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Manifesto » Review Log 03: Star Wars: The Old Republic
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Review Log 03: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Posted on Friday, January 13 @ 09:39:00 Eastern by danielrbischoff
This is my final review log before I post GameRevolution's full and complete Star Wars: The Old Republic review. That means I'm kind of wavering on exactly what to explore here because I've got to have something to say in the final review. Essentially I'm warning you that I'm going to get all the moaning and bitching out of the way here so my review is actually worth reading sometime down the line after a long stream of patches have fixed the major issues.
That's really the catch-all of MMOs. Anything I hate now might not actually exist somewhere down the line.
Take the grouping functionality, in it's current state at least. The Old Republic actually makes finding a competent group of players to quest or raid with a challenge. The chat in any given instance is consistently flooded with "lfg [insert quest name here]" and "lf healer for flashpoint." This is so inefficient and annoying. There's a Looking For Group comment function, but 9 times out of 10 you will be the only one using it. You're only hope is to find a group that's already been forming for an hour.
This is quite possibly the biggest flaw in Bioware's MMO. Flashpoints and Heroic Areas, some of which full-on REQUIRE a group of two or more, are a ton of fun. Last night I took on a high level boss with another bounty hunter and a pair of Siths.
Again, grouping with others and working as a team proved to be more fun than the hours of leveling I had done solo earlier. The other bounty hunter was quite knowledgeable, obviously a veteran of WoW and other MMOs. I learned things, I leveled, I healed, I pulled, I kited, I looted, I completed high level objectives. It was more fun than I'd had in video games in a month.
The problem is it took two weeks to get from one instance of this "fun" to another. The Old Republic caters to the solo player too much. The solo player is going to get bored, he or she is going to cancel his subscription, and he or she is going to leave the game and then more players will be left solo.
I'm not about to pay a monthly fee for a solo experience. It'll be hard enough to get me to continue a subscription, regardless of whether I can readily join with other players or not. Good luck Old Republic, you've got my money for one more month.
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.... No.
*shamelessplugtime*
Oh, and my review has been up on my blog here for almost 2 weeks now. So everyone go read it if you haven't already!
I was happy playing WoW for years, and I found groups for instances easily, by doing a search for the type of class we needed. It worked then it works now.
Trust me, Daniel, the last thing you want is an LFG system like WoW has. It -will- destroy the community, it destroyed the community on every server. Plus, it grouped you with random folks, 90% of the time, these were ****tards who didn't know **** about ****, or they thought they knew, and were elitist turds about it.
But, I digress, my point is that without the LFG tool I may not have really been into the Heroics as much as I was. And I know a lot of people who were the same way. Though, everything you say is true none the less.
I still don't have problems finding groups for things so for now away it seems like the right move even if it does add to the single player feel of the game.