Anyway, back to 2012…
So having blown an entire entry on character creation. I think we’re finally ready to start this game. One final note is that I’m not going to try to color-correct and adjust the levels on all of these screenshots. If BioWare wants to make a world of plastic figures, bathe them in flat lighting, and smear a color filter over the whole thing, that’s their business.

The Star Wars theme swells as my shuttle descends towards the Jedi academy. As a padawan, I’m here to complete my training. Presumably I’m arriving from some sort of Jedi middle school.
The shuttle touches down as the music builds and I ascend the ramp to meet my new master.

This is supposed to be an epic moment, but I’m realizing now that this is basically, “Dude gets off the bus at college for the first time” with a John Williams soundtrack.
I meet my new master. Or somebody’s master. I don’t know. He’s a Jedi. We welcomes me to the academy. Just to push his buttons a bit I lay on the padawan swagger. I trash-talk my old teachers, I’m impatient with him, and then I tell him study and meditation is boring. If he had a brain he’d nonchalantly reach under his console and start thumbing the big red alarm button labeled “SITH!”. At the very least he should hit me with something along the lines of, “Not cool, bro.”
But no. He’s practically apologizing for being so dull.

Orientation is interrupted when teacher-guy gets a call on his 3G iHolocron. Aparently the academy grounds are under assault by Fleshraiders. As a newly arrived student with a plastic sword, he sends me to check it out. See, the other students mostly don’t have any combat training.
I want to point out that a few years ago the Sith showed up and delivered a galactic-sized smackdown to the Jedi, slaughtering a heaping pile of them in the process. In fact, that’s why we’re here on Tython on not training at the capital. The opening crawl even tells us:

So after getting our asses handed to us in a surprise attack we’ve decided to round up a bunch of kids, put robes on them, and not give them combat training? Is there any possible future where this won’t end with them all dead?
Whatever. Let’s head to the front and see what this Flesh Raider attack is all about. No, hang on, I have to stop and re-bind my keys. It doesn’t save your keys when you change characters, so if you don’t use the default bindings then you must reset them for Every. Single. Character. I strongly believe that A and D should never, ever TURN left or right, and that this is a retrograde setup that borders on heresy. So I have to fix that and a couple of other small details.
Okay. NOW we can leave. Let’s see what’s going on at the platform.
Sure enough, monster-faced space creeps are attacking the platform in waves.
I have to go out and kill fifteen of these flesh raider guys. I’m still carrying my plastic glowstick practice weapon. Nobody offers me anything more appropriate for live combat. That’s not what’s bothering me. This is:

So… four Jedi Masters with lightsabers will stand at the wall and kill the occasional raider, while the students with practice swords leave the defensive fortifications to go and kill the massed enemies in the open field?
There are another seven Jedi up on the walls, guarding crates and empty buildings. (This is in addition to the class trainers, the quest-giver, and the Jedi that greeted me on the way in. I give those guys a pass since they have some gameplay purpose.)
Look, I get it. This is a videogame. An MMO even. We have to accept a certain degree of slop to allow for player characters to shine. But does it need to be quite this dumb? Can we get rid of ten out of these eleven idle Jedi? There’re all nameless copy-pasted clones of each other, so it’s not like someone’s finely crafted characters will go to waste. It will at least help sell the fiction that the Jedi are short-handed. There is no purpose to these extra guys beyond making everything seem dumber.
At the very least, remove the idle crate-guarding JEDI MASTERS and replace them with unarmed students. Then the ones out front are actually guarding somebody in need of protection.
Anyway, let’s go kill Flesh Raiders.

I’m really looking forward to getting my lightsaber.
While I’m running around in the field, I find this crappy makeshift wooden cage, which either contains a guy or a girl, depending on whether you believe the character model or the subtitles. This gives me a quest to run around and free some of the students in other cages.

Each cage is guarded by three or four Flesh Raiders. I’m really glad the game is balanced so that you fight groups of foes instead of singles. It means people with area powers get to use them outside of groups, it makes battles slightly more interesting, it lets everyone get a sense of how crowd control works, and it fixes the absurdity of a single street thug being a match for a legendary warrior.
How useless are these practice sabers? So useless that when the fleshraiders capture students, they don’t bother disarming the kids. It is a weapon so ineffectual, it’s safe to let prisoners keep it.
I have to rescue six kids. As soon as I free the last one, the mission is complete and I get my reward.

What? I get thirty credits and and a commendation token? From who? I’m still out in the field. Did the kid give them to me? Did Scotty beam them down? No, that’s Trek. I guess I’m not supposed to question it. Too late.
Once I’ve filled the Raider-murder quota and freed six out of the dozen or so students, I head back to base. A nearby Jedi Master calls me over for a little fully-voiced, animated exchange with a dialog wheel, and we get to enjoy the product of combining BioWare-style mechanics with MMO-style environments…

…which is other players standing around in your cutscenes. While I was talking to this quest-giver, another player ran in and stood directly between us. We continued conversing through his fully opaque head as if he wasn’t there, while in his own cutscene I was probably looming ominously over his shoulder. This doesn’t always happen. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a bug?
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You know, reading this makes me think maybe I DIDN’T miss all that much by not being able to play this. Which is good, I guess.
I never thought it was all that bad a game; just not really worth the 15 a month fee. The gameplay was okay, the story wasn’t too bad (I liked the story with my bounty hunter) and the voice acting was a nice touch. I did also like the touch that you could redo the UI through in-game options and move everything around on the screen where you wanted it without having to use mods.
Yeah, that UI touch didn’t come about until well over a year after launch (IIRC).
Before that it was stock or stock.
Which is one of the frustrating things about dealing with new MMOs – there’s been a decade of development in GUI’s for these things, all sorts of innovations, yet upon release every one of them has the same untweakable UI, the same shitty chat setup with the same shitty problems that WoW had on release, most of them won’t even have an auction house until months later.
It’s really not that bad, especially if you don’t mind spending a few dollars on the game. The quest lines are Star Wars enough that it feels fun, the combat is mostly good, and overall it’s a strong game. It’s even mostly f2p. They’ve got a weird system where if you pay at least once, quite a few of the f2p restrictions are released, and you can buy a single $1.00 thing if you want. Quick and easy.
Moreover…don’t take Shamus’s thing as a measure of the quality. He’s deliberately taking the piss out of the game, because that’s what he does. At the same time, it is Star Wars. It’s trying to be a little actiony, a little hero vs the entire world, and a little “don’t pay attention to everything, just run along and have fun”.
Sadly, I fell to the Star Wars craze after the release of the new movie, and had to play this MMO, since I played the original Star Wars Galaxies for 2 years back when it first released.
I leveled up a Sith Warrior through the story, and have barely sat down to play any more since.
What a mean, judging omniscient narrator, insiting on that poor dead padawan’s birth gender like that. All she wanted was to be her true self while pointlessly getting killed in a meat grinder her masters couldn’t be bothered dealing with themselves, or training and equipping her for.
The pic hover notes are great! I don’t really get why they’re supposedly so neat and important though. I mean, I still haven’t figured out how to see them with a touchscreen.
On my Android phone, pressing and holding the pictures to bring up the menu (which is supposed to be for options like “open image in new tab”, “save image”, “copy image” etc.) also brings up the alt text. Not sure if that’ll help with any other type of device.
Thats how it works on my android as well.
This should also work with iOS devices. At least, it does with my phone, when I’m reading the site there.
Also works on iOS.
Well obviously smartphones need a feature where they sense your finger hovering over a part of the screen, an translate that into a cursor hovering. :)
You’re probably joking, but this is totally a thing they should do. It’s not like it would be all that hard, I shouldn’t think; drawing tablets have been doing that for, like, a decade or something now.
It’s that extra bit of wit or comment that you just get SO used to having that the moment it’s gone…
…the cravings, man… they just don’t STOP.
I like the notes too. I just don’t understand why people prefer them as hover title instead of always visible caption under the picture.
I fully agree with your disgust at the default keybindings. The game should wean keyboard turners off of their horrid habits by making mouselook+strafe the default setup.
Whats especially funny to me is how adamant Shamus is about his up/down thing,yet here he is the oppressor.
I can see up down as a matter of personal preference. Once you are used to it one way doing it the other would be like fingernails on chalk board, and I doubt there is any real advantage one way or the other.
On the other hand, Mouselook+strafe is strictly better than keyboard turning + strafe bound somewhere awkward. There is no excuse for locking new players into that terrible habit that they will need to unlearn later if they want to graduate from slow and awkward to mobile.
Im pretty sure that Ive seen a game where a/d where for turning and q/e were for strafing.So no,its not strictly better.
Keyboard turning is bad. When you play online with a keyboard turner it is always obvious and extremely irritating (if they are on your side).
It is so bad that “keyboard turner” has become an common insult.
Games have used tons of horrible control schemes in the past. Moving the finger back from the W to the S is vastly easier with a now normal WASD control scheme than when using Q and E as the strafe keys. If I am supposed to switch between A/D and Q/E frequently, that just makes it even more awkward compared to a system where switching like that isn’t necessary.
One of the few things I will say in defense of SWTOR is that there is a decent amount of contrast in the art direction if you can run it at max settings. Although Im not sure why the game’s art was designed in such a way that people with lower-end hardware would have to put up with a washed out mess. Its not as though older games with similar amounts of fedelity couldnt pull off decent visuals.
Shamus: “So after getting our asses handed to us in a surprise attack we've decided to round up a bunch of kids, put robes on them, and not give them combat training? Is there any possible future where this won't end with them all dead?”
This could be me just making excuses, but this point didn’t bother me. At all. Just the opposite: The Jedi, despite the danger, are properly teaching students instead of sticking swords into their hands and sending them to the front line! How… absolutely appropriate for Jedi. And how utterly unlike the Sith.
I fully agree there’s lots o’ silly going on, and there’s one minor, irrelevant quest on Tython which annoys me because the “Light-side” response is both impatient, wrongheaded and quick to judge (or at least, quick to let someone else do it).
This, however, is just right for the setting and the situation. In fact, they even go to the trouble of showing Tython as a place to develop combat skills in field exercises and place the finishing touches on a young Jedi’s technique.
Shamus: “I'm really glad the game is balanced so that you fight groups of foes instead of singles. It means people with area powers get to use them outside of groups, it makes battles slightly more interesting, it lets everyone get a sense of how crowd control works, and it fixes the absurdity of a single street thug being a match for a legendary warrior.”
In practice, it’s merely annoying in other ways, since encounters are reduced to whacking three or four guys tediously, or trying to grab several groups so you can fry them all at once. This gets really, *really* tedious later on because the enemy placement is freakishly consistent across every zone in the game.
RE teaching kids how to fight:
I think the issue isn’t whether the jedi are throwing cannon fodder at the sith, but whether, given that the sith are danger and clearly are after jedi, any jedi, young jedi should be taught how to defend themselves.
And there the idea that the newest arrival has combat training but none of the already present students do is strange. They’re going to need to know how to stay alive in a dangerous universe, so they’ll need a lightsabre and a towel.
If the line had been ‘the other students aren’t ready/too young for such a fight’, that’d have been a more believable take on the issue. But trying to make the player the only combat capable student in a time of war makes the jedi seem timid and cowardly, not wise.
Teach them well, teach them carefully, yes. But the sith will hunt anyone in brown robes, so those kids will need to know how to block and dodge, at least. If you’re not going to teach them how to defend themselves, don’t make them jedi.
That is why they are on Typhon. It is explicitly shown that these trainees are here to learn how to fight before they actually go out into the field. The game explicitly shows that this planet was chosen because the Jedi needed a refuge that the Sith couldn’t find, and went out of their way to protect that secret so they could use it as a training ground. Also, the trainees aren’t really that young, and many may well be able to use a blaster. They’re just not ready for war.
There’s much to criticize in SWTOR. This is not one of those things.
Didn’t we see in AotC that Jedi combat training starts at about five years old? How the hell are adult students who should be one step away from being Jedi “not combat capable”?
Ummmmmmmm……
I.E., the Jedi are training them, including into combat, but they’re just doing a proper job of it and after they master the basics. The Jedi specifically are *not* prioritizing fighting skills over the understanding the Force. Whereas the Sith prioritize combat over everything, and throw students into a meatgrinder.
Also, these are not “kids.” At all.
They are sending them into straight into combat,from the minute they land,and thats proper training?What???They are sending them to fight before they teach them anything else,and thats not prioritizing combat over the force?What???
No, they are not. A lot of trainees were just caught by a large surprise attack from the alien guys. They weren’t expecting any kind of actual battle. Quests in this area mostly involve trying to rescue trapped students and investigate the cause. The events happened so recently that people on hikes are still hiding out, cut off from the Jedi base. The Jedi PC’s, of course, are immediately sent into danger. But then, you basically play an unstoppable respawning champion able to kill seven-foot-tall aliens with a stick* and who evidently has a frightening amount of talent no matter which Jedi class you play, and who is about five steps away from becoming a Knight already anyhow.
To be fair,if your first day at college starts with a John Williams soundtrack,it would be an epic moment.
Y’know, if you think Typhon is Jedi College, then Korriban is basically an 80’s high school complete with cliques and bitchy classmates. More evident in the Sith Warrior playthough, but I found the interactions hilarious, especially since your initial rival basically acts like some sort of school jock with his team of asshole preps.
The Inquisitor’s rival is teacher’s pet.
He’s a moron though your real nemesis is your teacher in that prologue. And now that I typed it out I realise how terrifying that sounds.
The Inquisitor’s rival basically has the same background and setup as the playable Sith Warrior. It’s pretty funny when you’ve gone through both and realize.
Just wait until you meet Renalda.
From the voice acting and context of her story, she’s supposed to be a young, prepubescent child. But Bioware didn’t have the budget to create a separate child body, so they just enlarged the head and eyes of an existing adult female model, giving us this nightmare-inducing monstrosity.
OH GOD, IT’S A BRATZ DOLL
KILL IT WITH FIRE
Oh SWTOR is so bad with children models. There’s one you meet on Ord Mantell that used to have the same model as a playable character. Now they’ve shrunken that model and it looks kinda weird.
Relevant to your Crouching Tiger (Hidden Piglet) Sword of Destiny tweets (Since I have no twitter):
This is actually something they (meaning importers/localizers/etc) do with a lot of non-English language films. Put a soundtrack over it that sounds cool, add some voice-over (“Destiny! Doooooom!”), and do not make it obvious that it’s subtitled. Because Americans hate subtitles, or something. Which means action scenes. Even if it’s an adaptation of Hamlet (Curse of the Black Scorpion, I’m looking at you).
Less cynically, it’s because American wuxia fans are already going to see this. So Marketing may as well try to bring in other people. But I’m fairly confident it’s more high quality wuxia.
On topic: I started SWTOR with a Jedi Knight. As my first MMO. As a tank-spec. It… was painful. Coming in as a newbie, no one bothers to explain the advanced principles of tanking. ‘Oh yeah, this boss has insta-death eye lasers during this phase, so you need to run around these crates and break line of sight, then pick him back up before he goes after the squishies.’
Storywise – I am so very happy that we didn’t get KotOR 3, if the Knight storyline was what we were going to get. I mean, there are fun parallels – KotOR is the good part of the Expanded Universe (Rogue Squadron, Han Solo Adventures, etc), KotOR 2 is the weird, kinda-not-star-wars-but-the-name’s-there-on-the-cover Yuuzan Vong & New Jedi Order stuff, and SWTOR – Jedi Knight is the Jedi Academy trilogy and Dark Empire. You know, the bloatware and the superweapon escalation.
I’ll hold off on further Jedi Knight commentary until we get there (if we get there) in the LP. But Bounty Hunter… Bounty Hunter is the best. Not the best storyline (which goes in concept to the Imperial Agent, even if the gameplay hobbles the execution, and the latter plotwork looks more like an Obsidian game), but the best companion. And best happy-fun-times-face-roll PVP spec, but that is no longer with us.
Mako is the first bounty hunter companion, and she almost makes Nal Hutta worth it. As your fixer, she helps you to focus on the important things. Because every time you ask, ‘What will you pay?’ Mako approves. If you can manage to get paid twice, she extra approves. If you taunt the bad guys, Mako approves. If you over-dramatically flirt with an employer’s secretary, Mako cracks up. And approves. In short, if you’re a witty, roguish, monetarily-motivated individual, you are okay with Mako. There’s a definite shortage of games that let you be swashbucklery, so I really appreciated Mako and the writers for letting me have my fun.
“By popular demand, I've added mouseover text to the images”
“By popular demand”
…WHY?! You maniacs! What have you done?! We were finally free! No longer did we have to remember, for every single image, to hover our cursor over top to avoid missing out on content! We could just read and look at pictures! It was beautiful. And now… gone.
mouseover typo in second image: “getting off a buss”
unless it has a second ‘s’ because it’s a space bus?
I remember playing it in pre-release open beta, it was pretty much this. I raged the whole time while trying it out. Loading bars for voices in conversations killed me. It almost seemed like the storyline was a decent start… for a single player game. However, it trying to be multiplayer hurt the combat system so bad that I was bored shortly after getting my lightsaber.
The only great part of that game were the Uxibeasts. Those were cool.
Other players are visible in your cutscenes? What the hell? I’ve gone back to Champions Online recently, and one thing I specifically noticed is that in cutscenes, other players are invisible.