I recently logged back in to Star Wars: The Old Republic after taking a break from playing. My guild has had the current Operations (Raids) on farm for some time, and there really doesn’t feel like there is all that much to do with my Bounty Hunter. Many of our players have scattered to the four winds, some have cancelled their subscriptions, and we’re all waiting to see if BioWare’s big 1.2 patch will be enough to invigorate the game once more. I could PvP, but I’m at a point were hitting the solo queue doesn’t seem like a great deal of fun and setting aside time to find a dedicated group to PvP with seems tiresome. Besides that, my Bounty Hunter was my guild’s main tank, so I have to essentially start the PvP gear grind all over again for a gear set that would actually allow me to survive 1 on 1 encounters. At the end of the day, I’m just leveling a couple of alts and enjoying the stories of different classes, since that is the primary area where BioWare got things right and advanced the MMO genre.
Which brings me to the point of this article.
Why did the honeymoon phase end so quickly with SW:TOR?
While there are many examples I could give, the main reason for me is that it feels like I’ve done all of this before. The same burn out I suffered in World of Warcraft after six years of the raiding treadmill has carried over to my SW:TOR experience. While I’ve defended BioWare’s MMO over and over again whenever I heard it written off as a WoW clone, in many ways it does feel like I’m dating an ex-wife who changed her name and bought a redheaded wig.
Familiarity can be a good thing, especially when you’re talking about a MMO with ten million subscribers. It lowers the barrier of entry, and allows people to start playing your game immediately instead of spending those first few crucial hours learning basic keybinds or the UI. Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, familiarity also breeds contempt. While it is normally a phrase used as a psychological reference to the idea that the better we know people, the more likely we are to find fault with them, I think it applies to games as well.
I’m finding a lot of faults with the Star Wars UI, and while I’m certain the customization options in patch 1.2 will help, some of these issues are found at the core of the game’s design.
As a visual aid, I’ll post a screenshot of the UI for my Trooper alt.
Buttons. So many buttons.
I won’t make any claims about being a keybinding genius. I play using a Razer Naga mouse coupled with a Razer Nostromo gamepad. I try to only use my keyboard for typing in chat and for leisurely keybinds to things like my inventory and quest log. My binding ability isn’t the problem. The problem is that out of all of these buttons, I probably only use about 10-12 of them 80% of the time. The rest are completely situational in nature.
My main binds to my core abilities are all located on the two bars immediately under my health bar near my character portrait – six on top, and six below. These are my bread and butter abilities. The remaining buttons, while useful at times, are really just providing the illusion of complexity. Just because I have 48 total available button slots doesn’t mean that all each of them are vital to the majority of my gameplay.
Beyond that, once I do start to fill up each and every one of these (much like I did in WoW – especially since every expansion includes a mandatory 3-4 new abilities for each class), I start to play the UI instead of the game.
Some of these buttons and binds are used up so that if I swap roles, say from damage dealing to tanking, I don’t have to spend time setting up a new UI. In the screenshot above, I keep my tanking stance, my guard ability (which allows me to share damage with another player if I am in the right stance) and my taunts (both single target and multi-target) on the left side bar. These abilities only exist because SW:TOR, like WoW, forces you into traditional roles of Tank, Healer or Damage dealer (DPS). If those roles didn’t exist, or if everyone shared them to an extent, then there would be little reason to have a UI this expansive.
Likewise, each class in SW:TOR has a specific buff that only they can provide to their group members. I use a slot for my Trooper’s buff. These buffs are designed to make you more powerful when grouping, since you can all buff one another. For organized activities like raiding and team PvP, it also means you’re forced to bring along at least one member of each class so that none of these buffs are missing. The downside to that is that, much like class roles in the “Holy Trinity” of Tank, Healer or DPS, you’re group composition is now constrained by these factors.
Still other buttons on the right side bar are used for temporary buffs that boost my damage or performance in some way. I have three different buffing items stacked together – a stim (like a potion in WoW) and two relics that my Trooper has equipped. The idea being that I hold these items in reserve for when I need an extra surge of power to take out an enemy.
Others binds are used for conditional abilities, ones that “proc” or require a prerequisite of some sort before becoming available. My Trooper’s High Impact Bolt (which is greyed out and bound to my number 5 key) only becomes active for use if I have the right damage over time ability already on my target. Other classes have similar abilities, and they are primarily used again to promote the illusion of complexity. They break up the monotony of a static ability rotation. The premise being that it adds a level of randomness that, in theory, keeps things from getting too predictable or boring.
My least favorite type of ability of all, and one which unfortunately has a place of prominence on bound to my 1 key, is the Filler. The Filler is an ability that you can always use regardless of what else is on cooldown or how much of your class resource you have available. It doesn’t really do much by itself, and it is by design not very interesting. In the case of my Trooper, it is a few rounds of burst fire that hit for mediocre damage. By weaving in a few of these “free” filler shots with my more powerful abilities (all of which use ammo), I effectively manage my ammo resource along with my cooldowns. This is intended to reward skillful play. What it really does is add a fairly useless keybind, and one that I would eliminate the minute I had macro functionality. Once I did, I would just add the filler to each of my cooldown abilities so that if the ability I really want to hit is on cooldown, it would auto fire my backup filler ability instead. Some would argue that this goes against the spirit of the game and reduces the complexity of what divides good players from bad ones. I would counter that it doesn’t require skill to know that if my number 2 bind is grey that I need to hit number 1. It is just clutter.
Thus far I’ve listed a few different categories of abilities:
- Core Abilities – Where the fun is.
- Role Abilities – Specific to which facet of the Trinity I’m serving at that moment
- Buff Abilities – Static abilities/items that provide temporary bonuses
- Conditional Abilities – “Procs” that aren’t available at all times
- Filler Abilities – Bland abilities that are similar to the auto attacks found in other games.
Add each of these up, and it is easy to see why without macro support and the ability to customize and scale your UI, your screen can easily start to fill up with buttons and binds.
Now, let’s take a comparative look at the UIs of SW:TOR and Guild Wars 2:
A Tale of Two UIs.
Image provided by GuildMag.com
In the image above, we have 24 available ability binds (only HALF of what they support) on top compared to 10 abilities (13 if you count the F keys) for Guild Wars 2 on the bottom.
Which offers the most complexity and fun? For me, the answer is clearly Guild Wars 2.
Instead of massive amounts of clutter for every ability my class can possibly possess, my binds are streamlined, making every ability a Core Ability.
From right to left, and ignoring how this particular player set up his personal keybinds:
Binds 1-5 are determined by your weapon and are class specific. For a two-handed weapon like the Hammer the Guardian is using in this image, all five of his binds are tied to his weapon. If you are dual wielding, the main hand weapon determines your 1-3 abilities while your offhand determines your 4 and 5 abilities.
There is also a weapon swap button for most professions (classes) that allows you to interchange two different weapon presets on the fly, in essence doubling your available weapon abilities without doubling the space your UI takes up. No fluff. No filler.
It is also important to note that the primary attack for each profession (the number 1 ability) is the only one without a cooldown, and it is usually far more dynamic than an auto attack or Filler Ability. Guild Wars 2 makes use of a fair amount of Chain Abilities in this slot – abilities that are essentially three different abilities that fire off in succession with each press of the button. It adds a lot of dynamic feel to the game while still giving you something to do to be effective if you’re waiting for the right moment to unleash your more powerful abilities.
Bind 6 is your heal. Every class has one, although there are three options you can choose from to customize your play style. You don’t need 5 different heals, a medpack, and a PvP specific medpack. One and done. Other heals and healing abilities are tied to weapon abilities, utility skills or are a side effect of traits you pick when customizing your character. Massive amounts of complexity contained within a minimum amount of UI.
Binds 7-9 are your utility skills. You choose three at a time from an available list of around twenty. You don’t need all 20 available at all times. Your utility skills help define you and what makes you different from the guy next to you who is playing the same class. More choice. more complexity. Less UI space.
The number 10 bind is for your Elite skill. This is your big nuke, your game changer, your “Oh shit!” button. You choose one from list of three class-specific and three race-specific Elites.
The remaining F key binds are class specific. Some classes, like the Warrior, have a single powerful weapon-specific ability. The Guardian has three virtues that have both passive and active effects. The Elementalist has four elemental attunements (Fire, Water, Air & Earth) that completely change all five weapon skill slots, giving her 20 different skills for each weapon set.
Complexity. Not clutter.
Just another reason I can’t wait for Guild Wars 2 to release. It isn’t about hype. It’s about the evolution of the MMO, and innovation that rewards skill and personal choice and customization while allowing you to play the game and not the UI.
It is also why last generation MMOs, including SW:TOR, have a hard time keeping my interest. I know a lot of my issues with traditional WoW-like UIs can be minimized or worked around with the use of mods and some basic UI customization features, but in my opinion, that’s masking the problem instead of solving it.
ArenaNet is setting out to solve it.
1.2 is really gonna make or break SW:TOR. I’ve had the same experience with my guild …nothing left to do, already boring 5 months after release. Not to mention there are *still* bugs in the Flashpoints and Hard Modes. Really just unforgivable after 5 months post launch. And NO Bioware, putting in vendors selling different colored crystals at crazy high prices just so you can suck credits out of the broken economy in a pathetic attempt to balance out said economy IS NOT CONTENT.
Another factor of why the honeymoon is over so quickly: tank/healer/dps is boring, boring, boring (Guild Wars 2 anyone?). This is made even worse in SW by the less divergent play styles between classes; whereas in WoW you really got a sense of different styles of play between classes (e.g. Warlock vs Shaman vs Rogue). All are viable dps but they play SO differently. SW, not so much (unless you count different combinations of colored buttons to hit as diverse and interesting play). Their best advance in this aspect is ranged tank, ala Bounty Hunter. Other than that it’s a step backwards in terms of class diversity, imo.
If I had to put money down I’d say Star Wars The Old Republic is in the beginning of it’s death throws. It’s on the fast track to free-to-play and mediocrity-ville.
I agree, Emmet, especially about the bugs. And honestly, speaking as a Powertech who was our MT, the ranged aspect of Bounty Hunter tanking didn’t have that much actual range to it. Most of my key abilities still required me to be inside of 10 meters. The only unique aspect of it is that I can back out after establishing threat, and still maintain a little bit of it with a few long range abilities.
It pains me to say it, because I really wanted the game to be great, but it feels like they’ve missed the mark by releasing too early. I plan on addressing that, and my 1.2 impressions, in a post sometime this month. I hope it will be a positive one about how 1.2 saved it from an early death, but I have a strong feeling it will be a postmortem.
Releasing later wouldn’tve made the core game system any less of a WoW-clone though. For SWTOR the main draw over WoW for most people is the ‘class storyline’ which is over at level cap and cannot counterbalance the weak -gameplay- systems. For a single player RPG, a strong scripted character story (with choices) is a strength. But for an MMO whose foundation is supposed to be longterm playability it’s a completely misplaced focus, imo.
It’s clear SWTOR’s budget went mostly to voices, setpieces, cinematic animations, and storywriting and they figured layering all that over a copy of WoW’s gameplay skeleton would equal success. And their misplaced design priorities have resulted in the inability to sustain a longterm playerbase (which is the entire goal of a MMORPG).
I had my struggles with interest in SWTOR. I eventually realized I just wasn’t enjoying my class at all. I feel like the problems around Juggernaut/Knight tanking have been well known from the get go, and not much was done. Initially the upsetting aspects were the ability queuing issues, or sometimes just being unable to use an ability period, they fixed some of that, and then it was just the horrific threat problems that the other two tanks didn’t (and still don’t) have. Then I began to notice dungeon layouts and how it seems mobs were laid out in an almost intentional pattern so that if you couldn’t grapple or silence to pull one in, you couldn’t use an AE ability to hit them all. Granted I’ve been a tank for a long time and I don’t mind some difficult tanking now and then on say a boss, but I don’t want a standard dungeon to force me into my A game.
On top of those problems its widely known that the taunt system in SWTOR is very different and… lame? This is more observable with a juggernaut again because the intrinsic threat is so much lower than the PT/SA equivalent, but once I figured out what was going on, I basically never lost threat on a single target again. I’m not saying the WoW method is the way to go here by any means, but for a Juggernaut the only thing that matters is hitting your taunt on cooldown, and eventually it is impossible for you to lose aggro, thats not a fun mechanic. I ran a tight rotation, I specced hybrid into vengeance to up my damage/threat and then I find out it doesn’t matter.
It was actually pretty hard for me to come to terms with the fact I just didn’t like tanking, because honestly it’s basically my favorite role in MMO’s and I think I’m pretty damn good at it. But it just isn’t enjoyable for me in TOR. I began backing away from it and recruited another Jugg to tank in our Operations so I could play my Sorceror which I enjoy a lot more, thinking I was all set into 1.2 and beyond. BZZZT! BioWare strikes again with the sudden change to “yeah you need two tanks in 8 mans come 1.2″, so while looking forward to most of the 1.2 content, I don’t look fondly on having to play my Jugg again.
I have enjoyed the pvp grind on my Sorc greatly, playing with a few guildies (Zerostellar, Suffocation, Nira (new guy)) and getting myself up to Battlemaster, this has allowed me to stay interested in the game somewhat even when I don’t find running FPs or OPs that interesting. We got both our titles and everyone mounts mostly, now we just sit pvping until 1.2
I was solo-tanking everything on my PT, including most Nightmare mode content, since Rennoc wasn’t really enjoying his Sith Warrior for tanking either. I was actually looking forward to content requiring two tanks again, but I don’t think 1.2 is going to deliver in the way I had hoped.
I’ll talk about it in more detail soon, but I’m getting the impression that BioWare is increasing the challenge of their PvE endgame by nerfing healing across the board. Granted, they’re finally fixing some of the Operative/Smuggler healing talents after months of leaving them broken, but Sorc’s and Merc’s are absolutely being reduced in effectiveness. It seems like a cheap way to raise the bar, and our 2 main healers are very unhappy.
Ya, I solo tanked every until we picked up Nira, then I gradually deferred to him and started raiding on my Sorc.
As far as healing goes, ya Arctic wasn’t very happy (he’s a Merc) and Yuk doesn’t care (Sorc healer) because it’s Yuk and he doesn’t care
.
The healing nerf I think has more to do with PVP than PVE, you literally can’t kill a BH healer in PVP atm unless you have like 3+ people. We’ll see, I like the game at its core, but as you pointed out, it’s just gotten stale and some of the things that should have been fixed by now (like jugg threat? christ that has 0 ramifications to pvp or other areas, how hard is it to turn that knob?) aren’t, but I’m still enjoying pvp for now so we’ll just keep on keeping on.
I certainly was not as hardcore into SW:TOR as the previous comment authors’ it seems, but from a more casual standpoint, SW:TOR brought very little to the table. I played WoW for many years very actively. While I don’t have that much time to commit to another MMO anymore, I found myself at max level and bored with SW:TOR within 2 months of release. Alts felt stale, class story system started to get annoying after a few alts, and generally, it felt like WoW but lacking some charm. I won’t ever go back to WoW, but I am hoping that GW2 with its much further departure from the “norm” will be a game I can stick with.
Great article though! I too look forward to the “simplistic” yet complex nature of GW2′s UI and ability systems.
“It is also important to note that the primary attack for each profession (the number 1 ability) is the only one without a cooldown, and it is usually far more dynamic than an auto attack or Filler Ability. ” True except in the case of the Thief, all Thief abilities have NO cooldown but cost initiative…
Great point! I’ve taken a closer look at the Thief recently, and between the Initiative resource, the way stealth is handled in GW2 and the Steal ability, it may tempt me play a “rogue’ type character for the first time in a MMO.
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Good article overall and brings to light of some flaws of SWTOR. But it is a view from a hardcore person. I see this type of view from many “raiders”. Its all about gear and stats and maxing out as fast as possible. Of course one is going to be bored of the game ASAP if thats all you want, which many raiders…thats it. GW2 is not going to be anything different and the hardcore are going to be burnt out just as fast and for the raiders..even faster. So don’t get your hopes up. The hardcore fail to see the strength of the game which is the PvE and story that drives it. BioWare did an amazing job with class quests and the sub-story line nested in it. I have talked with many hardcore/raiders who have left SWTOR and I mention hidden areas or quests lines that I liked..many times they go “oh really??”.
Another point to bring out is that it is Sci-fi and that those who play fantasy, in general, have a hard time adapting to it. I have been playing boardgames/roleplaying games before many of you were even born and its fact of the genre.
However, SWTOR is a new skin for an old face but better. The GEM of this MMO is the quality of PVE, the universe it builds on and I have a feeling it will be around a long time. heck, how old is Star Wars and every Christmas you see new products on the shelf. Its a cult.
As for GW2, I blew the 160 on the CE because I was looking for something new and excited to play it. I think it will open up new design. Is it going to crush WoW or nuke other MMO’s to non exisance..no it won’t. If have the hype is true.. I can see BLizzard taking the GOOD of GW2 and making it better when it opens its new MMO.
Anywho, Good article but don’t make your final judgement on it. Get more views and to really enjoy the game..don’t RUSH to 50 like this author most likely did. The view is of a half-empty glass… make sure you get a review from a view of half-full.
Thanks for the reply!
I actually took my time getting to 50, and was fortunate that I belonged to a guild who was interested in end game PvE without needing to push everyone to get there. My hardcore days are well behind me, and I had way more fun in SW:TOR just leveling and PvPing than I did raiding.
Like you said, SW:TOR has a really enjoyable leveling experience. From a character development aspect, it is unrivaled. The companion system is something other developers should absolutely take note of. BUT, as you also said, it is essentially a new skin on an old product. That doesn’t mean it is a bad game. I’ve enjoyed going back into 1.2 and I’m happy with most of the changes BioWare has made. It just feels much too familiar to me, and I’m struggling to find a way to justify my subscription.
The problem is that, by design, SW:TOR shares WoW’s shortcomings, and I do consider ability “bloat” (where you need to have 4+ bars of abilities and/or numerous addons and mods to make the game playable) a pretty big shortcoming. In WoW, and in SW:TOR, to a lesser extent since the floodgate for mods and addons isn’t open yet, it feels like you end up playing the UI instead of the game.
As someone on Reddit remarked earlier today, GW2 offers a lot of depth without needless complexity. That holds true for their UI and their questing system, and I think it is a design goal they try to pursue in every aspect of the game. I guess we’ll all see it for ourselves soon enough.
Thanks again for your comments!
Just a small note regarding dual wielding in GW2. Main hand determines the first 2 slots, off hand the last 2 and the middle depends on the combination of main and off i.e. a thief using dual daggers will give you Leaping Death Blossom but dagger/pistol will give you Shadow Shot.
I think that is specific to the Thief, if I recall correctly. They seem to be the exception to the rules. Very cool class.
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