Not that anyone else cares, as I'm way late on this given that the game is coming up on 10 years old in 2021 sometime, but my Old Republic progress continues apace. I finished, just this morning, actually, the class story for the Jedi Knight, which is considered probably the most iconic and classic of the class storylines. Sadly, the Jedi Knight is also one of the most bland and boring of the characters, and a lot of the missions that he's required to do are hoaky and silly, as are his responses to them. It's as if tiny children tried to come up with moral dilemmas which normal people just find asinine, for the most part. That can kind of be ignored, a bit, and some of it isn't the Knight anyway, it's the Republic class story that is often worse than the class story in this regard (and the exploration missions, which although they give you a handful of fetchit quests, actually bring down the writing quality average considerably because they're usually pretty stupid.)
Anyway, one down; seven to go. The Sith Warrior is starting chapter three, so he's within striking distance of finishing up too. I actually intend to take both of them through the expansions, but I seriously doubt that I'll take all of the characters through them, because ugh. Too much repetition.
But what to do after finishing the story with the Sith Warrior? Do I want to leapfrog back to the Knight and do some of the epilogue stuff like Ilum, Section X, the Black Hole, etc. and then leapfrog back to the Warrior to do the same again? Or do I want to start a more complicated leapfrogging by adding the Smuggler and Agent prologues into the mix first? With a four character leapfrog, my progress between the four will be slower, and I do want to get to at least Chapter 9 of Fallen Empire with at least one character so I can start opening all of these Heroic crates that I have and distributing whatever armor I pull out of them to the other characters still coming. Which means that I'll probably keep the Agent and Smuggler stuff moving a little slower; I'm thinking that maybe I'll do the epiloge stuff first, then the Smugger/Agent prologues, and then moving into expansions with the two knight/warrior characters. I think according to this plan, I'll get to the crate opening stuff after the smuggler and agent have finished chapter 1, which means anything that I open up that would look good on them can be worn through chapters 2 and 3 and however much of the expansion content I decide to do with those two characters.
I have not, you may notice, thought too far ahead beyond that, because obviously I still have four more classes to do after that; the other Jedi and Sith classes and the trooper and bounty hunter. Who will all benefit enormously from having much more choice of rare armor and weapon cosmetic items, and who therefore may look quite a bit cooler than my "main" characters who had to blaze the trail first without the benefit of being able to follow someone else who unlocked a bunch of crap for them already.
I do really enjoy a lot of the cosmetic stuff, to be honest with you. Star Wars, even the bad movies like the sequel trilogy and to a lesser extent the prequel trilogy always got at least one thing pretty right; the visual design. That said, there are some even cooler things in this game than in the movies, at least conceptually. Although often held back by the limitations of the medium. For quite a while now, my Jedi Guardian has had a black core blue lightsaber crystal with a big, chunky Onderon pummeler's hilt (I think that's what it's called anyway. Regardless, I like the look of it quite a bit.) This makes it kind of look like a darksaber that's blue instead of white, which is a really cool look, by the way. In fact, I like it so much that I've decided all of my force characters will have a variant of the black-core crystals. My Sith Marauder has two black core orange crystals, which are ferocious looking and super cool, and I need to get a hold of the black core green and purple crystals for my other Jedi and Sith characters with their double sabers respectively.
I also had a bit of a strange affectation with my Jedi Knight where I refused to dress him in those dumb brown robes. I have six alternate outfit designed, and I did relent a little bit and have a charcoal gray jedi robe as one of the later ones that I added. In fact, for quite a long time; the first two planets, basically, I wore the craftable Terenthium Onslaught armor followed by the Xonolite armor, with the head uncovered, which gave him a more of a Han Solo scoundrel kind of look. I did eventually come up with my own alternative Jedi classic outfit when I got some kind of dressy tunic of sorts that's mostly tan but with goldish accents. I gave him one of the headbands to look a bit like a crown (although there's an even cooler one in the tactical sets that really does look like a crown; time to upgrade eventually—when I want to spend a million credits and three thousand tech fragments on it, which won't be right away. I've spent too much there between my two characters and my tech fragment budget in particular is a bit depleted.) But mostly, I figure an action oriented knight would wear action-oriented clothing, not peasant robes. That was one of the few major misteps Lucas made on visual design; deciding that rather than Ben Kenobi wearing clothes that looked exactly like Uncle Owen's style because he was living in the same environment in hiding, that that's actually what Jedi dressed like. So, Uncle Owen dresses like a Jedi, even though he's just a dirt poor peasant farmer in a galactic backwater. Maybe he raided Qui-Gonn's closet when he was last on Tatooine or something.
I did also do a white robe highlighted with blue while on Hoth, but mostly because I thought it looked warm and I happened to get it at the right time to wear it for that planet.
I still think that the way to save Star Wars from itself is to start doing stuff that takes place as far in the future after the movies we have now as the Old Republic is in the past. But maybe borrow some of the color visual design elements that Old Republic did, which make it look familiar yet also a little different to emphasize that yes, this is Star Wars, but it's separated in time from the Star Wars that you know.
On the other hand, the super exaggerated spikes and pauldrons that a lot of the design elements have are really stupid and need to be toned way down.
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