Star Was: The Old Republic is next in line for our "What Would You Change About..." feature, the story driven saga where players can choose from a variety of different classes and iconic races from the popular films, TV shows and books and carve out their own story in this epic set in a Galaxy far, far away.

From its initial launch SWTOR saw many problems and a mass exodus of players in those early days, but over the years has managed to pull back its player base and then some, changing from its pure all subscription model and identifying a number of changes that needed to be made and addressing them.

So after checking out the title (don’t forget to check out our F2PMeter) we asked ourselves what could we change to make the game better?

The Business Model
The business model discourages players: The game offers players a free to play option with a wide variety of features limited for F2P accounts players are still able to experience all of the class story quests and then choose to purchase individual features or subscribe to the game for full access. The problem is that the F2P model, quite frankly, sucks and its purpose seems to be to make life so difficult for F2P accounts that in order to experience the game players don’t really have any choice other than to spend cash. This is fine, but for as many players as it forces to pay it puts just as many off, particularly with the combination of low XP rates making levelling a grind and the huge planets that players have to get around with no mounts then too many players quit before seeing the best of the game. We’d say they need to make it more accessible, not make it so nickel and dime and stop forcing players into becoming subscribers.

Game Performance
There are lots of complaints with lag: Since its initial release SWTOR has always had issues with lag to varying degrees, many people attributing this to the game engine that has been used to build it and how resource heavy the game is. From our own experience at launch, even on our relatively decent and over minimum spec rig, places such as the Alderaan Warzone were completely unplayable, over the years and particularly since patch 3.0 many people are saying that the lag is game breaking. For some classes that need to time their attacks and build combos up it is making combat almost unplayable. This should be one of EAs biggest priorities.

Unpopulated Planets
Planets feel dead: For all the life that the game has it’s definitely not due to overcrowding as players are constantly divided up into the various instances of the same planet, where you can go through some of the busiest capital cities such as Coruscant and they feel completely dead in comparison to the hustle and bustle we see in the movies. Even further on many of the planets is possible to spend hours there and only see a handful of other players. The instance population needs to be made higher... much higher.

New Class Storylines
No continuing story: One of the biggest pulls of the game are the individual class storylines, where players in some ways get to dictate their own journey by the choices they make (although realistically not really as all roads fundamentally lead to the same location). It’s just a shame that many of these stories feel slightly unfinished and the fact that after all these years since release the storylines haven’t been added to so that players can continue their journey for their characters, something we’re sure many people would love to see.

End Game
Limited End Game content: For many the endgame content is pretty non-existent, particularly for casual players that aren’t in any clans/Guilds, who are too weak to take on some of the more challenging areas. The end game content that has been created is practically impossible to complete with random Pick Up Groups (PUGs) due to the level of communication and group tactics needed. This leaves a lot of players unequipped with better gear and so are caught in a sort of purgatory between the same old level 55 content or level 60 content that they are nowhere near up to par to take on. A little more addressing of some casual end game content may be needed.

Addons
No addons for the game: It’s very tough call for developers when deciding whether or not to allow add-ons for your game, on the one hand it can create a lot of problems with botting/scripting that brings with it other issues, but on the other hand there is a complete community of developers crying out for the chance to make some add-ons for their favourite games. Back from when I played Ultima Online when it was released I have always been a hard-core addon guy, or have always loved modding games from Civilization to Skyrim to improve them, so it’s a shame that EA haven’t opened themselves up a little more to the modding community to allow them to make the little improvements that the games developers don’t appear to have the time to do.

SWTOR.com
Out of date site: They need to just update the site already, their game information, features and history is out of date and in need of a little care and attention to make it a little more current. Seemingly the people in charge are constantly pulled from the project or pushed onto something else that is deemed more important (and again we understand that sometimes there are things more important than having a nice up-to-date website), but as many players first port of call for the game it’d be nice to see it actually reflect the game and its content as opposed to being a big push towards subscription, the store and expansions.

These are some of the things that we would change about Star Wars: The Old Republic, but what do you think? What would you change about this game? Would you add anything else to the list? We await your opinions! Let us know!!!!!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2015 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.