Been watching beta videos from alterswtor.comand first impressions are not that good.

I watched the Kass City run through and how far they've strayed from canon is grotesque. Absolutely nothing about the visual art style looks Star Wars at all, and if it wasn't for the ambient sounds and classical scores to tie it all together, the layman could confuse this for any generic sci-if intellectual property.

It looks nothing like Star Wars, only sounds like Star Wars. As a fan of original films it's painful to look at. Compound the discomfort with a generic MMO experience aka WoW clone, and they would have to make this title F2P for me to show any further interest in it outside of the slight shimmer of hope when it was noted that Origin might not be required to run SW:KoR.

One thing that was very pleasing was how massive the city felt, and the sound led to an appropriate atmosphere, but nothing looked right which threw everything off.

The generic MMO look of it all (especially the stiff character animations) is also a huge downer. In the Kass City video you go into a bar and the new wave kinda jazz playing was interesting. The dancers on the other hand were very disappointing, and the overall feel of the bar itself was not that of a proper social hub, but more like a something an adult would use to make a younger child feel like one of the big kids such as letting them sit at the bar and making them a shirley temple.

The atmosphere of the game doesn't look very mature at all. Watching players sprinting around everywhere was distracting too. I can only imagine how ugly the vehicles would be as people simply ran you over to get from point A to B. If this is the kind of experience we can expect from SW:KoT, how the hell is it going to survive with a full subscription model in a market full of burned out mmo vets who want nothing to do with fetch quests or guarding mail boxes? /shrug

Feel free to enlighten me

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

Said comic series and game franchise is extremely awesome, for the record.

TOR disgusts me, though.

I just REALLY would've preferred KoTOR III - providing they could get their shit together for that one (II had more than it's fair share of problems).

It looks exactly the way other Old Republic things do, not to my taste but I wouldn't call it bad.

I don't know but I'm sure Chris Kents will be on hand to answer your question.

The idea of a fully voiced and story driven mmo is a great one, the gameplay itself is were it breaks down. It will be interesting to see how this game pans out but I think many people are going to be disappointed.

Reading forums on The Old Republic makes me so sad. Some people are going to enjoy the game and it has every chance to fail but thanks to EA it's VERY likely that it won't it has broken MMO pre-order records so clearly there is interest. People are going to play and like this game, so why is everyone hating on it so much?

yes

@SeriouslyNow said:

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

LOL so you're saying I need to be a super star wars geek like yourself, or this guy in order to fully grasp why a Star Wars game doesn't look anything like Star Wars to a guy who grew up with the movies and is potentially checking out this title... you know... the target market for this game.

NERD lol

SeriouslyNow , it's what people say when you open your mouth. <3

edit: jesus and with almost 7,000 posts apparently it never closes either.

I don't know but I'm sure Chris Kents will be on hand to answer your question.

Watching an MMO?

It doesn't look like Star Wars? Star Wars doesn't have a visual style.

Doctor Christopher Kent of Dirtmouth, Nova Scotia will not be pleased with this thread.

@Buzzkill said:

@SeriouslyNow said:

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

LOL so you're saying I need to be a super star wars geek like yourself, or this guy in order to fully grasp why a Star Wars game doesn't look anything like Star Wars to a guy who grew up with the movies and is potentially checking out this title... you know... the target market for this game.

NERD lol

SeriouslyNow , it's what people say when you open your mouth. <3

edit: jesus and with almost 7,000 posts apparently it never closes either.

You've never heard of Knights of the Old Republic, made by the same people who made this game? I though you were the Target Market for this game. Yeah, you have that awesome logic working again.

Keep it up sHitman.

@rmanthorp said:

Reading forums on The Old Republic makes me so sad. Some people are going to enjoy the game and it has every chance to fail but thanks to EA it's VERY likely that it won't it has broken MMO pre-order records so clearly there is interest. People are going to play and like this game, so why is everyone hating on it so much?

Im not hating on it. Im looking at it as an MMO, not as a Star Wars game. As an MMO the actual gameplay is not great. Its not even on par with the KOTOR games and those games didnt play all that well either(lets be honest, we played for the story).

I don't know how you manage to call it SW:KoR and SW:KoT in the same post, well done.

But you're clearly not the target audience, and if this is the first of this art style Star Wars game you've seen, you've not been paying attention to videogames for a long, long time.

E: Also what are you on about with the straying from the canon? This is set some thousands of years before the films.

It looks like shit. In other words, what one would expect from an MMO not from Blizzard.

@Buzzkill: If not for the Bioware style good/evil choices, and the cinematic style and voice acting which I think makes the story a lot more interesting to follow compared to just quest text, it's pretty much an MMO as far as I can tell.

Waiting on CL60's post.

Also, it looks plenty like Star Wars. Where have you been? I'm not even interested in this game so I typically wouldn't rise to defend it, but you make some serious non-points.

What's with people using my real name?

By the way, fetch quests and kill quests are rare. And 90% of them are optional that pop up when you kill something. Kill a sand person. Something will pop up saying. "BONUS: Kill x amount of sand people."

Simple as, don't like it don't play it.

The chosen art style is there for one simple reason, performance. Bioware want this game to be playable to a wide audience so having such an art style that isn't GPU intensive makes perfect sense. As for the generic MMO feel, why not? Why the freaking hell would Bioware want to create something that the majority of it's audience might not understand, they've said time and time again that it's a formula people know so that's why they stuck with it. Keep in mind that this is a different time setting then the classic Star Wars you might imagine, after all even KOTOR was different in artistic design.

I'm interested to play it, the Old Republic era is the best thing going for Star Wars right now and from a story perspective I'm excited to experience more of that era. Bitching about the game being immature is a tad rich, most MMO's aren't mature and the ones that are hardly get anywhere near the subscriptions The Old Republic will get. It's fair to dislike it, and I even get what folks don't like about it. But I've seen enough over the past few months to know I'll get at least some enjoyment from this being a Old Republic experience. And when they state that each characters first chapter is longer then the entire Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game (and there are eight chapters per class), it actually interests me a great deal.

@Buzzkill said:

@SeriouslyNow said:

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

LOL so you're saying I need to be a super star wars geek like yourself, or this guy in order to fully grasp why a Star Wars game doesn't look anything like Star Wars to a guy who grew up with the movies and is potentially checking out this title... you know... the target market for this game.

NERD lol

SeriouslyNow , it's what people say when you open your mouth. <3

edit: jesus and with almost 7,000 posts apparently it never closes either.

lol are you seriously on a video game forum calling someone a nerd?

@zoner said:

@Buzzkill said:

@SeriouslyNow said:

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

LOL so you're saying I need to be a super star wars geek like yourself, or this guy in order to fully grasp why a Star Wars game doesn't look anything like Star Wars to a guy who grew up with the movies and is potentially checking out this title... you know... the target market for this game.

NERD lol

SeriouslyNow , it's what people say when you open your mouth. <3

edit: jesus and with almost 7,000 posts apparently it never closes either.

lol are you seriously on a video game forum calling someone a nerd?

This. Grow the fuck up and discuss in a mature manner.

I've never wanted an entire game's whole thread page to be locked before. This just always makes me so fed up :<

@SeriouslyNow said:

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

LOL so you're saying I need to be a super star wars geek like yourself, or this guy in order to fully grasp why a Star Wars game doesn't look anything like Star Wars to a guy who grew up with the movies and is potentially checking out this title... you know... the target market for this game.

NERD lol

SeriouslyNow , it's what people say when you open your mouth. <3

edit: jesus and with almost 7,000 posts apparently it never closes either.

@Buzzkill said:

I watched the Kass City run through and how far they've strayed from canon is grotesque. Absolutely nothing about the visual art style looks Star Wars at all, and if it wasn't for the ambient sounds and classical scores to tie it all together, the layman could confuse this for any generic sci-if intellectual property.

It looks nothing like Star Wars, only sounds like Star Wars. As a fan of original films it's painful to look at. Compound the discomfort with a generic MMO experience aka WoW clone, and they would have to make this title F2P for me to show any further interest in it outside of the slight shimmer of hope when it was noted that Origin might not be required to run SW:KoR.

'Star Wars' is an intellectual property, not an art style. There has been plenty of 'grotesque' (certainly not the pretentious word I'd use) departures from that art style--even a few made in-house, i.e. the Clone Wars movie. BioWare had to devise an art style that was both timeless in terms of age-range appeal, looking on in retrospectively in many years, and compatible with a wide range of computers. I think they've done very well with this things in mind.

@Buzzkill said:

The generic MMO look of it all (especially the stiff character animations) is also a huge downer. In the Kass City video you go into a bar and the new wave kinda jazz playing was interesting. The dancers on the other hand were very disappointing, and the overall feel of the bar itself was not that of a proper social hub, but more like a something an adult would use to make a younger child feel like one of the big kids such as letting them sit at the bar and making them a shirley temple.

A lot of the complaints here are criticizing the unfortunate standards of the MMORPG genre. NPCs need to be static to accommodate the genre conventions, and there are only so many unique animations that can be created in a world filled with the thousands of hours of content that is expected of the genre.

@Buzzkill said:

The atmosphere of the game doesn't look very mature at all. Watching players sprinting around everywhere was distracting too. I can only imagine how ugly the vehicles would be as people simply ran you over to get from point A to B. If this is the kind of experience we can expect from SW:KoT, how the hell is it going to survive with a full subscription model in a market full of burned out mmo vets who want nothing to do with fetch quests or guarding mail boxes? /shrug

Again, you're asking for an MMORPG without other players? This isn't just a Star Wars game, it's an MMORPG. Further, about the 'mature' comment, you have to be aware that Star Wars is not necessarily a 'mature' IP. The reason why Star Wars succeeded was because it had appeal that reached every age. Whether you were 11 years old, or 30 years old, there was something there for you to enjoy with the original trilogy.

And to the fetch quest comment: half of KOTOR was fetch quests. Don't get me wrong, I obviously love KOTOR, but it's a bit of a contrivance of role-playing games.

@newhaap said:

@Buzzkill: If not for the Bioware style good/evil choices, and the cinematic style and voice acting which I think makes the story a lot more interesting to follow compared to just quest text, it's pretty much an MMO as far as I can tell.

I think you're spot on. And that's exactly what the OP doesn't seem to realize. What he was expecting was something so genre-bending that EA wouldn't have even dared investing the hundreds of millions of dollars into the project. They're going after KOTOR fans, and they're going after MMORPG fans. If an MMO with a couple of BioWare's signature flourishes doesn't sound appealing, then I think you should steer clear of this game, or at least readjust your expectations realistically.

And I think that's exactly the problem with this post: uncanny expectations. Even Mass Effect--a solely singleplayer experience, at 1/1000th of the gameplay content--failed to meet many of the OP's expectations.

@rmanthorp said:

I've never wanted an entire game's whole thread page to be locked before. This just always makes me so fed up :<

I entirely agree considering the replies I've gotten in this thread. I wonder if the reason they savagely defend The Old Republic is because the game provides virtual girlfriends for all the lonely star wars nerds, and you're still nerds btw just read the chart. I on the other hand am proudly 100% geek. In The Old Republic NPC companions are provided for your characters and you can have a relationship with them. The big pink circle on the chart explains why this feature would be of such high importance to them. >.>

Woah boys watch out, Fratbro over here's gonna tell us how to talk to grlz better by posting on an internet Forum.

I've been playing the Beta this weekend, so far it feels like a hybrid bioware game (the quality of the writing doesn't seem as good but it's serviceable) where there are other people playing in the same world.  The quests can be somewhat generic but i'm early in the game and in my Smuggler story.  Though i'm surprised to see that almost every quest is fully voiced with dialog trees that i've seen so far.  The art style is stylized... it's made to last for years...  while super realistic art design will look shitty after a few years, it's seems fine in my opinion. 
 
But damn, I really wanted to be an Jawa Jedi.... but looks like race selection is pretty limited at the moment.

@Atramentous said:

The idea of a fully voiced and story driven mmo is a great one, the gameplay itself is were it breaks down. It will be interesting to see how this game pans out but I think many people are going to be disappointed.

Agreed!

@Buzzkill said:

@rmanthorp said:

I've never wanted an entire game's whole thread page to be locked before. This just always makes me so fed up :<

I entirely agree considering the replies I've gotten in this thread. I wonder if the reason they savagely defend The Old Republic is because the game provides virtual girlfriends for all the lonely star wars nerds, and you're still nerds btw just read the chart. I on the other hand am proudly 100% geek. In The Old Republic NPC companions are provided for your characters and you can have a relationship with them. The big pink circle on the chart explains why this feature would be of such high importance to them. >.>

sHitmam : Master of social ineptitude. We've seen how socially skilled you are in the Steam group. Oh and Triangles.

I'm not a fan of Star Wars the carton series, But hey WHO FUCKING KNOWS what about waiting for release?

@SeriouslyNow: Your delusions I'm some other poster who's come back from the dead to haunt you only lend to your credibility. lol Never heard of a hitman guy and could care less.

@Buzzkill said:

@SeriouslyNow: Your delusions I'm some other poster who's come back from the dead to haunt you only lend to your credibility. lol Never heard of a hitman guy and could care less.

You're hardly one to be questioning credibility Mr Target Market. Oh and I never mentioned that he came back from the dead. Also, you couldn't care less. English; it's not that hard.

@DeeGee: and I always will, nerds <3

@SeriouslyNow said:

@Buzzkill said:

@SeriouslyNow: Your delusions I'm some other poster who's come back from the dead to haunt you only lend to your credibility. lol Never heard of a hitman guy and could care less.

You're hardly one to be questioning credibility Mr Target Market. Oh and I never mentioned that he came back from the dead. Also, you couldn't care less. English; it's not that hard.

Your level of butt hurt is so astronomical I hope that hitman guy doesn't find me and start charging royalties. LOL

@Buzzkill said:

@DeeGee: and I always will, nerds <3

@SeriouslyNow said:

@Buzzkill said:

@SeriouslyNow: Your delusions I'm some other poster who's come back from the dead to haunt you only lend to your credibility. lol Never heard of a hitman guy and could care less.

You're hardly one to be questioning credibility Mr Target Market. Oh and I never mentioned that he came back from the dead. Also, you couldn't care less. English; it's not that hard.

Your level of butt hurt is so astronomical I hope that hitman guy doesn't find me and start charging royalties. LOL

Fear the Krav Maga.

I wonder if they'll ever figure out they botched the context on that meme. Anyone with a clue can tell from the OP that I'm not complaining about star wars from a fan's perspective yet they used the picture of what your typical star wars fan looks like for the perspective of the meme. C+ for effort.

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

Yes, yes it is.

Star wars is no longer the original trilogy, it’s not even the new trilogy... it’s now

The Clone Wars, meaning that most likely the stars wars mmo will be populated

by a bunch of kids fresh out of club Penguin.

.

I really hope that there will be a strong single player element to the game; it’s the

only thing that could get me interested.

Wait around for Guild Wars 2. That's the "in" MMO right now.

@benpicko said:

@SeriouslyNow

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

I didn't know that, so why would normal people know that? Do the comics look as shit as the game?

Dude, I'm not a fan of this game. CL60 and I have already had that conversation. You're trolling up the wrong tree. That said, BIOWARE (them dudes wot did Mass Effect) are making this game and they also made two other well known games for XBOX and PC called Knights of the Old Republic (I guess you could argue they didn't make the sequel but w/e). Normal people who play games know this shit. Latecomers to gaming don't know this shit. In gaming terms that doesn't make you normal, it makes you misinformed.

I've only seen trailers and Dev demos of TOR, and the story/conversations look interesting enough. The gameplay is like a combination of WoW (PvE) and from what I've heard WAR (PvP). That's nothing new, but it doesn't have to be bad.

@SmilingPig said:

Star wars is no longer the original trilogy, it’s not even the new trilogy... it’s now

The Clone Wars, meaning that most likely the stars wars mmo will be populated

by a bunch of kids fresh out of club Penguin.

.

I really hope that there will be a strong single player element to the game; it’s the

only thing that could get me interested.

Well, it IS an MMO. if anything this is the most WoW like MMO so far, meaning there should at least be a capable 'story' for those wanting to solo the majority of content at least for leveling purposes.

Also, I think you underestimate the number of people who grew up with star wars and are now in their 20-30s. For many of those people the original trilogy is still star wars.

Extended universe!

and yes Bland centrale.

@SeriouslyNow said:

@benpicko said:

@SeriouslyNow

The game looks like THE OLD REPUBLIC. It's a series of comics from Marvel and a pair of games for PC and XBOX. People know that already. It's clear you don't. I'm no fan of this game but your post is little more than poorly informed troll bait.

I didn't know that, so why would normal people know that? Do the comics look as shit as the game?

Dude, I'm not a fan of this game. CL60 and I have already had that conversation. You're trolling up the wrong tree. That said, BIOWARE (them dudes wot did Mass Effect) are making this game and they also made two other well known games for XBOX and PC called Knights of the Old Republic (I guess you could argue they didn't make the sequel but w/e). Normal people who play games know this shit. Latecomers to gaming don't know this shit. In gaming terms that doesn't make you normal, it makes you misinformed.

I'm aware of the KOTOR games, I mean normal people wouldn't know about the comics.