RJO

*** Cross posted from my MMO blog AdventuresOfTaas ****

People, myself included, are starting to burn out on SWTOR (there’s the predictable ZOMG 3 MONTH TOURIST declaration over on Keen’s blog). I personally find myself playing a lot less and I know that overall my guild Aureus Knights has seen its activity level drop quite a bit (from ~30 active week day evenings to ~10-15). People are showing up for Raids no problem but other activities such as PvP, alt leveling and Flashpoints are starting to get stale for people.

There’s a lot of reasons for this: Linear leveling path making alts less appealing, no point to the space game once you’ve done leveling, Ilum being a bad joke for open world PVP, Battlemasters, PVP stats on gear and faction imbalance impacting other areas of PvP. There’s a lot of reasons to NOT log in.

There are those who are pointing to these factors and calling the game a failure. But I think what we have here is a solid platform for the future, not a failure.

MMO fans often get caught in the trap of viewing a game they get bored with as a failure. There’s a bigger fallacy that we allow ourselves to get caught up in and that’s expecting a game that is 2 months old to compete on content with games 5, 10 and 15 years older.

The truth is Star Wars The Old Republic has a lot going for it. The combat is fun, the PvP when not bogged down by gear differences is a lot of fun and when done right the raiding and dungeon experiences can be quite fun. This game is something Bioware can iterate on and expand the content offering for. SWTOR has a huge plus in that the leveling experience (initially) is engaging. Up front there is a lot of gameplay offered. Once they’ve been given time to expand the back end it will get exponentially better.

I think the best thing people can do is view this game as a long term investment and allow themselves to take a break. Come back in March when 1.2 has hit, come back a year from now when we are getting hyped over the first expansion.

There are games you play and think to yourself, “Man, this could really use another 12 months of getting the fundamentals right” or “level 30-40 (the mid game) is just unplayable because there’s no content and it’s all grind” and SWTOR is not one of those games. This is a game that over time you and your friends will return to and I suspect Bioware with the legacy system, whatever they have planned for space combat and other expanded content offerings will find ways to keep bringing us back for years to come.