I never set out in SWTOR to go full light side or full dark side. I'm not a min-maxer, and the first thing I do whenever I reinstall this game is go into options and switch off the feature that shows if a particular conversation choice is light or dark or neither. I find it a lot more interesting, even if some of what the game considers light/dark is... questionable.
The devs of SWTOR appear to strive for balance in the Force. At times they'll implement or amend features that distinctly improve the quality of the experience, and at others they'll implement or amend features that do the exact opposite.
The dark side was definitely strong in the development of the cash shop. Yes, they've lightened the restrictions somewhat in the past year or so, but this is still a game that wants to twist the player's arm to spend some money. Sometimes it's just petty – hiding the headgear visual*, and requiring an unlock to customise the appearance of your companion. Others are outright malicious, like having to pay to unlock the third crafting slot, which is essential if you actually want to do any crafting.
*In a game where there's so much focus on scenes where characters are talking to one another I'm always baffled that anyone would want to wear a full face helmet, hiding their character's expressions. I mean unless you really want to get your Vader on, I suppose.
Speaking of crafting... why in the name of QoL can't I queue up multiple 30 second long crafts? I don't mind sending off a companion for a few minutes to get something done – I can get on with other things while they're gone – but having to manually select each and every basic craft of 30 seconds or less, one after another, is the second most cumbersome crafting system I've encountered in an MMO. Neverwinter's overdone workshop system is still far worse, but that's a very low bar to cross.
That your companions do the crafting – fair enough, I suppose that works. That they do the gathering, leaving you standing there idly while your companion grubs around in the trash – that's just weird.
SWTOR has a good appearance system (give or take a cash shop unlock or two) and a gear enhancement system that's easy to use and has palpable benefits throughout the game, rather than being something that only kicks in late on or in endgame.
The rapid out of combat self heal skill that each class is given is nice - they're all well done and characterful and they're easy to use, and in the event you do lose a fight the medical drones mean you won't be down for long – with a 12 second grace period to get out of harm's way thrown in. I have to admit there are times I could really do with the grace period in City of Heroes after popping a rez inspiration. I also have to admit that now that medical drones are unlimited I wonder if anyone still takes the option to rez back in the medical bay. I can't think of any situation where that would be preferable except perhaps if you're completely outclassed and the fast travel skill is on cooldown.
On the other hand some of the fast travel options seem a little excessive. Being handed an instant FT to any Heroic you pick up (mostly, there do seem to be a few exceptions for reasons I can't quite figure out) feels a bit too much like hand holding, but then there's an awful lot of hand holding where the Heroics are concerned, and that led to one of the worst decisions ever made by the developers of this game, and like several other really terrible decisions it involved one of SWTOR's unique selling points – Companions.
SWTOR copied a lot from World of Warcraft – it's perhaps not quite as noticeable now after years of continued development of and changes made to both games, but at launch it was extremely obvious and actually quite staggering in its shameless mimickry. I mean sure, if you're going to steal then steal from the best, but Bioware stole Blizzard's car and then put it up for resale without even giving it a respray first.*
*Perhaps
the most blatant example of this was the Sith Warrior/Jedi Knight
skill progression, which was literally WoW's Warrior skillset with
the names changed. Well, that and the shoulder pads.
One thing that was unique to SWTOR was the companion system, in which the player accumulated a series of companions with different personalities, personal story arcs and, most importantly, unique skills and abilities. Some were tanky, some were healers, some did damage, and you could gear them up just as you geared yourself up. They were useful in a fight, but not so powerful that they overshadowed you. Well, not entirely. Vette was always a bit too good at stealing aggro from my Sith...
Key word: They were all these things. Not anymore, and that brings me back to the subject of Heroics.
I can't recall if it was around the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire or a little before, but at some point the devs made drastic changes to the companion system – and every one of these changes was bad.
Heroics had been pressed into service as dailies/weeklies/something to do while waiting for new content, and people were complaining that they couldn't solo them, because they were balanced for two players. Bioware's solution to this problem was to buff the companions to god-mode power levels – so excessively that even they walked it back a bit (not enough, but a bit) after it went live. So now anyone could solo their daily/weekly/whatever Heroics, because their companion was there to do all the heavy lifting.
The problem is that now that the companions make hard content doable they also make normal content trivial. There's a reason I ran almost the entirety of Coruscant solo, with my companion off on crafting missions while I took on content theoretically balanced for both of us. Companions are so powerful now that in a fight with four regular enemies they'll take out three of them by the time I've finished with one, and the big dramatic showdowns with elite enemies are over in less time than it takes for the cutscene in which they make their entrance to play out.
That's if you have them set up as DPS. Set them up as a Healer and your health bar will never move and you'll forget what your character looks like because they're surrounded by a permanent green glow. Set them up as a Tank and you might as well just wander along behind your companion with your weapon slung because no one will pay the slightest attention to you, and your companion can kill everything on their own anyway.
Any companion can fill any role now, and they all have the same stats, and their gear is purely cosmetic now so you don't have to think about that either. Just pick your favourite and go god-mode through every piece of levelling content that isn't a four player instance.
Companions aren't individuals anymore, they're nothing more than different skins for one all purpose I Win button on legs. It's an astonishing and absolute gutting of what was one of the very few things SWTOR did differently from other MMOs, and Bioware did it for perhaps the stupidest reason imaginable. People didn't like having to choose the right companion for the right task. They just wanted to run with their favourite at all times.
Responding to player feedback is a good thing. Pandering to those same players is not. Removing content is almost never a good idea – even Blizzard, when they threw out the original game world in Cataclysm, replaced it with something. Bioware replaced what they tossed out with nothing at all. They trashed an entire aspect of their game and they did it so that players could roll through the game with no thought or effort and would never be parted from their waifu of choice. That's not how you make an MMO, that's how you make a fucking dating sim.
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