I don’t want you killing the things I’m supposed to be killing.Īgain, it’s fairly obvious that most of my complaints here are about MMOs in general, but obviously there’s one MMO that deeply has its hooks in me, Destiny. Yes, I understand the appeal of clans and high level raids once you’ve sunk 500 hours into the game, but now? The other people populating the world A) just make me feel bad because they have way cooler gear than me and B) will clear out enemies in some zones making “kill X enemies” goals hard to complete. I can’t think of another game out there where I’ve actually avoided fighting enemies not because they over-leveled me, but just because I didn’t want to go through yet another mind-numbing combat encounter.Īnd the MMO aspect adds nothing for me. Or trying to walk carefully so you don’t get sucked in to cluster-fighting. The story is only 5% of what I’m actually experiencing, and everything else is just cluster-fighting or walking. I can’t pull myself through these story campaigns when combat is this dull and uninspired. But combat itself? It was only remotely challenging before I had my helper droid, but once I got him and set him in “healer” mode, it’s rare I even take damage now, much less actually get close to dying. Or it’s overcoming potentially game-breaking bugs like how I was unable to choose my specialization class for about five hours after I was supposed to. The hardest part of SWTOR is bringing yourself to walk all the way back through rooms of magnetic enemy clusters because your fast travel is on cooldown. That’s the other problem, the “challenge” found in the game is not from the difficulty of these enemy encounters themselves. I’m sure once you get to the endgame, there are a lot more specific “build” options to pursue, but in these lower levels, you can more or less button mash and kill anything and everything with ease. It may not help that I’m a Jedi, and 90% of my skills are just different ways to swing a lightsaber. Granted, SWTOR is a fairly old game at this point, but going from Skyrim and Dragon Age and The Witcher and Assassin’s Creed and Mordor and Arkham and all these other games that put an emphasis on live fighting, the enemy cluster/skillbar cooldown philosophy of combat is just so inescapably clunky and dull. But every encounter feels exactly the same, and these infinitely respawning clusters of enemies are always more of a hindrance than something that’s actually fun to fight.Ĭombat isn’t turn-based, nor is it as dice-rolley as combat in games like this used to be, but man, is it ever not fun. Sometimes they’re droids or flesh raiders or Sith soldiers or mercenaries. Sometimes there are two of them, sometimes five. It’s the famous set up of “enemy clusters” in a given area, where you will run back and forth in “combat zones” where little groups of enemies stand around waiting to be killed. The problem is not unique to SWTOR, but the game does exemplify everything I hate about MMO combat. The problem, however, is that I will have to play SWTOR for an ungodly amount of hours to realize these stories, and unlike other RPGs where that isn’t a problem, I just don’t think I’m going to be able to drag myself through the gameplay itself. You can essentially play SWTOR as a single player RPG now, as nearly all of the group elements have been rendered fully optional. This was the appeal talked about in Kollar’s article. And then do it all seven more times for all the other classes. I’m a bit sad I’m on the verge of abandoning the game entirely, because I really would love to see my Jedi Knight story through and do all these sidequests that are miraculously fully voiced with their own plotlines. I love the story aspects of SWTOR, and without them, there would be literally nothing pulling me forward in the game. I think MMOs are dying because this style of gameplay is just. Why? Many of my reasons will probably not have to do with SWTOR in and of itself, but the entire aging MMO genre, which is really hard to get into if you haven’t been a devotee of that type of game for the last decade or so.