Sorry… I know I was supposed to post this 3 months after the official release of the game but writing this post has been a lot more difficult than I expected it to be. To be perfectly honest, I had to do a bit of soul-searching to figure out what was what and this post will reflect that hopefully.
Instead of doing the more usual like/dislike post I tend to do with reviews, I’ll just go over my impressions as the weeks went by.
The early days: mad love
The old Republic swept me away in the early days. I was loving the quests, the lore, the classes, storylines. The early flashpoints were great and even the small bugs I encountered while questing couldn’t bring my enthusiasm down. Everything was perfect and I was ready to play this game forever. However, this would prove to be a honeymoon phase like any other game.
The cracks start showing…
As I got in my thirties, the game started to show some signs that not all was well. I had less interest to log in, the zones and quests seemed to all be the same and besides a few key stories, I couldn’t care less about this or that NPCs problems. Still, I wasn’t worried yet. I figured all games had these “bad areas” or slower stretches and that it would all even out in the end.
The game seemed to want to prove me right too. The last few zones, Voss and Corelia were a blast to play through and I enjoyed the ending to my class storyline. All seemed well…
The downfall
Then we hit endgame…. and it was horrible… Too much grinding, too many dailies to do, the flashpoints were bugged or badly tuned, pvp was unbalanced…. it was hell. I reconsidered playing this game for a while, I barely logged and thing just looked dire.
Then we started raiding and the bugs kept coming.. they still do in fact. Raiding was fun because of the awesome guild I am in but… the game itself didn’t look so great…
… and then I realized it was all my own doing!
About a month ago I started playing Lotro again just to get some fresh air and it did me a lot of good. Not only did I get said fresh air but I also realized I made a terrible mistake with how I approached Swtor.
I had unrealistic expectations of what Swtor should be.
I left WoW to go play Swtor with a very specific set of features I was looking for. I had a precise idea of what I wanted to see at endgame, in flashpoints, on gear, dailies, quests, etc… I never took the time to write all my expectations down of course, but thinking back on the transition from WoW to Swtor, I now realize they were there.
And of course Swtor failed to deliver on many counts. And how could it? I never sent Bioware my super secret list of wishes for Swtor and I do realize that a lot of what I would like is not what someone else would want.
In many ways, I set myself up to be disappointed by Swtor and what was bound to happen happened, I was disappointed.
Switch in perspective
Once I realized I had set myself unrealistic expectations, I started looking at Swtor in a new light. I decided to play the game for what it was, and not what I wanted it to be and I found out a surprisingly great game. Sure there are bugs, raiding is not perfect yet and the game still need quite a few months of hard work to be what it should be but right now, it’s still a great game.
So right now, I’m enjoying leveling an alt and just having a great time with SnarkSide. I’m also excited at all the devs are saying they are working on and I do think that given enough time, Swtor will turn out to be one of the greatest MMOs out there.
