Old Republic Update

I'll take a break from my CYOA reviews to talk about Old Republic. When I get back, my #3 By Balloon to the Sahara order did come in—earlier than expected—so I'll continue in order, I presume. I also have already #s 4, 5, 6, and 7. #s 8 and 10 are on order and should show up in a day or two, long before I get to reviewing them. I also have #9. When all's said and done, I'll have every title between 1-25, except for #24, which I never did have in the first place, and #12, which I deprioritized in my ordering because I remember not really liking it as much as I thought I would even back when I was 10 years old, or however old I was. And then I've got about half again as many titles to go after that; I think my grand total of titles that I own (or will own once the titles that I ordered come in) was just one or two shy of 40. However, while I didn't reorder #12 Inside UFO 54-40, which I used to own, I did order #27 The Horror of High Ridge which I haven't ever owned previously. So I'm mostly replacing titles that I once had but don't any more, but I did swap one that I didn't ever like very much with one that is extremely highly regarded among adult fans of the series. 

We'll see where we go from there. That'll keep me busy for a long time. I'd actually like to see if I can recruit my wife, my daughter, and maybe her boyfriend to do podcasts about these, where I read the books and they make the decisions, and explain why. I listened to a couple of episodes of a podcast that did this already, but I didn't like a few things about how they did it, so maybe mine will turn out better. Or... well, at least more to my liking, if not necessarily anyone else's. 

Anyway, so two weeks now of Update 7.0 in SWTOR. I've done two weeks of Galactic Seasons, and started just today the third week. That's been my favorite part. Not that I necessarily love the missions that it assigns, but because of the pretty constant sense of progress as well as a decent batch of rewards to work for, I think that's the best part of the update. I've come to terms with most of the other things that've changed, even if I don't necessarily like the changes all that much. I hadn't played much with my "new" characters, but I did go back just last night, kinda for the first time, and do some stuff with Hutran Thanatos, my Mirialan operative, who's on Dromund Kaas. It's been quite a while since I've done that, so I'm excited even about the exploration missions and stuff, but as I do more and more characters, I'll probably get burned out. That's what happened before, anyway. The faction stories, or planetary story arc, or whatever you want to call it, plus the Heroics and exploration missions that you can pick up from random quest-givers around the map, are all relatively weak compared to the actual class story arcs. But if you only do the class story arc, you'll be lagging behind where you want to be in terms of XP and level. So, unless there's a very lengthy double XP event coming up soon, I doubt I'll be able to skip too much of that stuff. When I did Graggory, my first playthrough attempt, I got to max level (75 at the time) on Alderaan, so before finishing Chapter 1, which is about half of the main, OG game. After that, I mostly only did the class stories with him, because by then I'd seen the faction stories with lots of other characters. I did play him during a long double XP event that lasted for a good month, though. None of my other characters leveled that fast. In fact, I finished two characters at level 65, never really went on with them, and eventually ended up deleting them.

I find that in general, the changes to the game for 7.0 have less effect at the lower levels. The movelists take longer to fill out, as they've removed some abilities and stretched out the progression for the rest of them, which I think is a mistake. But not a huge one. It just feels like it takes longer to actually be playing your class, because you're just spamming the same three moves for more levels and more planets. But mostly I've had as much playing my "new" characters as I did the first pass through. I don't like the Operative and Scoundrel as much as the Sniper and Gunslinger. But I'm sure that the 7.0 update isn't the cause of that. I do, on the other hand, really like the Mercenary variation to the bounty hunter, but not necessarily at the expense of the Powertech. I just really like both of those.

A week from today is when the BBA event will start, and I want to hit that pretty hard and earn as many contracts as I can so I can buy, at least, the elite bowcaster, and play my Vanguard bounty hunter. It'll be weird running two bounty hunters at once, but they'll both be very different mechanically than the bounty hunters that I already have, both of which are powertechs. But, as you can see, the BH story somehow just ends up being my favorite. I may think about something else too, like a Gunslinger agent, or a mercenary scoundrel, or something, but we'll see. I'm already doing an operative and a scoundrel, so I may be burned out on all of this story stuff for a while.