Star Wars: The Old Republic

Playing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV spoil you as a player.  What I mean by that is these are both games with rabid fan armies that keep a slew of websites updated with the freshest information.  Playing any of the other MMORPGs means you are going to be sifting through a minefield of abandoned websites and slightly incorrect information.  Hell even my own website adds to this confusion with my Planet and Bonus Series Level Ranges list…  that was created in 2012 as a way of trying to organize when you should be doing the bonus series and intermingling them with the leveling worlds.  For me… I have just been trying to find an accurate list of what order I should be doing the content story wise…  which causes me to stumble across wiki pages that seemingly have not been updated since 2014.  This was the core problem I also had when playing Rift was trying to sift through all of the debris to find a path forward into actually learning about the game.  Official forums are generally the correct answer but even they end up as a stratified mess of older posts when you dig below anything currently available at a surface level and start doing specific searches.

Last night I worked my way up to and through the Crisis on Umbara Flashpoint, and can I just say how happy I am for the existence of solo mode Flashpoints.  This gives them a way to expose story content in dungeons without ultimately gating story behind a wall that requires a group to see it.  Final Fantasy XIV also loves to put main story quest content in dungeons and primals…  but ultimately causes you to have a gear check wall to see the next batch of it.  SWTOR on the other hand has been expanded out horizontally for awhile, giving you new content without really bumping up the level or gear requirements.  I have a feeling that I am probably wearing the last gear I need currently that I got through Command Crates, which allows me to just sit there and focus on playing through the content rather than trying to gear up.  I realize that statement I just made is something that the raider me would have balked at…  but as a super casual in this game I love the fact that it is an option.  One of the quests leading up to the flashpoint did cause a really interesting bug to occur allowing me to take the above screenshot.

That is one word of warning that I have to give is that the game seems to be often times in a fairly buggy state.  I’ve noticed having to be very careful with my companion… especially with the sniper variants because they love to park their asses right out of healing range which means I have to keep dragging mobs back to them.  As such I GREATLY prefer the force user healer options because they will wade into combat with me, but when I am running with a “turret healer” I have to refrain from using my leap into combat.  Another thing that I did not remember is that apparently aggro does not reset in instances?  There are wide areas during the instance that just required me to wade back through a bunch of stuff  that I have already been through…  so I decided to mount up and make a run for it.  However this wound up with me getting everything pulled on top of me and summarily dying as soon as my healer dropped.  It was less than a stellar performance but funny enough when I respawned I did so in a way that allowed me to completely skip all of that trash in the first place…  rewarding me for my bad behavior.

So far the game has given me a train heist…  which is always going to be cool when it happens.  One of my all time favorite missions in The Secret World is Last Train to Cairo which also… was effectively a train heist of sorts.  This really is a bad ass construct and I am surprised that more games don’t use it.  If I had to guess the train I am on is probably stationary and the scenery keeps being spawned in and moving past me, but I have no clue how they actually pulled this off technically.  Whatever the case they make for really cool feeling missions when you get one of them.  The story still remains to be very interesting and there was a bit of a major mic drop spoiler moment in this…  that unfortunately I had spoiled for me ages ago when I watched the wrong trailer.  I will not however spoil that moment here because if I did not know it was coming… it would have been surprising.  I have my theories as to what it actually means however, because I figure it isn’t just as simple as face value.  Playing this game is making me want to commission Ammo to draw my Jedi Guardian…  in the gear that I fastidiously searched the auction house shortly after release to get.  This will always be his default outfit in spite of all of the other awesome outfits I have for him to run around in.

The extended holiday weekend for me was largely about playing Star Wars the Old Republic and working on the Knights of the Eternal Throne content.  As I talked a little bit about last week…  I got caught up in the Star Wars spirit which lead me to return to the Star Wars game I keep visiting periodically.  Thankfully the easing in period was pretty short and my muscle memory returned pretty quickly for hitting the right combat abilities at the right time.  I would have been completely screwed if my hotbars had somehow gotten reset between times playing the game however.  It makes me realize how much of game play for me is sort of fuzzing my mind out and letting my fingers do the actions on their own.  I think that is in part why I keep setting up various games in the same manner so I just don’t have to think about the controls and can instead focus in on enjoying the story and world.

One of the things that I am amazed by is just how compelling this game is when it releases new content.  While the early expansions Rise of the Hutt Cartel, Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds are a bit of a snooze fest…  starting with Shadow of Revan and going forward the game reaches a level that rivals the original main class stories.  There is however a necessary shift from class specific stories to being a more general story that has little nuggets of information embedded for specific classes but not necessarily an entire unique arc.  The logistics of maintaining class specific story arcs is just not viable given the less than solvent state that SWTOR has been in at various times in its history.  Knowing that rocky history however makes me appreciate all the more the content that was accomplished against this adversity.

When I last played SWTOR Fallen Empire had wrapped up and Knights of the Eternal Throne was just about to begin.  I am very thankful that they have a 2 month pass non-reoccurring option because in general this is about how long it takes for me to get the game back out of my system.  I am a content locust and I swarm back into a game after a large volume of content has been released and then fly away while it regenerates a batch of content for me to visit again.  This time I had the entirety of the Eternal Throne campaign as well as a bunch of side content that takes place after those events.  Which should keep me busy for the better part of this sixty day pass.  Again I would never suggest playing SWTOR without subscribing because the free to play experience is highly frustrating to me because it locks away a number of features that I consider crucial.

The thing that I like the most about both Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne is how cinematic the content feels.  It is weirdly disconnected from the rest of the game which in itself is a little weird to get used to, but once you have accepted that fact it is really great to experience.  At any point you can pick back up the story by simply hitting the play button in the upper right hand corner of the screen at which point you are teleported into the last step that you left off at.  The only real negative with this approach is that I found it extremely hard to stop playing until I had finished a specific chapter of the content.  I wanted to see how each step would eventually resolve, and along the way there were a few things that probably served to be controversial to long time players…  but made your decisions feel like they had significantly more gravity.

Now however I find myself in the extremely weird position of having defeated this beat the content and reclaimed the Eternal Throne for all that is right and good in the galaxy.  Then immediately afterwards as I started the next batch of content…  found myself as a Light Side Jedi Guardian…  willfully choosing to align with the Sith against the Republic.  There are distinct story reasons why I did this…  but man does it feel really weird to have made that decision.  I am largely hoping that this just has consequences related to the current batch of content and that I did not actually join the Sith Empire permanently.  Maybe the content that I just went through made me way more grey than I expected, or maybe I ultimately made the right choice given the sequence of events that played out leading me to this decision.  Whatever the case I am embracing it for the time being and playing across faction, which in itself is pretty interesting that they went there as an option.  I am no longer a Jedi Guardian… but instead the Commander of the Eternal Alliance… and have to make the choices that I feel best for the galaxy as a whole.

I am having a blast visiting all of this content, and it makes me realize that now that I have one of every single class… I could in theory do it over and over again if I so got the gumption.  The Jedi Guardian however will always be the character that represents me, and I like a lot of the directions his story has gone in as a uniter of allies rather than a dogmatic practitioner of an ancient order.  One of the things about Bioware and Star Wars that I loved… is there was always a bit of nuance to a lot of the experience.  They after all gave us Jolee Bindo one of my all time favorite Star Wars characters, and now that Kathleen Kennedy has announced that they are working on Old Republic content…  it is my hope that some parts of this universe can make it into the greater Star Wars story.  For me…  Revan and Bastila Shan is just as crucial and fundamental to the Star Wars experience as is Darth Vader or Boba Fett.  I grew up without placing barriers between what was officially Star Wars lore and the stuff that was excluded…  and now that I have Grand Admiral Thrawn another favorite character of mine I am hoping they swoop in and gobble up all of the Bioware goodness.

Replaying this game has left me with weirdly mixed feelings about Anthem.  Seeing Bioware at its story driven greatness is one thing…  but also realizing that this same studio Bioware Austin is largely responsible for reviving anthem gives me hope.  It also makes me chagrin for what might have been had they given that game enough time to properly cook.  That however seems to be the story of every game that doesn’t quite land solidly on its feet… is that it needed a bit more time to coalesce into its final product.