It's not really over until tomorrow, but with Mother's Day weekend and a lot of stressful and frustrating things going on at work, I haven't played as much of the Double XP as I hoped to. But I think I'm where I want to be with most of my characters. Here's a small tracker update:
- Vant Galaide: bounty hunter mercenary: level 30 or so and finished with Dromund Kaas. I haven't played him this week.
- Anstal Tane: smugger scoundrel: same, except substitute Coruscant for Dromund Kaas.
- Revecca Arden: sith inquistor sorcerer: she's in the upper 20s in terms of level and I've done most of Dromund Kaas with her. I'd like to finish that before moving on later tonight.
- Elemer Kell: Jedi knight sentinel: about the same as Anstal and Vant; hasn't changed since before the double XP event started
- Taul Kajak: Jedi knight sentinel: I've played him a bit, but he's dropping out of the recordings due to a corrupted video file, so he, like Hutran Thanatos, is just "for fun" now.
- Vash Galaide: agent powertech: I don't think I've played him since the event started, but he's already at about level 30 and on Dromund Kaas. Because I did the Black Talon flashpoint with him so many times, he's probably the most advanced considering his place in the story. I can keep him up front by continuing to do all of the exploration missions and stuff, or I can cut some of those missions and advance through the class story more quickly.
- Haul Romund: smuggler mercenary: I got him to about level 30 and to Coruscant. He's high level for his place because of the double XP. Good head-start during the event.
- Wulf Hengest: bounty hunter vanguard: I did the same with him as I did with Haul, more or less.
- Phovos Maledict: Sith warrior juggernaut: He's also in the same place as the two above, even though I created him specifically for the double XP week. That is probably all I'm going to do for now with regards to recording new characters. I really should have named him Phovos Maledictus, but too late now. It's prohibitively expensive to change character names, so forget it.
My naming conventions are a lot better than what I did with my original playthroughs of the game, where I had no idea what I was doing so I kind of just did... whatever, and doubled letters and added gratuitous apostrophes to make it work. That said, most of my names were cribbed from my own fantasy setting, although I now like them enough in this SWTOR context that I'm thinking of using them in my space opera context. Galaide as a last name won't work, because the Galaide Worlds are already from my own space opera, and are a small grouping of star systems. Vant and Vash weren't meant to be brothers or anything. Vant is actually just from the Mandalorian character Cobb Vanth with the h dropped, and Vash is just supposed to be a similar name. Revecca Arden is based on a different fantasy Revecca, but Arden is a nod towards Flash Gordon's girlfriend Dale Arden, one of the original space opera gals. Romund is a slight mispelling of a fantasy land in my fantasy setting, Normaund, and Wulf Hengest is just an Anglo-Saxon sounding name. Phovos is a slight misspelling of Phobos, the minor Greek god who is also the name-sake of one of Mars' moons, and Maledict is just from Latin for maledictus, or "curse." I like how SWTOR is informing and influencing my ideas of Space Opera X, though. Both for good and bad.
I'd like to, when I have more time, discuss the difference between space opera and fantasy. Some people, who are probably a little too immersed in genre fiction, see them as quite different, whereas I see them as two sides of the same coin. While there are some differences between them, obviously, most of those differences are more superficial than not, I think. There is at least one major, structural divide between the two, however. Anyway... tagged for another post in the future when I've got more time and energy to sit and think about things like that.
UPDATE: I'm off to bed, and when I next log on, the double XP event will be over. I finished Dromund Kaas with Revecca and got her her ship. I did the little interplanetary mission with Elemer Kell on Ord Mantell, and then brought him to Taris. And I went back to Anstal Tane and started doing some Taris stuff. More ridiculous SJWisms, but I had to really laugh when the squatters on Taris tried to claim that their old documents meant that they were the legitimate owners. I wasn't having any of it, and they kept trying to shame me by doing the "humans are still so racist" routine. Of course, Anstal Tane... is a Sith pureblood and not human at all. The whole conception was ridiculous anyway. The exploration missions in particular are pretty pathetic (that is actually part of the planetary faction quest string, but still); they rarely offer the normal most obvious thing to say, and you have to listen to someone trying really hard to set up some hoaky "moral dilemma" for you to face. Sadly, I keep falling for it, because I want to grind the XP, when in reality if I even talked to this quest giver person at all, I'd tell them to shut up and walk away almost as soon as they started talking.
UPDATE II: In remembrance of the fallen: the characters that I made and decided not to play. One of them is still on my server, but the other three have been deleted: Embric Stane, a bounty hunter mercenary cyborg (I decided against the big guy body type. I just didn't like it as much as I thought I would) Osan Galaide, a big guy trooper, Codon Veile the Jedi consular, and Phovos Mal, a zabrak sith juggernaut, who was replaced by Phovos Maledict, the human sith juggernaut. While I did indeed take some names from Dark Fantasy X, I was surprised on further review that I actually took more names from obscure parts of my star sector map for Space Opera X. And I don't just mean the over-use of Galaide as a last name, although that's part of it: Codon and Osan both hail from there, for instance. Codon is a world I haven't developed yet that's part of a far-westward Seraean colony and which used to be part of the Altairan Ascendency before being conquered. It's not unheard of today for people to have first names that are also place names--I've known people named Erin, Savana, Jordan, Dakota, and others, for instance. And sometimes it goes the other way, where places are named after people: Israel being a notable example, or Georgia (sorta. Although the name of the state wasn't ever George.) I think, therefore, that even if Codon ever gets developed for the Space Opera X setting, I could still have a character named Codon Veille there too. That's the interesting thing of this second playthrough and recording phase; although obviously these are Star Wars Old Republic characters, they're leading me mentally towards potential Space Opera X characters, not further Star Wars development.
Of course, the characters are the same. No matter how you build and customize your character, there are very few choices that you can make that are really substantive (and ironically, being a normal, non-beta type guy often ends up with the game calling you Dark Side for reasons that say very unflattering things about the developers and writers) but the point is that the voice acted dialogue is all prerecorded. You can't do very much that affects the character other than give him a "look" and maybe a glimmer in the back of your mind about some kind of backstory. I think it's silly to write backstories for video game characters, although I know of players who do that.
To be honest, I don't know how much value there is in spending too much time writing too much backstory for regular TTRPG characters, or even actual story/novel/movie characters, for that matter. Many of my favorite characters appeared with a paper thin backstory; you could say what you knew about their backstory in two sentences, if even that. And in many cases, if the writers decide to later explore the backstory of these characters, it's usually a mistake; the backstory that they come up with makes the characters less compelling, actually.
But all that's probably the subject of some other discussion in another post somewhere.
UPDATE III: In a final slightly unrelated update, in the wake of the launch of cosmetic weapons that match cosmetic outfits, I've decided that I don't necessarily love all that many of the sniper rifles after all; most of them are way too long. When I played my sniper through his story originally, I played him after my gunslinger. My sniper became my cybertech crafter, but my gunslinger was my armstech crafter. Both my trooper and my sniper (and for that matter, my gunslinger himself) went through a progression of using crafted weapons that my gunslinger had made for them, and when they "leveled out" of one weapon, I retired it and gave them the newer one that they could now equip. It was kind of fun to see the progression of weapons as I went through them. For the most part, the range in which you use a crafted weapon is about four levels, so long enough to enjoy it, but short enough to keep the variety going. Even the ones I didn't really like all that much I tolerated because why not? And then later, of course, as mods were how I kept my higher level version of my sniper up to date, I stopped using the crafted weapons and used mostly cartel market ones.
One of the things that I noticed is that I don't really love the super long sniper rifles. They look really, really awkward on the character's back. It's a little hard to imagine the guy running all over the landscape with the end of the barrel bumping up against his heels. While it's true that in real life, sniper rifles sometimes do have a longer barrel than "normal" rifles, this is due to the chemistry and physics of firing a bullet, and it's not clear why it would be true for a blaster rifle firing a burst of plasma, or whatever exactly a blaster "bolt" is supposed to be in Star Wars. In addition, this is to keep muzzle velocity and accuracy high at very long ranges; the sniper in SWTOR actually doesn't shoot at long range at all, and uses his "sniper rifle" more often like a semi-automatic regular rifle at relatively short range. Not only that, there's a lot of clipping issues with the really long guns, especially if you're wearing any kind of overcoat, or duster, or cape or anything like that. There's really no point at all in having the very long sniper rifles except for the visual cue of a long rifle being "sniper-like" in the minds of most people.
Of course, snipers can equip blaster rifles, although there wasn't a good reason to do so, because your damage output was lower. But with cosmetic weapons, you can now actually have a sniper rifle equipped, such as the 320-rated decurion gun, and have the visual of a blaster rifle that's a more reasonably sized weapon for the way in which its being used. And, of course, you could already do so with your companions that use sniper rifles by default, such as Risha, Gault, Aric, HK-51, etc. So I'm going through a phase right now where I'm equipping blaster rifles on my sniper in the outfitter tab (not for real, just the visual). I just had my armstech crafter whip up the four blaster rifles that I most like the look of specifically for my sniper to consider using visually. Granted, I don't need them. I've got plenty of cartel market or other blaster and sniper rifles to keep me in use for quite some time. And I don't have any character with more than ten outfits, so I can only use up to ten weapons anyway. But I think I may like this look better than most of the sniper weapons. In fact, although I don't have another sniper in the works right now, I'm kind of tempted to see what class I can play with the sniper mechanics right now that I'd be interested in. I've already got two agents (although now I'm only recording one of them); an operative and a powertech, two bounty hunters—a mercenary and a vanguard, and two smugglers; a scoundrel and a mercenary. I guess that makes the obvious choice a trooper.
I hadn't actually planned on making a recordable replaying of the trooper or the consular. The latter makes sense; if you read my Mother of All SWTOR Reviews, you'd know that it's my least favorite of the stories. The trooper I ranked as more middle of the road. But the reality is more complicated than that. When I ranked the stories, it was more about how well the archetypal story and characters were written and less about how much that archetype appealed to me in the first place. So the answer to the apparent conundrum of how I ranked both the trooper and the smuggler at middle of the road stories and yet I'm re-playing two smugglers right now and no troopers is that in spite of my disappointment in its execution, the smuggler is an archetype that just appeals to me a lot more than the trooper, so I'm more forgiving of its flaws. I actually think that the trooper is a significantly better written story, with some of the only "moral dilemma" choices in the entire game that don't feel contrived and hoaky. It's just that the whole concept of playing a Republic trooper kind of turns me off.
In any case, I'll probably actually play a trooper after all and start it up fairly shortly. I've even played around in the character creator to get a look for him, although I might change my mind and go back to my original idea of making a Chiss trooper again after all. The parameters I picked are:
Body Type: 2 (as always)
Head: 22
Scars: 1
Complexion: 23
Eye color: 1
Beards: 1
Tattoos: 1
Hair: 20
Hair Color: 1
Skin Color: 14
If Chiss,
Body Type: 2
Head: 9
Scars: 4
Complexion: 39
Hair: 20
Hair color: 3 (or 1)
Skin color: 5 (or 7)
And either way, I'll resurrect the Codon Veile name for him. I do really like that name for a fantasy/space opera character. Actually, even more for a space opera character. I really need to do that discussion on the two genres sometime soon...
No comments:
Post a Comment