SWTOR update

Well, I had to grind a few heroics on both characters, but I ended up getting to level 70 after finishing Quesh but before going to Hoth. I'll still do the world story on Hoth too, both Imperial and Republic side, but after that I'm done with world stories for the rest of this run. The end is in sight and legendary player status is in view!

Some fan art of Kira Carson

I've also finished up through Echoes of Oblivion with my Jedi Knight, as well as doing a few companion Alliance Alerts, notably to restart my romance with Kira Carson, my first true Jedi love. Sadly, that meant that I had to have a heartbreaking break up scene with Lana Beniko. I had thought, and then forgotten that I'd done this, that I'd better romance Lana now with this character, because who knows if I'd ever play through the expansions again with anyone else. Realistically, there's no reason why I couldn't; it probably wasn't really as long as I thought that it was, it's just that I was often intimidated by the apparent size of it, so I took my time moving in. If you skip through the daily area stuff, you can do the DLC stuff fairly quickly, I'd imagine. It doesn't really make much sense with any character other than the Jedi Knight, I don't think, although I do still intend to eventually do it with my Sith Warrior too, and play through a more Imperial sided approach. Plus, I want the payoff of my light-side Jaesa romance to actually... y'know... pay off. One of my big disappointments in the main story is that you can't actually romance Jaesa per se in the main story, because she's too goody-two-shoes and straight-laced. You can only have this strange "academic" romance.

Or you can romance Mission Vao... err... whatever her name is. The twi-lek girl who looks just like Mission Vao and has the same voice actress so she sounds just like her too. Personally, I just don't really like romancing alien girls, although maybe when I do a second playthrough I'll play alien characters when the chance of romancing alien girls comes up (it doesn't matter; there's no way I'm romancing Kaliyo Djannis no matter what.) Curiously, the "Diversity Inc." Republic only gives you one alien romance option out of the four main characters; that is, assuming the first, default romance option. (The smuggler has a secondary alien romance option, but she is neither feminine nor attractive, so I don't get it myself.) And that's assuming that Nadia Grell isn't just a regular human with weird cultural make-up, which I'm not entirely sure of. Given this, I'm almost guaranteed to want to play a human protagonist (I'm talking about male characters romancing the girls, obviously. I've never played any female characters at all yet.) Meanwhile, on the Imperial side, only the bounty hunter romances a human (technically cyborg, but c'mon) girl, at least in  their default run. My agent, because I hate Kaliyo Djannis so much, waited until he got Raina Temple, then I immediately stuck a customization on her so that she's a pretty white girl, and did a hurried romance with her in chapter 3. And My Sith Warrior studiously ignored Vette's romance attempts and stuck to Jaesa (also stuck a customization on her to turn her into a pretty white girl. Come to think of it, I did the same thing for Risha. It ticked me off that she had such a big part to play in the story before she was your actual companion, so you get a weird casting discontinuity halfway through the smuggler run.)

Anyway, my point is that the end of all of my first run through initiatives (with the exception of my Imperial Expansion Packs; the Sith Warrior is still stuck on Yavin IV) are looking to be done within the next few weeks. I can do the last two flashpoints with my Jedi quickly enough, and then I've just got four planets each; only one of which I intend to do the planetary story with. for my bounty hunter and trooper, and then BAM! I'm ready to... I dunno. Start something new?

I'm having second thoughts about the recording. For various reasons, when I went to have my brother add a graphics card when he built my PC for me, he was having trouble getting it to work. He ended up not putting one in, but I figured that with older games being the only ones I play, I'd be fine just off the processor. And mostly that's true. The only games that I play that aren't emulated from way back in the 90s or earlier are Street Fighter IV, which runs perfectly fine, and The Old Republic, which runs perfectly fine... most of the time.

I've had a little bit of lag here and there during the expansions to the game, and I found that Mek-Sha in particular is super laggy. I think its because the environment is so detailed and has so much more going on than most of the others. I actually remembered that I had my graphics settings turned up really high, so I reduced the shading quality and the frame-rate. I don't know that the frame-rate is noticeable at all, and I remember now that when I picked between low and high shading quality that it was not immediately obviously which actually looked better (very low, on the other hand, looks terrible.) That helped a bit. But my understanding is that with OBS, it consumes a lot of graphical resources to record. I'd have to record in small bits; fifteen minutes or so or less, before stopping, saving, and starting a new file. Maybe this is better anyway; it'll make editing much easier if I do my recordings based on missions rather than open wandering of the gigantic planets. But it makes the recording feel like it's like to be more of a chore than I expected too. So I'm not so such that I'm excited about it anymore.

Finally... some quick commentary on Echoes of Oblivion. The first half of the flashpoint was really cool. Creepy, atmosphere, reasonably well done, even a bit of fun humor with the banter between Kira and Scourge. The second half felt like an incredibly tedious and irritating acid trip, and the final battle was so chaotic that I really had no idea what was going on; I ended up just basically button mashing until I'd beat the three versions of the Sith Empire and could see the story cut scene again. Blegh.