The Jedi classes are obviously tied together, being the Jedi classes, but the other two are just grouped together by convenience, not otherwise really having anything in common. The smuggler and trooper classes both start together on the planet of Ord Mantell. In addition to their starting place, they are notable of course in that they are not force-using classes, and instead of lightsabers, they have guns. I played my smuggler as a gunslinger, with twin pistols, and I played my trooper as a commando with the big cannon-thing that he slings around like Jesse Ventura from Predator. I also had my smuggler become my armstech crafter, so he makes the craftable guns. For what that's worth. My trooper, on the other hand, used a progression of crafted cannons most of his "career" that the smuggler had made and mailed to him. One of the small yet significant upgrades I'm looking forward to in the new expansion that's coming out in about three weeks is the ability to have "cosmetic" weapons in the outfit designer, so the stats and the appearance aren't necessarily tied together anymore.
Anyway, let's go over again briefly the elements that I think contribute to the story playthrough experience: 1) the character himself and his portrayal through the written dialog and its delivery, 2) the plot and villains that you face off against, 3) the companion characters, and the romance options among them, and 4) how well the mechanics of the class contribute to the feel of the character.
SMUGGLER
The premise of the smuggler, of course, is to play as an Old Republic analog to Han Solo. The iconic look for the smuggler is usually even very similar to the classic Han Solo vest or jacket kind of outfit. (Although there's a commonly appearing odd one where you've got one of those neck pillows like you're about to go on a cross-Atlantic flight and want to sleep in your seat.) You even get a wookie companion, although its not the first or most prominent one in your lineup.
In general, I'd say that the smuggler class story is one of the middle of the road experiences. I was excited to play this one, as the concept is one that I really like, but the reality wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped it would be. There's a couple of different reasons for this, and I'll get to them below. First off, how is the character itself? I actually think that he's kind of charming most of the time, in a hapless kind of way. The voice actor, Maury Sterling, is perfect for the role, and there's a lot of wit and light-heartedness to the writing. That's the good. The bad is a bit more complicated. See, the smuggler is portrayed as this alpha ladies man. On almost every single planet, there's an opportunity for a romantic fling, for instance. However, what you start to notice after a while is that the smuggler himself is kind of reactionary, passive and even beta. It's like someone tried to write a ladies man character without having the first idea of what a real ladies man is actually like. His flirty options are often kind of cringy and begging-sounding, almost, from girls that a real ladies man wouldn't give a second chance to once she showed her unlikable first front. This problem carries forward more than normal with the actual plot of the story too; the character is somehow unable to make another NPC character give him the information that he needs. There's a poorly conceived fig-leaf for why he'd go along with being strung along like this, but I gotta be honest with you; it never felt very convincing to me.
I know some of that was probably inevitable because of the medium. You can't make characters too proactive with this kind of writing, because otherwise it would be too open ended for a writer to actually write it. But you can and should do a better job of concealing that, by making the character himself feel like he's in the driver's seat even so, and not following along like a puppy dog after some other NPC who holds all of the cards. Even though, as it happens, she held only a couple of the cards and for reasons that I can't divine, we treat her like she holds all of them. I couldn't help but imagine all kinds of ways that I would have gotten around that situation if it were a table-top roleplaying experience as opposed to pre-scripted computer roleplaying experience. Ultimately, that's just not what you're expecting. The Han Solo experience is that he's a capable fellow, independent, and used to making things happen, not a hapless tagalong on his own adventure. I haven't heard a lot of people complain about this in reviews, so maybe it's not a universal problem, but it just wasn't the experience I was expecting for the smuggler, and it ended up being really kind of disappointing.
Similarly, I think the two halves of the story are not created equal. All of the stories have basically two halves; the first one makes up the introduction and Chapter 1, a total of 6 planets, and the second makes up chapters 2 and 3, so 6 more planets. For each of the stories, you have a rival in the first half and then you graduate to a new rival/enemy and situation. With the exception of being led around too passively, which is the only thing that I don't like about the first half, I thought the treasure hunt stuff and race against Skavak was pretty good. When you go on to become a privateer for the Republic, it kind of loses focus. I don't think the second half of the story is nearly as compelling until you get to nearly the end where it tries to surprise you. I also kind of thought that dragging out an off-hand reference to Rogun the Butcher from Ord Mantell all the way to the end wasn't really credible. I was saying "Bring Rogun on!" from nearly the beginning, and yet I'm supposed to be running scared from him the entire game? The Republic privateer half promised a kind of Errol Flynn in space, but it felt like treading water until they could get to the plot point down the line that they were excited to show at nearly the very end. And to be honest with you, I'm not sure that I loved the idea of being a Republic privateer anyway. I liked the more independent feel of the first half of the story. I know that since everyone converges on the battle of Corellia at the end of their class stories that you can't be too independent, but that was always really the promise of the smuggler and bounty hunter classes in particular, and they didn't do enough to give them some space from the faction, in my opinion. Now, I'm sure it wasn't ever their intention to either, but I think that that independent feel is part of what makes both of those classes appealing as a concept, so they probably should have.
The smuggler has a decent set of companions, I suppose. Corso is the first one you pick up, and he's kind of a dumb bro type of guy. I think he's romanceable if you play a woman smuggler, but he feels a little too dumb for that to make sense to me. There's nothing wrong with him, he's just kind of always focused on some weird small picture item, like his favorite blaster, or something like that. His white-knighting personality starts to get old after a while too. The Chewie equivalent, curiously, is also kind of boring; he's just got the typical wookie former slave kind of thing going on, that we've now seen over and over again, as if it's the only thing any writer knows how to do with wookies. Gus is the last companion you pick up, and he quickly became one of my favorites. He's kind of a hapless Admiral Ackbar-looking failed Jedi swindler who's eager to please. They should have had more of him in the game, in my opinion. The two girls are the romance options, and you can do either, actually. One of them is Risha. Although you interact with her for a long time, on your ship no less, she doesn't officially become a companion until after chapter 1. Given that it was my intention to "recast" her, i.e., apply a customization to a prettier version, I found this kind of annoying. She's the more obvious romance option, but she plays so hard to get that I almost got tired of trying before it was done. I think the writers were going for the witty banter, Hepburn/Tracy kind of thing, but they didn't really do it very well because she was too bossy and ultimately started to veer into unlikableness, and the main character was too helpless against her banter, which I found really strange. It's almost like the writers don't actually have any idea what the relationship between a successful alpha-type man and a pretty girl actually looks like. Nothing about it rang very true to me. The other romanceable option is Akaavi Spar, the big, burly, Darth Maul looking warrior grrl, who is the least feminine "woman" I could ever have imagined. The very idea that anyone would want to romance her jars my suspension of disbelief.
I think the gunslinger option is supposed to represent a kind of Western gunfighter in space. I'm not sure that I ever felt entirely like that, though. The whole notion of needing to get into cover to use some of your abilities didn't feel very gunfighterish to me either, although maybe it makes sense in a more realistic sense. It's probably not really fair to harp on this, but I felt like I was bored with the combat mechanics of the class by the time I was done with it. I never got bored with the Jedi Knight. I will admit, though—for the first several planets, I thought his abilities were pretty cool and fun to use.
TROOPER
I admit that I expected the trooper to be one of my least favorites, and it ended up being better than I expected. The very reasons that I expected not to like it do keep it down, but they ended up not being as bad as I feared. Notably, the fact that you're constantly running around doing errands for some CO who's judgement and motivation you couldn't really trust, but because you're a soldier you don't really have a choice. This is definitely a thing. But there's a lot more going on than just that, which is what I was afraid that there wouldn't be.
In terms of character, there's not a lot going on with the trooper either. The voice actor turns out a credible job, but I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to be seeing. You can kind of pick his attitude; cocky and bragging, dutiful, etc. with the dialog wheel, but since it makes little difference I'm not sure what that accomplishes. Whereas the smuggler has a built in personality, the trooper doesn't really. His playthrough is much more based on plot than on personality.
However, I felt like the moral dilemmas that the trooper was faced with were kind of the only ones that weren't dumb and hoaky. There was actually some decent writing as the trooper had to deal with things like a squad of pilots who'd been thrown under the bus and made the scapegoats for top brass's lack of intelligence, how to deal with entitled, meddling politicians when you didn't necessarily trust the motivations or judgement of your own superiors either, what to do about a senior intelligence officer who seemed to be botching a mission and making the wrong call with some friends of one of your companions, an intelligence officer that you knew and liked but who you had to decide to save vs a whole boatload of other prisoners, etc. In general, I don't appreciate the BioWare moral dilemmas, because they don't usually represent real morality or realistic consequences of much of anything. They just feel preachy and dumb. The trooper, on the other hand, really kind of made them more real.
Tracking down a collection of traitors makes up the first half of the plot, and as is sadly all too often the case, the first half of the story was well-focused, and the second half lacks focus until you zero in on the ending. I felt like that was true here again for the trooper, as it was for the smuggler, and frankly, for many of the classes. The second half of the story is recruiting your team, and it not only felt unfocused and kind of weird and contrived, but frustrating, as several of the companions aren't really ones that I'd have picked myself, if I could. But I couldn't; I was simply told that this was going to be my team. For most of the companion recruitment for most classes, it's a bit more subtle; here you're just told that you're going to go recruit this companion just because and the whole planetary class story is about recruiting them. When you head to Corellia to confront your second half of the story nemesis, it's actually kind of weird, because you've only just heard of him, and don't really think of him as much of a nemesis. He was unfortunately not sufficiently built up to work.
I really only liked two of the companions, to be honest with you. The one you pick up on Ord Mantell is too grumpy to enjoy; his constant "On your feet!" because he's healing you when you just quick traveled (why does that always prompt the companions to heal you, anyway?) got really annoying, and I put him in the ship after that. Elara Dorne, the Imperial defector, is probably the most likable one. I like taking her also because even in the story she's supposed to be a medic. It made sense for her to run around with heal spec turned on. She's the romanceable option, and she's a relatively cute romanceable companion. A little stuffier than I'd like in real life (OK, a lot stuffier than I'd like in real life) but it works in the context of this character. M1-4X is a kind of walking "buy war bonds!" ad, but I actually didn't mind him from a roleplaying perspective. However, I did find that because he's a bigger companion than most that he often actually got in the way visually, so I didn't end up using him very often either. The two that you recruit in the later stages, the dishonorably discharged demolitions criminal that you are told to bring back "because he's the best!" regardless of his completely unacceptable behavior, just really bugged me, and the strange alien anthropology class is dumb too. There are several characters in the game that exist only to showcase their weird alien culture, and in almost all cases I really don't care for what they bring to the table.
The mechanics of the commando were really nice. I loved the explosive rounds, which tended to knock people down, and then you'd laser gun them right to the crotch while they were laying there on their backs on the ground. I did start to feel like some of the "trick ammo" variations weren't really all that different from each other, but for the most part, I thought combat with the commando worked really well and felt like what I'd have expected it to feel like. Because I was leapfrogging my commando and my powertech at the same time, going back and forth between them, I often felt like when I was playing one I missed some combat mechanic of the other really badly and vice versa. Because the powertech plays like the vanguard, albeit with different animation, I guess I know what to expect from both the mercenary and vanguard now too. Even though these are the two that I most recently just finished, they're also the ones that I'm in some ways most excited to play again from a mechanics perspective. And I wouldn't even mind seeing the stories again, even though I literally just did. I suppose that's a positive note to end on, even though I'd otherwise say that the somewhat bland personality, more forgettable or even unlikeable companion characters, and unfocused second act of the story make the trooper another middle of the road experience; not the worst one by far, but also not the best one.
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