If I want a big epic story driven by cutscenes and “decisions”, I’ll play an offline game. Specifically, if SWTOR was an offline sequel to KOTOR, I’d buy it pretty happily. As a sub MMO, it holds very little appeal.

I think this is a case of Bioware not realising just how different MMOs are from single player games. 200 hours is huge by single player standards – but plenty of MMO players rack up that much time in two months, yet expect to still be playing the same game two or more years later. THAT’S why these games eke out the lovingly handcrafted story content with kill ten rats and do this daily quest fifty times for your sexy-looking dragon mount – because players expect to have so much time occupied.

The nightmare scenario for Bioware is a steep drop-off of subscriptions after two or three months as players run out of story and feel cheated by what’s left. Given how much this game has cost to make, I doubt box sales plus a couple of months per player will cover their costs, let alone make the healthy ROI the suits at EA expect… and EA is even less forgiving than the Emperor.

I read this to mean you’ll have 200 hours of gameplay specifically designed for your class. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s 200 hours straight of just you and your class.. but rather side quests and what not specific to your class interests as opposed to some common content. There could be another 400 hours of shared content.

Another way to say it would be: If you’re a Jedi you’re going to do Jedi stuff all throughout the game. You’ll have quests, missions and content specific to that. If you’re a smuggler, you’ll have some content specific to that as well.

As opposed to Rift where you start off doing the exact same content based on the faction you’re from (i.e. they have 2 branches). Bioware is suggesting there are 8 (?) branches or storylines woven in with the content.

There is potential to do this really well or I could be letting my optimism get ahead of me.

I do agree, it is somewhat ambiguous which can leave people to interpret it to be better than it is.

If I add up all the time I spent on every WoW character until now…wow. Let’s say I’ve refused to do it on the grounds of I’d be afraid I’d want to hide. Suffice it to say, it’s alot.

But even back in Vanilla wow? My first mage alone ended up with days and days on him loooong before I completed all the content(which I never did do in Vanilla. I raided casually-yes, I was in a guild who didn’t mind a few casual folks as long as they didn’t stand in the fire/blow up the raid.) But assuming yeah-20 hours a week, I played him much, much MUCH Longer than 10 weeks.

Yeah, I’m not sure if I can really get why they’d say this on an MMO. It’s…too tough to really determine. There are so many factors involved…yeah, not sure I get it.

I don’t like the ambiguity of the whole “200 hours” statement. What does it mean, exactly? It will take roughly 200 hours to reach level 50 (in which case it’s far too short)? Is it 200 hours of JUST class-unique content per class (which is an awful lot)? Or is it being able to, effectively, complete the game (instances and all) in 200 hours on one character (which would be far, far too short)?

And I wouldn’t compare it to the Dragon Age. I’d compare their quality (and, frankly, I thought DA:O beyond the tutorial was a bloody awful game, so TRO doesn’t have to do much to impress) not the length, since most of the MMO crowd is going to compare it to WoW in terms of longevity as well.

I’d rather spend the time on the dailies, but only because I just don’t like DA:O. I don’t like dailies either, but I find the Hyjal slant interesting and I’m willing to work through them on the assumption that the outcome is good.

* small group PvE content (instances/dungeons)
* large group/endgame PvE content (raids)
* PvP content of some kind
* Quests/storyline

Are the 200 hours for all of that, or just the questing/storyline part?

200 hours at 20 hours per week (which is about average) is 10 weeks. If we finish in 10 weeks I think we will feel like the game is still new but we’ve run out of things to do.

One solution is generally interesting alternative characters. And of course that depends how interesting the quests are. If we are skipping the dialogues to kill ten of whatever I don’t see how the Bounty Hunter kill ten whatever is going to feel different from the Jedi Counsellor kill ten whatever. That may mean that to get the best out of the game we have to impose a self-discipline, make ourselves pay attention to the writing without giving in to the urge of the treadmill.

Unfortunately I think a lot of people will finish and will hang around being bored and whining – it may be a hard game to enjoy even if on its own merits it’s perfectly sufficient.

I think giving it levels was a mistake. We’re going to split apart after the first character so I’m level 10, my friend who is slow is level 40 still on his first character and my other friend has raced to level 30 on character 2. We can’t play together. Now I could play with random level 10 strangers but most of them will be newbies and I don’t want to teach people how to open their bags or use their minimap.

So here’s my plan: play it as a single player game with a communal auction house and a chat lobby. Any multiplayerness that emerges will be a pleasant surprise rather than what I buy the game for.