Quote Originally Posted by Beskar View Post
I hate to see you in a FPS game "This game is a grind! I just walk here and shoot things and then I go there and I shoot things!"
Yes - apparently that was my first reaction to playing football as a new entrant to kindergarden. "Mum, you have to kick the ball. Then, you have to kick it AGAIN!"

On FPSs you are right. My son is buying Halo ODST today and I've promised to play the campaign co-operatively with him. But to be honest, it fills me with dread. So boring. Shoot this, shoot that. Snooze.

It's like that point in Total War where you go "you know what? I can't be bothered fighting a 30 minute battle when I can just auto-battle it in a less of a second and I stand a good chance of winning".
I guess the point about grinding is that is doing repetitive things you don't enjoy. I don't like kicking balls, I don't like shooters, I don't like killing boars/rats. I love TW battles. And I love Bioware RPGs. Some of that is personal preference, but it's also to do with the complexity of the task and the effort put into the design. I am 100% sure that a lot more design effort goes into a Bioware quest than a generic "kill 20 boars" quest. Even if it is just a matter of employing good writers, giving a good story motivation to the quest, employing professional voice actors etc, a Bioware quest may still require you to go to place A and kill 10 mobs, but it will be a much more satisfying experience.

The thing I dislike about TOR, if it is a massive-online-single-player-game, I don't think there should be a monthly fee aspect to it, in a sense, it turns into something like guild wars which is pretty much free. The cost just seems too great otherwise.
That also relates to the issue of grind. If it is pay a monthly fee just to kill boars, then I can understand the objection. But if it is paying a monthly fee to enjoy the single player experience of a Bioware RPG, I don't see a problem. When you run out of good content, stop playing the game and paying the fee. There is the question of whether Bioware will add sufficient good quality content to keep people paying that fee for months on end. But I'm reasonably optimistic. Levelling in games like WoW can take a casual player like me around a year. I could conceive of Bioware delivering a similar amount of content but with a higher quality, especially when the MMO funding model should allow them to add areas and stuff over time. There will come a time when you are level capped and so the game will have to rely on something like PvP or raiding to keep you playing, but I don't see myself playing the same game for much over a year anyway (until the inevitable expansion).