Right now in SWTOR, the Rakghoul Outbreak live event is taking place. It is BioWare's first attempt at one of these, so it has been interesting to see how they have done it. Even though it is still taking place, there are some definite ways they can improve for their next event. There may be some spoilers in this post.
Hidden Quests. I'm referring to the Tracking the Origin quest. You obtain this quest by obtaining some buffs, which when combined end up unlocking a terminal that gives a mission. I'm ok with hidden stuff, but what bothers me is there there is no 'in character' way to know that this mission exists.
I play SWTOR for the theme and immersion, having to visit a fan site to find out that a mission exists just bothers me. We have cut scenes and gobs of audio, wouldn't it have been better to give clues about mission with those tools? The 5th codex entry is also given by mission, so to finish the story you need to leave it. Grrr.
SWTOR isn't the only one guilty of this of course, a lot of games do it. I remember when WAR came out and I was checking out the lairs. They had some nice Tome entries which gave a backstory. Of course, the story often had nothing to do with the secret of the lair.
In the future, I'd love to see special quests like these have clues in the game world. It doesn't have a mission indicator, but a realistic means to figure it out from inside the game. Of course now that I wrote this, I expect to be told there were in-game clues and I just missed them.
Timing. It seems to me that this live event should have been run prior to 1.2 launching. One of the interesting tidbits we learn is that the infected animal came from Ord Mantell. That would have been very interesting if we did not already know that the Explosive Conflict operation took place on that planet. Since we did, it was not really all that surprising.
I know in this age of data mining that keeping secrets is difficult, but having something to reveal would have made the event more interesting.
I really enjoyed the event starting out with the news cut scenes, but sadly that narrative did not really continue. Instead we were tossed a bunch of daily quests. In future events, I'd like to see more focus on the story as it evolves along with the daily quests.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Rakghoul Gripes
