Day 10: Death

It seems appropriate to finish off my 10 days of SWTOR screenshots series close to the end of the year, and end with the theme of death - which sounds a lot gloomier than it is, really. In MMOs, death is rarely much more than a temporary setback, and personally at least I often find it quite comical as well, which is reflected in some of these screenshots.

First off for example, we have this shot of a master mode Tyrans wipe in progress. Being dead on the floor always provides interesting opportunities for taking screenshots from a different perspective, but this was an unusual angle even for that situation. Plus I caught my co-healer stepping on me, which was an amusing bonus.

A different kind of death humour is illustrated by this shot of my Imperial agent dead on Ossus. I've long had a soft spot for humour derived from deadly verticality (one of the very first posts on this blog was about that subject), and elevators that go faster than should be physically possible are a classic that never gets old for me. So I was very pleased to find that the Imperial base on Ossus is also fitted with one of these, meaning that if you step on the lift at the top just as it starts its descent, you'll be taking one looong step down, which inevitably ends in having to call for a med probe.

This is an older shot from the PTS but pictures something that can happen on the live servers as well - a Sage or Sorcerer dying in their "immunity bubble" pose - because you did hit that button and should have been immune to damage, but the game decided that you should die anyway. Damn it!

Speaking of things looking not quite right, in this screenshot I found it striking how after Titan 6's death, the targeting circle for his body was quite some distance away from his targeting circle on the ground where we picked up the loot.

Seguing into dead bodies and loot, I'm perpetually baffled by Bioware's relationship with loot crates these days. Back in the day you always looted the boss's dead body itself, or you got a mysterious box if the body was inaccessible for some reason - which did make sense with some boss fights, such as Revan mysteriously disappearing at the end of the Foundry, or Darth Malgus in False Emperor needing to be pushed off a ledge in the fight's original iteration. But at some point... things got confusing.

As pictured above, you've been able to off Malgus the regular way for some time now, but you still don't loot him directly. That could be brushed off as a remnant of how the fight used to work, but it happens in newer flashpoints as well. I think it's the second boss in Spirit of Vengeance where you end up with a dead body (even though you technically don't kill the guy lore-wise), a copy of him that's still alive, and a box falling from the sky at the end of the fight. It's very strange.

Circling back to strange views of death, here's the view from the floor during Revan's core phase in Temple of Sacrifice... I get why the bodies are put off to the side like that, but I don't know why all those people died seemingly mid-air in strange jumping poses...

To, uh, another year of lots of virtual death?!