Well That Was A Strange Week
With Pax now behind us, how did BioWare deliver ?
Well, they gave us exactly what they said they would (not everything we wanted as fans). What they told us before Pax, they had the goods there. They had the early levels on the Sith classes, and what seemed to be a very respectable mid lvl instance. A great deal of interviews have come in, and I’m sure many more are on the way.
In respect to the game play, most every comment is positive, and from the footage we have seen, the instance does look like a highly engaging, and a somewhat challenging, fun packed run.
The only downside I would call out, is that of queues, that none could of foreseen. A 7 hour wait after 10 minutesof Pax opening, I’m sure you could have had four times the amount of games running, and demand would still outweigh the supply.
One major point of the many interviews stands out for me, and that is the amount of game testers that have got a hands on time with TOR. A shabby 1000 total. This 1k also includes BioWare staff, just think about it, only 1000 testers. The average server holds around 6-10k players at any given time.
Game testing has been ongoing for months now, anyone holding any hope of getting a game testing invite, would have a shallow empty feeling right about now.
Game testing sign-ups went up well over a year ago, and if I remember right, we crashed SWTOR site for a fair few hours, such was the interest around any type of game time.
Also in the news is a possible push back. But in defense of BW, they have not given a release date. The expected target window is a different kettle of fish, and this information came from EA. Which in turn, forced BW to make a statement, if that had not happened we would more than likely still be well and truly in the dark.
Fans of any game, will always have high expectations, and as such we try to wish things into being. Now there was a time, I would of been feeling a fair bit disappointed with this news.
Ever since TOR was announced, I’ve found it difficult to impossible, to have any interest in any mmo. Which is new ground for me, as an avid mmo gamer. Over the past 2 years, I’ve opted for pick-up, put down game like Diablo, Monkey Island 2 on an IPOD of all things. Also took a great deal of time beta testing many new mmo’s.
For me anything that was not TOR, just did not make the grade. Then in the past few months Rift entered the picture out of nowhere. This game now keeps me sane, a vastly enjoyable playing experience, that I did not expect.
It may of been the way Trion, approached their beta events. Spread over a number of weeks, 3 and 4 day events, that left you wanting more as the game was updated, tweaked and made better, that got me hooked.
Every beta event, you could see and feel what had been done to the game. Their turn around on bugs, tweaks was almost unprecedented.
I can only hope BW do the very same thing, in respect with TOR.
Well, Pax was ok from the outside, for those like me that did not get the hands on.
No great reveals so far, though we may get 100’s of hints from the many interviews, nothing new and solid came to light.
There’s always E3. Lets hope this up and coming event brings at a very minimum an open beta testing phase.
Until we meet again MrWarlock signing off.
One Response to “Well That Was A Strange Week”
“James Ohlen: We had two groups of a thousand players on a shard and that got us a lot of information because it was a lot more people playing together.”
I am not sure whether when looking at that quote from James, to think of it as 1 group of 1 thousand people or two groups of 1000 each?
when I first read it I interpreted it as 2000k testers, but it could very well be the way you interpret it also.
I am not sure what to say about which is correct now that I look it over more.?
I hope it is the higher number though because I dont want to see the tester base be only 1k people. 2k isn’t much better but at least it would be better than what I would have guessed before reading the interview.
good article, glad to have you writing here MrWarlock