evolution
I’ve been playing MMOG’s for years now… I’ve played the original EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings, Guild Wars, Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online, EVE… And, of course, World of Warcraft.
So I’m certainly familiar with the genre. I’ve seen how it has evolved over the years, seen some of the common stumbling blocks, seen some games get some things right… And other games fail miserably at other things…
The Old Republic is an MMOG, and that means it is essentially just a timesink. This is true of pretty much any diversion out there – other games, sports, movies, TV shows, books, music – it’s all a way to kill time in an entertaining way. But MMOG’s are a little more blatant about it. You’re paying a monthly fee to play, so it’s in their best interest to keep you playing for as long as possible. That’s why they’re all so grindy when you get right down to it.
TOR is no different. Yes, there’s a strong single-player feel to it… And the first few levels feel very quick, very streamlined, and very un-like your average MMOG. But as you level up, the necessary XP to hit the next level gets higher and higher, and the quests steadily become more grindy. Which is fine – that’s what the entire genre is about.
But TOR tries to offset this, to a certain degree, with the companions.
In TOR, you pick up your first companion somewhere around level 10 – right about the same time you’re leaving your starter world and picking a specialization and earning your first skill point. And as you progress through the game you’ll pick up more companions along the way. Each class gets its own companions, with their own skills and quirks.
You can ask a single companion to accompany you on your adventures. They’ll follow you around and lend their skills to your adventures… Some of them are tanks, some do DPS, some are healers… And they’re roughly equivalent to being grouped with a second player. So you can take on much bigger challenges than normal. You can complete much two-player content with just your companion along for the ride. And you can often squeak through content that requires four players just by grabbing one other person and their companion.
Additionally, you can send your companion to complete tasks for you.
TOR’s equivalent of “crafting” or “trade” skills are the crew skills. And if the name isn’t a dead giveaway – these are skills primarily utilized by your crewmembers. You can send your crew of companions out to harvest materials for you… And then ask them to build things with those materials… All while you carry on saving the world.
Initially, you’re somewhat limited by the fact you’ve only got one companion… And if that companion is out doing something like gathering resources, then they aren’t in your party helping you… But you’ll pick up a second companion when you get your ship, and more after that, which means you can have one in your party and one out gathering.
You can also send your companion to sell grey (vendor trash) loot, while you remain in the field and work on missions.
All of which is a very awesome way to reduce the amount of time you spend in-game that feels wasted. You don’t have to make quite so many trips back to town to sell… Don’t have to spend so much time gathering and crafting, when you’d rather be questing… Don’t have to spend so much time trying to put a group together…
What’s really glaring, however, are the omissions. You cannot send your companion to sell off anything other than grey loot. It’d be great if I could send my companion to sell some specific non-grey items… Or send them to put something up for sale on the galactic market… Or if I could have them go collect my mail… Or go put something in the mail… Or stuff something into my cargohold for storage…
Another glaring omission in TOR is the lack of support for any kind of customization or automation. No macros at all. No modding at all.
One of the things that Blizzard did very right with WoW is allowing players to script away the shortcomings in the game. Things that didn’t work quite right… Or didn’t make sense… Or were just a little too repetitive… And not only did Blizzard allow players this kind of customization, but they took the most popular changes and made them part of the core gameplay. Things like the raid UI and quest guidance were originally mods.
Right now, I’m finding myself desperately in need of a simple /castsequence macro to take a couple of these buttons off my hotbar. But there’s no such thing in TOR. Nor is there any mod to allow me to customize my UI like I could in WoW. Both of which are currently very annoying – but may very well graduate to full-on inconvenience as I learn more skills and fill up more hotbar slots.
I sincerely hope that BioWare is able to see the need for player customization… And that’s a genuine concern. BioWare has a history of making single-player games that are very story-driven. They may not have sufficient experience with multiplayer gaming to know how essential it is to allow people to make the game experience their own.
Another thing that has already graduated to full-on inconvenience is the fact that your keyboard bindings are stored server-side on a per-character basis.
I’m a somewhat particular individual. I’ve got my keyboard bindings set up just right. I’ve slowly refined this layout over the years… ESDF for movement, A to auto-follow somebody, W to target the nearest mob, X to sit down, Q to draw my weapon… And I’ll get it all set up on one my characters. And it’ll be fine. But then I’ll roll up a new character and everything is set back to factory defaults.
And since it’s all server-side, I can’t even just copy a file from one place to another to fix it.
I’m sure this will become less annoying the longer I play, since I’ll likely be rolling up fewer new characters and sticking with established ones. But the annoyance would be completely eliminated if the keybindings were simply global, or if there was a client-side file I could use to copy them, or something.