I was really positively surprised by the Sith warrior story. To be honest I had kind of expected it to be an "evil mirror" of the Jedi knight, with your character travelling around the galaxy smiting Republic soldiers in the name of the Emperor or something like that. Considering that the Jedi knight story wasn't exactly my favourite I didn't really have very high expectations for that particular scenario. As it turns out the Sith are a lot more selfish however, and while I certainly did my fair share of whacking things for the Empire, overall my story was mostly one of personal growth, intrigue and struggles for power.
In addition, the Sith warrior story seemed to be the most well-balanced of all the stories that I've seen so far in terms of pacing. With all the others I felt that there were definitely peaks and troughs as you advanced through the chapters, but the Sith warrior manages to deliver a truly solid experience every step of the way, as all three chapters of your class story connect into a single overarching plot that provides you with a very strong motivation to stay with it from beginning to end. I'd almost rate it as on par with the Imperial agent - less sophisticated I guess, but still entertaining as hell.
I quite liked all my companions and they were good for a lot of laughs. I wish I could have romanced Pierce beyond making him, ahem, love his job, but alas, us ladies keep getting the short end of the stick as far as romancing companions is concerned. I settled for shagging Quinn instead and made his life miserable, as I shot down his marriage proposal and then refused his request for some distance afterwards. I'm a Sith and he lives to serve me and my whims, damn it! I also thought it was interesting that there are apparently two different versions of your apprentice, depending on whether you nudge her towards the light or the dark side when you first take her on. (I did the latter and ended up with a fiercely loyal but bloodthirsty psychopath.)
There was one, ahem, plot twist involving a companion that I had been spoiled about as something that a lot of people hated apparently. I didn't think it was going to be that bad, but... to be honest it kind of was. Not because of what happens per se, but because your character's reactions are just too heavily railroaded for no good reason. I didn't really mind that the outcome was fixed to an extent, but I think it was handled kind of poorly, as it's all portrayed as your character naturally feeling that way. I would have felt a lot better if there had been some kind of intervention from other NPCs pushing me towards the inevitable so that I could've at least acknowledged the fact that my character had different feelings on the matter. I hope that was vague enough to not be a heavy spoiler while still making some sort of sense.
My Marauder was also my first character at max level who ended up going mostly dark side. Her "final score" was probably skewed by the fact that she had diplomacy and ran a lot of dark side missions, but even so I did a fair amount of not sparing my enemies and just generally being a dick. To an extent I found it justifiable, considering that Sith society teaches people to be ruthless and paranoid, but sometimes I still found it hard to make mostly dark side choices. If you go light side all the time, you end up being an insufferable goody two-shoes, but if you go dark side all the time, your character honestly just comes across as kind of insane, which I don't find particularly fun to play.
What else is there to say? It was interesting to see how levelling a Marauder compared to levelling a Guardian. The medium armour left me slightly more squishy, but getting a healing companion early on certainly made a big difference. Most importantly though, I levelled in tandem with my significant other's Sniper for more or less the entire journey, which obviously helped a lot, as nothing short of Heroic 4's posed any sort of challenge for us. Whenever we did one of those however, it was very strongly reminiscent of my Guardian's levelling experience, meaning that I found myself wishing for some sort of crowd control (that's not limited to droids) and hugging the floor a lot because all the mobs hated me and my AoE attacks.
Gameplay-wise, Marauders have way too many buttons for my liking - and here I thought the Guardian was bad! What makes it worse is that the icons for pretty much all of them consist of angry or agonised looking faces on a red background. Whenever I hadn't played the character in a while, it always took me at least half an hour to remember all my abilities and find them on my action bar.
Upon dinging fifty, I immediately picked up my free blue gear for both PvE and PvP, and oh boy, the PvE set in particular is truly horrible. And to think I had such a nice and sleek-looking suit of armour before! Now I've got random cables coming out of my shoulders and claw feet. Don't look at me like that, Pierce, you'd be embarrassed too!
Lastly, you know you play too much PvP when the Dark Council member you're most excited to meet is Darth Marr - because he does the intro to Voidstar on Empire side.
That incident was the first time I lamented that Bioware took the possibility to kill a companion out of the game.
ReplyDeleteI settled for slapping a slave collar on that person.
So did a friend of mine. Handy that they're available as social gear!
DeleteYeah, I remember a dev comment where they explained why they removed the ability to kill companions, and it said something along the lines of: "we allowed people to kill their companions, so they did, and then they complained that they had no healer". I bet this was the prime example! :P
DeleteI was going to ask about those feet, but.... Holy crap.
ReplyDelete