Josh Strife Hayes Takes on SWTOR

Josh Strife Hayes is a popular MMO YouTuber and streamer whom I've been following for a couple of years now. Looking at his back catalogue, he spent several years trying different angles from Let's Plays to guides to personal vlogs, seemingly struggling to find a wider audience, until he struck gold with his "Worst MMO Ever" series, which - despite the clickbaity title - is a thoughtful and light-hearted exploration of the wider genre.

As I said, I've been watching his stuff for some time... though I refused to subscribe (or may in fact have subscribed and then unsubscribed again at some point) due to him having some very bad takes on SWTOR. Or rather: that's how I remember it going down. Having watched his most recent video on the game, that memory doesn't really add up and I wonder whether I didn't get him confused with somebody else at some point. I went ahead and (re-)subscribed now either way.

Anyway, last week YouTube pointed out to me that Josh's "Worst MMO Ever" series had a new installment... about SWTOR. Now, to reiterate: he's in no way saying that SWTOR is the worst MMO ever, or even that it's bad - the title is pure clickbait. He justifies it by saying that he's trying different games in search of the worst MMO ever, which did make some sense in the early days when he was mostly covering very old or unfinished games that really were bad in variety of different ways, and which made me appreciate just how much work must have gone into the MMOs I play for them not to have all these problems. However, more recently he's been covering more mainstream games that are actually pretty good, so the title doesn't really have much of a connection to the content anymore.

I was therefore somewhat torn between being really curious about what he was going to have to say about SWTOR and worrying whether it was going to be harsh and unfair, due to those aforementioned (confused?) memories. Of course I went and watched the video right away anyway. And I needn't have worried.

Overall, Josh actually had a pretty good time (as I would've expected in this context!) and his criticisms are all fair, even if I don't necessarily agree with everything. E.g. he started as a smuggler and found that he quickly grew tired of that story as he didn't really care about the events his character got entangled in. Specifically, he felt that it was all too reactive and he actually would've preferred to play as Skavak, the guy stealing ships and treasure and being chased by everyone, instead of being the person chasing after him. That's a fair take, but my experience with the smuggler origin was the complete opposite, in that I thought the early smuggler story was extremely good at making me care and at motivating me to keep going. (Revenge!) Likewise, I would've most certainly been displeased if my character had been cast as a thief by default. Smuggling is not the same as stealing.

I think the two most pertinent criticisms he raises are the multitude of small random bugs you're likely to encounter in the game (animations glitching out, character falling through the floor, a flashing icon that can't be clicked away, a mission requiring a relog because an NPC disappeared etc.), to which I can only say "yep, I hear you on that one" and that the new player onboarding experience basically consists of nothing but walls of text.

The latter is something I'd been low-key wondering about for a while, but I hadn't really had a chance to see how bad it really is. While I acknowledge that a modern game should strive to do better than making you read pages and pages of what's effectively a manual, I'm generally someone who doesn't mind reading. More importantly though, I also don't remember ever being flooded with pop-ups the way he is in the video. Some of it is probably simply the fact that I've "grown up" with the game - I do remember occasionally seeing a couple of new pages of tutorials after a patch that added a new feature for example, but obviously getting all of that content spread out over the course of ten years is a lot less disruptive than receiving a massive info dump every time you level up.

However, I also saw some people in his comment section claim that the tutorial didn't used to be like this, which makes me wonder whether some of it wasn't actually patched in until a later date, but I honestly don't recall ever noticing any major changes to the system. An admittedly cursory internet search didn't yield details about a specific patch changing the tutorials either, other than KotFE updating the system for characters jumping straight into the content of that expansion.

Either way, I agree that it's not well-done at all, though I suspect it takes a very special kind of player to get as entangled as Josh did, reading a tutorial pop-up about the activity finder while questing on Ord Mantell and taking it as a cue to immediately stop doing what he was doing and queue for solo mode Esseles (which then led to - justified - confusion on his part when he got ejected on Carrick Station, while technically still stuck on Ord Mantell in terms of story). I suspect that in general, players are more likely to just ignore these pop-ups, or look at them very briefly before clicking them away, and then just look for help if they find themselves getting stuck or confused by something specific.

Some of this was definitely better done in the game's earlier days, with the story leading you to the Esseles naturally after you'd travelled to Carrick Station and were told to take a shuttle to Coruscant for example. However, I can see how that also conflicts with the game's desire in later years to reduce friction caused by certain systems and wanting to get people into and through the content they want to focus on faster and more easily. It's an awkward balance to strike, but it could definitely be done better. (Josh actually released a video called "How to Design a Tutorial" only a few days later... not hard to see where the inspiration for that came from!)