More SWTOR Barbie Dolling

I rewatched Vitnir's costume videos for SWTOR. He does tend to use a lot of the same elements, including a way too often reliance on the black/gray dye module. That said, that one is cheap; I don't blame him. I can make my own pretty easily, after all. One of the sets that he also uses pretty extensively is the Infamous Bounty Hunter set. This isn't surprising, I suppose. The Infamous Bounty Hunter set was released near the launch of The Mandalorian show's first season on Disney+, and it was obviously meant to capitalize on the popularity of that character. People had been wanting to make Mandalorian looking characters for years in SWTOR, and none of the options were really quite right. Of course, this made some sense. SWTOR takes place thousands of years apart from the Mandalorian look that we know from the movies and TV show. To expect fashions to be the same would be equivalent to expecting that we today still dressed like people did in the early Bronze Age, or even the Neolithic. Debate among gamers of SWTOR about which of the pseudo-Mandalorian helmets offered the best analog if you were trying to "cosplay" a Mandalorian or Boba Fett or whatever in game drove tons of reddit posts with screenshots, YouTube videos and more. 

Of course, then the Infamous Bounty Hunter armor set was released to coincide with the show, and it gave us pretty much exactly a standard-looking Mandalorian helmet. And although this has been out for some time how, as near as I can tell, it's probably one of the best sellers on the cartel market. I still see people wearing this armor set all over the place while playing. Of course, this is exactly one of the main reasons that I haven't been interested in doing so. There are actually three reasons, all of them probably just a demonstration of my general orneriness. (Which in a further display of orneriness, I demand that it be pronounced awnriness. Because that's how I grew up hearing it.)

—I don't like wearing anything in game that I feel is too popular. I want to be different than the crowd, not feel like I'm sheepishly following along with everyone else.

—I don't like too similar cosplays of characters. I actually kind of like some of the Mandalorian alternates better than one that looks exactly like it was lifted from the show. My favorite alt.Mandalorian helmet is actually the Relic Plunderer's.

—I also don't like stock "outfits." If you're not mixing and matching, you're not doing it right.

In addition, I thought some of the other elements beside the helmet for the Infamous Bounty Hunter were odd and unexpected, and I wasn't sure that I liked most of them. This has, however, changed for me recently, in part due to Vitnir's videos, which I linked in my last post. While the rest of the armor isn't really the heavier armor that you expect from a "supercommando" (an esoteric reference to some very early concept art for the character that became Boba Fett, done in the late 70s), if you divorce it from the helmet and do something else with it, I find that I like it more and more. Even the odd padded jacket and the boots start to grow on me after seeing them in other uses. Look at their use in this "The Professional" outfit, for instance.

My agent has bought another half dozen armor sets, which I found a decent deal on and which have elements that I'd like to use in my mixing and matching. This puts me even further behind on unlocking them in collections, especially given that two of them cost the outlandish amount of 400 credits each to unlock (seriously; what? Most of the rest of them are only 60. Gold vs bronze, but still. The gold ones aren't qualitatively better.)

For these, however, I refuse to actually spend money on them. I'll have to wait until the cartel coin grants come in, and then I'll use them then. Of course, with 800 needed just to unlock two of the outfits (not to mention 240 each for two weapons I still have, and more than half a dozen 60 items) it'll take three or four months until everything is unlocked. And by then, I'll probably have picked up something else too. Sigh.

And there are a good half dozen sets that I'd really like to get which are insanely expense on the GTN; hundreds of millions of credits. Realistically, they need to be bought on the cartel market, but it takes a good three months or so of accumulated cartel coins to buy those too.

This is why the game has been going as long as it has. The cosmetic microtransaction market is probably doing fairly well and requires very little expenditure or upkeep.

UPDATE: Seriously, Knights of the Old Republic takes place 4,000 years before the Rise of the Empire, which I guess would be the same year Revenge of the Sith takes place. According to the official timeline, there's 19 years between Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars, and then within five years, we have Return of the Jedi and the death of the Emperor. 4,000 in Western Civilization was so long ago that we know very little about it; it was 2,000 BC, and it was smack dab in the Bell Beaker culture period of Europe. Even speaking generously, Western Civilization as we knew it didn't even start to form until 2,000 years ago. This was twice as far back as that. The Bell Beakers were an early Bronze Age or possibly Chalcolithic (in its initial formation) culture that spread out of the Single Grave variant of the Corded Ware culture. It would be so incredibly foreign to us that we wouldn't recognize much of anything.

Why do fantasy fans (and I include Star Wars in this) think that these thousands of years long timeline are so impressive? Do you know how many polities lasted even a thousand years, much less thousands? It's overkill. If the Republic had been around for centuries instead of 10,000 years, as Obiwan alludes to when we first meet him back in 1977, the effect would have been exactly the same. If the Old Republic took place a couple of hundred years before the prequels instead of thousands of years; again, what difference would it have made? Other than it would have been more realistic and less absurd?