It begins:
“I’ve been in beta for about two and half weeks and I used to work for a large and famous video game company as a game tester. I would like to think I know a little bit about testing games, but this is just a general outline of what I think of the game and where it’s heading.”
The review goes on to tell us what SWTOR is:
“A really solid MMO that will be successful. Simply put, there is nothing that WOW does better, and the baseline for TOR leaves a lot of room for improvement and fun. Unless something insane happens and the game goes off the deep end, I don’t see it failing like most MMOs.”
And then, what it is NOT:
“TOR isn’t revolutionary.”
You can read the full review for yourself and find out why he says this.
He also has his own perceptions on when the ship date will come. Given his prior experience with games, he might be spot on with these predictions.
“There are two kinds of bugs when developing a game: Show stoppers, and everything else.
I’d say this game has dozens of show stoppers and general perf (performance) issues. This includes crashes, lag issues, and memory leaks. For instance: I joined a big raid group to take on a level 20 World boss. Because the game was basically tracking all the quests for everybody in the raid moving was almost impossible. That’s a big deal.
The other kind of bug: Basically mission bugs, Story bugs, respawn issues, itemization, and finally graphical bugs. Developers will go in passes to take out these bugs as new builds go forward. I would guess that each world has anywhere from 50-100 bugs like this, so at least 1000 bugs of the low level variety.
I would guess that the game would not be ready in two months, even if they are crunching hard to get it out. Not to mention, they still need to optimize and stress the upper ends of the game. (There is a planned event this week where we can roll high level toons by the way.)
Unless EA pushes an OCT. release date (which will mean more bugs on release) I would say NOV. for sure if you’re a betting man.”