I get excited about these things because while I do love SWTOR's class stories, they are not my first go-to when I'm looking for an evening of easy fun and they require a bit of conscious effort to work on. In addition, I get quite annoyed with myself when I have a character stuck somewhere in the middle of their story, because it makes me feel like I "can't"/shouldn't create another alt of the same class until I've finished the previous one's story. You can guess how peeved I was with myself by this point for taking three years to level up this second knight...
With how long it had been, I do have to admit that there were quite a few details to the story that I'd forgotten about, and it was nice to be reminded of them. I also took so many screenshots. When I levelled my first knight, I hadn't yet succumbed to using third party software to take screenshots to circumvent SWTOR's issues with the Print Screen button, so I had virtually no pictures from my first playthrough. As anyone who's played a Jedi knight knows, there are plenty of pretty epic and screenshot-worthy moments in that story.
All in all though, I still agree with my initial thoughts about the Jedi knight story. Sometimes it feels epic, other times it's so clichéd it hurts. So it remains one of the poorer class stories to me, even though I know many rate it highly or even as the best. One thing I have to say however, after replaying it after all this time and after having seen all the other class stories: It does a better job at dealing with side characters than most. There's a whole bunch of people whom you can kill or get killed relatively early on, who actually make a comeback on Corellia if they are still alive. They don't do anything that affects the outcome of the story, but it's still cool to see them again and hear what effect your actions have had on them. The cast of Jedi that you work with throughout the story is also pretty varied and interesting.
The biggest highlight of the playthrough was actually seeing Lord Scourge again. How could I forget all about him? I once listed him as the one Jedi knight companion that I wouldn't want to lose, but then I took my Guardian into KotFE shortly after it came out and well... obviously I haven't heard from him since, and since I had no other knight at a high enough level to own him as a companion, he just kind of vanished from sight for me. (I had no screenshots of him either.) "Getting him back" on this character made me really happy!
As a bonus, his voice was just as I remembered - shortly after 4.0, I remember grousing about how his new voice lines for when he is set to dps or heal (as opposed to his old default role, tanking) sounded all wrong and as if Bioware had hired a new voice actor for him who sounded nothing like the old one at all. Looking back at it now, the only references I could find about this talk about it being a bug, and that the sound files for several companions had gotten mixed up at the time? Either way, this time around he sounded completely like his old self again, even while healing me, which pleased me to no end.
He also got along a bit better with this Sentinel than with my old Guardian, since I at least attempted to make some dark side decisions on this one. I've said before that I can't really play dark side characters since I dislike being evil just that much, but at least towards the end I got a few dark side decisions in by being all: "My mission is too important for me to hang around and waste time with your petty problems right now!" (Ooh, so edgy!) I even refused to do the side mission near the end where you're supposed to rescue your companion from peril, which was made even easier by the fact that it was Rusk of all people who had gotten in trouble - I thought it was always Doc or Kira! Not that it makes a difference either way, as the situation is resolved quickly afterwards with a comment that one of your other companions filled in to do the rescuing.
One funny side effect of the new dark vs. light system is that you can effectively "cheat" your way towards being a certain alignment regardless of your story choices. (You could do that before if you had diplomacy as one of your crew skills, but it was quite an amount of work in comparison.) So even though I failed at being truly evil, with my supported alignment set to dark the entire time, Satele Shan told me at the end that she could sense the dark side in me. I kind of chuckled when my character responded with: "What have I done?" - because she really hadn't done much that would have been considered dark side.
Not sure what's up next for me in terms of story - I do have a Sage that has been sitting at the start of chapter two for nearly five years as well, but I'm not as fussed about her. But maybe I should go for it, since I seem to be on a bit of a roll?
Congratulation!
ReplyDeleteI have at least a few (rp)characters, sitting on Coruscant, Balmora or elsewhere. I find it really hard to pick them up again after months of not playing them. "I was this evil apprentice...but what exactly were my intentions with Darth Lachris again?". Mostly i rush them during a double-xp-event to 70 via FPs and Heroic-Missions, Abandon the role-playing part.
It's sad. I really should take notes on my characters.
It would be nice if we had little "codices" for our characters, like the blurbs they added for companions post-KotFE, where the game summarised big decisions we made and what effects they had.
DeleteThat is actually a really great idea.
DeleteRegarding Scourge, I believe there's an extra step on the ladder. Apparently all the lines we hear them say whenever they're in a different spec than they are 'supposed' to be (Healing lines being said while Tanking notwithstanding) aren't new; I've seen people say that they were recorded with the initial batch of Combat speech since (apparently...) the Combat-role switching aspect of Companions was supposed to be in from the get-go, but they changed it during Beta.
ReplyDeleteThe easiest one to see this with is Tanno Vik, since his heal-lines are definitely not said by replacement voice-actor Fred Tatascoire; his Tanno impression is decent, but still very noticeably different compared to Pizzuto's original recordings.
I still infinitely prefer the set-role list that we initially had, but I would have been interested to see how that panned out, if the claims are indeed accurate.
Yeah, I remember reading that as well but forgot about it again when Scourge's new lines so obviously didn't match his old voice actor. In hindsight I'm kind of surprised I didn't realise that it was actually another companion's voice - I saw a comment saying that he was using Rusk's lines for a while? I guess that goes to show how much time I've spent with Sergeant Rusk over the years (not very much)!
DeleteIn fairness, Rusk is definitely the least interesting of the Knight Companions, a fact which is of course highlighted all the more when he is immediately succeeded by the most interesting. :P
Delete"In addition, I get quite annoyed with myself when I have a character stuck somewhere in the middle of their story, because it makes me feel like I "can't"/shouldn't create another alt of the same class until I've finished the previous one's story. You can guess how peeved I was with myself by this point for taking three years to level up this second knight..."
ReplyDeleteHa! So I'm not the only one out there! It really took a lot for me to create another Knight when I had a few on different servers that were still in Chapter One (I hadn't finished any of the Knight's story at the time). I eventually picked one and stuck with it, but for the longest time I just hung around at the end of Chapter One and ran 4-man Heroics in Alderaan and Tatooine. Jedi Knights and Tatooine were just kind of made for each other, especially after experiencing the Smuggler's class story in Tatooine. Being a third wheel between Nariel Pridence and Vaverone Zare will do that to you.
The Dark vs. Light event last year desensitised me a bit because of the requirement to level eight new characters. I wasn't going to play through all the class stories again just for that, so six of them just levelled through flashpoints and PvP, completely ignoring any quests past the one to get their ship. Still, there's a difference between deciding from the beginning to ignore the story and just losing steam somewhere in the middle.
DeleteHave you read the book Revan. It ties KOTOR and SWTOR together mostly following Revan but Lord Scourge has a minor role in the book also.
ReplyDeleteYes, I have. I wrote a blog post about it too. :)
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