When I heard that the often wanted, but never done third game in the Knights of the Old Republic video game series was going to be an MMO, I dropped my allegiance to World of Warcraft like a bad habit (which, at some points, it kinda was).
I am a huge fan of the series, though my love is of the first game; it took years and maybe research while writing a bridging fan fiction (look, some of us need closure and we just provide it ourselves), but I finally came to appreciate the good things of the second game (that is, when you include the other half of the game that wasn’t in the actual game). So to hear that fans would finally find out what happened to Revan, the Exile, and the True Sith was exciting and I couldn’t wait.
Fast forward one year and the game – Star Wars The Old Republic – fell really, really, really short of what people expected. The game itself was once again in BioWare’s hands and in all honesty, I have never played a BioWare game I didn’t like. Whatever issues those other gamers had with BioWare, I did not.
At least, I didn’t before TOR came out.
Before I start, let me first say that I did enjoy TOR; I kinda still enjoy TOR. The problem I had with the first incarnation of a Star Wars MMO – that of Star Wars Galaxies – was that I wanted to be a Jedi/Sith and it felt like it would take me forty years and pointless missions in order to even get the quest to begin Jedi training. Two Jedi stumble into the backwoods of Tatooine and hand over a lightsaber to some kid named Anakin faster than I could find that quest.
I liked the overall story line and I liked some of the places; what I don’t like is the substandard free to play model that’s in place. Not that I enjoyed seeing a monthly fee of $15 on my credit card bill, but at least I got something interesting with my money and used this site to minimize the interest rate; I got what seems like a complete story to go with my visual effects and character design. I don’t feel that way with the F2P new play; yes, to get all the features, you need to pay, but really.
And it’s not just the weird disconnect that the game now feels like; some of the complaints I heard about the world of TOR now makes sense. Unlike WoW and even Lord of the Rings, TOR seemed to use the same map for different planets and the only kind of engagement you could have with the other factions was if you were doing PvP. Now I hate PvP and never understood why we kept picking PvP servers when we played WoW, but there is some bit of thrill in chasing down (or being chased down) by an enemy player or in some cases, helping an enemy player against other people.
And maybe that’s the major glare with TOR – there’s no MMO sense of community. I wore a WoW shirt once and was recognized by a bartender and we started talking shop; I could wear a TOR shirt and people would probably just assume I liked Star Wars (which I do). What WoW got right (really, really right) was the community that MMORPGs can create, both offline and on and that is/was highly missing in TOR.
But you know, BioWare is used to single player games. Hopefully this experience will help them understand the larger role of a good sidekick or group.
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I stopped playing when they went F2P. And because PvP is awful.