Day 3: Companions & Pets

This is the third post in my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots challenge. Click on any screenshot to see a larger version.

Let's start with a shot of my Vanguard alt with her customised Elara. (This is Elara Dorne customisation #5, just in case you're curious.)

Companion customisation kits are a funny thing to me personally. I seem to remember that the main idea behind them was to allow people to gloss over the fact that many players in the world around them would have exactly the same companions. In practice, I never actually experienced that as a problem - people choose different companions to have out most of the time, everyone gives them a unique set of gear, often they wear hats that cover most of their faces, and so on and so forth - so most of my companions were never customised in any way when I levelled my first couple of characters.

But once I started rolling alts of classes that I already had... oh boy. "My Vanguard can't be running around with that Elara, that's Shíntar's Elara!" So on my alts almost all my companions get a new look, purely for that reason. I can ignore other people's companions out in the world, but it seems I can't ignore my own legacy.

I just love this shot of my baby Sith warrior and Quinn. She looks so... disgusted by his offer to swear fealty to her! It seems oddly appropriate, considering the way the Sith warrior story goes later on (trying not to spoil it for anyone who doesn't know).

Also, I love this shot of my Sith Sorcerer waking up from one of her many fainting spells to see... Khem Val and Andronikos. Reassuring to see a monster that eats Force users and a pirate, isn't it? Khem is a companion with whom I've had a bit of a love/hate relationship in the past (being stuck with a deeply dark side companion for the first four planets when you're playing a light side character sucks), but his companion story is awesome.

Speaking of companion stories, I think Mako's is pretty good as well. When I levelled my second bounty hunter however, it really struck me how unsatisfying the ending of Mako's story is... there's just never any real resolution to what her "family" was actually all about. Unless I missed something?

Finally, a shot of a companion and a pet: my Gunslinger with her Corso (dressed up to look a bit like my pet tank) and her Orosquab. I still get a little bit excited every time one of my characters wins an Unusual or Mysterious Egg. They were one of Bioware's early attempts to make the acquisition of vanity pets  interesting. In the same vein I also wrote a long, rambling post about my struggle to capture a taunlet once. Even though I'm not a pet collector, I find it kind of sad that it took no time at all for them to abandon this development path completely. Maybe it's because mini-pets supposedly haven't been that big of a hit in SWTOR, but I suspect that it had more to do with the F2P transition and with needing lots of goodies to fill those Cartel packs - such as pets.