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 Post subject: Star Wars: The Old Republic (The Thread)

Posted: 2011-11-22 01:58am 

So for anyone who requested to get into the Old Republic Beta before this month you'll be given the chance to jump in on the last stress test prior to game launch. You should have gotten an email yesterday or today asking you to verify your status as a OR tester and saying you were available for this weekends test. For those who missed your chance, at least the NDA has been lifted and your starting to see lots of review videos hit the net with impressions from the Beta.

Looking forward to have a chance to play with the game early myself and see how well the story mission hold up. Deciding between Solider, Agent and Inquisitor for my main focus just to see how far I can get. Also the Beta forums are rather interesting to read.

One final note, the Beta is 20 gigs worth, happy downloading.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 04:11am 

I played as an Agent a couple weeks ago. Having not played any other MMOs before (besides Tabula Rasa and that didn't count too much), I can't really comment on how it compares. Apparently it's quite polished though. The one major complaint I have is that the captioning during conversations suck. Especially when you're talking to some alien who's speaking in whatever alien language, captions either take forever to show up or don't show up at all. I know Bioware really likes their "fully voiced!" thing, but really now, they should at least put in an option to fully caption everything.

I'll be back on this weekend, probably playing through Agent again. I want to see how far I can get.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 04:26am 

Patching the client right now... although I really don't have time for this, Skyrim and all

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 09:38am 

Huh, file size has dropped like a stone since this summer. Was 38 gigs then, 20 now. Yay for compression. Interesting that this summer didn't suffer from subtitle lag; I wonder if those two things are related?

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 12:53pm 

I just want to know if this is actually going to be a game worth playing or not.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 04:05pm 

Last beta weekend, I played Sith Warrior, Bounty Hunter and Trooper. Sith Warrior was kind of meh but I had a blast with the Bounty Hunter and Trooper! I don't really care for the PvP battlegrounds (more into open world PvP myself) or the end game content but the story quests are great. I'm happy that most of the "kill X things" are now just bonus quests and you usually accomplish them along the way to your main quests.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 05:35pm 

What's the end game content? WoW-style PvE raids? Warhammer-style "get a few hundred people and try to zerg rush this castle/fortress/city?"

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-22 05:57pm 

I first played Jedi Consular and then Sith Warrior and found it to be pretty meh, But once i changed over to the ranged classes (first Trooper and then Bounty hunter) i found the game pretty fun, Perhaps it's because Star Wars games rarely focus on anything but force users but it did feel kind of fresh to just unload a blaster rifle in somebody's face and be done with it.

All in all though i really doubt it will be game I'll play fanatically ..it just feels well..to old, Maybe if it had come out five years ago i would have jumped on it..but now no.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-23 12:25pm 

I just got the emailed invite a couple days ago. If I wasn't working over those dates, I would probably give it another spin (I was in the first, Labor Day, beta weekend). I'll likely give this game a couple months at the least once it goes live. I'm burned out on WoW (although yes, this is over 50% WoW in space), dropped EVE Online (keeping an eye on it again now that they are focusing on Flying in Space again), and FFXIV is coming to an end "soon" to its free-to-play era (horrible launch, terrible developer communication/arrogance, deserves all the flak it got, but still an interesting time-waster), so I need a new MMO to fill that slot . It will all pad out my BF3 game time, although I can't wait for the BF2 Karkand map pack next month.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-23 01:17pm 

Patched and ready to go.

Cant say I am that impressed with what I have seen thus far. The Force classes do not interest me and the overwhelming reactions seem to be the NON-Force Users have the better stories.
I'm looking to go the Smuggler since my Guild wants to do Republic firest - much to my disappointment but it would appear the Sith is really popular which could lead to interesting imbalance on PVP servers.

Jedi Consular / Sith Inquisitor - Both are supposed to be really powerful and they do seem rather interesting. The Sith Inquisitor has been dominating the polls for classes while the Agent / Smuggler often gets slapped at the bottom. Apparantly the Smuggler / Agent cover system is hard to get used to resulting in people going for the easier classes. Hence why I wanna go these classes to see if I can rise above the rest.

The graphics are lacking and the overall vibe results in: the obvious question:
What the hell has Bioware been doing for the past 5 years working on this MMO ?

On the one hand I'm glad it isnt a train wreck like Star Trek Online but on the other... after 5 years I would have expected a bit more on the gameplay side. As it is, the game comes across as basically being KOTOR 3 with multiplayer. I.E They expect you to play all 8 stories and replay it dozens of times like the majority of BW SP RPG stuff.

However, this weekend will be the last gasp before plunge into launch. I'm rather concerned BW are going to flop this when the server gets hit with so many people.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-23 04:25pm 

That shouldn't be a problem. It's already flopping because BW or EA fucked up the Security Questions. I can't even log into SWTOR.com, it keeps asking me the street I grew up on as a teenager and it won't accept my answer, in addition to that the forums are flipping out and redirect to different sections.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-23 04:41pm 

Yeah, lol at the TOR login shit. I've had to reset my password a zillion times now, half of which didn't even work, and it seemed to interfere with my BF3 logins too. Fucking EA.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 04:24am 

I already know that I will likely never get SWTOR for the same reason I'll never touch ME3. Origin can fuck off and die in a fire, and so can the EA shitbag that thought it up.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 01:43pm 

Origin is separate from SWTOR last I checked, you can install it from Origin but the beta at least runs fine without Origin installed.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 10:20pm 

Origin isnt required for TOR. I kinda expect Bioware told EA to fuck off with that shit since it would piss of alot of people.
Sadly, Mass Effect 3 is still on the Origin Shitlist... hopefully it will change or I'm gonna cancel my pre-order for that.

Managed to get into the Friday wave... pleasant surprise but I am expecting the servers to get fragged with the amount of people about to hit it. All the previous BETA testers keep saying it was fine with them but that kinda defeats the point of what this test is actually going to do. Running with a limited bunch of Bioware selected folks is a long way from literally opening the floodgates over a 3 day period.

Right now I'm trying to wager how long the queues will be and how long it will take for the servers to croak.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 10:25pm 

What's everyone's beef with Origin?

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 10:30pm 

It's not so much Origin being crap as the strongarm stuff EA's been pulling to try to push people from Steam to Origin. It's left a bad taste in quite a few mouths.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 11:02pm 

It's like Steam but without any of the useful features and four times the passive memory footprint. It's also much less responsive and the worst strike against it... it's not Steam. More specifically it offers nothing Steam does not already do but it's another thing to run in the background and bug you for updates. Also the update speed for those of us with nice high end connections is slow. If you have a nice end connection speed on Steam then you can get games downloaded at 48 Mbps but Origin tops out at 1.5 Mbps most of the time, at most which makes download games a pain when your talking 20 gigs worth which I could be getting in about an hour rather than two days.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-24 11:06pm 

lol 1.5mbps sounds like a good day for me in STRAYA

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-25 04:11pm 

Well I played two hours worth of the Trooper story I had fun. It's not WoW in space but it feels like a very polished wow clone kind of like RIFT felt. However combat is much faster than WoW default almost City of Hero's esk where you can take on three normals at the same time and it's only when elites and bosses are mixed in that you have to go one on one. Having lots of AoE mixed in meant it was fun and being able to do minor crowd control (sticky grenade makes people panic when stuck to them as they try and rip it off before going off with a pretty big AoE)

Each class has their own resource to manage some build it from attacking some count down from a fixed amount which refills via abilities or when combat ends. I don't have enough expensive abilities to spam my ammo counter dry. Going to try Sith Agent next. Already had half a dozen fun conversation options. Note the game is set up at least in the begging with dual questing worlds. Meaning that Sith Warriors/Inquistors share the same starting planet but do different missions, likewise Bounty Hunters/Agents, Jedi/Jedi and Smugglers/Troopers with the Trooper story the only one I've played so far but as I said already had a few laugh out loud options sadly it's not Mass Effect 2 funny so I can't actually shoot someone in the foot just threaten to.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-25 07:09pm 

Are the graphics as shitty looking as they were a few months ago?

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-25 07:37pm 

Yes. It looks pretty terrible. Especially animations.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-25 08:31pm 

The graphics put Half Life 1 to shame!
Half-Life 2 not so much. In fact I'd say HL2 has better graphics and more detailed environments.
Plus side is it runs just fine on a laptop even with everything turned on. Guild Wars 2 this is not.

OAN I hit 12 on my Trooper took Vanguard spent a perk or two. Going to roll up an Imperial Agent now because my Trooper companion and end resolution was kinda lame.

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-25 11:31pm 

Have no idea what Half Life even is let alone what it looks like.

Can someone intemperate that for a 360 console player?

 Post subject: Re: The Old Republic (Final Beta Test 11/25-11/27)

Posted: 2011-11-26 12:03am 

They're saying it looks like an FPS from 2004.