Pre-order: I give up

I’ve given up on receiving any sort of resolution to my pre-order issue. EA/Bioware don’t care. In the grand scheme of things, I can never really get repaid for the loss of Early Access, and the only ongoing benefit to having this resolved would be a low-level color crystal. Other than satisfying my desire for resolution, at this point it’s not worth my time and frustration to deal with this any more.

The Group Game

My primary character is played exclusively with a small static group consisting of my wife and a longtime friend.

I’m playing a Sith Inquisitor/Sorceror, investing heavily in the Madness tree (which looks roughly equivalent to a WoW Warlock). I may switch to Lightning (roughly a WoW Mage) depending on how I feel about the class as time goes on. I’m a DPS player by nature. I’ve never really felt the desire to heal, but having a heal spell or two to throw in a clutch situation is quite useful.

My wife is also playing a Sith Inquisitor/Sorceror, but is instead focusing on the Healing tree (roughly equivalent to WoW Priest). Her calling is healing, and she’s damn good at it. She’s enjoying having a few more DPS-oriented powers, though.

While the beta punished groups that contained more than one character of a given class by preventing them from taking part in each other’s class quests (one character could attend the other, but once done with the quest, could not enter the other player’s instance of it), this has been fixed. There are still a few speed bumps that seem to be in place, though. More on those later.

Our friend is playing our tank, a Bounty Hunter. He puts us to shame on small trash groups, having an ability that never fails to destroy an entire group in less time than it would take my DPS character to take down a single one. Slightly overpowered? Probably. He’s feeling some frustration as the actual tanking abilities (damage reduction, taunts, etc…) are apparently quite slow at being doled out. This will surely fix itself over time.

We’ve quested together up to level 15-ish, and done the first “Flashpoint” (TOR’s term for party dungeons). The max group size is 4, and there are only three of us, so we’ve been using a companion to fill the gap. Most of the time we use our Tank’s healer companion, since the Inquisitor’s first companion is a tank, and we really haven’t needed one as much as we’ve felt the need for a little more healing power.

Stories

The storyline portions are rather hilarious in a group, particularly when it comes to mixing Light/Dark characters. In our case, both of my party members are Light, while I’m playing Dark. This of course makes my character look like a raving lunatic some of the time. And that makes us all laugh like crazy.

Bioware’s had a lot of experience crafting conversation systems. What we have in TOR is essentially the same system as in the Mass Effect games. Generally you get three choices: “Good”/”Kind”, “Evil”/”Mean”, and “Neutral”/”Smartass”. By and large this works - but it offers three paths, where there really exist only two. There are defined “Light Side” and “Dark Side” gearing paths, but no path for “Neutral” characters.

There’s even an in-game reference to a character who walked the Neutral path - Revan. Started as a Jedi, ended up a Sith, then redeemed himself to the Light Side, and ended up master of both. He’s a legendary figure, to be sure (his story partially told in Knights of the Old Republic, and then glossed in the novel), but gives in-game evidence that such a path can exist. It’s a shame Bioware didn’t implement this.

The Solo Game

I’ve also soloed two more characters to level 10 (where you get off the first world and join the world-at-large), with two more on the way. Eventually I’ll have at least eight - one of each class on each side - but for now I’ve been primarily concentrating on the Empire.

The story lines thus far have all been pretty good, with the Bounty Hunter failing to grab me as much as the others. The Agent’s storyline is a bit more comedic, whereas the Warrior’s story is filled with awesome badass Dark Side moments.

The stories don’t give equivalent rewards in terms of Dark/Light side points. My Inquisitor took every Dark Side option available, and even did a few more quests than my Warrior (as he was able to group for the Heroic quests), but came out around 800-ish Dark, while my Warrior left Korriban with over 1300, having been played completely solo. It’s possible (and likely) that these will even out over time.

Likewise, all characters don’t feel like they’re equivalently powerful. Tanky-types definitely feel much more powerful than Magey-Shooty ones. My Warrior could effortlessly leap into a group of 3-4 enemies and down them in a few seconds. My Agent needs to plan every move carefully, as he’s incredibly impotent once non-focused mobs get up close. Again, this will probably even out as levels climb and the damage output of DPS characters outpaces that of tanks.

Wishlist

There’s a few areas I’d really like to see some improvement:

• When grouped, doing normal “drop” quests, we’ve noticed that sometimes either my wife or I would end up just having drops stop once the other had finished collecting the required number of items. To fix this, I would need to drop group, and my wife would need to reset her quest, and then complete it without me in the group. This is disruptive and frustrating, and needs to be addressed.

• Companions sometimes disappear for no apparent reason. When a party member has a companion out, and you send your own out to do some crafting, the timer ends up off-screen.

• UI Mods - I want my four action bars grouped at the bottom of the screen. I want to reposition my chat window. I want to remove extraneous bits from the UI. I’ve heard that UI mods are something that will be possible in the future. It can’t come too soon. (THis would also allow the community to fix issues with the default UI, such as the companion timer I mentioned previously.)

• Customer Service. This needs serious improvement. CS needs to be available, competent, and willing to help, particularly when everything isn’t going as planned. The SOP for EA/Bioware seems to be to clam up, shutting down access to the website, forums, and phone support when there are issues. This is unacceptable. Based on a number of folks in the forums who still haven’t had legitimate issues properly addressed, but are being lied to and having their tickets closed, the BS that I went through is still going on. This is also unacceptable. If there’s anything that’s going to cause folks to leave this game, this is it.