Out of Pod Experience

So after canceling my subscription and deleting the game Star Wars the Old Republic I have lost faith in MMO's.

SWTOR is yet another failed age of conan and warhammer.

The days of eve online and star wars galaxies and WoW and FF11 and Guild wars and many others all released over 5 years ago soon a decade ago it makes you wonder what the hell is wrong with the MMO genre and developers.

If you asked anyone what MMO's would be like in 2012 back in 2003/04 I bet everyone saw huge potential and had high hopes for the future, how can things have gone so wrong? Should I blame companies like EA? I know I will never buy another EA title again and after dragon age 2 and TOR I am done with Bioware as well, just another dead westwood studios and mythic. Bethesda is the king now of western rpgs.

So what went wrong? In eve I got sovereignity awesome sandbox stuff, in star wars galaxies I could do pretty much anything, had cool unique class systemand eve has it, sometimes annoying, train skills over time system and wow etc had levels. SWG also had player housing, fun space content and enjoyable PVP, SWG and eve had the best pvp in my book, with UO back in the day I guess. WoW at least had arenas and BG's that had its moments and are the best in terms of what the game is. Also old MMO's had warzones/world pvp that was something cool.

So what does TOR have? ****** battlegrounds, can't select which one to play and no world PVP etc.

In TOR you run around meeting less people on a full server than a round of teamfortress 2. No LFG tools, bugs up the wazzoo with terrible glitches and they don't even have chat bubbles lol. Can't change my UI either and keybinds sucks and no macros. There is also no community, not even server based forums or proper guild support and another million missing community features existing in all other MMO's. The customer support and ingame help is more bad than that of a free to play MMO to make matters worse.

It took them 4 years to make it, it is now officially the most expensive developed gamein history, and it is crap, worse than MMO's in every way that were released almost 9 years ago (except for perhaps the novelty of story and all voice over quests that get old once you hit 50 with one character.)

I just don't get it? I thought after EvE almost a decade ago that in the year 2012, besides world coming to an end :P, that we would have awesome MMO's with everything eve or SWG or wow had but with +10 times the stuff and +10 times better than back then.

To me the most stagnated genre of all things gaming, you look at videogame awards of 2011 and you see, and I also played, games like Batman Arkham city, Skyrim, uncharted 3 etc then you look at the MMOspace and cringe... second to MMO genre being full of garbage is the FPS genre, with BF3 and MW3 being huge let downs, but at least you had games like Crysis 2 etc. Same goes for RPG, Skyrim, action, batman and uncharted to name a few.

I have played better iPhone games than MMO's in last years.


So almost a decade later, best MMO is still EvE Online, WoW and I want to say SWG but Lucas Arts and EA forced them to shut down prior to release of SWTOR because of license competition. Still even SWG after the CU and NGE is better than last years MMO releases.

So what can I look forward to? I suppose only new MMO's made by CCP, Blizzard and whatever they are called that made Guild Wars perhaps?

In 2004 me and all my friends dreamt of massive worlds with massive content and massive stuff happening and things just crazy when you think about it today. But all other genre's except for FPS has delivered satisfying results to me over the years and peaking now for great entertainment. Heck I put more hours into Skyrim than any MMO combined in the last years...

At the moment though I can't think of or know of one MMO worth time or money today, at least in EvE I can pretty much play for free thanks to PLEX which I do, but to me even this is getting old, I suppose it was unrealistic to think MMO's almost 10 years later would be better than back then.

I actually do play that, but I am weird in the sense I play my season as a real season almost spending maximum 2,3 days of ingame time a day and not more. Making my seasons take very long time and spend little on it each day, no more than the time it takes watching a real game :)

Don't ask why, it is just how I like to play my FM's :D

In any case, the game is not part of my topic at all really, same goes for other great games, I for instance love the batman and skyrim.

You seem to forget all the things you are complaining about weren't in the first releases of the MMOs in the early part of this century either, they ended up getting added later (UI stuff etc).

The problem with MMOs now is they are still using the same formulas of previous MMOs. From watching a live stream of someone playing TOR for an hour or two it pretty much looks like an exact replica of WoW with different graphics. The mechanics and everything else is the same, except minus some features which will undoubtedly get added later (like UI customization etc).

It's not about making something good anymore, it's about using the same formula and cranking out as many as possible, same with every entertainment industry for the last 15 years or so.

I dont understand how you people believed this was some how some sort of MMO revolution. All the previews over the years it was in development said that it was exactly the same song and dance as all other 3rd person fantasy MMO's... And on top of that many of the previews I read were from die hard starwars fans.

I'm pretty sure the devs themselves touched upon that the mechanics were really not changing... Just add voice acting, and a few nuances here and there.

So I assume that you saw the words "Star" and "Wars" and higher brain function ceased to process everything else as dreams of light sabers, wookies, and han solo characters clouded out the ever present signs that this was just another 3rd person fantasy MMO.

I wont even say it's bad I just know I wont like it after the nuance wears off in 2 weeks. I figure this will actually be wow's main competition...and probably do quite well in the long run.

So if I buy a new FPS game I should not expect to see a match finder or server list and rely on gamespy since that is how it worked in the 90's? Your logic does not make sense, sorry, anyone who thinks it is ok to have all WoW's launch problems of 7 years ago?! in every new game is crazy. Or only have features of EvE online at its launch. But theydon't even has a 10th of the stuff SWG had at its launch.


I do agree the formulas have stagnated, but even with the same formula how can SWG have 10 times more content at its launch then this games launch? It makes no sense to me.

Also improving on the formula should not be so difficult, all other genres does it, even FPS to a degree with games like portal etc. Or deus x.

As for TOR being a replica of WoW you are correct, except they forgot to copy everything, just some parts, some of them bad and the best WoW has to offer they wont copy. To be honest, whoever was lead designer for this game needs to be fired, I promise you my little sister could do a better job designing this game or an MMO. The game also has worse combat, pve and pvp than WoW at launch, except, again, novelty qust system that gets old extremly fast, and I doubt they will addsingle player experiences close to as good as Skyrims anytime in the future, and they expect money upfront.

I do agree with all entertainment pushing same formula to a degree, except other genres and medium have better media today than before even if incremental improvments is all that has been made, but you also have exceptions in every other genre and medium today that is fresh and new.

I don't know why people (including myself) think of MMO's as having died. People keep bringing up SWG. I played SWG from the day it opened up to the first mega 'upgrade' (lol) and it was nothing special. Being able to place buildings was neat, but no more so than rifts or companions or epic customization levels. Even as far back as Ever Quest it was just a second job.. something to 'do' at your computer that we liked because it was a neat new idea. All we've done since then is get better at making the same crappy game over and over again and it's lost that 'neat new idea' feel for veteran gamers.

The single solitary glimmer of hope for the genre was DAoC's three way war PvP as it's end game focus. NOT just because it was PvP, but because it was an end-game that was independent of content. The player base had something fun to go do once they had finished building their character instead of waiting for the next expansion or rolling alts. No one gets that, and no one has tried it again as far as I'm aware. Mythic themselves didn't even do a good job with DAoC's development and went on to create WAR...

Recently I heard something similar for the first time in the ten or eleven years since DAoC came out. Diablo 3 (though obviously not an MMORPG like we're discussing) will have a fourth difficulty setting where the entire game is laid out flat at max level. The very first zone outside the very first noobie town is exactly the same difficulty as the end of the game. Once you've made your uber pro character that's max level in godly gear... you have SOMETHING TO DO that is independent of content being rolled out.

GW2 is supposed to not follow the same formula that all the MMOs that have been released in the last 5 or 6 years have followed, but that remains to be seen.

Guild Wars 2.

Yeah same people, but I wouldn't expect it any time soon. They haven't set a release date, I'm guessing it's a couple years out still.

So many people never played DAOC unfortunately, but hands down the most fun pvp of any MMo i've played. And it was because the end game was pvp. Yes they added pve stuff, but that was just extra. (More akin to lets see if we can kill that dragon...nope..oh well back to pvp) On top of that it had goals in world pvp, and layers for skills. There were also very few solo pvp classes (At least at first) Which meant you really needed a group or groups to get the most out of it. It also gave a benefit globally of capturing territory that wasn't loot based.

But for whatever reason world pvp has gone by the wayside in MMO's, and having long term goals other than gear or stat grinding. I understand the need for instances. (casual people) but damned if you can't add some sort of depth to pvp. I dont know if it's harder to do or MMO players have become more lazy to take and hold territory. Would seem like if you're able to assemble a 30-60 man raid that takes 4 ******* hours to complete why can't you be bothered with in depth pvp and kingdom building?