Thursday, July 26, 2012

Not For F2P

Generally speaking, I'm not a player that is either pro-F2P (free-to-play) or anti-F2P. To me, it depends strictly on the MMORPG in question. 

Some games like Maplestory needs to be F2P or else...well, no one will play it. The game basically has no story or anything out of the ordinary (expect its cuteness) that will draw players in if it’s not F2P. However, some games are not suitable to go the F2P route. Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) is one of those games. I played the game for over 4 months and I will say this is one game should not go the F2P route. 

The reason is that the main draw of the game is the class stories. In SWTOR, each class has their own storylines and anyone who had played SWTOR will tell you that the class missions are in a class of their own. They are better than the other missions. In the game, I reached level 80 in both my Jedi Consular and Bounty Hunter characters (one for the Republic, one for the Empire) and I reached 80 well before I finished Planet Crollia. And you know what I did when I reached 80?

I skipped the rest of the Crollia missions and just concentrated on the class missions. I got on my speeder and just raced to the class missions, skipping everything else. To my knowledge, a lot of players do the same thing in SWTOR. So if the game goes F2P...everyone will play the class missions and that’s it!

You are going to have a pure empty space in the gameworld where everyone is just racing to the next class mission location. SWTOR is not a pvp game or even a combat-based game. It’s a storyline game and its greatest strength will be diluted if it goes F2P. Hopefully Bioware and EA will have more sense than that.

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