Would you just LOOK at how horribly this jacket clipped with the skirt? The whole time I was running around in that combination, I was constantly thinking that I looked as though I shat myself.
-1 of SHAME from me to me
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Fashion faux poop
Posted in Being Dumb
Tagged -1 of SHAME, fashion failures, immature and dumb, main, screenshots, swtor
5 Comments
Linear questing and will SWTOR make it work?
This is cross-posted from my guild’s blog, snarkside.com
Back when Cataclysm was relatively new and people were leveling to 85, WoW started to draw a lot of criticism from the blogging community for being too linear. Between the heavy use of phasing and the lack of multiple options for zones that were level appropriate, many players began to complain that they felt as though they had been put on a very rigid pathway and that there was no room for organic discovery or leveling.
I was one of those people. I’ve always been the sort of person who likes to take a break from the main by leveling an alt. But when it came to Cataclysm, I was only partway through leveling my second character to 85 when ennui set in. And while I did eventually get a few more characters to level cap, I was looking for ways to do so that didn’t involve questing.
Cut to today and I’m happily leveling a handful of characters in SWTOR. I don’t have a single one to the level cap as of yet, but I do have enough characters leveled far enough that I am already starting to become very familiar with many of the earlier quest lines. While they have in no way become tedious as of yet, I couldn’t help but note that SWTOR has a pretty rigid progression path. If you’re Republic, you can count on being sent to Coruscant somewhere around level 10. Once you’re there, you can count on fighting the same gangs, getting entangled in the same political wrangles and saving the same damsels in distress.
The good news is that you’ll still have the major thread of your class story line and, assuming you’re trying out a different class, it will be completely different from the last class story line you experienced. And thanks to having multiple options on how to talk to the NPCs you interact with, you can effect some change in how even the same old quest lines might end.
But if you’re like me and plan on trying out the Advanced Classes for every class, well, then you’re going to start to see some more redundancy. My own plan to combat the “been there, done that” sensation is to play one character towards the light side and the other character of the same class to the dark side. Since I am in absolutely no rush whatsoever to have eight level capped characters, I’ll undoubtedly be waiting for quite some time to make progress on the second set.
Will trying to make different choices on each character for the non-class quests be enough to defeat the overall problems of a linear path to level 50? I don’t know. I do wonder at there not being much in the way of overlap or parallel paths, but I suppose one could always break from questing by running flashpoints or taking on space combat missions.
In the meantime, I’m hoping class quests and the choices we do have will continue to be enough to keep the leveling game from growing too stale over time.
Posted in Leveling or Questing, SW:ToR
Tagged class quests, linear progression, mmo comparisons, planning ahead, swtor, wow
7 Comments
False Urgency
Here’s the situation. There’s an insane Sith attacking the local populace in a nearby town and the local military is too busy trying not to get slaughtered on another battlefield to do anything to help out the civilians. So we need you, Brave Hero, to get over to that town as quickly as possible and do whatever it takes to neutralize the threat. If you don’t hurry, everyone will be slaughtered!
Okay, so that’s not actually a quest I’ve run across in SWTOR yet, but man, is BioWare ever good at instilling a sense of urgency in their story telling. The other night, despite being exhausted, I found myself unable to tear myself away from a quest chain because I was so immersed that I felt like I had to act now. There might not be a later for the people I’m trying to save.
I never felt that way in WoW, to be honest. Even with the odd quest that had a timer, I never felt like I couldn’t wander away and pick it up again if I needed to do so. To be fair, most quests in SWTOR are also available for the good old do-over. But not all of them are. I ran across one on my trooper, failed it, and am now stuck with it mocking me from my quest log because, for reasons unknown, I can’t abandon it.
Typically, the only time I’ve ever stayed up late despite exhaustion (and despite having work the next day) was because there was a really good book I just couldn’t bring myself to put down. To have the same sense of false urgency in a game is a little startling, but I think it only makes the whole RP experience that much more enticing.
Have you been sucked so far into the story that you forget you’re really just trying to save pixels? Or am I the only dork that does that?
Companions
Companions are giving me flashbacks.
I spent some time in WoW being the Guild Leader of a fairly casual guild. The kind that raided but that wasn’t particularly good at it and relied heavily on the good old nerf bat to down content. In that guild, I had many players who were, well, lazy. They had to be told to gem and enchant their gear. They needed to have someone else break down why they shouldn’t have points in that tree and why they should have them in this one for the role they were intending to play.
They were also needy from a social perspective. If someone said or did something they didn’t like, the very idea of dealing with it themselves never seemed to enter their minds. Instead, they would pull aside an officer or myself and go on a 15-minute rant about how the other person was horrible and what ought to be done about it. If it wasn’t that, it was random complaints about their personal lives, as though the Guild Leader existed to be some sort of confessional and/or life coach.
And now my companions are doing the same things!
Micro-managing their crew skills, I can handle. Fine. It makes sense to me.
But, Qyzen Fess, aka Lizard Face, keeps pulling me aside for random chats about…. I don’t even know what. It goes something like this:
Qyzen: So, this one time? I was on this planet that no one ever goes to because it’s a totally hostile place, man.
Me: Yeah? That sounds cool, I guess.
Qyzen: You have no idea how cool it was. Even the Imperial scum had no idea I was there.
Me: So… what happened while you were there?
Qyzen: Well, I found this incredibly large animal that everyone thought was completely extinct.
Me: Um. Neat?
Qyzen: Then I fuckin’ killed it. Got a lot of points that day. Lost an eye though. No big.
Me: Sucks about the eye, but, uh, grats?
Qyzen: Yeah, it was totally wicked. Some other time I’ll have to tell you about the time I single-handedly saved the world.
And then I get +something of PROUD. Unless I totally downplay his achievements, at which point it’s the -many of SHAME. But I’m left scratching my head and wondering why the hell that just happened. I suspect Qyzen gets bored and raids the medicinal fungus supplies and then gets chatty.
Dialogue Choices
But it’s the dialogue choices that really get under my skin. Tharan Cedrax is the worst companion ever in this regard. Most of time, when I make a choice that falls in line with the Jedi Code, he gives me -1 of SHAME. And before I read up on him, I had no idea why.
But it felt familiar. Like all those times I would make a decision as Guild Leader only to have some portion of the guild give me their own version of the -1 of SHAME but not say why they were displeased or what they thought might have been a better option. Hell, sometimes SWTOR doesn’t even give you a better option. It doesn’t matter what you say or do, you’re getting the SHAME.
The good news is that companions don’t hold onto their petty little grudges the way real people do. I just give them something shiny (or perhaps a few shiny somethings if I’ve really pissed them off) and it’s like nothing ever happened. And if worst comes to worst, well, then I can leave them on my ship with that obnoxious-as-hell C2-N2 and find a better companion who won’t judge me in quite the same way. Though they’ll still totally judge me. Sigh.
Posted in Being Dumb, Companions, SW:ToR
Tagged -1 of SHAME, companions, main, swtor, wow
10 Comments
Stubborn
I’ve been leveling two characters more or less in tandem. I have my Sage, that I consider to be my main, who is now in her upper 20′s and merrily throwing rocks at people across Tatooine. I enjoy her a great deal, and now that I’ve got my speeder, she’s really starting to feel like the main. My crew skills are all in good shape for my level and I think I found the companion to fall in love and make babies with. (We’re ignoring that this is apparently Bad and Wrong for a Jedi to do.)
Then there’s my Trooper. She’s 20 right now because she’s the character I play while I am at work and not hanging out at the home office with Dion. Even though we mostly quest separately, it’s nice to be in the same general level range as one’s SO for when those Heroic 2+ missions come along.
Also, my Trooper makes serious money. I wouldn’t have been able to afford my speeder and have my crew skills at a decent level otherwise.
The thing is, Njessi keeps saying that I’m obviously loving my Trooper a whole lot and she is convinced that I’ll end up abandoning the Sage in favor of the Trooper for end game content.
I find myself mentally digging in my heels to prove to everyone that I will be a Sage, dammit. And I know I am being stubborn because, more often than not, I just have to be right. I will make every attempt to fit that square peg into the round hole, even if it means changing the whole shape of the square peg. I know this is dumb behavior, and that I’m probably lessening my own enjoyment of the Trooper specifically because I’m apparently about as mature as a five year old in this case.
While I was aware of the fact that I was being stubborn about having to be right, it wasn’t until I thought about and then rejected the idea of writing a post about how I really dislike being asked to heal when I am not specced for it at all. And… I do dislike it quite a lot. And a good ranty post is always fun. But writing that post would mean admitting that there’s something about my Sage that I don’t like (to be clear, I am fine with healing if I am actually specced to do so, though it’s not my favorite) and then perhaps Njessi would… I don’t know… crow at me or something.
I guess I’ll find out.
Do you ever get stubborn over stupid things? What does is take to snap you out of it?
Posted in Being Dumb, SW:ToR
Tagged adventures in healing, alts, immature and dumb, main, swtor
13 Comments
OOF
I’m pretending I’ve coined a new term. Go with me on it.
Last night, I was running some 4-man Heroic quests with some friends. All three of them were tank-like and as the Jedi Sage, I was ensnared into healing. It wasn’t terribly fun. I would try to CC just to cut down on the outgoing damage and one of those morons would break it at least half the time… and then not pull the attention to themselves, leaving me to take the damage.
One of the morons in question was my SO, Dion. So I growled in his general direction and blamed him for everything that was going wrong, whether he deserved it or not. I find healing to be stressful, okay?
On one of the last pulls before we all went our separate ways, I suddenly couldn’t cast my healing spells any more. “I’m OOM,” I called out… and then glanced at my screen and reconsidered. “Or maybe I should say I’m OOF?”
It feels like a punch in the gut to watch people die and not be able to do anything about it. So yeah. OOF it is.
The important topics
Let’s talk fashion.
Specifically, let’s talk about the merits of the boob holster.
My nipples hurt just looking at this
This is my list so far of what is good about it:
1. Nothing
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Strange problems
I’m a planner. I like to look down the road and scope out the possibilities and start forming contingency plans for all the scenarios I can think of. Most of this effort is somewhat wasted because I’m not the world’s greatest forecaster. But when it pays off, it pays off. And I can’t help myself. So I keep looking down that road and planning ahead.
Right now, I am looking at our roster for eventual operations in SWTOR. We’re planning on doing 8-mans, and our main problem right now is that of the 11 or so people we have planning to play, four of them want to be tanks. Three or four of them have strong leanings towards healing.
I know everyone might change their minds about what they want to be and do between now and when we’re actually getting close to end game. But for now? I’m laughing my fool head off that we might have to make a big push to recruit DPS, of all things.
What sort of guild ever has a problem like that?
Role Playing
One thing that I think will immediately strike anyone who plays swtor is the way they’ve chosen to incorporate story into questing. Story is everywhere and whether it’s through simply watching a cut scene to receive the details of your latest mission or actually being able to tell someone to just stuff it, you get to be neck deep in it.
How different that is from what I’ve grown accustomed to in WoW: skimming the quest text if it’s new but usually just hitting accept after seeing that so and so only wants me to clear out the local bear population.
In WoW, I never got the whole Role Playing thing. It was a rare thing for me to feel genuinely connected to my characters as people with their own personalities or to feel anything at all for most NPC’s. Occasionally one would come along that had a gripping or heart-wrenching story, but for the most part, they were all interchangeable figures with yellow exclamation marks over their heads. It took reading WoW bloggers who were very interested in lore for me to even notice many of the stories that take place in their quiet way in WoW.
So much of what really grabs me about swtor is that we are given choices and those choices do affect what we see. During the beta, while I was trying out a Bounty Hunter, I decided to play the character as a total mercenary. Who cares what the target is or why, I’m out for money and killing is fun times.
Minor Spoiler, highlight to read
I ended up shooting some kid’s father right in front of him.
And I felt sick, a little. The only time I ever felt that way in WoW was the first time I played through the DK starting area and killed my old friend. But in swtor, I am always being given the choice to say or do things I would never consider saying or doing in real life. I wouldn’t double cross someone. I don’t call people ugly to their faces. It’s far easier for me to play to the side of getting points in the Light side…. but it’s surprisingly fun and challenging to say and do the opposite of what my real moral compass tells me to do. (As an aside, my significant other couldn’t make the same choice I did and ended up with a different end to the story, which was interesting to see.)
All in all, this is the sort of RP I could get behind to a certain extent. When it actually affects the outcome of the game, it makes the hell of a lot more sense to have, and I applaud BioWare for getting this aspect down the way they did.
