Yeah, you read right. I've decided that Star Wars: The Old Republic has failed to engage me to the point that I'm willing to maintain it concurrently with WoW and EVE.
I don't think TOR is a bad game. Actually, I take that back. Perhaps I'm feeling uncharitable right now, but I do think it's a bad game. I think they chose to launch with too few features, and I think they put too much time and effort into the single-player aspects of the game without ensuring that the multiplayer, one of the Ms in MMO, was up to snuff. I think the gameplay is rough, much rougher than it should be at this stage in the life of video games. I think the ability set of each class tries too hard to be "iconic" -- I can only speak intelligently about the Sith Inquisitor here, but I have a move that duplicates the part where Darth Maul stabs Qui-Gon through the chest. That's a special move. I think that's silly.
I'm not enough of a Star Wars fan to give the game a pass on that alone. (Frankly, I think that Star Wars deserves very little of the hype it gets, but that's a rant for another time -- and I really dislike the Expanded Universe, but that's also another kettle of fish.) The Jedi/Sith dichotomy appeals to me for reasons independent of story, but there's not enough there to keep me interested either. (A third rant: the manner in which having one or two Jedi/Sith in the universe makes them way more awesome than having thousands of each.) I'm aware that over a million people have subscribed to this game, making it something like the biggest launch in history. Which is what being Star Wars will do for you, no doubt about that.
I'm not the target market for this game (i.e. I'm not a Star Wars fanatic). Also, contrariwise to popular opinion, I don't find the three-choice "conversations" to be any more immersive than the page o' quest text approach. Let me unpack that for you. Some of you may know that I'm a fairly experienced DM for tabletop RPGs (D&D, mostly). In tabletop RPG culture there's the concept of "railroading," which is the idea that, no matter what your character does, the end result is going to be the same. The DM is going to run the game he wrote for this session, dammit, and no matter what your character tries to do, that's just what's going to happen. Attempts to take the game "off the rails," such as say throwing a fireball at the king when he tries to give you a medal, will be ineffectual.
In tabletop games, railroading is generally frowned upon. Of course, not all DMs are really great at improv, and filling out an entire world with the kind of detail needed for a proper adventure is an exercise in futility. So, as a DM, if you don't want to railroad (and players generally hate it when you do), you have a three-state fuzzy machine: you can get really good at improv, you can make everything except the prepared adventure mind-numbingly boring, or you can give your players the illusion of choice.
Obviously, there's a lot of railroading in computer games. This is because computer programs are, by and large, unable to procedurally generate story. A spontaneous dungeon crawl is one thing, but NPC behavior is governed very strictly by their written dialogue. You can't shoot a fireball at King Wrynn in Stormwind (and Lord knows I've tried) because there simply isn't a script in the game for your usurping power. Gamers understand this, so they forgive it.
But the prize has always been the sandbox: the game world in which player choices actually have meaningful impact. EVE manages this pretty well, and it does so by not having any story at all to speak of. EVE is a RTS game where all of the units are controlled by other players. Importantly, while there are parts of the game world that are "controlled" by NPCs, the majority of the world map is able to be held by players. And do they ever hold that territory.
Star Wars would love to be a sandbox (leaving aside for a moment the fact that settings created for a specific story tend to break apart when they're sandboxed -- yet another rant, I should make a list). But instead it puts forth the appearance of at least being a game in which your choices matter. And they do, in some fairly meaningless ways. Yeah, maybe this answer will give you dark side points while that one will give you light side points, or maybe your companion will like you more if you're an asshole to this guy over here. But ultimately those choices aren't relevant to the outcome of the game. Most of the "choices" you make aren't even that meaningful -- no matter what dialogue option you choose, you're going off to Anchorhead and killing ten jawas. The only "difference" your conversational choices make are in how big of a douchebag the NPC thinks you are, which is relevant to absolutely nobody and recorded absolutely nowhere. (Light/Dark Side points and companion Affection notwithstanding.)
This isn't choice. These are barely-disguised rails, and I am annoyed by them. If my dialogue choices aren't going to matter, then I don't want to have to make those decisions at all. Returning to my original point, there's no immersion when being scathingly rude to a quest-giver doesn't result in him getting pissed off and telling me to go pound salt. There's no immersion when mouthing off to my Sith Master has no repercussions, short- or long-term. There's no immersion when being Light III doesn't make said Sith Master cut me loose as an embarrassment to all Sith everywhere.
Is WoW more immersive? Most people would say no. Again, I'm the odd man out. I get "into" my paladin so very much more than I do my sith assassin, and I think it's because I can give my paladin his own voice in my head. Sure, quests are a yes-or-no affair, but if I want to have a mental conversation with an NPC, I can do that, and that conversation will be entirely mine. If I want to fly from one end of the world to the other, I can do that, and the narrative for why I'm doing that is mine alone.
Brings me to another point about TOR: there aren't any "secret places." Like. There's this little shack on the west coast of Azeroth, roughly halfway between Stormwind and Ironforge. There's just a goblin there, if I remember right, who serves no essential purpose whatsoever. He's just there. Something to find if you happen to fly out in that direction. TOR has nothing like that. There's no exploring. You can't pick a random spot on a planet and go there, you're always landing at the spaceport and fenced in by invisible walls. (Never mind that the world feels huge, almost too large -- Tattooine is nothing but a giant desert, and if I want to land somewhere other than Mos Ila, it should be trivial to do so.) TOR feels much, much more like a series of stages to me than WoW does, and that's another thing that just yanks me right out of the immersion.
There are a few things that WoW could learn from TOR, but bottom line, it's not the game for me. And that's disappointing because I do love the concept of playing a Sith, especially a light-side Sith. I'm glad that the game at least allows for that. But for the time being, I'm finished in the Star Wars galaxy. If I meet some people who play the game who I'd like to play with, I'll probably come back. If Bioware introduces macros and addons and so forth, I might come back. But as it stands, TOR does the same thing WoW does, only WoW does it better and I've got six years invested. It was a nice diversion, but I'm giving it a pass.
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