SWTOR dev diary steps beyond story

The story and art for this game look great, but after seeing the gameplay footage from E3, I'm hoping they work on that aspect of the game a bit harder.

It looks like a Buddha statue, except... it's a giant golden Hutt instead of a Buddha. o.O;

The dev diary reads a bit like "pimp my nardasha" to me but its good the writers get to put in a few pennies worth before it ships. To be honest i have found the tf2 dev blogs and diaries more interesting than the tor ones.

I wouldn't quite have the balls of steel to type that on swtor.com those... fanboi frenzy!

The more of I see of TOR the less interested I get, I think it's just the same old combat with a new skin on it, I don't think I can bring myself to kill ten more mobs, rinse repeat and activate hotbars anymore.
Shooter mechanics and active combat like in DCUO, fallen earth or even STO's combat upgrade seem more fun to me, for this IP better faster combat would have been a no brainer....Plus the space combat on rails is a deal breaker, I really wanted to have a ship and fly around where I wanted to.

Jabba is evil Buddha. I knew it!

The more I see the "core MMO gamer" (read as Raid or Die assbonnets) get turned off by TOR, the more I like this game.

I'm just looking foward to a game without row after row after row after row after row of useless, repetitive, boring character skills when one bar's worth should do. Most of them just repeat what two other do anyways in a different way.

I hope SWTOR doesn't have that.

Was playing Rift and you can set 8 hotbars on your screen. Do they think that's some kind of innovation?

Who in the world needs 8 hotbars of skills and crap?

Will this game be alt-friendly? As in, will you want to re-read all of the text/etc. again? will you be able to skip it?

I'd like to be able to explore that universe without feeling like I'm following train tracks. I'm not demanding a vast open world like Fallen Earth. But I don't want to be hemmed in either. I hope SWTOR will be open enough for me to wear my explorer hat.

It's a very nice developer diary. It's nice to see the writers can collaborate with the art team, that the two units aren't isolated from each other. It gives me hope that the art team and other parts of production will have enough understanding and feel for the story and setting, that they'll create a living, interesting world.

I'll be forwarding the link to my guild.

TOR will be an avolution of massive multiplayer into single player story telling with massive multiplayer options. People still expecting a new wheel really should just not bother. They spent so much money on writing and voice acting they aren't going to risk dozens of other new game mechanics alongside it because they don't want those new game mechanics to overshadow the story and voice cting and become a crutch that stops people enjoying the game. Innovate in areas and let other games innovate in areas never try to innovate everything at once, that's just stupid and bound to fail.

@Frostpaw

That's actually correct, if they are too innovative than it will be too overwhelming for the majority of potential players. They definitely take ToR to the next "level", and it is very much a "next generation" game, really the first of them to be honest. Any game that's made a significant impact on any genre chose one or two things to innovate, and made the rest "better" by those innovations but still familiar and easy to pick up and get into for your average gamer. They would be stupid, as Frost paw said, to overhaul every mechanic of the game for the sake of innovation alone and anyone expecting them to do that, especially right off the bat, is setting themselves up for disappointment not only with BioWare and SW:TOR, but any other game that will come out in the future. Evolution is a slow process, and something that happens right at the beginning of the new generation of anything. Piece by piece, rome was not built in a day..ETC. This is not to say that there are not more parts of the game that are innovative and we have just not heard about it, or the fact we're making assumptions about gameplay based off videos and peoples 1-17 hour testimonials of the earliest parts of the game.

Also, MMO's are always a work in progress. There will be updates and expansions and you might be surprised what they come up with and how they create a much more enjoyable gaming experience for MMO players with what they bring to us in the future.