Old Republic

I haven't made a new post (although I have had a number of YouTube videos posted about D&D and other things) but as I'm now back at home again after several weeks on the road, and back to sitting around at home working, but also just mostly being at home, I've engaged in video games again. I've started working on rebuilding my streak for daily challenges on Red Dead Redemption so I can be ready and set for the October outlaw pass that we know is coming in the next few weeks or so. They've also released some great new clothing items, which are fun to wear because they look pretty nice. But the Naturalist role is still very hit or miss. I like the legendary animals, but I've found that the Gus clothing are all kinda samey after a while, and not all that cool to begin with (why can't we have the hood without the coat, already?) and Harriet and literally everything associated with her is absolutely terrible. Granted, I think that her idiot aggressive and bullying SJW approach is supposed to be kind of a joke, but it's not a very funny one, because there's no remedy to it other than to refuse to engage in the role. You can't tie her up and throw her off of a bridge, or feed her to an alligator or bear; you can't catch her tent on fire and watch her burn alive and then piss on her body, which is exactly what I'd want to be able to do.

So, I haven't been doing too much beyond the basics of keeping a streak going and earning cash to buy the cool new clothes, especially the ones that will go away soon. Unfortunately, there are more gold bar gated items than I'd like, but that's always been the case. What I've actually spent a good deal more time on is the Old Republic, though. I've picked up my old bounty hunter game, where I was only about halfway through Balmorra, and I've burned through that planet, Nar Shadaa and Tatooine now, including all of the planetary missions. Rather than run off to Alderaan, I've also spent some time on Ilum, because you could pick up some missions there on the fleet. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, though, with jumping up to a expansion before I've finished the main story, other than some basic flashpoints and other simple missions that I can do that don't have any bearing on the story.

I've decided to spring for a subscription, obviously, and I've not only nearly finished Chapter 1 (finally) but my character is now level 69; fairly close to the max level. Heck; I've even got it on during work and I do crew crafting skills in the background on one computer while I'm working on the other. Anyway, I don't have too much to say about this other than that I'm doing this, but here's a few observations:

• Combat is kind of tedious and not really all that fun. Just jacking up the hit points of enemies to make them take longer to kill doesn't make it more fun either, although at least some opponents do have some tactical stuff here and there. But mostly it's just key-mashing your way through the combats.
• I wish there was some kind of vehicle chase action scene of some kind. That's a major miss.
• Playing on the Imperial side but not being overly "evil" is probably the best to avoid silliness. I think BioWare took to heart the complaints that they had from the earlier Knights of the Old Republic game about how dark side options were just petty and stupid; sadly, it seems that the light side options are now idiotic hand-wringing rather than actual heroism or goodness.
• No sensible person will ever pick 100% light or dark. My character is about four-fifths light to one fifth dark, and I'm sometimes surprised that being true to your word and not lying is dark side, when you knew going in that that was your mission. For that matter, saving bad guys isn't always a good choice. Ever hear of a thing called justice, BioWare? Of course not. They're SJWs. But most of the missions themselves and their obvious resolution default to favoring the light side, even on the Imperial faction.
• I haven't gotten into the weird higher level pervert romance options yet, but in the age where the Democrats and their surrogates in Hollywood and elsewhere are cratering into scandal after scandal of pedophilia and harrassment, it doesn't come across as a good look. Honestly, it never did, but it seemed like relatively harmess if moronic virtue signaling a few years ago. Now, it comes across as shockingly tone deaf.

Anyway, I'm so far quite enjoying being back in, although I continue to wish that the Old Republic had been converted into some other kind of medium and cleaned up by a writer who isn't pyschologically disfunctional and creepy. That said, even with a lot of virtue-signaling and women acting like men, and strangely diverse human populations, and whatnot, it's still better Star Wars material than almost anything that's come out in the last twenty years, and certainly better than anything Kathleen Kennedy touched.