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[MMO] SW:TOR free to play, and is terrible
- Thread starter Ravenpoe
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Oh wow, EQ1 went F2P? I know EQ2 has been for awhile but it's restrictions are almost EA-tier (locked classes/races talked me out of it pretty quick).
GasBandit
Staff member
I tried going back to EQ1 just to have a look. It was.. like... well, the closest experience I could describe to it is attempting to decipher all the numbers on the bloomberg channel in real time, back when it was a tiny talking head with a screen full of arcane symbols. There were something like 13 new stats that I could not tell for the life of me what they were for... like "moxy" or some shit.
And the F2P is the same as EQ2, only allows 4 races and classes, plus you can only have the first rank of spells (now THAT'S horseshit). I'll poke around a bit but I can definitely see myself uninstalling this pretty quickly.
GasBandit
Staff member
If you guys want a pretty fun F2P experience, try DCUO. That's F2P done right. They even coaxed a couple bucks out of me for a costume option. That's something very, very few F2P games can say. I think TF2 might be the only other one. Much as I played LOL I didn't spend any money on it.
Oh yeah, I had a ton of fun in dcuo, it's a good game.
I paid for DCUO when it came out, it's kinda fun but it got a bit too repetitive for me. I've always had trouble with the CoH-type games like that.
GasBandit
Staff member
Out of curiosity, were you a hero or a villain? I tried both, and found the Villain side so very much more enjoyable. The differences are especially noticeable in where all the quest NPCs hang out - heroes get carbon copy boring same-same police stations with drab music... but every villain "night club" has its own look, feel, and music. I often even saw villains just hanging out and dancing and stuff there... never saw that happen heroside.
Oh, also, I played with PVP enabled, which makes the game a whooooole lot more entertaining and potentially difficult/frustrating. Nothing like somebody 15 levels above you dropping out of the sky to beat you senseless. It's especially funny when villain and hero event/questing areas overlap with conflicting goals.
I think I was hero mainly, but it's been so long I can't remember. Maybe I'll give the game another shot over the weekend.
Is the Iceberg Lounge in? That would be where The Penguin runs his business.
GasBandit
Staff member
It's in the game, but I don't know if it's a quest hub. I didn't get to max level in the game.
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, I certainly knew that feel in CoH (really, CoV, that's the only side I played), as your powers didn't really scale with level, even with the bestest most expensive enhancements. Even by the high 30s my fire/fire brute who used to trash entire rooms of whites at once was having trouble if there was more than one blue. It helped in DCOU that mook npcs stayed pretty mooky the whole way, scaling better... but PvP felt very... I dunno, like those episodes of JLU with huge ensembles in them.
Plus, I had a really righteous villain who was specced baseball bat named Lieutenant Smack. That gag just never got old.
Don't get me wrong, it's not the perfect game, or even the perfect MMO, but for free I've played much worse and few better.
Speaking from experience, Level 30-40 is the point when you feel your weakest because you don't have your Tier 10 ability to compensate for the sudden difficulty spike. Level 30 is also when you start running into guys like the Carnival of Shadows and when the Circle of Thorns and the Freakshow stop being jokes because they get new units like Juicer/Stunner Freaks, Meat Doctors, and Blahpunks/Noise Tanks. It only gets worse from there: Level 40+ brings on groups like Malta and Sisters of Artemis, groups DESIGNED to fuck with end game characters by letting them use all the enemy tricks you've hated. Teleporting Gunslingers with blinding flashbangs and stunning grenades? Sappers that drain you of all your Stamina? The most basic of enemies will drop caltrops on you, slowing you down and they LOVE to stack big piles of them on you?
I honestly feel like Champions Online is a worse offender: I feel constantly as strong as I was at Lvl 1... which is stupid. Why am I still having problems with gangbangers at level 30+?
Still got 3 days left till they pull the plug.
This is what I hate the most about MMOs, the fact that once they end, they end. If in five years Blizzard comes out with Titan and then WoW suddenly loses so many players that they have to shut down all the servers, my son will never be able to enjoy the game with me. If I want to play Mario Brothers with him, I can, because it does not rely on servers out of my control, but not so much MMOs.
I have a drive in theater less than a half hour away with three screens showing double features every night during the summer. You might be surprised at how many are left: http://www.driveinmovie.com/mainmenu.htm
Besides, most previous MMOs are resurrected on a smaller scale by third parties running their own servers. You can run your own WoW server without too much trouble, and there appear to be private CoH servers, so someone out there has the code to run them.
Some still exist, but that is because the people behind those games are willing to keep the server running for them. Not every company will do that.
Issue with private servers is they are often not the same as the regular server. Either they have almost no population, cheats, or other issues. It's never going to be the same as just playing the official one, which is like me playing a knock-off Mario Brothers browser game then the real one.
You're right. It will not be exactingly the same thing you are experiencing right now. But then the game hardly looks like itself 4 years ago either - you could easily say that there is no "official" one without also specifying a release. Not only that but there are over 200 realms with different players and play styles. If you switch realms you'll find that it's not exactly the same as the one you're playing now.
The actual game part of the game - quests, NPOs, storyline, etc will be the same.
But I concede the point that you can't take your child, go back into the past to today, and play it exactly as you are experiencing it now. Even if you could, you yourself would have changed in the interim, and so it wouldn't be the same for you even if it was exactly the same game, server, players, etc.
I'm so sorry for your anticipated loss.
Kind of running with that huh?
I am fine with change, but I care that it exists in the first place. The game can change, but a private server is not the same, it never is, because you don't have a company as the GMs, you have a bunch of asshats.
Now I loved EQ back in the day, but that is because I played it with friends, had a lot of friends in game, and had a good time with them. Once they all stopped playing, I basically did too. It was fun doing dumb ass shit like duo'ing the entirety of Lower Guk with a bard and my now husband's cleric because we got bored waiting for spots to open in Ass/Sup. It was fun to sit outside Hate/Fear and shoot the shit while waiting for the entrance to be broken. But I guarantee that if I tried to go back and play Vanilla EQ/WoW now, it wouldn't be the same because most of those people aren't around anymore. It's easier to look back and call things awesome, but GD was EQ grindy as shit. And Vanilla WoW was the shittiest game ever if you were a hybrid and didn't want to heal. And buffs, oh lord. 5 minute blessings, single target only, 40 man raid. I'm pretty sure that's all paladins ever did. That and be the Out of Combat rezzer before they fixed that.
I had such a love/hate relationship with EQ. The steep leveling curb and severe death penalties were always balls. Losing days worth of progress due to one death is just plain stupid and I'm stoked that they don't do that anymore. On the other hand, I'm kind of sick of the "fast food" gaming of WoW. I liked having your choices in your talent trees being permanent, it made you really specialize in your character and have more development. I also liked actually having to work with the group within your specific role to successfully finish a dungeon. The fact that you can pretty much steamroll over even the highest level dungeons is boring and removes almost all social interaction from the game. Really, at this point, you might as well add bots as party members because they'll be just as reliable as random douche number 28,000.
GasBandit
Staff member
Often I wished I could populate my party WITH bots instead of having to subject myself to PUGs.
Careful, GW2 gives you NPC helpers for story quests and they're all pretty much useless. It doesn't always work out well, sadly.
Apparently there's a Mercenary function in EQ1 now that allows you to hire in NPC's to help, but with the huge number of restrictions SoE put on EQ1 and 2 for free players I haven't bothered to try the games out since I quit forever ago.
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