Randomness with TOR

Alright, it appears I missed an entire month. Not surprising as I ended up staring at a few things that interested me. Also not surprising I still haven't written a review about DCUO, but what is there really to say about it? The game hasn't changed from its beta perspective and other than a few things here and there is still too easy, and pretty much is a mockery of that vaunted choice they claim to have in their system. Despite that I do try to log in occasionally to play with friends who insist on it. Free is free, after all, though Sony's practices are very suspect.

Other than that I've been playing things like Terraria, Minecraft and even had two weekends in The Old Republic. So, I kept getting distracted, a lot. This blog won't be so much of a review as me just sitting here shaking my head and how far the human gene pool has gone down the tubes these days. But first, I know people want to know what I think of The Old Republic, so I will sum it up quickly.

For people expecting TOR to be a revolutionary game, stop daydreaming. The game is pretty much WoW in every shape, form and fashion. People telling you it's not need to pull their heads out of their ass's. To misquote Yahtzee, TOR is average, boiler plate, run of the mill. It's a competent MMO with its only remarkable feature being how far it's stuck up its own ass. It passes no boundaries and pushes no envelopes. An envelope would move faster in front of a glacier.

Now people will probably mistake what I mean there, but I did enjoy TOR. I am not gaga over TOR, but I will say, the artwork is beautiful (anyone who claims the art or graphics are bad needs to stop bashing their head against the keyboard or actually turn their monitors on because you are batshit stupid if you believe anything of that nature and have actually played the game) and the talky bits, when they aren't standard MMO tripe do add something. But in the fashion of revolution, TOR has done nothing of the sort. Outside of the talky wheel non-sense you could transplant WoW or even EQ into the model and everything would translate almost flawlessly.

In fact, like Blizzard when WoW released, I am stupefied how game developers keep making the cardinal sins they do when it concerns their UI interface and taking out basic key features that have been standard since the second generation of MMOs. As of this writing, I absolutely hate that UI in TOR, and I will definitely be modding that up the moment we are allowed to.

In short, people that talk up TOR as if it is the second coming or think TOR is not WoW, EQ or any other previous MMO with a new skin, are deluded in a way that just need to get over it. TOR will undoubtedly pull large numbers immediately, but retention will probably not be its strong suit. People are leaving WoW now, and I doubt people are going to find TOR offering anything they don't already do in their previous titles, especially since BioWare have made it clear they are going to "follow Blizzard" which means they are most likely not going to do much to deviate themselves from the standard WoW design and formula. Just expect longer than normal update periods since they will have to record voices and crap for any type of update that includes new quests. And to close this off, again, while I know a few people will assume that I loathe TOR, they just need to get over it that TOR has not done anything remarkable or special in the genre. The game is good, I enjoy it, and may for even a few months, but it's not an MMO, more than just a theme park game with massively player options. MMOs, to me, are sandbox games, and a game like that has not been developed in years. And people that claim that TOR has sandbox features are so deluded they need to take their heads out of whatever drug induced fantasy they are in and come to realize MMOs haven't had sandbox features in a long, long time.