In an earlier article I detailed my thoughts about the SWTOR beta now that the NDA’s been lifted for testers.
To recap, I feel that it’s a mixed bag with promise but ultimately will compete with MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online rather than the seemingly unassailable World of Warcraft.
I don’t know what it was – perhaps the amount and specificity of my bug reports – but I was surprised when my second beta invitation arrived.
The next beta that I was invited to was for the entirety of Thanksgiving weekend, which made sense from a capacity testing viewpoint but struck me as being inconvenient for the testers.
Luckily, we don’t travel for the holidays so I had the entire window open to test to my heart’s content. And that’s when something happened that I don’t think bodes well for SWTOR in the long-term: I just couldn’t build up enough interest to actually play the game at all.
Think about that for a moment: you’ve spent years and millions of dollars to create this game and after playing it for a good bit in the last test the only feeling your investment generated in me was apathy.
When Monday rolled around and I received the “thanks for testing this weekend” email from Bioware, I sat down and tried to figure out why I just didn’t feel like playing SWTOR much less playing it for free. After all, it’s not like I disliked the game.
In the end, I concluded that I had already seen the essential elements of what SWTOR has to offer and that that was enough to sate my appetite.
I honestly feel bad because I want the game to succeed. The MMO genre needs more than just Blizzard doing the thinking and innovating because Bioware’s got some really great ideas.
Just my $0.02.
