Sigh

Well... I decided. I'm going to stop trying to archive my playthrough, at least with full video recording. I'm going to probably delete or otherwise not play at least three of my characters, maybe four or five of them, and I'll just play through more casually, recording certain things but not worrying about it for other things, with the remainder of the characters. 

When the stuff is working properly and launched, I'll create a new bounty hunter character that uses the Vanguard rules, and play through that way, counting on a bowcaster as a signature (albeit probably only in a cosmetic slot) weapon. I also want to play as a mercenary, but I'm wondering if it makes sense to add that as a second combat proficiency to my scoundrel that I haven't yet played. I mean, I do also have a mercenary that I created, but I don't know if I love that character. I thought I could get away with making a cowboy cyborg looking guy using the big guy body type, but the more I look at it, the less I like it. I strongly (and sadly) suspect that I'm not going to want to finish the game with him after all.

I will take smaller, disconnected videos and screenshots, however, and continue to post them as desired.

I'm really disappointed in this development, but honestly—I probably should have seen it coming with my first Taul Kajak videos and their poor quality rendering, especially when the character is moving and lots of objects are needing to render at once. I don't know if its OBS or Microsoft Photos Video Editor or both that's the culprit; taking up too much resources to get a high quality render out of what is a high quality gameplay experience. But its one of the two of them. And that would only have improved if I'd been able to install the graphics card that I had bought in this computer without it causing problems that my brother and I just couldn't resolve. With hardware that just doesn't measure up, there's no solution other than to get better hardware. Given that I just got this computer two years or so ago, and from my point of view, it's still "new", that's not likely to happen anytime too soon either.

If I'm unable to archive these playthroughs, and the game ends up shuttering, then so be it. I won't be able to play it anymore when it's gone, and I won't be able to watch it with my characters either. I'll have to watch someone else's on YouTube.

I wonder if the migration to a Steam option was meant to always be a long-term replacement of sorts for it, though. Some way to keep it running after they can't maintain it the same way anymore. I dunno.

Anyway, here's a few more screenshots.

It's actually hard to get the full map of Ord Mantell unlocked, because there's a portion of it that you can only access if you jump up a series of rocks. Of course, I've done that with my characters, but y'know. Here's my smuggler showing off one of his newer outfits on the Lava Overlook portion of the map.

One of my bounty hunters on his ship, standing in one of the few places where the lighting is sufficient to take a decent, non-noirish image.

My gunslinger again, sowing off his Cad Bane inspired outfit during the Tatooine sunset. Tatooine is, of course, normally brightly lit, but if you go to the Stronghold there, you get this sunset lighting.

Elemer Kell, my "Darth Maulish" Jedi, showing off some new coloration that he added to his outfit. I realized that I had the Thexan outfit on too many character at a time, and that at least coloring one of them would give it a slightly different look. This character is now more dark red than black, but y'know... they're both pretty good Sithy colors. Not that the character is in any way meant to be Sith-like. He's definitely a standard Jedi personality, once you get past the self-righteous nonsense on Tython.

This was taken in the Coruscant shuttle departures area of the Republic Fleet. I won't take the shuttle, though—I'm already signed up to take the Esseles departure, which of course is more adventurous.

UPDATE: To cement the deal, I went and purged a number of my characters. I still have two Jedi Sentinels, because both of them have finished Tython, so I may yet want to play them both—or, at least I can't decide which one I want to purge, and the sunk cost in time is more real, and therefore harder for me to let go of. I got rid of my older Jedi Shadow and Sith Assassin, because I didn't like either of those characters very much. I also got rid of the trooper that I would have played but now won't, as well as the Jedi Sage and Sith Juggernaut. I wasn't terribly thrilled with the character look on that one, and I'll want to go back and do a Sith Juggernaut later, I believe. 

Loads of sunk costs. I had most of those new characters send 800-900,000 creds back to John (J'ohhn) my "banker" but I had sent all of them 2 million to get started. Sigh. At least its just creds, not cartel coins. Although I had spent cartel coins on two dye modules. Not cartel coins that I bought, they were my subscriber monthly grant, but still. Now I'm buying cartel coins because I spent those. I didn't delete either of the characters with a dye module, but I don't think I really want to play the Mercenary. I'll want to rebuild another mercenary with body type 2. I just can't quite bring myself to do that because cartel coin sunk cost is an order of magnitude more painful to throw away than credits. But I seriously doubt I will ever play him all the way through, unless another double XP event shows up and I can just do the story missions, not the faction missions.

UPDATE II: And last night, I finished up Hutta with my Operative that I had been recording but forgot to do the last bit of with Karells. I didn't record any of it. Much of it was exploration missions anyway; the story missions were pretty incidental by this point. Got my agent to level 17, I believe, without even doing the Flashpoint Black Talon yet. I'll be nearly level 20 when I arrive on Dromund  Kaas. I do admit that I'm going to miss, a little bit, wearing my "Red Blade" disguise. The "real" Red Blade outfit is a kind of "Lando's skiff guard disguise" except reddish. I never liked that look. Once I could wear the Gree red scalene armor except with a Sanguine Commando eyepatch instead of the Gree armor helmet. Now that I have access to crafting the Dark Red and Black dye module, after getting enough Yavin IV reputation to buy the schematic, I've found that I'm using it to create all kinds of interesting "Red Blade" disguises. And since my Operative killed the real Red Blade, who's to say that any of my characters aren't the Red Blade if I want them to be?

I'm also working on the Section X dye module, the Makeb dye module, and the GSI dye module, all of which will give me alternative red dye module options that will look good on certain outfits. And although I've got a lot of things to spend bounty contracts on, that's another one of the ones that I want pretty badly too.

Although my recordings are pretty whack, I've given some thought to doing another agent at some point after the expansion drops, and recording him again. I'd like to do him as a human, because that's my default for everyone. Also, because I find that most recordings that I can find on YouTube have the agent romancing Kaliyo, which bugs the crap out of me because of how unlikable she is. In other words, I want to do my agent pretty much the same as I did my last agent. Sigh. Don't know which mechanics I want to use, though. I'm tempted to keep the Operative as a second combat style, because it will give me access to sneaking around. I may, in fact, have Operative, Shadow, Assassin or Scoundrel for all of my characters as a second class so that I can have access to stealthy movement and miss much of the trash mob problem in the game, while still using the combat classes that I like quite a bit better as my real default. I guess I better wait and see how it looks. 

I'm also thinking that rumors are that there will be more character customization options in the new character generator, although so far I'll I've seen are badly clipped and obviously incomplete patchy stubble, dreadlocks and cornrows. I won't have any interest in more "diversity" in my hairstyles and face shapes or whatever, but I'll wait and see what gives. If they put the original Theron Shan hairstyle in as an option, I'll be glad that I waited.

Anyway, getting back to the original point, the whole mission on Hutta seems kind of dumb now that I'm playing it with the benefit of having seen the entirety of not only this story, but all of the others too. We want Nem'ro on our side because we want to buy svash gas from him? I'd forgotten that the whole premise behind the start of the agent story line is pretty weak. Or rather; it's considerably weaker than the scope and scale of both the rest of the agent storyline from this point on, as well as that of the other classes. The scale somehow seems off. If the whole thing were at that scale across the game, there wouldn't be any problem with that, but it isn't. Both Imperial Intelligence's interest in the whole Nem'ro the Hutt palace politics seems unlikely, and Darth Jadus' interest in the mission is even moreso. It's just too small and unimportant to get very excited about.

One could possibly make a similar claim about the Smuggler and Bounty Hunter class stories, but while the scale is small on the galactic scale, it's hugely important on the personal scale for those two characters, so it never feels like you're just treading water waiting for the story to start. You've got intense personal stakes almost right away.