@CarlitosWay @johnwck90 Well, I am on the RP server on Sith and on the alliance I am on a pve one. I have my own guild just for my characters so wouldn't want to leave since I like my guild names!
@CarlitosWay @johnwck90 Yes, I used the group finder, it worked great. I had some nice groups in the game for instances but I never had a way to gear up for the elite stuff so I stopped playing.
@CarlitosWay @johnwck90 Well, I suppose you are right. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd found people willing to play with, but nobody wants to group for quests in any mmos it seems, I wish someone would design one with servers for groupers who just want to log in and play cooperatively. I didn't enjoy it though, it was limited.
I bought this and levelled three characters to 55, I thought it was poor. I am not sure I will even bother to buy a future expansion. It was too short, they didn't develop the talent trees (always a major source of interest to me in WoW expansions), it showed a complete lack of labour on the part of the creators. The community in the game is non-existent, I found it hard to get going and impossible to make friends, I quickly remembered why I lost interest in the original. Really, it lacked vision, lacked a quality of execution, the game has always felt like something made-to-make money, it lacks craft and imagination (which usually comes down to labour and the quality of ideas), maybe it's because it was an attempt to use ideas derived from Star Wars to make a game, maybe that inhibits, rather than developing their own world, as they have done in WoW or GW. Maybe inventing new myths is a better idea, creatively, than using old ones whose images we've all seen. I never got as far as the new instances, another problem for me, in WoW, you always got the interest of new instances as you levelled, so you could try out your new talents, all that's missing here. It was a poor experience, more like dlc than an expansion.
It was announced that Rift will be free to play in June, so that will be another quality free-to-play wow-clone with a recent and extensive expansion so you have to wonder whether the market can support pay-to-play for much longer. Surely, if you are wanting to play a cooperative online rpg then you will play between expansions for the new content of each mmo? WoW is lucky in that it has a vast adolescent player base whose parents pay the fee maybe that will be sufficient to make their business model viable but in terms of future games it will be interesting to see whether the market will support their new project as pay-to-play. Same with Elder Scrolls Online which I am now finding difficult to justify paying to play. I paid to play Star Wars The Old Republic when it came out because I accepted the pay-to-play model as a necessity of the genre but now I don't. I played the Dragon's Age Beta last night, it's not great, but it's operational and eventually surely the market conditions will be such that they undermine any rationale for paying when we've all seen the genre well executed and developed in each expansion of each product.
@Mordaeniis @johnwck90 Well, I didn't mean to suggest that the graphics don't matter at all. They matter for each generation of games, you get used to a certain visual grammar that needs to be there for the game to be enjoyable but there are parameters. It's like with films where you first see them when they are new they seem very realistic, then over a long period of time you wonder why you ever thought it looked realistic as the means of representing things changes and you get accustomed to a new way of rendering. You need to be able to play each generation of games at playable framerates but this level of difference doesn't make much difference to me personally.
There is no significant difference to the experience for me. Surely the issue of visual quality is only an issue if there is impairment of the experience or an inability to model certain effects that are significant to the game. Perception operates via the sense of forms so that provided those forms are rendered there shouldn't be a great difference in experience, your experience is far more determined by the quality of the ideas and their execution and incorporation into the different aspects of the game. Maybe I am just too old to discern any significant distinction in these platforms, I'd be happy to play it on any and can't wait to get this game!
The surreptitious perceptual effects of great ideas made the first game one of my favourites, so I am glad to see this review suggests they sustained the labour that goes into seamlessly intertwining ideas to make a provocative and engaging experience. The writing in the first was as good as anything I am aware of in PC gaming. Really looking forward to this now.
The market has changed. When I started to play, it was the best game I could play on a mid-range laptop, now you can buy large laptops relatively cheaply that will play games for longer periods. There are many more options. I think people are only going to play MMOs periodically, clear the content, then move faster than in the past when there was more incentive to play the same game over again. This is why the shift to free-to-play has to occur. It will be interesting to see whether Blizzard can sustain the fee-to-play model and for how long before people do as I am doing and say "I am no longer prepared to pay-to-play".
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