Grey Day for Elcia said:
Starke said:
I find it disingenuous and deceptive to report on something you've not properly experienced and my comment was aimed towards people who have played so little of the game they still have yet to encounter core components or have simply not played it at all.
Honestly, with TOR? You encounter the core game mechanics in the first 10 minutes after character creation. You experience the dialog system and experience combat. If you spend another hour or two with the combat and decide it's crap, in that time frame, then I can't say that's being disingenuous.
There are other things to do, but questing and killing mobs are the two largest time sinks in the game. If these don't appeal, there really isn't a compelling reason for someone to keep playing... I started to write something else, but honestly, that's it. That's the core of TOR. And if you're an MMO veteran, you'll be able to accurately assess how combat will scale.
It took me 45 minutes to get a feel for exactly how TOR's combat was scaled, and in the 15-20 hours I spent with the game it
never deviated from that.
Grey Day for Elcia said:
If you were to sit down with a ten hour game, play two hours of it and say "I found the controls and combat to sluggish, broken, unresponsive and boring" I'd think you'd seen enough of it to make that claim. When someone plays an MMO to level 9 and makes broad, sweeping comments concerning the entire game, not just the segment they experienced, I more or less consider their opinion moot. Not because of my own personal opinion, but because they are commenting on something they only know a fraction about.
Honestly? That really depends on the MMO in question. In DCUO that's 1/3 of the way through the level progression, and by that point you really have seen it all, with some exceptions. With Guild Wars, Level 9 was nearly halfway to the level cap, though your statement there is more valid, as level 20 wasn't the end game.
As for TOR? Honestly, in this case, getting to ~level 9 should be just long enough to really hammer home for you that you're not playing your character, you're playing one of eight characters Bioware cooked up for you, Commander Shepard style. In a single player game that's fine, but in an MMO, this is like stepping out the door and running into six or seven more copies of Hawke or Shepard or Cousland (sp?) Fair or not, for a lot of people that was a real deal breaker. I should say a lot of MMO players, but still. At that point they've seen the experience as... not a fraud, but a shell game, an illusion that's now broken. And then what? Grind on through?
Someone who logs into an MMO and spends 30 minutes in the character creator, logs out, and bitches out the game? Sure, that's damn disingenuous. But someone who spends two hours with TOR, sees the same "MMO style" combat they've seen since, shit, at least 2002, and logs off, and proceeds to ***** out the game for being derivative? I can't say that's genuinely unfair of them. They gave it a shot, and what they found was a familiar flavor of dreck.
Grey Day for Elcia said:
Really, I simply wish people would stop trying so hard to be a fan or a hater. Sounds extreme, I know, but with just about every release you see and hear people complaining, critiquing, praising and defending games they've never played, out of pure principle. Bias is innate, like you said--you cannot ever review something objectively, as everything you see and hear is influenced by your personal experiences and view point--but to come to something or avoid something all together based on conjecture and with preconceptions and *still* offer an opinion is just... bad.
Welcome to the internet. That may sound harsh, but it's true. Though, with TOR, the variety of hate leveled at it... some of that's just knee jerk backlash, but in this case, a lot of it seems to be "you told us this would be revolutionary, instead we got a reskinned version of a game we'd already played."
As to objectivity? Yeah, you
can try, and any competent reviewer (mostly in media other than games) will tell you that you need to get around that. It is possible to write an objective review of something. But, you do need to be aware of your own biases, as much as possible, when writing.
In my case, I held up the Bioware writing. It's no secret, I've found Bioware's writing since
Jade Empire to be pretty hideously cliche, formulaic, and derivative. That said, even with that bias, I can say pretty solidly that the story in TOR is just not up to Bioware standards. This is a game written on autopilot in many cases. Now, true, I didn't experience those plots to their conclusions, but at the same time, I've seen these dances already.
Grey Day for Elcia said:
Skyrim is a similar case. I don't like it. However, I put in a dozen hours before forming an opinion. Take a quick peek over the forum and you'll find a multitude of people bashing or defending Skyrim despite admitting to never playing it or, at the most, having played it for an hour or so. If you play ten minutes of a game and find it ugly, boring or just uninteresting, feel free to say so. But don't make comments about more than you actually played yourself.
I think I screwed up the comment pacing... see above. :\
Grey Day for Elcia said:
Bandwagons, haters, fanboys -- all words I thought overused. But you know what? They aren't. And that sucks.
I'm ranting, so I'll stop. I hope my opinion was well enough expressed and you can understand what I'm getting at. Peace
I do. And, unfortunately, there is one critical issue, which is, there's a point at which you, whoever, has seen enough of a product to render an accurate assessment. That point is almost never the same from person to person. Saying someone needs to do X before they can chew out a game is a nice concept, but actually setting X gets a bit problematic. It's easy to say someone who hasn't played the game is out of line, but even on just 45 minutes, you can already start to render some pretty valid criticisms against TOR. Though, I think, for example, doing the same with Terraria would be a mistake, as it takes the game a good couple hours to get going.
