Blur is the problem.
Blur made DCUO look incredible. Theres been an untold amount of money paid out to Blur on TOR trailers and those CGI trailers make it look incredible.
The in engine art is cartoony, sub-realistic and the overall refinement options at the character level are, well, it looks like they're trying to capitalize on the Clone Wars cartoons to be honest.
Gameplay wise, you have the generalistic MMO mechanics in place since EQ and a lot of what you'd expect from WoW, only instead of the relatively impersonal quest window that you and a million other players get, you get a slightly more personal experience in of which you have a threaded story dependent on your chosen class which you and several other hundred thousand people will experience "personally" to make the game feel more "epic".
Then you of course have the bolted in BioWare conversation wheel to make you feel like you're actually making choices that are going to alter the relatively linear storyline you're stuck in. And voila, kaching goes the cash register.
Far as the game not having been in beta "that long" I was in a beta squadron for TOR last year. They'd been testing for a good while before that. Everyone in my test squadron threw the exact same issues at them. The combat is stilted and predictable, the animations look like they were ripped almost part and parcel out of KoTOR and the art is only what I'd call minimally better.
Whats worse is the worlds of TOR suffer from the same problems all "worlds" of every MMO suffer, things just stand around in clustered areas waiting to be killed. When I was testing once I worked out the minimal agro radius of the enemies in the area I was in I could literally thread my way through the place with no consequences at all.
Not to mention the whole generic tanking/healing/control/DD aspects of MMO classes being brutally evident when I tested, literally one of the primary tanking classes having absolutely zero damage mitigation capabilities other than to stand there and outlast incoming damage by virtue of having a larger HP pool and armor factor than the things shooting/attacking it....and I was just thoroughly unimpressed with what I saw, especially for all the time and money thats gone into the game.
And the big problem is if they'd not latched on to the MMO mechanics that work for WoW and had actually worked harder to make their game play and art design more closely resemble the pure visual awesome that Blur Studios is making the game out to be in trailer after trailer....we'd have ended up with something that was new and breaking new ground in the industry.
All we really have, to be honest, is character creation system that makes people look like retarded plastic action figures, WoW style MMO combat dynamics, and the only upside is BioWare's story based approach to character progression and thats about it....but when it comes down to it, everything you see in WoW...its in TOR.
It is my belief after watching this title go from a rumor to actually beta testing it to now seeing its "game play" conditions as it nears its potential release that EA and BioWare literally decided that if its good enough for Blizzard its good enough for them, and all they really needed to do was tack on a few original bits, and it would somehow make the title competitive.
And, unfortunately, since WoW continues to dominate the market..they may be right. And I think that is not the fault of EA or BioWare but the fault of the gaming market, which has rejected every title thats hit the market with a new concept and stuck with the tedious pablum that is WoW and literally forced anyone who wishes to survive in the industry to mimic its dynamics in some way.
But Star Wars already tried to look like WoW, it was called the NGE back in 2005, in SWG. And that didn't go over to well. I guess maybe -starting- from an NGE perspective will cause TOR less damage than SWG, as they're not switching up to mimic WoW midstream, they're just coming right out of the gate to say....everyone can be a jedi and its WoW with lightsabers. Enjoy!
Seriously though the character models are as bad as seen in that photograph. They have not gotten better, and I don't expect they're going to by release either.
Knights of the Cartoon Republic, Rated E for Everyone.
