Missing The Small Touches

I wonder if I'll ever get over the fact that there won't be any more additions to the individual class stories in The Old Republic. I mean, I understand why the devs decided to go down that road and it's not as if I'm about to quit the game over it, but finishing the last of the class stories last month certainly made me wonder. Before that point, it always felt to me as if there was a nigh endless potential of stories to explore in the game, something that I was never going to catch up with. You have to admit that it sounds brilliant in theory, to think that every major patch was going to add a unique new piece of content for up to eight different alts. I'm not surprised that it's not actually financially viable with the amount of subscribers the game has, but that doesn't mean that I don't still love the concept. I think there's a part of me that still dares to dream that some day, somehow, the devs will come up with a way to give us more class stories without completely breaking the bank.

The problem I have at the moment is that with no more class stories to come, alt play is kind of doomed to end in boredom eventually. I feel that right now my main motivation to play alts is the reputation system, because they give me the option of binging myself on new content whenever a new set of dailies is released and allow me to save up a lot of rep within a short time in order to use it later. Yet every time I play through that content on another alt, it's more or less the same. Yes, I can choose from a handful of different conversation options, but those quickly come with diminishing returns. I have to admit that I can't quite fight the feeling that Bioware has been slacking a bit when it comes to tailoring new content towards different classes at least on a small scale.

One example of this are class-specific lines. In the original levelling game up to fifty, almost every time you have to make a choice in a conversation, at least one of the options is tailored to your class. I even remember reading an article or an interview somewhere way back when, where someone from Bioware talked about how this was an important opportunity for the writers to distinguish the classes from each other, especially the slightly similar ones like knight and consular. They should never sound the same because they are totally different! Supposedly.

Makeb really made me notice how much that has changed. I quite enjoyed my first playthrough (on Republic side), and didn't think it was particularly problematic that my trooper sounded a bit... "sassier" than usual. Her lines still seemed to fit her well enough most of the time. But then I went back to go through the whole story again on my smuggler... and all her lines seemed to be exactly the same, word for word. I couldn't quite decide whether that meant that my trooper was joking too much or my smuggler was too serious; the point was that they sounded the same! I might've been a bit more forgiving about similarities between the two types of Jedi for example, but there's just no way a trooper and a smuggler should give the same response to everything. It was particularly disappointing since prior to expansion release, Bioware had been emphasising that even though the class stories in the original sense were gone, the dialogue on Makeb would still feel uniquely tailored to our character. In reality I saw even less evidence of that on Makeb than there is in the generic planetary story arcs from release. I can understand why the class stories turned out to be too much work to maintain, but are things really so bad that they can't write and record a couple of extra lines for each conversation (without changing anything else) just so the classes don't all sound the same?

Another area of detail where I've noticed a drop-off in quantity and quality is that of companion affection gains from conversations. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that companions barely have any sort of reaction to most of our dialogue anymore these days. And I'm not talking about actual voiced interjections here, but the simple little pluses and minuses under their portraits that tend to show up during conversations. So, you know, no voice acting required or anything, just someone to add "Vette: likes this" or whatever to each conversation option.

I can't find the source right now, but I distinctly seem to remember Njessi mentioning somewhere that she was surprised that her love interest seemed to have no opinions whatsoever on her character flirting on Makeb, something that is pretty much a guaranteed "-1 of shame" with most companions that you're romantically involved with during the original levelling content. Ever since the expansion I've noticed that these little indicators seem to get harder and harder to come by with every new quest. Your companions will probably still have an opinion on your light/dark side choices, but seemingly not on anything else you say.

You'd think that this is something that shouldn't matter that much, but it's really a little thing that adds a lot. It feeds my imagination to know what my companions like or don't like, and makes me picture them high-fiving my character afterwards, or giving her a serious frown. It can affect the way I make decisions, knowing that my current companion will or won't approve. When they suddenly stop having opinions because nobody at Bioware could be bothered with the busywork of adding the numbers for forty different companions, the game definitely loses something.

Solving the Screenshot Issue

For as long as I can remember, there's been a bug in the game that causes the screenshot function to not work properly for some people, me being one of them. I used to be kind of torn about how to feel about it, because on the one hand taking screenshots is hardly a key aspect of gameplay... but on the other hand this is a problem that has been present at least since launch, and I can't believe that they still haven't figured out a solution after nearly two years.

Personally I've been affected by this bug in two ways: Firstly, I'm usually unable to take screenshots during cut scenes. It does work on occasion, but there's no rhyme or reason to it and those occasions also seem to be getting less and less frequent (or maybe I've just given up trying often enough). This is annoying because cut scenes are usually the perfect time to take screenshots! There's interesting stuff to see and you're not busy mashing buttons just to stay alive. I remember seeing this awesome cut scene during the consular story that included some great imagery, mashing my Print Screen button like crazy... and was then disappointed afterwards to see that not a single one of them had actually been taken.

I've got to take a screenshot of that, Qyzen!

The other thing that happens is that sometimes, Print Screen will just stop working entirely. This can at least be fixed by restarting the game, but unless you regularly tab out to check your screenshot folder it's something that's easy to miss. Nothing like lining everybody up for a great boss kill shot, hitting Print Screen and then realising that it stopped working about an hour ago. Argh!

If you're not someone who takes a lot of screenshots, this might not even matter to you at all. However, personally I do like taking screenies of everything and everyone, sometimes for the blog, but mainly because I enjoy going back through them later and going: "Man, that picture brings back memories, such fun!" (I do a similar thing in real life by taking my camera with me everywhere and taking snapshots of everything from buildings to flowers to sunsets.)

Keeping that in mind, I'm not actually sure how I managed to put up with this screenshot bug for as long as I have without looking for a workaround. I guess I was lazy and hopeful that surely this couldn't be something that would take long to fix. Well, nearly two years later and while levelling my upteenth alt I'm finally fed up with it!

Simple workaround: I already had Fraps, so I set it up to take pictures when I hit Print Screen and to put them straight into my SWTOR screenshot folder. I used to only start it up when I was planning to make a video, but since it's hardly a resource hog while it's not recording, it shouldn't be an issue to keep it running for screenshot purposes too. Whenever SWTOR's screenshot function actually does work properly, I now end up with two shots of the same thing, but that's hardly a big problem either.

If you don't have Fraps, there are plenty of free programs that can take in-game screenshots for you too and I can heartily recommend taking the couple of minutes to get it all set up. I still can't believe how long I put up with being unable to capture my characters' greatest moments...

Brief Update

Like Rav, I generally prefer to keep my personal life out of my blog, but also like her I haven't really been writing as much as I used to - thereby sadly ruining a pretty solid posting schedule that I'd previously kept running for nearly two years - and I just wanted to say that it's got nothing to do with the game. Basically, about a month ago, my relationship, living and employment status all changed at once and since then things have been pretty stressful and exhausting.

I have been playing some SWTOR during that time, because it's been a nice way of having some stability in my life while everything else has been caught up in a whirlwind of change. Logging on for ops with my guild has allowed me to hold on to at least some sort of normalcy for a few hours a week. The rest of the time however, I've honestly been too distracted to spend much time thinking about the game in the way I used to. Hierarchy of needs and all that.

There are still game-related subjects that I'd like to write about, and I'm hoping that I'll eventually get back into some sort of rhythm, but for now I'm afraid that you'll have to make do with whatever I find the time and motivation for (which may not be that much for a little while). Either way I'm still around to read and comment on other people's writings.

Too Many Goodies!

The other night I decided to create a new alt from scratch, something that I hadn't done in a few months. I was rather surprised when immediately upon entering the world, I had no less than fourteen messages waiting for me in my mailbox.

Yes, I preordered the game, I paid up for the Digital Deluxe edition before the game went free to play, then I preordered Makeb, and so on and so forth, all of which came with some goodies, usually a title, a vehicle and/or a pet. And yes, I know that various subscriber rewards were dished out along the way as well, but some of those were only temporary (or at least I'm not getting any more Gannifari pets mailed to me for free), so I didn't really think that it would all add up to quite that much.

It still baffles me just how many of these "rewards" I'm receiving on any newly created character now. Do they even mean anything anymore at this point? It really struck me when I realised the other week that there had been a promotion last month, primarily aimed at getting current free players to (re-)subscribe, but also rewarding current subscribers, that I hadn't even known about. It only came up when someone mentioned during an ops run that he'd received a speeder and a pet in the mail but wasn't sure why he had got them, and nobody else was really sure at the time either.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the thought, but a "reward" for something that I was doing anyway, that I didn't even know about and that just gets drowned among a dozen similar items isn't that exciting to me. I suppose the fact that I'm not a big pet or vehicle collector plays into it, but even so... I think this is one area where the SWTOR team might want to try coming up with something new soon.

Thoughts on Dread Fortress and Palace

When Oricon was first released, I made a post about my first impressions of Dread Fortress, and a few days later I summed up my initial experience of Dread Palace in a short YouTube video. I did want to spend a little more time talking about both operations though, seeing how they wrap up a  story arc that has been running through the game for more than one and a half years now.

I don't actually have that much to add to my Dread Fortress post, because it still sums up my thoughts about the story mode operation pretty well. The only thing I forgot to mention was the hilarious exploding droid trash leading from the second boss to the fourth, which seems to regularly leave up to half of our raid dead on the floor. It initially gave me flashbacks to the first hallway of trash mobs in WoW's Tempest Keep back in Burning Crusade, and how the melee regularly cried that they might as well just stand back and do nothing for all the good they did. Of course the difference is that the exploding droids can be rendered completely harmless by a bit of coordination of stuns; it's just that most of the time people don't seem to want to put that much effort into handling trash.

On hardmode we're up to Corruptor Zero at the moment, whom we haven't downed yet, which hasn't been helped by some hiccups with our roster as well as the fight seemingly changing with every patch - and it's not always clear whether the changes are intentional or bugs.

As for Dread Palace, when we entered it for the first time, someone commented that it seemed a bit lacklustre and tacked-on, what with the way it was designed as a straight hallway with five tunnels leading off to one boss encounter each. Oh, how wrong that turned out to be.

I have to admit that I ended up being really impressed by that instance. Bestia isn't the most imaginative of fights (tank swap, adds and red circles, yawn), but on pretty much all the other encounters the developers have clearly gone out of their way to come up with something new and interesting.

Dread Master Tyrans was a real hoot the first time we faced him and realised that the floor soon started disappearing under our feet. Of course I seem to have a bit of a thing for falling floors, based on my love for Soa, but still... I wasn't the only one who was cackling maniacally when we found ourselves isolated on one last floor tile during our first attempt and managed to down the boss with only three people left standing.

Calphayus was sadly bugged the first couple of times we downed him, meaning that he didn't actually execute any of his special moves, and I've only got to see the fight in full twice since then. However, what I have seen of it definitely looks very unique and interesting. I'm still not entirely sure about everything that's going on with those crystals and that seed, and why they are so crucial to defeating the boss, but it's certainly an exercise in coordination (and an opportunity to recite endless Back to the Future quotes).

The Raptus fight mixes things up yet again with its individual challenges for each role, and it's pretty funny to see messages about your healer's incompetence pop up as raid warnings in the middle of your screen - and I say that as a healer myself! (As an aside, the forums seem to agree that the healer challenge is/was overtuned compared to the others.) As an added bonus, there's a (very easy) "bridge boss" as well - I believe initially we even had someone claim that the gap was too small to fall through, but then we had someone else promptly prove otherwise when we exited the area after the fight.

And then we have the final council fight, which I dare say manages to do the Dread Masters justice, which was not an easy feat considering how much build-up they've had as villains. If you watched the little video I linked above, you can hear the whole group howl with laughter and excitement when Styrak and Brontes make a reappearance, and the encounter as a whole is just absolutely manic. It's been a month and I'm still not entirely sure about everything that's going on during that fight each time.

In summary, I think that Bioware has done another excellent job with these two operations. There is less of a story-telling angle than in previous raids (with Scum and Villainy being the prime example of how that is done in my opinion), but they have clearly been learning from previous experience and are rebalancing things all the time. I found it quite noteable for example that there are no overly long stretches of trash in either instance this time, and from what I've seen after a month, none of the boss fights suffer from prolonged periods of repetition or tedium either. I'm looking forward to whatever the devs will come up with next, now that the Dread Masters have been dealt with.

Holiday Season

Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob put up a post yesterday in which he talks about feeling a certain amount of ennui with WoW's holiday events. I haven't even played WoW in one and a half years and I can still relate, because I was already getting kind of tired of these same events before I quit the game. I've said before that I'm a big fan of the occasional one-time event that everyone can gorge themselves on and then go back to normal while retaining fond memories of the whole thing... instead of, you know, having it come back over and over again and leaving you with an increasing feeling of disillusionment. (I have to admit that I'm already getting a little bit of that with the Gree event and Bounty Contract Week, but at least those are easy to ignore if you don't care to participate.)

Plus, with things like Halloween and Christmas, among others, there is also the fact that it's very jarring to have these things inserted into our fantasy worlds. No, I don't care what your excuse is for why Azeroth, Tyria or wherever just happen to celebrate all the same holidays as the US, it's not convincing. I'm not a big fan of them in real life, why do they have to haunt even my attempts at escapism?

So one thing I like about Star Wars: The Old Republic is that the devs don't have an excuse to insert real life holidays into the game willy-nilly. Not that this stops them from trying, mind you. Last year they stooped so low as to dig up Life Day from the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, just to have an excuse to sell vaguely Christmas-themed items in the cash shop. Was that Celebrator speeder the cheesiest thing ever or what? (Though I do love the Tinsel Bomb simply for giving me something else to throw at people during raid breaks all year round.) And that was when the Cartel Market was still in its infancy so to speak. I fully expect a much bigger cash-in this year.

What I didn't expect was for Halloween to have any influence. I'm not aware of any sort of similar festival existing in the expanded universe (though feel free to educate me on that front), and it just doesn't really... fit with the universe. For example, ghosts officially exist, but they aren't exactly scary in the conventional sense. So imagine my surprise when this showed up on the Cartel Market yesterday:

The "TRK-R Treatment Chamber" is basically a Sith meditation chamber recoloured to look like a grinning pumpkin when it's closed. Why? Who knows! It's just a random Cartel Market item; it doesn't need an explanation. I would be kind of annoyed if I wasn't seriously impressed with the creativity of whoever came up with that particular idea. I just hope that it's not an indicator of more forced random holiday insertions yet to come.

A Bounty Hunter's Tale

It's finally happened: I've completed all the class stories! The bounty hunter was the last one I was missing... until today that is. I have to say that it didn't turn out to be one of my favourites, though I'm not sure how much of that was due to the story itself and how much of it was due to the on-again-off-again nature in which I played through it. I mean, I originally made my first bounty hunter back in early 2012, played her very little (I believe I only got her to Nar Shaddaa), and then made another one earlier this year. Her journey from creation to the level cap to completing her class story took me something like five months in total, and there were a lot of breaks and distractions. Maybe that's why I didn't feel a strong sense of urgency to push onwards and find out what happens next a lot of the time.

Some of that may have been due to spoilers. I got spoiled big time for the ending of the bounty hunter class story very early on, without even realising at the time that it was the very ending of the story that had been revealed to me. So I happily played on until about halfway through chapter two, at which point I realised that the only way for the event that I had read about to still fit into the story would be at the very end. Knowing exactly what lay ahead admittedly took some of the wind out of my sails.

Other than that... I'm not really sure where I can accuse the story of going wrong. I felt that at the start there were some parallels to the trooper story (which I quite liked), in terms of trying to add a personal angle to a profession that is kind of cold and businesslike (soldier/mercenary). However, where the trooper story takes its time to build things up until the end of the prologue, the bounty hunter story tries to tug at your heartstrings as early as something like three quests in, where you've barely had enough time to develop an attachment to anything or anyone, so that fell a bit flat for me. I did however enjoy the way this puts you into the position of it being "you and your first companion as the underdogs vs. the world". The entirety of chapter one with its story of fighting your way to the top was quite satisfying.

After that things started to flounder a bit though. It kind of felt like my character was wasting her time playing silly games, and I didn't particularly care for any of it. Things got better again in chapter three, though again I felt like I was supposed to care about characters to whom I honestly didn't have that much of a connection (yet). I did quite like the interlude where I got to go out and rescue my male love interest from peril - that felt funny in a subversive way. But well, other than that... like I said above, I knew exactly where it was going and wasn't massively excited about it.

The companions were also a bit of an odd bunch. In another parallel to the trooper story, I quite liked the first four and found the last one to be annoying as hell. Also, while I quite liked the second companion once I had him, I have to say that he had a very annoying "acquisition story" that made little sense and felt heavily railroaded. I bet he was another one of those that got killed a lot in beta before they removed the ability to kill companions...

In terms of gameplay, playing a Powertech hasn't been too bad considering that neither melee nor tanking truly feel like my calling. I had however been told in advance that Vanguard/Powertech was probably the easiest tank class to play, and it certainly seemed that way. At least I never felt completely lost when I picked the character back up after not playing her for a while (unlike on my Marauder for example) and always got back into the swing of things quickly. The tanking "rotation" (as far as there is one) felt very fluid and natural.

Nonetheless I think that tanking will remain something that I enjoy only in very limited doses. Charging in ahead of everyone else just doesn't come easily to me, and I don't particularly like that feeling of constantly having to reassert myself as the leader all the time.

Czerka Health and Safety

Doing dailies at unusual times can lead to interesting discoveries. The other night I was roaming around CZ-198 late at night, as I was suffering from a cold and found myself unable to sleep. Since it was a lot quieter than it usually is when I go there, I was surprised to find quest item spawns in places where I generally don't see them because they are always gone... such as this biotoxin container in the middle of the office area. Never mind the big hazard warning sign next to the door to the next room...

Now, Czerka isn't generally known for being the most caring company when it comes to its employees (just refer to the main quest line on Tatooine for Republic players), but that still struck me as funny. You've got to feel sorry for the poor employee that used to work at that station. Can't you just imagine it? "Who dumped the biotoxin next to my desk again? I thought we went over this during the last health and safety meeting..."

The Galactic Starfighter "Expansion"

When Rise of the Hutt Cartel was turned into a free goodie for subscribers last month, I remember seeing a couple of people comment that this might be a sign of a) another expansion coming out soon, and b) Bioware considering giving away future expansions for free (or at least including them as part of the subscription). Personally I didn't think that either of those sounded particularly likely, but as it turns out these commenters were right. Last night a press release was posted on the official site to announce "Galactic Starfighter", a new expansion that is planned to release as early as December. And unlike Rise of the Hutt Cartel, it's going to be completely free from the start and available to everyone; release will just be staggered so that subscribers get access earlier.

Its main (and only, to be honest) selling point is 12 vs. 12 freeform space combat. Now, this is something that a lot of people have been asking for pretty much since the game's launch, and as a result, overall reactions to the announcement have been very positive from what I've seen. This is good! For me personally however... this whole thing is pretty meh to be honest. I've written about why I don't really do space combat, and it's got nothing to do with the current system being on rails. It's just not my cup of tea. I'll try to keep an open mind of course and will probably give the new space PvP a try at least... but I don't really expect it to grab me.

What I personally found the most interesting about this whole announcement are the semantics. Back when Rise of the Hutt Cartel was announced, I was already very sceptical about calling that an expansion, because it didn't seem to bring enough to the table to really be worthy of the title. (To be fair, in hindsight I feel that it did introduce enough changes to be indeed worthy of being called an expansion... though perhaps an "expansion light".) This Galactic Starfighter thing on the other hand... from everything I've read, the new space PvP is going to be all there is to it. More levels? Nope. Any PvE? Nope. How is that any different from a big patch then? In fact, as someone who isn't into space combat, this "expansion" will likely add less to the game for me than any of the major patches have done so far. Where's the distinction between patch and expansion then, other than semantics, especially if both are free?

I wonder if they are now trying to go for a model along the lines of EVE Online's, which releases free "expansions" all the time as well. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, as I don't actually play EVE.) The important difference is of course that EVE is a sandbox game so expectations for what qualifies as a significant content addition are very different. I'm not sure that calling a big patch an expansion every now and then is going to do quite the same thing for a theme park MMO.

NBI: Start Your SWTOR Blog Today!

In the MMO writing community as a whole there's currently a project called "The Newbie Blogger Initiative" going on, which is supposed to encourage people to start their own blogs about MMOs. I wasn't originally going to get involved simply because I don't feel that I have a lot to say on the subject. My blogging is very niche and I do quite a few things that people usually advise against, such as writing only about a single game and producing walls of text that aren't broken up by any images, so I'm probably not the best person to go to for advice.

However, looking at my SWTOR blog roll on the side gave me food for thought. I used to be quite strict about purging inactive blogs after three months, but lately I've been giving them more and more time simply because I hate to take blogs off the list and have nothing to replace them with. Maybe I'm just looking in all the wrong places, but I don't see a lot of personal SWTOR blogs starting up right now, and I think that's a shame. Just because the game isn't the hottest new thing on the block anymore, doesn't mean that there isn't still a lot to be said about it!

Why should you blog? Well, it definitely isn't for everyone, however I've met plenty of people online that made me think "this person should definitely have a blog". Mostly it's about whether you like expressing yourself in writing. Basically, blogging is a logical next step if you're the type of person who likes to leave long comments on other people's posts or writes a lot on forums. The problem with these forms of writing is that things tend to get lost and buried. This is annoying if you think that what you've said was relevant and deserves more exposure, but also when it comes to archiving. Ever found yourself in a situation where you went: "I know I wrote my thoughts on this down somewhere, but I don't remember where"? Yeah, this is why it's good to have your own blog and a solid archive function. I can still go back and look at stuff I wrote about WoW four years ago, and that's nice.

So if you've got things to say about SWTOR and have ever considered starting your own blog about it, now is a good time. Just head on over to the NBI site for lots of advice on how to get started as well as plenty of opportunities to get your new blog promoted. And of course I want to hear about it too! Need more things to add to the blog roll...

P.S. You know I'm looking at you, Mace...