Touch of Darkness

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I am deeply susceptible to fits of nostalgia, this is a known quantity if you have spent any time at all reading my blog.  One of the ways this regularly manifests itself is with a constant sequence of abrupt returns to games that I thought I had packed neatly away.  Without fail it seems like the moment I finally get around to uninstalling a given game…  that is ultimately the one I am going to be poking my head in next.  There are a few times of the year when I feel excessive “Star Wars Patriotism” for lack of a better term.  Obviously whenever a new movie releases that is an extreme time of loving all things Star Wars.  Similarly the made up internet holiday of “May the Forth” and “Revenge of the Fifth” have some effect but they are largely just contact highs brought on by the extreme amount of tweets I am going to read with pictures from the universe.  The one that apparently worked this time however was the Celebration Weekend, which I have several folks in my social feeds that attend.  However the absolute tipping point for me was setting a tiny adorable Jyn Erso delivering Deathstar Plans to every Leia cosplayer she came across.  When you combine this with the fact that I am kinda in a high point with Bioware right now after wrapping up Andromeda…  the two combined turned into me reinstalling SWTOR and picking up where I left off.  Ironically I had literally just uninstalled the SWTOR client from my laptop a few weeks back to free up some space.

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Around the launch of Force Awakens, myself and a few others of our crew had a short renaissance with Star Wars the Old Republic.  At that point I went on a bit of a bender trying to see all of the class story lines, and when eventually faded away from the game I was pretty near the end of the Sith Inquisitor content.  So instead of going out and experiencing the new content on my Jedi Knight main…  I wound up settling right back into the comfortable groove of running around and being a largely dark side Sith Sorcerer.  Its funny how each class really seems to dictate if I can go full Dark Side or not.  With the Jedi Knight, if you go Dark Side you just end up being the biggest asshole on the planet.  With the Inquisitor however, choosing those Dark Side options just feels right most of the time, especially when it allows me to use force lightning as the answer to any question.  One of my favorite sequences involved needed to smuggle someone off of a planet… and using Force Persuade to get past some guards…  and then Force Persuading my Ally when he asked how I did that.  However as I got later in the content, there were several moments where I just could not be cruel to those who didn’t deserve it.  Functionally if someone was loyal to me…  I would even go so far as to take a light side option to save them.

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When we last played the game it was during the twelve times story mission multiplier, meaning you could get through the game just by focusing on nothing but the main story.  Now instead the game highlights anything that is part of the main planetary story arc, and all of your class quests in purple…  and in theory it seems like just by focusing on those you can accomplish much of the same thing.  However it also seems like every last drop of experience has been increased, because when I hopped back in the game all I was missing was Corellia and the final show down between Republic and the Sith.  During the course of wrapping up the tiny bit I had remaining on Voss… and doing all of Corellia…  I wound up almost 56 before finally finishing the story.  So while the game is no longer quite the elevator to the top that it once was…  it still seems to go insanely fast.  I started an Imperial Agent last night after wrapping up the Inquisitor… and made it to 12 before leaving Hutta, doing nothing but focus firing the purple quest elements.  Functionally it is the Agent that is the last bit needed before having completed all 8 class stories, and it is also the least “Belghast” of all possible class stories.  So far it is interesting, and I opted to go Sniper instead of going healer once again on another smuggler type class.  I am not entirely certain if I will regret this or not, but I was somehow shocked to see that apparently at some point they did away with commendations, and all of the mod components are purchasable with credits.

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I am not entirely certain how long this whim is going to last, but for the time being…  I am enjoying myself and I guess that is all that really matters.  In the short term I will be playing a lot more Belgeist to see if I can actually manage to finish out the Agent story this time and get the achievement for having finished all eight classes.  I am not sure why this matters to me so much, but it is really similar to Elder Scrolls Online, and not wanting to do any of the “expansion” content without having finished all three realms of the original content.  I am in a similar holding pattern with not wanting to start any of the Fallen Empire content without having done all eight of the original story lines.  Fortunately it feels like the SWTOR goal is a hell of a lot closer than the Elder Scrolls Online goal given that I have yet to wrap the second realm there and have an entire third realm to go.  One of the awesome things about being woefully behind in several of these games… is the fact that I can always return whenever I feel like it….  and it seems like I have mountains of content waiting on me to sift through at my pace.  This is also why I tend to bounce pretty hard off of the games that have limited time content that functionally means if I am not playing it as my primary game… I will never get to experience it.  Whatever the case I enjoyed my weekend of comfort gaming, and time will tell how long it lasts.