On Alts, Progression and Story

The other day I logged into SWTOR, delighted with the knowledge that I had a few hours to play, with no particular pressure to do anything specific, not even Conquest - I figured that I'd be able to do anything I wanted, finally able to work on some long-neglected character goals.

I stared at the character selection screen for several minutes and then logged off. It wasn't that I didn't want to play, or that I had nothing to do... but when it came to thinking of specific goals, I felt lost. I didn't even know where to start. On the plus side: This got me thinking on why that was, which is why you're getting this blog post.

In a level-based MMORPG with a narrative like SWTOR, progression basically consists of two parts: character progression and story. SWTOR puts more emphasis on the latter than most, but that doesn't mean that the former doesn't matter at all.

Ideally these two types of progression should work in tandem. You find yourself wanting to level up to see the next bit of the story or vice versa. When things align properly, level also serves as a sort of signpost to where you should be in the story, so in SWTOR's early days, if you hadn't played a character in a while, you could just glance at their level and get a pretty good idea of where you left off, e.g. "Hm, that one's in her thirties; must have left her somewhere on Alderaan."

Ever since 4.0 though, character and story progression have become utterly separated due to how much levelling has been sped up. The other day I even saw a F2P player - those who receive less XP than anyone else - complain that things were going to fast. "Why does it matter?" you might ask. "With level sync, you'll just continue to receive level-appropriate rewards anyway, even if you're over-levelled for the content you're doing." Well, it matters because with the way level sync is tuned, being overlevelled makes you way too powerful for combat to be much fun. (I received a stark reminder of this when I took a level 50 Sniper to Ilum this week and noted that the downlevelled players around me had several times more hitpoints as me.)

However, even if you leave that aside, you're still left with levels having become largely meaningless. Basically, you'd have to play in a very specific and self-limiting way to not overlevel content as you go along, so you never have reason to look forward to levelling up - it just kind of happens automatically. I actually find it alarming more than anything else when one of my few remaining sub-70 characters gains ten levels in a single play session these days. The only way to remain low level is to basically not play at all, which I've opted to do on a couple of characters whom I'm "saving" to continue to have access to the lowbie and midbie PvP brackets.

Aside from the characters mentioned above, almost my entire stable of alts has levelled up to 70 by now, more or less by accident and while still in hugely disparate places in the story, ranging from a few who are completely caught up with current content to those who've only just got their ship on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas. I do tend to always have a vague idea of where I left off - for example I've only taken a relatively small handful of characters through KotFE/KotET so far, so I do remember which ones those are, but if you were to put me on the spot and asked for example: "Hey, wanna level through Makeb with me?" I'd be staring at you like a deer in the headlights, because while I theoretically know that I've got quite a few characters who haven't done Makeb yet while technically being eligible for it, I'd have a hard time picking one on the spot.

And that's why I had such a tough time with that character selection screen, to bring us back to the beginning of this story. I like a good narrative, but I'm also a big fan of character progression, and there's not much left of that. I suppose Galactic Command provides an alternate progression system of sorts, but aside from the fact that I already have more 300s than I care to count, you'll note that this is also something you pretty much need a spreadsheet to keep track of, since the character selection screen certainly doesn't give you any indication of what Command level each character is at either.

Yet even if we ignore all of that and assume that I'd be happy to play my umpteenth alt just to see the story again, it's just a pain to keep track of where each character is at. And this is coming from someone who's been playing since launch and knows the game inside out. I dread to think how a returning player must feel when they go to their ship, see six different quests on their personal mission terminal and wonder what order these are even supposed to be in. It's not like their level is going to be any help.

A random page from my character selection screen with notes on some things that are very much not obvious.

 

So what can be done about this? Well, I suppose in my ideal world I'd like to see levelling slowed down again. We could keep level sync and just make it less OP. I know that's never going to happen though. I suppose a smaller thing that might help a little is if the character selection screen gave you the option to see more information about each character before logging in, such as what quests they are currently on or something. For now, I've settled on creating a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' mission progress. Just putting it together has already been quite informative and enlightening to be honest. (What? I can't believe I never did the Revan storyline on Shilu! Huh, I totally don't remember taking Tessal through Forged Alliances...) At the same time I feel that I shouldn't really need to have a spreadsheet for this kind of thing though.