Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1048258" data-attributes="member: 8158">Well, it's been less than a month and this past week I've already started to find reasons not to log in. Right now, there just isn't a lot for a casual gamer to do. Most creatures BAF (bring-a-friend), making solo-hunting difficult at best. Missions are strictly of the kill-those or deliver-that variety, which is not only tedious but often way too dangerous for lone players.SWG has the same miserable emphasis on doing hell runs as every other MMORPG to date. Run out into the middle of nowhere for a mission, run out to the middle of nowhere to use a deed, run out to the middle of nowhere to do maintenance on your harvester....One would think that in a sci-fi setting characters would actually get to spend some time in a less rural setting. With currently no modes of fast transport (e.g. portals, teleportation, vehicles), again there is a viability problem for someone who doesn't have the time for long, dangerous jaunts into the wild.If you're a casual player, expect most monsters on those hell runs to con red to you. If they're human enemies with ranged weapons, expect them to aggro from far, far away. Worst of all, mobs ofen don't even load until you're right on top of them. If only that /maskscent command actually worked more than 10% of the time, stealth would be an option...Cities are boring shells. Even a supposed metropolis like Coronet City is nothing more than a way station for characters to dash in for some healing and banking before they go on their next hell run. Oddly enough, the designers have made navigating cities more difficult than necessary through the elimination of alleyways and other shortcuts,  filling in the space between buildings with concrete and laying down impassable fences through open spaces. Buildings are mostly identical from city to city, and often from world to world. NPC citizens don't do much to enhance the atmosphere. In fact, their propensity for getting clustered into the bipedal equivalent of logjams--standing in rows with ther faces pressed firmly up against walls--actually diminishes any sense of the city being alive. It could be downright creepy at times if players actually every stopped to notice it. Come to think of it, the wilderness is pretty dull too; although it's frequently brimming with mobs, the outdoors generally lacks any other interesting features. In Asheron's Call, there were actual landmarks and points of interest. In SWG, I see the same ubiquitous rolling landscapes. I sure hope mounts and vehicles come into play soon, because there's no reason to take a casual hike through the woods for sightseeing purposes. All the tall grass and scrub and flowers and trees and what have you are pretty, but so bland and generic that it becomes cloying.I haven't seen any of the "theme parks" (i.e. dungeons) that I heard were going to be present in the game. I imagine they're group-oriented as well. I have seen the occasional "slave camp" during my hell runs, which is actually just a block of machinery not at all unlike a large air-conditioning unit guarded by red-and-yellow-conning bad guys.On top of all that, my character has hit a plateau in his development already. Once I hit my first advanced profession--pistoleer--my advancement became a snail's pace. That's because combat skills only provide a nominal increase in fighting ability, but at the same time the bar to acquire the next level in development is raised substantially (175,000 pistol XP to gain my next pistoleer skillset, which won't even make me all that much nastier). Even with the best weapon and armor I can afford, I still die quite easily, and in fact for the most part I still fight the same things I fought as a newb. And have no doubt: other than crafting. killing is the only real activity to take part in right now. Other than bounty-hunting, I don't see any profession-specific missions that require actual skills to complete.Oh, and another strike against casual players: pets are nastier than you. I've seen those droids at work, and they sure do go a long way to draw a line between the haves and have-nots in SWG.Having not logged in for a week, I know I've really screwed myself. My harvesters will be in flames and my house will be a shambles. I've been too bored to earn the necessary cash to keep them going anyway. I guess I just need to travel a bit more. Maybe things are different on other worlds, but right now I feel like this game is geared towards the power-gaming group of hunters.Everyone else is so sure things are going to get better, but I've played enough MMORPG's to know that most of the designers' promises about how the game's going to improve take a looong time to implement, if they ever happen at all. Once the game goes gold, those lofty promises all too often fall to the wayside while bugs are fixed, exploits removed, classes & items are balanced/nerfed/buffed/tweaked, and server stability is improved. And how long do the developers really have before they have to get cracking on the expansions?I know SWG will evolve into a great game, I just don't know if it'll be a great game for me. Developers have to learn that you can't make the game ideal for both casual gamers and power gamers. At some point they have to choose, and I think they're not choosing my kind. I need something to do to kill an hour, maybe two, then I want to log off.</blockquote>

Verification