Watch Me Take Part in the Galactic Championship!

I quite enjoy interacting with other bloggers or other types of content creators that play the same games as me, but with work and barely being able to find the time to do all the playing and creating that I want to do by myself, it's not been as much of a thing for me lately (I'm sure other content creators can relate). Looking back on the blog, the last "collaboration" I did was either (depending on how you count it) joining Swtorista on one of her streams back in 2020 or being a guest on the SOTOR podcast in 2017. Either way, it's been a while.

I was therefore quite delighted when Kal from Today in TOR approached me a few months ago to ask whether I was interested in taking part in what he described as a "SWTOR gameshow". The only reason I didn't immediately say yes was that his proposed filming times were between midnight and 2 am in my time zone, and that he said participation was going to require an Imperial character on Star Forge. For all the new characters I created for the purposes of doing seasons on multiple servers, that was an area I didn't have covered yet, as all my characters on Star Forge were Republic.

After a bit of deliberation I decided to go for it though. I didn't love the recording times - while I'm naturally a bit of a night owl and gaming until past midnight isn't unusual for me, there's a difference between feeling like staying up late and having to do it, you know? Ultimately I decided that I was up for it for the duration of the project though. When you're dealing with people from all over the world, there's just never going to be a time that's perfect for everyone.

As for the Imp on Star Forge, I realised that I still had the second free character boost that Bioware gifted to us with Knights of the Eternal Throne seven years ago, and this seemed like a worthy cause to use it on. Kal assured me that I didn't need to be max level or have good gear as we'd only visit the base game's planets during the challenges and there wasn't going to be much combat.

I had used the first free boost that was given out with KotFE back in early 2020 during Covid times, when I quickly wanted another tank to run flashpoints with my guildies. I remembered the process as not unpleasant, if mildly confusing, and it was a similar experience this time around. 

I created Shintoo the blue Twi'lek Sorcerer specifically to be my Galactic Championship character and tried to immediately respec her to heals for a bit of midbie PvP, but for some reason tutorial mode had got turned on. Let me tell you, tutorial mode and healing do not get on - I think my entire ability list only had about two skills on it and I was so confused. I thought my character was bugged or something until I finally realised what was going on and that I just needed to turn tutorials off.

I didn't bother to actively level Shintoo (though I did gain some XP from doing the Ossus story and the aforementioned PvP); I just did some travelling around the base game's planets to unlock quick travel points (which turned out to be a wise decision), and after one of the first filming sessions I also dual-specced her into the Shadow combat style.

All of this was a couple of months ago because Kal put a lot of thought into this project and has in fact been working on it for a while! So in real time, the Championship is already a bit more progressed than what you'll see when each episode comes out, but I won't spoil anything.

Either way, a trailer (see above) and episode one are now up on YouTube, so I thought I'd give it a little shout-out here. Go check it out! Just don't expect to see that much of me because obviously there are a lot of contestants and erm... I have to admit the first few challenges got condensed a lot more than I expected. That's television for you I guess, quite a big difference between what you see on set and what makes it to the final edit on screen. I might make a little "behind the scenes" video of my own once it's all over to showcase some of my own favourite moments that didn't make Kal's cut. Plus obviously I'll share some more thoughts about the experience in writing once it's all over. For now though, just go and watch the videos!