I tried the SWG free trial when the NGE came out. Wasn’t enticed to buy the game. SWG, from what I saw of it, relies heavily on making the player do fairly repetitive and uninteresting tasks - farming, camping, crafting, dancing in a bar for hours to achieve anything in the game. Apparantly the game allows and encourages players to create macros to allow you to automate repetitive tasks. This to me seems like the wrong kind of gameplay - the content of a game shouldn’t be so boring as to encourage automation. That seems more like work than fun to me.
That’s one thing CoH got right - the gameplay is fast and fun with little in the way of repetitive monkeyclicking. Nealy all the game content involves combat, and the CoH combat system is very good. There are a lot of different power sets which can be combined in a remarkable number of ways, and there are a lot of ways to make good combat-effective characters. And characters are powerful right from the start - a first-level character just out of chargen can fight half a dozen even-leveled villains and win, unlike some other MMORPGs where your first experience in the game may well be getting killed by a rat.
The problem with CoH is that the combat is really the only content; the missions are nearly all variations on the same basic themes: Defeat all X on mission map, click on all Y in building, defeat N mobs of type Z, and a few others. There’s very little variation in gameplay between the low levels and the high ones. And as people have figured out how to use the remarkably versatile combat system to build super-effective builds, the developers have responded with repeated power nerfs, which not only weakens the super-optimized builds but gimps everyone else as well. I recently cancelled by CoH subscription, mostly due to getting bored with the game, but partly due to the attitude of the developers and the direction the game’s gone in since I subscribed.
SWG has another problem, in that it is set in a fictional world whose story has already been told. Players in SWG can never be significant to the world; the Star Wars universe has its heroes and its story, which doesn’t involve your character. You can’t have 10,000 people all playing Luke Skywalker in the same online world. It might have worked better if the game world was set in a time far before the movies, like the Knights of the Old Republic games, but they decided to set the online game world as taking place between episodes IV and V. Which meant that, among other compromises, nobody could make Jedi, becuase there were essentially none during that time period. But people don’t want to pay to play a Star Wars game and not be able to play a Jedi, so they were retrofitted in, which was not only in violation of established story canon but unbalanced the gameplay for all the established non-Jedi characters. Of course, those new Jedi players still can’t actually have anything to do with the storyline already written for that time period in the Star Wars universe.
I expect the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG to have similar problems - there is already a prewritten, dramatic, world-affecting story written for that universe, yet a MMORPG requires a fairly static and unchanging world with room for thousands of players to all have their own entertaining stories. You can’t have thousands of people all running around playing Gandalf or Aragon in the same persistent online world, and nobody can destroy the One Ring because that would change the game world dramatically for everyone. So as a player you’ll end up being at best a minor background character in somebody else’s epic adventure. IMHO trying to make a MMORPG based on a movie or book, especially one with a grand and epic story arc, is a mistake; either the players can’t affect the main story and end up being overshadowed and irrelevent, or you end up completely rewriting the story and the world to fit the needs of an MMORPG.
) and often told I was the best controller anyone had ever met. sigh