Scott Adams, the "Great Predictor" is a liar

What kind of nonsense is this? Making a decision based on what we already know about coronavirus vaccines like this which were NOT approved for SARS for instance because of known significant safety issues with them isn't rational? Because it's not certain? Certain = rational = science?

Sorry, Adams. I remember when we learned how science works in middle school. I remember learning how to use a dictionary even earlier than that. What you're saying simply isn't true. Not even a little bit. The fact is that the information to make a rational decision absolutely was available. You, Lying Adams, just didn't take advantage of the opportunity to try and find it or understand it. You just listened to "experts" which a rational person would already have known not to trust very far and so should have done the research to make a rational decision. 

What's really happening is that you're lying because you're desperate to create an interpretation of reality in which you weren't wrong. Which you are very much starting to believe that you are as more and more info about the "vaccines" comes to light. You are sharp enough to understand that there's a high probability that you were very, very wrong. But you can't imagine how anyone else could have figured that out before you did, so you're lying about what science is and about what a rational decision means. 

I don't know if this desperate CYA rearguard action is to try and protect your professional reputation or to protect your toxic beta ego. Either way, it's contemptible. You threw in with the wrong side. And now you want to pretend like you didn't because if YOU didn't know better than NOBODY could have known better. Sorry, but no. You're not that special. 

UPDATE: Although published about a week after this post I made, this is a very good descriptor of what's happening with Scott and many Americans who you would think would know better... but who don't. https://neociceroniantimes.wordpress.com/2022/01/04/scott-adams-come-to-fauci-moment/

Legacy of the Sith

While I'm not exactly a black-piller doom and gloomer, and I kind of despise too much of that attitude, I think some of the black-pill comments about SWTOR are probably directionally correct. The game is old. The updates are puny. Even this "big update"; what a UI change and a character designer change, and some mechanical stuff that is allegedly going to make existing content feel a bit more fresh again? My thought on the "combat styles" was "Cool. (shrug)" If there were new content, new stories, etc. I'd feel like this game really had some life in it. I feel like the devs are trying to give us the illusion that there's life in this game while, in reality, they're just letting it mostly sit there and make modest money from cartel coin sales and other cosmetic stuff that they put out to nickel and dime the players with in microtransactional (or not so micro-sometimes) fashion. We actually haven't heard anything about the new content.

To be fair, they did do a fairly big content update of that kind a few years ago with Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. And scuttlebutt is that the reaction to that was mixed. I think the reality is that BioWare isn't really doing much with this game, and isn't likely to. The lead developer may have recently said publicly that he expects the game to be going strong for many years to come, but the reality is 1) what else is he going to say, regardless of what he does or doesn't know? 2) he's not likely to be in a position to know what the head honchos at EA are thinking about the game and its life cycle, and 3) it hasn't been "going strong" by any reasonable definition of that phrase already for a long time.

I think I'm justified in moving forward, and maybe in fact, in advancing my timeline, of recording the stories. Oh, sure... sure... there are other people who have done this already, but I want my own versions of the characters. And I want to keep it saved for posterity so that when the game is gone, if I feel the itch, I can relive it with my recordings. 

Where I'm being a bit wishy-washy is in how to record it. I've already played every class through once. Twice, in the case of the bounty hunter. And my first run through was done very iconically; white males as the characters, and the most iconic (in my opinion) of the advanced class options. So... do I do the same thing over again so that I have iconic recordings? Or do I explore the alternative options; alien races and less iconic combat mechanics? If I do, will that mean that I'm ultimately less happy with the result? Do I want to record more than one of each class?

I don't know. And on top of this, I'm a little intimidated by the technology; I've never really done much with OBS Studio, or movie editing, and I don't know how difficult it will be to do. Which causes me to demur somewhat and not get around to recording anything. I need to do a little bit of experimentation, and probably soon, just so I know how it all works. I'm almost tempted to do the cutting and clipping on my phone, of all places, because I am familiar with KineMaster, at least. And I'll probably want relatively short cuts to build up to the total movie. The editing is likely to be a big task. And do I want to mostly turn the music off in the game, and add music in myself? If I don't, I'll likely get weird music cuts because the music will be playing in the background while I'm cutting and chopping up the experience. That just makes the editing more work. 

So yeah; I've got a lot of stuff to figure out, and because I'm kinda wishy-washy and a bit intimidated by the project, it's taken much longer to get off the ground than I initially thought. But, the Legacy of the Sith expansion actually suggests to me that I better do it soon. It's not a super substantial expansion. And at the 10th anniversary? Either BioWare is playing their cards very close to the vest in terms of stuff that we'll see this year, or they're just not really making a huge deal out of it. Either way... the future of the game, especially at its age, is probably uncertain. Just like you go and ask your grandfather to tell stories of his youth while you still can, knowing that his age means that you could lose access to them if you don't, I'm feeling like I better do this while the game is still here. And then, with any luck, it'll still be here in five more years. But if it isn't, well... I'm not left high and dry.

UPDATE: As I kind of suspected, feeling intimidated by the technology was foolish. I did a trial, and it was easy. I went ahead and recorded the opening cut-scene of my new Jedi Knight. I made him a male Mirialan, and as is my wont, I did not dress him in a typical "Jedi" fashion. What most forget, in this post prequel era, is that there was no indication throughout the entire original trilogy that the Jedi Knights wore any kind of robes. Obiwan did when we meet him, its true, but then again, he dressed like that because he was in hiding on a poor backwards planet. If you recall, there's essentially no difference at all between how Obiwan dressed and how Uncle Owen dressed. For that matter, Luke's own "moisture farmer" outfit with a simple homespun tunic and leggings wasn't particularly different either. 

Obiwan was then, of course, shown that way as a force ghost, so he'd be easier to recognize (I presume) and so that they didn't have to make him a new costume. Yoda also wore simple, homespun peasant gear. But he was also in hiding in a hut on a primitive planet. If you'll recall, Luke never wore anything like "Tatooine peasant" garb in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. And it wouldn't have made sense for him to have done so, either. He wore his orange X-wing pilot flight suit, and he wore a khaki set of "fatigues" jumpsuit for lack of a better term, during the second movie; an all-black set of fatigues-like outfit during pretty much the entirety of the third. He did have a cloak on early in Jedi, but that's probably better seen as a concession to the environment of Tatooine than trying to look like a Jedi.

Anyway, I could be wrong, and maybe Lucas knew all along that the Jedi wore plain robes, rather than him deciding that during the prequel pre-production in order to give them obvious strong visual cues. And there's something to be said for that, especially as his Jedi became more and more monk-like in many respects. However, I've never been a fan myself, so my Jedi are not weird, monastic characters sitting around being pretentious and spouting fortune cookie wisdom without any context, like Lucas' do; my Jedi are simply swashbuckling action heroes with a lightsaber and some modest magical powers.

I used the type 2 body (as I—so far—have always done) with the Trailblazer jacket (dyed black and deep red), the Trailblazer gloves, the Series 615 Cybernetic belt, Advanced Slicer pants and Thermal Retention boots. Head slot is hidden, although for the heckuvit, I put the Thermal Retention goggles on, since I'd already pulled them from collections anyway. Maybe I'll use them visually occasionally. I played around with the color unification to give me a good look; sometimes unified, sometimes not. And I replaced his dumb practice sabers with some vibroblades that I have in my collections as well. He's got double crossed swords on his back right now, since he's a Sentinel. It's more of a "traditional" smuggler look than a Jedi look, but again; I suspect that utilitarian casual clothes are what everyone wears day to day, regardless of class. I think it fits my vision of this character quite well, and my vision of what the Jedi should be like anyway.

It took me a couple of hours to record what was essentially about five minutes of video. Part of this is because I actually had over thirty minutes of video, and I had to edit and cut what I had. Why'd it take so long? Because getting the stuff to look right is tedious. I "escaped" out of the cut scene so I could run to the mailbox, get all of the stuff that I get as a new character, exit out of this character to one that has some money and other things, mail that to my new character, log back into my new character and retrieve all of that stuff, set up my UI the way I want it, grab the stuff in collections that I needed, equip my character, and then run back and start the cut scene over again, except this time equipped. It turned out fairly well, but was more time-consuming than I thought. And then, of course, I had to actually cut and edit the thirty minutes of footage that I had, and watch them a time or two to make sure that it all worked. Then I had to do more cutting of "dead footage" to make it a bit tighter, and watch it again. And then once again I did more cutting and more watching. I had recorded some voice-over during all of this stuff that I was doing, thinking that it'd make a good "behind the scenes" stuff, but I wasn't thrilled with most of that, so I'll probably not use it for anything. (Maybe I can do voiceover that I record separately over some of that footage after all. I'll keep it just in case. For a little while, anyway.)

The only thing that I messed up and will have to live with is that I didn't mute my microphone when I wasn't talking, so there's some minor mic noise here and there, during the opening crawl, for instance. I forgot that there was a mute button on the mic cable. Oops. 

Anyway, I'm reasonably happy with how this turned out. I don't know that I'll be able to record any more before going out of town for the holidays, but when I come back, I will focus more on this aspect of the game than my existing characters, who are mostly just tooling around with dailies and reputation and other things like that. I'd like to get these class stories recorded sooner rather than later (ideally before the launch of the update, although that seems very unlikely) and now that I've actually started, it seems more doable than ever.

Next time I post about this in particular, hopefully I have a link to my actual first Youtube upload in this series. And then I have to figure out my cadence. Do I want to stick with this character, Taul Kajak (names borrowed from my Space Opera X game), or do I finish Tython and then do another character's introduction too?

AIDS, Covid, Fauci and the medical-industrial complex

Interesting article. I recommend reading it in full.  https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-vaxxing-anthony-fauci-and-aids/

Unz makes an offhand claim partway through that correlation does not imply causality. This is incorrect, however. Correlation certainly does IMPLY causality. It doesn't PROVE causality. But correlation is the classic case of where there's smoke, there's often a fire. It bears investigation to make sure that the correlation and causality relationship is correct. But you NEVER have causality WITHOUT correlation. Indeed, you have to have it. So correlation and causality are, not to be cute, themselves correlated. The maxim that correlation and causality are not the same thing isn't meant to be imply that correlation and causality aren't often linked, merely to be careful not to casually and incautiously assume that correlation is causality.

In any case, the lesson, as always, is that it's not just the news that's fake. Science and history are equally fake. A huge portion of the world, as we collectively believe it to be, is a hoax or a lie.

Bounty Hunters

While waiting for the servers to come back online after being shut down for a patch update, I've been watching some SWTOR on YouTube, including a bounty hunter playthrough that I've been going through very slowly for months by username Hathur. I'm watching Taris now, and she's (? The character and user avatar are shes) is doing the Imperial faction story. It occurs to me that it doesn't really fit the bounty hunter very well, as many of the Imperial faction stories don't. Because when I came back and reinstated my OG bounty hunter Graggory, I was already max level, I just did the class story stuff for chapters 2 and 3 and ignored the faction stories completely, I'd kind forgotten how badly the bounty hunter in particular fits. Taris as the Imperial faction story is clearly a caricature of moustache-twirling Sith philosophy. And even my Sith lord characters would probably not really have cared to have gotten involved in such a silly escapade. The whole point that the Empire is waging war on Taris is absurd.

Star Wars has really kind of ruined the notion of bounty hunters. I think that the whole idea of bounty hunting was a fringe activity that most people didn't think about or even know anything about prior to the popularization of Boba Fett. And, of course, Boba Fett gave them the wrong idea. Bounty hunting doesn't mean that you're muscle or a contract killer/kidnapper for organized crime, as Boba Fett was. Bounty hunting was the privatization of law enforcement. Quite the opposite as presented in Star Wars, to be sure. And it used to be that law enforcement was a much more privatized affair. Sure, there were the sheriffs, and whatnot, but when they needed help, they didn't call paramilitarized SWAT teams, they formed up posses of volunteer, deputized civilians. The bounty hunter was another useful extension; a way to get law enforcement activity beyond what the sheriff himself had the manpower to do. 

Curiously, Red Dead Redemption 2, in both the story mode and online, does bounty hunters more or less correctly. Which is curious, because the characters that you play are criminals, but when they're bounty hunting, they're not engaged in any crime, but rather—quite literally—a patriotic public service.

I hadn't played Graggory in a long time, but I usually play my characters as "neutral", that is, I'm kinda harsh and gruff, but underneath it, not really a villain at all. This ends up resulting in, because off SWTOR's ridiculous morality, a neutral effect; sometimes doing the sensible thing gives you light side movement, but sometimes dark side movement. And I tend to play all of my characters this way. I don't imagine that Graggory (or Galat'ion, my other powertech) are bad guys, and most of the Imperial class story crap that they're expected to do, I wouldn't actually do it if I were RPing in a tabletop environment, rather than a CRPG environment. 

For that matter, a lot of the class story is kind of weird too. "Bounties" that you are intended to pursue are sometimes legitimate bounties, but are frequently just when some criminal or powerful person wants to eliminate, cripple, or otherwise deal with a rival. The bounty hunters aren't hunting bounties, they're just mercenary enforcers for criminals. That's not bounty hunting. 

And yet, that's kind of how Star Wars has always treated them. Boba Fett's profession was always treated with contempt, he was always a villain. When he was hunting Luke for Darth Vader, even though Darth Vader was a bad guy and a tyrant, he was legitimately a privatized extension of Imperial law, though. When he took Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt and otherwise hung out as part of Jabba's entourage, he was not. He was just a criminal.

Han Solo, on the other hand, is a legitimate criminal, and in spite of his "heart of gold" story arc, Star Wars has actually reversed the bounty hunter and smuggler roles. Putting the smuggler on the Republic side, where he—laughably—at one point refuses to smuggle because that's against the law! is ridiculous, and putting the bounty hunter on the Imperial side, where they are effectively little more than paid criminal enforcers is equally bad. How interesting it would have been had the roles been reversed!

In reality, of course, one of the attractions of both roles, which is sadly not realized nearly as much as it should be, is that they are kind of neutral actors. Neither should really be associated with either the Republic or the Empire. In fact, they should be able to move between them somewhat at will.

That said, I've also thought that the events are another opportunity to get people to explore places that they otherwise couldn't. The BBA event, for instance, actually brings classes that otherwise couldn't ever go to Ord Mantell to Ord Mantell to get a bounty. Why not have all of starting and capital planets work that way? How fun would it be for a Jedi Knight to be hunting a bounty on Korriban or Dromund Kaas?

In any case, this end game stuff, after the class stories, is where my bounty hunter really feels more like how he should feel. I wish the BBA event was a bit bigger, and ran all the time like a regular reputation track planet, like CZ-198 or something, rather than an event that only comes once every other month for a few days. Both the bounty hunter and the smuggler benefit especially from feeling like they have material to do which suits their class, and of course, there's no reason why anyone of any class can't join the fun. Instead of a recurring event, that should just be a normal part of the game. They should integrate it into the game—and probably Dantooine pirates, because that feels like it gives a reason for Dantooine to even be on the galactic map; having it only come up once every other month or so is very strange there too. Swoop bikes, on the other hand, kind of "vandalize" the scenery, so having that event be more off and on is nice. The rakghoul event, on the other hand, by virtue of its very nature, is also more of a recurring kind of thing. The Gree event has it's own special third of Ilum dedicated to it; it seems odd when the event isn't running that you can still run around out there with nothing to do.

In general, I think a good half of the recurring events should be folded into the main game as always available now, and probably a couple of new events should be developed. I'd actually probably rather have that than minor story expansions that dribble out a little bit at a time. They feel more "evergreen" than another story flashpoint and daily area.

UPDATE: If I were in charge, this is how I'd do it. At this point, the main story mostly focuses on Jedi or Sith (depending on if you're playing Republic or Imperial faction.) The tech classes can play them, but they feel like afterthoughts that don't fit very well. They need some kind of endgame activity that feels more attuned to their specialities. I'd take four of the five current rotating events and make them permanent; you can do them all of the time. This is the BBA bounty hunting, the Gree event, the Dantooine pirates, and the rakghoul event. The BBA event doesn't even require much space, while the Gree and Dantooine pirates already have unique space that just sits there empty without anything going on when the event isn't happening. The rakghoul also doesn't take much space, plus it happens on one of three planets. I think the planets should still rotate, but it should always be happening somewhere. The swoop bikes, I'll admit, I don't like as much, so I don't care. Plus, they "vandalize" a lot of real estate when that event is going on, so making it be usually off is better than having it always on.

And then I'd task the developers with coming up with three or four new events, that would be the subject of future patches or minor expansions. These would also rotate more rapidly. There's only an event every other week. Given that they're rotating five events out, that means that any one given event turns up at best once every two months, at worst, once a quarter. You could replace most of the event vendors in the bazaar section of the fleet, because they'll always be available at the actual event, which is no longer an event, it's just a daily area. (Area isn't entirely accurate for the BBA event. That probably needs to stay on the fleet where it is, as well as the specialty vendors and the swoop bike vendors.)

The Mother of All SWTOR Reviews: Part VII: The Expansions

There were some original add-ons after the class stories; a continuation of the faction story, at least, with some class specific dialogue. I was actually surprised to learn that the original plan was to continue the class stories in the expansions, but when EA cut staffing and left a bunch of bean-counting yes-men (not my term and I'm hearing that second hand if not even... more hands than that, but it sounds eminently believable) it didn't happen. The original stuff that was added was actually in many ways a foreshadowing of the daily area, reputation stuff and group content that there is now a lot of. This includes the Ilum stuff (a beautiful planet, with a fascinating night sky view) which ends on back to back story flashpoints, the Black Hole; a special separate area on Corellia that serves as a weird kind of coda to the stories on that planet. The former is a must-do, but the Black Hole is skippable if you're not interested, and you won't miss much.

There's some other stuff too; Section X, which you need to be subscribed to access (or buy access on the cartel market—a weird experiment, which luckily they didn't try again) along with the seeker droid and macrobinocular missions start off a fascinating sub-story about the Dread Masters, which of course we know from most of the stories on Belsavis, or at least the faction stories. This goes on and on with several little chapters that pop in, but which sadly ends in a series of operations, so solo players will not be able to finish it. There are, however, reputation tracks and unlocks available along this, including for Section X itself, and the follow-up for it on Oricon, the "horror planet" where the Dread Masters showdown takes place (in back to back operations.) It's too bad because the ambiance on Oricon is one of the best, but you have an ongoing cliffhanger, sadly.

This is true for some of the other stuff that starts at this stage too. The Seeker Droid and Macrobinocular quests are quite long, and varied, and kind of interesting, but you can't quite finish them when you get right down to it, unless you do grouping. And finding a group that's still going to do those really old quests is easier said than done. I actually tried to for a while, in spite of my aversion to grouping, but couldn't ever find anyone interested. There's a Czerka planet, CZ-198, which is also pretty interesting, but it also ends on two back to back flashpoints that are not soloable. (I tried. Maybe I'm just not good enough, but it doesn't seem reasonable to play these without a group.) So, you can get introduced to the concept, and go do some dailies on the planet, get some Reputation and buy some interesting unique gear.

There were some other interesting expansions, like Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds, which are just asides for collectors, in my experience. But the first expansion, and certainly the first "real" expansion, is Rise of the Hutt Cartel, which offers faction story expansion, with some class specific dialogue here and there. It offers a significant story element, as well as a reputation track, and a quite large new planet to explore; quite a bit larger than Oricon or CZ-198, or Ilum, for instance.

However, all of these lack the depth, length and focus of the class stories, which are obviously significantly more meaty. This is especially true of the second and third smaller expansions, starfighter and strongholds, which only add "asides" to do. However, with the fourth expansion, Shadow of Revan, the "main" story really gets started again in a big way. Shadow of Revan includes four back to back (to back to back) soloable flashpoints, with accompanying cut scenes, and three planets (albeit one of them is quite small.) These include the pirate planet of Rishi, Yavin IV and Ziost. All three of them have reputation tracks and dailies. These planets are mostly pretty fun, especially Rishi, which is one of my favorite planets in the game. Rishi also has a class specific small quest for each class; the last time something like that was done. Otherwise, all classes go through the same story, although there are some faction specific stuff. It's clear that the developers basically expect you to play these expansions with a Jedi Knight, or maybe a Sith Warrior, and everyone else fits a little less well.

The flashpoints are also quite interesting; there are invasions of Korriban and Tython, and depending on your faction, you do them differently (needless to say.) Rakata Prime and Manaan, both from Knights of the Old Republic, also make reappearances in the flashpoints. Although the end of the Jedi Knight story is that he kills the Emperor, it turns out that it didn't "take" and he managed to survive his death (much like Sidious, by coincidence, although here it's not nearly as badly and confusedly executed as the sequel trilogy.

There are two big expansions which follow and which kind of serve as back to back parts of the same long story arc. This is Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne. It turns out that the Emperor has, for decades, been living a secret "bigamist" life, as another guy entirely who's also the emperor of Zakuul, a planet lost somewhere out there in the galaxy. However, he's got this crazy fleet of robot starships under his control, as well as his own order of force-using Jedi/Sith analog knights, and he sends his twin sons out to go conquer the galaxy. Which they do, pretty effectively—their force knights and their "Eternal Fleet" basically bring both the Sith Empire and the Republic to their knees. Your own character, along with Darth Marr, ends up going to face this Emperor and recognizes him as the Sith Emperor in a different body. But one of the Emperor's sons kills the Emperor, kills Darth Marr, makes you the scapegoat, and freezes you in carbonite for five years. The next thing you know, some of the characters you know from Shadow of Revan are rescuing you. You find out that the emperor still lives after being killed again, but as a disembodied entity in your head. You've lost all of your companions, but you get new ones, and gradually are able to re-recruit most of your past companions (as well as past companions for many other classes from your faction in particular, but occasionally from others.)

Anyway, you end up becoming the leader of yet a "fourth" super power in the galaxy, the Alliance for the overthrow of Zakuul, with a group made up of Imperial, Republic and criminal elements all out to overthrow the current rulers of the galaxy. This is quite a good story, actually, although it makes the most sense if you play it as a Jedi Knight in my opinion, and because it's exactly the same (for these two expansions anyway) there's not a lot of reason to play it with all of your classes. When its done, the Emperor is dead yet again, your Alliance is in possession of the Eternal Fleet, for a while until that goes caput, and you end up having to pick a side; Republic or Imperial again. This paves the way for more "traditional" Republic/Imperial factions and rivalries going forward.

Both of these expansions play a bit differently than the game had done until this point. You move from chapter to chapter, and each chapter is more like a flashpoint that you play solo than like traditional planetary missions. There are a lot of planets that appear in these chapters, but they aren't open planets that you can go and explore in a traditional sense. 

The next expansion, which is for a little bit longer, the current expansion is Onslaught, works a bit more traditionally. There are a few story missions on small planets, which you can then go back and do dailies on for reputation. There aren't any class stories anymore, but there are faction stories (which; again, seem to assume that you're either a Jedi Knight doing the Republic faction or a Sith Warrior doing the Imperial faction. Anyone else can do them, but they make a little bit less sense and feel much more forced.) There's a final coda to the story of the Emperor, before he's well and fully purged from the galaxy for good for good. You get a fairly detailed biography of him as it goes on, and the three personas that he had. Tenebrae is his original form, where he was "the black-eyed Sith lord", and a member of the Sith Pureblood race. Vitiate is his form known from the original class stories, where he is a human Sith Emperor who looks and acts very much like Sidious/Palpatine from the Star Wars movies. But they talk all through the class stories about how he was often missing in action and hadn't been involved with the Empire in a regular way, if at all, for years. This is because of his third persona, Valkorian, where he was the human emperor of what became the Zakuul Empire, which briefly conquered both the Republic and the Sith Empire.

It's interesting because of the obvious parallels with what Jew Jew Binks (as E;R calls Jar Jar Abrams—see my last post) tried to do with Sidious in Rise of Skywalker, because the ideas are very similar, but one is well developed and reasonably well executed, and one is a slap-dash, obviously thrown together afterthought done for poor reasons and extremely poorly executed. If you're interested in getting the total view of the Emperor's biography, there are some YouTube biographies of him out there here and there, and of course you can read a lengthy discourse about him on Wookiepedia. 

Anyway, as I said, with Onslaught on, we get back to more simple stories; the Empire vs the Republic, small story updates on small planets, and the addition of a flashpoint and operation here and there. All of these new smaller planets have a reputation track and dailies, and special gear that can be unlocked via the reputation system. We get planets like Iokath, Ossus, Mek-Sha, and Onderon. Dantooine makes an appearance as a flashpoint, where we get to explore deja vu style the ruins of the Jedi Enclave from Knights of the Old Republic in an area that's separate from the Dantooine that you see with the pirate event and the swoop bikes event.

Without the Emperor, the threats are more realistic but less focused and obvious. They've tried to use Darth Malgus (the bald guy from the cinematic trailers), first as a stand-in in earlier years for the Sith overall, but later as the kind of overarching bad guy who replaces the Emperor, but it's unclear if the story group for the game is up to the challenge of creating story content that's even a fraction as engaging as the original class stories, or the Valkorian arc.

The good news is that there is no reason to buy the expansions. If you subscribe, even for a single month, then you unlock all of the expansions currently available... forever. (Except for Section X. You need to be subscribed, or buy that with cartel coins, i.e., real money, to play that.)

Legacy of the Sith is the most recently announced expansion. It was supposed to launch next week, but just in the last day or two a delay of two months was announced.

Finally, and this is the last word on the Mother of All SWTOR Reviews, one of the things that I do content wise is the recurring events. About once every other month or so, each of these events comes up for a week in rotation. There are some other events that occur less frequently. Mostly, these include some special areas to explore, daily missions to do and a reputation track. Many of them give out special currencies, which can be spent with special vendors on unique items, some of which are hard to get and indicate a fair amount of effort put into getting them if you see them on someone. Some of these include minigames, like the swoop bike races for the swoop bike event, or some of the weird cooking events on the Feast of Prosperity event. Some of them are more straightforward, like the bounty missions on the bounty hunter week, or the pirate missions on the Dantooine pirates event, or most of the events in the rakghoul caverns for the rakghoul events. The Gree event is, other than swoop bikes, the most unusual of them, as while easy to earn reputation, more or less, as a solo player, its much more difficult to earn the gree currency, gray helixes, without doing either grouping or PvP stuff.

I tend to like these events, and I'm sometimes frustrated at the amount of time in between them. I've been waiting for a few weeks for the bounty hunter event to get announced, as I need some more reputation and currency for some stuff I really want to buy from the bounty hunter vendors. Of course, it was just announced as taking place while I'm out of town, so now instead of weeks, I'm going to have to wait until probably at least February and maybe even March for it to come up at a time when I can play it. Sigh.

And a very newly implemented event, or maybe event isn't quite the right word for it, is galactic seasons. It came out while I was offline, and when I came back, it was just wrapping up. The next season won't start until the expansion launches, so I can't give you much firsthand experience with it, but it's something that I'm excited to try out because it's got loads of pretty cool rewards.

But you see the trend. Reputation. Dailies. A reason to keep coming back and tinkering. That's what they offer now. The story has taken a back seat to just "wander around doing repeatable stuff."

Of course, the story's still there, it's just that there isn't much added to the story these days. Which is probably OK, I suppose, because what they are doing is no doubt easier and cheaper, and SWTOR wasn't the "WoW killer" that many fans thought it would be in advance of its launch. 

Overall impression? I'm not a big video game player in general. I played quite a bit of RDR2, as my back catalog of posts might suggest. I played a lot of Street Fighter (and similar) type games. And I play the BioWare Star Wars games. That's about it. Of them, this is probably my favorite game, and one that if it's still out there, I'll probably keep coming back to for years to come.

However, it's literally celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year. The game engine and graphics weren't really top of the line when it was new; they're certainly not any more. Of course, being even older hasn't made Knights of the Old Republic less of a classic. But, I can't imagine that this will be around forever. All the more reason to record some playthroughs so I can have them archived when the game finally locks up for the last time and closes its virtual doors. It's inevitable that it will happen. Hopefully it's later rather than sooner, but we'll see.

E;R on Star Wars

E;R is a bit crankier and more complainy than I am. Plus, he's younger than me, which means that he only appreciates the original trilogy in a more academic sense rather than visceral one, like I do (like my own sons do, for that matter.) And, I also appreciate what Star Wars did to pop culture generally throughout the 80s, which was my formative cultural touchstone, being a little kid when the 80s started and about to graduate high school shortly when they ended. 

But other than that crankiness, his commentary on various elements of Star Wars is pretty much spot on. Watching all of these is, admittedly kind of long. It's also kind of yesterday's news, if by yesterday, you mean the last several years. But Star Wars is always on topic for me. Both how much I love it for what it (briefly) was and what it reached for and how much I hate it for what it descended into being.

SWTOR 7.0 Update

Not that I'm a SWTOR news source or anything, but just today, BioWare announced that the release date of December 14th for the 7.0 update will be delayed until mid February. Which means... my subscription will probably have just barely run out, or is just barely about to. Nice.

Still, I don't know if this is because of technical challenges that they're facing (their implied claim) or loads of feedback from players that there are elements of the change that they don't like (they made a mention of something that might be interpreted this way. And certainly there is loads of bad feedback) leading to hasty undoing of some "features" that nobody asked for.

Sigh. Meanwhile, the flash sale today on the Cartel Market was Provenance, a pistol that I've had my eye on for some time. I spent some real money because I couldn't resist. Sigh again. This thing is pretty fly, though. Although my Mercenary and my Scoundrel both had something else in mind to use. I re-equipped my existing Gunslinger with the new gun (and a few companions who use pistols) and decided to do a bit more with him in the meantime so I can enjoy these. 

Next characters

Although the update in the next couple of weeks will split the class story from the class mechanics, somewhat, I still want to play the other alternate of each character that I haven't done yet. That means, let me whip up a quick and dirty table:

Class	Already played	Will Play
Jedi Knight	Guardian	Sentinel
Jedi Consular	Shadow	Sage
Sith Warrior	Marauder	Juggernaut
Sith Inquisitor	Assassin	Sorcerer
Smuggler	Gunslinger	Scoundrel
Trooper	Commando	Vanguard
Agent	Sniper	Operative
Bounty Hunter	Powertech	Mercenary

These will be the ones that I attempt to record. I don't know how much I'll be doing human characters, since I've already played a human male character for all of the classes I've played. I've unlocked most of the alien races that I'd be interested in playing, and I'd actually kind of like to play some of them in "unconventional" places, like a Chiss Jedi or a Sith pureblood smuggler, or something like that. I don't know for sure that I want all of my new characters to be aliens. I actually don't think I like that too much. But I'll do some. I haven't yet decided which characters will go with which races, although I do have a few in mind.

My Jedi Sentinel, which will probably be the first one that I do, will be Mirialan. I've already decided that I want him to use the rakghoul event lightsabers, and the rakghoul event black-core green crystals. I like the idea that his lightsabers will match his skin tone, somewhat. Don't yet know how I'll have him dress, but I don't really go in for traditional "Jedi robes" kind of looks; I tend to have more smuggler-looking outfits, which are more traditional casual outfits. Will I try to make them be mostly green? I dunno. That might be too much green.

My mercenary will probably be a cyborg, with the "sunglasses" looking implants. I've already decided that he'll wear less of the heavy armor and more of the gunfighter or space cowboy kind of look. Less Boba Fett and more Cad Bane.

My other non-humans I'm a little less sure of. I haven't bought any of the cartel market races, like togruta, cathar or nautalan, because, they're too alien and I know that I'd never use them. I also haven't unlocked the twi'lek or miraluka either, although I have unlocked Mirialan, Chiss, Ratataki, Sith Pureblood, the two Zabraks and Cyborg, so I can have all of the options that I'd actually want to use.

Although I may change my mind, I'm considering the Sith pureblood as a scoundrel. I also want my two Sith characters to be aliens, given that their romanceable options are aliens. Probably my Jedi Sage too. Haven't decided which for which, though. I do like the idea of using the Republic Zabrak as an Imperial character and vice versa, though. 

Some other cosmetics; I decided to have my Jedi Sentinel use the rakghoul lightsabers with the special rakghoul crystals, but I also have other black-core crystals. And, of course, I have other crystals too, including craftable ones, some of which are kind of cool. Who's going to use which? I don't know. If my Sage ends up being a reddish Darth Maul looking Zabrak, I'll use the black-core red crystal with him to match, no doubt. Of course, with the addition of weapons to outfit designer, I can have more than one color crystal per character, using them to match outfits specifically. 

Another interruption in your Mother of All SWTOR Reviews

Well, I feel kind of sheepish and stupid. I had believed that I had locked out my story on my first character, a powertech named Graggory. It turns out that I had not. I had believed that I'd locked out my romance with Mako because it wasn't working the way it did in the KOTOR games. But I hadn't locked it out after all; although I had gone to some planets that were above the main story, like Ossus and Onderon and Ilum. However, I hadn't done any of the story missions above the main story mission, so I actually still had it open all along. And because I had believed that I'd locked it out, back when I still was kinda new to the game and didn't know how all of the mechanics worked, I just never really looked back at Graggory, and I did a different bounty hunter named Galat'ion. I'd deliberately made him to look a lot like Graggory, and I'd had the same advanced class, same discipline, and everything. But now I feel kind of stupid. I can finish the second half of the story with Graggory after all, and because I've been max level for a long time now, I don't have any reason to do anything at all other than the class stories, so I can also do it fairly quickly (in fact, I blazed through Taris and Quesh earlier today, before doing a bunch of stuff on the Gree event with all my other guys.)

So now what? I don't have any need for two nearly identical powertechs, but there are some other reasons why I don't want to get rid of Galat'ion either. So, I spent just a small handful of cartel coins to update Galat'ions appearance just a little; changed his hair and eye color, really is all. Just enough to make him look a little bit different than Graggory. And, I also went to the disciple retrainer on the fleet, and since I'm a subscriber, I can change that for free too. I changed pyrotech to prototype, so I've updated some passives and just a few of my attacks on Galat'ion. I don't think I'll be using him for anything but reputation dailies and events and stuff now that I'm done with his story, so it'll be nice to have them both just a tad different from each other. In fact, I'll probably work on some dailies the next few days with Galat'ion in particular to get used to his new abilities on his new discipline.

Swtorista, who's one of the most popular YouTubers in the SWTOR community, actually said not too long ago that she has a character for every single discipline. That's a lot; there are 16 classes when you split each class story into its two advanced classes, and each of those 16 classes has three disciplines. Does she really have 48 characters? That's how many you'd need to have one of each discipline. Yeah, she probably does. Her full-time gig, as near as I can tell, is as a SWTOR content creator, and she's been subscribed since pretty much the inception of the game. I'm not quite that serious, to say the least, so there's no way that I'll ever have that many different characters. But I can have a few alternative versions, and since the bounty hunter is my favorite class anyway, it makes sense to explore the options there a bit more than normal.

UPDATE: I still, of course, have the "opening crawl" text say that I'm on my way to Makeb and the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion. I feel less stupid about believing that I'd screwed up my game. Everything about it seems to be telling me that I'd screwed it up with the exception of one small marker that I had another story mission to go do. Because I also had story missions on Ilum and Makeb, that can perhaps be excused for getting lost in the shuffle, and it is more explainable why I thought I'd messed up my game and started all over again, this time actually tracking my progress.

That said, it's been pretty fun going through stuff again so soon. Belsavis is not very fun for the bounty hunter; it's poorly designed in terms of having to sit around waiting for those bounties to respawn (and those are poorly implemented anyway; not very interesting) and of course you have to deal with Skadge the entire time. This time, I'm not even having the companion conversations with him. I'm going to stuff him in the corner of my ship and pretend he's not there as much as is possible. Ugh, I hate that guy. But so does everyone else, apparently. Even if I do have the companion conversations with him, because he was the last pick-up, exposure to him is pretty small anyway. If they hadn't made him so important to the story of Belsavis, I'd probably like playing that planet as a bounty hunter a bit better.

Anyway, I'm on to Corellia, so I'm almost done now. I've also done a ton of Gree stuff during the Gree event this week. I'd never really spent any time on that, but I maxed out my reputation, and I've got a ton of reputation trophies to spend as soon as the week resets. (I may even have enough that I'll max out next week too and have to spend some the week after.) Earning the Gree currency is pretty hard. I've done the Gree Relay quest with all of my characters, which earned my a fair bit of gray helix currency, but you can only do that once ever per character, so it's pretty much done. The only way to really get more is to do the heroic, which is difficult to do alone, but you can do impromptu quick groups with the people standing around the pylon, which tends to work fairly well, and the weekly stuff. 

What I really want is more bounty hunter contracts. I don't know when the bounty week will be back on, but I'm afraid it could well be while I'm out of town (although if the rotation actually works like a normal rotation, it should probably be Dantooine pirates while I'm off for Christmas break—too bad; I'd like to get some more reputation for that event too and buy the blue Dantooine pirate outfit.) There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to buy with bounty hunter contracts, but I've only got 12 of them on stock, which is barely enough to buy most of it. A lot of that bounty contract gear is bind on pickup rather than bound to legacy or even bind on equip, which means you can only buy it with the character who's going to use it, and then he's the one stuck with it forever. Not sure how I feel about that, but what can you do? That's where I got Galat'ion's totally awesome gun, by the way. I've got some other pistols that I'm eyeing for my mercenary playthough in the future on the other platform opposite the BBA platform; the grek pistols that you can buy there with cartel certificates. You get a decent little stack of those every month if you log in every day, and I'm already legend status on the rep track, so I can buy it all if I can afford it. I need to keep that going too so I can keep getting the currency to spend.

Other than that; well, I'm starting to think about how I'm going to make my next set of characters for the next playthroughs. Although the 7.0 release will be out in just a couple of weeks, and will have the new combat style stuff, I actually think that I probably prefer (at least for now) to play the class mechanics that are meant to go with the class. What I mean is, when I play my mercenary and my Jedi Sentinel, for instance, I'll play them as bounty hunter and Jedi Knight, the way that they would have been prior to 7.0. The same will probably be true for all of the other playthroughs that I intend to do.

Anyway, my work day is wrapping up soon, and I'd like to get an hour or so of playing in before I have to start my evening stuff. Maybe I'll finish the story with Graggory today yet. If not, for sure I will tomorrow.

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.