Tuesday, September 29, 2015

SWTOR Livestream Impressions - No Spoilers

Over the weekend at Twitchcon, BioWare was there showing off the Fallen Empire expansion.  They had a bunch of guest streamers who all played through a chunk of Chapter One.  I ended up watching a couple of the run throughs.  Some players knew what they were doing, others did not.  Overall, it seemed like a fun event.  Now, on to my spoiler-free impressions.

Quality.  First, the positive.  What I saw was really well done.  BioWare has really stepped up their game.  The cinematic scenes, voice acting, story, and environments were well done.  I really liked what I saw and can't wait to play for myself.  And the decisions we had to make?  They were interesting too.  It really gives me high hopes for the expansion.

Length.  Sadly, it may all not be positive.  It took streamers around an hour to play through most of Chapter One.  I think it is time to accept that might be the average length of a chapter.  That means when it launches, we might get ~9 hours of story content.  When the monthly content starts, it might be just one hour per month.  That will probably not cut it for a lot of people.  Maybe this chapter was just an aberration, but there are indications that it is not.

To BioWare's credit, they are giving players more to do than just story content.  So maybe it'll work out fine.  How long did it take you to finish Rishi and Yavin IV?  I'm going to guess around 9 hours?  I just hope the monthly content is good enough to convince a lot of people to pay $15 a month.