Star Wars: The Old Republic, Life After (Level) 50

The folks at GameSpy have penned an editorial focused on BioWare Austin’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, and its end-game content specifically. While they don’t seem to be excessively impressed (nor disappointed) with what is there so far, they also seem cautiously optimistic that BioWare will manage to fix the flaws in the future. Here’s a snippet:

Largely because several key members of my guild are still leveling, my experience with TOR’s operations (or TOR’s version of raids) has been minimal at best. Yet the attitude among those who can run the harder of the three difficulty levels for each one, though, seems cautiously optimistic. Jon, an Jedi Guardian on the Veela server who’s played MMOs for 13 years, enjoys the current endgame raiding content. “I think BioWare’s done quite well for itself in the whole month or so that the game has been out,” he said, although he expressed a common concern that ranged classes seem much more useful than melee and a few of the encounters, while fun, seem behind the times in complexity. “Still, there’s a lot of unfounded whining going on at the moment. Right now, it’s true that there’s not much else to do at endgame aside from grinding for gear, either through PvP or PvE but then again, what else does World of Warcraft really have?”

Dennis, a German player who’s been leading endgame operations on the Hydian Way server (EU) since December 28th with his Sith Assassin, is a bit more concerned. “It almost seems like operations were an afterthought, or, even worse, additions that weren’t properly attached to the rest of the game,” he said, while also criticizing the many bugs that characterized operations at launch and the comparatively weak stories within them. “I think the reduced number of bugs in patch 1.1 hints that they’re at least getting the technical side right.” Most worrisome of all, he said, is that gear seems far too easy to come by. “There are so many ways to get gear that you can plan on getting decked out in tier 2 gear in just two to three weeks. You can’t keep raiders motivated to keep playing like that.”