I think you nailed it when you said that SWTOR was an MMO for people who've already played MMOs. I never looked at the tutorials and I just googled whatever info I needed for whatever system I was working on when I needed it.
The big issue is that these text dump tutorials are a result of the changes they've made to the game over the years as they've added new systems and changed old ones, it was a much better onboarding experience earlier in the game's life before the shift to free-to-play unfortunately
Playing a light side Sith Warrior was probably one of the best Star Wars experiences I ever had, all the NPCs are just flabbergasted, I am a Sith who is Schooling Jedi Masters on the Jedi Code, kicking their teeth in and sparing their lives as I go on with my mission
I have very fond memories of that story line. Nothing quite beat talking down a pair of Jedi on my hunt for Jaesa by convincing them that if I don't attack them first then they can't attack me or they're in violation of their own code. While chapter 2 was certainly weaker (imo) for the Sith Warrior line, Chapters 1, 3 and the final wrap-up were some of Bioware's best RPG writing work ever. The way they brought back things from as early as Nar Shadda was brilliant.
Same with Dark Side Jedi Knight. Your character even constantly says "It really does seem like I'm the only one doing everything" and gives zero fucks about the Jedi Code.
Oh man, I remember when companions were class locked. The game was genuinely hard back then and the bosses at the end of the class chapters would WRECK you.
Those were good times, I walked away when they nerfed everything, removed the ability for companions to use armor, and made the companions generic. Give me back my dedicated healing, tanking, and DPS companions, having all companions do everything as needed was really lame especially as they made the content so easy at the same time.
Yeah and now when fighting any class chapter boss you can just do any of the prestige abilities you unlock for completing campaigns (e.g., force choke or force lightning) and basically one shot them
easy? the combat in lowlevel is a joke... i went back to the game arround a month ago equipped some modable cosmetic gear (the stuff that has 0 stats and less base armor than the white starter gear) from my arsenal without putting any mods in and streamrolled my way till lvl 40 without ever installing mods/crystals in any of my gear.... after that i got bored and uninstalled again.
@@Patrickf5087 Yeah, they weren't THAT hard. Maybe occasionally some of them were harder. I remember fighting the.... last boss (avoiding spoilers) as the Jedi Knight, and having to do the fight three times. That's also the last boss though. They're right about the rest though, the combat was harder, in general.
The Imperial Agent story is amazing. It still to this day is one of the greatest pieces of narrative gaming I've played. It has four significant ways that Chapter 1 can end based on your choices throughout the entire chapter (not just by the conversation options, those let you pick between the two versions your previous choices determined). There are three different outcomes for Chapter 3, and one of them is only available if you made certain decisions in Chapter 2!
Yeah i started the game as a jedi, but after playing Sith Inquisitor and Imperial Agent, those two storylines are way ahead, real solid! Man that was quite some time ago
@@Kirill_Fedorov1970 The other way around. JK - a little boring but great heroes journey and the best SW themed story; JC - the most complex story because while everyone plays checkers, he plays 3D chess and carries entire republic on his back; the simple soldier who achieves impossible; S - person who earns every power he has, tons of lighthearted fun On the other hand: SW - you are a dump idiot who raises your master and kills all his enemies and dont expect him turning on you and then kill him (and this is the only story I like there), SI - you play as idiot who is pushed by writers and plot convenience to be victorious even when you dont deserve anything you get, BH - total loser who killed 1 target in the great hunt and would die in act 3 if there was any plot logic, IA - republic clean up crew who serves more republic interests even when not mind controled because imperial intelligence should be renamed to imperial stupidity, easy to see plot twists for the sake of plot twists that dont really enrich anything but create a mess that writers didnt even properly understand Also, republic stories achieve something and all fight against the empire, imperial stories dont really achieve much apart from killing tons of their own. Thats why republic wins in the end, rep characters are simply, better, stronger, well written and just way more enjoyable. Imperial stories only have edginess, dark humor and allowing you to be more evil going for it.
@@Dark_Voice Entirely convinced you either played an entirely different game than I did or that you were on something. Jedi Consular is one of the most boring, obvious stories ever, that you call it the most complex story and then sh!t on Agent confounds me
I remember playing this with a friend. We flipped a coin, went Dark Side. they were a Sith Warrior, I was a Sith Inquisitor. It was actually pretty cool seeing these two Sith who had very different backgrounds see each other as a good partner for each to rise through the ranks. It was also cool how when we did side quests we each could speak up and change things for each other. Friend may of been trying to be peaceful, but I possibly insulted the guy's mother and now we're stuck fighting because I couldn't shut my mouth.
Just swallow your pride and apologize. Take back your words or even lie to him. Sometimes growing up needs that. Don't lose a friend for something that I imagine is really petty and stupid.
Regarding the shared overworld items, I remember when there was a casino event, but due to the shared overworld, if too many players tried to use a slot machine at once, the machine would bug out. It was the first time I've ever seen players politely, and of their own volition, form an actual, honest to god line in game.
Saw the same with one of the quest objects in an event area (Gree on Ilum). What's even more amazing, the line consisted of players from both factions - in a PVP area!
@@Sithoid First time I saw it was in Oldschool Runescapes second League, people would line up and wait for one another to kill the one mob everyone needed to kill to progress. Nobody said, but every time someone new showed up and saw a line of say 4 people, they just joined the back of the line, and so it kept going for several hours. It was kind of beautiful. I can imagine seeing that kind of silent cooperation where people just understand what needs to be done in TOR was equally beautiful.
@@Sithoid Not only that, but if someone came in and started a fight or cut in line, they’d get clapped by all the enemy faction members and usually none of their own faction members would join to help them. The event was INTENDED to get people fighting in the over world by giving everyone the same objective in a PvP area, but people just decided to be polite and respectful to each other instead, out of a mutual desire to accomplish the exact same goal COOPERATIVELY in the quickest, most efficient, most painless way possible.
I've seen that kind of jolly cooperation once before in an MMO. Right after the release of Cataclysm, where everyone was rushing to roll a Worgen character, there was one particular quest in their starting zone where you have to rescue a cat. Only one player could rescue the cat at a time, and then there was a cooldown. Must've been a few dozen players just forming an orderly line to collect the cat one at a time.
The worst part is that originally the tutorials were story linked, but after a few years and some probably one-sided player feedback about the lack of new players, they ditched the existing flow and replaced it with what you experienced.
Its so sad to see the state of SWTOR in this day and age, because nearly all those things you mentioned you didn't like such as the tutorial system, how it TP you to the dungeon etc, never used to be a thing, everything followed the narrative so much closer when it was first released. But it then got loads of criticism for being a story first MMO, which was its strength and which i loved, so after all these years its now just a bit of a convoluted mess. Such a shame because to me the first 2 years of SWTOR are some of the best MMO memories i have.
SWTOR suffers from one primary issue. With aims of player retention the devs always spent their tiny budget on new features rather than fixing the old stuff. So the game has grown more and more messy over time, and even gamebreaking bugs from the game's first launch still exist. It's the best MMO on the market in some areas, and its one of the worst in most others, and its so sad to see. I loved playing through the various class storylines, I love the general atmosphere of the game and many of its ideas, but I eventually left it because it was such a horrible mess. I didn't need more new features for retention, I needed the game to be bug fixed and smoothed out. I honestly believe that if they put the money into bug fixing and updating graphics/controls for the game they could pull an FFXIV like relaunch and explode their player numbers again, but the way they are running SWTOR atm they are doomed to slowly dwindle their playercounts until the game gets shut down for having 5 people a day logging on.
Agreed, I played SWTOR at launch (and even the beta) and I remember those things being spaced out and part of the questing. I remember having to go modify your weapon after they gave you something, running over to the console so I could add the part. F2P was drinking unicorn blood, so much stuff is locked away and behind things, I can't load up my old characters anymore because they get bombarded by a billion notices, and then half of the things I used to be able to do are just "If you want to change this, it's money now, lol." I loved SWTOR, beat the main story & both major expansions as a Trooper (JHale!) and a LS Sith Warrior (I am a cat meow), but you could absolutely tell they overestimated initial release (by level 30, planets were dead, maybe a dozen people per planet so group missions were a PAIN to find people for), so they had to reduce the server count, which helped, but eventually money dried up and "Fully Voiced" became "mostly voiced", "Class Questlines" became "Here are three quests related to your class, have fun", and "Republic Quest Chain & Empire Quest Chain" became "One shared questline because we don't have the money to make two." One of my favorite parts of SWTOR was playing as the opposite sides, and undoing the work of the opposite faction. The second and fifth(?) planets are swapped, so for Republic you free an Empire world but late in the Empire campaign, you visit it and have to re-subjugate it, and vice versa for the other side. There is also a set of dungeons that have the Jedi going to a Sith location and Sith going to a Jedi location, AT THE SAME TIME narratively, only to return and be like "Oh snap, they were just here!"
Its interesting, because at launch, most of the things you suggested... were in the game. There were (some) quested tutorials, Flashpoints were sequential and often part of the story progression, you were narrative locked in most places and couldnt sequence skip through things like Flashpoint groups. People hated them, and they changed it to emphasise the MMO, and made it much worse worse. Most of the problems with the game are directly resultant from player feedback.
The Esseles and Black Talon Flashpoints are meant to be "You were taking the faster transport from the Fleet to the capital, but you get sidetracked by an Imperial Moff."
SWTOR at launch slapped, I tried jumping in again last year and when I wanted to do that first Imperial flashpoint... queued for 20 minutes, then got slapped into an endgame raid I was scaled to but couldn't really help in, I was like... the fuck?
I also want to point out how good the story decision making is. For instance, that last Flashpoint you showed where you kill the captain and the Lieutenant has to take charge. If you kill the captain, she believes that the pods are a distraction and allow them to attach to the ship. However, if you let the captain live, he is experience enough to know that they contain shock troopers targeting the generators, giving the player a better way to complete the Flashpoint.
Also, if you kill the captain, in the end you find some of the officers made a mutiny that became a fight and everyone at the bridge died. If you keep the captain the flashpoint ends peacefuly.
@@AgusSkywalker I'm not sure it was a mutiny, or if the Droid had orders to waste the bridge. You'll notice they are all in a circle around him when the IA returns.
There are also multiple points where you can talk your way out of combat. Several encounters shown in this video you can avoid battle with a slick enough response, such as the separatist with the droid where you can convince the idiot to "fix" the droid's faulty sensors.
@@georgeblair3894 well, it tells you there was a mutiny. it's possible it lied, but nobody dies in the good ending, so I don't see why the droid would kill them if you kill the captain, or refrain from killing them if you don't.
If you play a male agent, you absolutely must kill the captain. You'll get a dialogue option where the voiced response to one of the crew is just the most perfectly delivered "Tell me you're not going to cry".
My favorite part of this game has to be Co-op cutscenes where you and your friends both talk and both have a chance to choose what you do leads to some cool roleplay moments
This! This so much! ... with that said... it is so damn shame, that you cannot do that after the core game and once you enter the expansions. The expansions are designed to be a 'solo experience' tailored for your character. Your friend won't be able to join you or have any input in the story. You're left with your follower to finish the story.
@@Kineela This was exactly what I said was going to be the problem way back before this game released when I was following it. I was like 'okay, this all sounds great, but I seriously doubt they're going to be able to keep up this pace of content/story creation, especially with the multiplayer element, in the future.' And what d'ya know, they didn't. Hell, even the original game didn't keep up. That first flashpoint, the Esseles/Black Talon, set a great story example...and then none of the other flashpoints had much of any story at all, they were all VERY light on dialogue. It was very much a bait & switch there, cause you got to see the ONE flashpoint that was actually fleshed out really well at low levels, but never got that level of experience again.
Biggest thing to note is all the instruction boxes and difficulty of early game changed a few years back when the game went free to play. Originally any missions stating Heroic 2+ were generally difficult, flashpoints wern't soloable and you had to visit trainers to learn skills etc, however when the player count dropped they added the reduced difficulties to enable players to solo these and get trhe information they needed without requiring a guild.
@@Nipah.Auauau if you solo flashpoints you'll only get blue (worse) gear doing flashpoints with players offers epic gear, so if you solo everything you'll be at a disadvantage in endgame and tbh even campaign fights are hard, im experiencing it right now on my jedi knight full rare gear and i fought Lord Scourge and he tore me to pieces (im using kira as a dps not a healer, since i figured its better to kill the mobs quickly than for the companion to heal you, often she cant fast enough and i die anyway) and many strong/rare enemies really deal serious dmg
Not only is the voice of Solid Snake (David Hayter) the voice of the male Jedi Knight, but the voice of the very first NPC you meet in the Jedi Knight questline is voiced by Cam Clarke AKA Liquid Snake! Someone in casting knew what they were doing, the cheeky bastards
One of the coolest things about SWTOR that wasn't mentioned was, as a Sith, as you accumulate dark-side points, you can watch as your character changes too. Like more red eyes and distressed facial features. Very immersive.
@@mythicalfelix Actual, no. Here is a quote from OP " as a Sith, as you accumulate dark-side points" That part is wrong. As a Jedi you can also accumulate dark-side points.
To be fair. . when this game first came out, fights WERE harder. They took longer AND your companions roles were locked so it was tougher. At times it felt like a slog too. . . .
Yup. I played when it first came out and took a break for a long time. Got back into it recently and couldn't believe how easy its become. While I can appreciate appealing to a more casual audience it shouldn't almost always be a cake walk.
@@UnderseaPumaKing They've really shifted a lot of the difficulty to optional quests. The heroic areas, flashpoints, etc. are more challenging and reward good exp and gear in exchange. If you make your companion not a healer, then the game is a good bit harder too.
Yeah I remember boss fight be very hard of you didn't have stems or med packs or your healing Companion. When I cane back 5 years or so later it had chnaged so Drastically
@@UnderseaPumaKing the star wars IP is so expensive, that they will need a ton of players just to pay for the name. then the mmo format, which makes it even more costly. in short: swtor should had launched in this state. it would still had failed, but it would had taken longer to do so. i was there at launch too. i got wrecked in the forums for predicting its downfall.
@@prestonroe268 There is ONE main quest on Ilum on which not having companion on tank role is suicide(Im talking about one mission on Ilum and specific boss)
SWTOR is actually, truly a great game whose best elements are also its downfall. The role play elements used to be extremely strong, uniquely great for a MOG. The stories are extraordinarily great, the voice acting is often amazing, the sidekicks are a blast, the settings are really quite amazing looking, etc. But the questing is basically killing 48923 things, the stories are very linear and specific so once you've played one through the variety ends. But once you have gone through those stories, once you have done each class's storyline and each follower's story... its not nearly as fresh. It works against you by making the same thing over again more tedious. And all that voice acting that is so easy to appreciate is EXPEN$$$$IVE for the company, making expansions more difficult and costly than they could be in other games. For being as old as it is, the graphics are quite good and the sound is amazing, and it is actually quite fun to play through, so much so that every few years I get on and play more again. It really is recommended even though the game economy is utterly ridiculous. Seriously, high end stuff costs hundreds of MILLIONS of credits. And yes, the story thing causes very odd and troubled events and there are a lot of bugs, many of them added in by the latest expansion and change in the game.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by high end stuff costs hundreds of millions of credits when you can buy cheap stuff at your fleet and mod it better than the high end stuff or craft the mod and make it even more unique. You can also collect datacrons and upgrade your character along the way permanently to improve your advantage over whoever decides to pay for something in the game. You almost never have to spend money on the game unless you subscribe once to get the updated expansions every now and then.
@@christophertaylor9100 Yes the prices are high on GTN but you don't have to use it and it is not necessary because you could make equivalent high end stuff for WAAAY LESS
Swtor is the only mmorpg that ever really HOOKED me after learning the mechanics. The role play is so much more immersive. The fact that EVERYTHING is voiced makes a huge difference. The dialog options and infinate ways to design your toon's "look" really help you get into character. Plus, I really love dungeon content, and swtor has some seriously excellent dungeons. Also, the player base IS really nice & welcoming.
I have no idea how I square that with my experience. I spawn on the planet tatooine and there are just random mobs respawning in set locations inside buildings along the streets. They are so stupid and pointless to fight that everyone just ignores them and I was like "guys there's enemies here why aren't u like defeating them ur just standing around chatting...."...after fighting them for 4 minutes I completely ignored them too. Any hub surrounded by enemies that are just ignored out of boredom and pointless to fight mechanics is not a good sign.
@@Cerbyo I mean, you do get extra exp most of the time fore fighting enemies around your quest area. In fact, I'm pretty sure every quest has that sort of "miniquest" Also I was too immersed by the story to care either way.
I gotta disagree. The dialogue is highly repetitive and most of the time boils down to 'kill them or save them' for light or dark side points respectively. The design is nice but it's really nothing beyond appearance, fighting is so easy I just could spam the same 4 skills and win every encounter. Most quests took more time to arrive at the quest area and return than actually carry out and the rewards were always garbage. The worst part was... there was good content. The main storylines for each character are pretty good and flashpoints actually have great fights, music, and high stakes stories... but that's all a minority of the gameplay. Eventually I got bored.
The sad part as others I'm sure have mentioned is that there used to be in game tutorials for all these systems and the fights were actually more challenging. But for some unknow reason all the systems were "revamped" and the game was made to be much easier on all levels.
Yeah I remember screwing around with my tank+damage companion, quit for a while, got back in, talent system was rewamped, companion suddenly started healing me (they had specific nonchangeable roles before), and dungeons made it painfully clear how easy the game became. For reference, before some revamps, before the dungeon finder, I STRUGGLED to solo two-man flashpoint (shown in the video, imp side) as a tank with a healer companion (which is basically the "easy mode" of playing the game) because it simply wasn't meant to be soloed. It was possible, but difficult. Without heals, not possible. Same with other dungeons, and 2-4 man quest zones out in the open. And some revamps later I could consistently solo FOUR-man dungeons and quests with NO heals, more easily than I could solo 2 man flashpoints WITH heals before the changes. Difficulty became trivial. Regular quests are basically "story mode" difficulty, 2 man jobs may be the "normal" difficulty, and 4 man jobs I'd maybe dare to call "difficult", except if you're a tank with a healer companion because then everything loses one difficulty level. But to be honest, I'm not mad about it, because I never really liked the MMO part of the game. Generally speaking the people I encountered with weren't the patient type but the veteran type who played through everything a hundred times and rushing was routine for them, so they didn't like the fact that I was interested in the cinematics and choices, something which only bred conflict and put needless pressure on me, so ya, I kinda liked that I could basically solo everything after I returned. It was ridiculous, but good.
When was this? I stopped playing around the time the very first dlc was being released. They I came back one day and found all my abilities and states just straight gone and j couldn't bring myself to try and finish my with sorcerer... I was so trying to romance the cute little jedi too
@@somzer I am and always have been a big fan of the flashpoints(the trinity version, now existing exclusively at level cap. awful choice.) That said, I drop about 1/3 of the groups right away, because I hate speedrunning. I've seen them all a ton of times, still want to play through normal and not rush. Operations, I love too, but I don't find that many guilds do them. Basically, you're seeming to say that the game is a single player rpg with OPTIONAL mmorpg available at whim. I'd say that is a correct assessment.
the reason was money. most people wont pay for challenge, they will rather pay for fun and convenience. and the game wasnt ready for it either, it was so poorly optimized, that the boss i was supposed to interrupt didnt even spawn on many occasions. when i tried to explain it in the forums, all the fanbois flamed me as a loser and hater. without the name, this game would had shut down many years ago.
One change that was made to SWTOR that I absolutely hate is how you get to choose your advanced class type during character creation. The game originally had you start off with just your base class (Jedi Knight, Smuggler, Trooper, etc.) and introduced you to advanced classes after you leave the starter world, so you get a feeling of how your class feels WITHOUT the extra moves and could better understand how your advanced class will alter the gameplay. I have no idea why this was cut.
It was cut because people wanted to respec their advanced class, and moving that to part of character creation made it clear to these people that it was an irreversible choice.
I think for the most part new players kept skipping the two people that were to the side of the stairs. Also many people didn’t know the new advanced class came in a bag. I still wish they could have forced us into a cutscene at the capital ship when we land
I like to think that The Old Republic was the last actually good game done by Bioware before EA milked Mass Effect dry and decided to make its days numbered. I remember playing TOR back when it became free to play, and I remarked that it felt legitimately like KOTOR 3, and I meant it. The UI, granted, was changed and it was in an MMO space, so I had to share my adventure with other players and an internet connection. But everything else was still there - the mystical and ancient feel of the worlds, the impact of what my character did to the people around them, the high quality of the characters and the narration between them. It's a feeling that I still admittedly feel whenever I pick the game up again. I just wish EA didn't still have their grubby hands smeared all over it.
Ngl I think Mass Effect 3 is also great, though admittedly DLCs and updates have done a lot to improve upon the shortcomings it originally had. But I won’t deny that EA has been a blight on this company and their newer games are a far worse than what came before.
Just some common tips 1. In the map you can enable extra missions, called exploration missions 2. In the settings you can have it identify alignment choices(dark and light side) to make faster decisions when talking 3. The map problem of only being ale to see shops or taxi are also changeable in the settings menu 4. The plus sign near your health and energy bar can be used to expand how many bars you have and allow you to use more abilities 5. Like everything tutorials are turn off-able 6. When using AOE type attacks you can press the key or icon twice to auto target a hostile 7. The green people are cover opportunities that when you click either F on your keyboard or the crouching icon you will roll to said location and be in cover automatically 8. You can have cool downs have numbers present(in settings) This may be a lot, if not sweet. If you use any of these just spread the love of knowledge :) Edit: Thanks to the people that gave the comment support. I kept forgetting about it then getting the urge to play the game whenever I got a notification about this comment. So thanks everyone Also, I came back to the game after a while and wanted to mention that - If you prefer Numbers when it comes to health and energy, in the settings you can have the game identify those values. Go to the hud editor, and select your health bar and scroll through that box and you can turn it on.
yeah he really doesn't look at menus or anything at all or look around or open skills or talents or anything in ANY game, and just bitches and moans "well i can see it there, bUt ThEy DiDnT tElL mE hOw To UsE iT sO i WoNt PrEsS iT oR eVeN PreTeNd It ExIsTs!!" and then goes thru the game like a brainlet screeching about the issue he could very easily fix for the entire rest of the video. forget the game but recently he played one where he REFUSED to spend his skill points then bitched about how boring combat was and it was only auto attacks, because they didn't show him how to spend them even though he had the screen open and VERY OBVIOUSLY just had to click the skills. and he seems to do some variation of that on EVERY SINGLE ONE of these videos.
the other stories are even better. the sith inquisitor story line literally has you become a sith lord, and it feels SO worth it, like you struggled and got beaten down the entire way and finally connived your way up
You can literally become a member of the dark council and the game makes you feel like you earned it, it's such an amazing achievement and such a shame it didn't take off as it should. There was so much content on day one all fully voiced it was mind boggling, it's still a great game but you can feel the budget restrictions in the new content.
@@Formulka there's probably two reasons it didn't do as well as it could have. One is that the gameplay loop is based off of WoW's gameplay loop, it is almost literally WoW in space. Why would people go play SWTOR when they can get almost the same gameplay on WoW, and they and their friends have probably been playing on WoW for years now. FFXIV for example is a theme park MMO like WoW and SWTOR, but has measurably different gameplay mechanics, thus why people are commonly talking about choosing WoW or XIV and not WoW or SWTOR. The second reason has to do with the first Star Wars MMO, Star Wars Galaxies. At first it was nothing like WoW, a pure sandbox MMO, though lacking in some areas early on. There were no classes, instead skill trees for you to specialize in. even after they had classes there was still the Entertainer profession, that was a non-combat class (yes, even with classes there were classes that did not fight) and had its progression tied around player interaction. The entire point of the entertainer was to buff other players. Players cold build their own houses, set up guild hall, build star ship and land mounts like speeder bikes, BUILD ENTIRE CITIES FROM SCRATCH, and do all of this on literally any open square of land, not predesignated locations (except crafting, you needed a crafting station or that. even there though you could build the crafting station and put it down anywhere you liked). this MMO ran from 2003-2011, towards the end the developers tried to copy WoW and ruined so many things' people loved about the game in the process. With the old game shutting down the same year the new one launched, it was obviously done to support the new one. So when SWTOR was a theme park like WoW with very similar gameplay to WoW, many SW MMO fans left it, because it wasn't what they wanted in a SWMMO. So between basing it off of WoW and trying to attract the same player base who already loved WoW, and shutting down an actually unique Sar Wars MMO in favor of one that is trying to cut into an already cornered market, they basically shot themselves in the foot and set themselves up for failure from the get-go. The fact that it has survived is a testament to the player story aspect, which is actually unique to it.
@@mc.builder8267 I don't have much that I can say about your second reason, but in reply to your first reason, I can give two reasons why someone would rather play SWTOR rather than WOW. One is that some people simply want to play in a Star Wars setting, or even more specifically an Old Republic setting. And the other is simply that SWTOR is free. At least, all the base game content and a couple expansions are. Along with 50 or 60 levels (I forget which) rather than WOW's free 20 levels.
The most fun i have had with this game was playing through the bounty hunter story with my friend playing an imperial agent. we played as if our characters were actually working together from the chance meeting on hutta.
Different classes have different personal quest zones, that only a certain class can enter. But you can enable an option in settings that allows party memberse to enter said zone with you. Meaning you can go with your friend, help him fight and then watch him go through the dialogue. But you won't have a quest in the same zone because you're a different class. But yeah generally it's totally plausible to go through all the quests with a friend, you'll just be doing more traveling. Swtor is a game which you shouldn't rush anyways, the story is the best element and having played through all the class stories and expansions except for the newest one, i must say it's definitely worth it and will be more fun with a friend.
@@ditchfood8047 It is worth mentioning however that, as in most faction-based games, you cannot play on opposing sides and still play together. There IS a sort of RP underground for cross-faction play, though it's complicated, because you can't whisper or pm cross-faction, so you have to arrange contact points via discord or something, then only communicate face to face at neutral or contested-zone meeting places.
Me too man with my friend I played Jedi Shadow and he was Smuggler Scoundrel and it was like we had an unlikely alliance, setting aside our differences taking on the empire. This game did group questing better than any other MMO.
I tried a lot of MMOs in early teens to college years. Ultima Online, EverQuest 1 and 2, RuneScape, Star Wars Galaxies, ArcheAge, Star Trek Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Guild Wars. World of Warcraft and this game were the only two that kept my attention and were fun enough for me to actually reach the end game in them. Lots of fond memories of SWTOR and WoW raids. The narrative direction of this MMO really made it stand out and made a solo experience feel like less of a grind compared to all of the others I played.
The Flashpoint system made a lot more sense, especially the first one, when they required you to get to a certain point in the story to unlock. The first one, for example, is actually woven into the narrative as something that happens while you're going from the planet you start on to your faction's hub zone. It's an example of changing something for...really no good reason other than "GROUP CONTENT EARLY HURRAH!"
Understandable from a Story enjoying player but to be honest.. On the German server were struggling to get a group together for FPs imagine now having to consider levels into the equasion. Its a sad reality. But if you really want to enjoy the story there are also Solo/Story flashpoints.
Oh I was wondering about that. Because I played the game way back when it released and was certain that you could not just join a flashpoint until you had done the quests.
yeah with Flashpoints I tend to do them when I encounter them on the map like the Essels Flashpoint I don't do it till you see like the Essels Ship in the Fleet and can go on the Ship to the next planet instead of taking a shuttle
Yeah, when I started playing this game back in 2015 it made alout more sense. Sad how they missed stuff up like that, and trivialized combat. I still play it today, and I love it, but they really messed up alot of things for no reason along the way. I also dont remember having so many text dump tutourials back then...
And then the poor level 15 player joins Hammer Station lacking most of their skills and it's extremely painful. I still can't believe the second pull with the two big droids is one of the hardest I've seen in any flashpoint of that game.
My best experience with the game was when I was playing as a Sith and the rebel leader started dictating terms to me in exchange for information. I could have fulfilled his conditions, but the game gave me the opportunity to start killing this leader's people, friends and loved ones. And so I got the data I needed, killing everyone except for a random person who asked a legitimate question - "why did you kill everyone, but not me." The answer is also natural - I'm a Sith, I'm fucked up. This was spectacular.
Probably one of the best and most honest reviews of SWTOR I've seen in quite a while. Well done, Josh. I've played the game off and on since beta, so I've had the pleasure and displeasure of riding the waves of changes that either were a benefit the game, or served as a detriment to it. I still love it and I go back to it for short periods of time, but only for the story. PvP? HARD pass. Flashpoints? Meh. Events? Can sometimes be fun, but it depends on which event it is. Space combat with your class ship? Not worth bothering with, really. So, yeah, your perspective about how this serves better as an RPG with multiplayer elements is spot-on. The story is where it's at in this game, because unlike other MMOs, where the "story" of your character is as thin as a post-it note because all the devs (and other players, usually) care about is "EnDgAmE!1!!", SWTOR's class storylines give you a reason to care about what you're doing...at least, it does for me. I see other people play the game on streams and in YT videos and they skip the dialogue and cut-scenes, and those people annoy the bejeezus out of me. The one MMO that actually gives a shit about story, and you're skipping it to get to the combat? Even if you've played them a bazillion times, skipping over what sets this game apart from others in its genre just seems wrong. You're completely right about the Imperial Agent storyline; best one in the game by a mile. I do also recommend the Bounty Hunter one, because for a good chunk of the progression, you're actually doing bounty-hunter stuff. I'm also fond of the Sith Warrior and Jedi Knight storylines, because if you want to be either Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, those are the paths to follow, and the expansion content just works better in those classes. Honestly, there are great story moments throughout all of them, but a few are just more entertaining than others.
I remember SWTOR was hyped for about 5+years before it was released (not unlike CP2077) and on launch, I felt such a sense of underwhelming disappointment. The class stories where great but the graphics felt horribly dated and this was compounded by the fact many people bought the game on the back of the insanely good cinematic trailers. If it was done properly, I'd love to see a reboot of this game with much better graphics/animations.
PVP was amazing imo. Playing a healer didn't feel like hot garbage like it does in wow. The ME/DAO style interactive quests and the 8 independent storylines were a major high point imo.
The saddest part of SWTOR eventually shutting down would be the lost opportunity for people to play through the imperial agent storyline. It trumps darkside KOTOR/KOTOR2 by such a massive margin that it is a shame it isn't its own standalone singleplayer game. I still haven't forgotten the emotion when you get the conclusion to your watcher's storyline, whom I had started to romance. I actually couldn't believe they provided closure for that plot so long after the surrounding plots had concluded, and it hits me right in the feels to this day.
It isn’t getting shut down any time soon! I’m still a regular player on that game (at least 2-3 times a week), and I’ve been playing since 2011! They just released their road map for 2024-2025 and said they have big plans for 2026! So if it does get shut down relatively “soon”, it won’t be for at least another 3-4 years, and even that is *HIGHLY UNLIKELY!* Hell, they’re adding date night into the game where you can have pretty much unlimited dialogue with any character that you’ve romanced/married in the game! It also allows you to do quests with your married companion. In other words, lots of Yee Haw time, kissing scenes, and legitimately going on “dates” with your married companion. They haven’t specified what these “dates” will entail, but it’s still going to be a *HUGE* update that will bring a lot of people back to the game! I get to have legitimate dialogue with Vette again, so that’s all I care about! Vette is my girl lmao!… ❤❤❤
@@sirurza55 Yea, my first playthroughs were actually great, but when I got to smuggler I was disappointed with how it forced you to be a Han Solo type. I was hoping to be able to be kingpin or pirate or just someone unsavory and unwanted by the law by technicality
From my experience every class story will be both defended and criticized by someone, somewhere. And I really liked the the scrappy, fly by the seat of your pants romantic idiot vibe. Someone who is competent and justifiably cocky but also on the... not dumb but mroe short sighted thrill seeker. SoR class quest encompassed it best for me, where after not all that successful heist, you're asked why are you still in the business when you've obviously made several fortunes. Because I am in it for the job. I like not knowing if I get through the day and what the tomorrow will bring. It might be cheap excuse for some, but for me it perfectly captured the Star Wars smuggler. Which is the important part, not a smuggler,. the Star Wars smuggler. Who (be it Solo or Carrde) were often ultimately on the side of the angels.
To make it even worse, when i played SWTOR for the first time, I have actually started my first character as smuggler. M guy looked EXACTLY as the bad guy but without the face tatoo. Until the end of chapter one i was genuinly convinced I was chasing myself and i thought my character was under some influence of the force for half the time...
@@jankostrhun8725 That's a pretty good point. I don't hear the inquisitor or the consular getting as much praise as some of the other classes, but I enjoyed the character you could make for both. My first inquisitor truly felt like a master of the dark side, brute force and deception were the hammer and chisel of his craft. He would have fit in nicely among the rule of 2, he held no allegiance that wasn't calculated and wasted no time with pride or short term problems, and had no qualms entertaining the light side and its practices if they could prove useful. He was a dark sider, but not truly one of the sith code, and that was the most interesting type of character for me
Note on that first flashpoint: IIRC, it was originally presented as an alternative route from the tutorial world to the capital city. The flashpoint entrance was on the space station above the tutorial world, it was narratively integrated into the rest of the game, and once it was over you would arrive at the main story's next destination.
20:36 Fights like that *used* to be significantly harder because you had a fraction as many powerful abilities which *used* to come later, after picking an advanced class - which you only had access to after leaving the starting area. I.E. Smuggler could be gunslinger or scoundrel - but not until you made it off Ord mantel and onto the republic fleet station where you would get the quest to *pick* an advanced class. As a result, you literally didn't have access to the aoe ability you just used to down those npcs. Also, companions could, previously, only have one dedicated role. So that fight was much - much - harder, once upon a time.
Yeah, i wish the difficulty was brought back as optional things for those who want to relive the challenge. I know I do, as I've returned to that game recently.
@@shcdemolisher Well, you can always choose to keep your companions in their original configuration. Ultimately though - I think most of the changes were made in order to intentionally speed up lvling so people could do the xpacs. *Especially* after the xpacs began to become episodic with Shadow of Revan and even more so the Eternal throne drama (kofe/koet). For my part I've played swtor off and on, but I am a pre-order founder and I even have a full victorious pioneer lvling set from the dvl event (which got nerfed, btw). I have not played since the recent class restructure though, so I don't really know how I would honestly view the game if I came back. I will say, there's a good two hands full of things I don't like about the game's direction - but as of earlier this year when I last played (pre-class restructuring): I would say I liked the game overall, more so, than I did at launch.
I played the game on launch as a Bounty Hunter, and I remember dying a couple of times to one of those intro sequence bosses. I came back to the game like two years ago and got through most of Imperial Agent, and I don't think I saw my health drop below 50% other than when I unsummoned my companion in hopes of a bit of challenge. The game's definitely gotten considerably easier.
Interesting info: The reason all speeders dont have companions get in or hop on is because of the Trooper droid companion. They scrapped the entire system before launch because of him. We picked on our Main Healer trooper for a looooong time about that.
@@balazsvarga1823 he was small enough to fit the spacing in a 'compact' form. He was 1 small animation away. Big boy was the size OF the Speeder, so he screwed it up for the whole class.
Fun fact that they changed in the February mega update: smuggler and imperial agents...the ones who primarily use cover, can equip a "roll to cover" option that sticks them into cover for added defense instead of just crouching. Originally this was the default but for some reason crouching became the default and rolling was something you could equip in the ability manager later on.
Oooooh, I was so confused, I kept thinking that my game was bugged cause I remember rolling around like sonic as my smuggler before, when I created him. Then a few years later he was poop squatting
@@Eucep the strat is to always target the enemy first, then see what the game highlights as cover. If you’re playing a sniper you should ideally always get the first shot off on enemies…so I’d imagine it’s less of an issue for them.
@@KaitoGillscale Does not matter for this issue. The green highlight is not always where you will roll to, rarely it will detect something in the way and will go to another spot. Targeting the mob matters nothing for it. Then there is the mid combat issue. Many abilities force you out of cover and in the chaos of combat you can suddenly roll of into an additional mob pack. In the past died numerous times to that, that is pre to when your companions could be set to their role. I have no experience in how the issue is in operations.
The original cover mechanic was amazing, it actually prevented you from being hit from foes in that direction, or if you're in a corner, both directions- so long as you're not firing or using other abilities! It's a real shame it isn't a mechanic for all of the gun classes.
Finally Josh is covering SWTOR, was my Main MMO for awhile, it has seen better days, ever since the Eternal Empire expansions, the games been on the decline, the new expansions like Onslaught and Legacy of the Sith haven't been that exciting and a little disappointing and the gameplay loop has gotten exhausting, that's why I stopped playing Hopefully an expansion like Knights of the Fallen Empire comes one day, to pull people back towards the game, but that seems unlikely
I'm playing right now and it looks like it's doing pretty good player wise. The starting zones are full of returning and new fans of the game. I spent the better part of my gaming time assisting new players yesterday. Truly happy to see so many happy gamers.
I tried getting back into it this yr since i had some financial issues the last few yrs and no time to play like i use to and loaded up one of my mid level characters (i have a character for all classes with 4 characters ar end game, a 2 at the beginning since i started them due to the server issues while back and the rest all mid level) that I know had 3 1/2 task bars full of abilities. I had 3 empty task bars after moving everything together again, my subclass seemed to have become permanent (i say seems cuz maybe if i looked hard enough i could change it again idk) and there's now a timer on the world missions so I have to do them before the week is over or they reset on me. I knew the end game was shit thus didn't go onto that but I wasn't 60 bucks on a 2 month sub thst I only used 3 days of due to how much they nerfed me. I was still over leveled and killing everything easily but I could no longer optimize my attack output properly and felt like I was level 5 again just using the basic attack for 90% of the game so all battles were tedious. I was already annoyed a few yrs back when they started level capping worlds so ya couldn't do the group stuff over leveled (ya still can just tedious). So this made me not wanna play a game I've been playing on and off since release about my favorite(and only good) time period of star wars. Maybe when the bitterness goes away I can try again with new characters and get back into it but for now I'm just resentful and bitter they ruined all my good memories.
@@Kris-wo4pj Every time I come back to this game from taking a break, I always start a new class (I do that in every MMO really)...it's much more enjoyable to learn your class from the start, and start a unique story that you become invested in, rather than starting out with a faint idea of the backstory of your character you made years ago.
I expect guarded positivity here - all the big complaints I see are from players playing the expansion content. The new player experience is still excellent, all that Josh will likely see in his eight hours will be whatever opening planet he chooses and maybe the first Flashpoint, and all of that is just great late 00s/early 10s Bioware. The real meat and potatoes of the TOR experience is running multiple characters and experiencing all the class stories and PC voice actors. Josh won't see that here - hell, I see a lot of discussion online from people who've played for weeks and months and never worked out that they were supposed to be running multiple characters. So I suppose that will weaken his impression of the game. But unless anything catastrophic has happened in the last few months I still have a lot of faith in the first couple of dozen hours, before things bog down a bit around Alderaan/Tatooine.
The game used to be deeper. The modifications system was nerfed into nothing by the changes to the initial story section, for the current game it's irrelivent until end game now. This happened when they decided you should only have to do the class story so you got to the newer content faster. It's sad, some of the old quests (all fully voiced) were removed.
So many cool quests hidden by the stupid filter on your map...the sacrificial blood alter thingy with the skull as a sith with the granny sith...or the couple on tython who give you a kyber crystal if you don't snitch. I'll never forget leveling a sith juggernaut to 50 or 55 for the first time and getting the really cool seasonal pvp gear. Ah the memories
Like said below they were not removed, but stream lined. You can turn on Exploration Quests. Tbh I like it not being as long. Tatooine and Hoth were awful back in the beginning. Now they are less awful 😂
I love the touch of describing an English accent in the game as 'An Imperial Accent' Apparently the Empire literally all speak with English accents normally, and in order to disguise themselves sound more 'Galactic Basic'' (American) This is such a beautiful combination of meta and world building. Even Imperials speak in different ways according to status (more scrappier imperials speaking with Cockney accents)
The more I play this game the more I realize that it really doesn't need to be an MMO lol. I barely notice other people, I never found myself needing to find a group (I did mostly beginner stuff though), and it just feels like the highlight is the story which only really involves the player.
It's because this was supposed to be KOTOR 3, but then MMOs were the new hotness and everyone wanted to be the WOW-killer and a slice out of that pie, so EA made Bioware turn it into one. To this day, I'm still salty about it, as I would've really loved to play this game without it being saddled with all the MMO baggage.
@@Horvath_Gabor I was going to say I think this is exactly what happened. It was sort of back in the day where everything had to have a co op mode or a multiplayer component of some kind, online passes were a thing, and publishers were trying hard to put out the next big MMO. You had better believe that EA was all over this one. When I play it, I always ask myself why there is all the generic MMO crap getting in the way of a good KOTOR game, and why that KOTOR game looks like a Sims expansion.
For the fights not feeling like Boss fights: Everything below 60 for me feels like "okay, game got updated, old AddOns and bosses got weaker due to squishes" - Some later boss fights actually take much longer and look very nice. Not very dangerous for singleplayer modes, i grant that, but they are fun, and in "Veteran"-Mode even challenging! And for the Plot point: Actually you do not get your ship back on Ord Mantell anyway, but you notice Skavak has fled the planet with it. You need to follow him to Coruscant before you get it, which you do by traveling with a Shuttle to the Fleet, and continue with a ship to Coruscant, and heres the point: The Esseles was one of two options to travel to Coruscant, and you just tried to get a friendly travel when the attack happens. What your problem in that situation was, is also, due to the strong leveling that is going on with the change of XP: You leveled into a stage where you get a classical group finder, which wasn't there back in the day, and get the Dungeon before you would - back in the day -accessed it! So thats a trouble of "Old Content" Problems many MMOs have. The only one that didn't throw me into dungeons early in old content, was Final Fantasy 14, which just locks them into the main story line, so you can't accidentally "get in too early".
@@RickReasonnz I mostly agree with that, excepting that just a handful of specs really blow ass at soloing, such that H2 as a standard would actually make those a slog to play. That inherently cripples choice. I remember the overall challenge of the game being drastically higher than it used to be, but that was all the way back in vanilla, when the game actively tried to kick your ass, and you actually had to figure out how to play your class or you would die repeatedly against some STORY bosses. Oh, and also, you had to gear and rep your companion in order to make them useful at all, in the one role that particular comp was allowed to fill.
@@antonsimmons8519 I know; you're probably right. However, I only started playing in... 2020, so really I've NEVER had a challenge levelling in SWTOR. Although, I know some are better at it, but I don't really think there are classes that are so bad at soloing they'd be a joke to play, especially now with the choices behind double classes.
FFXIV is still the only game I've played so far that does this so well. You can't skip content on your first char and everything unlocks progressively like it did when it first launched. Blows my mind how other games dont do this
That first Flashpoint actually makes sense if you pick up the quest from its original location. Kinda sad that you don't unlock it there first before being able to just auto queue for it. It's supposed to be your transport to Coruscant after you get to the space station. Coruscant is the next planet in the main story after Ord Mantell. And the fact it doesnt put you back on Ord Mantell where you queued up for it is a huge problem
Yay i was wondering that, i havent played in ages, but i remember the Esseless.. they dumbed you where the flashpoint ORIGINALY started i think, which wow
I remember when this game first released, the onboarding of new players was actually pretty organic. Most everything felt like it was a part of the character's main storyline, even that first weird flashpoint is *supposed* to be the character's dramatic trip from the faction's main fleet to the next planet, and you couldn't just teleport to it until you had actively finished the events of your starting planet, (Ord Mantell, Typhon, Nal Hutta, or Korriban) Hell, there was even a small little story quest where your character got to select their class specialization where you talked to an npc representative of your class and they actually explained the role of your expanded class specialization in a way that felt organic and interesting, (now days you select the specialization at character creation and just are that subclass from the start). Not to mention that companion NPCs actually had specifically assigned combat roles, which made the decisions of which companion you were bringing with you actually feel legitimately important, as if you had the tank npc, and you were playing a dps class, then you were about to learn the definition of genuine pain, when both you and your tank got fucking melted by enemy blaster fire almost immediately with no healing in sight. It's worth noting that the combat encounters on the tutorial planets were also more difficult in that early time, and if you were not careful, you would die and need to retry mission beats over and over again until you could get through them. Cut to... Jesus... eleven years later, now and the game has been "Streamlined" to make it more immediately accessible to more people, yet it feels more like a mass produced generic copy of the vibrantly interesting game that it began as. All in all, I miss the early days of Old Republic for it's immersiveness, but I'm still glad that it exists today.
Totally agree. I've been a SWTOR player since 2012 as well, and now my son is getting into it. When they removed companion specialization at first I thought "cool, now I can just take who I want" - but I quickly realized it made the game much more boring. While yes, the game play itself was simpler back then (I honestly don't have the time to learn all the new crafting skills, for example), being able to jump right to level 70 just...seems cheap.
every game was streamlined. That's the sad truth of marketing. And making "individual difficulties" where enemies have more health and dmg for you alone is boresome. Honestly, at this point, SWTOR (but frankly any other decade old MMORPG) needs to be shut down and start again as a new games. SWTOR 2, WoW2, Neverwinter onliine 2 and etc.
It was annoying but also cool. The companions not only had certain classes but you had to equip them too. I hated having to take a certain companion even if I didn't want to. Though you don't miss stuff till it's gone, and now I miss having to plan stuff
Okay, so, as someone who hasn't touched this game since at least 2016 or something (I remember being surprised that I could switch the class of companions), it sounds like any attempt to play it nowadays will leave me disappointed. For one thing, I _really_ liked the in-game advanced class system. What stands out is my Consular character being concerned about Shadows drifting towards the Dark Side, but being reassured about it. Also, the feel of "Okay, you've graduated to Knighthood. Now you can leave the planet and stretch your wings, including checking in with an advanced tutor." Edit: Just finished the video. If his score is Star Wars/10, then yeah. I'm not gonna even try to recapture the old magic because it's gone away. At least the George Lucas films are still there to see despite modern "improvements".
SWTOR is my main mmo. I love it, I'm so glad this video exists! A note to potential new players: Please don't worry about the in-game tutorials. Look up tutorials on UA-cam instead. I'd recommend looking up Swtorista and going through some of her videos.
I'm saying this as someone who was "tutorialized" when the game came out, and knew how to play MMOs before, so I'm probably biased on this, but do you even need any tutorial as a new player? When you get to the endgame, sure. For the singleplayer bits, I can't really think of anything.
I actualy like in-game text wall tutorials. SWTOR I pick, play (depends if for me or with others) every year or so for awhile then dont play for months on end. The "horrible" text tutorials allows me to read through them and im back in action, no need to replay 5h of ingame tutorial.
A lot of the problems Josh points out, actually only started with the recent 7.0 update. Bugs and UI stuff. They really took a step back with 7.0 in terms of usability. It's why I stepped away from the game currently.
Yep, as far as wide ranging and game engine bugs this 7.0 was the worst, other updates had area or world specific bugs not ones that infiltrated the entire game.
For me, the game was better when it first came out. Each class was personalized, followers were unique to the class and the gameplay was far better. Now it reeks of online mobile game mechanics, and a crapload of daily quests. I miss the investment into my character's story, and as a serial altoholic I hate that companions got shared after the Eternal Empire expansion.
My entire guild stopped playing after 7.0, it was super underwhelming and a lot of bad/unnecessary updates that they chose to implement regardless of the really bad feedback from the public test servers.
A major thing you missed out is the harassment support system Two reasons people stay for this game 1: It Star Wars, Obvious 2: You can nearly get away with anything, You can troll, Attack, Harass and say nearly all the worst words you can think of, People have used special letters to have names like Nazi or Hitler or other words I rather not repeat I seen multiple people brag they got banned from Final Finatasy or another game and so came back to SWTOR till the ban is up Nobody is around to read or address the problems, You can have piles of evidance and 9/10 nothing will happen Also have been reports when people tried to edit a report ticket with information and details they just get a error and lose all the progress So players and guilds tend to police themselves by reporting to the point they get "squalched" which is muting them from using general chats and whispers Among other savoury options
@@beefcake1876 See that's the problem, It easy to avoid it in other MMO's but SWTOR it very small The map is small the hub is small the player base is small, So no matter what you can't get away from it Other MMO it very easy, Maps are big enough to avoid and more players to meet Can't do that with SWTOR, And not everyone going to have thick skin
You do realize the game lets you play as a genocidal maniac if you want? You're allowed a slave as a sith war? Considering that it seems weird to complain about character names. Harrasment of other players is different and I would discourage that but the names thing is kinda silly to complain about.
I don't know if ''you can be an open racist bigot and not be canceled'' is the ''selling point'' you think it is, or i missed the point when we just all became fascist pricks and I'm in danger.
A couple things I haven't seen mentioned: 1) You can toggle multiple filters for the map, but you have to find and turn on a setting in the preferences menu to do it. 2) There's actually a third level to how much you spend on the game - once you have spent any amount of real money on a subscription or cartel coins, you gain "preferred" status. Even if you let a subscription lapse, you keep that status indefinitely. It comes with a few more privileges than free2play, though you don't get access to new expansions when they drop, and you still need to pay to use artifact equipment. 3) There is a way to earn cartel coins without spending any real money! If you sign up for a 2FA security key (which is free), you get a small amount of cartel coins every month, regardless of your subscription status, or if you even log into the game.
You can also get cartell coins by completing achievements. If my math is correct, you should get about 500 coins simply by playing all class stories for your legendary status
I did the 2FA thing in 2015, I went back to the game this year to the tune of 8000 Cartel Coins which is over 50$ worth of cartel coin purchases and all that without spending a dime in an account almost 7 years old. I think this plus gaining sort of a preferred status after making purchases is some of the most F2P friendly attitude towards any MMORPG I have ever seen and honestly I wish more games did it. The subscription for the game is not necessary but it helps and you don't have to stop playing just because you aren't paying anymore, which is one of the things about FF14 that irks me the most. Note: You need to have preferred or sub status to be able to spend the Cartel Coins earned through 2FA, so you still need to spend money but as little as 5$ will do it which is great value in my opinion
except this prick tells the exact same lie of deserving every aspect of every mmorpg for free you see it every time he starts lying on and on about pack sizes in every video
Remember folks, especially to the new viewers, Josh is pretty fair with his reviews, he’ll praise the positives just as much as he points out the negatives. The previous Worst MMO video has shown this, so chill out. Just felt the need to do a little PSA because of the game he’s choosing to cover on this series with a pretty negative name.
Negative: I wanted to take out a monthly subscription via Steam, unfortunately it didn't work, money was debited and support had to activate it manually within 8 days. Pro: I can slay Jedis
@@vanusk3493 yeah no any mmo with its own website/launcher ya always go for their own shit. The steam version will always be the least supportive and shittiest since most people don't use it.
I'm a huge fan of the game who just returned to finish up some more class stories. Can't wait to see Josh tear into the mtx side of this game or the over inflated marketplace. Wanna know something great? I'm still gonna love the game after the video.
Having played SWTOR at launch, and trying to come back to it a few times (I also started Imp Agent, and wholeheartedly agree with it being a phenomenal story), I feel like this all really does encapsulate my experiences. Extremely good game, but terribly managed. Guild Wars 2 and this have to be the two 'biggest potential, most mundane execution' in modern gaming
@@rinslittlesheepling1652 Guild Wars 2 is being handled a lot better, though. Besides balancing issues, the game is improving, and a lot better than launch.
@@obyone878 True. I haven't played GW2 as much as I've played SWTOR, but I've seen both in different phases and GW2 shows actual improvement over time, albeit with some definite issues. SWTOR shows no signs of anyone at its studio ever improving on anything meaningfully; it's the definition of "phoning it in" and coasting off of what's already there, while occasionally being an outlet for a new design lead to come in and fail upwards by making the game worse and then leaving.
I honestly think the game was better at launch, even with the failures they had I'd play a "Classic SWTOR" in a heartbeat, even if it required a monthly sub to play.
Interesting thing about how you mentioned that on the republic flashpoint, there is a moral choice where being good makes the mission harder. The opposite is true for the Imperial flashpoint. If you keep the Black Talon's captain alive, because he is an experienced captain, he avoids some of the boarding torpedoes.
This was one of my mains for years until college started kicking my ass and I had to step away. I knew this was coming. I was nervous as hell, but... I had no reason to be. You did this game justice for both its positives and negatives, as you do with every game you cover. Truthfully, I think that is what has made you such a great reviewer. You don't do shit for the views, or to pander. You make, honest, good, faithful content. Thank you for all you do.
My favorite aspect was the ability to ESC out of a conversation choice "playing out" if you didn't like the effect on your dark/light/companion relationship and try another option. The worst is thematic strange things like playing a Jedi with a convoluted into mission where you craft your first lightsaber, and then a little later some twelve year old kid thanks you for rescuing her brother by handing you a better lightsaber... as if they were on sale at Wal-Mart. Also, if you had played Jedi or Sith (also the name of a race that scoffs at any other races being Sith), you would have had some extra systems involving stances that change skills, and some more... magical... storylines. (Since I was a player back when it cost money - i.e. before it was free - I have some perks even when I play for free.)
The community is very welcoming; every time I dip my toes back into this game I always find amazing people that are willing to help and explain things.
Same. Been playing off and on for years, and anytime I go back, there is always a guild or two that will actively encourage new players and teach along the way.
my favorite part is the general chat on Dromund Kaas (Capitol of the Sith Empire), the people there are either quoting Darth Baras or are the autistic version of a 4chan pol thread.
After years of playing the only section of the game where i consistently see toxic people the 4v4 PVP deathmatch. The 4v4 mode doesn't not pop up too often but you always get at least one teammate who tells one of your team to never queue for pvp again or some dumb shit like that.
i remember getting my friend to try this game out back in the day and he made a republic trooper. there’s a small story beat where a private comes to you begging to help him because his commanding officer is corrupt and is probably going to get him killed, and without hesitation my friend immediately hit the third dialogue option which was “GET LOST.” i nearly pissed my pants laughing that night especially when he got the message later that the private died after being sent into a minefield or whatever. this game was the shit.
The foundation hasnt necessarily been neglected, its been reworked poorly. A lot of your gripes are due to how the early game has been restructured. It definitely could use some new structure changes. Btw if you get stuck in the environment again just type /stuck
My first character in the game was the Jedi Consular and I stopped playing after a few days. I tried playing again after a few months, as an Imperial Agent, and weeks of my life disappeared as I was so immersed in the story. There were multiple times I would forget I was playing an "MMO" game. The Imperial Agent story line is just that good.
Consular story line is honestly at the bottom of all the class storylines in swtor right next to republic trooper and probably bounty hunter. The rest of the classes were done justice
It's really odd because for some reason, to me, Consular is my absolute favourite class on Republic side, however I very much think that it is not a good first class to play, I think mostly because its storyline requires a bit of prior knowledge from other storylines first. In contrast, I absolutely despised doing Jedi Knight and that's the one that made me swear off of republic side otherwise lol. Never did manage to finish Smuggler or Trooper - though, as I am returning to the game I should probably do so, at least for completionism's sake.
I really dislike Jedi ethos. I usually play smuggler/rogue/scoundrel types and losing the ship was frustrating probably because someone in a previous game stole their loot. I haven't ever made a dark side choice in the game. As Bounty Hunter I never killed targets I would just report them dead for the reward and let them vanish for a price.
What's interesting to note is that some of these systems like gear customisation actually used to be explained ! As for the smuggler story, it gets better after the first act. And yes, I think that every Empire story is better than the Republic side. Ithink there's no bad story in this game, but the "less good" ones are all Republic side. At the end of the day it's all subjective, there's not really a bad class story as every story is good at what it does. Many say the consular's story is the worst but it's one of my favs. In the end, every story fits it's class, and that's what matters.
I'm that type of player that wants to play on the good side most of the time, but yes, no matter how you look at it, somehow the dark side stories are just better written in this game.
Personally I liked both Jedi stories more than the bounty hunter one, and liked consular more than knight. From what I recall, Smuggler was the weakest one, especially early on... never liked Corso so I guess that didn't help either.
@@blissett4148 Originally I started out with the consular at first back in the day, but somehow I still managed to finish the sith inquisitor first. Somehow it pulled me in as a story a little bit more, even though I didn't liked to be mean to the npcs still XD Most of the time for me it felt like the Jedi side had something missing from the story, but that's just me, I probably didn1t vibe with those stories at that time
@@blissett4148 Corso has been the most annoying campaign to me as well. And since he's the first, you have to play a much larger chunk of the game before replacing him.
The flashpoint thing is undeniably true, but it did use to be that you had to get that flashpoint by reaching the fleet, talking to an npc and accepting a quest and then boarding the ship that flashpoint was taking place on. Its sort of been messed up due to the age of the game and most people having done it. You are right that it was much better without actually doing anything the text dumps tell you to do. I ignored them in the beginning and ignore them now(obviously).
I just want to note something real quick about the story. So from my experience playing against type is far more fun than the alternative. So what I mean is playing on the empire as an incredibly empathetic just nice dude is so strangely satisfying that it’s a little alarming. On the flip side playing as a murderous,embittered Jedi knight with a massive superiority complex is so much fun it’s bonkers really the games far better when playing against type and I recommend it to anyone who plays this game.
i agree a lot, but for some classes it is just meaningless or boring as hell, there is no way to salvage the mess that is the counsler story, ds or ls, and the commando is hella boring after chapter 1. same goes for bounty hunter. i love going dark side with the inquisitor a lot more then light side, and ds sith warrior means orgy with vette and domina jeysa willsam HELL YES.
Probably irrelevant at this point, but from what I recall from playing it many years ago, that tutorial flashpoint on the republic side is actually integrated into the overall class story progression, just like it was on the sith side (and as a fun side note, if I recall it is the same in-universe event played from two different perspectives depending on faction). It seems that they messed up the timing of when the pop-up and the ability to queue for it show up. If a new player ignores that, they should arrive at it way more organically with any of the classes by just following the story... which would avoid the confusion. Ironic that the text tutorial was apparently what caused it.
Yup. You actually use the Black Talon flash point as the shuttle to Vaiken Spacedock. You were just a passenger on a ship that was commandeered by the Imperial Intelligence and you were then made to take out the traitor on the other ship.
@@LasherTimora tbh group finder is 100% fine. Just introduce the dungeons in the story and unlock them that way. I really like the QoL later in the game. Or if you are a veteran and already saw every dungeon.
I played and finished all class stories (yay for legendary status) and I think that overall all Empire stories are much more interesting, fleshed out and fun than the Republic ones. My personal favorites are Bounty Hunter (my main, long before The Mandalorian made it cool), Sith Warrior and Sith Assasin:)
I enjoyed playing some of the storylines in "opposite mode", playing a LS Sith Assassin, or a DS Jedi Shadow (Iiirc my initial playthroughs were LS BH, LS Sith Assassin, DS Agent, DS Sith Warrior, LS Trooper, LS Jedi Knight, DS Smuggler, and DS Jedi Shadow. DS Jedi Shadow is probably the most weird mix of stuff. You'd think the Jedi Council would eventually get mad that you keep killing the people they tell you to not kill, but no. The number of times this played out almost exactly is kind of silly: Council: Hey, go find this guy and bring him to us Find guy, get info from him, kill him Council: Hey, where's the guy we asked about? Me: Dead Council wags their fingers at me Council: Hey, don't do that again. We've got another person for you to find... Though tbf, The DS Agent & DS Sith Warrior were just too fun. Agent for the "License to Kill" feeling (complete with seducing everything on two legs), and DS Warrior just felt like being a serious beast of a Sith.
I remember playing SWTOR at launch for several months, and the new player experience just felt so good. No text boxes, no terrible guides, talent points... it all felt so much like a classic MMO in all the right ways, but with excellent voice acting, an amazing score, and WAY better narrative than most other MMOs even attempt. What hurts the most is the "teleport to your first dungeon" thing. My first playthrough, I got to the station, followed my story quest, and then saw this guy offering passage to Coruscant on the cheap, and found out it was a dungeon. Partying up with a group of players all heading to Coruscant as my first dungeon experience was incredible! It felt so cool having all the disparate storylines converge for a brief moment aboard this ship going somewhere you all HAPPENED to need to be. It felt like you started the game off as a superhero, and then the Esseles was this early game Avengers event where you all got together and saved the world. Seeing that experience diluted just makes me so disappointed, but also glad I stopped playing the game well before it got to that point.
All of this was done during the Knights of the Eternal Throne Arc, it broke soo many systems that it cheapened new player experience past redemption......the Eternal Throne Arc really fucked over SWOTOR and took away the mmo feel and made it just an online RPG. Rise of Revan murdered dungeons with the 3 man dungeon system but Eternal Throne killed what was left...
SWTOR for new players could be a heaven. Some of the the stories in this game saurpass every SW movie. Ancient Sith Lords compared to the likes of Darth Vader or Luke are like Titans to an ant. Some are so well written that you'd be wanting a movie based story. Also the Empire in this game is portrayed not like in the movies "all evil and cringe". In fact most brutal kills ever made in this universe, is made by Jedi, not Sith. Also some classes have 2 or 3 replayability because it has different outcomes in the story
"ancient sith Lords compared to the likes of darth vader or Luke are like titans to an ant" My biggest problem with legends, summed up in one sentence. Impressive.
Damn, so many memories. And I am saying this because I actually was on the testing team back in the day at this game at EA. I remember encountering bugs, submitting them then reviewing if they were actually fixed, checking the mechanics, the mission flow was not obstructed and that it can be completed and so on. I decided to write this comment because my tester instinct kicked in at the minute 13:36 when for half a second the room in front of Josh disappeared. That is actually a bug named occluder and if you stay in that area and move the camera around slowly you will actually see that you can reproduce it.
I love this game. The story really made you feel like a sith, jedi, bounty hunter or smuggler. I stopped playing cause of the lack of end game content long before they started releasing the DLC's. As a free MMO now, it's worth a play through if you never played it
The Smuggler storyline doesn't feel like a smuggler at all. What are you talking about? Sure, you "smuggle" stuff occasionally, but you're basically just a delivery man - at no point do you actually have to run from the law, or even attempt to hide the fact that what you're doing is illegal. An NPC lawman literally stops you on Taris and says "I know you're a smuggler, but I can't prove it, so go about your business." Heck, you don't even get half-way through the Smuggler story before you're recruited by the Republic to work for them. And because of the game's binary alignment system (Republic or Empire) you can't even betray the Republic to cash in with the Empire (Even in the late game, where you can choose the Saboteur path, you're still stuck with the Republic, have to murder thousands of Empire soldiers and sith lords, and just occasionally get an optional side quest to undermine the war effort).
@@LadyDoomsinger Smuggler story is hands down the single worst class story in the game. I really struggled to hit 50 with it and my smuggler has been sitting at the bottom of my character list for nearly a decade at this point untouched, unloved and unwanted.
@@LadyDoomsinger Yeah the smuggler story has it's moment, for example when a Sith and a Jedi quarrel over you on Tatooine. But the other class stories really are by far superior.
Weirdly enough the Esseles and Black Talon Flashpoints are introduced via the story. When you are told to take a shuttle from the Fleet to your capital planet, the game makes you walk past the respective Flashpoints. There's an NPC who talks about how taking a shuttle can take a few days but a faster option had been arranged for your character, that being the Esseles or Black Talon cruiser.
just a short list of things i remember having changes: Companions: These used to be class locked (DPS, Heal, Tank) So you needed to get to a specific point in the story before you would get a certain class helper. Mods: As mentioned in the video any mods required use of the mod table. Quick travel locations: You used to need to interact with travel stations in order to unlock a location for quick travel use. Class trainers: Your class abilities used to be locked to a trainer that you were required to unlock new skills from. Subclasses: Each class only had 2 subclasses originally. now they have been cross merged (2 knight classes + 2 counciler classes = 4 total subclasses under either story choice) this adds an interesting dynamic to class story and their combat allowing a play through to be more dynamic. Leveling: The leveling system is much improved since the days gone by of F2P being constantly 2-3 levels under recommended. and as the game was based around this model the fights become very easy when you are at or above the recommended level. the shop: The Cartel Market used to be much simpler in scope. mainly serving to grant subscriber benifits or unlocks or to buy special outfits or mounts. this has exploded in order to scrape as much money as possible from the currently running (movies or shows) Star Wars content. I am sure there is more but this is what I remember.
Further about subclasses, they aren't locked in any sort of way at all anymore. You can select any of the subclasses for your main class archetype at character creation, even if the subclass is for the other faction. Example: you can create a Jedi Knight for the storyline, but start it off with Sith Assassin abilities. Serves very well for RP purposes. You also get to choose a second class now to switch between.
One huge thing that made a big difference in gear progression for vanilla swtor was each planet had its own commendations that would be used to buy gear with big stats but getting those wasn’t easy or fast and eventually they merged the commendations into one currency which made leveling way easier around shadow of revan era cause you’d be able to plan out and upgrade every 8 or so lvls
The irony is that everything he's complaining about as a new player was added to the game in an effort to make it easier for new players. The tutorial popups are a relatively new addition because the developers thought it was too hard for new players to learn stuff at the beginning. Same thing with the teleporting to dungeons that got him stuck on Carrick Station. The good news is you can avoid all these problems by just turning the tutorials off. Just disable all the popups, and you'll figure out everything naturally.
Ya know I was just thinking during his segment about the flashpoints that i remembered it working very differently when I played years ago. First time I saw flashpoints was when I was supposed to take a ship to the 2nd imperial planet and there was an option for a "faster option" that was the introduction to flashpoints.
lol, do you think it was the casuals, who were begging for faster access to FPs? and i dont see how the stair bug makes it easier for new players either. you have to explain that one for me.
@@kimrasmussen7188 the lesson to learn, which no MMO seemingly does is... stop making it easier for anyone. When can we just admit that MMO's arent for everyone. the ADHD people who want rapid rewards and complain about MMO's being too hard, are the first ones to get bored and abandon the game for a newer shinier one. No MMO that I can think of which was later made easier was made better. they all failed and lost players.
@@jamescampbell720 okay. do you want to invest 100s of millions in in a risky project with low earning? this may come as a shock to you, but no game of any kind grows in size , as they get older. it is true, that mmos arent for every one. but if you think, that showing a paying customer the door is good business, then i have dozens of bridges to sell you...
25:32 That is one of the biggest pet peeves I have with the companions. The game is really inconsistent in acknowledging them. For most of the time you could actually roleplay as if they were some ghost you imagine, since the game mostly totally ignores your companions. But ever so often, suddenly an NPC will acknowledge your companion in a cut scene, which proves they are there... only to totally ignore them standing beside them in the next scene.
It's mostly the class story missions where they are acknowledged, though some world story missions give them dialogue as well. I think this is a limit of the games budget, fully voicing dozens of companions and incorporating them into the stories would take a crap ton of resources and time. But yeah, it is a shame.
i also hate how DLC companions like theron or lana don't really react or comment when you do non DLC stuff, for example if you come to dromund kaas with mako she'll comment on it while for example lana or theron who im guessing would have much more to say about it do not comment becuse they're post class story companions i was always sad about it, i'd love to hear their reactions about different places you go to, especially my sith space wifes :P
There used to be a few things that made the og class story hard maybe 5 years ago, being: 1. Companions were skill locked, so you would usually wait for your first healer or play healer yourself and let your companion do all the work. You also needed to gear your companion. 2. Boss fights had mechanics that actually meant something: one-shot abilities you needed to interrupt, grapples that took half your health, abilities you needed to shield. 3. Abilities were trained with credits not automatically given, so if you didn't have enough money to train your abilities you would go into fights without super overpowered AOEs like Sweeping Blasters (the one you use often in the video) As someone who's played the game for a long time, I will note that the old 'tor was a lot more engaging combat wise because of said difficulties. Had you played the game when it came out, I'm sure the fights would have felt more immersive. The game made you grind more to progress. Now the only hard content is endgame. Super great video recounting the current state of swtor, though :)
The tutorial system is definitely hampered by .. well, years and years of added systems - back in the day, the tutorials were pretty basic and were about core things like.. well, moving. Years and years later any system you remotely come near unlocking is dumping info on you that other players would be drip fed over time as it was released. Now its kind of all just showered on you, which is a somewhat common MMO problem that is so easily solved I do not know why most of the time it's not. The dungeon finder is also a good example of how it can disrupt the game even more - originally Esseles/Black Talon was, as other had mentioned, an optional but flowing part of the narrative taking you to the fleet and introducing you to group content and the old system of social points and multiplayer rolling for dialogue options, with all that entailed. It's also interesting see how easy the early game is now with all the reworks - I have memories of it being somewhat difficult, but as with all MMo's things get easier early on as time goes on. I have very distinct memories of trying a quest on a later planet for several hours as it was so tightly tuned with required interrupts that I had to be perfect with. Even with all its flaws though, SWTOR is an amazing rpg with optional multiplayer content, and even the worst story is still worth giving a play through - especially as many of the choices to have some impact somewhere along the line, even if its just "oh this guy is alive and helping me for 30 seconds because I spared them early" type Bioware stuff. I like to come back to it now and again play the new content and no doubt I'll end up going through some of the original stories again one day when they're faded. It's a shame that SWTOR is in a pseudo not quite maintenance mode as I assume it still makes enough money to put out a little bit of new content once in a blue moon but not quite enough for the love it deserved and got originally. Also, Carrick :p.
Well said. "Great RPG, not a great MMO." I was a day 1 player, then EA ruined everything. How did they ruin everything? Only paid players may wear purple (epic) items. My clothes and weapons all fell off!!
I played it also for a very long time. Of course with subscribcion. Then i wasn't at home for a year and had no real internet so i let my subscribcion went out. When i got home, i wanted to play it again of course. It was then, when i noticed a few differences between sub and the preferred player but it was still ok. Then that went out too and i was a F2P Gamer and man... that sucked. I had millions of credits on every character. And after that i only could hold 100.000 Creds at the time. I had the best equipment at this date (luckily my characters were all max Level so i could still wear it) but buying new equipment from the market or traders? Nope. Cosmetic changes like the same colour scheme for the armor or even removing the helmet? Nope. For each armor part, i had to buy the same colour scheme again. And i even couldn't go on Flashpoints with my guild comrades. I played a few months but after the Eternal Empire story i had enough.
Not disagreeing on that point, the fact that they could let non subs to use purple gear but that purple gear is literally useless. All you have to do is grab an adaptive armor for very cheap or an outfit and replace the mods once 30-40 levels or so. Not to mention that if u just do flashpoints, you can run with 0 gear till max lvl then go straight for endgame gear. edit: i've been playing on and off since 2013 and i never had problems with purple gear.
i remember playing this at launch with a few friends. we decided to plays siths, however, unlike my friends i decided to play as "good" sith. so whenever we did a dungeon it was always funny (for me) when we had to make one of those good vs bad choices, and i ended up winning the dice roll and getting them all mad in the process. happy times (:
Tbh Swtor is underrated as hell. The story alone makes it worth playing if your into Star Wars. The expansion story is one of my favorite gaming experiences. The game play is kinda like a diet wow but it has enough depth to it to keep things interesting and each class has a different unique play style.
My personal gripes: class specific and companion content basically ends after the main story. I get that it would be a hassle to make every expansion have a different story for each class but it would be cool and keep the overall game more cohesive. Pretty weird to have a dude with a gun throwing down with a planet eating super space wizard. And companions already didn't have that much content around them, but once you get to the expansions they all basically just take up space. I play sith inquisitor and NONE of my original companions come back in any meaningful way in the expansions. Sad. It's kind of cool that they give you access to everyone's companions later on and then some, but that just adds to the feeling that none of them really matter and I'd rather just go on more adventures with my original crew.
I really wish they kept the expansion but made a unique way to handle it with every class that ties into your past character experience. I felt like a jedi knight on my honourable "my word is my bond" bounty hunter towards the end and I wanted nothing to do with it.
@@Supadrumma441 the eternal empire story just doesn't fit any of the none force sensitive classes. Maybe there's a way they could've had every class take a different role in the conflict. Like the inquisitor gets possessed by volcorian and they deal with that, the warrior deals with arcann and/or vaylin, the smuggler does the heist, etc, etc. Not really a big fan of the whole alliance situation
I played my Jedi in the expansions because I need my existence to make sense. But I missed Jorgen, he was my fav companion. Oh! I can still travel with him?! Um…why would he travel with my Consular? Could I have another storyline for my trooper please? Please? BioWare! Hello!!!! They hung up on me.
Nah, there’s nothing more badass than a random dude with a gun throwing down with ultra-powerful space wizards. It’s the ultimate Star Wars fantasy. Everyone I knew growing up wanted to be Han Solo, not Luke.
I played for the first 7 years of this game. It's such a good game, we used to chomp at the bit for a continuation of the storylines alone. I still pop in to play sometimes. I think the main reason it has deteriorated over time is they chose a poor engine that had limitations and just didn't work to fix that and it has aged poorly because of that.
I did/do the same. Watching this vid will probably get me to sub for another month.. play a while.. and then move on again. Idk.. I really enjoyed it for a very long time.. but I guess it is a bit dated now. If they did a SWTOR 2, I would be so into that.
I really really enjoyed this game, from start to end (of where i had played until) I loved healing in this game, and the only game that had even been close for me for that was WoW. I mained a commando healer and me and one of my best friends who played a tank would queue together, and we could tie up 3-4 players of the 5 on the enemy team with that combo. God they really do need to make a sequel. tbh so does STO, I would love to see them lean in to the bridge commander style of gameplay in STO.
It’s a good review. This game was definitely worn down by time. I think the sadest thing for me was that the combat got easier and easier. You used to have to cycle interrupts and stuns, not just aoe everything down with OP companions. I died on some bosses multiple times in the early days in solo instances and had to ask people for suggestions on bow to beat it.
played this on a sub a few months back and i have to agree aside from some few bosses the regular mobs are just way too easy. more annoying then anything from how many there are when you are just trying to travel somewhere
I remember when I first beat the emperor I was super disappointed because of how much of a pushover he was, then reading about how hard the final bosses used to be. The devs could easily scale up the hp and damage of them, but they just won't. I've found ways to force the combat to be harder, such as removing buffs and companion abilities, but even this really isn't enough. As for interrupts, it took me until the end of Ilum to even learn about those, since I literally didn't need them until coming across a boss with a one hit kill ability.
I got real good as an End based Assassin tank, in the old days, with a full rotation. Shortly after F2P and the initial class changes (simplification) it just got too easy, and dumbed down.
@@brubbbbbb yeah. I do everything I can to nerf my character while playing: buy an item in the main faction space-station from the gree (black something?) that nerfs how fast you level, dont wear gear, keep companion on passive so they dont do anything, etc. it kinda works but it removes the fun of finding good gear and it’s weird when your companions dont do anything. I wonder if anyone made a “classic” server for this game…
38:50 The real way to fix being stuck, is with /stuck btw; that command will become quite common, as it's also the "suicide to make a raid wipe quicker" command Otherwise quite a good video ^^ I would say as a longtime player, they streamlined leveling to the point of triviality (bad), but at the same time, introduced purple quest icons for main storylines (good) And in general, the community is fantastic compared to wow
Virtually everything I experienced with this game could be summed up with "the Imperial version is cool and the Republic version feels like a complete afterthought". Then the developers were confused why they had a massive population imbalance the second the game launched...
When has the good guy side not been boring? Look at every star wars movie currently out it is all a rerun about the same family, the skywalkers, now compared that to a potential movie about Revan and the Old Empire. There is literally endless of lore they could use here to make a dark and gritty star wars movie or series that the fans would love but instead they keep on repeating a beaten to death story that even the normie crowd are tired of by now. I would argue even the old star wars movies were trash compared to what they could have been, but disney is just carrying on the torch of the originals further running the IP into the ground for no good reason other than appealing to literal 5 year olds. FIX UR SHIT DISNEY.
The imperial agent storyline really is just beautiful. Chapter 2 got me so emotionally invested, I called out of work and played until 3am just to rush to its conclusion. If nothing else, play through it for the feels.
I absolutely love the agent story. I had only played jedi and sith before trying it and I absolutely did not expect any of it. At least the real story since chapter one is basically just introducing you to imperial intelligence since it's not exactly a faction we see much of in other forms of media. Every now and then I just make a new agent just to experience the story again, even though I already know what happens it is still amazing
So, couple of thoughts here. The game USED to introduce you to systems naturally. There was a quest revamp like mid 2010's that stripped out most of the main quests, religated many to legacy quests, broke the planets story and in general just shortened the game. This is fine. The problem is many of the quests that were removed were designed specifically to teach you these systems and slowly introduce you to the game. Hence they added in all those tutoral boxes to explain things rather than acutally use the system. In fact many things like the reason you can modify everywhere, or limitations on the systems that were put in place for narrative reasons were REMOVED through MARKETING feedback. Yes the worst kind of feedback who'se goal will be to dumb everything down to make it as accessible as possible. This death spiral is indeed exactly the problem with the game right now. Basically, the game used to play like a RPG, getting from start to max was a journey, not a destination. The problem was once you did the game once on one character, people wanted to skip ahead and be able to skip planets on other characters because it's rehashing stuff they already did. That is reasonable. The solution they came up with though made the story irrelevant on your FIRST!!! playthrough. Which was the problem. Second, difficulty. it used to be that companions did specific things, some were healers, some were dps, some were tanks... this was terrible. So they fixed it and allowed you to customize your companion into whatever form you wanted them to take. This was great! And the process it also removed a lot of companion gear, which was great! (companions stats used to be tied to the gear they were wearing, yes... that means that you had to gear them AND your character if you wanted them to be like, useful). The problem was the Dragon Age problem. In order to make things possible to defeat WITHOUT a healer companion... you had to drastically dumb down the encounter as the healer companions made solo combat trivial with a healer. That and buffs to players to make them feel more 'epic' and cater for retarded monkeys who cant push buttons but get mad because they lose they cant means that quests that should be epic are trival because of the aforementioned problems. In short, its a failure of balance. Bugs... yeah, those have existed since the beginning. The game was NOT ready for prime time and was shoved out to meet a financial quarter/year/expectation and failed within a year because of it... since then held together with a shoestring budget. Still it's a good story if you like star wars legacy (pre-disney woke trash). And some of the newer expansions are good as well...
I remember playing first as a light side sith inquisitor. I was really impressed how they actually let you play something whacky like that and make it feel good in the story.
Light Side Imperials are some of the most fun, especially a Light Side Sith Warrior out-talking Jedi on more than one occasion (the bafflement of the Jedi on the receiving end is the cherry on top). Though there is something to be said for the morally gray Inquisitor. Sometimes, you just want to zap a guy with all the lightning.
I LOVED playing as a LS inquisitor as well! I played as a Twilek, and starting out as a slave and ending up the story the way it did felt so epic. What a good time.
The Sith Inquisitor storyline, though, just feels bad. You get handed the Idiot Ball at the start of Chapter 2, then run with it full-tilt for the rest of the chapter, and then spend most of Chapter 3 trying to fix the problems that you created for yourself in Chapter 2. On the other hand, the Inquisitor has some of the best lines in the game, like Khem Val's line when you exit the cantina on Tatooine: "I have an excellent sabacc face. That is a joke. I hate sabacc." and the female Inquisitor's line at the end of the Tatooine questline -- "I brought Andronikos back!" in an utterly out-of-character chirpy voice.
This video will hurt me, this was my main MMO for a very long time. Me and my friend started close to release day, he was a trooper, I was a consular. I really enjoyed PvP - even at low levels, you received buffs to bring you up to par with others so you had a chance. The game had old school WoW "talents" so I customized my Jedi to be hybrid DPS/healer which showed up as damage during PvP. The game felt like they tried so badly to not copy WoW that they didn't use the good things and kept the bad/annoying ones. The voice acting of pretty much everything was a huge plus. I rarely read the quest description in WoW (since it's mostly "collect 10 wolf asses anyway") so this helped. I told my friend that the game will go free to play in about a year. Well, it did. I really enjoyed the game so I even dropped some cash on it. I don't really remember the tutorials but I had no issues with the systems at the time. 14:15 I kinda remember the boss fights being harder. I remember using long cooldowns to get the job done. 26:30 Wasn't legacy around level 30 back in the days? 34:25 Ah, this is the scaling I mentioned in PvP, glad it's still in. 35:00 IIRC that's how it was. I think the "dungeon finder" was a later addition but I might be wrong. OK, it wasn't that bad. I expected the game to be way worse after so many years.
The game was semi-hard and grindy when it came out. They massively nerfed it later and the made it slightly harder (but not as hard as launch) w/ the last expansion. Either way, it was still easier in the starting zones which he uses for the video than it was later in the story.
I've played SWtOR for ten years: Tutorial critique is so true. Didn't learn half the systems until I had to in order to do end-game raiding. It is definitely a bit of a learning curve when you first reach level cap. Had a great guild that made that fun for me.
Pretty fair review. I always come back to replay some story, or sub for a while and get the new expansion. Two things worth noting: (1) You NEED to play female Sith Inquisitor. The voice actress is amazing and most conversations are so sarcastic. (2) SWTOR got a “WoW treatment” at some point. Leveling used to be challenging and the quest bosses were actually “hard”, but it became trivial at some point (I don’t recall which xpac it was).
I haven't played a ton of story lines. But Male Sith Warrior light side is easily my favorite. "Light side"Sith is so funny, you're not a hero, you're not a good person. You're a psychopath who occasionally lets people live. As a Marauder, I was basically Sith Deadpool, and that was utterly hilarious.
@@Deadsnake989 Absolutely, sith warrior is probably my most played class... and its my least favorite combat. That right there tells you everything you need to know about the quality of the story and characters in it.
Maybe I'm missremembering but I loved how light side sith warrior was more of a warrior-poet archetype who instead of going berzerk and killing every jedi he met, used logic and philosophy to show them flaws in jedi teaching and make them question it and loose faith.
Have to add some love for female sith inquisitor. She was the first class/origin I chose when I tried the game and still the only one I've completed the base game story with. I tried jedi consular after her but darn I miss quizzie's sass :(
I remember the "fully voiced MMO" thing being such a selling point at the time. I also remember my disappointment upon realizing that meant reusing the same 6 lines of monotone alienese a thousand times and slapping different subtitles under them. SWTOR was such an experience for me. I was a tremendous Star Wars fan, I was just really breaking into the online space and being social, and when my PC at the time couldn't run SWTOR, it even became my first DIY PC build. I played it for about six months. I *lived* in it. Fully engrossed in most of the class stories, all-in on the crafting. I even did PVP as much as the group content, which was extremely rare for me. I had a couple friends who were just as devoted, and it was just bliss. And then it ended. I don't really even know what happened. For some reason, it couldn't immerse me anymore. Almost overnight, it just ceased to be my galaxy far far away and became a video game. I thought I was just going to take a month or two break from it, but I didn't return to it until many, many years and expansions later, and that stint lasted mere days. It was just a video game - one that I couldn't force myself to enjoy. I don't know if there's any point or moral to my story, there. Just thought I'd share. Josh prodding at the old memory banks, I guess.
wow. same here. Like almost word for word, including the pc. Interesting. I come back every year or so just to check up on things.. nostalgia out a bit.
Yes it was “fully voiced MMO” and “SGRA” and I’m not sure it shipped with either one. I played for a few weeks, until my server pop died and no one played light-side.
The Funny thing about the fully voiced is, that DC Universe Online Released 2010 and was fully voiced as well. And the voice acting there was good, so i never understand why that was such a big selling point for SWtoR
Played this game many years ago, if i remember right, the flashpoint "the esseles" was something you first would get access to in the main hub, the space station. After you followed your class story to that point, the story quest would lead you to coruscant, however if i remember right you had the choice to go to coruscant via the flashpoint,since the entrance to the flashpoint is close to the space shuttle for coruscant. Its supposed to be an optional story segment of you travelling to coruscant. I liked it much better like this as it made sense, i had no idea you could now just teleport to it. That sucks.
Enemies and bosses used to be a WHOLE lot harder than they are now. Around the time we got role-changing on companions they then made the difficulty easier. Same with XP, usually you would reach lvl 10 on your last mission in the start even after doing ALL sidequests, and you only reached level 12/13 in the end of the prologue if you used xp boosts. After the change story missions gave more xp and made content a little easier, therefore mitigating the need for side-questing. Problem was you were now always over-leveled if you did 1 side-quest and you fight bosses 3 levels under you, plus their nerf Until probably 2016 (?) I died often, had to use med-packs and play strategic. After that update i have probably only used med-packs in a flashpoint, and can play the game as a bulldozer just walking. Its fun to have combat where you can get good action packed parts, and not fight bullet-sponges that just have 20 000 hp for no reason does almost not damage you, but they overnerfed especially the starterplanets.
Yes it used to be much more difficult. Every major MMO eventually nerfs its content as far as I'm aware but I agree they went too far especially with the changes to companions. As a jedi knight you didn't get a healer companion until around level 30 if I remember right which did feel like a disadvantage. But it made the leveling experience feel that much different for each class. I'm also not sure why they got rid of companion gear. And my favorite aspect of the game besides the story was the crafting which was gutted substantially. I played at the beginning for a couple months and then again a few years ago. I think some of the changes were necessary. They added a lot of good features and I'm glad they made it more solo friendly because groups can be almost impossible to find while leveling. But I agree they overnerfed the mobs. And the leveling speed is so outrageous it feels like they are actively preventing people from doing sidequests for some reason. Although I think I heard that you get level synced to the planet now? Or was that just my wishful thinking?
@@blueager222 yes, you get level synced luckily. But its still really easy, but at least quite balanced (not starter planets, they are SUPER easy especially when you reach for example lvl 14, get level synced to 10 but is still on lvl 8 content storywise) Its how the story minibosses and most of the other bosses are so easy now that bothers me most. Arcann, Vaylin and Valkorion , difficult fight, i like it. Most KOTFE/ET content actually challenges you. But bossfights in the older stories has gotten so easy that its laughable. I remember dying in my fight against Darth Skotia early Inquisitor story. Now? He is hardly stronger than an escaped slave champion in the wilds of Dromund Kaas. Im still a sith Acolyte. It SHOULD be hard to kill a Darth EVEN if you use the emp thing you stole
This is my favorite single player RPG hiding in an MMO. All 8 of the classes have their own story lines which are worth playing, and the expansion stories get progressively better. The parts I dislike are all the trappings common to MMO's, like the auction house and horrible free-to-play gating systems.
This is probably the only series which does a proper "bad" storyline where you actually feel it's right to do the bad things. It's in theme and in character and you are rewarded for playing your character. I find every other moral choice system is no actual choice at all by comparison. You just get punished for doing the bad things, and rewards for doing the good things. Also this was the only game that managed to pull off storylines with multiple players actively making choices in that storyline. When it came to key points in the flashpoints you all got a say, not just one lead character and it was always hilarious when you got the bad group in the good mission. I have fond memories of being a little miffed that our Jedi team decided to vent a lot of crew into space to save a little time. It was funny afterwards that they gave us players that choice, and one 'bad' player couldn't ruin it for everyone, but 2 out of 4 was a dice roll. So yes, much more RPG than MMO and IMO a lot better for it. I would have gone back but I had assumed it was a dead game. Glad to hear it's still alive and well, and it's time to see how my legacy is doing. Highlight was grinding for, and finally unlocking my Tauntaun. Lastly, I disagree with the whole "chosen one" storyline and my character always having to be the only chance to save the galaxy. I just want to be a part of the rich world. Nothing breaks me out of any MMO faster than 50 chosen ones all running around the same area together.
this! I always love playing the bad moral options in games, but this game really took it to a level as yet unreplicated by any other game I really adore the light side sith storyline, I played as an inquisitor
Also important for "not ruining it" if someone else chooses the bad choice and you are chosing the good one, you'll get the Good points for sentiment. Thats something that was good for me, since, i kinda dont want to be punished for "I wanna be a bad jedi" player on my team!
Still the only game I've played where any group content quests (Flashpoints) are actually group, from quest acceptance through to hand-in. Other games it's only the doing the quest between that is group.
I've been playing this game off and on since launch, and you want to know what hurts most about this critique? A lot of the systems that need to be introduced over time are, like the Flashpoint and everything, once were introduced through the narrative. But the tutorials are tied to level value, and now even F2P players are getting more levels than the narrative is accounting for. The Flashpoint played, the Esseles, is the connective tissue between the starting world and the capital. But the game rushed the story, and now it's out of order. You need a flow chart to know what and where the plot should take you, because for the game to keep up with modern expectations, it has separated the narrative from the grind so they can be done independently.
I loved the Bounty Hunter story. Getting to be an all out action hero was great, duking it out with Jedi and Sith later on. All of the class stories are great, but that one stays with me the most.
SWTOR is absolutely one of my favorite games, I adore it and have spent countless hours on each storyline, which is why its so painful to see what it's become, from removing ingame tutorials to just poorly done expansions, I wish it would just get a remake in the form of a single player game containing only the base 8 class stories. The expansions are great in some regards but you can tell they lost the budget they had for the base game as no class feels truly unique, hell if you play through as a republic character on the expansions you feel like a secondary character, all of them feel designed for the sith classes, the sith sides actually get to enjoy the story and it actually matters to them. But to boggle it down even more if you aren't playing a sith itself, you still lack that feeling of this story was made for your character, it's not as severe but you can definitely tell the expansions were made with the idea that a sith warrior or inquisitor would be the one going through it.
Eh not really, at least for Sith Inquisitor. My main was SI and halfway through KotFE I was wishing I had done a separate character for the expansion. DS SI was canonically a brilliant, witty, utterly insane powerhouse. Expansions made them feel washed-out and generic. It also felt like it was trying to convert my char to LS, which just felt odd.I finished at Ossus, though, so not sure how it developed further.
Lol honestly..the whole "single player" push like you mentioned you wanted..is the exact reason the game went downhill. Ie kotet and kotfe were designed to have people stop whining about making kotor 3 and a single player experience..by streamlining it just like kotor 1 and 2 and turn swtor from a multi-player experience into a single player experience..
I've watched a lot of your "Worst MMO" videos and I've seen a lot of comments saying "this was my first MMO" and I finally have the chance to say that myself because SWTOR was my first real MMO. I had played stuff like Toon Town and Pirates of the Caribbean Online, but SWTOR was the first MMO that I ever played that wasn't designed for kids, and I learned a lot from it. The old early combat used to actually be a little challenging if I remember correctly. It took my 14 year old self much longer then 6 hours to get my ship, but it felt like much more of an accomplishment for me back then because I had beaten some story bosses that were actually challenging. I think what changed is the system where you can change your companion to any class. They used to be set classes so you couldn't just have a healer by default. I also played a Jedi and Trooper so the ship didn't feel like a necessary part of the story like it does for Smuggler which I'm glad you pointed out. I agree that the years of updates have affected the game. I have a lot of time on the game and I do love it, but the systems and overwhelming amounts of content are jarring, even for someone like me who has played the game on and off since launch. I also think the free to play model is awful because being a subscriber is so drastically different and seeing what free to play is like really does make it feel like a demo like you mentioned. I also am saddened by the technical issues they have with the game because I can't even subscribe to the game now. I recently tried to sub on the SWTOR website and it said there was an error with my account (which is weird because I was just subscribed for a month sometime last year) so I tried to sub through Steam and that didn't work and basically just took my money. All of the hoops that you have to jump through to enjoy the game are so tiresome and I would personally love to see some massive overhaul or just see the game be shut down and a new modern Star Wars MMO created. I really loved this game but I think I have the same feeling as a lot of WoW players over the past few years. This game used to be fun, albeit a little messy, but now the mess is becoming much more noticeable and it really does feel like the players care more for the game than the developers. It also feels like it's getting a little too bloated and a full reset might be warranted now.
Very much this. SWTOR was the first MMO I ever got to max level in. I enjoyed the stories in it so much, Bounty Hunter and Jedi Knight were my first loves. It's interesting to see the state it's in now. Combat was much more challenging and you weren't just handed power from nowhere. You had to understand your stats to fulfill your role (which could have used better explaining, even back then) and you reached the flashpoints appropriately because you could ONLY queue for them from the hanger deck, there was no LFG. Not to mention they were also very challenging. You tank had to know how to aggro properly and the healer had to be able to manage their resources. Now everything is scaled up and designed for any group comp and so the encounters all feel neutered. Like JSH said in his video, a lot of the bosses are pretty disappointing because they are too easy compared to the build up.
@@wildeyoung3943 There is still difficulty in group content, but just Master mode FPs and vet/HM Operations. All of which you need to be max level for.
Yeah, they really EA'd it up, just trying to PLAY the game can be a challenge sometimes. Like they don't even want my dang money. It was never a super polished game, but I really wish they'd spend some time and effort bugfixing and making 1-50 less janky.
I played SWTOR at launch, actually even before that as I got into several Beta's. I absolutely loved the original combat, stat, and tutorial system. They were awesome. It really felt like I was playing a newer version of the old Star Wars Tabletop game. The only time I ever had an issue was right at the beginning when it tries to teach you how to mod your gear. I figured out, naturally through simple player exploration, that you could click a specific utility provided nearby the merchants on the starting planet to mod all my gear at the same time. So I thought I had done it. But as it turned out, I had to click a faintly blue glowing square of blue gray metal to actually complete that tutorial quest.
Loved this back in the day, but the combat has always been lacklustre. It’s the MMO that should’ve just been an RPG - as you mentioned, trying to do both excellent, deep storytelling and good MMO gameplay cheapened both. You should do Age of Conan next!
I have a lot of fond memories from this game, like treating myself to the special edition with the Malgus statuette when I had very little money at the time (still have it), taking on three Jedi as a Powertech while leveling on Tatooine and winning, it was also the first proper game my wife and I really enjoyed playing together. So this is a DAMN good critique, necessary too as the game seems to be stumbling as of late but I hope someone out there is listening to this.
I've just started playing SWTOR again after a several year break and some of the changes since then are pretty jarring. But some of the issues you identified I think are due to the swap to F2P from Sub based at launch. Enemies used to be much more of a threat at low levels on the starting planets. You originally couldn't change the stance of your companion and they filled a role. Corso was originally a DPS companion and you didn't get a healing or tanking companion until later in the game. the Jedi Knight gets a healer at like level 30ish on the planet Balmorra, so many encounters were actually difficult without that healing. When they made some changes to how companions work, they made it so each one can do all three roles so you can choose who to bring no matter the situation. The Flashpoint taking you to the fleet is also a relic of this. You used to only be able to do the flash point when you get to carrack station naturally, at the end of the starting planet you get told to go to the capital, when you get to the station you need to head to the shuttle bay to fly to the capital, but then you're given the option of taking a shuttle directly there, or doing the intro flashpoint which is a ship on the way to the capital and gets attacked. Either way, you wind up on the capital planet once you either take the shuttle or the flashpoint. Since they went F2P and made so many system changes, it's all jumbled up now. for example, I'm playing the jedi Knight Story (1-50) and I'm level 57 right now, but I'm only on the level 45 planets. But since I'm also 57, I'm allowed to do the content for the new expansions that start at 50+ while I haven't even finished the main story line. but overall, it's still a super fun game once you get past the quirkiness.
I think you nailed it when you said that SWTOR was an MMO for people who've already played MMOs. I never looked at the tutorials and I just googled whatever info I needed for whatever system I was working on when I needed it.
it a rng with mmo features honest
The big issue is that these text dump tutorials are a result of the changes they've made to the game over the years as they've added new systems and changed old ones, it was a much better onboarding experience earlier in the game's life before the shift to free-to-play unfortunately
Or you could try to find out yourself which is the fun of it, to explore the game..nevermind lets google it
it was a better game at launch and before the expansions and free to play hit. never had those text dumps if we did there was only like 10 of them.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree, this was the first MMO I had ever played and I caught on pretty quickly for the most part.
Playing a light side Sith Warrior was probably one of the best Star Wars experiences I ever had, all the NPCs are just flabbergasted, I am a Sith who is Schooling Jedi Masters on the Jedi Code, kicking their teeth in and sparing their lives as I go on with my mission
I have very fond memories of that story line. Nothing quite beat talking down a pair of Jedi on my hunt for Jaesa by convincing them that if I don't attack them first then they can't attack me or they're in violation of their own code. While chapter 2 was certainly weaker (imo) for the Sith Warrior line, Chapters 1, 3 and the final wrap-up were some of Bioware's best RPG writing work ever. The way they brought back things from as early as Nar Shadda was brilliant.
My lightside sith warrior was my highest level character. loved that storyline
Not the best story overall but playing a dark consular was even funnier than the light versions of the sith classes imo.
Same with Dark Side Jedi Knight. Your character even constantly says "It really does seem like I'm the only one doing everything" and gives zero fucks about the Jedi Code.
I really enjoyed playing a light side Imperial Agent as well.
Oh man, I remember when companions were class locked. The game was genuinely hard back then and the bosses at the end of the class chapters would WRECK you.
Those were good times, I walked away when they nerfed everything, removed the ability for companions to use armor, and made the companions generic. Give me back my dedicated healing, tanking, and DPS companions, having all companions do everything as needed was really lame especially as they made the content so easy at the same time.
Yeah and now when fighting any class chapter boss you can just do any of the prestige abilities you unlock for completing campaigns (e.g., force choke or force lightning) and basically one shot them
I had zero issues with those bosses.... and I played at launch...
easy? the combat in lowlevel is a joke... i went back to the game arround a month ago equipped some modable cosmetic gear (the stuff that has 0 stats and less base armor than the white starter gear) from my arsenal without putting any mods in and streamrolled my way till lvl 40 without ever installing mods/crystals in any of my gear.... after that i got bored and uninstalled again.
@@Patrickf5087 Yeah, they weren't THAT hard. Maybe occasionally some of them were harder. I remember fighting the.... last boss (avoiding spoilers) as the Jedi Knight, and having to do the fight three times. That's also the last boss though.
They're right about the rest though, the combat was harder, in general.
The Imperial Agent story is amazing. It still to this day is one of the greatest pieces of narrative gaming I've played. It has four significant ways that Chapter 1 can end based on your choices throughout the entire chapter (not just by the conversation options, those let you pick between the two versions your previous choices determined). There are three different outcomes for Chapter 3, and one of them is only available if you made certain decisions in Chapter 2!
I legit had a crush on Scorpio back in the day, the voice acting was superb
Yeah i started the game as a jedi, but after playing Sith Inquisitor and Imperial Agent, those two storylines are way ahead, real solid! Man that was quite some time ago
@@kurojima Imp side storyline way better than pub
@@Kirill_Fedorov1970 The other way around.
JK - a little boring but great heroes journey and the best SW themed story; JC - the most complex story because while everyone plays checkers, he plays 3D chess and carries entire republic on his back; the simple soldier who achieves impossible; S - person who earns every power he has, tons of lighthearted fun
On the other hand:
SW - you are a dump idiot who raises your master and kills all his enemies and dont expect him turning on you and then kill him (and this is the only story I like there), SI - you play as idiot who is pushed by writers and plot convenience to be victorious even when you dont deserve anything you get, BH - total loser who killed 1 target in the great hunt and would die in act 3 if there was any plot logic, IA - republic clean up crew who serves more republic interests even when not mind controled because imperial intelligence should be renamed to imperial stupidity, easy to see plot twists for the sake of plot twists that dont really enrich anything but create a mess that writers didnt even properly understand
Also, republic stories achieve something and all fight against the empire, imperial stories dont really achieve much apart from killing tons of their own. Thats why republic wins in the end, rep characters are simply, better, stronger, well written and just way more enjoyable. Imperial stories only have edginess, dark humor and allowing you to be more evil going for it.
@@Dark_Voice Entirely convinced you either played an entirely different game than I did or that you were on something. Jedi Consular is one of the most boring, obvious stories ever, that you call it the most complex story and then sh!t on Agent confounds me
I remember playing this with a friend. We flipped a coin, went Dark Side. they were a Sith Warrior, I was a Sith Inquisitor. It was actually pretty cool seeing these two Sith who had very different backgrounds see each other as a good partner for each to rise through the ranks. It was also cool how when we did side quests we each could speak up and change things for each other. Friend may of been trying to be peaceful, but I possibly insulted the guy's mother and now we're stuck fighting because I couldn't shut my mouth.
Just swallow your pride and apologize. Take back your words or even lie to him. Sometimes growing up needs that. Don't lose a friend for something that I imagine is really petty and stupid.
@@karrimgyver He's talking about things their characters did in the game.
@@atraxisdarkstar Oh. Lmao.
@@karrimgyver lmfao thats a pretty funny misunderstanding actually
@@karrimgyver Thank you, this made my day. 😂
Regarding the shared overworld items, I remember when there was a casino event, but due to the shared overworld, if too many players tried to use a slot machine at once, the machine would bug out. It was the first time I've ever seen players politely, and of their own volition, form an actual, honest to god line in game.
Saw the same with one of the quest objects in an event area (Gree on Ilum). What's even more amazing, the line consisted of players from both factions - in a PVP area!
@@Sithoid First time I saw it was in Oldschool Runescapes second League, people would line up and wait for one another to kill the one mob everyone needed to kill to progress. Nobody said, but every time someone new showed up and saw a line of say 4 people, they just joined the back of the line, and so it kept going for several hours. It was kind of beautiful. I can imagine seeing that kind of silent cooperation where people just understand what needs to be done in TOR was equally beautiful.
this happened regularly on classic wow as well
@@Sithoid Not only that, but if someone came in and started a fight or cut in line, they’d get clapped by all the enemy faction members and usually none of their own faction members would join to help them. The event was INTENDED to get people fighting in the over world by giving everyone the same objective in a PvP area, but people just decided to be polite and respectful to each other instead, out of a mutual desire to accomplish the exact same goal COOPERATIVELY in the quickest, most efficient, most painless way possible.
I've seen that kind of jolly cooperation once before in an MMO. Right after the release of Cataclysm, where everyone was rushing to roll a Worgen character, there was one particular quest in their starting zone where you have to rescue a cat. Only one player could rescue the cat at a time, and then there was a cooldown. Must've been a few dozen players just forming an orderly line to collect the cat one at a time.
The worst part is that originally the tutorials were story linked, but after a few years and some probably one-sided player feedback about the lack of new players, they ditched the existing flow and replaced it with what you experienced.
@kolim jone Right? Not having a healer for most of the game sucked SO hard.
So weird
@@jimmysmith2249 agree getting your healer was always like a big deal when I played
Its so sad to see the state of SWTOR in this day and age, because nearly all those things you mentioned you didn't like such as the tutorial system, how it TP you to the dungeon etc, never used to be a thing, everything followed the narrative so much closer when it was first released. But it then got loads of criticism for being a story first MMO, which was its strength and which i loved, so after all these years its now just a bit of a convoluted mess. Such a shame because to me the first 2 years of SWTOR are some of the best MMO memories i have.
I still love SWTOR. I wish the old character creation menu was still there but other than that, I haven’t seen any big changes!
SWTOR suffers from one primary issue.
With aims of player retention the devs always spent their tiny budget on new features rather than fixing the old stuff. So the game has grown more and more messy over time, and even gamebreaking bugs from the game's first launch still exist.
It's the best MMO on the market in some areas, and its one of the worst in most others, and its so sad to see.
I loved playing through the various class storylines, I love the general atmosphere of the game and many of its ideas, but I eventually left it because it was such a horrible mess. I didn't need more new features for retention, I needed the game to be bug fixed and smoothed out.
I honestly believe that if they put the money into bug fixing and updating graphics/controls for the game they could pull an FFXIV like relaunch and explode their player numbers again, but the way they are running SWTOR atm they are doomed to slowly dwindle their playercounts until the game gets shut down for having 5 people a day logging on.
Agreed, I played SWTOR at launch (and even the beta) and I remember those things being spaced out and part of the questing. I remember having to go modify your weapon after they gave you something, running over to the console so I could add the part.
F2P was drinking unicorn blood, so much stuff is locked away and behind things, I can't load up my old characters anymore because they get bombarded by a billion notices, and then half of the things I used to be able to do are just "If you want to change this, it's money now, lol."
I loved SWTOR, beat the main story & both major expansions as a Trooper (JHale!) and a LS Sith Warrior (I am a cat meow), but you could absolutely tell they overestimated initial release (by level 30, planets were dead, maybe a dozen people per planet so group missions were a PAIN to find people for), so they had to reduce the server count, which helped, but eventually money dried up and "Fully Voiced" became "mostly voiced", "Class Questlines" became "Here are three quests related to your class, have fun", and "Republic Quest Chain & Empire Quest Chain" became "One shared questline because we don't have the money to make two."
One of my favorite parts of SWTOR was playing as the opposite sides, and undoing the work of the opposite faction. The second and fifth(?) planets are swapped, so for Republic you free an Empire world but late in the Empire campaign, you visit it and have to re-subjugate it, and vice versa for the other side. There is also a set of dungeons that have the Jedi going to a Sith location and Sith going to a Jedi location, AT THE SAME TIME narratively, only to return and be like "Oh snap, they were just here!"
Its interesting, because at launch, most of the things you suggested... were in the game. There were (some) quested tutorials, Flashpoints were sequential and often part of the story progression, you were narrative locked in most places and couldnt sequence skip through things like Flashpoint groups.
People hated them, and they changed it to emphasise the MMO, and made it much worse worse.
Most of the problems with the game are directly resultant from player feedback.
as one wise man once said "you think you want it. But you dont"
The Esseles and Black Talon Flashpoints are meant to be "You were taking the faster transport from the Fleet to the capital, but you get sidetracked by an Imperial Moff."
SWTOR at launch slapped, I tried jumping in again last year and when I wanted to do that first Imperial flashpoint... queued for 20 minutes, then got slapped into an endgame raid I was scaled to but couldn't really help in, I was like... the fuck?
This sounds like "shoot the messenger" kinda argument. The issue is not the feedback, -- it's always with how the company decided to process it.
@@nemesisVtuber If mmo-ney is all you love, then that's what you'll receive! ;)
I also want to point out how good the story decision making is. For instance, that last Flashpoint you showed where you kill the captain and the Lieutenant has to take charge. If you kill the captain, she believes that the pods are a distraction and allow them to attach to the ship. However, if you let the captain live, he is experience enough to know that they contain shock troopers targeting the generators, giving the player a better way to complete the Flashpoint.
Also, if you kill the captain, in the end you find some of the officers made a mutiny that became a fight and everyone at the bridge died. If you keep the captain the flashpoint ends peacefuly.
@@AgusSkywalker I'm not sure it was a mutiny, or if the Droid had orders to waste the bridge. You'll notice they are all in a circle around him when the IA returns.
There are also multiple points where you can talk your way out of combat. Several encounters shown in this video you can avoid battle with a slick enough response, such as the separatist with the droid where you can convince the idiot to "fix" the droid's faulty sensors.
@@georgeblair3894 well, it tells you there was a mutiny. it's possible it lied, but nobody dies in the good ending, so I don't see why the droid would kill them if you kill the captain, or refrain from killing them if you don't.
If you play a male agent, you absolutely must kill the captain. You'll get a dialogue option where the voiced response to one of the crew is just the most perfectly delivered "Tell me you're not going to cry".
My favorite part of this game has to be Co-op cutscenes where you and your friends both talk and both have a chance to choose what you do leads to some cool roleplay moments
This! This so much!
... with that said... it is so damn shame, that you cannot do that after the core game and once you enter the expansions. The expansions are designed to be a 'solo experience' tailored for your character. Your friend won't be able to join you or have any input in the story. You're left with your follower to finish the story.
@@Kineela This was exactly what I said was going to be the problem way back before this game released when I was following it. I was like 'okay, this all sounds great, but I seriously doubt they're going to be able to keep up this pace of content/story creation, especially with the multiplayer element, in the future.' And what d'ya know, they didn't.
Hell, even the original game didn't keep up. That first flashpoint, the Esseles/Black Talon, set a great story example...and then none of the other flashpoints had much of any story at all, they were all VERY light on dialogue. It was very much a bait & switch there, cause you got to see the ONE flashpoint that was actually fleshed out really well at low levels, but never got that level of experience again.
If only I had friends
It is pretty cool - then again, you have a whole lot of players who don't even glance at the story in MMO's - even the ones with good plot.
@@Kineela As someone whos finally gotten to the expansion, this broke my heart
Biggest thing to note is all the instruction boxes and difficulty of early game changed a few years back when the game went free to play. Originally any missions stating Heroic 2+ were generally difficult, flashpoints wern't soloable and you had to visit trainers to learn skills etc, however when the player count dropped they added the reduced difficulties to enable players to solo these and get trhe information they needed without requiring a guild.
Are the higher difficulties rewarding to play solo, or is it just a case of "I can't win the DPS race"?
@@Nipah.Auauau if you solo flashpoints you'll only get blue (worse) gear
doing flashpoints with players offers epic gear, so if you solo everything you'll be at a disadvantage in endgame
and tbh even campaign fights are hard, im experiencing it right now on my jedi knight
full rare gear and i fought Lord Scourge and he tore me to pieces (im using kira as a dps not a healer, since i figured its better to kill the mobs quickly than for the companion to heal you, often she cant fast enough and i die anyway) and many strong/rare enemies really deal serious dmg
Not only is the voice of Solid Snake (David Hayter) the voice of the male Jedi Knight, but the voice of the very first NPC you meet in the Jedi Knight questline is voiced by Cam Clarke AKA Liquid Snake! Someone in casting knew what they were doing, the cheeky bastards
The Sith Emperor is voiced by PINHEAD as well.
Don't forget your female romantic interest is Jaina Proudmoore.
@@athras8822 You mean Laura Bailey, but yes. Your "apprentice" and potential love interest.
@@Nickulator He was referencing a more famous role by the same VA, just like the other comments...
@@athras8822 Oh shit now i need to ppay it
One of the coolest things about SWTOR that wasn't mentioned was, as a Sith, as you accumulate dark-side points, you can watch as your character changes too. Like more red eyes and distressed facial features. Very immersive.
Only half true. It's not limited to sith. You can make it work on a Jedi too for example.
@@Real_JKDOS nothing the OP said implied he meant that only sith changed. Your assumption
@@mythicalfelix Actual, no. Here is a quote from OP " as a Sith, as you accumulate dark-side points" That part is wrong. As a Jedi you can also accumulate dark-side points.
@@Real_JKDOS as any character you can accumulate dark side points and become visually corrupted
@@Real_JKDOS 🤓
To be fair. . when this game first came out, fights WERE harder. They took longer AND your companions roles were locked so it was tougher.
At times it felt like a slog too. . . .
Yup. I played when it first came out and took a break for a long time. Got back into it recently and couldn't believe how easy its become. While I can appreciate appealing to a more casual audience it shouldn't almost always be a cake walk.
@@UnderseaPumaKing They've really shifted a lot of the difficulty to optional quests. The heroic areas, flashpoints, etc. are more challenging and reward good exp and gear in exchange. If you make your companion not a healer, then the game is a good bit harder too.
Yeah I remember boss fight be very hard of you didn't have stems or med packs or your healing Companion. When I cane back 5 years or so later it had chnaged so Drastically
@@UnderseaPumaKing the star wars IP is so expensive, that they will need a ton of players just to pay for the name. then the mmo format, which makes it even more costly.
in short: swtor should had launched in this state. it would still had failed, but it would had taken longer to do so.
i was there at launch too. i got wrecked in the forums for predicting its downfall.
@@prestonroe268 There is ONE main quest on Ilum on which not having companion on tank role is suicide(Im talking about one mission on Ilum and specific boss)
SWTOR is actually, truly a great game whose best elements are also its downfall. The role play elements used to be extremely strong, uniquely great for a MOG. The stories are extraordinarily great, the voice acting is often amazing, the sidekicks are a blast, the settings are really quite amazing looking, etc. But the questing is basically killing 48923 things, the stories are very linear and specific so once you've played one through the variety ends.
But once you have gone through those stories, once you have done each class's storyline and each follower's story... its not nearly as fresh. It works against you by making the same thing over again more tedious. And all that voice acting that is so easy to appreciate is EXPEN$$$$IVE for the company, making expansions more difficult and costly than they could be in other games.
For being as old as it is, the graphics are quite good and the sound is amazing, and it is actually quite fun to play through, so much so that every few years I get on and play more again. It really is recommended even though the game economy is utterly ridiculous. Seriously, high end stuff costs hundreds of MILLIONS of credits.
And yes, the story thing causes very odd and troubled events and there are a lot of bugs, many of them added in by the latest expansion and change in the game.
I'm trying to understand what you mean by high end stuff costs hundreds of millions of credits when you can buy cheap stuff at your fleet and mod it better than the high end stuff or craft the mod and make it even more unique. You can also collect datacrons and upgrade your character along the way permanently to improve your advantage over whoever decides to pay for something in the game. You almost never have to spend money on the game unless you subscribe once to get the updated expansions every now and then.
@@anwaarsamai have you... not checked the GTN ever?
@@christophertaylor9100 Yes always. Most of those ratings you could get with mods at higher levels.
@@anwaarsamai If you have checked the market then you know clearly and without a doubt is that prices are insanely high.
@@christophertaylor9100 Yes the prices are high on GTN but you don't have to use it and it is not necessary because you could make equivalent high end stuff for WAAAY LESS
Swtor is the only mmorpg that ever really HOOKED me after learning the mechanics. The role play is so much more immersive. The fact that EVERYTHING is voiced makes a huge difference. The dialog options and infinate ways to design your toon's "look" really help you get into character. Plus, I really love dungeon content, and swtor has some seriously excellent dungeons.
Also, the player base IS really nice & welcoming.
I have no idea how I square that with my experience. I spawn on the planet tatooine and there are just random mobs respawning in set locations inside buildings along the streets. They are so stupid and pointless to fight that everyone just ignores them and I was like "guys there's enemies here why aren't u like defeating them ur just standing around chatting...."...after fighting them for 4 minutes I completely ignored them too. Any hub surrounded by enemies that are just ignored out of boredom and pointless to fight mechanics is not a good sign.
Same here bro
@@Cerbyo I mean, you do get extra exp most of the time fore fighting enemies around your quest area. In fact, I'm pretty sure every quest has that sort of "miniquest"
Also I was too immersed by the story to care either way.
the nice and welcoming player base part is debatable
I gotta disagree. The dialogue is highly repetitive and most of the time boils down to 'kill them or save them' for light or dark side points respectively. The design is nice but it's really nothing beyond appearance, fighting is so easy I just could spam the same 4 skills and win every encounter. Most quests took more time to arrive at the quest area and return than actually carry out and the rewards were always garbage.
The worst part was... there was good content. The main storylines for each character are pretty good and flashpoints actually have great fights, music, and high stakes stories... but that's all a minority of the gameplay.
Eventually I got bored.
The sad part as others I'm sure have mentioned is that there used to be in game tutorials for all these systems and the fights were actually more challenging. But for some unknow reason all the systems were "revamped" and the game was made to be much easier on all levels.
Yeah I remember screwing around with my tank+damage companion, quit for a while, got back in, talent system was rewamped, companion suddenly started healing me (they had specific nonchangeable roles before), and dungeons made it painfully clear how easy the game became.
For reference, before some revamps, before the dungeon finder, I STRUGGLED to solo two-man flashpoint (shown in the video, imp side) as a tank with a healer companion (which is basically the "easy mode" of playing the game) because it simply wasn't meant to be soloed. It was possible, but difficult. Without heals, not possible. Same with other dungeons, and 2-4 man quest zones out in the open.
And some revamps later I could consistently solo FOUR-man dungeons and quests with NO heals, more easily than I could solo 2 man flashpoints WITH heals before the changes.
Difficulty became trivial. Regular quests are basically "story mode" difficulty, 2 man jobs may be the "normal" difficulty, and 4 man jobs I'd maybe dare to call "difficult", except if you're a tank with a healer companion because then everything loses one difficulty level.
But to be honest, I'm not mad about it, because I never really liked the MMO part of the game. Generally speaking the people I encountered with weren't the patient type but the veteran type who played through everything a hundred times and rushing was routine for them, so they didn't like the fact that I was interested in the cinematics and choices, something which only bred conflict and put needless pressure on me, so ya, I kinda liked that I could basically solo everything after I returned. It was ridiculous, but good.
When was this? I stopped playing around the time the very first dlc was being released. They I came back one day and found all my abilities and states just straight gone and j couldn't bring myself to try and finish my with sorcerer... I was so trying to romance the cute little jedi too
@@somzer I am and always have been a big fan of the flashpoints(the trinity version, now existing exclusively at level cap. awful choice.) That said, I drop about 1/3 of the groups right away, because I hate speedrunning. I've seen them all a ton of times, still want to play through normal and not rush. Operations, I love too, but I don't find that many guilds do them. Basically, you're seeming to say that the game is a single player rpg with OPTIONAL mmorpg available at whim. I'd say that is a correct assessment.
the reason was money. most people wont pay for challenge, they will rather pay for fun and convenience. and the game wasnt ready for it either, it was so
poorly optimized, that the boss i was supposed to interrupt didnt even spawn on many occasions. when i tried to explain it in the forums, all the fanbois flamed me
as a loser and hater. without the name, this game would had shut down many years ago.
@@kimrasmussen7188 "without the name, this game would had shut down many years ago." Nope. Still a great RPG.
One change that was made to SWTOR that I absolutely hate is how you get to choose your advanced class type during character creation. The game originally had you start off with just your base class (Jedi Knight, Smuggler, Trooper, etc.) and introduced you to advanced classes after you leave the starter world, so you get a feeling of how your class feels WITHOUT the extra moves and could better understand how your advanced class will alter the gameplay. I have no idea why this was cut.
It was cut because people wanted to respec their advanced class, and moving that to part of character creation made it clear to these people that it was an irreversible choice.
prob cus I made it my mission to be a max level Jedi knight
I think for the most part new players kept skipping the two people that were to the side of the stairs. Also many people didn’t know the new advanced class came in a bag. I still wish they could have forced us into a cutscene at the capital ship when we land
@@boobah5643 Literally could have just added something to make them aware of that before choosing it.
@@boobah5643 I still find this a punishing design. Mainly because new players can't figure out how they play differently
I like to think that The Old Republic was the last actually good game done by Bioware before EA milked Mass Effect dry and decided to make its days numbered. I remember playing TOR back when it became free to play, and I remarked that it felt legitimately like KOTOR 3, and I meant it. The UI, granted, was changed and it was in an MMO space, so I had to share my adventure with other players and an internet connection. But everything else was still there - the mystical and ancient feel of the worlds, the impact of what my character did to the people around them, the high quality of the characters and the narration between them. It's a feeling that I still admittedly feel whenever I pick the game up again. I just wish EA didn't still have their grubby hands smeared all over it.
Erm Have you played Inquisition?
@@illyaismaili6413 It's dogshit lol
Ngl I think Mass Effect 3 is also great, though admittedly DLCs and updates have done a lot to improve upon the shortcomings it originally had. But I won’t deny that EA has been a blight on this company and their newer games are a far worse than what came before.
Just some common tips
1. In the map you can enable extra missions, called exploration missions
2. In the settings you can have it identify alignment choices(dark and light side) to make faster decisions when talking
3. The map problem of only being ale to see shops or taxi are also changeable in the settings menu
4. The plus sign near your health and energy bar can be used to expand how many bars you have and allow you to use more abilities
5. Like everything tutorials are turn off-able
6. When using AOE type attacks you can press the key or icon twice to auto target a hostile
7. The green people are cover opportunities that when you click either F on your keyboard or the crouching icon you will roll to said location and be in cover automatically
8. You can have cool downs have numbers present(in settings)
This may be a lot, if not sweet. If you use any of these just spread the love of knowledge :)
Edit: Thanks to the people that gave the comment support. I kept forgetting about it then getting the urge to play the game whenever I got a notification about this comment. So thanks everyone
Also, I came back to the game after a while and wanted to mention that - If you prefer Numbers when it comes to health and energy, in the settings you can have the game identify those values. Go to the hud editor, and select your health bar and scroll through that box and you can turn it on.
I've played this game for years on and off and didn't know that about the AOEs!
yeah he really doesn't look at menus or anything at all or look around or open skills or talents or anything in ANY game, and just bitches and moans "well i can see it there, bUt ThEy DiDnT tElL mE hOw To UsE iT sO i WoNt PrEsS iT oR eVeN PreTeNd It ExIsTs!!" and then goes thru the game like a brainlet screeching about the issue he could very easily fix for the entire rest of the video. forget the game but recently he played one where he REFUSED to spend his skill points then bitched about how boring combat was and it was only auto attacks, because they didn't show him how to spend them even though he had the screen open and VERY OBVIOUSLY just had to click the skills. and he seems to do some variation of that on EVERY SINGLE ONE of these videos.
Also there’s a setting in there about auto looting which adds just the slightest bit more convenience
ive been playing the game on and off for 5 years, and i never knew about the map filters, thanks and I love you
I could have just done 6 instead of dragging my cursor around this whole time…
the other stories are even better. the sith inquisitor story line literally has you become a sith lord, and it feels SO worth it, like you struggled and got beaten down the entire way and finally connived your way up
Don't forget the ghosts
You can literally become a member of the dark council and the game makes you feel like you earned it, it's such an amazing achievement and such a shame it didn't take off as it should. There was so much content on day one all fully voiced it was mind boggling, it's still a great game but you can feel the budget restrictions in the new content.
@@Formulka there's probably two reasons it didn't do as well as it could have. One is that the gameplay loop is based off of WoW's gameplay loop, it is almost literally WoW in space. Why would people go play SWTOR when they can get almost the same gameplay on WoW, and they and their friends have probably been playing on WoW for years now. FFXIV for example is a theme park MMO like WoW and SWTOR, but has measurably different gameplay mechanics, thus why people are commonly talking about choosing WoW or XIV and not WoW or SWTOR.
The second reason has to do with the first Star Wars MMO, Star Wars Galaxies. At first it was nothing like WoW, a pure sandbox MMO, though lacking in some areas early on. There were no classes, instead skill trees for you to specialize in. even after they had classes there was still the Entertainer profession, that was a non-combat class (yes, even with classes there were classes that did not fight) and had its progression tied around player interaction. The entire point of the entertainer was to buff other players. Players cold build their own houses, set up guild hall, build star ship and land mounts like speeder bikes, BUILD ENTIRE CITIES FROM SCRATCH, and do all of this on literally any open square of land, not predesignated locations (except crafting, you needed a crafting station or that. even there though you could build the crafting station and put it down anywhere you liked). this MMO ran from 2003-2011, towards the end the developers tried to copy WoW and ruined so many things' people loved about the game in the process. With the old game shutting down the same year the new one launched, it was obviously done to support the new one. So when SWTOR was a theme park like WoW with very similar gameplay to WoW, many SW MMO fans left it, because it wasn't what they wanted in a SWMMO.
So between basing it off of WoW and trying to attract the same player base who already loved WoW, and shutting down an actually unique Sar Wars MMO in favor of one that is trying to cut into an already cornered market, they basically shot themselves in the foot and set themselves up for failure from the get-go. The fact that it has survived is a testament to the player story aspect, which is actually unique to it.
@@mc.builder8267 I don't have much that I can say about your second reason, but in reply to your first reason, I can give two reasons why someone would rather play SWTOR rather than WOW. One is that some people simply want to play in a Star Wars setting, or even more specifically an Old Republic setting. And the other is simply that SWTOR is free. At least, all the base game content and a couple expansions are. Along with 50 or 60 levels (I forget which) rather than WOW's free 20 levels.
Bro the sith warrior storyline is fucking insane
The most fun i have had with this game was playing through the bounty hunter story with my friend playing an imperial agent. we played as if our characters were actually working together from the chance meeting on hutta.
Can you actually play together with different classes and it progress along? Does the progress count for both? Or do you have to do your own as well?
Different classes have different personal quest zones, that only a certain class can enter. But you can enable an option in settings that allows party memberse to enter said zone with you. Meaning you can go with your friend, help him fight and then watch him go through the dialogue. But you won't have a quest in the same zone because you're a different class. But yeah generally it's totally plausible to go through all the quests with a friend, you'll just be doing more traveling. Swtor is a game which you shouldn't rush anyways, the story is the best element and having played through all the class stories and expansions except for the newest one, i must say it's definitely worth it and will be more fun with a friend.
And honestly, I can see this being canon.
@@ditchfood8047 It is worth mentioning however that, as in most faction-based games, you cannot play on opposing sides and still play together. There IS a sort of RP underground for cross-faction play, though it's complicated, because you can't whisper or pm cross-faction, so you have to arrange contact points via discord or something, then only communicate face to face at neutral or contested-zone meeting places.
Me too man with my friend I played Jedi Shadow and he was Smuggler Scoundrel and it was like we had an unlikely alliance, setting aside our differences taking on the empire. This game did group questing better than any other MMO.
I tried a lot of MMOs in early teens to college years. Ultima Online, EverQuest 1 and 2, RuneScape, Star Wars Galaxies, ArcheAge, Star Trek Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Guild Wars. World of Warcraft and this game were the only two that kept my attention and were fun enough for me to actually reach the end game in them. Lots of fond memories of SWTOR and WoW raids. The narrative direction of this MMO really made it stand out and made a solo experience feel like less of a grind compared to all of the others I played.
Same to me, just that lotro got me hooked too, till it went f2p..
The Flashpoint system made a lot more sense, especially the first one, when they required you to get to a certain point in the story to unlock.
The first one, for example, is actually woven into the narrative as something that happens while you're going from the planet you start on to your faction's hub zone.
It's an example of changing something for...really no good reason other than "GROUP CONTENT EARLY HURRAH!"
Understandable from a Story enjoying player but to be honest.. On the German server were struggling to get a group together for FPs imagine now having to consider levels into the equasion. Its a sad reality. But if you really want to enjoy the story there are also Solo/Story flashpoints.
Oh I was wondering about that. Because I played the game way back when it released and was certain that you could not just join a flashpoint until you had done the quests.
yeah with Flashpoints I tend to do them when I encounter them on the map like the Essels Flashpoint I don't do it till you see like the Essels Ship in the Fleet and can go on the Ship to the next planet instead of taking a shuttle
Yeah, when I started playing this game back in 2015 it made alout more sense. Sad how they missed stuff up like that, and trivialized combat. I still play it today, and I love it, but they really messed up alot of things for no reason along the way. I also dont remember having so many text dump tutourials back then...
And then the poor level 15 player joins Hammer Station lacking most of their skills and it's extremely painful. I still can't believe the second pull with the two big droids is one of the hardest I've seen in any flashpoint of that game.
My best experience with the game was when I was playing as a Sith and the rebel leader started dictating terms to me in exchange for information. I could have fulfilled his conditions, but the game gave me the opportunity to start killing this leader's people, friends and loved ones. And so I got the data I needed, killing everyone except for a random person who asked a legitimate question - "why did you kill everyone, but not me." The answer is also natural - I'm a Sith, I'm fucked up. This was spectacular.
Alright im downloading right now.
TOR is full of cool stuff like that if you're a SIth. They did the Sith storylines so damn well.
@@synergy6035 have fun man i’ve played since the f2p release :)
@Flare ? didn't KOTFE come out after that?
I did exactly the same LMAO
Probably one of the best and most honest reviews of SWTOR I've seen in quite a while. Well done, Josh.
I've played the game off and on since beta, so I've had the pleasure and displeasure of riding the waves of changes that either were a benefit the game, or served as a detriment to it. I still love it and I go back to it for short periods of time, but only for the story. PvP? HARD pass. Flashpoints? Meh. Events? Can sometimes be fun, but it depends on which event it is. Space combat with your class ship? Not worth bothering with, really. So, yeah, your perspective about how this serves better as an RPG with multiplayer elements is spot-on.
The story is where it's at in this game, because unlike other MMOs, where the "story" of your character is as thin as a post-it note because all the devs (and other players, usually) care about is "EnDgAmE!1!!", SWTOR's class storylines give you a reason to care about what you're doing...at least, it does for me. I see other people play the game on streams and in YT videos and they skip the dialogue and cut-scenes, and those people annoy the bejeezus out of me. The one MMO that actually gives a shit about story, and you're skipping it to get to the combat? Even if you've played them a bazillion times, skipping over what sets this game apart from others in its genre just seems wrong.
You're completely right about the Imperial Agent storyline; best one in the game by a mile. I do also recommend the Bounty Hunter one, because for a good chunk of the progression, you're actually doing bounty-hunter stuff. I'm also fond of the Sith Warrior and Jedi Knight storylines, because if you want to be either Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, those are the paths to follow, and the expansion content just works better in those classes. Honestly, there are great story moments throughout all of them, but a few are just more entertaining than others.
Personally the Rail Shooter ship missions are my FAVORITE part of the game.
I remember SWTOR was hyped for about 5+years before it was released (not unlike CP2077) and on launch, I felt such a sense of underwhelming disappointment. The class stories where great but the graphics felt horribly dated and this was compounded by the fact many people bought the game on the back of the insanely good cinematic trailers. If it was done properly, I'd love to see a reboot of this game with much better graphics/animations.
If you want to try another story-focused MMO I highly recommend Final Fantasy 14.
PVP was amazing imo. Playing a healer didn't feel like hot garbage like it does in wow.
The ME/DAO style interactive quests and the 8 independent storylines were a major high point imo.
SWTOR and FF14 are very much the two primary "story focused" MMOs on the market today, and watching people skip cutscenes on either is very annoying.
The saddest part of SWTOR eventually shutting down would be the lost opportunity for people to play through the imperial agent storyline. It trumps darkside KOTOR/KOTOR2 by such a massive margin that it is a shame it isn't its own standalone singleplayer game.
I still haven't forgotten the emotion when you get the conclusion to your watcher's storyline, whom I had started to romance. I actually couldn't believe they provided closure for that plot so long after the surrounding plots had concluded, and it hits me right in the feels to this day.
It isn’t getting shut down any time soon! I’m still a regular player on that game (at least 2-3 times a week), and I’ve been playing since 2011! They just released their road map for 2024-2025 and said they have big plans for 2026! So if it does get shut down relatively “soon”, it won’t be for at least another 3-4 years, and even that is *HIGHLY UNLIKELY!*
Hell, they’re adding date night into the game where you can have pretty much unlimited dialogue with any character that you’ve romanced/married in the game! It also allows you to do quests with your married companion. In other words, lots of Yee Haw time, kissing scenes, and legitimately going on “dates” with your married companion. They haven’t specified what these “dates” will entail, but it’s still going to be a *HUGE* update that will bring a lot of people back to the game! I get to have legitimate dialogue with Vette again, so that’s all I care about! Vette is my girl lmao!… ❤❤❤
cope
@@AcidWorkz?
please put the crack pipe down
@@Kabal39 hes saying its better than kotor, its not.
I laughed when you realized you would rather be the villain you're chasing. I think I agree. It would have been a better story for a smuggler.
Often times it feels like you're not playing the class fantasy you'd expect.
@@sirurza55 Yea, my first playthroughs were actually great, but when I got to smuggler I was disappointed with how it forced you to be a Han Solo type. I was hoping to be able to be kingpin or pirate or just someone unsavory and unwanted by the law by technicality
From my experience every class story will be both defended and criticized by someone, somewhere.
And I really liked the the scrappy, fly by the seat of your pants romantic idiot vibe. Someone who is competent and justifiably cocky but also on the... not dumb but mroe short sighted thrill seeker.
SoR class quest encompassed it best for me, where after not all that successful heist, you're asked why are you still in the business when you've obviously made several fortunes. Because I am in it for the job. I like not knowing if I get through the day and what the tomorrow will bring. It might be cheap excuse for some, but for me it perfectly captured the Star Wars smuggler. Which is the important part, not a smuggler,. the Star Wars smuggler. Who (be it Solo or Carrde) were often ultimately on the side of the angels.
To make it even worse, when i played SWTOR for the first time, I have actually started my first character as smuggler. M guy looked EXACTLY as the bad guy but without the face tatoo. Until the end of chapter one i was genuinly convinced I was chasing myself and i thought my character was under some influence of the force for half the time...
@@jankostrhun8725 That's a pretty good point. I don't hear the inquisitor or the consular getting as much praise as some of the other classes, but I enjoyed the character you could make for both. My first inquisitor truly felt like a master of the dark side, brute force and deception were the hammer and chisel of his craft. He would have fit in nicely among the rule of 2, he held no allegiance that wasn't calculated and wasted no time with pride or short term problems, and had no qualms entertaining the light side and its practices if they could prove useful. He was a dark sider, but not truly one of the sith code, and that was the most interesting type of character for me
Note on that first flashpoint: IIRC, it was originally presented as an alternative route from the tutorial world to the capital city. The flashpoint entrance was on the space station above the tutorial world, it was narratively integrated into the rest of the game, and once it was over you would arrive at the main story's next destination.
20:36 Fights like that *used* to be significantly harder because you had a fraction as many powerful abilities which *used* to come later, after picking an advanced class - which you only had access to after leaving the starting area. I.E. Smuggler could be gunslinger or scoundrel - but not until you made it off Ord mantel and onto the republic fleet station where you would get the quest to *pick* an advanced class. As a result, you literally didn't have access to the aoe ability you just used to down those npcs. Also, companions could, previously, only have one dedicated role. So that fight was much - much - harder, once upon a time.
Yeah, i wish the difficulty was brought back as optional things for those who want to relive the challenge. I know I do, as I've returned to that game recently.
@@shcdemolisher Well, you can always choose to keep your companions in their original configuration.
Ultimately though - I think most of the changes were made in order to intentionally speed up lvling so people could do the xpacs. *Especially* after the xpacs began to become episodic with Shadow of Revan and even more so the Eternal throne drama (kofe/koet).
For my part I've played swtor off and on, but I am a pre-order founder and I even have a full victorious pioneer lvling set from the dvl event (which got nerfed, btw).
I have not played since the recent class restructure though, so I don't really know how I would honestly view the game if I came back. I will say, there's a good two hands full of things I don't like about the game's direction - but as of earlier this year when I last played (pre-class restructuring): I would say I liked the game overall, more so, than I did at launch.
I played the game on launch as a Bounty Hunter, and I remember dying a couple of times to one of those intro sequence bosses. I came back to the game like two years ago and got through most of Imperial Agent, and I don't think I saw my health drop below 50% other than when I unsummoned my companion in hopes of a bit of challenge. The game's definitely gotten considerably easier.
Meh it was never that hard
I don't really play MMOs, but because I've seen enough of Josh's content, I guessed this was the case. Interesting to see it confirmed!
Interesting info: The reason all speeders dont have companions get in or hop on is because of the Trooper droid companion. They scrapped the entire system before launch because of him. We picked on our Main Healer trooper for a looooong time about that.
Liberty prime did that? Never knew, though what about the Jedi droid companion?
@@balazsvarga1823 he was small enough to fit the spacing in a 'compact' form. He was 1 small animation away. Big boy was the size OF the Speeder, so he screwed it up for the whole class.
Fun fact that they changed in the February mega update: smuggler and imperial agents...the ones who primarily use cover, can equip a "roll to cover" option that sticks them into cover for added defense instead of just crouching. Originally this was the default but for some reason crouching became the default and rolling was something you could equip in the ability manager later on.
Oooooh, I was so confused, I kept thinking that my game was bugged cause I remember rolling around like sonic as my smuggler before, when I created him. Then a few years later he was poop squatting
The original change was done because (and it now again happens) they tended to roll way to often into mobs.
@@Eucep the strat is to always target the enemy first, then see what the game highlights as cover. If you’re playing a sniper you should ideally always get the first shot off on enemies…so I’d imagine it’s less of an issue for them.
@@KaitoGillscale Does not matter for this issue. The green highlight is not always where you will roll to, rarely it will detect something in the way and will go to another spot. Targeting the mob matters nothing for it. Then there is the mid combat issue. Many abilities force you out of cover and in the chaos of combat you can suddenly roll of into an additional mob pack. In the past died numerous times to that, that is pre to when your companions could be set to their role. I have no experience in how the issue is in operations.
The original cover mechanic was amazing, it actually prevented you from being hit from foes in that direction, or if you're in a corner, both directions- so long as you're not firing or using other abilities! It's a real shame it isn't a mechanic for all of the gun classes.
Finally Josh is covering SWTOR, was my Main MMO for awhile, it has seen better days, ever since the Eternal Empire expansions, the games been on the decline, the new expansions like Onslaught and Legacy of the Sith haven't been that exciting and a little disappointing and the gameplay loop has gotten exhausting, that's why I stopped playing
Hopefully an expansion like Knights of the Fallen Empire comes one day, to pull people back towards the game, but that seems unlikely
I'm playing right now and it looks like it's doing pretty good player wise. The starting zones are full of returning and new fans of the game. I spent the better part of my gaming time assisting new players yesterday. Truly happy to see so many happy gamers.
I tried getting back into it this yr since i had some financial issues the last few yrs and no time to play like i use to and loaded up one of my mid level characters (i have a character for all classes with 4 characters ar end game, a 2 at the beginning since i started them due to the server issues while back and the rest all mid level) that I know had 3 1/2 task bars full of abilities. I had 3 empty task bars after moving everything together again, my subclass seemed to have become permanent (i say seems cuz maybe if i looked hard enough i could change it again idk) and there's now a timer on the world missions so I have to do them before the week is over or they reset on me. I knew the end game was shit thus didn't go onto that but I wasn't 60 bucks on a 2 month sub thst I only used 3 days of due to how much they nerfed me. I was still over leveled and killing everything easily but I could no longer optimize my attack output properly and felt like I was level 5 again just using the basic attack for 90% of the game so all battles were tedious. I was already annoyed a few yrs back when they started level capping worlds so ya couldn't do the group stuff over leveled (ya still can just tedious). So this made me not wanna play a game I've been playing on and off since release about my favorite(and only good) time period of star wars. Maybe when the bitterness goes away I can try again with new characters and get back into it but for now I'm just resentful and bitter they ruined all my good memories.
@@Kris-wo4pj Every time I come back to this game from taking a break, I always start a new class (I do that in every MMO really)...it's much more enjoyable to learn your class from the start, and start a unique story that you become invested in, rather than starting out with a faint idea of the backstory of your character you made years ago.
I expect guarded positivity here - all the big complaints I see are from players playing the expansion content. The new player experience is still excellent, all that Josh will likely see in his eight hours will be whatever opening planet he chooses and maybe the first Flashpoint, and all of that is just great late 00s/early 10s Bioware.
The real meat and potatoes of the TOR experience is running multiple characters and experiencing all the class stories and PC voice actors. Josh won't see that here - hell, I see a lot of discussion online from people who've played for weeks and months and never worked out that they were supposed to be running multiple characters. So I suppose that will weaken his impression of the game. But unless anything catastrophic has happened in the last few months I still have a lot of faith in the first couple of dozen hours, before things bog down a bit around Alderaan/Tatooine.
yep, I just unisntaled the game last week, I have been playing casualy since 2.x and just wasn't having fun anymore.
The game used to be deeper. The modifications system was nerfed into nothing by the changes to the initial story section, for the current game it's irrelivent until end game now. This happened when they decided you should only have to do the class story so you got to the newer content faster. It's sad, some of the old quests (all fully voiced) were removed.
So many cool quests hidden by the stupid filter on your map...the sacrificial blood alter thingy with the skull as a sith with the granny sith...or the couple on tython who give you a kyber crystal if you don't snitch. I'll never forget leveling a sith juggernaut to 50 or 55 for the first time and getting the really cool seasonal pvp gear. Ah the memories
Most aren't removed, but are filtered by default. You can activate them on your map.
Like said below they were not removed, but stream lined. You can turn on Exploration Quests. Tbh I like it not being as long. Tatooine and Hoth were awful back in the beginning. Now they are less awful 😂
mods are completely irrelevant endgame, ilevel max went from 306 to 330 with 7.0 but there aren't any mods past 306
Happens in so many MMOs, they listen to the people that complain levelling is part of the game at all.
I love the touch of describing an English accent in the game as 'An Imperial Accent'
Apparently the Empire literally all speak with English accents normally, and in order to disguise themselves sound more 'Galactic Basic'' (American)
This is such a beautiful combination of meta and world building. Even Imperials speak in different ways according to status (more scrappier imperials speaking with Cockney accents)
Josh: "flirting is always the correct option"
Josh once he plays through tatooine with his imperial agent: "I have made a severe lapse in judgement"
OMG, I remember that. On my second playthrough I did better though lol
You could say the same with Trooper on Tatooine
I hate this mmo it’s terrible the of original games are better
@Tarragon5351 that's what we in the functioning human being business call "an opinion"
@@ATemplarIGuess Ok??? Well in my opinion its shit.
The more I play this game the more I realize that it really doesn't need to be an MMO lol. I barely notice other people, I never found myself needing to find a group (I did mostly beginner stuff though), and it just feels like the highlight is the story which only really involves the player.
It's because this was supposed to be KOTOR 3, but then MMOs were the new hotness and everyone wanted to be the WOW-killer and a slice out of that pie, so EA made Bioware turn it into one. To this day, I'm still salty about it, as I would've really loved to play this game without it being saddled with all the MMO baggage.
@@Horvath_Gabor very plausible. I think I might have even heard that confirmed before.
@@Horvath_Gabor I was going to say I think this is exactly what happened. It was sort of back in the day where everything had to have a co op mode or a multiplayer component of some kind, online passes were a thing, and publishers were trying hard to put out the next big MMO. You had better believe that EA was all over this one. When I play it, I always ask myself why there is all the generic MMO crap getting in the way of a good KOTOR game, and why that KOTOR game looks like a Sims expansion.
SWTOR is a single player MMO.
@@georgeblair3894 That sounds soooo stupid, but it is.
For the fights not feeling like Boss fights: Everything below 60 for me feels like "okay, game got updated, old AddOns and bosses got weaker due to squishes" - Some later boss fights actually take much longer and look very nice. Not very dangerous for singleplayer modes, i grant that, but they are fun, and in "Veteran"-Mode even challenging!
And for the Plot point:
Actually you do not get your ship back on Ord Mantell anyway, but you notice Skavak has fled the planet with it. You need to follow him to Coruscant before you get it, which you do by traveling with a Shuttle to the Fleet, and continue with a ship to Coruscant, and heres the point: The Esseles was one of two options to travel to Coruscant, and you just tried to get a friendly travel when the attack happens.
What your problem in that situation was, is also, due to the strong leveling that is going on with the change of XP:
You leveled into a stage where you get a classical group finder, which wasn't there back in the day, and get the Dungeon before you would - back in the day -accessed it! So thats a trouble of "Old Content" Problems many MMOs have.
The only one that didn't throw me into dungeons early in old content, was Final Fantasy 14, which just locks them into the main story line, so you can't accidentally "get in too early".
Good explanation. Personally, I find Heroic +2 to be a nice challenge level, and wish that was the default for the rest of the world.
@@RickReasonnz I mostly agree with that, excepting that just a handful of specs really blow ass at soloing, such that H2 as a standard would actually make those a slog to play. That inherently cripples choice. I remember the overall challenge of the game being drastically higher than it used to be, but that was all the way back in vanilla, when the game actively tried to kick your ass, and you actually had to figure out how to play your class or you would die repeatedly against some STORY bosses. Oh, and also, you had to gear and rep your companion in order to make them useful at all, in the one role that particular comp was allowed to fill.
@@antonsimmons8519 I know; you're probably right. However, I only started playing in... 2020, so really I've NEVER had a challenge levelling in SWTOR. Although, I know some are better at it, but I don't really think there are classes that are so bad at soloing they'd be a joke to play, especially now with the choices behind double classes.
People complain about the FFXIV thing where it locks all content behind the main quests... But there IS a reason for it, and it generally works.
FFXIV is still the only game I've played so far that does this so well. You can't skip content on your first char and everything unlocks progressively like it did when it first launched. Blows my mind how other games dont do this
That first Flashpoint actually makes sense if you pick up the quest from its original location. Kinda sad that you don't unlock it there first before being able to just auto queue for it. It's supposed to be your transport to Coruscant after you get to the space station. Coruscant is the next planet in the main story after Ord Mantell. And the fact it doesnt put you back on Ord Mantell where you queued up for it is a huge problem
Yay i was wondering that, i havent played in ages, but i remember the Esseless.. they dumbed you where the flashpoint ORIGINALY started i think, which wow
I remember when this game first released, the onboarding of new players was actually pretty organic. Most everything felt like it was a part of the character's main storyline, even that first weird flashpoint is *supposed* to be the character's dramatic trip from the faction's main fleet to the next planet, and you couldn't just teleport to it until you had actively finished the events of your starting planet, (Ord Mantell, Typhon, Nal Hutta, or Korriban) Hell, there was even a small little story quest where your character got to select their class specialization where you talked to an npc representative of your class and they actually explained the role of your expanded class specialization in a way that felt organic and interesting, (now days you select the specialization at character creation and just are that subclass from the start). Not to mention that companion NPCs actually had specifically assigned combat roles, which made the decisions of which companion you were bringing with you actually feel legitimately important, as if you had the tank npc, and you were playing a dps class, then you were about to learn the definition of genuine pain, when both you and your tank got fucking melted by enemy blaster fire almost immediately with no healing in sight. It's worth noting that the combat encounters on the tutorial planets were also more difficult in that early time, and if you were not careful, you would die and need to retry mission beats over and over again until you could get through them.
Cut to... Jesus... eleven years later, now and the game has been "Streamlined" to make it more immediately accessible to more people, yet it feels more like a mass produced generic copy of the vibrantly interesting game that it began as. All in all, I miss the early days of Old Republic for it's immersiveness, but I'm still glad that it exists today.
Totally agree. I've been a SWTOR player since 2012 as well, and now my son is getting into it. When they removed companion specialization at first I thought "cool, now I can just take who I want" - but I quickly realized it made the game much more boring. While yes, the game play itself was simpler back then (I honestly don't have the time to learn all the new crafting skills, for example), being able to jump right to level 70 just...seems cheap.
That explain why there are so many medical vendors around
every game was streamlined. That's the sad truth of marketing. And making "individual difficulties" where enemies have more health and dmg for you alone is boresome.
Honestly, at this point, SWTOR (but frankly any other decade old MMORPG) needs to be shut down and start again as a new games. SWTOR 2, WoW2, Neverwinter onliine 2 and etc.
It was annoying but also cool. The companions not only had certain classes but you had to equip them too. I hated having to take a certain companion even if I didn't want to. Though you don't miss stuff till it's gone, and now I miss having to plan stuff
Okay, so, as someone who hasn't touched this game since at least 2016 or something (I remember being surprised that I could switch the class of companions), it sounds like any attempt to play it nowadays will leave me disappointed. For one thing, I _really_ liked the in-game advanced class system. What stands out is my Consular character being concerned about Shadows drifting towards the Dark Side, but being reassured about it. Also, the feel of "Okay, you've graduated to Knighthood. Now you can leave the planet and stretch your wings, including checking in with an advanced tutor."
Edit: Just finished the video. If his score is Star Wars/10, then yeah. I'm not gonna even try to recapture the old magic because it's gone away. At least the George Lucas films are still there to see despite modern "improvements".
SWTOR is my main mmo. I love it, I'm so glad this video exists!
A note to potential new players: Please don't worry about the in-game tutorials. Look up tutorials on UA-cam instead. I'd recommend looking up Swtorista and going through some of her videos.
swtorista is the best thing about swtor.
I'm saying this as someone who was "tutorialized" when the game came out, and knew how to play MMOs before, so I'm probably biased on this, but do you even need any tutorial as a new player? When you get to the endgame, sure. For the singleplayer bits, I can't really think of anything.
@@LasherTimora Yeah, let's be real, the game plays itself, even a child would be fine, you don't need to understand anything in term of gameplay.
Swtorista and Vuulk are copycats. Dulfy was the true innovator. Shame she left content creation.
I actualy like in-game text wall tutorials. SWTOR I pick, play (depends if for me or with others) every year or so for awhile then dont play for months on end. The "horrible" text tutorials allows me to read through them and im back in action, no need to replay 5h of ingame tutorial.
A lot of the problems Josh points out, actually only started with the recent 7.0 update. Bugs and UI stuff. They really took a step back with 7.0 in terms of usability. It's why I stepped away from the game currently.
Yep, as far as wide ranging and game engine bugs this 7.0 was the worst, other updates had area or world specific bugs not ones that infiltrated the entire game.
Same, I was so disappointed by the 7.0 update that I haven't played it since.
For me, the game was better when it first came out. Each class was personalized, followers were unique to the class and the gameplay was far better. Now it reeks of online mobile game mechanics, and a crapload of daily quests. I miss the investment into my character's story, and as a serial altoholic I hate that companions got shared after the Eternal Empire expansion.
My entire guild stopped playing after 7.0, it was super underwhelming and a lot of bad/unnecessary updates that they chose to implement regardless of the really bad feedback from the public test servers.
Is that what happened? I was confused as I'd played the game around six months ago without issue.
A major thing you missed out is the harassment support system
Two reasons people stay for this game
1: It Star Wars, Obvious
2: You can nearly get away with anything, You can troll, Attack, Harass and say nearly all the worst words you can think of, People have used special letters to have names like Nazi or Hitler or other words I rather not repeat
I seen multiple people brag they got banned from Final Finatasy or another game and so came back to SWTOR till the ban is up
Nobody is around to read or address the problems, You can have piles of evidance and 9/10 nothing will happen
Also have been reports when people tried to edit a report ticket with information and details they just get a error and lose all the progress
So players and guilds tend to police themselves by reporting to the point they get "squalched" which is muting them from using general chats and whispers
Among other savoury options
Who cares bro it's words
@@beefcake1876
See that's the problem, It easy to avoid it in other MMO's but SWTOR it very small
The map is small the hub is small the player base is small, So no matter what you can't get away from it
Other MMO it very easy, Maps are big enough to avoid and more players to meet
Can't do that with SWTOR, And not everyone going to have thick skin
@@beefcake1876 you are the problem.
You do realize the game lets you play as a genocidal maniac if you want? You're allowed a slave as a sith war? Considering that it seems weird to complain about character names. Harrasment of other players is different and I would discourage that but the names thing is kinda silly to complain about.
I don't know if ''you can be an open racist bigot and not be canceled'' is the ''selling point'' you think it is, or i missed the point when we just all became fascist pricks and I'm in danger.
A couple things I haven't seen mentioned:
1) You can toggle multiple filters for the map, but you have to find and turn on a setting in the preferences menu to do it.
2) There's actually a third level to how much you spend on the game - once you have spent any amount of real money on a subscription or cartel coins, you gain "preferred" status. Even if you let a subscription lapse, you keep that status indefinitely. It comes with a few more privileges than free2play, though you don't get access to new expansions when they drop, and you still need to pay to use artifact equipment.
3) There is a way to earn cartel coins without spending any real money! If you sign up for a 2FA security key (which is free), you get a small amount of cartel coins every month, regardless of your subscription status, or if you even log into the game.
The 2fa is understandably very broadly explained and is understandably difficult to work through.
You can also get cartell coins by completing achievements. If my math is correct, you should get about 500 coins simply by playing all class stories for your legendary status
I did the 2FA thing in 2015, I went back to the game this year to the tune of 8000 Cartel Coins which is over 50$ worth of cartel coin purchases and all that without spending a dime in an account almost 7 years old. I think this plus gaining sort of a preferred status after making purchases is some of the most F2P friendly attitude towards any MMORPG I have ever seen and honestly I wish more games did it. The subscription for the game is not necessary but it helps and you don't have to stop playing just because you aren't paying anymore, which is one of the things about FF14 that irks me the most.
Note: You need to have preferred or sub status to be able to spend the Cartel Coins earned through 2FA, so you still need to spend money but as little as 5$ will do it which is great value in my opinion
@@Ark_Strike To be fair with the game effectively being 8 RPGs it's quite reasonable
except this prick tells the exact same lie of deserving every aspect of every mmorpg for free you see it every time he starts lying on and on about pack sizes in every video
Remember folks, especially to the new viewers, Josh is pretty fair with his reviews, he’ll praise the positives just as much as he points out the negatives. The previous Worst MMO video has shown this, so chill out. Just felt the need to do a little PSA because of the game he’s choosing to cover on this series with a pretty negative name.
@@Anedime FR. I once saw a guy who said he should, “control alt delete himself from existence.” People are crazy.
Negative: I wanted to take out a monthly subscription via Steam, unfortunately it didn't work, money was debited and support had to activate it manually within 8 days.
Pro: I can slay Jedis
@@vanusk3493 yeah no any mmo with its own website/launcher ya always go for their own shit. The steam version will always be the least supportive and shittiest since most people don't use it.
I'm a huge fan of the game who just returned to finish up some more class stories. Can't wait to see Josh tear into the mtx side of this game or the over inflated marketplace. Wanna know something great? I'm still gonna love the game after the video.
@@Kris-wo4pj They have over 1500 negativ reviews only for the bad steam support for the monthly sub.
Having played SWTOR at launch, and trying to come back to it a few times (I also started Imp Agent, and wholeheartedly agree with it being a phenomenal story), I feel like this all really does encapsulate my experiences. Extremely good game, but terribly managed. Guild Wars 2 and this have to be the two 'biggest potential, most mundane execution' in modern gaming
"Biggest potential, most mundane execution" actually sounds like *THE* best-case scenario these days! 🍺
So much this. Played both for a decent time at launch, both had great foundation, which wasn't expanded enough to actually make them great games.
@@rinslittlesheepling1652 Guild Wars 2 is being handled a lot better, though. Besides balancing issues, the game is improving, and a lot better than launch.
@@obyone878 True. I haven't played GW2 as much as I've played SWTOR, but I've seen both in different phases and GW2 shows actual improvement over time, albeit with some definite issues. SWTOR shows no signs of anyone at its studio ever improving on anything meaningfully; it's the definition of "phoning it in" and coasting off of what's already there, while occasionally being an outlet for a new design lead to come in and fail upwards by making the game worse and then leaving.
I honestly think the game was better at launch, even with the failures they had I'd play a "Classic SWTOR" in a heartbeat, even if it required a monthly sub to play.
Interesting thing about how you mentioned that on the republic flashpoint, there is a moral choice where being good makes the mission harder. The opposite is true for the Imperial flashpoint. If you keep the Black Talon's captain alive, because he is an experienced captain, he avoids some of the boarding torpedoes.
This was one of my mains for years until college started kicking my ass and I had to step away. I knew this was coming. I was nervous as hell, but... I had no reason to be. You did this game justice for both its positives and negatives, as you do with every game you cover. Truthfully, I think that is what has made you such a great reviewer. You don't do shit for the views, or to pander. You make, honest, good, faithful content.
Thank you for all you do.
I want to like this. But the balance already achived. Have my comment instead
My favorite aspect was the ability to ESC out of a conversation choice "playing out" if you didn't like the effect on your dark/light/companion relationship and try another option.
The worst is thematic strange things like playing a Jedi with a convoluted into mission where you craft your first lightsaber, and then a little later some twelve year old kid thanks you for rescuing her brother by handing you a better lightsaber... as if they were on sale at Wal-Mart.
Also, if you had played Jedi or Sith (also the name of a race that scoffs at any other races being Sith), you would have had some extra systems involving stances that change skills, and some more... magical... storylines.
(Since I was a player back when it cost money - i.e. before it was free - I have some perks even when I play for free.)
What perks?
@@littlebadassgaming Mostly more character slots, plus some other things I don't remember - it has been a while since I played.
The community is very welcoming; every time I dip my toes back into this game I always find amazing people that are willing to help and explain things.
Same. Been playing off and on for years, and anytime I go back, there is always a guild or two that will actively encourage new players and teach along the way.
my favorite part is the general chat on Dromund Kaas (Capitol of the Sith Empire), the people there are either quoting Darth Baras or are the autistic version of a 4chan pol thread.
@@Humongous_Hongonggolongus baras, the thick lord
Explain things? More like stranger things! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
After years of playing the only section of the game where i consistently see toxic people the 4v4 PVP deathmatch. The 4v4 mode doesn't not pop up too often but you always get at least one teammate who tells one of your team to never queue for pvp again or some dumb shit like that.
i remember getting my friend to try this game out back in the day and he made a republic trooper. there’s a small story beat where a private comes to you begging to help him because his commanding officer is corrupt and is probably going to get him killed, and without hesitation my friend immediately hit the third dialogue option which was “GET LOST.” i nearly pissed my pants laughing that night especially when he got the message later that the private died after being sent into a minefield or whatever. this game was the shit.
The foundation hasnt necessarily been neglected, its been reworked poorly. A lot of your gripes are due to how the early game has been restructured. It definitely could use some new structure changes. Btw if you get stuck in the environment again just type /stuck
My first character in the game was the Jedi Consular and I stopped playing after a few days. I tried playing again after a few months, as an Imperial Agent, and weeks of my life disappeared as I was so immersed in the story. There were multiple times I would forget I was playing an "MMO" game. The Imperial Agent story line is just that good.
Consular story line is honestly at the bottom of all the class storylines in swtor right next to republic trooper and probably bounty hunter.
The rest of the classes were done justice
Bounty Hunter is pretty good, what are you talking about
@@Kaledrone Yeah, if you ditch that whiny bitch Mako.
It's really odd because for some reason, to me, Consular is my absolute favourite class on Republic side, however I very much think that it is not a good first class to play, I think mostly because its storyline requires a bit of prior knowledge from other storylines first.
In contrast, I absolutely despised doing Jedi Knight and that's the one that made me swear off of republic side otherwise lol. Never did manage to finish Smuggler or Trooper - though, as I am returning to the game I should probably do so, at least for completionism's sake.
I really dislike Jedi ethos. I usually play smuggler/rogue/scoundrel types and losing the ship was frustrating probably because someone in a previous game stole their loot. I haven't ever made a dark side choice in the game. As Bounty Hunter I never killed targets I would just report them dead for the reward and let them vanish for a price.
What's interesting to note is that some of these systems like gear customisation actually used to be explained ! As for the smuggler story, it gets better after the first act.
And yes, I think that every Empire story is better than the Republic side. Ithink there's no bad story in this game, but the "less good" ones are all Republic side.
At the end of the day it's all subjective, there's not really a bad class story as every story is good at what it does. Many say the consular's story is the worst but it's one of my favs.
In the end, every story fits it's class, and that's what matters.
I'm that type of player that wants to play on the good side most of the time, but yes, no matter how you look at it, somehow the dark side stories are just better written in this game.
I´d say Jedi Knight beats at least the Bounty Hunter in my book, so a solid 4th place for jedi knight xD
Personally I liked both Jedi stories more than the bounty hunter one, and liked consular more than knight. From what I recall, Smuggler was the weakest one, especially early on... never liked Corso so I guess that didn't help either.
@@blissett4148 Originally I started out with the consular at first back in the day, but somehow I still managed to finish the sith inquisitor first. Somehow it pulled me in as a story a little bit more, even though I didn't liked to be mean to the npcs still XD Most of the time for me it felt like the Jedi side had something missing from the story, but that's just me, I probably didn1t vibe with those stories at that time
@@blissett4148 Corso has been the most annoying campaign to me as well. And since he's the first, you have to play a much larger chunk of the game before replacing him.
The flashpoint thing is undeniably true, but it did use to be that you had to get that flashpoint by reaching the fleet, talking to an npc and accepting a quest and then boarding the ship that flashpoint was taking place on. Its sort of been messed up due to the age of the game and most people having done it. You are right that it was much better without actually doing anything the text dumps tell you to do. I ignored them in the beginning and ignore them now(obviously).
I just want to note something real quick about the story.
So from my experience playing against type is far more fun than the alternative. So what I mean is playing on the empire as an incredibly empathetic just nice dude is so strangely satisfying that it’s a little alarming.
On the flip side playing as a murderous,embittered Jedi knight with a massive superiority complex is so much fun it’s bonkers really the games far better when playing against type and I recommend it to anyone who plays this game.
Agreed, the light side Sith warrior is extremely well done.
i agree a lot, but for some classes it is just meaningless or boring as hell, there is no way to salvage the mess that is the counsler story, ds or ls, and the commando is hella boring after chapter 1. same goes for bounty hunter. i love going dark side with the inquisitor a lot more then light side, and ds sith warrior means orgy with vette and domina jeysa willsam HELL YES.
@@Noamalmoggg cringey kid
Totally agree! My smuggler is space El Chapo.
@@memitim171 I had so much fun being so nice as the Sith Warrior that I drove that one Jedi to the dark side out of sheer frustration.
Probably irrelevant at this point, but from what I recall from playing it many years ago, that tutorial flashpoint on the republic side is actually integrated into the overall class story progression, just like it was on the sith side (and as a fun side note, if I recall it is the same in-universe event played from two different perspectives depending on faction). It seems that they messed up the timing of when the pop-up and the ability to queue for it show up. If a new player ignores that, they should arrive at it way more organically with any of the classes by just following the story... which would avoid the confusion. Ironic that the text tutorial was apparently what caused it.
Yep. Yet another game ruined by group finder :D
Yup. You actually use the Black Talon flash point as the shuttle to Vaiken Spacedock. You were just a passenger on a ship that was commandeered by the Imperial Intelligence and you were then made to take out the traitor on the other ship.
@@LasherTimora tbh group finder is 100% fine. Just introduce the dungeons in the story and unlock them that way. I really like the QoL later in the game. Or if you are a veteran and already saw every dungeon.
I played and finished all class stories (yay for legendary status) and I think that overall all Empire stories are much more interesting, fleshed out and fun than the Republic ones. My personal favorites are Bounty Hunter (my main, long before The Mandalorian made it cool), Sith Warrior and Sith Assasin:)
Mandalorians are what have always made bounty hunters cool. Not the Disney show mind you, but the warrior race of now dead EU.
The Sith Warrior story is incredible.
Eh, the Jedi Knight and Trooper stories aren’t half bad. Counselor is kinda meh and the Smuggler story (as Josh found out) is pretty boring.
BH is just hunting bounties…. AND THAT’S ALL WE WANTED BABEEE
I enjoyed playing some of the storylines in "opposite mode", playing a LS Sith Assassin, or a DS Jedi Shadow (Iiirc my initial playthroughs were LS BH, LS Sith Assassin, DS Agent, DS Sith Warrior, LS Trooper, LS Jedi Knight, DS Smuggler, and DS Jedi Shadow. DS Jedi Shadow is probably the most weird mix of stuff. You'd think the Jedi Council would eventually get mad that you keep killing the people they tell you to not kill, but no. The number of times this played out almost exactly is kind of silly:
Council: Hey, go find this guy and bring him to us
Find guy, get info from him, kill him
Council: Hey, where's the guy we asked about?
Me: Dead
Council wags their fingers at me
Council: Hey, don't do that again. We've got another person for you to find...
Though tbf, The DS Agent & DS Sith Warrior were just too fun. Agent for the "License to Kill" feeling (complete with seducing everything on two legs), and DS Warrior just felt like being a serious beast of a Sith.
I remember playing SWTOR at launch for several months, and the new player experience just felt so good. No text boxes, no terrible guides, talent points... it all felt so much like a classic MMO in all the right ways, but with excellent voice acting, an amazing score, and WAY better narrative than most other MMOs even attempt.
What hurts the most is the "teleport to your first dungeon" thing. My first playthrough, I got to the station, followed my story quest, and then saw this guy offering passage to Coruscant on the cheap, and found out it was a dungeon. Partying up with a group of players all heading to Coruscant as my first dungeon experience was incredible! It felt so cool having all the disparate storylines converge for a brief moment aboard this ship going somewhere you all HAPPENED to need to be. It felt like you started the game off as a superhero, and then the Esseles was this early game Avengers event where you all got together and saved the world. Seeing that experience diluted just makes me so disappointed, but also glad I stopped playing the game well before it got to that point.
All of this was done during the Knights of the Eternal Throne Arc, it broke soo many systems that it cheapened new player experience past redemption......the Eternal Throne Arc really fucked over SWOTOR and took away the mmo feel and made it just an online RPG. Rise of Revan murdered dungeons with the 3 man dungeon system but Eternal Throne killed what was left...
SWTOR for new players could be a heaven. Some of the the stories in this game saurpass every SW movie. Ancient Sith Lords compared to the likes of Darth Vader or Luke are like Titans to an ant. Some are so well written that you'd be wanting a movie based story. Also the Empire in this game is portrayed not like in the movies "all evil and cringe". In fact most brutal kills ever made in this universe, is made by Jedi, not Sith. Also some classes have 2 or 3 replayability because it has different outcomes in the story
God, the Imperial Agent story is so great
"ancient sith Lords compared to the likes of darth vader or Luke are like titans to an ant"
My biggest problem with legends, summed up in one sentence. Impressive.
@@anna-flora999 That's not true though.
So true. My Jedi had a kill count FAR north of any of my Sith characters. FAR.
@@georgeblair3894 The funny thing is, the Warrior and Inquisitor kill as many of their fellow Sith as they do Jedi, with similarly high-profile kills.
Damn, so many memories. And I am saying this because I actually was on the testing team back in the day at this game at EA. I remember encountering bugs, submitting them then reviewing if they were actually fixed, checking the mechanics, the mission flow was not obstructed and that it can be completed and so on.
I decided to write this comment because my tester instinct kicked in at the minute 13:36 when for half a second the room in front of Josh disappeared. That is actually a bug named occluder and if you stay in that area and move the camera around slowly you will actually see that you can reproduce it.
Yeah, it still pops up in the open world occasionally...though it's getting rarer.
I love this game. The story really made you feel like a sith, jedi, bounty hunter or smuggler. I stopped playing cause of the lack of end game content long before they started releasing the DLC's. As a free MMO now, it's worth a play through if you never played it
The Smuggler storyline doesn't feel like a smuggler at all. What are you talking about? Sure, you "smuggle" stuff occasionally, but you're basically just a delivery man - at no point do you actually have to run from the law, or even attempt to hide the fact that what you're doing is illegal. An NPC lawman literally stops you on Taris and says "I know you're a smuggler, but I can't prove it, so go about your business."
Heck, you don't even get half-way through the Smuggler story before you're recruited by the Republic to work for them. And because of the game's binary alignment system (Republic or Empire) you can't even betray the Republic to cash in with the Empire (Even in the late game, where you can choose the Saboteur path, you're still stuck with the Republic, have to murder thousands of Empire soldiers and sith lords, and just occasionally get an optional side quest to undermine the war effort).
@@LadyDoomsinger Smuggler story is hands down the single worst class story in the game. I really struggled to hit 50 with it and my smuggler has been sitting at the bottom of my character list for nearly a decade at this point untouched, unloved and unwanted.
@@LadyDoomsinger Yeah the smuggler story has it's moment, for example when a Sith and a Jedi quarrel over you on Tatooine. But the other class stories really are by far superior.
wait, its free now?
@@SyaitanBDO yes
Weirdly enough the Esseles and Black Talon Flashpoints are introduced via the story.
When you are told to take a shuttle from the Fleet to your capital planet, the game makes you walk past the respective Flashpoints. There's an NPC who talks about how taking a shuttle can take a few days but a faster option had been arranged for your character, that being the Esseles or Black Talon cruiser.
I ALWAYS left the Ambassadar behind in Esseles. Even if I was pure lightside Jedi, I'd let them have that one dark mark everytime.
just a short list of things i remember having changes:
Companions: These used to be class locked (DPS, Heal, Tank) So you needed to get to a specific point in the story before you would get a certain class helper.
Mods: As mentioned in the video any mods required use of the mod table.
Quick travel locations: You used to need to interact with travel stations in order to unlock a location for quick travel use.
Class trainers: Your class abilities used to be locked to a trainer that you were required to unlock new skills from.
Subclasses: Each class only had 2 subclasses originally. now they have been cross merged (2 knight classes + 2 counciler classes = 4 total subclasses under either story choice) this adds an interesting dynamic to class story and their combat allowing a play through to be more dynamic.
Leveling: The leveling system is much improved since the days gone by of F2P being constantly 2-3 levels under recommended. and as the game was based around this model the fights become very easy when you are at or above the recommended level.
the shop: The Cartel Market used to be much simpler in scope. mainly serving to grant subscriber benifits or unlocks or to buy special outfits or mounts. this has exploded in order to scrape as much money as possible from the currently running (movies or shows) Star Wars content.
I am sure there is more but this is what I remember.
Further about subclasses, they aren't locked in any sort of way at all anymore. You can select any of the subclasses for your main class archetype at character creation, even if the subclass is for the other faction. Example: you can create a Jedi Knight for the storyline, but start it off with Sith Assassin abilities. Serves very well for RP purposes.
You also get to choose a second class now to switch between.
One huge thing that made a big difference in gear progression for vanilla swtor was each planet had its own commendations that would be used to buy gear with big stats but getting those wasn’t easy or fast and eventually they merged the commendations into one currency which made leveling way easier around shadow of revan era cause you’d be able to plan out and upgrade every 8 or so lvls
The irony is that everything he's complaining about as a new player was added to the game in an effort to make it easier for new players.
The tutorial popups are a relatively new addition because the developers thought it was too hard for new players to learn stuff at the beginning. Same thing with the teleporting to dungeons that got him stuck on Carrick Station.
The good news is you can avoid all these problems by just turning the tutorials off. Just disable all the popups, and you'll figure out everything naturally.
Your one of the ones he said would be mad at the start of the video 😂
Ya know I was just thinking during his segment about the flashpoints that i remembered it working very differently when I played years ago. First time I saw flashpoints was when I was supposed to take a ship to the 2nd imperial planet and there was an option for a "faster option" that was the introduction to flashpoints.
lol, do you think it was the casuals, who were begging for faster access to FPs?
and i dont see how the stair bug makes
it easier for new players either. you have to
explain that one for me.
@@kimrasmussen7188 the lesson to learn, which no MMO seemingly does is... stop making it easier for anyone. When can we just admit that MMO's arent for everyone. the ADHD people who want rapid rewards and complain about MMO's being too hard, are the first ones to get bored and abandon the game for a newer shinier one. No MMO that I can think of which was later made easier was made better. they all failed and lost players.
@@jamescampbell720 okay. do you want to invest 100s of millions in in a risky project
with low earning?
this may come as a shock to you, but no game of any kind grows in size , as they get older.
it is true, that mmos arent for every one.
but if you think, that showing a paying customer the door is good business, then i have dozens of bridges to sell you...
25:32 That is one of the biggest pet peeves I have with the companions. The game is really inconsistent in acknowledging them. For most of the time you could actually roleplay as if they were some ghost you imagine, since the game mostly totally ignores your companions.
But ever so often, suddenly an NPC will acknowledge your companion in a cut scene, which proves they are there... only to totally ignore them standing beside them in the next scene.
It's mostly the class story missions where they are acknowledged, though some world story missions give them dialogue as well.
I think this is a limit of the games budget, fully voicing dozens of companions and incorporating them into the stories would take a crap ton of resources and time. But yeah, it is a shame.
i also hate how DLC companions like theron or lana don't really react or comment when you do non DLC stuff, for example if you come to dromund kaas with mako she'll comment on it while for example lana or theron who im guessing would have much more to say about it do not comment becuse they're post class story companions i was always sad about it, i'd love to hear their reactions about different places you go to, especially my sith space wifes :P
There used to be a few things that made the og class story hard maybe 5 years ago, being:
1. Companions were skill locked, so you would usually wait for your first healer or play healer yourself and let your companion do all the work. You also needed to gear your companion.
2. Boss fights had mechanics that actually meant something: one-shot abilities you needed to interrupt, grapples that took half your health, abilities you needed to shield.
3. Abilities were trained with credits not automatically given, so if you didn't have enough money to train your abilities you would go into fights without super overpowered AOEs like Sweeping Blasters (the one you use often in the video)
As someone who's played the game for a long time, I will note that the old 'tor was a lot more engaging combat wise because of said difficulties. Had you played the game when it came out, I'm sure the fights would have felt more immersive. The game made you grind more to progress. Now the only hard content is endgame. Super great video recounting the current state of swtor, though :)
and skills tree was better than now. But i still love this game, yes, its wow clone but with style
The tutorial system is definitely hampered by .. well, years and years of added systems - back in the day, the tutorials were pretty basic and were about core things like.. well, moving. Years and years later any system you remotely come near unlocking is dumping info on you that other players would be drip fed over time as it was released. Now its kind of all just showered on you, which is a somewhat common MMO problem that is so easily solved I do not know why most of the time it's not.
The dungeon finder is also a good example of how it can disrupt the game even more - originally Esseles/Black Talon was, as other had mentioned, an optional but flowing part of the narrative taking you to the fleet and introducing you to group content and the old system of social points and multiplayer rolling for dialogue options, with all that entailed.
It's also interesting see how easy the early game is now with all the reworks - I have memories of it being somewhat difficult, but as with all MMo's things get easier early on as time goes on. I have very distinct memories of trying a quest on a later planet for several hours as it was so tightly tuned with required interrupts that I had to be perfect with.
Even with all its flaws though, SWTOR is an amazing rpg with optional multiplayer content, and even the worst story is still worth giving a play through - especially as many of the choices to have some impact somewhere along the line, even if its just "oh this guy is alive and helping me for 30 seconds because I spared them early" type Bioware stuff. I like to come back to it now and again play the new content and no doubt I'll end up going through some of the original stories again one day when they're faded.
It's a shame that SWTOR is in a pseudo not quite maintenance mode as I assume it still makes enough money to put out a little bit of new content once in a blue moon but not quite enough for the love it deserved and got originally.
Also, Carrick :p.
Well said. "Great RPG, not a great MMO." I was a day 1 player, then EA ruined everything.
How did they ruin everything? Only paid players may wear purple (epic) items. My clothes and weapons all fell off!!
Damn, glad I was long gone before that happened. EA is so pathetic.
That sucks for an existing player. They should have let people keep their already equipped gear.
I played it also for a very long time. Of course with subscribcion. Then i wasn't at home for a year and had no real internet so i let my subscribcion went out. When i got home, i wanted to play it again of course. It was then, when i noticed a few differences between sub and the preferred player but it was still ok. Then that went out too and i was a F2P Gamer and man... that sucked. I had millions of credits on every character. And after that i only could hold 100.000 Creds at the time. I had the best equipment at this date (luckily my characters were all max Level so i could still wear it) but buying new equipment from the market or traders? Nope. Cosmetic changes like the same colour scheme for the armor or even removing the helmet? Nope. For each armor part, i had to buy the same colour scheme again. And i even couldn't go on Flashpoints with my guild comrades.
I played a few months but after the Eternal Empire story i had enough.
Not disagreeing on that point, the fact that they could let non subs to use purple gear but that purple gear is literally useless. All you have to do is grab an adaptive armor for very cheap or an outfit and replace the mods once 30-40 levels or so. Not to mention that if u just do flashpoints, you can run with 0 gear till max lvl then go straight for endgame gear.
edit: i've been playing on and off since 2013 and i never had problems with purple gear.
So EA is like tequila.
i remember playing this at launch with a few friends. we decided to plays siths, however, unlike my friends i decided to play as "good" sith. so whenever we did a dungeon it was always funny (for me) when we had to make one of those good vs bad choices, and i ended up winning the dice roll and getting them all mad in the process.
happy times (:
Tbh Swtor is underrated as hell. The story alone makes it worth playing if your into Star Wars. The expansion story is one of my favorite gaming experiences. The game play is kinda like a diet wow but it has enough depth to it to keep things interesting and each class has a different unique play style.
My personal gripes: class specific and companion content basically ends after the main story. I get that it would be a hassle to make every expansion have a different story for each class but it would be cool and keep the overall game more cohesive. Pretty weird to have a dude with a gun throwing down with a planet eating super space wizard.
And companions already didn't have that much content around them, but once you get to the expansions they all basically just take up space. I play sith inquisitor and NONE of my original companions come back in any meaningful way in the expansions. Sad.
It's kind of cool that they give you access to everyone's companions later on and then some, but that just adds to the feeling that none of them really matter and I'd rather just go on more adventures with my original crew.
I really wish they kept the expansion but made a unique way to handle it with every class that ties into your past character experience. I felt like a jedi knight on my honourable "my word is my bond" bounty hunter towards the end and I wanted nothing to do with it.
@@Supadrumma441 the eternal empire story just doesn't fit any of the none force sensitive classes. Maybe there's a way they could've had every class take a different role in the conflict. Like the inquisitor gets possessed by volcorian and they deal with that, the warrior deals with arcann and/or vaylin, the smuggler does the heist, etc, etc. Not really a big fan of the whole alliance situation
I played my Jedi in the expansions because I need my existence to make sense. But I missed Jorgen, he was my fav companion. Oh! I can still travel with him?! Um…why would he travel with my Consular? Could I have another storyline for my trooper please? Please? BioWare! Hello!!!! They hung up on me.
In FF XIV you have job missions for every class, granted, it's not much, maybe 5 quests per expansion, but it's something.
Nah, there’s nothing more badass than a random dude with a gun throwing down with ultra-powerful space wizards. It’s the ultimate Star Wars fantasy. Everyone I knew growing up wanted to be Han Solo, not Luke.
I played for the first 7 years of this game. It's such a good game, we used to chomp at the bit for a continuation of the storylines alone. I still pop in to play sometimes. I think the main reason it has deteriorated over time is they chose a poor engine that had limitations and just didn't work to fix that and it has aged poorly because of that.
I did/do the same. Watching this vid will probably get me to sub for another month.. play a while.. and then move on again. Idk.. I really enjoyed it for a very long time.. but I guess it is a bit dated now. If they did a SWTOR 2, I would be so into that.
@@fudgefudge8913 Yeah a full sequel with a brand new engine and new content, along with some good familiar stuff from the first would do well.
I really really enjoyed this game, from start to end (of where i had played until) I loved healing in this game, and the only game that had even been close for me for that was WoW. I mained a commando healer and me and one of my best friends who played a tank would queue together, and we could tie up 3-4 players of the 5 on the enemy team with that combo. God they really do need to make a sequel. tbh so does STO, I would love to see them lean in to the bridge commander style of gameplay in STO.
Yeah the engine is a... mess.
Ya melee pvp was soooo rough at launch
It’s a good review. This game was definitely worn down by time. I think the sadest thing for me was that the combat got easier and easier. You used to have to cycle interrupts and stuns, not just aoe everything down with OP companions. I died on some bosses multiple times in the early days in solo instances and had to ask people for suggestions on bow to beat it.
played this on a sub a few months back and i have to agree aside from some few bosses the regular mobs are just way too easy. more annoying then anything from how many there are when you are just trying to travel somewhere
I remember when I first beat the emperor I was super disappointed because of how much of a pushover he was, then reading about how hard the final bosses used to be. The devs could easily scale up the hp and damage of them, but they just won't. I've found ways to force the combat to be harder, such as removing buffs and companion abilities, but even this really isn't enough. As for interrupts, it took me until the end of Ilum to even learn about those, since I literally didn't need them until coming across a boss with a one hit kill ability.
I got real good as an End based Assassin tank, in the old days, with a full rotation. Shortly after F2P and the initial class changes (simplification) it just got too easy, and dumbed down.
@@brubbbbbb yeah. I do everything I can to nerf my character while playing: buy an item in the main faction space-station from the gree (black something?) that nerfs how fast you level, dont wear gear, keep companion on passive so they dont do anything, etc. it kinda works but it removes the fun of finding good gear and it’s weird when your companions dont do anything. I wonder if anyone made a “classic” server for this game…
Your score made me actually burst out laughing it’s sooo accurate to what you said lmaoooo 44:18
38:50 The real way to fix being stuck, is with /stuck btw; that command will become quite common, as it's also the "suicide to make a raid wipe quicker" command
Otherwise quite a good video ^^
I would say as a longtime player, they streamlined leveling to the point of triviality (bad), but at the same time, introduced purple quest icons for main storylines (good)
And in general, the community is fantastic compared to wow
Virtually everything I experienced with this game could be summed up with "the Imperial version is cool and the Republic version feels like a complete afterthought".
Then the developers were confused why they had a massive population imbalance the second the game launched...
At launch, I was a Jedi Sentinel and remember getting constantly trounced in pvp....all the time...it was fun a lot of the time though lol.
The Jedi Knight story is OK, but everything else sucks
@@anonymous_hulk Trooper story is fun. Counselor story is decent. Haven't played smuggler
@@anonymous_hulk Nah, Trooper Story is actually fun though. I had the Most fun with this game on Republic Side as a Trooper.
When has the good guy side not been boring? Look at every star wars movie currently out it is all a rerun about the same family, the skywalkers, now compared that to a potential movie about Revan and the Old Empire. There is literally endless of lore they could use here to make a dark and gritty star wars movie or series that the fans would love but instead they keep on repeating a beaten to death story that even the normie crowd are tired of by now. I would argue even the old star wars movies were trash compared to what they could have been, but disney is just carrying on the torch of the originals further running the IP into the ground for no good reason other than appealing to literal 5 year olds. FIX UR SHIT DISNEY.
The imperial agent storyline really is just beautiful. Chapter 2 got me so emotionally invested, I called out of work and played until 3am just to rush to its conclusion. If nothing else, play through it for the feels.
One of the best stories in the game, for sure.
I absolutely love the agent story. I had only played jedi and sith before trying it and I absolutely did not expect any of it. At least the real story since chapter one is basically just introducing you to imperial intelligence since it's not exactly a faction we see much of in other forms of media. Every now and then I just make a new agent just to experience the story again, even though I already know what happens it is still amazing
So, couple of thoughts here.
The game USED to introduce you to systems naturally. There was a quest revamp like mid 2010's that stripped out most of the main quests, religated many to legacy quests, broke the planets story and in general just shortened the game. This is fine. The problem is many of the quests that were removed were designed specifically to teach you these systems and slowly introduce you to the game. Hence they added in all those tutoral boxes to explain things rather than acutally use the system. In fact many things like the reason you can modify everywhere, or limitations on the systems that were put in place for narrative reasons were REMOVED through MARKETING feedback. Yes the worst kind of feedback who'se goal will be to dumb everything down to make it as accessible as possible.
This death spiral is indeed exactly the problem with the game right now. Basically, the game used to play like a RPG, getting from start to max was a journey, not a destination. The problem was once you did the game once on one character, people wanted to skip ahead and be able to skip planets on other characters because it's rehashing stuff they already did. That is reasonable. The solution they came up with though made the story irrelevant on your FIRST!!! playthrough. Which was the problem.
Second, difficulty. it used to be that companions did specific things, some were healers, some were dps, some were tanks... this was terrible. So they fixed it and allowed you to customize your companion into whatever form you wanted them to take. This was great! And the process it also removed a lot of companion gear, which was great! (companions stats used to be tied to the gear they were wearing, yes... that means that you had to gear them AND your character if you wanted them to be like, useful). The problem was the Dragon Age problem. In order to make things possible to defeat WITHOUT a healer companion... you had to drastically dumb down the encounter as the healer companions made solo combat trivial with a healer.
That and buffs to players to make them feel more 'epic' and cater for retarded monkeys who cant push buttons but get mad because they lose they cant means that quests that should be epic are trival because of the aforementioned problems. In short, its a failure of balance.
Bugs... yeah, those have existed since the beginning. The game was NOT ready for prime time and was shoved out to meet a financial quarter/year/expectation and failed within a year because of it... since then held together with a shoestring budget. Still it's a good story if you like star wars legacy (pre-disney woke trash). And some of the newer expansions are good as well...
I remember playing first as a light side sith inquisitor. I was really impressed how they actually let you play something whacky like that and make it feel good in the story.
Light Side Imperials are some of the most fun, especially a Light Side Sith Warrior out-talking Jedi on more than one occasion (the bafflement of the Jedi on the receiving end is the cherry on top).
Though there is something to be said for the morally gray Inquisitor. Sometimes, you just want to zap a guy with all the lightning.
I LOVED playing as a LS inquisitor as well! I played as a Twilek, and starting out as a slave and ending up the story the way it did felt so epic. What a good time.
The Sith Inquisitor storyline, though, just feels bad. You get handed the Idiot Ball at the start of Chapter 2, then run with it full-tilt for the rest of the chapter, and then spend most of Chapter 3 trying to fix the problems that you created for yourself in Chapter 2. On the other hand, the Inquisitor has some of the best lines in the game, like Khem Val's line when you exit the cantina on Tatooine: "I have an excellent sabacc face. That is a joke. I hate sabacc." and the female Inquisitor's line at the end of the Tatooine questline -- "I brought Andronikos back!" in an utterly out-of-character chirpy voice.
This video will hurt me, this was my main MMO for a very long time. Me and my friend started close to release day, he was a trooper, I was a consular. I really enjoyed PvP - even at low levels, you received buffs to bring you up to par with others so you had a chance. The game had old school WoW "talents" so I customized my Jedi to be hybrid DPS/healer which showed up as damage during PvP.
The game felt like they tried so badly to not copy WoW that they didn't use the good things and kept the bad/annoying ones. The voice acting of pretty much everything was a huge plus. I rarely read the quest description in WoW (since it's mostly "collect 10 wolf asses anyway") so this helped. I told my friend that the game will go free to play in about a year. Well, it did. I really enjoyed the game so I even dropped some cash on it.
I don't really remember the tutorials but I had no issues with the systems at the time.
14:15 I kinda remember the boss fights being harder. I remember using long cooldowns to get the job done.
26:30 Wasn't legacy around level 30 back in the days?
34:25 Ah, this is the scaling I mentioned in PvP, glad it's still in.
35:00 IIRC that's how it was. I think the "dungeon finder" was a later addition but I might be wrong.
OK, it wasn't that bad. I expected the game to be way worse after so many years.
what a great experience it was so much great memories i feel u
The game was semi-hard and grindy when it came out. They massively nerfed it later and the made it slightly harder (but not as hard as launch) w/ the last expansion. Either way, it was still easier in the starting zones which he uses for the video than it was later in the story.
I've played SWtOR for ten years: Tutorial critique is so true. Didn't learn half the systems until I had to in order to do end-game raiding. It is definitely a bit of a learning curve when you first reach level cap. Had a great guild that made that fun for me.
I found it funny that the trailer shorts for TOR were the best Star Wars movies since the original trilogy.
Pretty fair review. I always come back to replay some story, or sub for a while and get the new expansion. Two things worth noting:
(1) You NEED to play female Sith Inquisitor. The voice actress is amazing and most conversations are so sarcastic.
(2) SWTOR got a “WoW treatment” at some point. Leveling used to be challenging and the quest bosses were actually “hard”, but it became trivial at some point (I don’t recall which xpac it was).
I haven't played a ton of story lines. But Male Sith Warrior light side is easily my favorite. "Light side"Sith is so funny, you're not a hero, you're not a good person. You're a psychopath who occasionally lets people live. As a Marauder, I was basically Sith Deadpool, and that was utterly hilarious.
@@Deadsnake989 Absolutely, sith warrior is probably my most played class... and its my least favorite combat. That right there tells you everything you need to know about the quality of the story and characters in it.
"Please don't get all sentimental on us. We've only just met". At that moment i knew she is going to be my favourite VA in the game.
Maybe I'm missremembering but I loved how light side sith warrior was more of a warrior-poet archetype who instead of going berzerk and killing every jedi he met, used logic and philosophy to show them flaws in jedi teaching and make them question it and loose faith.
Have to add some love for female sith inquisitor. She was the first class/origin I chose when I tried the game and still the only one I've completed the base game story with. I tried jedi consular after her but darn I miss quizzie's sass :(
I remember the "fully voiced MMO" thing being such a selling point at the time. I also remember my disappointment upon realizing that meant reusing the same 6 lines of monotone alienese a thousand times and slapping different subtitles under them.
SWTOR was such an experience for me. I was a tremendous Star Wars fan, I was just really breaking into the online space and being social, and when my PC at the time couldn't run SWTOR, it even became my first DIY PC build.
I played it for about six months. I *lived* in it. Fully engrossed in most of the class stories, all-in on the crafting. I even did PVP as much as the group content, which was extremely rare for me. I had a couple friends who were just as devoted, and it was just bliss.
And then it ended. I don't really even know what happened. For some reason, it couldn't immerse me anymore. Almost overnight, it just ceased to be my galaxy far far away and became a video game. I thought I was just going to take a month or two break from it, but I didn't return to it until many, many years and expansions later, and that stint lasted mere days. It was just a video game - one that I couldn't force myself to enjoy.
I don't know if there's any point or moral to my story, there. Just thought I'd share. Josh prodding at the old memory banks, I guess.
wow. same here. Like almost word for word, including the pc. Interesting. I come back every year or so just to check up on things.. nostalgia out a bit.
Yes it was “fully voiced MMO” and “SGRA” and I’m not sure it shipped with either one. I played for a few weeks, until my server pop died and no one played light-side.
@@fudgefudge8913 Did you and your friends scream "HUTTBAAALLLL!!" into your mics like a bunch of frat boys every time you got a match?
This reminded me of a mogwai album. Hardcore will never die, but you will.
The Funny thing about the fully voiced is, that DC Universe Online Released 2010 and was fully voiced as well. And the voice acting there was good, so i never understand why that was such a big selling point for SWtoR
Played this game many years ago, if i remember right, the flashpoint "the esseles" was something you first would get access to in the main hub, the space station. After you followed your class story to that point, the story quest would lead you to coruscant, however if i remember right you had the choice to go to coruscant via the flashpoint,since the entrance to the flashpoint is close to the space shuttle for coruscant. Its supposed to be an optional story segment of you travelling to coruscant. I liked it much better like this as it made sense, i had no idea you could now just teleport to it. That sucks.
Enemies and bosses used to be a WHOLE lot harder than they are now. Around the time we got role-changing on companions they then made the difficulty easier. Same with XP, usually you would reach lvl 10 on your last mission in the start even after doing ALL sidequests, and you only reached level 12/13 in the end of the prologue if you used xp boosts. After the change story missions gave more xp and made content a little easier, therefore mitigating the need for side-questing. Problem was you were now always over-leveled if you did 1 side-quest and you fight bosses 3 levels under you, plus their nerf
Until probably 2016 (?) I died often, had to use med-packs and play strategic. After that update i have probably only used med-packs in a flashpoint, and can play the game as a bulldozer just walking. Its fun to have combat where you can get good action packed parts, and not fight bullet-sponges that just have 20 000 hp for no reason does almost not damage you, but they overnerfed especially the starterplanets.
Yes it used to be much more difficult. Every major MMO eventually nerfs its content as far as I'm aware but I agree they went too far especially with the changes to companions. As a jedi knight you didn't get a healer companion until around level 30 if I remember right which did feel like a disadvantage. But it made the leveling experience feel that much different for each class. I'm also not sure why they got rid of companion gear. And my favorite aspect of the game besides the story was the crafting which was gutted substantially.
I played at the beginning for a couple months and then again a few years ago. I think some of the changes were necessary. They added a lot of good features and I'm glad they made it more solo friendly because groups can be almost impossible to find while leveling. But I agree they overnerfed the mobs. And the leveling speed is so outrageous it feels like they are actively preventing people from doing sidequests for some reason. Although I think I heard that you get level synced to the planet now? Or was that just my wishful thinking?
@@blueager222 yes, you get level synced luckily. But its still really easy, but at least quite balanced (not starter planets, they are SUPER easy especially when you reach for example lvl 14, get level synced to 10 but is still on lvl 8 content storywise)
Its how the story minibosses and most of the other bosses are so easy now that bothers me most. Arcann, Vaylin and Valkorion , difficult fight, i like it. Most KOTFE/ET content actually challenges you. But bossfights in the older stories has gotten so easy that its laughable. I remember dying in my fight against Darth Skotia early Inquisitor story. Now? He is hardly stronger than an escaped slave champion in the wilds of Dromund Kaas. Im still a sith Acolyte. It SHOULD be hard to kill a Darth EVEN if you use the emp thing you stole
This is my favorite single player RPG hiding in an MMO. All 8 of the classes have their own story lines which are worth playing, and the expansion stories get progressively better. The parts I dislike are all the trappings common to MMO's, like the auction house and horrible free-to-play gating systems.
This is probably the only series which does a proper "bad" storyline where you actually feel it's right to do the bad things. It's in theme and in character and you are rewarded for playing your character. I find every other moral choice system is no actual choice at all by comparison. You just get punished for doing the bad things, and rewards for doing the good things.
Also this was the only game that managed to pull off storylines with multiple players actively making choices in that storyline. When it came to key points in the flashpoints you all got a say, not just one lead character and it was always hilarious when you got the bad group in the good mission. I have fond memories of being a little miffed that our Jedi team decided to vent a lot of crew into space to save a little time. It was funny afterwards that they gave us players that choice, and one 'bad' player couldn't ruin it for everyone, but 2 out of 4 was a dice roll.
So yes, much more RPG than MMO and IMO a lot better for it. I would have gone back but I had assumed it was a dead game. Glad to hear it's still alive and well, and it's time to see how my legacy is doing. Highlight was grinding for, and finally unlocking my Tauntaun.
Lastly, I disagree with the whole "chosen one" storyline and my character always having to be the only chance to save the galaxy. I just want to be a part of the rich world. Nothing breaks me out of any MMO faster than 50 chosen ones all running around the same area together.
this! I always love playing the bad moral options in games, but this game really took it to a level as yet unreplicated by any other game
I really adore the light side sith storyline, I played as an inquisitor
Also important for "not ruining it" if someone else chooses the bad choice and you are chosing the good one, you'll get the Good points for sentiment.
Thats something that was good for me, since, i kinda dont want to be punished for "I wanna be a bad jedi" player on my team!
Still the only game I've played where any group content quests (Flashpoints) are actually group, from quest acceptance through to hand-in. Other games it's only the doing the quest between that is group.
I've been playing this game off and on since launch, and you want to know what hurts most about this critique? A lot of the systems that need to be introduced over time are, like the Flashpoint and everything, once were introduced through the narrative. But the tutorials are tied to level value, and now even F2P players are getting more levels than the narrative is accounting for. The Flashpoint played, the Esseles, is the connective tissue between the starting world and the capital. But the game rushed the story, and now it's out of order. You need a flow chart to know what and where the plot should take you, because for the game to keep up with modern expectations, it has separated the narrative from the grind so they can be done independently.
And they trivialized everything with the companion rework.
I loved the Bounty Hunter story. Getting to be an all out action hero was great, duking it out with Jedi and Sith later on. All of the class stories are great, but that one stays with me the most.
SWTOR is absolutely one of my favorite games, I adore it and have spent countless hours on each storyline, which is why its so painful to see what it's become, from removing ingame tutorials to just poorly done expansions, I wish it would just get a remake in the form of a single player game containing only the base 8 class stories. The expansions are great in some regards but you can tell they lost the budget they had for the base game as no class feels truly unique, hell if you play through as a republic character on the expansions you feel like a secondary character, all of them feel designed for the sith classes, the sith sides actually get to enjoy the story and it actually matters to them. But to boggle it down even more if you aren't playing a sith itself, you still lack that feeling of this story was made for your character, it's not as severe but you can definitely tell the expansions were made with the idea that a sith warrior or inquisitor would be the one going through it.
Eh not really, at least for Sith Inquisitor. My main was SI and halfway through KotFE I was wishing I had done a separate character for the expansion. DS SI was canonically a brilliant, witty, utterly insane powerhouse. Expansions made them feel washed-out and generic. It also felt like it was trying to convert my char to LS, which just felt odd.I finished at Ossus, though, so not sure how it developed further.
Lol honestly..the whole "single player" push like you mentioned you wanted..is the exact reason the game went downhill. Ie kotet and kotfe were designed to have people stop whining about making kotor 3 and a single player experience..by streamlining it just like kotor 1 and 2 and turn swtor from a multi-player experience into a single player experience..
I've watched a lot of your "Worst MMO" videos and I've seen a lot of comments saying "this was my first MMO" and I finally have the chance to say that myself because SWTOR was my first real MMO. I had played stuff like Toon Town and Pirates of the Caribbean Online, but SWTOR was the first MMO that I ever played that wasn't designed for kids, and I learned a lot from it. The old early combat used to actually be a little challenging if I remember correctly. It took my 14 year old self much longer then 6 hours to get my ship, but it felt like much more of an accomplishment for me back then because I had beaten some story bosses that were actually challenging. I think what changed is the system where you can change your companion to any class. They used to be set classes so you couldn't just have a healer by default. I also played a Jedi and Trooper so the ship didn't feel like a necessary part of the story like it does for Smuggler which I'm glad you pointed out. I agree that the years of updates have affected the game. I have a lot of time on the game and I do love it, but the systems and overwhelming amounts of content are jarring, even for someone like me who has played the game on and off since launch. I also think the free to play model is awful because being a subscriber is so drastically different and seeing what free to play is like really does make it feel like a demo like you mentioned. I also am saddened by the technical issues they have with the game because I can't even subscribe to the game now. I recently tried to sub on the SWTOR website and it said there was an error with my account (which is weird because I was just subscribed for a month sometime last year) so I tried to sub through Steam and that didn't work and basically just took my money. All of the hoops that you have to jump through to enjoy the game are so tiresome and I would personally love to see some massive overhaul or just see the game be shut down and a new modern Star Wars MMO created. I really loved this game but I think I have the same feeling as a lot of WoW players over the past few years. This game used to be fun, albeit a little messy, but now the mess is becoming much more noticeable and it really does feel like the players care more for the game than the developers. It also feels like it's getting a little too bloated and a full reset might be warranted now.
Very much this. SWTOR was the first MMO I ever got to max level in. I enjoyed the stories in it so much, Bounty Hunter and Jedi Knight were my first loves. It's interesting to see the state it's in now. Combat was much more challenging and you weren't just handed power from nowhere. You had to understand your stats to fulfill your role (which could have used better explaining, even back then) and you reached the flashpoints appropriately because you could ONLY queue for them from the hanger deck, there was no LFG. Not to mention they were also very challenging. You tank had to know how to aggro properly and the healer had to be able to manage their resources. Now everything is scaled up and designed for any group comp and so the encounters all feel neutered. Like JSH said in his video, a lot of the bosses are pretty disappointing because they are too easy compared to the build up.
@@wildeyoung3943 There is still difficulty in group content, but just Master mode FPs and vet/HM Operations. All of which you need to be max level for.
Yeah, they really EA'd it up, just trying to PLAY the game can be a challenge sometimes. Like they don't even want my dang money. It was never a super polished game, but I really wish they'd spend some time and effort bugfixing and making 1-50 less janky.
"Skavak is having the adventure I should be having!" is the funniest epiphany ever. xD
Josh's voice could literally be a Imperial NPC.
I played SWTOR at launch, actually even before that as I got into several Beta's. I absolutely loved the original combat, stat, and tutorial system. They were awesome. It really felt like I was playing a newer version of the old Star Wars Tabletop game. The only time I ever had an issue was right at the beginning when it tries to teach you how to mod your gear. I figured out, naturally through simple player exploration, that you could click a specific utility provided nearby the merchants on the starting planet to mod all my gear at the same time. So I thought I had done it. But as it turned out, I had to click a faintly blue glowing square of blue gray metal to actually complete that tutorial quest.
Yeah I remember that, that was a complete melt. I could never work out how to use it lmao.
Loved this back in the day, but the combat has always been lacklustre. It’s the MMO that should’ve just been an RPG - as you mentioned, trying to do both excellent, deep storytelling and good MMO gameplay cheapened both.
You should do Age of Conan next!
I have a lot of fond memories from this game, like treating myself to the special edition with the Malgus statuette when I had very little money at the time (still have it), taking on three Jedi as a Powertech while leveling on Tatooine and winning, it was also the first proper game my wife and I really enjoyed playing together.
So this is a DAMN good critique, necessary too as the game seems to be stumbling as of late but I hope someone out there is listening to this.
I've just started playing SWTOR again after a several year break and some of the changes since then are pretty jarring.
But some of the issues you identified I think are due to the swap to F2P from Sub based at launch.
Enemies used to be much more of a threat at low levels on the starting planets. You originally couldn't change the stance of your companion and they filled a role. Corso was originally a DPS companion and you didn't get a healing or tanking companion until later in the game.
the Jedi Knight gets a healer at like level 30ish on the planet Balmorra, so many encounters were actually difficult without that healing.
When they made some changes to how companions work, they made it so each one can do all three roles so you can choose who to bring no matter the situation.
The Flashpoint taking you to the fleet is also a relic of this. You used to only be able to do the flash point when you get to carrack station naturally, at the end of the starting planet you get told to go to the capital, when you get to the station you need to head to the shuttle bay to fly to the capital, but then you're given the option of taking a shuttle directly there, or doing the intro flashpoint which is a ship on the way to the capital and gets attacked.
Either way, you wind up on the capital planet once you either take the shuttle or the flashpoint.
Since they went F2P and made so many system changes, it's all jumbled up now.
for example, I'm playing the jedi Knight Story (1-50) and I'm level 57 right now, but I'm only on the level 45 planets. But since I'm also 57, I'm allowed to do the content for the new expansions that start at 50+ while I haven't even finished the main story line.
but overall, it's still a super fun game once you get past the quirkiness.