The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part VIa: Ranking the stories

I'm not going to repeat stuff that I said in my more detailed reviews of each class story, and you can probably glean much of this from reading those anyway, but one of the popular things to do is to forcibly rank the class stories available to the SWTOR player. I do recommend playing all eight of them, actually, because they all add something to the tapestry of the Old Republic, but some of them are clearly better than others. 

I also think it's interesting to compare them to Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II. I'm not going to actually put them in the rankings next to the Old Republic stories, but I'd put KOTOR about smack dab in the middle of the top four stories of SWTOR, and KOTOR 2 as a flawed yet brilliant story that'd be smack dab in the middle of the bottom four stories of SWTOR. SWTOR is, therefore, broader than either game; better when it's at its best than either, and yet worse when it's at its worst than either as well.

8) Someone has to be at the bottom and the Jedi Consular takes this spot. The boring character, the boring or even irritating companions, the confusing plot that didn't live up to its promise, the lackluster romance, and the class mechanics which I didn't even like very much all combined to make this my least favorite of all of the classes to play. (As an aside, it bugs the crap out of me that so many people on YouTube, when talking about the consular, continue to call it the counselor. Or maybe councilor. But not consular. Literacy is a sadly lost art in Current Year. Sigh.)

7) The Sith Inquisitor is the second worst. Confused and messy tone that couldn't figure out what kind of story it was, unlikeable companions, a contrived and silly plot, and the same lackluster mechanics as the consular made this the second worst of the stories for me. It's only saved a bit from the last spot by its humor.

6) The smuggler is next. The character just doesn't ring true or realistic. A cringy beta who's a successful ladies man? I just couldn't ever accept it. I also admit, like I said earlier, that I got kind of bored with the combat mechanics after a while, and I didn't like very many of his companions either.

5) The trooper is next. A boring character with mostly boring companions, saved by a pretty good story with some actually smart moral dilemmas to deal with. I liked the way the mechanics played too. I admit, though, that prior to playing either class my expectations for the smuggler were very high and my expectations for the trooper were fairly low. Had that been otherwise, they'd probably swap places in the ranking with each other.

4) The Sith Warrior is next. It's hard to rank it in comparison to the Jedi Knight; I think the Sith Warrior was a better character, but the Jedi Knight had a marginally better story to deal with. The two are probably mostly equal, but one has to sit on top of the other. Sorry, Sith Warrior. For that matter, all four of the top half are all extremely close to each other in terms of quality, although for different reasons. It wouldn't have taken much nudging to completely reshuffle their order.

3) The Jedi Knight, if he had a more interesting character, could be the top spot, but his boring personality and rocky start on the starting planet drop him slightly below the top two spots.

2) The Agent is just a very well written story, and a good character too. It gets marked down somewhat for being less Star Warsy than you'd probably want, although the fact that there are very Star Warsy options elsewhere in the game makes this more experimental story a welcome change of pace. Terrible companions also bring it down, but what it does do, unexpected though it is, it does very well.

1) The bounty hunter is my favorite. I admit that I like the concept the best, and that makes it rise more than it otherwise would, and people who aren't as in to the concept of the bounty hunter probably don't like it as much as I do. But I think it's mostly just brilliant, only marred by minor flaws like a somewhat lackluster second chapter and a few companions who aren't as cool as the others are.

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part VI: The Non-Sith Imperial Classes

For the final time, here's the elements of the story experience review that I believe need to be addressed:

1) The character as written by the writers and performed by the voice actor.

2) The plot and villains/rivals that you have to deal with.

3) The companion characters, in particular, the romanceable options.

4) The mechanics of playing the class.

The non force-using Imperial classes are two that stray a bit from the classic Star Wars story, although the bounty hunter option has now become very iconic within Star Wars thanks to the Mandalorian show. I mean, it was already based on Boba Fett who was an extremely popular character, but the movies gave us very little to work on in terms of what bounty hunter life was to be like in the Star Wars milieu. There were some expanded universe things, of course, but not everybody read everything in the expanded universe, and how well EU stuff actually fit into the Star Wars milieu was sometimes subject to wildly differing interpretations. Arguably, the bounty hunter story as told here was one of the first really good stabs at the idea.

The agent storyline is also very classic, but not in a Star Wars milieu; it's the classic thriller vibe. It's often compared to James Bond, but maybe it's really best compared to three completely different thrillers, that each correspond to a different chapter of the agent story; it starts off more like the show 24 for instance, and gets more complicated from there, with elements of the Manchurian Candidate and more before it's all done.

In spite of their differences from classic Star Wars tropes, both stories are considered very highly among SWTOR fans, especially the agent storyline. I only hesitate to recommend them both first because of their lack of classic Star Wars tropes, but once you've already gotten the classic Star Wars tropes (mostly from the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior) then it's much easier to recommend these two as two atypical Star Wars stories that are very, very good.

BOUNTY HUNTER

Well... the bounty hunter isn't universally loved, I should add. I personally love it, and I think in the wake of the Mandalorian, its popularity has gone up. But many people think it's kind of too straightforward and less interesting than it could be. I can't remember anyone ever really saying that they disliked it, but I think many fans think it's more middle of the road. 

The only real complaint I had with it is that it wanted so badly to be an independent freelancer, but was tied to the Imperial faction because you have to have a faction. It was really interesting and frustrating if you were going back and forth between class story quests and faction story quests on a given planet to go out of your way to point out that you weren't Imperial only to be told in the next quest how Imperial you were.

The gist of the story is that you're a new hunter; high in calibre and talent, but low in experience and name recognition, and you've been recruited by an outside coach to join the Great Hunt, a big Mandalorian-led competition for bounty hunters that allows you to quickly make a grab at fame, fortune and the big time if you're successful. A cheating scumbag murders most of your team in the first few moments of the story; while still on the starter planet of Hutta, actually (known as Nal Hutta in the Clone Wars) and becomes your rival until the end of Chapter 1, where you finish the Great Hunt.

The second half, as in many of the stories, lacks some focus for a while; you've won the Great Hunt, so now what? Big bounties, but they're just kind of all over the place until you find yourself the target of the biggest bounty in the galaxy thanks to corruption in (you probably guessed it) the Jedi order and the highest Republic political echelons, who want you taken down in revenge for other bounties that  you've done in the past. At this point, the plot gets into the kind of tense desperation that makes a good thriller good, and it offers (if you choose to take it, of course) one of the most satisfying conclusions of all of the class stories. 

The voice acting for the bounty hunter is really top notch; a deep, gravelly voice that is perfect for the role. He does, sometimes, say something too frequently that is a variation on "all I care about is getting paid" but as the character develops, if you pick the right options to develop him, this improves significantly. 

The bounty hunter has pretty good rivals too. Your rival in the Great Hunt is not quite as good as Skavak from the smuggler story, but has a similar vibe, and I liked taking him down. I liked, honestly, that I had the option to just leave him to die ignominiously rather than having to kill him, too. The rivals you develop at the end; the rogue Jedi and the Sith Lord who's pulling your strings, are pretty good too. The Sith Lord in particular I hated, and I was itching for an opportunity to take him down after first meeting him and having him choke one of my companions (it was even Mako, I think). Having the option to go take him down and do some freelance for a Republic politician who was willing to clear the air at the cost of his career, was awesome... as well as an interesting piece of the puzzle; in all of the Republic stories, you kind of wondered why the role changed from one character to another. Here, you see why. In fact, it really lived up to the promise of the bounty hunter as a free agent, unattached to the faction, and capable of doing whatever he wanted to. (It helped that by this point, I'd maxed out my character level, so I'd stopped doing the faction stories too. If you're doing the faction stories along with the class stories, you don't get that feel nearly as strongly, because the faction stories keep pulling you back in.)

So that's the character and the plot/rivals. Among my favorite in the game. I admit that the opening premise felt a little contrived, but it picked up quickly and started working very well. Running around in the slums of Hutta trying to curry favor with a Hutt Lord so he'd sponsor you off of his stinking rock felt very "on brand" for the class as well. I don't hesitate to recommend the bounty hunter to anyone and never did (it was the scene of two of my three abortive starts on the game, before I finally figured out how to play properly and not lock myself out of my own story by jumping ahead) so clearly it was one that appealed to me right away.

The bounty hunter also has some of the better companion characters. You start off with Mako, who's also your default love interest, voiced by Lacey Chabert. I'm not sure what she's famous for, but I always think of her as the youngest sister in Party of Five and I think she was one of the two girls who hung around with Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls. She knows her stuff. She's one of the better romanceable partners, in my opinion, although she holds out for "don't get involved with work partners" principle for too long, when you could be seeing more cuteness instead. Still, even so, I thought she was the equal of Kira Carsen in terms of likeable romanceable partners, which puts her at the top of the heap. She's also one of the few romanceable characters who I didn't think there was any need to apply a customization to make her prettier, either. Gault Rennow is also one of my favorite characters, and his comments make him one to bring out with you more often than not (pro tip; I laughed out loud hardest in the entire game because I had Gault with me on Hoth. Be sure and bring him.)

Blizz, the eager to please Jawa tinkerer is kind of a fan favorite, although he feels more like a puppy dog than a companion to me. Torian is fine. He tries too hard to talk about Mandalorianism way too much for my taste, but I get it; a lot of fans really like the Mandalorian ethnography stuff. (Personally, I was amused beyond all get-out to see that the Clone Wars clearly made Mandalorian culture something completely different than the EU had made it, and I was kind of annoyed to see Rebels and the Mandalorian show itself attempt beyond all reason to wrangle the old EU paradigm back into place.) Skadge is the last companion you pick up, and he's usually flagged as one of the worst companions in the entire companion roster of any character period. I agree, but you don't actually get exposed to too much of him, which helps.

I played the game as a powertech, specifically a pyrotech, so I was really, really into the flamethrower stuff. I think that the bounty hunter mechanics work very well with the character, and I enjoyed the area attacks with fire most especially. While you're supposedly supposed to be heavily armed and armored, it may not feel too much like it. A lot of the attacks come from "hidden" accoutrements on your suit, I suppose, but you only actually wield a single pistol. This is probably fine if you get a big enough one (I had a massive piece that I bought on the fleet right after Hutta from the bounty broker vendor. It was so good that I never once felt at all like swapping it out. It really looks the part. I love that gun.) The "other" advanced class, on the other hand, is a duel pistol wielding gunfighter, which seems a little odd given that mechanically he's a mirror of the commando, the trooper that has the big, slung, cannon. I haven't played this version of the bounty hunter, but I did play that version of the trooper. While the animations are clearly going to be different, the mechanics seemed very appropriate for either, I think. Although I never understood why either would be a healer, except that they felt that they needed a healer, I suppose. It's possible  to pick a DPS spec and avoid most of the healer stuff, which for single player, in my opinion, makes the most sense. It also seems to fit the class better too.

IMPERIAL AGENT

While the bounty hunter seems popular enough, I suspect that my esteem for it as literally one of the best character stories is probably unusual. This is not the case with the agent. Most fans of the game will point to this story, and even if it's not to their liking personally, they have to admit that it's one of the better stories. If nothing else, it's got more meaningful options that affect the conclusion of the story than any other class. It cleaves very tightly to the conventions of its genre and what makes its genre so successful (although, again, to be fair, that genre isn't space opera. It's spy movies and other types of thrillers.) It offers some unique perspectives; an actual patriotic Imperial agent who cares about the Empire and believes in its cause for the right reasons, but who has to navigate the craziness of working around the Sith all of the time. (The implicit conflict between the Sith as a caste in Imperial society vs non-Sith is an interesting background vibe that never really completely leaves the Agent's storyline.)

I think it's this actual character trait of the agent that makes it so compelling. The understated, quiet British accent is perfect for the role, and no doubt plays a part in why it is so often compared to James Bond specifically, instead of other spy thrillers like something written by James Patterson or Tom Clancy, even though it invites comparison to them just as readily. The agent is a servant of the Imperial government, but he never once really feels like a villain; he's a sympathetic, likeable and relatable guy who wants to see his people succeed. There's even a bunch of special lines of dialogue available to people who play a non-human agent, and the "iconic" agent was probably envisioned to be a Chiss.

I've already mentioned that the plotlines are probably the strongest point of the class; more than most other classes, it simply doesn't feel like "oh, we have to go to this planet because it's a design parameter of the game to have us go here next, so cram something in and make it fit." The agent class story feels more natural and simply better written than any of the other stories. It also manages to come up with a lot of the natural tension that thrillers have, and keep it there, which is quite a feat given the kind of laissez-faire wander around doing whatever quest is closest to you at the moment feel of the game. Your pulse is never too far from the central issue of the class story, whether it be trying to stop imminent terrorist attacks, trying to undo Manchurian Candidate mental conditioning that is taking away your agency, or trying to stop a shadowy cabal of movers and shakers that no other class story even imagines exists.

However, all is not roses on the agent's front. Unfortunately, in spite of these manifest strengths, the agent has among the worst companions you can get in game. In fact, you're stuck with literally one of the worst ones for a very long time. Luckily for me, I have access from the get-go to some non-story companions, like Shae Viszla and Treek, so I benched Kaliyo, the worst girlfriend in the world, and talked to her as infrequently as possible. She's also supposed to be the default romance option, which is ludicrous, as she's the most unlikeable girl in the entire lineup of frequently unlikeable and unattractive girls. I shut her down hard, and would have loved to not even take her on as a companion at all if I could have. Luckily, there's a late alternate romance option that's not terrible, a girl you pick up on Hoth who's been on assignment to the Chiss. Her voice actress is a blonde Aussie, but the character herself, for some reason, is black. I swapped her out for a much prettier white girl option and romanced her. It was... OK. A little rushed as late-appearing companions always are, but certainly preferable to the bald crazy chick who only makes super beta SJWs excited. Kaliyo is literally the worst. Besides these two romanceable options, the rest of the companions aren't that great either. You spend a fair bit of time with Vector, and I think he's the romanceable option if your character is a girl. Sadly, he's one of those anthropology lesson characters, who just talks about alien culture all the time. Given that he's a human who's been partially "borgified" by a bunch of super creepy bugs, I didn't find him particularly likeable either; in fact, he kind of creeped me out, and if I could have chosen to not take him on at all, I would have done so.

You also get SCORPIO, the completely untrustworthy egomaniacal robot girl with a serious superiority complex. Another iffy choice. And finally, you get Dr. Lokin, a middle-aged scientist with a Bruce Banner "anger management" issue of sorts. It's telling that of all of the companions, he's one of the least offensive to have around. 

I played the agent as a Sniper, which is similar to the smuggler's gunslinger advanced class in terms of mechanics, even though it has a sniper rifle instead of dual pistols. I expect to see more of this in game, actually, once the separation of "combat style" (what used to be advanced class) and story happen in the upcoming expansion in a few weeks. He's the only one who can wield a sniper rifle, and the mechanics work quite well. I actually found that they worked better for this class than they did for the gunslinger, to be honest with you. I felt that it felt more appropriate for a sniper in most respects. Plus, since its the only class that used this option, I felt like I had to do it. However, I admit that the stealth abilities of the Operative seem very appropriate for this class too. A used a collection of crafted sniper rifles for most of his run, updating them once I hit high enough level to do so. I might adopt a different look now that weapons will be part of the outfit designer going forward.

All in all, I can heartily recommend both of these classes. Neither are perfect, but both offer a top-notch experience all the same. The bounty hunter is brought down occasionally by its unfocused "treading water" sections of the plot, and the agent is brought down by the absolutely terrible companion characters. But in spite of those weaknesses, they both still manage to be among my favorite experiences in the game. In part, precisely because they weren't iconic Star Wars stories, but stories from another genre; a western and a thriller, if you will, yet grafted pretty seamlessly on top of the space opera Star Wars setting. 

For the next part, I'll review the storylines of the expansion packs, Knights of the Eternal Throne and Knights of the Fallen Empire, as well as the smaller expansions like Shadow of Revan, Onslaught, etc. at least as far as they go so far, as well as some of the other extra content that you can do once you're no longer doing the class stories, because you've finished them. Then I think we'll be done with what will have turned out to be a seven part Mother of All SWTOR Reviews series.

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part V: The Sith Classes

Once again, the class stories, which are the real meat and potatoes of any BioWare game, including Old Republic, are the most important single elements, and I've decided that they include four constituent parts needed to evaluate them. These are 1) the main character, and his portrayal by the writers and voice actor, 2) the plot and villains/rivals, 3) the companion characters, including the romanceable options, and 4) the class mechanics.

Again, to really be a true mother of all SWTOR reviews, I'd need to play each class story twice; so that I could see both advanced class options and both the male and female voice actor performances. I've only done each of them once, however, with a male voice actor on all classes.

Let's talk today about the Sith classes. Like the Jedi, there are two options, the Sith Warrior (with a Juggernaut 1-lightsaber option and a Marauder 2-lightsaber option, that correspond with the Jedi Knight) and the Sith Inquisitor (with a double lightsaber and stealth option called the Assassin and a single lightsaber and loads of lightning powers called a Sorcerer. These correspond to the Jedi Consular Shadow and Sage respectively.) Both Sith classes start on the planet Korriban (called Moraband in the Clone Wars) which is kind of a combination of a space opera rendition of Mars with Old Egyptian-like architecture and ruins all over the place. Korriban as portrayed here could be Eric John Stark's Mars in almost every way.

(As an aside, if you haven't read the double book that includes "People of the Talisman" and "The Secret of Sinharat" before, you absolutely should. It's fantastic, even though it's a good 70+ years old now. My copy is the 1982 printing called Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars, but there are other printings, including the Ace Double Book, which have the exact same text.)

SITH WARRIOR

The Sith Warrior is the second most iconic of all of the class stories, and serves as a kind of dark mirror in many ways to the most iconic, which is the Jedi Knight. The Sith Warrior seems to be a kind of aristocratic Sith Warrior, although of course he has to prove himself at the Sith Academy on Korriban, and there are many places in his career where he could have been killed ignominiously. The voice actor is British and does a fantastic job. My Sith Warrior was a human male, which seems in some ways the most appropriate, and the story is absolutely fantastic. 

I also played the Sith Warrior as a kind of reformer of sorts, who didn't really do the ridiculous "dark side" option all that often when I had a chance to do something more sensible. I suspect that most people who play the Sith Warrior do something similar; picking light side options as often as not. The character himself is fairly serious, although there are definitely some moments of dry wit that make me laugh out loud. In many respects, I thought he was a more interesting character than his Jedi counterpart, although I admit that the Sith story and the Imperial faction stories in general didn't grip me quite as much because of its ridiculous cartoon villainy that you have to accept more than you'd probably like. I've heard him compared as a character specifically with the Clone Wars era Obiwan Kenobi, in terms of his sarcasm and wit, in particular. 

The plot here is also one of the better ones. Darth Baras is the Sith Lord's master for a big chunk of the story, although it's hardly a spoiler to point out that eventually he becomes the final rival that must be defeated at the end of the arc. There's a lot of spy stuff going on, and a frankly kind of silly idea that there's this super special Jedi girl who has a super special power that would wreak havoc on Imperial agents all over the galaxy. While I found this concept a bit McGuffinish in a silly way, the story is otherwise really good. It also involves the high level Imperial politics and what's going on with the Emperor specifically, which is why it's an interesting dark mirror to the Jedi Knight, and the only one (of two) class stories that actually flows in a good way into the Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne storylines. The interaction between the Sith Warrior and Darth Baras, who is the third act villain, unsurprisingly, is also extremely well done. I actually thought that in terms of very clear focus prior to Darth Baras' inevitable betrayal, that it probably could have been a little better. Darth Baras' Jedi counterpart and rival was not nearly as compelling a figure, although it did allow for an exploration of the corruption and hypocrisy of the Jedi code and the Jedi structure in general. One of my personal favorite topics in Star Wars, if done well, because it increasingly becomes clear that Lucas' interpretation of the Jedi is flawed and absurd. This theme is even very apparent if the Sith Warrior is a reformer and a light-sider (mostly) seeking to make the Sith more reasonable and effective rather than cartoonishly villainous. 

The Sith Warrior has a decent collection of companions, compared to some of the ones we've seen before. By this I basically mean that about half of the companions are likeable, and the other half I could take or leave. Vette, the sassy twi'lek girl is the first one you get, and the default romanceable option for male Sith Warriors. I actually didn't romance Vette, because she's a weird blue-skinned alien with tentacles instead of hair, and my Sith Warrior was a good looking human male. He has better options! Or, at least he should, although the game doesn't really provide them. I suspect that its a good romance, because Vette is a charming character, but her alien-ness just kind of turned me off. Jaesa is a human female; the former Jedi padawan that you take as your apprentice. You can go dark or light side with her, and I did light-side. The romance with her doesn't progress very well in the normal story; you get to a platonic understanding that having children together would be logical, and that's about it. However, at the end of the expansions, you can have an actual romantic reunion with her that is probably worth the payoff. It's a shame that this wasn't developed, though, as for me, it was a much more likely scenario than a sassy teenaged alien. I'll probably replay this again as an alien character (Chiss or Miralian or Zabrak or something) and since my character will be an alien too, I'll probably feel better romancing an alien girl. It might also be worth doing the dark side Jaesa option just to see how different it is, because it is a completely different type of relationship compared to the light side Jaesa, and makes her character strikingly different.

Quinn is the next most important character, and he's interesting because he offers some unique moral dilemmas. He's not exactly a likeable character in his own right, but he's an interesting one in terms of what he brings to the story. Pierce, on the other hand, is just the Imperial version of a trooper, and has a kind of boring military story going on, and Broonmark is nothing more than an extra violent Chewbacca or something; he brings very little to the table, and I don't care about him in the least. 

The Marauder is a pretty classic Sith feeling mechanicals. It's in-your-face aggressive, and very much to my style

In fact, I think the Marauder in particular is considered by many fans to be one of the funnest mechanical sets to play, and very well-suited to the Sith Warrior. 

I'd rank the Sith Warrior as one of the better experiences in the game. If you only play one character story, I recommend the Jedi Knight, probably the Guardian with one lightsaber being the most iconic mechanical advanced class option. But if you play two, I probably would recommend the Sith Warrior, specifically as a Marauder as the second most iconically Star Warsian story to play. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that the Sith Warrior or the Jedi Knight is literally the best story, just that its combination of being iconic along with being really good makes them the ones that you should play. And they are among the best stories, no matter how you cut it, although a case can be made (and I'll do that in my next post) that the non-Force using Imperials classes are perhaps the "best" stories.

SITH INQUISITOR

The Sith Inquisitor, on the other hand, is one of the poorer experiences. Perhaps a little better than the Jedi Consular, but not a lot. The character itself and his performance is fine; actually mostly fairly well done. The character isn't really one of the more serious ones, in fact, the cartoony cape-swirling villainy is frequently played up for laughs, and he's frequently put in absurd situations where there's allegedly humor in the absurdity. Sometimes this works OK, sometimes it just makes the whole Inquisitor experience feel like a dumb joke. The character himself is billed as a manipulative, darkly magical analog to Darth Sidious, but he's more like Darth Sidious' retarded older brother who only succeeded at much of anything due to insanely unbelievable levels of dumb luck. Even when the character is repeatedly told quite clearly what's happening, he stumbles right into blatantly obvious traps and insanely stupid hijinks. The Sith Inquisitor class story documents the Team Rocket of Sith Lords. 

If the story were billed as a farce, it might have been a little more palatable. As it is, I cringed way too often, and laughed way too infrequently for that to have been successful either. I think it needed to commit to being a farce and gone all in on it. 

In any case, the story itself is OK, especially for the first half. Running around binding Sith ghosts wasn't a terrible idea (although, of course, as it turns out, it was a terrible idea, the main character was just too stupid to have figured that out until he'd already done it.) However, the second half of the story it kind of falls apart. Some other Sith Lord takes your dumb luck ascension personally, or so it seems, and becomes your rival, but you never really understand exactly why he cares one way or another, making the entire second half feel extremely forced and plot devicey in a completely unconvincing manner. 

The story could maybe have been saved if the companions were cool, but this is actually one of the weaker companion collections out there as well. In fact, for a very long time, the only companion you have is Khem Val, your "morose monster." While not a terrible character, he's pretty one dimensional until a second personality is sucked into the body, at which point, he really becomes the only character in the entire retinue that's actually very interesting. Andronikos Revel, the space pirate, is fine, I suppose, although he's a little too predictable as a generic pirate to really be as interesting as he should be. I believe he's the romance option if you play as a female inquisitor, which according to many, is the better way to do it. Not that the male voice actor failed in any way at doing a good job, just that the dry farce nature of the story seems somehow to work better on a girl. Talos Drellik, the Sith archaeologist doesn't offend at least in a boring professor kind of way, and Xalek, who becomes your bone-faced apprentice is a complete cipher who gets no development at all whatsoever. And finally, you have your love interest, a failed Jedi girl named Ashara Zavros, who's Togruta. She's kind of pushy and unlikeable herself, and her motivation for being on your team never feels convincing. She's one of the weaker romance options, yet she's the only one you get. Not only is she a weird looking alien, but she's not even likeable as a girl. Vette at least has that going for her. 

Finally, I didn't really enjoy the Sith Assassin, pretty much for the same reason that I didn't much enjoy the Jedi Shadow. I liked the stealth ability... a lot... but actual combat never felt very interesting or varied, and I ended up button mashing just a few abilities over and over again most of the time. I think that the sorcerer is a more iconic use of the class, all the lightning abilities and whatnot, but sadly, that's not the one that I played. Given that I didn't love the story all that much, I'm not likely to want to play it again too soon either; I've got plenty of other characters that I'd rather replay with a different advanced class before I get around to this one.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled mother of all SWTOR reviews...

I'll get back to it tomorrow. In the meantime, I've been out of town, enjoying the Emerald Coast this last week. If you have never been to the Emerald Coast, I recommend it. Especially if you are, like me, an ethnic Southerner. It's been many years now that I've felt like a foreigner in my own country. There's two reasons for this: 1) America has been flooded with foreigners, especially uncouth Third Worlders with extremely uncouth behavior, and 2) I've been living up in Yankeeville, and even the Americans feel like foreigners to me up here. After more than twenty years, I'm still surprised on an almost daily basis by something that somebody does or says. 

I did not feel like a foreigner on the Emerald Coast. I hardly even saw any foreigners. One or two families of vacationing Hindis and one or two families of vacationing Mexicans and a British guy with an American wife. I think that's about it. I also hardly saw any Yankees. Most of the people there were from Georgia or Alabama or were locals from Florida. And the western panhandle of Florida is basically the same as Alabama or Georgia but with better beaches.

Normally, my yardstick for beach quality has to include wave height, and I'll freely admit that by that standard, the Emerald Coast isn't all that great. But the water is incredibly clean and clear, the sand is the best sand I've ever seen, and honestly, it was late enough in the year that it was a little too cold to do much swimming anyway. I enjoyed the beach the way my wife enjoys it; by just sitting in the sun, cracking open a water bottle every so often and mumbling some comment to my wife about something or other, laughing at seeing other people's Southerner, often blond, good-looking kids, who reminded us of our own from years past, as they played near us and were generally attractive and good looking families, and watching wildlife in the Gulf, including breaching fairly small devilfish and some distant dolphins. It wasn't the kind of beach vacation that I'm used to, but it was one that I enjoyed.

While there, I read three books, Planet of Peril by Otis Adalbert Kline, Godborn by Dan Davis, and Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. The third one is the one that caught my attention in a particular way. I'd never read any Piper before, but obviously his is a name that you hear if you're a science fiction fan. (To be fair, I'm much more of a fantasy fan. Which is why I haven't read some classic science fiction even now, sometimes.) One thing that surprised me (which no doubt surprises very few others) is that the Sword Worlds were obviously invented by Piper. When I saw the Sword Worlds in the Spinward Marches of the Traveller setting, I assumed that the Traveller people made them up. They didn't. I don't pretend to know a ton about the Sword Worlds in Traveller necessarily, but from what I do know, it seems hardly anything in the Traveller version of the idea didn't already exist in the Piper version of the Sword Worlds. 

Another surprise was the frequent mentions of a world called Hoth, which clearly George Lucas didn't invent either. Now, I don't know that Piper's Hoth is a frozen world. Nothing suggests that; rather, it's mentioned several times in an offhand way as a space Viking world. 

Space Viking is an interesting story in part because of its political discussions. There's an extended discussion, sometimes buried in other pursuits of the novel, about civilization, how to civilize, and how civilizations get decivilized. The long discussion about the planet Marduk and its civilization is one that many will recognize in Western Civilization today. Piper himself kept trying to compare what was happening overtly to Hitler, but it really feels more like the barbarism of the Left having taken over civilization than it does Nazism. Not that the story is a detailed discussion of the rise of the Fake Hitler character, but from what little it does mention, little of it seems specifically Nazi. And I've read some pretty detailed accounts of the rise of the Nazis, including Shirer's classic work (which misses some pretty obvious stuff in hindsight, in spite of it's "classicness.") No, a reader from today reading it isn't going to be reminded of Hitler. He's going to be reminded of the Democrats, and painfully, of the Republican Establishment.

When Trask, the main character, remarks sadly to his friends on Marduk—at a point where they aren't yet ready to accept this fact, although they are forced to later on—that their nice civilization is already finished, because they've already let the barbarians run amok inside the gates, that's a painfully obvious parallel to what has happened to us already too. And just like the nice Mardukians are mostly in denial of that, most Americans are as well even today, but the die has already been cast. What will come is inevitable now. And even if it could somehow be stopped, averted, or at least mitigated, which I doubt, there's no political will to do so, because most people are in denial about what is inevitably coming.

But people used to know it. H. Beam Piper talked about it at length in, what: 1962 and 1963, when this novel was serialized in Analog? In 1962 many of the inevitable problems in America hadn't even started yet. 1962 was a wonderful year. A magical year, in many ways. Frankie Avalon's Beach Party came out in 1963. Surfin' Safari came out in 1962, and the next three classic Beach Boys albums came out in 1963. I'd love to have been a young man during the time Space Viking was published. But I missed it by a generation. That's when my dad was a teenager. I had to have the late 80s, which—to be fair—was a pretty cool time to be a teenager too. But little did we know; America was about to be irrevocably changed for the worse.

Anyway, enough melancholy maundering. Tomorrow I'll continue the Mother of All SWTOR reviews series by talking about at least half of the Empire side class stories. Maybe both halves, if I have time.

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part IV: The Non-Jedi Classes (Republic)

The Jedi classes are obviously tied together, being the Jedi classes, but the other two are just grouped together by convenience, not otherwise really having anything in common. The smuggler and trooper classes both start together on the planet of Ord Mantell. In addition to their starting place, they are notable of course in that they are not force-using classes, and instead of lightsabers, they have guns. I played my smuggler as a gunslinger, with twin pistols, and I played my trooper as a commando with the big cannon-thing that he slings around like Jesse Ventura from Predator. I also had my smuggler become my armstech crafter, so he makes the craftable guns. For what that's worth. My trooper, on the other hand, used a progression of crafted cannons most of his "career" that the smuggler had made and mailed to him. One of the small yet significant upgrades I'm looking forward to in the new expansion that's coming out in about three weeks is the ability to have "cosmetic" weapons in the outfit designer, so the stats and the appearance aren't necessarily tied together anymore.

Anyway, let's go over again briefly the elements that I think contribute to the story playthrough experience: 1) the character himself and his portrayal through the written dialog and its delivery, 2) the plot and villains that you face off against, 3) the companion characters, and the romance options among them, and 4) how well the mechanics of the class contribute to the feel of the character.

SMUGGLER

The premise of the smuggler, of course, is to play as an Old Republic analog to Han Solo. The iconic look for the smuggler is usually even very similar to the classic Han Solo vest or jacket kind of outfit. (Although there's a commonly appearing odd one where you've got one of those neck pillows like you're about to go on a cross-Atlantic flight and want to sleep in your seat.) You even get a wookie companion, although its not the first or most prominent one in your lineup.

In general, I'd say that the smuggler class story is one of the middle of the road experiences. I was excited to play this one, as the concept is one that I really like, but the reality wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped it would be. There's a couple of different reasons for this, and I'll get to them below. First off, how is the character itself? I actually think that he's kind of charming most of the time, in a hapless kind of way. The voice actor, Maury Sterling, is perfect for the role, and there's a lot of wit and light-heartedness to the writing. That's the good. The bad is a bit more complicated. See, the smuggler is portrayed as this alpha ladies man. On almost every single planet, there's an opportunity for a romantic fling, for instance. However, what you start to notice after a while is that the smuggler himself is kind of reactionary, passive and even beta. It's like someone tried to write a ladies man character without having the first idea of what a real ladies man is actually like. His flirty options are often kind of cringy and begging-sounding, almost, from girls that a real ladies man wouldn't give a second chance to once she showed her unlikable first front. This problem carries forward more than normal with the actual plot of the story too; the character is somehow unable to make another NPC character give him the information that he needs. There's a poorly conceived fig-leaf for why he'd go along with being strung along like this, but I gotta be honest with you; it never felt very convincing to me.

I know some of that was probably inevitable because of the medium. You can't make characters too proactive with this kind of writing, because otherwise it would be too open ended for a writer to actually write it. But you can and should do a better job of concealing that, by making the character himself feel like he's in the driver's seat even so, and not following along like a puppy dog after some other NPC who holds all of the cards. Even though, as it happens, she held only a couple of the cards and for reasons that I can't divine, we treat her like she holds all of them. I couldn't help but imagine all kinds of ways that I would have gotten around that situation if it were a table-top roleplaying experience as opposed to pre-scripted computer roleplaying experience. Ultimately, that's just not what you're expecting. The Han Solo experience is that he's a capable fellow, independent, and used to making things happen, not a hapless tagalong on his own adventure. I haven't heard a lot of people complain about this in reviews, so maybe it's not a universal problem, but it just wasn't the experience I was expecting for the smuggler, and it ended up being really kind of disappointing.

Similarly, I think the two halves of the story are not created equal. All of the stories have basically two halves; the first one makes up the introduction and Chapter 1, a total of 6 planets, and  the second makes up chapters 2 and 3, so 6 more planets. For each of the stories, you have a rival in the first half and then you graduate to a new rival/enemy and situation. With the exception of being led around too passively, which is the only thing that I don't like about the first half, I thought the treasure hunt stuff and race against Skavak was pretty good. When you go on to become a privateer for the Republic, it kind of loses focus. I don't think the second half of the story is nearly as compelling until you get to nearly the end where it tries to surprise you. I also kind of thought that dragging out an off-hand reference to Rogun the Butcher from Ord Mantell all the way to the end wasn't really credible. I was saying "Bring Rogun on!" from nearly the beginning, and yet I'm supposed to be running scared from him the entire game? The Republic privateer half promised a kind of Errol Flynn in space, but it felt like treading water until they could get to the plot point down the line that they were excited to show at nearly the very end. And to be honest with you, I'm not sure that I loved the idea of being a Republic privateer anyway. I liked the more independent feel of the first half of the story. I know that since everyone converges on the battle of Corellia at the end of their class stories that you can't be too independent, but that was always really the promise of the smuggler and bounty hunter classes in particular, and they didn't do enough to give them some space from the faction, in my opinion. Now, I'm sure it wasn't ever their intention to either, but I think that that independent feel is part of what makes both of those classes appealing as a concept, so they probably should have.

The smuggler has a decent set of companions, I suppose. Corso is the first one you pick up, and he's kind of a dumb bro type of guy. I think he's romanceable if you play a woman smuggler, but he feels a little too dumb for that to make sense to me. There's nothing wrong with him, he's just kind of always focused on some weird small picture item, like his favorite blaster, or something like that. His white-knighting personality starts to get old after a while too. The Chewie equivalent, curiously, is also kind of boring; he's just got the typical wookie former slave kind of thing going on, that we've now seen over and over again, as if it's the only thing any writer knows how to do with wookies. Gus is the last companion you pick up, and he quickly became one of my favorites. He's kind of a hapless Admiral Ackbar-looking failed Jedi swindler who's eager to please. They should have had more of him in the game, in my opinion. The two girls are the romance options, and you can do either, actually. One of them is Risha. Although you interact with her for a long time, on your ship no less, she doesn't officially become a companion until after chapter 1. Given that it was my intention to "recast" her, i.e., apply a customization to a prettier version, I found this kind of annoying. She's the more obvious romance option, but she plays so hard to get that I almost got tired of trying before it was done. I think the writers were going for the witty banter, Hepburn/Tracy kind of thing, but they didn't really do it very well because she was too bossy and ultimately started to veer into unlikableness, and the main character was too helpless against her banter, which I found really strange. It's almost like the writers don't actually have any idea what the relationship between a successful alpha-type man and a pretty girl actually looks like. Nothing about it rang very true to me. The other romanceable option is Akaavi Spar, the big, burly, Darth Maul looking warrior grrl, who is the least feminine "woman" I could ever have imagined. The very idea that anyone would want to romance her jars my suspension of disbelief.

I think the gunslinger option is supposed to represent a kind of Western gunfighter in space. I'm not sure that I ever felt entirely like that, though. The whole notion of needing to get into cover to use some of your abilities didn't feel very gunfighterish to me either, although maybe it makes sense in a more realistic sense. It's probably not really fair to harp on this, but I felt like I was bored with the combat mechanics of the class by the time I was done with it. I never got bored with the Jedi Knight. I will admit, though—for the first several planets, I thought his abilities were pretty cool and fun to use.

TROOPER

I admit that I expected the trooper to be one of my least favorites, and it ended up being better than I expected. The very reasons that I expected not to like it do keep it down, but they ended up not being as bad as I feared. Notably, the fact that you're constantly running around doing errands for some CO who's judgement and motivation you couldn't really trust, but because you're a soldier you don't really have a choice. This is definitely a thing. But there's a lot more going on than just that, which is what I was afraid that there wouldn't be. 

In terms of character, there's not a lot going on with the trooper either. The voice actor turns out a credible job, but I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to be seeing. You can kind of pick his attitude; cocky and bragging, dutiful, etc. with the dialog wheel, but since it makes little difference I'm not sure what that accomplishes. Whereas the smuggler has a built in personality, the trooper doesn't really. His playthrough is much more based on plot than on personality.

However, I felt like the moral dilemmas that the trooper was faced with were kind of the only ones that weren't dumb and hoaky. There was actually some decent writing as the trooper had to deal with things like a squad of pilots who'd been thrown under the bus and made the scapegoats for top brass's lack of intelligence, how to deal with entitled, meddling politicians when you didn't necessarily trust the motivations or judgement of your own superiors either, what to do about a senior intelligence officer who seemed to be botching a mission and making the wrong call with some friends of one of your companions, an intelligence officer that you knew and liked but who you had to decide to save vs a whole boatload of other prisoners, etc. In general, I don't appreciate the BioWare moral dilemmas, because they don't usually represent real morality or realistic consequences of much of anything. They just feel preachy and dumb. The trooper, on the other hand, really kind of made them more real. 

Tracking down a collection of traitors makes up the first half of the plot, and as is sadly all too often the case, the first half of the story was well-focused, and the second half lacks focus until you zero in on the ending. I felt like that was true here again for the trooper, as it was for the smuggler, and frankly, for many of the classes. The second half of the story is recruiting your team, and it not only felt unfocused and kind of weird and contrived, but frustrating, as several of the companions aren't really ones that I'd have picked myself, if I could. But I couldn't; I was simply told that this was going to be my team. For most of the companion recruitment for most classes, it's a bit more subtle; here you're just told that you're going to go recruit this companion just because and the whole planetary class story is about recruiting them. When you head to Corellia to confront your second half of the story nemesis, it's actually kind of weird, because you've only just heard of him, and don't really think of him as much of a nemesis. He was unfortunately not sufficiently built up to work.

I really only liked two of the companions, to be honest with you. The one you pick up on Ord Mantell is too grumpy to enjoy; his constant "On your feet!" because he's healing you when you just quick traveled (why does that always prompt the companions to heal you, anyway?) got really annoying, and I put him in the ship after that. Elara Dorne, the Imperial defector, is probably the most likable one. I like taking her also because even in the story she's supposed to be a medic. It made sense for her to run around with heal spec turned on. She's the romanceable option, and she's a relatively cute romanceable companion. A little stuffier than I'd like in real life (OK, a lot stuffier than I'd like in real life) but it works in the context of this character. M1-4X is a kind of walking "buy war bonds!" ad, but I actually didn't mind him from a roleplaying perspective. However, I did find that because he's a bigger companion than most that he often actually got in the way visually, so I didn't end up using him very often either. The two that you recruit in the later stages, the dishonorably discharged demolitions criminal that you are told to bring back "because he's the best!" regardless of his completely unacceptable behavior, just really bugged me, and the strange alien anthropology class is dumb too. There are several characters in the game that exist only to showcase their weird alien culture, and in almost all cases I really don't care for what they bring to the table. 

The mechanics of the commando were really nice. I loved the explosive rounds, which tended to knock people down, and then you'd laser gun them right to the crotch while they were laying there on their backs on the ground. I did start to feel like some of the "trick ammo" variations weren't really all that different from each other, but for the most part, I thought combat with the commando worked really well and felt like what I'd have expected it to feel like. Because I was leapfrogging my commando and my powertech at the same time, going back and forth between them, I often felt like when I was playing one I missed some combat mechanic of the other really badly and vice versa. Because the powertech plays like the vanguard, albeit with different animation, I guess I know what to expect from both the mercenary and vanguard now too. Even though these are the two that I most recently just finished, they're also the ones that I'm in some ways most excited to play again from a mechanics perspective. And I wouldn't even mind seeing the stories again, even though I literally just did. I suppose that's a positive note to end on, even though I'd otherwise say that the somewhat bland personality, more forgettable or even unlikeable companion characters, and unfocused second act of the story make the trooper another middle of the road experience; not the worst one by far, but also not the best one.

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part III: The Jedi Classes

Because, as I've hopefully made clear in my earlier parts of this review, the RPG class stories are the heart and soul of the Old Republic's success and are really the main attraction of the game, I'm going to spend the rest of of the parts of the "mother of all SWTOR reviews" talking about them, two at a time. Today we'll tackle the two Jedi class stories which start on the planet Tython. Reviewing class stories and how they play means that there are a few common things that I need to cover, because they are the main inputs that determine how well the class experience plays. I'll reiterate very briefly in each subsequent post what these are, but here I'll explain why I think these inputs are the ones that need to be discussed.

1) The character itself and his portrayal, voice acting, etc. I can't comment on this entirely; I've only played through each story as a male character, so I don't know much about the female voice acting. Obviously, which options on the dialog wheel you pick will make this somewhat different, but mostly you'll find that those options often have little real impact, and you kind of get funneled by inertia into a certain portrayal of the character for the most part anyway. While it's possible to try and play a dark side Jedi, I suppose, the reality is that surveys by BioWare have shown that on the contrary, most people play their characters—regardless of faction—as more or less good guys, doing what they themselves would like to think that they'd do, or as close as they can approximate with the choices on option. That said, the writing makes certain characters all kind of have a certain temperament and personality, regardless of what choices you make or try to make for your character. The smuggler is a flippant wit and the Jedi are fairly serene, bland sticks in the mud, for instance.

2) That last phrase may have been a bit of a spoiler; the character of both of the Jedi classes is not their strongest element. It's almost like they went out of their way to make them as uninteresting as possible. But the main character is only one input; the plot of the story for the class is the one of the next big ones. In this, I'm also including the villains or rivals that you face, since they are so integral to the plot. A really good villain can raise a mediocre story, and if there's a good villain with a good plot, even a bland main character won't hold the story back.

3) Given that this is a BioWare game, another important aspect is the supporting cast, i.e., your companion characters. An interesting ensemble of sidekicks can also really help bring a mediocre main character to life. Given that this is a BioWare game, this also includes the romance options available, since romancing companion characters is such an on-brand trait for a BioWare game. If you've got a cute, plucky sidekick that you can make into your girlfriend in a reasonably charming romance, then that goes a long way towards adding charisma and likeableness to the main character too. Again, I've only played male characters so far, so I'm only familiar with the girl romance options (the weird gay and alien options only are applicable in the expansions; the main story had fairly "normal" romance options.)

4) How well do the class mechanics play and how fun is the class? Obviously, I can't comment fully on this. There are two advanced classes for each class story, and each advanced class as three "specs" although these changes are a bit more on the subtle side compared to the differences between the advanced classes. But they're not immaterial. For the most part, all of the specs are fine, but some aren't really as suitable for solo play. Mostly, I'd recommend picking a DPS (damage dealing) spec rather than a tank or healer, and keeping your companion on its default heal setting. The other settings are probably best explored by people who are actually using the character for grouping content. However, I didn't always do this correctly, and I did find that, for instance, using a tank spec Jedi Shadow was sometimes kind of suboptimal; I got a bunch of abilities that in hindsight I didn't really end up wanting to use very much. It's possible, to be honest, that I simply don't really like the Jedi Shadow advanced class (or its Sith equivalent) as those are the two I had the least fun playing from a mechanical perspective. I think that the other alternative is now considered the more "classic" take on the class, so I probably just made a mistake there in picking an advanced class that I didn't like as much, and picking the same mirrored one on the Sith side at the same time. 

JEDI KNIGHT

It took me a while to actually get going on this game. I played a demo of it way back in the very early days, and I played a female smuggler up to 20th level or so. I also played bounty hunter for a bit on another account. When I really started playing for real, I played a bounty hunter again, but because I didn't realize that you could lock out your story if you jumped into an expansion, I messed it up after spending many hours on it, doing all of chapter 1, including all planetary and exploration missions. This guy is level 75, and I need to keep him because he's my armormech character (Crafting. I haven't even mentioned that, have I?) Anyway, I decided finally to quit messing around, and made a chart of everything that I'm supposed to do and when I'm supposed to do it so that I don't accidentally kick off something that locks me out, and then started over with the Jedi Knight class as the first organized and well managed character I played. (ed. aside: This game isn't quite as open world as it may seem. Just because a guy is standing around with a quest icon over his head doesn't necessarily mean you should always go talk to him.) I kind of leapfrogged my Jedi Knight and the Sith Warrior, chapter by chapter, and played them concurrently. 

It's clear that the Jedi Knight is the canon class of the game. It's kind of the one that the devs consider the most iconic. It's got most of the stuff that leads into the expansion stories integrated into it too. I feel like the most effort was put into it in some ways. It's the one that has the most "Knights of the Old Republic III" feel to it. If for some reason you only ever play one class, this is the one that I'd recommend the most. Not necessarily because I think it's the best story, but it's just the most iconically Star Warsian of them all.

Let's go through the numbers then, shall we? First, the portrayal of the character itself is probably one of the weakest aspects of this story. The voice actor that they cast has a very relaxed, "serene" delivery, no doubt at the director's insistence, that accentuates the fact that he's really kind of written as a boring stick in the mud. Ask him anything, and you get an out of context fortune cookie quote as an answer. I don't want to call him a goodie-two-shoes, although that's really how he comes across. This is also accentuated by the fact that right off the bat you're treated to an inane "moral dilemma"; the Jedi council on Tython sits around hand-wringing about an illegal settlement of twi'lek trespassers. These entitled, bratty little princesses complain that the Jedi don't help them more—when they're the ones trespassing on the Jedi's planet in defiance of the legality of their settlement—and then ultimately (and this is a minor spoiler) they stab the Jedi in the back and betray your character specifically. 

In spite of this, if you advocate with the council for telling them that the party's over, and the crashers have to go back home and leave, you get a bunch of smug lectures delivered in a hall monitor tone from the useless Jedi masters of the council.  I actually thought that the start of this story was fairly inauspicious and frustrating. Luckily, once you leave the rest of the Jedi behind, for the most part, it improves tremendously. This has almost always been a problem with the portrayal of the Jedi Order across all mediums in Star Wars; they're supposed to be these paragons of virtue and wisdom, but in reality they more often than not come across as the villains of the story. Not in the comic book swirling dark capes around and laughing menacingly kind of villains; those are the Sith, of course—but in the sense that they are a fifth column chewing away at social order and cohesion, destroying the Republic from within with their smug, self-righteous craziness. I think the problem is that all too often the writers are SJWs, women and betas, including all too obviously George Lucas himself, so they have a poor idea of what good and evil actually is. Their attempt to portray good sometimes is just flat-out evil. In any case, I was actually kind of annoyed with the story during Tython, but it improved significantly once I left. 

In fact, it's probably best that we turn to that now; the plot of the Jedi Knight is the most "high fantasy"; the biggest, swashbucklingest, high stakes craziness space opera plot of the whole game, and it is certainly one of the stronger portions of a Jedi Knight playthrough. While the Empire and the Republic are technically in a state of peace, a rogue element of Sith are waging open warfare against the Jedi and Republic and this character in particular for personal reasons, using illegal superweapons that the Republic developed (but shouldn't have) which have been stolen. After rushing around desperately stopping all of these at the last second, the war starts for real. The Hero is caught up in a strike team to go assassinate the Emperor himself (because I guess that's now a legitimate way to wage war. SJWs.) This goes disastrously wrong, the entire strike team is brainwashed and turned to the dark side, but our Hero manages to escape thanks to the ghost of his old master and an unexpected ally close to the Emperor himself, who now admits that he's known for centuries that the Emperor wanted to consume all life in the entire galaxy and had a vision that this guy, our Hero, would be the one to stop him. The story ends on a final, epic second confrontation with the Emperor himself. Again; once you get past the fart-sniffing, hand-wringing of Tython, this story is fantastic, and it hits all of the right notes for what a truly epic Star Wars story should have. It's on par with other equally well-regarded Star Wars stories, like Knights of the Old Republic itself, in my opinion. The classic well-rounded villains as well as the gripping plot alleviate the blandness of the main character, who gradually grew on me over time once he didn't have to spend time sweating contrived, hoaky "moral dilemmas" clumsily constructed by writers who wouldn't know morality if it beat them up in a back alley.

The Jedi Knight also has probably the best collection of companion characters too. T7, your first one, has most of the charm of R2-D2 himself. Kira, your second, is probably the best, or at least tied for the best, romantic option in the game. She's a great girlfriend and a charming NPC. Doc is a little try-hard, but he's good for some laughs, and Scourge, when you get him, is one of the more unexpected and interesting characters you can get. He's also probably the best "last character" you pick up in the game; most of those last companions you pick up just don't have the time to develop properly, so they feel kinda meh. The only exception to the great companions is Sergeant Rusk; a character that I never really figured out what his role was other than that they needed one more character. He's kind of a cipher filling space like goods in a package, and I could do without him and never really notice the loss.

Did I mention that Kira is probably the best, or at least among the very best romance options in the game? (I know, I did.) Laura Bailey, now of Critical Role fame, does the voice acting. She's one of the best developed and best written and best portrayed of all of the romanceable characters, and because you have access to her as a companion for almost the entire game (you pick her up officially on Coruscant, the second planet) you have plenty of time to develop the romance. She's also actually got an interesting story of her own to explore where she had been an Imperial asset as a child and has to deal with the fallout from that past. The plot, villains and companions of the Jedi Knight are really top notch; probably the absolute best in the game, and go a long way towards alleviating the plank of wood personality that the main character himself is kind of saddled with by the writers. 

I played the game with the Guardian advanced class. This one uses a single lightsaber, and has a variety of very classic Jedi moves. In fact, I think it does a really good job of making you feel like you're playing a Jedi as they're portrayed in the movies, with similar abilities and combat styles. Some of the classes don't really feel quite as much like the moves in game match what you'd expect from the source material, but in this case, it very much does. Again, I suspect that the devs put their greatest effort here, making the Jedi Knight feel like the most iconic class to play in the entire game. It's a shame that they didn't see a more dynamic and human protagonist as consistent with being a paragon of the Jedi Order. If they had, they'd have managed to do literally everything right with this story. In spite of a little bit of a rough couple of hours of play at the beginning, I think this is the one that I ended up having the most fun with overall. It's the most Star Warsy of them all too.

JEDI CONSULAR

There is another Jedi class, though. It also starts on Tython. Like the Knight, the Consular is also, unfortunately, a plank of wood, who's voice actor was coached into portraying him as if he's trying to put everyone he talks to to sleep. In fact, this character is probably a good order of magnitude more boring and bland than the other Jedi. And unfortunately, the rest of the elements that make up his experience aren't good enough to ameliorate it as they are in the knight. To wit:

The plot is a little bit all over the place. It tends to focus on hidden, mystical, mind-controlling corruption type things. A Dark Plague is turning Jedi masters to the dark side and controlling them. Our Hero finds some kind of mystical ritual that removes the plague and restores their personalities, so for the first chapter, you have to run around rescuing Jedi masters who've been taken by this plague. At this point, he gets an extremely precocious honor, and he's called the Barsen'thor. Of course, nobody knows what a Barsen'thor is, but supposedly it's an incredible honor that hardly anyone has ever been given, you being only the third in the entire Jedi history. And this is at the end of chapter 1. Following this, you're sent on a kind of run-of-the mill diplomatic mission to deal with some entitled and bratty politicians who are skeptical that the Republic has their planets' best interests in mind. The third act involves dealing with sleeper personalities loyal to the Emperor embedded within unknowing people throughout the Republic. This is an interesting callback to Kira Carsen of the other Jedi class, because she was supposedly one such who had that sleeper personality rooted out of her. The same was not the case of many others, who had no idea that they were secretly pawns of the Emperor until he "turned on" their Child of the Emperor subroutine and they became agents for evil. 

Sadly, this space opera Manchurian Candidate idea sounds cooler than the actual execution of it ended up being. I felt like the reality was kind of jumbled and confused rather than a tense standoff where you never know who to trust. Overall, I'd give the plot of the Consular story as mediocre; it has some good ideas, and sometimes its reasonably well executed, but it's never as good as it sounds like it would be, sadly.

Some of this could be salvaged with interesting characters, but again, I felt like the companion characters that this character gets sound better on paper than they are in reality. For quite a long time, you only get the weird Trandoshan as a companion, and they tried too hard to really explore this strange Trandoshan culture and religion, which feels too much like a boring anthropology lecture and too little like a swashbuckling space opera story most of the time. Next you get Tharan Cedrax, the eccentric inventor with a holographic AI girlfriend, who comes across as all high concept and no thoughtful development. His whole story is trying to compete with fellow scientists to develop the coolest invention. He's kind of weird and creepy, in my opinion. Zenith, the unlikeable revolutionary political figure from Balmorra is what left wing weirdos think of as a hero, but everyone sees correctly for a villain. He didn't interest me in the least either. In fact, quite the opposite; I'd have ditched him right away if I'd been able to choose to do so. Felix Iresso is a slightly more interesting character, who's had his mind tampered with and discovers that Sith secrets are buried in his head somewhere. But again, this is a more interesting concept than a reality; you never actually even dig into what the secrets are or find them! Given that we're discovering all of this at the same time that the Manchurian Candidate Children of the Empire plot is running amok in the story, it seems odd that it's a weird parallel to that but which goes nowhere. Finally, Nadia Grell is the only romance interest. She shows up extremely late and isn't really all that cute. The relationship feels rushed, forced, contrived and just-so. 

I played the character as a Shadow, a double (Darth Maul style) lightsaber wielding guy. In combat, I actually found him kind of boring; and I was mostly just button mashing a few basic moves. It didn't feel very Star Warsy. I will say, though, that the stealth ability was gold. When I played this class, I'd already played four classes in a row, and being able to just waltz right past loads of trash mobs was such a relief, because I was imagining having to stop and fight them with any other class. Ugh, tedious. 

Overall, while I'd say that the Consular class experience isn't a complete wash, it was probably my least favorite of the eight. It's a shame because there's good ideas buried there, they just never were able to rise to their potential due to poor execution. The Consular is like the prequel trilogy of the Old Republic. While the Jedi Knight can be savored in all its glory, (minus the very first part on Tython) the Jedi Consular is best saved for a time when the double XP event is active and you can blow through just the class story as quickly as possible without lingering on the disappointing aspects that otherwise make up the experience of playing this class.

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part II: Characters and companions

As I said last time, there are eight class stories. Originally there were eight classes. This is kind of changed now. The classes originally split into two advanced classes as ability trees partway through, which offered some different visuals and mechanics, but which still followed the exact same class story. Now you have to pick your advanced class at character creation. Rather than "advanced class" it's more like just a different interpretation of the archetype altogether. For example, for the bounty hunter, the Powertech is the heavily armored, flame-throwing Mandalorian-type guy, while the Mercenary is more like a Cad Bane cowboy in space gunfighter type. But regardless of which you pick, you'll have the same class story, companion NPCs, voice actor, etc. These classes are mirrored (from a mechanical, if not graphical) perspective across the factions too, so where the bounty hunter as the powertech and mercenary archetypes, the trooper has the vanguard and commando archetypes that are mechanically the same. They are graphically quite different, though, so they don't really feel like the same thing exactly.

This will change even further in the upcoming update in the next few weeks or so; you'll now be able to decouple your class story from your mechanical class altogether. All non-Force classes can be used to play any non-Force class story, for instance. We don't know exactly how this will work until it launches, and some changes to the class mechanics themselves are also expected. Even though this is "the mother of all SWTOR reviews" I can't actually comment on every single mechanical class, because I've only played one iteration of each class story so far, and in half of the cases, I did the mirrored Imperial and Republic versions. This means that I didn't see the other mechanics at all, sadly. 

Compared to the earlier Knights of the Old Republic games, the stories are really all out. They are fully voice-acted, rather than you simply selecting from a dialogue wheel. I mean, you still select from a dialog wheel, but then your avatar will recite lines with a professional voice actor that represents a "bigger" take on what you selected in the dialog wheel. Sometimes the dialog wheel summaries aren't very good and you don't get exactly the response you thought you were getting, but if it bugs you that much, you can hit escape and start the conversation over to make different selections. For the most part, these choices aren't really choices, they're just an expression of your attitude and mood as a character, and the story will progress the exact same no matter which you pick. Occasionally a more substantial choice will pop up, like to kill or spare a character, that may reappear if spared, for example. Mostly, though, the choices that have some but not a ton of meaning are about companion influence, i.e., do they like or dislike the choice, and light or dark side allegiance. There aren't a lot of mechanical implications to light vs dark side (although we're to understand that the new system described above will be dependent, at least on force-using class mechanics, on your light vs dark side balance.) In fact, the game's morality is sometimes seriously out of whack and gives you light or dark side movement in situations that make little sense. The companion influence makes more sense, because it's based on the character of the companion, but the reality is that the choices you make that they dislike have little real impact, and you can make up for it easily by giving a companion gift or two anyway.

This is the BioWare trademark stuff here, though—companion characters, interactions, soap operas, romances and hoaky moral dilemmas that feel forced and dumb most of the time, but which occasionally work surprisingly well. Knights of the Old Republic did this quite well, although with only one story and only two directions to potentially take it, and only one romanceable option, it was obviously a bit less varied.

I say that every class story is different, and that's true, they are quite different in many ways, not least of which is tone. Some are pretty serious, some are light-hearted, some of them are mostly serious but with flashes of dry wit. However, they all follow a very similar pattern, which makes them more similar than they otherwise could be. 

First, a little bit of context. Knights of the Old Republic takes place some ~3,000 years before Star Wars, and Knights of the Old Republic II takes place only about five years after that. This game takes place over 300 years later, so still long before the original movies, but also significantly after Knights and Knights II that the galactic setting is quite a bit different. The Sith Empire has emerged out of the depths of Wild Space, or wherever it was hiding, it attacked and sacked Coruscant a few years ago, but then gave it back as part of a treaty. Now, a good chunk of former Republic worlds are under the sway of the Empire and the two powers are in a state of Cold War, itching to get back to hot war in many ways. Much of what was taken for granted in the Knights games is different. In Knights, there was a healthy Jedi Order based at an Enclave on Dantooine. The opponent is Revan's Sith Empire (well, Malak's now) and is unconnected to the Sith Empire here, other than the fact that Revan and Malak were corrupted by the Sith Emperor. Anyway, that backstory is a bit complicated, so I won't get too much into it here. Revan's Sith Order and the "True Sith Empire" are two completely different polities, though, so the Sith Empire of Knights and of this game are not the same. In Knights II, the Jedi Order is almost extinct, and the Sith Triumvirate is kind of a spin-off of what happened with Revan, a bunch of crazy kooks that bear a closer resemblance to villains in a horror movie than a Star Wars movie in some ways. By the time this game starts, the Jedi Order has been rebuilt, but it is kinda sorta in self-imposed exile on Tython after the surprise attack of the Sith on Coruscant and the sacking of their temple there.

All characters start off on a starting planet. There are four of them, two class stories per planet. The smuggler and trooper start off on war-torn Ord Mantell, where Republic troops battle Imperial sponsored Separatists. The agent and bounty hunter start on Hutta (called Nal Hutta in the Clone Wars) where both, unsurprisingly, deal in the organized crime environment of the Hutts. Both Jedi classes start on Tython, and both Sith classes start on Korriban (called Moraband in the Clone Wars.) This is where you pick up your first companion, and when you're done you head to the faction fleet, before heading to the faction capital planet; Coruscant for the Republic and Dromund Kaas for the Imperials. At the end of this second planet, you get your ship, and the Introduction is officially over.

Chapter 1 is the next four planets. The order is slightly different by faction; The Republic go to Taris, Nar Shaddaa, Tatooine and Alderaan, while the Imperials swap out Taris for Balmorra. Taris is the same planet as in Knights, but it's now an overgrown jungle ruin, swarmed by rakghouls, and there's a reconstruction/recolonization effort underway. Its vibe is very, very different than in the earlier game. Chapter 1 is also, along with the Introduction, the end of the first story arc. You finish things off with your main rival and accomplish the goals that you've been chasing down. Yes, at the end of Chapter 1. This is true for all class stories, although obviously it's just set-up for bigger and badder adventures in chapters 2 and 3. All class stories converge at the end on Corellia, which is supposed to resemble Dresden in the process of the fire-bombing during World War II, I think. The Empire is invading the planet, and you either support the invasion, defend against it, or pursue your own goals with the war in the background.

Each character has a little finale after Coruscant after which the official class story is over, but more material came out shortly, including faction stories for Ilum, Makeb, Oricon, Rishi, Yavin IV, and more. Eventually you enter the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion, where a third party has smacked down both the Sith Empire and the Republic, and has them both at heel. The story here gets pretty epic, but it's also basically exactly the same no matter which class you play. Fallen Empire is followed by Knights of the Eternal Throne. After this, the next expansion was Onslaught, and it introduced more faction-based separation. The announced expansion coming in the next few weeks is to be called Legacy of the Sith. Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne has you forming a Galactic Alliance to fight the Eternal Empire, so your a mixture of Imperial, Republic and even criminal elements all to take out the greater evil. But as you start to see success, the old Sith and Republic rivalries reopen, and the game settles back down again into Sith vs Republic, basically, although your team is a bit more eclectic now.

Because the class-style stories with your regular class-style companion relationships ends at the end of the main storyline, but rest of the game feels a bit different. You actually lose your original companions and run around with a whole different crew, eventually reuniting everyone. You have all new romance options, for instance, too, which BioWare thinks is really on brand for them and their type of storytelling. While in the main game, the romance options are more or less "normal" in the expansions, they're all over the map. When the game started giving me options to flirt with other men, weird alien gay lizard men, and who knows what else, the virtue-signaling noise drives out the signal; it materially takes away from the options to have better dialogue and character building options built in instead. While a few new options might be nice, especially considering that the "default" options for some of the characters isn't a really attractive romance choice, the reality is that most of these follow-up new options are even worse.

The game has also steadily added more levels over time. It initially went from levels 1 to 50. It currently goes up to 75, after some more creeping over time as new expansions added a few more levels, and we expect it to max out at level 80 in the Legacy of the Sith expansion. I'm not quite sure what these new levels will add exactly, though. More abilities? The level synching means that this is mostly a transparent thing anyway; I don't really feel like there's any difference playing a level 3 character vs a level 30 character vs a level 75 character except for the fact that fewer abilities are unlocked at the lower levels. If anything, it almost seems easier at the lower levels sometimes. You can also pick ability trees that customize your advanced class. For example, my powertech is on the pyrotech ability tree, which unsurprisingly focuses on all kinds of flamethrower options.

In typical MMO fashion, some players come up with "rotations", by which they mean the order in which abilities are used in combat. Personally, I think any game that has rotations is a game that takes itself too seriously as a tactical piece. I like that The Old Republic doesn't require this. It doesn't require 1337 gear to play. Old Republic, at least in the solo experience, is a pretty relaxed game that is much more about the story and exploration than it is about anything else. I know it has its raiders and fans of the MMO stuff, but I don't know how well it really stands up to "pure" MMOs in that regard, and I don't really care. Ohlen's comments, mentioned in the last post, that players really wanted something much more like Knights of the Old Republic with some online stuff here and there rather than full on World of Warcraft, but that the studio decided (for some reason) to try and chase after the perceived WoW money was off-brand for BioWare. He kind of admits regretting that a little, but I think he's dissemblin just a bit; I think that was a major problem and that they saw fairly quickly that they'd made a pretty serious miscalculation of where their fanbase was. It took them a while to sort it out, but right now, the game is pretty good for the people like me who really wanted a very different experience than what BioWare hoped to sell us.

Next, I'll start deep-diving into the specific stories and where they work and don't work.

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part I: The game experience and environment

First, a little bit of context. I was already a big fan of Knights of the Old Republic, which I still have for my old Xbox system (even though the system's dead; I got a Steam replacement). I'd also played some of the other early BioWare RPGs, like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, both of which I played around with, and Jade Empire, which I played more extensively. But of all of these franchises, it was Knights of the Old Republic that was by far my favorite. It also came out at a time when the Star Wars franchise was at a bit of a nadir (little were we expecting the lows of The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker or The High Republic which were yet to come.) The prequel trilogies were out, and while visually lavish and beautiful, and chock full of some really cool ideas (like Darth Maul) they were ultimately mostly frustrating and disappointing because of what they could and should have been and yet weren't. Knights of the Old Republic was part of a wave of Star Wars rehabilitation, that also includes some other great video games, like The Force Unleashed, as well as the well-received (and mostly deservedly so) animated Clone Wars show. Perhaps because of this context, I like Knights of the Old Republic better than it deserves, but even so, it's considered a classic for a reason. I don't know that the recently announced remake is going to be any better, in spite of obviously going to be prettier; I suspect that they'll have to ruin it with some kind of new diversity mandates, or something. Carth Onasi will have to be black, have dreadlocks and be the main character's gay lover, or something. 

Knights of the Old Republic II was also a good game, although because of developmental rushedness, the ending is a little bit confused and it almost takes some reading offline to understand exactly what was supposed to have happened. As a quick aside, and then I'll try to stop mentioning this so much, it's clear that the original concept of the main character was that he was a guy. Have you not seen the promotional art for the game? They decided in retrospect that the "canonical" interpretation was that he was a she, and they've written up all kinds of details about who The Exile is. She even makes an appearance as a force ghost in The Old Republic. This is fine, though. Ultimately, we can accept at least some degree of space wizardry is magical anyway, so why not have action-grrls here and there who can do it too?

Knights came out in 2003, and Knights II in 2004. Seven years later, The Old Republic came out, after a fairly long lead-up; it was announced in late 2008 and came out almost at the very end of the year 2011. Of course, while fans were excited, there was a sense of "uh... what?" to the announcement as well. The Old Republic was announced as an MMO, which is not the kind of game that BioWare had ever done before, not the kind of game that Knights or Knights II had been, and arguably, not really the kind of game that the fans were interested in. Certainly I wasn't; grouping up with randos on the internet to have to play didn't sound fun to me at all, and going on boss-fight dungeon raids didn't either. I also had no interest in a subscription payment method. 

I think in retrospect, the skeptics were proven sorta right. The majority of the consumers wanted RPG-like content, and were content to dabble in grouping on occasion. A relatively small yet healthy community of groupers and raiders has developed, and some content specifically for them has been developed in the years since. But BioWare also, belatedly, but not too terribly so, I suppose, decided to make the solo content more accessible for those who really didn't want to do any grouping at all. (Like me.)

Today, if you sit down to play this game fresh, you'll find that your first choice is to pick a character class. This isn't just a mechanical choice, as each character class has a fully realized separate story from the other seven classes. You can play a huge class story where you travel to a total of twelve level-gated planets (although there is level-synching, so those gates aren't as hard and fast as they used to be once upon a time). In addition, each of those planets has a faction story; each of the eight classes belongs to either the Republic or Empire faction, and you have a faction quest string that's as big (sometimes bigger) than the class story, also on each planet. There's not quite as much variety here; rather than eight, there's obviously only two, and sometimes the class and faction stories mesh quite well. Sometimes they don't, even though most likely you'll be doing them mixed together as you wander around on the planet.

In addition to these story quest strings, there are also a ton of unstringed exploration quests; characters standing around in the environment with a quest icon over their head. If you go talk to them, you can pick up one-off quests. Some of them are even repeatable, although most are not. Many of the repeatable ones are Heroic quests. Once called Heroic 2+, they were designed for a group of 2 or more characters. As part of their focus on solo players, they were rejiggered to be more challenging than normal exploration quests, but certainly doable by yourself. These exploration quests and Heroics often have a similar theme to what's going on in the faction quests especially, but they are just asides that have no impact on the story. If you do them, it's great; a little extra credits and XP and some modest gear rewards, but hardly required or necessary.

Although each character class story is substantially different, the progression of planets, due to their original level range design, is not. This leads to a pretty predictable arc as you're playing. However, because of the well-done level synching, you never feel like there's a difference between operating on an end game planet vs a beginning planet, other than that higher level characters will have more options and abilities unlocked, and will probably be cosmetically superior, having acquired more gear. Anyway, I'll talk more about this progression and the stories, planets, NPCs, etc. in a future post. 

Although BioWare have played around with subscription costs, the need for subscriptions at all, what you get for a subscription, etc. we're at a point now where you don't need one to have a good experience in the game. However, if you're going to be pretty serious about playing through it, like I was, then a subscription is probably worth it. I bought it in the two-month at a time chunks. It's cheaper if you buy it for a year, but since I didn't play for a year straight, I think what I did worked out well. It gave me some conveniences and advantages that were worth it to me, and when I wasn't playing, I let it lapse automatically without having to go remember to cancel or anything like that. I suspect a fair bit of the money that BioWare still makes from the game isn't from subscriptions, but rather from micro-transactions. They create a lot of cosmetic options, many of them can be bought for "real money". While I like a lot of the stuff that the game drops naturally, I also have to admit that some of the cosmetics are really cool and are super tempting.

One of the other changes made was that some of the group content that was important to the story now has solo options. These are Flashpoints, and they were the original idea for how to do raids. About half of the flashpoints are now soloable, and they are all the ones that have some tie to the story. The ones that are not are completely side stories that have no impact on the main thrust of the game, but are interesting if you're into that kind of thing. Nowadays, story progression that is added is often in the form of new solo flashpoints, which you can then go back and play as a group in a harder mode if you like. Different types of content is also now available for the groupers; Uprisings are kind of like mini-flashpoints; shorter and faster to do, but require a group. They are quick and dirty raids for people who don't have tons of time. Operations, on the other hand, are very complex dungeon raids that require eight or even sixteen players to complete. Sadly, when BioWare were still experimenting with this stuff, they didn't always hit the right beats, and sometimes legacy things are left in that are kind of a pain. For example, there's a long questline for both the seeker droids and macrobinoculars missions that you can do solo. There's actually some really cool stuff in those, but when you get to the end, you find that you're gated behind Heroic 4s, which you can't do solo. So, you can spend several hours on the questline, only to be left with a cliffhanger at the very end that you can't complete without a group. And good luck finding anyone that still even wants to group up for that anymore, even if you're willing to try. The whole Dread Masters storyline is another one that you get loads of info on, and you can even do quite a bit of it, before you're gated because the end of it is a pair of operations.

I think those three in particular are jarring and disappointing because of the time you can put into them solo only to be left hanging. Also, because they are now quite old, and the devs and most of the players have moved on, they linger and no solution has ever been given for them. Sigh.

Another interesting aspect of it being a kinda sorta wannabe MMO instead of an RPG is that in the online environment, stuff doesn't "stick" like it did in Knights and Knights II. You'll have to learn to deal with terms like "trash mobs" and "drawing aggro", even if you don't pick up on the jargon, you still have to deal with the reality of them. You can kill all of the troops in an aggravating and tedious "trash mob" on your way to an objective, only to have to deal with them all over again on your way back, because they reset fairly quickly. Of course, this can also work the other way; you can expect to fight hordes of trash mobs only to find that someone just ahead of you on the same path has killed them all and they haven't reset yet, giving you free and easy passage. Sometimes you find yourself leapfrogging with another player between trash mobs; if he draws the aggro on a mob, you can walk right by unharmed, but then you pick up the next one. This reset thing also has other interesting side effects. Sometimes you have a quest to "sabotage five communication towers" or something like that. You only need to find one, though, and after you sabotage it, you can just sit and wait for it to reset and sabotage the same one over and over again five times. Sometimes the reset time is too long, and there's even a group of players all hanging around the same area waiting to jump on the first reset.

Not everything works like this, of course. In the online gaming jargon, there's a thing called "instancing" in which you go into a little "room" where you don't and can't interact with other players. This performs very much like a little mini-offline section of the game, and most story quests end with a private instance, so the behavior of the instance can be more predictable than it would be in a purely online environment.

After the main stories are all complete, there's (now) quite a bit more story to do. Loads of story flashpoints and new planets have been added. There's also a very long string of quests called "chapters" that function like strung together story flashpoints, kind of. This new content is pretty cool, and there is a faction division of sorts between it, but there isn't anything really that continues the class specific stories. In fact, this new content doesn't even fit all character concepts equally well. It was clearly meant to be played primarily by the Jedi Knight, or possibly the Sith Warrior, and it makes considerably less sense for the non-Force-using classes. Although you can do it anyway. It's just clear that from the writer's perspective, they're mostly expecting you to do it with a Jedi Knight.

A final note on this part of the review; the game is ten years old here in the next few weeks. Although it's not very well optimized, its age means that any computer from the last five years or so can probably play it pretty well. When my brother was assembling my computer from (mostly used) components, we were having trouble getting the graphics card to work without causing issues, so we punted and didn't put it in. Yes, I'm running the game without any graphics card at all. Very occasionally when a lot is going on on the screen at once, like in a big flashpoint boss fight, or a super detailed environment like Mek-Sha, I do notice a little bit of lag and then I remind myself that even without a graphics card at all, I have the graphics settings turned pretty much all the way up and I forget that. On Mek-Sha I turned them down temporarily so it would run a bit better. Other than that, I've had no problem running the game at all. It's not a graphical tour de force, of course. My son played Ghosts of Tsushima on the PS4, so I know what a really pretty game looks like. But it's certainly attractive enough most of the time. Most of my complaints about the graphics aren't really about the technical quality of them. Rather, the stylized nature of the graphics and the relatively few elements that are repeated a lot are what mostly drags them down. Sure, sure... the action cut scenes aren't going to be winning any cinematographic awards anytime soon, but you don't really think about that much when you're playing. You do think about how every other NPC seems to have the same face just with a different facial hair overlay or something like that, and the strange spikey bits that look insane on the armor. I'd say the graphics are comparable to another one of my favorite games to play: Street Fighter IV. In general, I'd say that SF4 actually looks a little better in terms of character modeling, although technically there are obvious similarities. The clunkier animation, repeated elements, and worse clipping of Old Republic are notable, but the fact that there is so much more content is worth pointing out. (As is the fact that Street Fighter IV was almost four years older than Old Republic. It's a PS3 vintage game.) Certainly it looks wonderful compared to Knights or Knights II.

Long story short on the graphics and tech specs; they mostly do the job. It's not amazing, but it's also not so bad that you are constantly reminded of them either; mostly when playing, you don't think about it much at all. I don't think I've ever really heard many players have serious complaints about the graphics from a technical standpoint, although there could be some complaints about decisions that were deliberately made (like all of the fatso tubby nearly Jabba-sized characters out there, for instance, or gigantic shoulder pads that are the size of trash can lids and tipped with sword-points.)

But that's starting to inch into the next category, so we'll end Part I here, I think.