Gel

@Lenn I don't know about LOTRO, but Rift's Instant Adventures are insta-group runs through zones with mission objectives. You cant' do it alone.

Their Chronicles are also for at least two people. If you have the right build , you may be able to get through a Chronicle on your own...albeit quite sloooowly :-)

From what I have read, Panda is a Torrent client for specific software. It has the same advantages and drawbacks as all other TOrrent clients.

Running a Torrent client such as uTorrent and sharing files will produce the same "drain" on your bandwidth until you manually close the client.

The problem seems to be that people don't know what it is, or what it really does.

I wouldn't bet on it with GW2 due out next year. There are a lot of things about SWTOR that will turn people off once the rush wears off.

I think people need to take a wait and see attitude with what happens next, and what BIoware prioritises. From a features perspective, it is already well behind the curve of current 2011 MMOs such as WoW, Rift, CO and even EQII.

If these aren't fixed and once the initial rush dissipates, people are going to start comparing. Telling them that in the early 2000s WOW didn't have this either isn't going to cut it.

I'm also concerned about new content. How are they going to release new areas, and new quests? Every area will need to have 8 separate, completely voiced quest lines. WHAT!?

I think we're already seeing evidence that this is a tall order with the Raids, where the latest areas are a far cry from the complexity and depth of some of the launch flashpoints.

For me, right now SWTOR is a 7.5 / 10. But I'm having fun :-) I wouldn't start a dedicated site for it right now though. A few Guides here and there, some commentary..but not a dedicated site.

Very sad the parent company for the books and lore is struggling to stay in business. :( We all should go buy some of their books as a sign of appreciation.

http://www.herogames.com/home.htm

Of course they should all have it. It's a fantastic feature to keep people playing and progressing together.

As this article stated, the only reason is that it may affect the bottom line of the companies because content Gates are meant to keep you in a specific content area for a specific period of time. Subscription fees, and earnings are all based around this. Balancing can fairly easily be handled, as these other games that utilise such a sidekick system have shown. Even without sidekicking, balancing in games that do NOT carry it isn't perfect so even if when sidekicking balance is a bit off, it doesn't ruin the experience.

There are many "features" that people accept in MMOs that are nothing more than money makers. Another of these are the overly long travel times, but I guess that's for another article.

I always wanted these games to have more streamlined interfaces. The deep menu system should be supplemented by a context sensitive button system. There should also be mission style gameplay and an overarching storyline..a campaign so to speak.

That's just me...what I would like. I guess at the end of the day I am more a Freelancer than a X3 type of player.

Despite the fact that I was interested in X3, and bought it...I just couldn't get engaged in it. It felt like work, sorting through several layers of menus , making notes on a notepad etc.

If they simplify everything, provide a context sensitive user interface, some structured storylines etc. then I can see myself buying it. But I kind of doubt the same team would do anything radically different from X3.

Good grief.

Haven't we seen all this in Fallout 3, Borderlands, Bulletstorm to a certain extent,Crysis 2.

The game palette seems very washed out and...dull.Now they look good...but very dull.

I'm kinda getting really tired of the whole post apocalyptic, zombies, cities falling apart stuff.

Why do we see these huge clumps of themes in our games? Will there be a "forest Theme" in our next 5 games? A space theme? Do Developers all get together and say , for the next two years we are all going to focus on post apocalyptic worlds with zombies and/or aliens. Then the next two years we're going to focus on terrorists etc. etc.

When is this due out? Sometime in 2012? ^_^

:-\

I would have bought it for MMOs! :-)

@eyeball2452 You keep dismissing performance and hardware issues.
But it IS true that people are having serious performance errors. The game does not use SLI or Crossfire hardware to best effect. That needs to be improved (and the devs have said so, I believe they are working on it). The game is REBOOTING people's machines. It is freezing and crashing. Not making this up, it's happening.

You can argue that it is people's Power Supplies, Heat or bad Memory. But it's happening with Rift, and prior to Rift these people played other games without a problem. So without it necessarily being causation, the mere fact that there is correlation with Rift makes it a Rift issue that needs to be addressed.

When it works, it works very well. The game is beautiful with shadows etc. But people who are having issues are dropping the game to Alternate Render mode in order to play. Which makes it look quite bad in comparison to normal mode.