BioWare has campaigned for months that SWTOR would be a groundbreaking story-driven MMO that uses collaborative decision tools and voice acting for quest interactions with NPCs. So I was most interested to see how big a part storyline played in character development, how closely or loosely class storylines were intertwined with each other... and whether or not the whole thing was as unique and robust as advertised. Well... if the smoothness and polish of the beta product is any indication, then the game is well on its way to becoming what they hoped it would be. Read the rest of this entry »

Tiger Woods PGA Tour appears to have regressed from a quality golf simulation to an obvious console port that plays like an occasionally buggy Facebook game. If you are used to playing past PC versions of Tiger Woods PGA Tour from EA, you will likely find Tiger Woods Online to be disappointing. Read the rest of this entry »

World of Warcraft's primary game play directive has become one of herding the masses into end game as quickly as possible in pursuit of ensuing major expansion sales. But to physically make it through end game requires a player to invest serious time and study outside of the game, regardless of how helpful a player's guild might be. Based on this trend one can surmise that 86% of WoW subscribers are not up to that task and I truly believe Blizz is alienating them as a result. Read the rest of this entry »

Brutal Mode aside, there is also a sizable library of World of Warcraft-style achievements available that players can chase, both in campaign mode (on Casual, Normal and Hard Mode settings) as well as in PvP mode. The campaign is broken down into seven mission trees, three of them conclude with having the player choose one of two campaign plot paths. The campaign's closing mission tree has a final plot branch that is a point of no return. Once this mission is completed the entire final mission tree is no longer available for replay, precluding the player from earning every possible mission achievement within a single campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

EA's expectations are simple: they want this game to financially blow Star Trek Online and World of Warcraft out of the water. The developers' goals are pretty lofty too. For instance, instead of the usual text and a few canned sound bites, Bioware & LucasArts are incorporating complete voiceover scripts into NPC interactions ala' Knights Of The Old Republic. In fact, SWTOR is being fashioned as a gloriously produced Lucasfilms MMO version of KOTOR. Read the rest of this entry »