Why Star Wars The Old Republic Is Bad For Role Players

A lot of words have been written about SWTOR lately.

The impression I get is that these words have been mostly positive about Star Wars The Old Republic. And, to a certain extent, this is rightfully so. SWTOR is actually a pretty decent game.

I was given the opportunity over the weekend to participate in the final stress test for the game, and spent the greater portion of the weekend doing so. While I enjoyed my time playing it, despite some fairly annoying bugs, I’ve come to the following conclusion about The Old Republic.

It’s good for themepark gamers, bad for role players.

Darkside/Lightside Points

Bioware for some time now in their games have been using a simple alignment system to let players choose to be nasty or nice. This has the effect of altering the game play to some degree by changing the outcomes of some conversations with NPCs, and even altering the path of the game a little, even though the end result is the same.

This works quite nicely in a game like Mass Effect to provide some replayability and allowing different choices on the way through, but whether a player in Mass Effect goes light or dark really has no effect on anything other than romantic choices. But Mass Effect is not a MMORPG.

The big problem here is that Bioware has tied light and darkside gear to this system. If you are playing a darkside Sith or Jedi, when you reach darkside level 1 you can purchase DS1 lightsabres. It’s not clear to me if this equipment is better than what is normally on offer, or awarded from quests, but if it is then this encourages players to choose one path, dark or light, and stick to it.

Why is that a problem, you say.

Well, your choice is removed. If you want to be able to raid later on, you will need the best gear. Even if raiding is not your goal, having decent equipment is still going to be something to be desired.You are going to want to make the ‘right’ choice for your path, not necessarily the right choice for your character.

In other words the current darkside/lightside system encourages min-maxing.

If you are a role player who also wants to be competitive in raiding or grouping, you will have to choose between picking the option that awards the most points or the option that feels right for your character.If you don’t give a care about end-game, sure feel free to make the choices you want.

I did create a character on the weekend that was intended to be unrelentingly evil, and making the dark choices was fun, but even so, the darkside choice didn’t always feel right. That’s why the best bad guys in books, movies, and TV are so interesting, they make interesting choices. The worst bad guys are the ones who bwaa ha ha all the time.

It’s also interesting to note that the Bioware idea of morality was a bit off at times. Some of the light side choices were distinctly on the wrong side of right.

Legacy System

The proposed legacy system dictates that when your character completes the first chapter you choose a unique legacy surname. That is then used for all your future characters on that server.

This build has our first iteration of the Legacy System! At its core the Legacy system is about allowing players to create a family tree of characters. Family is pretty important to the Star Wars universe, with the Skywalker family having one of the most interesting dynamics in movie history. This version is just the foundational components that we will use to build upon in the future. Here are the features of this iteration:

• Once your character has completed their Chapter 1 storyline, they will be able to choose a Legacy Last Name. This Legacy Last Name must be unique and is shared across all characters on that server – so choose carefully!
• Once you have unlocked your Legacy, any and all characters on that server will now contribute to that player’s Legacy Experience Points. Much like normal experience points, when you reach certain Legacy thresholds, you will increase yourLegacy Level.

We already have plans for how we will expand the functionality of the Legacy System in one of our major post-ship patches. This will include being able to shape your Legacy’s family tree, and give you a reward for all those Legacy Levels.

I”m not really certain what the purpose is for this. I’ve seen conjecture that it allows characters on a server to share equipment, or provides some kind of bonus, but from the announcement it isn’t really clear.

Once thing is clear though, once you have a legacy name every character on the same server, no matter what species or allegiance shares the same last name. So your Twi’lek Consular, Human Bounty Hunter, and Chiss Sith Warrior will all have the last name. Nope, no logical problems with that at all. After all different species often share the same cultural background that results in the same last names… Hmmm.

This incredible lack of logic does not even take into account that a player might simply want to create a role play character that is not associated with their other characters. It’s odd to me that Bioware, a company that has grown to greatness on the back of encouraging role play in its games, is almost completely disregarding it in SWTOR.

So, if you are a roleplayer, you are pretty much out of luck.

Companions/Ships

A big part of SWTOR is the companion system. As the player progresses he is awarded companions that he can interact with, do their storyline quests, and even romance. Unfortunately here the role player is also let down.

You see you don’t have a choice.

You are given the companions for your class. You can’t choose from a pool or selection.

Every Sith Warrior is going to run around with that whiney Twi’lek as the first companion. (No wonder I enjoyed shock collaring her so much!) About the best differentiation you can hope for is to change the skin colour.

I remember reading a lot of love for the Jawa companion, Blizz. He’s only available for the Bounty Hunter. So if you love Blizz but can’t stand the BH playstyle, tough. If you want to access Blizz you will have to play a character you don’t like.

Of course you get a choice of which of the companions to take with you on a mission, but even this is limited by your class. A Jedi Knight for example is a tank. A JK player will always take the companion that offers the best support role, a healer for example. Some companions will be useless (does a tank need a tank companion?) Other companions will be indispensible and always chosen.

The same goes for the ship you get. Every character gets a ship which is nice, but the bounty hunter gets one single type of ship while the Jedi Knight gets another.

Now while this doesn’t directly affect a players role playing choices as much as the first two points above, there is an indirect effect in that all players in a class are exactly the same.

No two Jedi are unique. No you are not a precious snowflake in Bioware’s galaxy.

Homogenousity

Okay. Made up word.

I guess everything I wrote above boils down into my biggest criticism of Star Wars The Old Republic.

There is very little room for customisation.

From character creation where there is barely any difference in some of the face styles and other choices (why couldn’t my Republic Zabrak have Darth Maul colourings?) to the rewards for light/dark side choices and companion and ship allocations there is very little chance for customisation.

For the most part players will be constrained to playing Star Wars The Old Republic through a fairly narrow and linear corridor.

Themepark players will love this game, as long as they are not roleplayers too. SWTOR is a masterpiece of themepark design, taking the player along on what appears to be a great story. But that’s about where it stops. It’s a very limited game in some respects, perhaps only having long term playability for raiders and those who enjoy battleground style PvP. There’s no sandpit in this themepark.

While the story that I’ve encountered so far is excellent, it is the Bioware story that is being played, not yours.

That’s why I think that SWTOR will be bad for role players.

How about you, what do you think?

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Ahh Bobby, You’ve Done It Again!

Question: What is Activision CEO Bobby Koticks favorite WoW Race?

Answer: Troll.

As SWTOR is rushing headlong to release, Bobby (I keep typing the name as Booby for some reason, must be freudian) Kotick has commented that he doesn’t think that EA will get much out of Star Wars The Old Republic. Apparently he reckons that Lucas makes sure all these deals come out heavily in his favor.

Well, duh.

Of course Lucas writes deals in his favor. He has one of the biggest IPs in history. He can.

But that doesn’t mean that EA gets nothing from this. They’re big too (are they still the biggest game publisher?) and have some negotiation skills available to them.

Will Bobby’s commentary make the slightest bit of difference to the horde of hungry players eagerly waiting for the 20th of December?

If the Full indicators on the dozens of SWTOR test servers on the weekend are any indication. Not a jot.

With WoW showing some signs of being on the wane, a game like SWTOR that has the potential to grab another couple million WoW subscribers (whether it can hold on to them is another matter) must have Kotick worried. Then there is the Secret World next year, also eagerly anticipated, that could do some damage.

So hence the trolling by Activisions CEO.

Ahh Booby, you’ve done it again!

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Playing With HAL

One of the banes of the modern MMORPG is the bot.

They pop up everywhere, but you see them most often where the rewards of a long grind are the greatest. If an extremely rare item drops off a type of NPC in a set location once in a million kills, there are likely to be bots in that area taking the burden of the million kills of the gold farmer on the other end.

For the most part these types of bots are pretty easy to detect. They tend to follow a fairly simple preset pattern, which even to a casual observer doesn’t appear like a human is driving. Humans, though somewhat predictable, tend to be fairly random in how they operate. Even a sophisticated bot will have patterns that appear over time to an observer, revealing their unhumanity. You called call them AI, but really only a very rudimentary form.

I was wondering then, if a MMORPG would be a good place to conduct a competition along the lines of the Loebner Prize. The Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence is a competition where entrants attempt to develop a program that can pass the Turing Test and respond to questioners in a way that they cannot tell if it is a human answering or the AI.

An equivalent test set in a MMORPG environment  would require that the contestant build an AI that would play the game in a manner indistinguishable from a human player. In fact this would be a tougher test than the Loebner prize since that contest only requires a conversation to appear human.

Interestingly, since most human players don’t farm gold in the intense way that the current generation of bots do, then if a contestant bot ended up gold farming in the same way, then it would be instantly recognisable as a bot and lose the contest.

On the other hand with the recent bot banning in Runescape, bot developers may want to create a more human bot to avoid such punishments in the future. They’d be less productive, but more secure. There’s a lot of money in gold farming, are these developments already underway?

It also seems to me that any serious AI R&D would be already be looking at the virtual worlds of MMORPGs to test out their experiments. It’s evolutionary after all, survival of the fittest, and MMORPGs can be pretty cut throat places. If an AI gets recognised as AI players report it and it is banned, killing it off, leaving the ‘fitter’ AI’s to fill its niche.

I wonder if this has already been done. Are we playing with HAL?

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SWTOR Test

Even though I was kind of expecting it, a little surprise was waiting in my inbox this morning. It was an invitation to participate in a SWTOR test weekend, of as yet undetermined date.

I was in two minds as to whether I’d bother with it to be honest.

The decision by EA-Bioware to restrict the launch regions means that I won’t be able to play at launch, and the rumors (I know I know) suggest that it may not be until at least February, and maybe closer to April, before the so-called red zones open go green.

As I’ve said before, I have more interest in TSW that SWTOR. If Bioware delays the release too much I’ll probably skip Star Wars completely and join a secret society, and come back to SWTOR in maybe six or twelve months.

So I’ve decided to do the test, the downloader is patching as I type this. I figure it may be the only real chance to get a play of this game anytime soon.

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Star Corsairs — No Account Necessary!

A lot of MMORPGs let players create trial accounts, but Machine 22 let you try out their free to play game Star Corsairs without even having to create a trial account first!

This post by indie MMORPG developer Dave Toulouse   gives a bit of detail on the new tutorial mode for Star Corsairs that gets a new player up to speed without needing to come up with yet another password, or at least until you’ve decided to keep playing.

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SOPA — Bad For Gamers, Bad For Games

This article on the TechDirt blog just came up on my reader.

I’ve been hearing about this SOPA bill that is being pushed before the American legislature for a while now. It used to be called EPARASITE, which seems a fitting name, as it seems to be about to unleash a parasitical attack on the worlds innovative industries.

It also appears to be an attack on gamers, especially those gamers who devote creative activity around the games they enjoy.

Just as people post cute pictures and videos of themselves, their pets and their kids singing and dancing to copyrighted works, gamers of all ages routinely post pics and stream video of themselves during game play. All of these things have, for the most part, been considered “fair use” under the law. Tens of thousands of videos currently available online featuring game play from popular games like Call of Duty, Halo, Starcraft and others could be made illegal under these laws.

From what I can gather, SOPA allows anyone who calls themself a rights holder to issue a notice to an ISP and have any offending content taken down immediately, without any notice or recourse to the originator of the content. The rights holder can also conduct even more draconian action if they wish.

For instance, if I posted a screenshot on this blog of a game I am playing and the game developer took issue with that, they could conceivably not just issue a takedown to my host and get Stropp’s World taken offline, they could also complain to my domain provider and I could lose the domain too. And just like a bad set of steak knives, that’s not all. If I have a donation button on the site, SOPA allows them to go to PayPal and have them block my account.

All without any due process or legal recourse.

Now while that exact situation is a bit unlikely, game devs tend to like fans promoting their products, I wonder if there are situations where a bigger publisher could exploit this legislation to their own end.

Could SOPA be used to take down a blog that put a negative review of a game up? Hey if it uses trademarked phrases and screenshots or video segments it could be fair game. This could be a great way for unethical game publishers to do a bit of reputation management. Complain and the bad reviews just magically go away.

How about the recent trademark fight between Notch and Bethesda? Under current legislation Bethesda had to go to court. Under SOPA all they have to do is to issue a takedown. It doesn’t matter if Notch is in Europe, the domain may be registered in the US. The site may be hosted there. And the payment processor is almost certainly US based. All Bethesda has to do is get in first and Notch wouldn’t have stood a chance. That’s justice right?

Even worse, because the burden of proof is lowered even further, it may become rediculously easy for game publishers to take out the competition. Just claim copyright infringement. Right now you cannot copyright an idea. But since there is no due process anymore, just a claim that the competing developer has infringed might be enough to close down the competitor. This might not work between two giants like Activision and Ubisoft, but what about Activision claiming against an innovative indie developer?

There’s no way an indie can fight that sort of fight. Right now indie developers are enjoying a golden age as the web has opened up lots of opportunities for them. How easy would it be for SOPA to end all that?

All this legislation is being sponsored by politicians who are in the pockets of the *IAA’s and big corporate lobbyists.

Political donations == legalised bribery.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans are fooling themselves by thinking that they are in the land of the free when their freedoms are being eroded inch by inch by the greedy and corrupt.

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Skyrim User Interface Designer Checks Into Rehab

After reading this about the Skyrim user interface, amongst other commentary on the issue, I wonder if it is good I don’t have enough time to play it now. Maybe waiting six months until this sort of crap is fixed might not be a bad idea.

You’ve got to wonder how a user interface as bad as that got past usability testing. Was that part of the team on acid?

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Been There, Done That, Let’s Go Back

I haven’t been playing Skyrim. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that all this wheeling dealing businessy stuff is taking up my time at the moment and Skyrim deserves a level of monogamy I cannot promise. That still doesn’t stop me from looking askance at this gorgeous supermodel of a game, and occassionally wondering if it’s okay to cheat on my business commitment a little.

And just to be clear, because so many take things the wrong way, by looking askance I mean reading reviews and blogs about Skyrim, and by cheat I mean spending money I don’t have to buy the game and play it for many many hours while I should be working. I’m not a cad. Honest.

Anyway, back on track eh? Keen at Keen and Graev’s makes the statement today, MMO worlds should be like Skyrim. He wants a MMO world to be spacious, and adventuresome, with players (or should I say inhabitants?) feeling a connection with a certain area and hanging around these places.

I agree.

But it’s been done.

Asheron’s Call 1 was like that. Huge open spaces where you could walk for ages and not see another player. Turn in any direction and you could follow your nose across the map and not come across any contrived barriers. Sporadic towns and villages dotted the map. And players, many of them, formed attachments to certain towns and would return after venturing across the map.

There are a couple of other games like that too. Eve Online falls under that category, giving players quite a lot of freedom in both highsec and losec space. Anarchy Online I remember, while it had artificial barriers in places, gave adventurers lots of room to move. And of couse there is ATITD where you can barely sneeze without encountering a player built town around some resource.

Unfortunately however players have gradually fallen victim to the curse of the zone. Everquest 1 was the first game to artificially restrict players to entering and exiting zones from certain locations by using contrived barriers like impassable mountains to restrict player movement. At the time, this was certainly due to technical restrictions, but over the years other games like WoW have continued this tradition even though they had no technological need to do so.

So when Keen laments that Worlds should be like Skyrim, I certainly agree. I’d love to see less restrictions on how players travel across the world, and what they can do while there. Certainly server tech is now powerful enough to overcome many limitations of zoneless servers, and the software technology to implement such a server is at least understood, and very likely solves the problems that zoneless worlds have.

The themepark however has other ideas. They work best by funneling players from ride to ride, and zone to zone, and by at best giving the illusion of freedom. It’s a thin illusion though, easily shattered.

The big open world has been done. Let’s go back.

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Eight Legged Freak Therapy

Huntsman Spider -- these guys are regular visitors

I don’t know when it started. It might have been when I was four or five years old and tried to drink from an outside tap. I turned it on, put my mouth down to drink, and a big black spider crawled out from the faucet. That could have been it, or it could have been any one of a hundred childhood traumas with those evil critters. I mean eight legs? Yeech!

And of course there was the time I reached down for the gate latch and felt the furry body of the fellow in the picture. I jumped like it was voltage. He wasn’t so happy either, and climbed on top of the gate post and raised his front legs at me aggressively.

Why do I tell you about my (not so) secret fear?

Well, I’m not so freaked out by spiders anymore. Sure I still can’t really stand them, and reach for the spray when a big one decides to crawl across the wall or the ceiling toward me. But I don’t have the crawling feeling of revulsion anymore.

I put a lot of this down to the last few years of gaming.

After all who hasn’t had to make quest progress by killing thousands of the eight legged freaks? How many dungeons have web lined tunnels straight out of some game designers coffee enhanced, pizza fueled imagination have all of us ventured down?

They do say that the best way to defeat your fears is to face them. So hows this for a theory. Running spider infested quests is therapy for arachnophobes. That those who play these games reduce their fears.

Why do I say this?

Well I just saw a post on RPS about a mod for Skyrim where the spiders are replaced by other less limbed critters like bears (although there is a crab mod apparently so the number of limbs remains the same, but crabs aren’t so creepy. Perhaps it’s because we eat them.)

Way to go modders. Giving arachnophobic gamers a way to escape much needed therapy. For shame.

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Everquest 2, Now More Free To Play

There’s a bit of buzz today over the announcement by SOE that Everquest 2 is going to go completely free to play. (See the producers letter for details.)

SOE have been testing the waters of freeness with EQ2 for a while now, with EQ2 Extended. That must have been a successful enough test to encourage SOE to go all the way with free to play. At least with EQ2. (I wonder if they’ll go the same way with other titles like Vanguard?)

My first thought was that I’ll now be able to get back to EQ2 and spend some time adventuring with my characters. But after seeing how the FTP works, I’m not so sure how this all is going to work with existing characters.

Have a look at the price chart for EQ2. (Click for a bigger version)

You notice a couple of things about the free option, and the silver for that matter.

Spell Tiers

If you pay for the Gold membership, you’ll have access to all spell tiers. That means you can upgrade your spells and combat abilities to the maximum allowed, that’s master level now I think. However, with the free sub you can only upgrade to the adept level.

Now that’s okay for a new character. I have no problem with SOE encouraging players to subscribe with better character progression, after all they’re in the business to make some money. However, I’m not sure how this works with existing characters.

If I log in free with Bargears, my close to max level Troll Shadowknight, what happens to the many abilities and spells I have upgraded beyond Adept?

Do I lose them completely, or am I just temporarily downgraded to Adept until I purchase the appropriate subscription?

Shared Bank Slots

This is another concern. Over the years I have collected a bunch of items that I have put into the bank, and when I’ve run out of room, into the shared bank slots.

With a free account, not only does the number of bags I can have get reduced from six to two, my shared bank slots go down to zero. What happens to all the gear and items I have in those slots? Gone forever, held in escrow, or something else?

Active Journal Quests

Everquest 2 has perhaps one of the most generous allowances of active quests I have seen anywhere. For a long time WoW only had 25 or so, not sure what it is now, and Fallen Earth only has 20. Even so I found myself bumping my head on the quest limit, and when I departed the game over a year ago now, I reckon I was close to the limit too.

Free accounts now only have room for 20 quests in the quest journal. Again, not a big deal if starting fresh. SOE has to make some money to keep the game running. But again I find myself wondering what happens to those quests above the limit when a player logs in for the first time.

These questions may have already been answered. I haven’t gone looking for a FAQ yet. But there was no mention of the consequences for long established players who have let their accounts lapse and then log in after the game has gone free to play in the producers letter. If they haven’t already addressed these issues, then SOE needs to do so before the FTP goes live. Otherwise there may be some very unpleasant surprises waiting for players.

And that won’t be good for anyone.

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