice will go a long ways towards matching characters to their voice. Just jarring talking to NPC's in an old town inside of a voiced game, and you go from talking to a white NPC that sounds like a black guy from Brooklyn, over to a white NPC that sounds like a yuppie Californian white woman etc.

Even more so, and New World's sound team talked about this a bit in a related subject - Artists and Developers can create their own language, and how people from that culture sound when they speak English, and what they replace certain English words with etc. Should add up to a really immersive experience.