New outfit video for SWTOR characters

SWTOR characters, and what they can represent in Space Opera X, since I like to use SWTOR outfit designer as concept art for SOX.

SWTOR Winter gear

I'm making some of those SWTOR "walk around slowly showing off your outfit" videos. I thought it'd be fun to have a winter themed one, so I have some footage. Needs editing, but here's the screenshots of the four outfits that I decided to showcase for this "part one."

I've showed this one before, recently, since Hutran Thanatos is about to go to Ilum when I play him again next. This is one of two "Han Solo Hoth" like coats in the game. The other one has the hood up, but of course, many headpieces will make it disappear instead. I like that here the hood is down, and headpieces don't interfere with it. I also dyed it a crafted white/light gray dye, which for most intents and purposes is sufficient to look like just white/white in most conditions. But it sure is cheaper!

Vant Galaide, my first mercenary created during Onslaught when you still had to play the bounty hunter story to play a mercenary, showing off his Hoth gear. He hasn't even been to Hoth yet. I'm on Balmorra with him. This is obviously mostly based on the Infamous Bounty Hunter; the first "real" Mandalorian outfit that was based on the look from the movies and shows of actual Mandalorians, rather than a "Old Republic" original take on the concept. Because of that, the outfit was super popular on the cartel market and I used to see everyone running around dressed in it (usually uncustomized, however.) I think BioWare realized how well it sold and started creating more alternatives that were more Mandalorian show looking, or actual ESB Boba Fett looking, etc. and put them out there too.

Luukke, my original smuggler, showing off his cold weather gear. Sadly, I created this outfit long after he'd already played Hoth and even Ilum, but I still really like it. The coat is dyed, but it's an older high level craftable coat, and I think you have to be at least level 65 or 70 to wear it. The dye is also a high level and (relatively) recently added craftable dye that I use a lot, because it's a darker gray than the black/gray dye module that you can craft, and the "black" is actually a very dark navy, so it has just a bit more color than pure black. It's a decent alternative, and it comes in reverse too, and it's craftable.

Mirabeau Tane, an odd first name that I took from a figure of Texas history (I went to a school named after him as a kid) hasn't really been anywhere cold yet either, but he's prepared with this great version of a Season jacket, that has a kind of biker or aviator look to it once it's dyed. I can't remember the dye; I think it's Honorable General, but it might be the reverse of that (Underworld Crime boss, I think it's called?), whichever one made the jacket look like brown leather. He actually has three cold weather outfits, which is probably a bit much. The one that actually looks the warmest is based on the same coat as Vant's above, so I decided to go with this lighter look, which probably will look better on planets like Alderaan, Ziost or Elom. And it looks like you could even wear it just about anywhere that doesn't look overtly hot, like Tatooine or the jungle planets, although maybe I'd want to hide the balaclava in that case.

I have at least four or five more options coming in a part 2 later, but I'll wait until some of those characters are high enough level to actually get to Hoth. Three of them don't even have spaceships yet, and two of them haven't even really started their story at all yet. It's exciting to have all of these options, though! I almost wish there was another cold planet that I had reason to have them running around in. And maybe I can show off another one of the outfits where I have more than one cold outfit per character, or something—although they do start to use a lot of the same basic coat models after a while.

This idea of starting my three newest characters with a unique outfit for every one of the original main planets has really been pretty fun. I'm excited to see it play out with them.

UPDATE: Here's the video. Music is "Winter Chan" by Xurious, featuring Zephora.

SWTOR Tracker 10/7/2022

I haven't done much with SWTOR since going out of town for my first wave of vacations this summer, to Boise to see my son and his kids, and then to Bear Lake for a family reunion, and then hiking in the Cloud Peak Wilderness of central Wyoming. After that lengthy vacation, I'd obviously lost loads of momentum with SWTOR.

Of course, not long after getting back and getting caught up with work, I got laid off from work, which made me feel unmotivated to play computer games when I needed to be finding a job. I also went back to Boise for two weeks as my oldest son (well... his wife, anyway) had another baby. I was already planning on doing this before getting laid off; it wasn't really vacation, it was working remotely so I could be around when needed. The baby came early, so it wasn't really exactly what we envisioned; neither my wife nor I watched the other kids while they were in the hospital, because we haven't even showed up in town yet. And, of course, I spent a fair bit of that time chasing around; the first week I was there, I had on average two interviews a day, and by the time the second week was halfway through, I had four offers to sort through. I had to accept one before coming home, or it would have expired, which I did, and now I'm scheduled to start on Monday.

Of course, this means less time to play video games again. Although my evenings will be relatively as free as they had been, I think, I'll be a lot busier during the day, and will—at least for now—be in an actual office, not working from home, so that means no firing up the game during my lunch break or anything like that. That said, due to timing, even though I haven't played much the last couple of months, I hadn't actually had my subscription run out either (I buy one-off two month blocks of subscription at a time). It was about to in a week or so, so I actually just bought another two month block. I'm feeling a bit motivated to play some more again, and let Hero Forge take a little bit of a back-seat. Not that I want to stop doing that, and my Dark Fantasy X posts—in fact, I envision a fairly substantial revision to the monster list of Dark Fantasy X in the nearish future—but I also want to get back on the bandwagon with my SWTOR videos and playthrough.

So, here's my latest version of the tracker; basically the same as the one I posted in June. A few updates, not because I've done much of anything, but because I've made some decisions that I hadn't back then.

Anstal Tane. Level 44 Scoundrel playing the smuggler story. Sith Pureblood, male. Recording all missions. Just finished the Taris bonus series. Although he's the farthest along, I may well play more of him, so as to spread the pack out just a bit and not have everyone bunch up on just the second and third planets.

Elemer Kell. Level 36 Sentinel playing the Jedi Knight story. Imperial Zabrak, male. Just arrived on Taris and walked out of the spaceport, but otherwise have to start all of the missions. After moving to Nar Shaddaa and recording just a bit with Anstal, I'll probably do him next. In fact, I'm trying to reorder the list of characters in the order I expect to play them. Recording all missions.

Vant Galaide. Level 35 Mercenary playing the bounty hunter story. Human male. Just arrived on Balmorra. I actually skipped the phone call from Crysta so I could go shop for a Mako customization on Balmorra and make her blonde, but then I fast-traveled back to my ship. Recording all missions.

Revecca Arden. Level 34 Sorceress playing the Sith Inquisitor story. Human female. Just about to go to Balmorra.

Haul Romund. Level 33 Mercenary playing the Smuggler story. Human male. On Coruscant.

Codon Veile. Level 21 Sniper playing the trooper story. Chiss male. On the Republic fleet; needs to take the Esseles to Coruscant.

Vash Galaide. Level 35 Powertech playing the agent story. Human male. Just arrived on Dromund Kaas

Phovos Maledict. Level 28 Juggernaut playing the Sith Warrior story. Human male. Just arrived on Dromund Kaas.

Mirabeau Tane. Level 20 Gunslinger playing the trooper story. Cyborg male. Just arrived on the fleet from Ord Mantell.

Wulf Hengest. Level 30 Vanguard playing the bounty hunter story. Human male. Just arrived on Dromund Kaas.

Embric Stane. Level 19 Mercenary playing the bounty hunter story. Cyborg male. Just finished Hutta. I actually decided to bench Embric and not worry about recording him. I may still play him from time to time, just like I do my other benched characters, Taul Kajak and Hutran Thanatos. (Who by coincidence are both Mirialan.) In fact, that's what I've been doing since getting back in town and playing a bit again; crafting and selling with John and playing a bit of Hutran Thanatos on Tatooine. 

I've got a fair number of videos to edit, but I'm deliberately not going to worry too much about that for now. In the past, I'd sometimes psyched myself out not to play, because I didn't want to record more video, because playing is more fun than video editing, and I didn't want to mess with the latter. For now, I'll do whichever of the two I feel like and not allow myself to get worked up over the backlog.

UPDATE: I was looking through my raw videos, and I've got a lot of Anstal Tane on Taris coming up, and then some other stuff, including the launch of Codon Veile and Mirabeau Tane. However, the last several have, for some reason, no sound. I screwed up when recording them and probably forgot to adjust my settings on OBS, so it was looking for sound coming from my Xiberia headset, which I wasn't using, or something like that. Luckily, most are of Embric Stane, who I'm not going to worry about... but not all of them. Sigh. Maybe I should just use someone else's archived play if I ever want to watch this again when it's gone. That's discouraging.

UPDATE II: Well, I played Phovos Maledict through to getting his ship. I actually think, because I have so many "young" characters that don't have their ships yet, that I want to get everyone their ships before moving on. The galaxy really comes alive once you have a ship; not before. That means, I'll be doing a bunch of Coruscant and Dromund Kaas, I suppose. I had six characters, three and three on the two factions, that needed it. Since I just did a Sith Warrior, I'll need to switch to a Republic character next to break up the rainy jungle monotony. And maybe I should do one of the trooper stories so that I can space them out a bit too. I'll probably do Codon Veile next.

UPDATE III: Before I do that, though, I'm finishing off a few things that have lingered for too long. Luke, my OG smuggler is on Makeb, and I want to both just finish that, and also finish leveling up the Makeb reputation which has been on Champion for months. I actually just finished the max for the week, and I'm only a couple of hundred shy. But in addition to the Makeb reputation track, which has been almost but not quite finished for months, I've got the Section X on Belsavis and the Yavin 4 reputation tracks in basically the same place. I won't actually be able to finish any of them this week, but I want to max out my reputation this week so that I can easily and quickly finish them next week because I've only got a couple hundred rep points left to do. Then I'll record the next part of the next character, which will be Codon Veile doing the Esseles and Coruscant. Let me reorder the characters in the order I plan to do them, starting with Phovos Maledict, who I just recorded a bunch of earlier this week.

Phovos Maledict (check)

Codon Veile

Wulf Hengist

Haul Romund

Vash Galaide (the agent)

Mirabeau Tane

Vant Galaide (the bounty hunter)

Anstal Tane

Revecca Arden

Elemer Kell

From now on when I make updates to this, I'll use that order.

SWTOR footage edited to create trailers

I like these. Sadly, he only ever did them for these two classes. But then again... these are two of my favorite class concepts. The smuggler is sometimes a little disappointing in terms of living up to its concept, but it's not as bad as I had initially described, I'm finding. You can impact—a bit—much of the experience by simply not taking all of the beta dialogue options. And if you can ignore quests from entitled, bratty narcissists, especially by ignoring the faction quest stories on each world and many of the exploration missions, then it's not so bad.

Of course, you probably need those missions for the XP that they give. Sigh. Yeah.

Taul Kajak sigh

So, I've had a few minutes to play today, and I've had a tough time. First, while recording my "alternate" Mirialan Jedi Sentinel, I had the game crash on me in the middle of a recording. That was OK. I could restart it well enough and splice the two video files together But then, about forty-five minutets or so after getting it restarted, we had three little micro-pulses of power outage. Enough to reboot my computer and my modem, even though each of the outages was less than a second. My wife, upstairs with nothing on but the TV, didn't even notice it. (I didn't think to check the microwave or oven clock.) The side effect of this is that it screwed up my recording. I have a file, but I can't play it. Its a gig and a quarter, but it's corrupted and won't play, and I'll have to delete it. 

So, my Mirialan Sentinel is my backup Jedi. My Darth Maul looking zabrak Jedi Elemer Kell is my "main." It was, however, my intention to keep recording him anyway, so it's disappointing to lose that footage, since you can't go back and replay those missions (which is a complaint for another post, but it goes all the way back to the entire MMO paradigm of SWTOR, so that's a twelve year old complaint now. I need to get over it). I could also keep going anyway and just be missing that portion, but I'll have to skip some of the early story missions (and some exploration missions, although I won't miss those) on Coruscant, which are pretty crucial. What a pain. What in the world caused that stupid micro-blackout? Argh. 

By funny coincidence, the two original recording playthroughs that I had to abandon because I had story missions that I "lost" either by forgetting to record them, or now by this, were both Mirialan. I guess I'm just not intended to record a Mirialan playthrough. That's what I get for abandoning my human male only take, I guess. Although as I go through the Sith Sorcerer with a human girl character, I'm more and more convinced that it somehow just works better as a girl. No idea why. That story is borderline farce anyway, so maybe that's the reason. Her sarcasm and occasional silliness work better as a villainess rather than a villain.

Of course, I can still play through these two Mirialan characters and probably will, but I also have to decide what to do with them. I imagine that after I finish the stories, I may keep them around for a little while just in case I want to do a bit of the post-story stuff, but it may make sense to just delete them when I'm done too.

SWTOR Videos

I've got quite a few videos that I've recorded, but not edited or posted. I've actually spent some of my time the last few days after I've done my daily requirements for the BBA event and the Galactic Seasons cleaning some of that up rather than playing too much more. However, the next two videos in my queue to edit are ones where I forgot to plug in my headset. As I was having lots of problems with sound when I first started using OBS, I set it somehow so it only records sound when my USB headset is inserted. If I forget to put that in, then I get video that doesn't have sound. Usually I don't forget to do this, of course, but occasionally I do, because it's playing well out of my bluetooth speaker and I forget.

Sadly, one of the two recordings I made was the initial video for my Vanguard bounty hunter. I haven't done anything else with him yet, except the intro cut scene. I'm trying to decide if I want to just go through that without sound for my video series (it is subtitled, for example) or start over; deleting the character and creating a new one that looks the same. I'm not out too much other than some time and credits that I spent on outfitting him, but my budget is such that losing a couple million credits isn't a big deal to me anymore. I can earn that back in no time selling some crafted V-9 Advanced Grenades or something.

That's probably what I will do, although its a real shame to have to do so.  Sigh.

The second video that doesn't have sound was the last part of Vant Galaide, my normal Mercenary, on Hutta. Luckily, he'd already finished all of the story, and this was just some clean-up on a few exploration missions that I wanted to finish before leaving the planet. That one I can't redo even if I wanted to, so I'm going to upload it as is, with just the note that if it really bothers anyone, they can skip it if they want.

UPDATE: Did it. Deleted Wulf Galaide and replaced him with Wulf Hengest. I like the Anglo-Saxon better anyway. Well, kinda. Hengist is usually how it's spelled, but Hengest is also attested. He looks the same. It cost me an extra 2 million credits, but I'm selling probably twenty million of items that I crafted this afternoon, so no biggy. I'm actually really looking forward to getting more acquainted with the Vanguard combat, which should be the same (well, mirrored abilities, but differing animations for them) as the Powertech, and I've certainly played plenty of Powertechs already. 

UPDATE 2: In terms of more general updates, I've spent almost all of my SWTOR time this week grinding for bounty contracts, because that's a limited time event, I missed it last time it came around because I was out of town, and there's tons of stuff I want to buy that require the BBA currency. I'm finding that although I quite liked that event before, compared to most of the others, I'm getting a bit burned out on it. It's grindy and after a while, it's tedious. It takes about 15-20 minutes to get a character through a BBA contract all told, between all of the things that you have to do to complete it and cash it in. And since I have twelve characters who are at a place that they can play in the BBA sandbox, that's the better part of three hours, or even three and a half a day doing just BBA stuff. 

Luckily, doing BBA stuff is 1) giving me plenty of conquest points to meet my Galactic Seasons daily requirement, without me having to go do something else unique for that, and 2) is actually giving me enough XP to be noticeable. My lower level characters, of which I have five participating, four of which haven't even finished the capital world and picked up their ships yet, will probably get a total of 4-6 levels each just from doing BBA stuff. It'll actually be nice when next week rolls around to try and slowly move my characters forward again. They haven't really gotten very far. Hutran Thanatos is the farthest of my low level characters, but that's because I deliberately stopped recording him, so he's a bit easier and more relaxing to play.

I also still have three characters that I started but literally haven't done anything with other than their opening scene and equiping. (Actually four, but I doubt I'll play one of them. I'm reluctant to get rid of him, though, just in case.) And I've got two more in mind; some kind of Sith Sorcerer, although maybe being played as a Jedi Knight, and another agent to make up for the mistake I made on recording with Hutran Thanatos. I also don't really like that he's an operative; I dislike the operative mechanics so far. I haven't decided if I'll play my next agent as a Gunslinger, or as a Sniper again. Either way, I really like both mechanics, and I'd like to have an excuse to use them both. Plus, I've got tons of collected blaster pistols and sniper rifles, and it seems a shame to not use more of them.

UPDATE 3: I'm finding the bounty missions are starting to get tedious. I guess that's what happens when you do twelve of them every day for almost a week now. I've got one more day of them. One of the things that I'll do is buy one more kingpin bounty. I should still have enough to buy the 50 BBA currency item after I do it, but I'm cutting it down to absolutely the last BBA currency unit I'll have. Sigh.

However, I was thinking about how frustrating it is that I want to have a bounty hunter vanguard with a signature weapon of a bowcaster, but I can't actually equip the bowcaster that I bought from the BBA vendor earlier this week until 10th level. But then I thought; hey, how about before I do any missions I run around killing random enemies and see how hard it really is to get to 10th level before starting? The answer, it turns out, is that it's kind of tedious but not that bad. It took me about two hours, and I got quite a few syndicate data files to turn in for syndicate reputation later, I got the whole map of Hutta uncovered, I did two Heroics because while wandering around I found and remembered that the quest giver is right there. I wasn't going to do missions, but because those are repeatable anyway, I figured what the heck. My gear is pretty upgraded due to drops, and I've got quite a few more abilities unlocked (although still not enough to make the character all that interesting to play yet. Sigh.) But I got there. I equipped my bowcaster and now, except for the opening cut scene, I'll do everything with my signature weapon. I could, actually, have done it even before doing the opening cut scene, so I'll keep that in mind for the future, maybe.

But I really shouldn't prioritize him quite yet. I've got plenty of low level characters who need to advance their story still without starting my new bounty hunter vanguard, mercenary smuggler or whatever mechanics I end up using agent. Sigh again. But it was an interesting experiment. Certainly it's possible, and not too terrible to get to 10th level, allow yourself to equip items that you can't otherwise equip, like Alliance crate armor pieces, my scalene armor, the bowcaster, etc. without putting too much work and effort into making it possible, and then you can play the game with even more options on customizing your appearance. Plus, because you'll be doing level 1-2 levels right at first while already 10th level, they'll be easier than expected, I suppose. And when I finish my starting planet and move on, I should be a few levels head-started compared to the other characters I'm doing. Staying a few levels ahead of the curve is always preferable if you can pull it off.

New Legacy of the Sith cinematic trailer

It's been quite a while since BioWare have given us a cinematic trailer for SWTOR. This just dropped less than an hour ago. I said the following, and I'll say it here because most likely it'll be deleted on the YouTube channel: It's hardly new news anymore that the Jedi are actually lying manipulators rather than paragons of virtue or goodness. However... well, actually it's hardly new news anymore than women are too emotional to handle too much responsibility. The anti-suffragettes said so quite plainly, and it was just an implicit assumption of society before they had to actually say it to rebut the crazy people who denied it. But it IS certainly new news for BioWare to openly portray that! Kudos for the realism, I guess.

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.

Bounty Hunter and Smuggler

I'm still struggling mentally with what to do about my recording plan. Having messed one of them up already, and now feeling quite honestly like I'm just not sure that the whole idea was a great one to begin with (I'm really disappointed in the video quality of my rendered videos from OBS and Windows Photos Video Editor) I'm having second thoughts about the whole affair.

I wonder how it would work if I streamed it and then grabbed my streamed videos after the fact? Well, they wouldn't be edited, so there'd be tons of long, unwatchable running around and messing with inventories and crap like that. Sigh. What a disappointment. 

Maybe I just play the characters I got without recording them, and wait until the new thingy launches, and then do characters that I want to do, like a bounty hunter using the vanguard mechanics, etc. Actually, that's the only one on my radar, other than maybe an agent as a gunslinger or powertech or something. I kind of want to do a mercenary too, but I'm not sure that I like my current mercenary as much as I thought I would. Some of the characters that I haven't really started and don't really care about I can transfer whatever money that they still have and delete them and chalk up the losses as sunk costs. 

Right now I'm leaning that way (sigh) with more targeted videos and screenshots. Maybe a series of outfit videos, like Vitnir makes.

Anyway, I was considering how to best replicate or cosplay in game Cad Bane. You can't have a Duros character, but the Chiss race looks pretty close, or at least as close as you can get. Here's a screenshot of how I'd create such a character, probably as a Mercenary, but you could do it as a Gunslinger too. Mechanically, I mean. Both of them are two-gun space gunfighters in a classic, Western sense.

This is my cosmetic build of the character. Yeah, he's got a relatively big nose compared to no-nose Cad Bane, but you know; none of the options are really much better. I like the strong chin and the eyes are right. Go to the moods setting and set your character to annoyed and he'll have the right expression too. The skin color is probably the right one for the Boba Fett version of Cad Bane. The last skin tone, whatever number that is, is probably best for Clone Wars Cad Bane, who's a bit more royal blue in coloration.

This is the outfit. I put it on my existing human gunslinger, because I already had him and it worked. I'll explain it in more detail.

In order:

Hat: I used the Trimantium Onslaught hat, which is craftable, but only wearable at relatively high level. The cartel market Outer Rim Gunslinger is identical, but of course, it's a cartel market hat, and you have to buy it. Long ago, I bought the similar but slightly more detailed Shrewd Rascal's armor set instead of the Outer Rim Gunslinger, because I thought most of the time I'd prefer the extra detail. If I were building this for a 1st level character, I'd put that on him instead. The detail isn't preferred for this particular cosplay, however.

Body: The TD-07A Scorpion Jacket is already perfect as is. There are some alternative versions, including the craftable Titanium Onslaught (although it doesn't work right on Republic faction characters) although it's more gray rather than black, or the GTN/Cartel Market Troublemaker (which is identical), or the GTN/Cartel Market Subversive, although it's green. But this one is the best. You can't buy it as a 1st level character, because it's available on the fleet, but you can wear it as a first level character, as long as someone else buys it and mails it to you to you can equip it. And, it's actually cheap.

Arms: The Secret Agent bracers. With this build, you can actually see the bracers. Ideally, you'd have some chunky ones, but the only ones I know of that are chunky are the Infamous Bounty Hunter, and I don't have that set. I'm also not 100% sure that's the piece I'd want here anyway. I admit that this isn't quite ideal.

Hands: I used the Secret Agent gloves. They are fingerless, biker-type gloves, which is good for this character. The Skiff Guard also has chunker fingerless gloves that look like halfway up your arm gloves that are fingerless, but they don't look technical. The Dust Storm Survivor gloves are also a good alternative, that I happened to have handy. And I've since updated this armor (since taking this screenshot, I mean) with the BK-0 Combustion gloves. I couldn't find one that really looked perfect, though, between the gloves and the bracers. Maybe the Secret Agent's gloves with the Infamous Bounty Hunter's Bracers are the best you can get. Either that, or give up on worrying about the fingerless jazz, and you've got more good options than you can shake a stick at.

Belt: I used the Scout Trooper belt, but I admit that I have many options that I think would have looked good. I like the ammo belt look of that one in particular. The Remnant Yavin Trooper seems to be identical, but of course you can't wear that until 10th level, even if you mail it to yourself from another character.

Legs: Loads of options would look equally good here. I used the Decorated Targeter's Leggins, which is a smuggler world drop that I had held on to because I liked the look of them. Using Cartel Market pants, I'd probably go with the my Black Vulkar Swoop pants, Corellian Pilot's pants or my Nefarious Bandit pants. 

Boots: Again, I went with an Alliance crate set, the Remnant Dreadguard Bounty Hunter. They look perfect from the front. They look a little silly from behind, though. The Combat Engineer's boots would be a relatively easily obtained GTN set that also has the ammo look to it and would work very well. The Republic Protector's boots that you can get with Makeb reputation and then send to a 1st level character would also do in a pinch, although they do have a bit too much of a ski boot look to them in my opinion.

For weapons, they're not cosmetic yet unless they're modifiable, but when they are, luckily the first set of craftable pisols looks quite  a bit like what Bane used, the Carbo-plas Onslaught or Asylum (they look identical.) Personally, I prefer bigger guns for my characters, but that's a personal thing, I admit.

Agent blew it

Well, I feel really stupid. I had a little bit of free time earlier this morning, so I played my Operative storyline for about half an hour... and forgot to hit record! Huge story developments (well, given the scope of things on Hutta they're huge, anyway) and I've got no recording of them! I feel pretty stupid.

I'm not quite sure how to proceed. It's still early enough; do I start over with another agent and delete this one? Or do I just patch it over? Sigh. I don't know. Maybe I just give up the whole thing. My recordings aren't super high quality because I don't have a graphics card. They look great while I'm playing, but they don't render well in the video editor afterwards. And I'm not doing any real editing of the videos other than cuts. Maybe I'm better off just grabbing someone else's archived version of the stories and saving them. SIGH! I was pretty excited about this project at one point, and I've had a number of setbacks that have made me less so as I've gone on. Now I've got characters that I'm not even sure if I want to play or not lined up still. Maybe I'm better off salvaging the credits that they have, deleting most of the characters and just playing what I want to play again, and not worrying so much about it. Maybe I'm better off, even, waiting until the update drops and creating characters that may or may not have matched story and mechanics; like a vanguard playing the bounty hunter story, for instance, or a gunslinger playing the agent story.

It's kinda funny that for whatever reason, its my Mirialan characters that are causing lots of trouble. Maybe I just have been playing them more, and that's why.

Anyway, here's a picture of my Mirialan agent in his updated Red Blade disguise while I think about how to handle. Yeah, I mean it's just the Red Scalene armor from the Gree event but with an eye patch because the helmet is kinda dumb.

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?

Star Wars Barbie Dolls

Sometimes people who are into trying to create the perfect look for their SWTOR characters are accused of playing Star Wars Barbie Dolls. That's not... entirely without merit, even if I am one of the aforementioned.

For those who like it, here's some Scandinavian or German nerdy dude's video series about creating iconic archetypal Star Wars looks in SWTOR.

Admittedly; maybe some of the looks are a bit more iconic and archetypal than others. But it's the thought that counts.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVHe_wcOIXuMyABNS_cKckt1nzWHxSvs9

By the way, I finished my Tython playthrough with my "Darth Maul's teenaged younger brother" looking Jedi Sentinel. I'm going to step aside from him for a little bit and do some of the other characters' starting planets now.

Be sure and read the commentary for each video too. It's brief.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLCtWhv3V1bEYRqttbYCWgDa0MGyufP3e

SWTOR videos going forward

I finally decided that I'm going to do Elemer Kell, the Jedi Sentinel who looks like Darth Maul's teenaged nephew or something, at least at first. I'm going to record the entirety of Tython and the Republic Fleet with him (including the Esseles Flashpoint) and present edited versions on Youtube, as well as create a disc offline that I can have as an archive. 

I actually wanted to know what my oldest son thought, because I was doing it mostly for myself, but partly for him, because he's a big fan of the older Old Republic games, but hasn't ever played this one. I thought he'd enjoy watching it. But I haven't heard, and I made an executive decision anyway. But it's not a huge deal which one I start with, because I'm only going to do the starting planet and then jump to a different character to do their starting planet. I'd kind of like to do a very different character than the Jedi Knight after doing it, so I'm leaning towards maybe the Imperial Operative or Mercenary for my second one.

In any case, here's the list of playlists on the channel that I'm using specifically for this project. Updates will appear there. Each small section will (hopefully) be fairly short; around 7-10 minutes or so long each. The total time value of each planet is going to be—again hopefully; once it's edited down—about equivalent to a full-length movie, i.e., ~2 hours.

As an aside, I've finally found a way that seems to be generating a modest, yet significant way to earn some money, and it's with the Cybertech crafting. I'd previously ignored that, mostly, because I wasn't interested in the products themselves. But I've now got speeder schematics, and they're among my favorite speeders, so I've been making them for all of my characters. But more to the point, the Advanced V-9 Seismic grenades sell for a decent amount of money. I can craft 25 of them in the background in a couple of hours, and then sell them for about 5 million credits. Mostly, these sales go through pretty quick; within a few hours. On a really productive day, I can sell three or four of these a day, although that means spending more time doing that then other things that I'd probably actually rather be doing.

Because I've made a decent amount of money (although it would have been good money a year ago; now it's fairly modest) I've bought a number of relatively cheap yet attractive cosmetic things. Not so much armors, although I have bought some of those too; mostly pets and weapons. However, to unlock these in my collections, I need cartel coins, and I'm pretty much out of those. Every month I get about 650 if I'm subscribed, because of my subscription and my security key. I need 1200, and that assumes that I don't buy anything else. I don't know how much of this I'll want to use with my current crop of characters, but the pets can be adopted at any time, just like mounts can.

UPDATE: And here's the playlist for Elemer Kell, my "Darth Maul's teenaged nephew" Jedi Sentinel. So far, I've added 8 videos of running around on Tython, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through that planet. It'll end up being twelve or so total videos, depending on how many times I cut my playthrough up. The last two videos were a bit on the longer side, because I was doing a bunch of little rinky-dink missions. I'd actually prefer to be on the shorter side, but it's kind of an issue of which missions are available and when.

And as an aside, I've really got, I hope, all of the cosmetics that I "need" and then some. I do need to unlock two more guns in Collections, which I can do when my next round of cartel coins grant shows up. But neither of those are going to be used anytime too soon.

I had had a discussion on the SWTOR boards briefly, where someone asked what combination of class story and mechanical suite we were excited to play. I said that this was just taking old content and giving it the appearance of freshness; we aren't actually getting anything new, and the ability to use sniper (or whatever) mechanics with the bounty hunter story doesn't really make it exciting per se. However, part of that is just me being crotchety. I actually think it'd be pretty cool to play a sniper or maybe better yet, a vanguard, with the bounty hunter, and use the legacy bound elite bowcaster as his signature weapon. Sure, he can't equip it until 10th level, but you'll tend to hit that about two thirds of the way through your starter planet.

One more minor update; I've been playing the rakghoul event a bit this week, which started yesterday. I think I'm about done with it, though, to be honest. I've already maxed out the reputation for T.H.O.R.N., so I don't care about doing it for reputation anymore. I've also got thirty six rakghoul cannisters right now, and nothing in particular that I'm planning on spending them on (I already bought a third lightsaber and several more rakghoul crystals) so my urgency to grind through it just to hoard rakghoul crystals for some future use is low. Maybe if I do the bowcaster bounty hunter in the future, I'd use the very expensive outer rim hunter's helmet as part of his outfit, but even that only costs 30 rakghoul cannisters (plus the Gree helixes and bounty contracts.)

SWTOR Playthroughs - all character intros

I've now recorded the character introduction to all of my characters.

Because I had previously played all of the class stories with white male characters, I decided that this time I wouldn't have any white male humans (with the exception of the cyborg. Because they count cyborg as a different race than human.) Six aliens, one cyborg, and one girl—I figure that's alien enough to count as a seventh.

I haven't yet decided which one I'm going to prioritize and start doing their opening planet missions first, though, but I do intend to leapfrog between all of these characters so nobody gets too far ahead of the pack, and nobody falls too far behind it either. Obviously, this means that the long-promised update will happen in the middle of this series... but that's OK. I actually very much wanted to start all characters before the update hits. Among other things that are changing is the character generator interface.

Anyway, in no particular order:

Our Jedi Sentinel Elemer Kell, who looks a bit like a teenager cousin of Darth Maul. He'll have red lightsabers too, when he gets his lightsabers, and dresses like a Sith Lord. That doesn't mean that I'll be playing him dark or anything. I just thought it would look incongruous and kind of cool.

Anstal Tane is a Sith Pureblood for his race, but he's on the Republic side (kind of) as a Scoundrel. I always thought that the fun of the smuggler and bounty hunter classes were that they weren't conceptually tied to the factions, really. Sadly, you still have all of the faction missions on each planet. You can skip them, but if you do, you probably won't level up fast enough unless you grind Heroics, or do it during a double XP event.

Hutran Thanatos is our Operative, and I decided to make him a blond Mirialan.

The Sith Juggernaut is a Republic-style zabrak, but you'll probably often forget that because he wears a face-hiding helmet. It'll automatically come off when he's doing companion dialogues and stuff, but otherwise, that's his look.

Codon Veile is a rattataki Jedi Sage, who also wears a stealthy, colorless suit that matches his skin tone. I tried to get as little of the Rattataki face tattoos as I could, but the option with the least tattoos does have "tattoo eyeliner", so my character will look much more emo than I intended, I've noticed. His face is mostly hidden except the eyes normally too.

Osan Galaide is my Big Boy chiss vanguard. I actually deliberately, if you haven't noticed, tried to use Imperial races on Republic classes and vice versa. Of course, you won't really notice him either, because he wears armor head to toe. But not only is he an Imperial race, but he wears Mandalorian style armor, which isn't standard Republic issue by any means. But screw that; the Havoc Squad standard issue white with orange markings that look like Stormtroopers is not for me.

Only the second Big Boy character I've ever created (I didn't make Fatso the Hutt characters, just the big brawny guys) is my cyborg mercenary. This one is a little bit of a cheat; cyborgs aren't counted humans, but I'm sure that I'll almost always forget that.

And finally, Revecca Arden, the Sith Sorcerer. Or witch, if you prefer, although I figured that if I'm going to make a girl character, I'm going to make her a good looking one, at least. I was initially going to make her a Mirialan too, but I didn't really want two of them. I thought about a Miraluka or twi'lek, but let's be honest. I don't like those races at all, and neither of them are very pretty either. And, to paraphrase one of my sons, if a girl can't be pretty, what is she good for?

He actually said that it doesn't matter how hot a girl is, if she can't be pleasant to be around, what is she good for, in regards to a very pretty girl that had an obvious crush on him, but who got so awkward and nervous around him that she was impossible to talk to. I think he should have given her another chance, personally, but he seems to have moved on. You can eventually overcome that shyness, and then you're left with a very pretty girl, after all.

Anyway, the look of the characters will probably be the same, more or less, the entirety of the run. I tried to create some costumes for them that are iconic enough that they require little updating. A few of them were built with some Remnant armor pieces in mind, and you can't wear those until Level 10, though. In particular, you may notice that a lot of characters are wearing the same gloves. However, for many of them, these gloves are surrogates, and once they hit level 10, they'll replace them. 

Here's a brief list of what will change, once I can do so:

• Hutran Thanatos is wearing surrogate goggles. He'll have different ones, which are actually agent drops on Hutta, as soon as I can find them. He also has a second outfit, because as the intro suggested, he's going to go undercover as a different character shortly, and I thought it appropriate for him to have a disguise for that effort.
• Phovos Mal will replace his gloves, and maybe his boots and leggings too.
• Osan Galaide is waiting on gloves, boots and leggings/greaves, so what he's wearing now are surrogates.
• Embric Stane will replace his gloves and his boots.

In addition, all of the Jedi and Sith characters both don't have their lightsabers yet. I could, actually, equip lightsabers, but since in story they don't have them, I thought that that would look a little silly. Some of the characters will, in fact, go through a series of crafted weapons—rifles this time for Hutran and Osan. I did the same thing with double-bladed lightsabers on two characters in the past, as well as blaster pistols, assault cannons and sniper rifles. Five characters went through this routine, and I liked it. One of the things that will happen with the update when it comes is that weapons will be cosmetic like armor is, so you can have the look of any weapon of your type that you want, regardless of what you're actually wielding. I'll probably settle on a single look rather than an ever advancing one once that feature goes live, but I don't know for sure what weapons I'll be using for that yet. Some of the craftable weapons are butt-ugly, but some of them are quite attractive, and I might seriously consider using them. And finally, my smuggler will pick up a pistol from a vendor on the Fleet when I get there. It's Bind on Pickup, so nobody else can buy it and send it to him; he'll have to buy it himself. That'll be the last piece of gear that I'll be waiting on to get all of them "properly" "cosmetically" geared.

A final note; the graphic quality still isn't as good as when I'm actually playing the game. I suspect that my computer just can't handle the graphical oomph required to export these videos as well as I'd like. I did mention many posts ago that due to incompatibility issues that we didn't figure out, when my brother and I were building my computer, we ended up leaving the graphics card out. Curiously, it's still got a fast enough processer and enough CPU RAM that it does most things I want it to quite well. This is one of the few times that I've had an issue with the hardware. 

Too bad. I bought a really hot graphics card, but we couldn't get it to work with the build without causing problems. If I'd been able to install that, it'd really be screaming.

Star Wars and Planetary Romance

Planetary romance, or sword & planet as it was also called in the 60s, is—arguably—the original subgenre of science fiction. The trail was blazed in terms of what planetary romance was by the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the original "pulp era" there were a number of successful series here; ERB also wrote a Carson Napier of Venus series, for instance, and later one that took place on the Moon. Otis Adelbert Kline wrote a number of series taking place on the Moon, one on Venus and one on Mars. Other writers dabbled here too, but those are the ones that seem most remembered from the original run. Curiously, probably the best known of these types of stories comes from another medium; when King Features Syndicates wanted to do a John Carter comic strip, they weren't able to get the rights, so they just "pastiched" it; wrote one of their own that is in the exact same genre and features similar scenes a faire. This is Flash Gordon. 

You'll also notice that the genre fades imperceptibly into traditional space opera. John Carter is transferred to Mars by some kind of mystic process that is never explained. In the Kline Mars and Venus stories, there's some handwavy pseudo-science about telepathic transference of consciousness, or some such. But Carson Napier and Flash Gordon (and later other characters in ERB's Mars books) travel by normal space ship to an exotic planet. They usually then get stuck there, and adventure on the planet, rather than zipping around in space ships between planets—which seems to be the only significant difference between this genre and early space opera, such as the Leigh Brackett or C. L. Moore stories featuring Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith, respectively. There are a lot of other forgotten authors who wrote in this genre; in fact, Brackett and Moore (and early Ray Bradbury) famously were among the frequent contributors to Planet Stories; a pulp magazine that ran from 1939 to 1955 and which specialized in this kind of early space opera that was only a tiny bit removed from planetary romance.

After old fashioned space opera had itself started fading, curiously planetary romance came back into style for a while, and people like Lin Carter and others wrote planetary romance stories in the 60s, immediately preceding George Lucas' own Star Wars early drafts. By this time, the genre was often called sword & planet, but it was deliberately—even almost slavishly—imitative of the earlier wave.

Anyway, while I was running around doing one of the grind chores for tauntaun mounts in SWTOR last night, while my character was traveling across the landscape of Hoth on a speeder to get to the various tauntaun nests and feed fruits to the taunlings in hopes of luring a tauntaun parent to the nest—which isn't a disagreeable task, but which is a bit time-consuming and repetitive—I was considering one of the funniest aspects of Star Wars; the single environment planet. Tatooine is the desert planet, Endor is the forest planet, Hoth is the snow planet, Dagobah is the swamp planet, Alderaan is the mountain planet, Coruscant is the city planet... and so on and so forth. Of course, Star Wars wouldn't really be all that different if instead of being based on early space opera it was based on planetary romance. What if instead of planets, those environments were just regions on a single planet? What if instead of space ships, they had speeders. Han Solo could still have been a smuggler hotshot pilot if the Millennium Falcon was an airship instead of a spaceship. The Death Star could have been a gigantic floating fortress, like a supersized helicarrier from the Winter Soldier movie instead of a space station. There could still have been dogfights and a trench run to destroy it, without them having to go into space.

Now, going into space allows for more varied, exotic and strange landscapes. Or, at least, you can have weird things like the gigantic red disk of Yavin in the sky, and the asteroid dogfight between Jango Fett and Obiwan is unlikely to play out well on a single planet. But other than a few scenes, which could be easily reworked if needs be, Star Wars is really not much different as a planetary romance than as a space opera.

Although, I will own to the fact that it would seem odd for there to be all kinds of weird aliens all over the place on a single planet. But planetary romance is certainly famous for having exotic races of humans with blue skin or red skin or green skin or whatever. Barsoom has the thoroughly alien "green men" of Mars, the mostly human red men of Mars, the white-guys yet bald Holy Therns, the jet-black alien First Born, the lemon-yellow polar men, and of course, there are lost valleys, cities and whatnot with all kinds of weird aliens scattered here and there. It starts to get silly after a while. But Star Wars only throws a handful of aliens in important roles; most of the aliens are just background color. As I'm fond of pointing out, Star Wars as a menagerie of weird aliens is an artifact of later Star Wars; the original Star Wars (the entire original trilogy) is largely the story of people in space. Not just any people, but people who are recognizably normal Americans and British people, in fact. In SWTOR, most of the aliens are just funny colored people, with some contact lenses and a few minor make-up attachments, that an amateur could come up with using supplies from your local Halloween store. Like my most recent alien SWTOR characters, for example.

Kinda emo-looking space biker red-skinned dude

I don't know if it really makes any difference if Star Wars is space opera or planetary romance other than the bigger potential scope of space opera kind of captures the imagination. However, in terms of actual execution, that bigger potential scope is hardly ever actually used. Like I said, the entire Star Wars original trilogy could easily take place on a single planet, or even in a single large country the size of the US. The same is (mostly) true of the prequel trilogy with the exception of the asteroid, as mentioned above. The same is pretty much true of the sequel trilogy too, I think—not that anyone cares one way or another about that. And the same is true of the Mandalorian. The Book of Boba Fett not only could take place on a single planet, but it actually does. (So far. With the caveat that I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet.) This opens up some interesting possibilities when it comes to treating these stories slightly differently, and giving them a more grounded, down-to-earth (literally, in this case) feel that space opera doesn't always have.

Anyway, just some musing while I've been going about a relatively relaxed set of crafting and selling and gathering and stuff; all less stressful and low-key stuff that I've been spending a fair bit of my SWTOR time engaged in lately. (I've also been attempting to level up my reputation on a few factions. And next week, I'll need to be at least a little bit engaged in gathering rakghoul cannisters so I can spend them on new crystals.) Other than that, I'll be slowly creating my new characters over the next couple of weeks or so, for my recordings, but I'll also be slowly moving them forward. Including a replacement Jedi Sentinel that will replace the terrible quality videos that I have for Taul Kajak. Ugh. I'm frustrated that that didn't work out very well, and it sucks to have to do it again. But there's worse things.

As an aside, I'm considering switching two of my characters' races. I think maybe a Darth Maul style zabrak as a Jedi Knight and an Imperial Agent as a Mirialan might sound more compelling than the other way around. In fact, I'm thinking of not only making him look like Darth Maul, but dressing like a Sith Lord and using red lightsabers. I think it'd be a little amusing to have a visual Sith playing as a Jedi. 

Tython done

Well, last night, I finished recording and editing the last of my Tython missions for my Jedi Knight recorded playthrough. A few thoughts:

-- First off, it took me a few "sessions" to get the equipment right. However, since you can't redo missions in SWTOR, with the exception of the Heroics and a few other repeatables, I had to live with a few minutes worth of video with crappy audio, including one small section with no audio at all. Egh. Anyway, it's over with soon enough, and then I move on to where I figured it out better. But the initial start is a little bit rough from an audio standpoint, I have to admit.

-- I had considered doing some really "fancy" editing, but I didn't end up going for it. I just have cuts—sometimes, admittedly slightly awkward ones because I didn't think to record with slight pauses where I thought I'd later want to cut it. Mostly what I was thinking about doing was turning down the music volume and adding music in later manually. I ended up not doing this, and the cuts, obviously, will be pretty apparent in the music breaks. But this is less distracting and clunky than I feared, so I don't think I'm going to change it going forward.

-- I tried to eliminate most of the running around and fighting "trash mobs", although I did leave a few mob fights in to be "representational" rather than anything else. I also left just enough running around to be able to get a decent sense of what the planet looks like.

-- Rather than the audio commentary that I thought I might do, I added much more minimalist text commentary. Trying to leave the mic open for audio commentary was exactly why I was having sound issues early on and the text commentary forces me to be much more brief anyway. I think I'll stick with this for the time being. Probably, actually, for good.

-- The video quality drops dramatically when my character is moving. I don't know why this is. My experience playing the game doesn't look like this. It's either an artifact of the OBS recording, or the Microsoft Photos editing and exporting or the YouTube uploads. Don't know what (if anything) I could do about it other than have a better computer with a sick graphics card. Curiously, during cut scenes, and any scene where my character isn't running or moving, the quality quickly improves to regular HD.

-- A bit more fiddling, including the recording of a relatively shorter video on the Republic Fleet now that I'm done with Tython. The "raw" video was about half an hour, but after editing all kinds of shopping, moving of items from my character inventory to my storage locker, etc. it came down to about 5-6 minutes. I had no problem with video quality on this smaller video. I think the problem is exporting longer video files out of Microsoft Photos to mp4. This means that I basically screwed up my source files when I combined them into two hour long videos. Sigh. More experimentation gone wrong with my first run at this. Sadly, I already deleted the original shorter videos after I made the longer ones, so another ship that sailed due to my impatience. That said, I don't know that I want to have really short videos on Youtube. Maybe if I keep them to half an hour or so, and keep the shorter files for my DVD archive? Not quite sure how best to do this yet. I doubt I want to redo this character after as much time (and in game credits) as I've put into him, but I may. I'm not feeling like it represents my best, merely my prototype, warts and all. Plus, I've figured out how to make decent money by selling crafted stuff finally, so the money is less of a problem than it used to be. So... what's it going to be? Scrap my work on Taul Kajak and start over with.... Kaul Tajak or something? I just might. I'll have to think about this for a couple of days before I know what want to do, I think.

After editing all of my sessions, I was left with eight videos ranging from just under 5 minutes to a little over half an hour. I've since combined them into two videos just under an hour each. Those are what I'll load up onto Youtube as well as make part of my DVD videos when I'm ready to burn those. I had hoped to do one planet per DVD-R, but may not be able to, based on the file size. Oh, well. I'll do what I have to do, one way or another.

Anyway, as soon as my last video finishes exporting and I can get these loaded up on Youtube, I'll come edit this post to include the links. And now that I'm done with Tython, I'm considering at least kicking off another character. Maybe my sith pureblood scoundrel.

UPDATE: Yeah, the problems with these videos are going to bug me. I decided that I'll come back to the Jedi Knight later with a new Jedi Sentinel character, once I've got some new black-green crystals from the rakghoul event. In the meantime, I started a smuggler. I'll probably bounce back and forth between various characters, and try to keep them more or less at the same place. It'll keep it from getting too stale to go back and forth (I hope) while giving me something to do for months to come. Plus, I'd really like to actually create all of the characters before the update hits and makes character creation all different.

This series (and all subsequent ones) will be much shorter videos, so you'll have to watch them with the playlist feature, or just accept shorter <10 minute videos or so.

After figuring out all of my sound issues... I forgot to plug in my sound device. Luckily, I realized it right as the opening crawl started that my USB cord was sitting there unplugged so you don't really miss anything.