SWTOR server select screen
I was going to get a bunch of things done in SWTOR and write about it, such as trying to get the datacron in Tatooine and failing miserably because I’ve always been a terrible platformer, but it seems like SWTOR is experiencing a lot of down time lately.
Calreth, now with a 600% longer nameplate
I’ve reached level 32 and completed Act 1 of my class quest. One of the rewards was being able to choose a legacy title, which is like a surname. It’s a unique name that sticks with you for all your characters on that particular server, even those on an opposing faction. There’s supposed to be more to the legacy system, but that hasn’t been implemented yet. There’s some complains about it having to be unique, particularly from the RP community. I can see that being a bit of a problem if you and a group of others want be roleplaying as being from a same house, or wanting to get married. To me, it’s a great system. Since SWTOR is a game in which many will be creating alts to experience the different class storylines, it helps to create a unique identity across all your characters to help others identify you. Much better than Blizzard’s BattleTag system. Appending a random number to a name to make it unique? Come on, I can do that on my own too without needing to build a whole system around it.
There’s also a “bug” involving not being able to advance Mako’s storyline until you have finished Act 1. Upon finishing Act 1, I received a whole ton of quests from Mako at once – half a level’s worth of exp. I say it’s a quote, unquote, bug, because the companion quests doesn’t seem to be dependent on the progression of the class quest for other companions. So far, the developers have been silent on the issue and would neither confirm nor deny if it’s working as intended.
I’m having a lot of fun playing SWTOR and I seem to be leveling too fast for my own good. I didn’t get a chance to do most of the content on Balmora and Tatooine before they were grayed out. Instead of some gradual slope of decreasing exp for every level the quest is below you, you get a flat 5 exp for doing grayed quests. You still do get the same amount of credits though, so it isn’t as bad. I find myself wanting to complete all the quests available as I level up, because I genuinely find the majority of them well crafted and interesting, rather than for some meta-game achievement. This is something rare for me. Unlike my friend Jaradcel, I am generally not a quest whore, but SWTOR seems to have turned that around. There seems be some well crafted back story for most NPCs in the game, even the minor ones that send you on to kill ten banthas. My favorite part of questing in SWTOR is that you’re reminded of the choice you make later on in the game, mostly in the form of a letter sent to you by the NPC. It makes the world feel so much more alive and I find it highly rewarding.
Here’s some of the many that I’ve received and particularly liked thus far.
SWTOR is exciting and it certainly challenges age old ideas of MMORPGs being nothing but a grind-fest and an elaborate spreadsheet with animations, topped with a chat functionality. While SWTOR has not completely consumed me, yet, time spent on other games and activities are sure to drop in the days ahead.
“fast <dungeon_name> group lf 1 more no rp”
In common lingo, the above expands out to mean a fast dungeon run where the player is expected to skip through all dialog options as quickly as possible and not to watch any cut scenes.
Melmoth’s recent post about the possibly of SWTOR’s conversation system degenerating into a Spacebar of Extreme Exposition Expedition event has already happened, or at least it is starting to my server, The Swiftsure. As pointed out by Melmoth, the NPCs speak at an insanely slow rate, which I can attest to when I rerolled the first ten levels of my bounty hunter and did it all in around an hour or less by skipping all the dialog. In contrast, my first playthrough took nearly an afternoon with me letting all the dialogues play out and pondering my options for a minute here and there.
I can understand the logic behind not wanting to stop and watch lengthy cut scenes after the n’th number of runs through a particular flashpoint, especially if your goal is to get x number of commendations in y amount time as efficiently as possible. I’ve played enough MMOs to know that a good number of players care not for anything but min-maxing their characters and play time. As a new(er) player though, I feel pressured each time I join a new flashpoint and wanting to know the backstory, but feel three other pairs of impatient eyes staring at the back of neck. However, For the developer team at BioWare, this raises an even greater question. Are players sufficiently appreciating the fully voiced cut scenes to make the investment worth it? While I believe most players do watch the cut scenes the first time through, do they still do so on the second run? What about the third run? How fast does the utility a player get from each successive view of a cut scene decrease?
I’m still enjoying my cut scenes on my current bounty hunter run, and is likely to do the same for each of the other class quest chains. As for the ones that come with the random menial tasks, I would probably skip them. I do wish my groups would explore the different dialog choices for the flashpoints, as some of them lead a substantially different playthrough as I discovered when the captain was spared on The Black Talon. Everyone seems to prefer the dark sided choice.
Everyone seems to have one these posts speculating whether which game would do well or badly for 2012, and I’m going to contribute my two cents worth. I wrote this lengthier than usual article as a guest post on a friend’s site, so do check it out here on The Running Mice.
Before (left) and after (right).
I rerolled out of vanity.
The Absurd. This is what I got while trying to read the patch notes yesterday.
There’s no doubt that SWTOR is a fun game, but there’s the dark side of it too. Support has been a horror story so far, with people unable to get through to a CSR after holding for hours on a phone.
I hope the support woes and long maintenance window is a genuine problem caused by the game doing too well, rather than an indication of things to come.
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
I’ve been cautiously hesitant about trying Star Wars: The Old Republic because I wasn’t sure the MMORPG genre had any more tricks up its sleeves. There seems to have been a virtual worlds slum of late, with a number of games failing to reach the critical mass required to sustain a profitable business and instead switching to a F2P model.
After a few hours of playtime, SWTOR feels refreshing. The unmistakable underpinnings of an MMO are there, but the world feels different. Perhaps I’ve been so used to fantasy games that the sci-fi atmosphere is a welcome change, but it gave me reason to want to explore.
The storytelling has the hallmarks of BioWare written all over it, although watching a cut scene for every "<$verb> <$num_of> <$mob_name>" quests felt tiresome at some points and I found myself skipping through them, just as I would click pass quest dialogues in other game.
I found the morality, i.e. light side(LS)/dark side(DS), choices rather well presented. For one quest, I was tasked to steal and recharge power sources from a scrap yard for a family struggling to get by. However, the foreman I was stealing from begged me to stop, else the owner would punish him for doing a poor job. Both needs seemed equally fair, and it was a real dilemma. The more common morality choice comes in the form of being tasked to kill or steal from a person, only to have the person trying to buy you off or even sabotaging the quest giver. In this second dilemma, the LS/DS choices are less obvious. Typically, the game awards you LS points for choosing not to kill the target, and DS points for killing the target. I often find myself disagreeing with which choices reflected LS/DS in these cases. You’re not exactly a “good” person by accepting someone’s call for help, and then screwing the person over.
Roleplaying a bounty hunter, my general rule of thumb is to always accomplish the task set forth by my employer. It wouldn’t be good for business, reputation, or even my own survival to upset my employer.
I love the bounty hunter mechanics, especially the heat system. Whenever you use a skill that’s stronger than the your standard laser blast, say a firing a missile or a charged shot, you build up a certain amount of heat. At 100 heat points, you can’t use another skill that generates heat until your current heat level dissipates. The default rate of dissipating seems to be around 5 heat/s, and you get a skill which is on a 2 mins cooldown that lets you instantly vent 50 units of heat. This reminds me fondly of the times playing MechWarrior where I would fire all my weapons, overheat and perform an emergency vent while the mech’s computer shuts down for a few minutes.
I wonder how long would SWTOR retain my interest. It is very single player orientated, although you do occasionally get a group, albeit short, quest. There isn’t that feel of a living breathing world, but rather that of a single player game with an IRC channel that people idle in. There’s the occasional LFGs and the “my class is gimp” chatter, but it’s comparatively quiet than during most of the other MMO launches. Or perhaps the people who’ve gotten the game a week earlier had already all beaten it and moved on. Who knows?
Whether I’ll be playing SWTOR a month from now, it’s still too early to tell. Much is clouded by the dark side of the force.
Now that I’ve sent Alduin back to wherever dragons go to die, it’s time to revisit an old love.
Morrowind.
When I last played Morrowind, I was in secondary school. I was one of the few people that had a graphics card which supported programmable pixel shaders, and was immediately blown away by the water in Morrowind. I’ve never seen such realistic water textures before, not even in John Carmack’s games. I was hooked. Morrowind became the first non-MMORPG game that I played full day to the exclusivity of all other games for a period of months. (Confession: I didn’t even know what an MMO was then.)
Right after I finished up most of Skyrim (45/50 completion if you go by the achievement metric), I installed Morrowind and set about creating a new character. Soon, Calreth, a level 1 Breton Nightblade, born under the sign of the Shadow, was wandering the streets of Seyda Neen.
If you thought Skyrim was huge, prepare to have your socks blown off. Putting Skyrim and Morrrowind side-by-side, Skyrim feels more of a theme-park than open-world game. Forget all you’ve experienced in RPGs in the last 5 years, this is ye olde RPG with no safety rails. There’s no compass with places of interest marked on them, nor big exclamation marks on the heads of NPCs vying for your attention. Even the map is initially shrouded in a fog of war. You pay attention to quest dialogues, because that’s all the hints you’re going to get. If an NPC tells you he lost his ring in the marshlands south of the city, reachable if you exit, take two lefts, follow the river south until you get a wooden bridge, and then go right, you had better remember that. There is a quest journal in diary form, and even that doesn’t show you immediately which quests you are on and how many stages there are. Perhaps the biggest indicator that you’re not playing a 2010 game anymore is the combat system. Regenerative health and mana system are for boys. Real men don’t need frigging auto-regen.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
Did I just make Morrowind sound really negative? That depends. None of what I pointed out is inherently bad. It’s a conscious design decision to encourage the player to explore the immense game world. The non-regenerative health system means that you have to plan for fights, at least initially before your character is über geared. You feel the rush of adrenalin in fights, or the panic as you look at your lowly health and dwindling potions count. The enchanting and spell creation system is also a lot more comprehensive that in Oblivion or Skyrim (where there’s no spell creation at all). The UI is done right. You get a grid for inventory, instead of a list, as it should always should have been. Buffs are shown on screen, identifiable by their icons as in traditional RPGs and modern MMOs, instead of a list within another list.
If I caught your excitement, but you’re still hesitant about playing a game that might resemble a giant pixel monster by today’s standard (it really isn’t), you’re just in luck. 2.0 of the Morrowind overhaul project was just released today, and it makes the game look a lot better. However, if you have it in you, I highly encourage you to play vanilla Morrowind to get a true experience of the game as it was originally designed.