animehermit said:
You are grossly simplifying the quests.
I was referring to the sidequests, which
are frequently of the 'collect 10 whatevers' style.
Class quests are no where near half the leveling content, it's closer to 20% of the leveling content.
Which means if you run all 4 of the class storylines then 80% of your time you'll be doing exactly the same thing you did on your previous character(s). And, just like in Mass Effect (to give one example) the difference in quality between the story quests and the filler is often very very noticeable.
Also, play a Worgen, Goblin or now, Pandaren and tell me you can switch your starting zone.
Now a Pandaren? Little premature there, given that Mists isn't due until summer. Regardless, it's still the first 20 levels, not, as in TOR, the entire game.
It's all fine and dandy that CoH has moral choices, but playing the game for about a month a few weeks ago, I was never presented with any moral choices, in fact it was mostly just "go to this place kill dudes" and it was nowhere near the cinematic quality of the quests in TOR.
The moral choice system was introduced with Going Rogue. If you don't have that then you're playing older content. It's not really much to say that SWTOR is more innovative than content made in 2004...
Also TOR announced it's moral system in 2008 when the game was first announced.
Yes, and what they said in 2008 does not change the fact that by the time they brought this 'innovation' to MMOs another, older game, had been doing it for over a year.
Why would you reroll the exact same class?
New character concept... oh wait, that won't apply to TOR because my character is predefined by the straitjacket of their story. Okay, then let's say I'd done a Darkside Sith Tank and then felt like doing a lightside Sith Warrior DPS. Yeah, I'll get some new cutscene dialog, but the content will be the same.
Why not just roll the faction opposite and get the same mechanics, but a completely new story?
That's a very telling statement. Does TOR have 8 classes, or does it have 4, mirrored?
No other MMO has come anywhere close to the level of cinematic story telling TOR does. You can stand around all day twisting things to fit your point of view, but it doesn't change a thing, no other game has done what TOR did, which means it innovated.
The only 'innovation' TOR has done has been in superficial presentation. The actual mechanics are a straight lift from WoW - color coded gear, talent trees... I worked out how to play my Sith Warrior instantly because it works in exactly the same way as a Warrior in WoW. Exactly.
Oh, and there's the companions I suppose, which is nice if you want to make every class a pet class...
The fact is that this kind of defensive rhetoric from Bioware, phrased in their default tone of egomanical self adulation, is completely unecessary and unjustified, and makes me wonder exactly who they are trying to convince.
Rather than accepting that their WoW meets KOTOR meets Mass Effect is noticeably derivative, they're insisting that it's some kind of genre defining masterpiece. And that is just plain not true.
