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.)