09/07/2022

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!)

10 comments :

  1. You're braver than I, because I still haven't watched his LOTRO video beyond 10 minutes in, much less the SWTOR one.

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    1. Don't know why you stopped, he really enjoyed LOTRO too.

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    2. I guess I didn't want to hang around for the hammer to fall. I saw what he thought of Rift, and it's a shame that Rift kind of torpedoed themselves, because there was a good story there in the old zones. But oh well.

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  2. This is from a comment I made on Xam Xam's discord, " watched the video. The issue of teaching new players how the game works is spot on. The problem is that teaching new players is an unsolved problem for all MMOs. Trying to build intros/in-game tutorials that go from people who don't even understand WASD to hard-core enthusiasts is really hard.

    Another issue is that it is probably more profitable to build new content for your existing player base than try to make it easier for new players to get into your game. Unless you can add more new players than your entire existing playerbase, it is likely not going to be a proposal which will be greenlit".

    I liked his video enough to enough to watch the ones on other MMOs I've either played or have tinkered around with. For the most part he's pretty upbeat about the good sides of the games. (Though the Neverwinter cash shop got savaged. Rightfully so, it seems, but that's a comment for a different blog. :))

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    1. Trying to build intros/in-game tutorials that go from people who don't even understand WASD to hard-core enthusiasts is really hard.

      Agreed! Another reason I never had any issues with SWTOR is that it was clearly targeted at the WoW crowd at launch, so if you knew the basics there, your knowledge could largely be mapped onto the new game, greatly reducing the amount of new things to learn. Modern WoW on the other hand tries hard to be more welcoming even to complete newcomers to the genre and in turn gets called out for "dumbing things down" by the more experienced players.

      Though the Neverwinter cash shop got savaged.

      Yeah, I thought that one was a little unfair not in the sense that it was untrue, but that it didn't mesh with his usual approach to the games he covers in this series. I think he did say that he was biased due to his past history and that he was still going to try to approach the game like a new player, but I don't think he really succeeded. I just can't see a new player going on the kind of shopping spree he went on. I played for years and never would've thought of buying any of the stuff he listed in his video, simply because that kind of gear isn't really relevant until you get into higher level content.

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  3. I broadly agree with JSH's take on both SWTOR and LOTRO. Both games used to introduce players to different types of content in a measured and linear fashion, when it was both narratively and level appropriate. However, subsequent revisions to the games have broken this process and it is now confusing to new players. I hope he covers Star Trek Online at some point.

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    1. STO would definitely be a fun one! It's been a long time since I played it and I didn't play for that long, but I'm sure there would still be enough for me to recognise in a review...

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  4. "...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..."

    Idk how common it is on DM, but at least on SF I regularly see new players on fleet asking how to get back to their starter planets because of this exact problem.

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    1. Interesting! Maybe it's more common than I would have thought then.

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  5. I've been a fan of his Worst MMo series for awhile. When he mentioned on twitter that he was getting ready to put out a video about Swtor I was a little nervous. I don't know if this is true or not, but I've heard he's not a big Star Wars fan, so I wasn't sure what his take would be.

    I sort of agreed with him when it came to the wall of text. I personally didn't have any problems because I don't mind reading, however my brother didn't like reading the tutorials. It's probably something they should consider overhauling in the near future.

    I'm honestly not surprised he started a flashpoint before he was supposed to. If you watch any of his earlier videos, he usually tries out a dungeon as soon as they become available. I have encountered a few players who ended up getting lost because they left the starter planets before they were supposed to, but in my general experience a lot of new players ask when they should do flashpoints.

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