Star Wars: The Old Republic Archives - Page 4 of 16

Unlikely Agent

April 25, 2017 by Belghast

This is absolutely one of those mornings where I am staring blankly at WordPress sort of hoping that a blog post materializes in front of my eyes. I have this fitful relationship with sleep. It is something I crave but something I can never quite get at normal levels. I mean I have my own normal, which is four to six hours of sleep a night. If I get over that I tend to get groggy… which is what happens to be going on this morning. Sunday night I had a horrid bout of insomnia, which when combined with the fact that our middle cat was being insane… meant I probably got two hours of real sleep. So by the time I hit 9 pm last night I was conking out at the keyboard, and decided to put the house to bed and crash. That means I managed to get roughly eight hours of sleep… and my body is confused as hell. Its like… what was this thing, I think I like it… lets do nothing but that from now on! Hence the sitting in my office chair in a dark room, with a cat laying on the desk beside me… staring blankly into oblivion.

Before the impending crash however I spent a good deal more time with Star Wars the Old Republic working through the Imperial Agent story. I mean there is a good reason why I saved this one for last… because in truth this has always been the class that I had zero interest in. I am not a stealthy person… nor am I necessarily a normally deceitful person. So the idea of flying around the galaxy and crushing rebellions through unsavory means did not exactly sound that fun to me. In true Bioware style however… it is allowing me to play a fairly atypical Agent that regularly talks back to his handlers. In truth I am trying to play it much like a smuggler that somehow got drafted into imperial service, and and for this reason I am not using any of the traditional imperial garb, but instead decided it was a great time to break out the Nico Okarr duster.

I am occasionally breaking out the HK-55 helm when I want to feel more bounty hunter than smuggler. I did most of Hutta in this fashion because I felt like anyone called the “Red Blade” simply would not do to be wearing Imperial Garb. All of these mental adjustments are helping me to enjoy the story as I am sort of re-purposing what is happening into the narrative that I would rather be playing. The positive is that apparently Kaliyo is eating it all up, given that she apparently likes violence against those who deserve it… and general smartassery the rest of the time. Because of my general stance of only harming the wicked… I am playing a fairly “grey” character, sitting on straight up neutral currently. This is an interesting departure from the “did you say force lightning” options of the Sith Inquisitor. At the point I crashed for the night I had just started Imperial Balmorra, which is probably my least favorite planet. However just focusing on the class and planetary stories means I tend to get off the various planets pretty quickly, but at the same time feel like I see the entire place through the new classes eyes.

Touch of Darkness

April 24, 2017 by Belghast

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.

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.

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.

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.

Random Screenshots #3

February 23, 2017 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about. Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm… when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30. Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch. As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3. That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching. It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show… be prepared for some disturbing content. That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode. Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about. I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar. I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners. Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is. The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion. For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt. Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable… but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked. Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me… where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home. I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams. This is one of those games that I root hard for… just from a distance.

We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do… but still don’t end up playing that often. I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype. I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized. I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed. I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content… let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne. I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point… they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing. I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing. This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World. To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character. To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create. However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it. Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on. When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed. I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long… and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it. This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp. If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender… you wind up with Blood Dragon. If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory. It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry… nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.

Social Structure and MMOs

December 15, 2016 by Belghast

I’ve talked off and on about Imzy, and how it is filling a niche for me at least that Google+ used to in that it allows for a sort of long winded discussion that twitter just simply doesn’t. Yesterday I read a post there that made me realize something I had been trying to sort out in my head for awhile. The vast majority of my gaming time is spent playing MMOs and I tend to have several that I am in various states of active in at the same time. However I rarely if ever gain any sort of permanent traction in them, and after a few weeks of play tend to fade away again until the whim hits me to fire it back up. I go through a cycle of curiosity that leads to excitement… that leads to confusion and disillusionment that ultimately ends with me leaving once more. I will pick up a game and for a few days to weeks it is going to be the most interesting thing in the world as I get adjusted to the systems and mechanics again. However I always reach this point where an overwhelming sense of “what now” hits me. When that happens I wind out going right back to whatever it is happens to be my core game… which if we are being honest with me is an alternation of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. I have been working on my games played during 2016… and decided to extend that out to all of the games that are easy to track thanks to my blog. There is a clear pattern of when I start getting super excited about WoW I shift away from FFXIV and versa vicea. There is of course some overlap, but you can see a back and forth pattern that emerges.

So the question is then…. what do these two games seem to have that so many others don’t. The answer was sitting there waiting for me to notice. I often talk about games having great communities… but generally speaking this is in broad terms and extremely non-specific. Most games have some excellent niches in them, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t really do much to add core enjoyment for me. I keep returning to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV… because those are the games that I have established communities in. There was a time when I was willing to branch out and meet new people… plunk myself down in a brand new game and start growing an entirely different infrastructure. The community that I have right now… is in large part the result of me doing this over and over. Each new game I go into I meet a whole new cast of people… but at some point that began to change. As I gathered a larger and larger core of players… I stopped looking outside to the community nearly as much and instead looking to my guild. While I am still meeting a lot of new people… they are coming with the pedigree of knowing someone I already know and am familiar with… which of course speeds up the social footnotes that come from meeting anyone new.

Last night was a prime example of this happening, because we were raiding in World of Warcraft and had someone pop by and join…. that I had not personally played with in several years. My personal community in House Stalwart within World of Warcraft seems to have this ability to stay evergreen… and always have a certain chunk of the population that is active and always happy to be there. House Stalwart my guild has existed for twelve years… in spite of my actions. When I left WoW to start playing Rift I tried my best to burn down everything about the game… actively recruiting people away to play this new an exciting game. I did the same thing for Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online… and countless other games. However at its core… the guild still remains and not only that… but has remained viable for the purpose of doing interesting end game content the entire time. Similarly the Final Fantasy XIV guild… while considerably younger just seems to endure whatever boom and bust cycles we go through population wise, and in both cases…. I know that I can return at any point and will be welcomed back with open arms. In truth I think pretty much everyone who has touched either guild feels the same way… which is why folks are constantly showing up from out of the woodwork and reintegrating back into the core at least for a little while.

So the problem that exists with nearly every other game… is I just don’t have anything close to this infrastructure… nor do I really have the emotional or intellectual strength to try and forge it. There have been House Stalwart offshoots in damned near every MMO that has existed… or at least as a guild community we have chosen a specific server and faction to all roll on. However for most… these interludes serve as a vacation from the game they were already playing… and after a break most folks wind up going right back to the familiar. In a traditional MMO I need to have something that I am building towards, and that object on the horizon is usually doing interesting things with my friends. So while it is absolutely fun to pop in and play Rift or ArcheAge for a weekend… I find hard keeping motivated when I know I have no real facilities to do any of the big interesting things… other than pugging. I am spoiled to be honest, and so many years of not having to PUG has soured my experience as a whole. Any random person I encounter is somehow tarnished by the memory of all of the good times I have had with my guild throughout the years. After generations of MMOs… this has lead me to be rather insular in my gaming habits and tending to return to the folks I already know and respect rather than trying to create something new.

So now days I tend to operate in two modes. I have the games that I am active in and have deep social connections… and the games that I slink off to when I need to limit my social connectivity and turtle for awhile. I tend to gobble up whatever new content is available, and then happy drop that game by the wayside as I return to active duty again. Games like Star Wars the Old Republic, The Secret World and Elder Scrolls Online are great for this role, given that they all have deeply engaging stories that you can find yourself completely lost in… so much so that you forget that you are essentially alone in a crowd of strangers. There are a lot of games that I think I would enjoy… if I had a similar stable infrastructure. However at this point… to be honest… folks are pretty stratified in their gaming habits. I can no longer really make an impassioned argument as to why they should abandon X game that they know and love for Y game that is new and different. I know this boom and bust cycle all too well at this point… and while it is a hell of a fun ride, to some extent I am getting that fix elsewhere. For me personally… the Diablo 3 season mechanism perfectly emulates the feeling of “unwrapping” a brand new MMO and rushing with your friends to level as quickly as you can. This time however we all know it is perfectly fine to fade away once you have achieved your goals… because its a game we will all return to again and again as new seasons happen. I have been the cause of so much frustration and disappointment in my gaming career… that I guess in some part I would rather slink off alone… than get folks excited about yet another game that I am sure we will all abandon within three months time. However that same instinct… is what keeps any of these games from actually gaining traction. What I realized this week when reading the post on Imzy is just how desperately I need that social infrastructure for me to be able to enjoy a MMO.