I completed Mako’s story arc today. Instead of just being lovers, you do get to formalize it with a marriage, but without any fanfare. I was a little disappointed with how the story ended. It seemed too sudden, and the conclusion revealed very little. Other than Project 32 being a clone project, and that Coral was the original, I don’t know anything else about it. What was Project 32′s purpose? How did Mako get detached from the other members of the project? There’s quite a few unanswered questions here.

I’ve progressed quite a bit since my last SWTOR post, and am sitting on level 49 now. My friends were astonished that I’m not 50 yet. See, I’ve quite a reputation for filling progress bars. In Lineage 2, I was the first to hit level 75 for my class, the initial level cap at launch. But in SWTOR, I don’t feel the pressure to reach level cap. There’s good stories being told, and worlds to explore.

Speaking of worlds, the zones in the later planets are massive. While the planets have a lot of detail in them and are generally beautiful, especially Voss with its tranquil monastery like environment, it can sometimes feel rather empty. Belsavis, with its many highways and long hallways is one such example. The planet is massive, but sparsely populated, and I believe I spent more time traveling between quest areas than doing any actual combat.

Completing the class quest on Belsavis granted me the last of my companions, Skadge, whose upper body and face resembles that of a Hutt. Skadge practically invited himself on to my ship with the reason that I was his only ticket off the planet, and didn’t have the courtesy to leave afterwards. Now he just sulks in a corner of my ship. I wish BioWare had given us the option on whether to bring a character onboard or not, but I could see the problem with that too. You get a total of six companions, with up to five being able to be deployed for crew skills at once, leaving one other as your sidekick. The numbers are just right, and even if there was an option to not bring a companion onboard, I might not have done so since I’d be effectively gimping myself on available manpower for my crew skills.

While still having no luck getting a Colicoid War Games or D7 group, I’ve managed to run Red Reaper a number of times. Unlike flashpoints from the previous tiers, which mostly featured tank and spank bosses, the last two bosses in Red Reaper have certain mechanics to them. Taking down the droid, SV-3 Eradicator, involved clicking on power crystals to change their color to the inverse of the shot it is charging to fire, significantly reducing its damage. If it charges up a blue laser bolt, you’ll need to switch the crystals to red, and vice-versa. Darth Ikoral involved the person who is on the receiving end of his channeled lightning to stand behind the adds he summon, positioning so that the add is in the path of the lightning and ultimately gets killed by it. There’s also some “fireball” grabbing the tank has to do to mitigate Darth Ikoral’s damage.

In the few Red Reaper runs I did, I noticed that people who do not have prior experience playing MMORPGs before had trouble with Darth Ikoral and are unable to grasp concepts such as stacking or positioning. I don’t blame them. Some of the concepts that us MMO veterans are used to, such as stacking, aren’t very intuitive. In fact, I don’t recall having to do that at all in any game outside of an MMORPG.

I’ll probably hit level 50 sometime later this week. I’m about 90% away from it, and while I could theoretically do it tomorrow, my class ends late at 6:30pm, and I have a 8:30am class the subsequent day. Better to get some rest instead.

Between falling sick and school, the majority of my time this week was devoted to SWTOR. Did you think otherwise?

I found a guild, Gods of Slaughter. It’s primarily an oceanic guild, which means people are around during my play hours. As I discovered while playing Rift, not having to wake up at odd hours if I wanted to do anything with the guild is great.

I skipped a planet, Quesh, and I’m now more or less caught up with the main story arc. Hooray for not having to do grayed out quests! I covered Taris and Hoth and am currently on Belsavis right now. Hoth was big part for my class quest, because it’s where I got what is ultimately the cutest thing in the Star Wars universe as a companion – Blizz, a Jawa. If they ever made a Blizz plushie, I’m getting one. Meanwhile, SOE continues to disappoint with its lack of Hoo’loh plushies.

A huge portion of my SWTOR play hours involved me standing at the AH looking for fashionable gear for Mako. In the end, I decked her out with a sleek leather looking coat, along with matching boots and gloves. She’s got a tinge of that sexy and mysterious cyberpunk looking spy appeal now. The head piece took the longest to search for, and I had ultimately settle for something that’s more fashionable than functional. By fashionable, I really mean least obtrusive. I find it silly that you can have companion customization kits, but no way to hide the head gear from appearance, which ultimately covers up whatever customizations you made, rendering customization kits useless.

Groups seem to be harder to come by as the levels go. I’ve been trying to do Colicoid War Game and The Red Reaper for the whole of yesterday and had poor luck finding a group. I did manage to get into a Colicoid group but that fell a part. The instance is rather unique as it involves turrets you can mount to fend off waves of mobs. Starship Troopers style. That was as far as I got. My group didn’t survive the second set of turrets and promptly broke.

I did, however, manage to run two instances from the previous tier. And KOTOR fans, be prepared to have your socks blown off in a surprising double revelation. The Foundry is now my favorite flashpoint.

Whoa!

Do not adjust your sets computers. Regular programming will resume shortly.

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.

/getdown

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.

I never used to be one to nitpick over the look of my characters, but with SWTOR’s innumerable cut scenes featuring some rather well done facial animations, I found myself staring at my character a lot. The Chiss’s single textured eyes started to bother me. I don’t expect alien races to resemble a humanoid in all its features, but even the Twi’lek have complex eyes. In conversations, eyes help convey character personality and social cues, and not being able to tell where my sight is narrowed and focused at distracted me. I felt a disconnect between my character and the world. I found it hard to believe my character was really the hard-boiled yet suave bounty hunter that I wanted to portray.

I rerolled out of vanity.