So, TOR’s going F2P.

Without getting into the economics involved, or speculating on the timing of it, the health of the company or the game, I’m just thinking about the changes in store.  Now, I don’t avidly follow all the other blogs as many proper journalists/bloggers do, kibbitzing about every last detail, and critiquing the whole mess.  I saw the recent video detailing the upcoming changes, and here are my thoughts on it.

1) They spent an /awful/ amount of the airtime reiterating that subscribers won’t see any changes. Mentioning it once or twice in a two-minute video should have been fine, but without going back and watching it again, I’d say it got mentioned a LOT more than seemed necessary.  It came across to me as ‘if you stay subbed, you won’t lose anything’ more than ‘if you sub, you’ll have no restrictions!’, even tho the latter is more of a direct quote.

2) The only thing that made me go WTF for a few moments was the bit about limiting freep chargen to 3 species. From a design standpoint, if you want all 8 classes represented, you have to have a minimum of Humans, but why Cyborg?  Zabrak, fine, I’m okay with that, it’s got roles in both factions.  But Cyborgs?  They might have roles in both factions, but to me, they’re a reskinned human model.  If I were coming at TOR for the first time, I wouldn’t find the species selection very appealing.  I’d want at least Twi’lek or something a little more exotic than Human, Kinda Human, Human with Horns.  When EQ2 went F2P, they had a ton more race/class selections and I thought I was restricted when it went down to 4 races, but the races had some goodly variety amongst them, enough that I felt the restriction (whine, high elf!).  My initial kneejerk reaction wasn’t all ‘HOLY SHIT, I can’t play ANYTHING?!?’

Full disclosure: On my active server, I have 2 Humans, 1 Twi’lek, 2 Zabraks, 2 Cyborgs, 3 Chiss, 1 Rattataki, 1 Sith Pureblood, so obvs I like the variety of the alien races. I’ll probably reroll one of the doubled-up races when the Cathar come out.  Wonder when that will be.