Gaming
And they lived happily ever after – A first glance into end-game content
02 weeks ago
“You have taken your first step into a larger world.”
-Obi-wan, Episode IV – A New Hope
Of late, my toon has been racing across the galaxy, conversing with thousands of citizens of the Republic approaching him for help. He has killed countless enemies, gathered, destroyed, pillaged, escorted…and generally had a blast doing it all.
At the pinnacle of it all was his own defining story, a truly epic and heroic tale, of which he was the center of a major conspiracy which drove straight through the heart of the Republic. Not only did he survive the entire ordeal, but in the end he emerged from the ashes of conflict as a true hero of the Republic, and all the glory she stands for.
Then, the unthinkable happened.
Dodd hit level 50. His class story wrapped up shortly thereafter.
As a SWTOR player, this changes the context and psyche of the game considerably. Dodd is still very much the carefree flyboy with a heart of gold that I had intended him to be, however…the class quests and xp grind have both come to a fairly abrupt end. And also, the class story is done. No more Voidwolf chasing me around the galaxy. No more big schemes to thwart. The loading screen, which constantly provided me with an updated SW-themed scroll with Act I, Act II, Act III now reads…”Interlude”.
I found myself quickly asking…ok, what now?
I’m fairly sure as a n00b level 50, others have asked themselves this question, as well as those within the guild who will be getting there shortly. I owe big Props to Dashl for grouping up through several planets, and Jeezbus for running us through several flashpoints. I also freely acknowledge that I devoured this game content in relatively short time and found myself slightly ahead of the leveling curve in comparison to my Alvian guildmates. This was done consciously, for personal reasons I won’t get into here.
So I’m taking the time to document my research on life after level 50, and present it to you, spoiler-free. I’m sure this entry will not necessarily be complete, and perhaps might even become outdated by the time you read this. But here is my best attempt. Here is how to gear up and get ready for Alvis Operations. I admit, we may be getting slightly ahead of ourselves on this one, since they might be a ways off. But it doesn’t hurt to be prepared ahead of time…
Things to remember as a level 50 n00b:
1) You don’t need regular XP anymore, but you will be continuing to gain legacy XP. Keep this in mind if you’re still on Corellia at level 50, on a bonus quest and somehow thinking you still need to kill n mobs of x in total. Bonus quests provide a nice xp boost, but you don’t need xp anymore. So unless you think there is a hint of getting additional credits or commendations from the bonus, ask yourself if this grind bonus quest is worth it for legacy xp, or if it will help you move your character forward in any way. If the answer lies somewhere in the negative, or if you’re uncertain, or just plain bored, you may wish to discontinue the bonus quest and just focus on the overall quest objective.
2) All quests still provide you gear, credits and legacy xp. Average payouts for most Corellian quests are decent in the 6K+ range/quest. So they’re worth doing.
3) Continue to earn as much money as you can. If you go with Speeder 3 training, you’ll need about 500K or so for class training AND speeder 3 training when you hit 50. I was flat broke afterwards and could barely afford fuel costs when I was done on the Republic fleet. Sure, the 1.5 mill speeder which you can buy from vendors might look enticing, but keep in mind this is a vanity item, an expensive one at that, and might take time to grind that kind of cash. For now, speeder 3 and a nice Aratech Dagger will get the job done at 110% speed, quite adequately.
4) This is an MMO. MMO endgames usually involve the eternal quest for better gear until the level cap is raised and more content is added. SWTOR continues to deliver story and purpose to this MMO grind, but overall, the goal as compared to every other MMO remains the same. Get more gear!
5) According to Devs…more moddable endgame gear is on the way. This is a complaint on the forums I’m reading. The best thing about an MMO is that it is ever evolving, patching, ever improving. We’ve only just begun with SWTOR, folks. If there’s something you don’t like about the game…sit tight…chances are the Devs have noticed and are already working on it.
Things to experience at level 50, while your guild is getting ready for Operations:
1) First things first. Help other guildies, to the best of your ability. Class quests and Heroics aren’t always easy, having an extra blaster or saber at their sides will help (not to mention a level 50), and while you won’t earn XP anymore and you’ll be potentially gimping their XP gain for killing the mobs, you will nevertheless earn good karma xp. I’ve had the good fortune of Jeezbus running us through several Flashpoints, and I would say that I am extremely grateful for his assistance. Not only this, but consider the more people hit 50 in Alvis, the more available help you’ll have for some of the more difficult content, just as daily heroics and flashpoints (see below). So help out others and enjoy the content this game has to offer.
2) Gear up, and get ready for endgame PVE content. Here are the known current ways of getting started…
- PVE Repeatable Daily Quests. Without story spoiling, if you’re really stuck…Go back to the Republic Fleet. A Twi’lek located in the Cantina will point you to Belsavis, where you will eventually unlock around 8 repeatable daily quests on that planet, in a level 50 zone. These quests, unlike other regular quests, will provide PVE Commendations (along with credits) which can be traded for PVE items on the fleet. Each quest (there are at least 7) earn 1 commendation and 7150 credits.
- Hard mode flashpoints. Group up and try some of the higher-end flashpoints (Directive 7, The Battle of Illum, or The False Emperor), or redo some of the original content on hard, and nightmare modes. The way these work is that the bosses up to the final boss will drop epic gear, and the final boss will drop a class token. All bosses will also drop Tionese Crystals, which are used in conjunction with other commendations to purchase epic PvE gear from the Tionese vendor on the Fleet. The main disadvantage here is that the gear drops are random, and from what I hear, Bioware still has some patching to do to ensure equal distribution amongst classes. As of today, the endgame loot bags we were promised while the game was in development aren’t there yet.
- Flashpoint Dailies and Weeklies. These are straightforward and gotten from the Fleet. Complete 1/day and 3/week on Hard Mode to get the max reward. Basically you’ll just be doing Esseles to complete this quest.
4) Gear up, and get ready through endgame PVP content. So – yeah. The PVP item purchasing system is a little confusing at first. But it’s pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. For this, you’ll mainly do PVP Warzones. Lots of them. I’m guessing premades will help a lot in winning if you can find a good group of people who communicate and work well together. Otherwise, be prepared to swallow your pride and lose…repeatedly. I’ve been in about two dozen battlegrounds so far with Dodd and haven’t won one yet. I keep hearing that Republic isn’t that bad, and I’ve probably just experienced a string of bad luck. You might win a bit in the process, and develop l33t skills, pwn teh nub (then go to iHop).
- Grind Warzone Commendations through warzones, and trade them in for Mercenary Commendations at the PVP vendor (at a 3:1 Conversion Rate). Essentially, once you’ve accumulated 800 Warzone Commendations (specifically, 200 Warzone Commendations and 200 Mercenary Commendations), you can start buying Champion and eventually Battlemaster bags once your valor rating is 60. If you’re serious about this grind, you’ll basically want to set aside your tokens until you hit 60 valor so you’re skipping the Champion bags altogether (Rating 140 versus 136). These bags have (at the time of this article) a one in ten chance of dropping random epic items, as well as Champion / Battlemaster tokens which you trade in on the fleet for gear.
- Daily and Weekly PvP Warzone Wins – These two quests are picked up on the Fleet. Win 3 matches a day, and 9 a week. Daily gets you 1 Champion Gear bag, and the weekly gets you 3.
- PVP Dailies – Similar to Belsavis PVE quests, you will also get a quest to head to Illum, and there are daily quests there which also give rewards for completing specific objectives within a PVP zone. The slicing there is excellent, also…incidentally.
5) Crafting. At the time of this article, there aren’t a whole lot of schematics worth crafting for endgame, from the research I’ve done. Nevertheless, it’s still worth investigating and ensuring both you and your companions have the best crafted gear available.
6) Have you discovered all the holocrons and looked at Matrix Cubes yet? If you’re anything like me…you probably rushed through and never bothered. But they will give you a slight extra edge, so look them up on swtor-spy, and get cracking!
7) Do your companions love you, or hate you? Do you care? Do you want them to open up to you more? Romance, and possibly marry them? Try building your relationship with them by offering them gifts, and questing some more with them.
Roll an alt! Same server toons earn shared Legacy XP and it’s easy to run some PVE/PVP dailies on your main to get a couple mods and ship some credits to your new toon and blast through crafting much faster.
9) Social Points, titles, space content…there’s so much more the game has to offer.
I might have missed some stuff here, or there may be some clarifications required. Again, I’m still a newbie level 50, and I’m still putting the pieces together. But I hope this helps you, fellow Alvian, to quickly find your way in the universe after you’ve completed the leveling grind.
May the force be with you.
Basic Healing Theory
11 month ago
This is not about healing in SWTOR, this is a very very broad overview of healing in MMO’s in general.
Healing is all about “just enough.” With DPS, you want to do as much as possible, period. With tanking, if you have extra threat, so what? With healing, you are constantly balancing health versus your force/energy/ammo bar.
HPM versus HPS
Oh noes, scary letters! Breathe. Let me explain.
HPM = Heal Per Mana. In our case, it’s force/energy/ammo and totally not mana, because that’s so “WoW”, right? This means what is the heal going to COST you. After all, a healer who is out of mana is a useless healer and people start croaking.
HPS = Heal Per Second. This means how much health you’re delivering in a given amount of time. How fast are you filling up those health bars.
Each healer of every class has hard-hitting expensive heals (High HPS, Low HPM), and slow-ass cheap heals (Low HPS, High HPM). Your job as a healer is to judge incoming damage and balance between HPS and HPM.
That’s it. Really. If the tank is taking slow damage, you can use cheapie heals. If the tank is dropping fast, you use the big fat mana-hoggy heal-bombs and hope that you will have time later to use cheapie heals and build up your resource pool again.
It’s Probably Not Your Fault
Sure, if you ONLY use your big fat hoggy heals and run yourself out of mana early and the whole group dies, maybe you’re doing it wrong. However, could you have used anything smaller at any point? Did you need to spam those huge heals to keep people from croaking? If so, it’s not your problem. Someone ELSE was effing up. Maybe the encounter was too hard. Maybe morons were standing in the fire. Maybe the tank overpulled. Maybe the tank forgot he had cooldowns that he could have used to mitigate the damage. Maybe there was crowd control fail.
Not every death is your fault. In fact, most of them are NOT. Remember that. And if someone dares to blame you, come down with the fury of Alvis and smite his sorry ass.
Practice Healing
I know, this is DUH, but bear with me. It is FAR easier to level as DPS and switch to healing later, and that’s fine. But before you throw yourself hyperventilating into a flashpoint, why don’t you do some heroic quests with your buddies? Maybe it’s “too easy” but it’s the laboratory where you can learn.
How much of the health bar does the heal fill? How much of my mana bar does it consume? Often you’ll be eyeballing the health bars and soon you’ll know exactly the right heal for 1/4 a bar.
It’s a good way to get comfortable with the slow-ass cheapie heals. Often when you get into your first flashpoint, you kinda panic and go “zomg everyone’s gonna DIEEEE” and start throwing out the heal-bombs and next thing you’re out of mana. Practicing can give you the confidence to say “this will take care of the damage, nobody will die in the next 3 seconds, I CAN afford to be cheap.”
And finally… where your buttons are. You do not want to be FUMBLING later. Half of this is muscle memory. I am a total dork for about a day after I move any keybinds.
Attitude
The last thing you should take away is that you are super-important. You are more important than anyone else in your group. The tank may feel important, but he’s a loser. You are the backbone of the group. They will die without you.
It is totally ok to let someone die on purpose. You won’t get dark side points. Don’t do it just to be mean. Ok, you can do it to be mean, but not too often. If they can’t get their asses out of the fire, they need to learn the hard way. There are times where you are skilled enough to pull out the miracles to save someone who is about to die. Whether you choose to go to those extreme lengths is up to you.
If you are out of mana (or whatever) you can (and should) stop the entire group and tell them STOP AND I HAVE TO REGENERATE. If they wander off anyway, they are just asking to die.
DPS are a dime a dozen. You are a superstar. They need you. Never forget that.
Flashpoint Group Play: A Primer
01 month ago
In recent conversation with a guildmate who hasn’t played an MMO in earnest since Galaxies, he confessed he was afraid that his lack of Warcraft experience would hinder him as he went higher in level. This prompted me to want to write a primer for how group play in MMOs like SWTOR generally work. This is intended to help close the knowledge gap between the WoW vets and the people who skipped that. Some of the information may seem obvious or elementary, but it is all building to more complicated concepts later.
Basic Group Theory: Division of Labor
In group play there are three main roles that people play. Either you are designed to take damage, heal damage, or deal damage. We commonly refer to these roles as Tanks, Healers, and DPS respectively. Unlike in single player games, where at some point you become a god, MMOs divide up the jobs over different classes so people specialize in something and have only moderate abilities if any in the other areas. Tanks for example have talents and equipment designed to reduce that 1,000 point hit down to 750 or even 500 points. They tend to focus on having more health than other roles as well. But the cost to those abilities is they can’t heal themselves and their damage is mediocre compared to a character designed for DPS. Let’s take a look at what the roles do.
Tanking in a Nutshell
If MMO combat was a dance, the Tank would be the one leading. They often plan how the enemies will be pulled, they designate which ones will be crowd controlled, and they decide the kill order. But a tank’s main goals are two fold really:
- Stay Alive
- Keep enemies hitting them and no one else
The staying alive is partly up to the healer who we will cover later, but also up to the tank. Tanking in general is a very equipment focused role. Your gear directly influences your health pool, armor rating, and your ability to dodge, parry, deflect, or absorb attacks.
In addition to the gear, they also have talents designed to increase their survivability. It may be a talent that adds a debuff limiting the damage output of an opponent. Or it may be a talent that massively reduces incoming damage. Some will be passive requiring now work at all, while others will be something you want to use in special circumstances.
The final part of the staying alive job is knowing when to use your cooldowns. Cooldowns refer to special abilities that cannot be used more than once a minute. These tend to have big effects and should be used judiciously. Warding Call for a Jedi Guardian is an example. It reduces incoming damage by 40%, but can only be used once every three minutes. You would want to save this for when you need it and not just use it every time you can.
Keeping enemies hitting you is the second job a tank must master. Think of enemies (or mobs as they are often called) as having little lists of who they hate most. They will generally always attack the one they perceive as being the biggest threat. If the enemies were rational they would realize that the healer should die first, then the DPS and save the tank for last. But mobs are not terribly rational and we have tools to make them think the low damage guy in heavy armor is way more of a threat to them than the sneaky smuggler who just two shot his friend. Having the mobs attacking you is often referred to as having threat or aggro. One of the key skills a tank must master is when to use his taunt. A taunt forces the mob to switch who it is attacking towards the tank. This is really useful when an enemy is pummeling your healer and you want to redirect it to yourself.
Healing in a Nutshell
Healing is key to any advanced encounter. A good healer can keep bad tanks standing and dumb DPS alive through some rough patches, but a bad healer can let the tank die from simple neglect, wiping the group. The key to healing is knowing your priorities. A healer’s first job is to stay alive. A dead healer does no healing. A common ‘ailment’ of healers is tunnel vision. They get so focused on keeping everyone else alive and watching health bars they neglect to notice they are standing in the fire. The second job is to keep the tank up. Remember tanks are so much better at taking hits than anyone else that in many fights a good tank and healer can finish a fight long after the DPS has died. It may be close, but barring a fight mechanic like an enrage timer or the healer running our of resources (force power, ammo, energy etc), the tank and the healer can often finish the fight. That said keeping your DPS alive really does help.
The key to being a good healer is knowing how much to heal and when. Some fights are just a steady trickle of damage which can be responded with a regular heal. Other fights have large spikes of damage, but they are less frequent. Those might require a large powerful heal to respond, after which the healer goes easy in order to restore the resource pool for healing. Each healing class has strengths and weaknesses. Some are good at AoE heals (an area of effect heal that can heal multiple targets at the same time), others specialize in heals over time (HoTs) which are good for keeping people topped off. Some have really good single target heals but might not be as strong in other areas. It is important to learn the playstyle for your healing class and knowing which heal is the right way to respond to a given situation.
DPS in a Nutshell
DPS gets the reputation of being the easy job. People will rag on you as being a dime a dozen and easily replaceable. And while there are a lot of DPS players out there, the difference between a good DPS player and a bad DPS player is huge. A good DPS player will stand out for the small things they do that help a group out. The fundamentals of being a good DPS player are as follows:
- Minimize unnecessary the damage you take
- Crowd Control wisely
- Focus Fire on the right target
The first thing to know about being DPS is minimizing your incoming damage. If you are the Jedi Knight who insists on standing in the lava for some reason, you are going to irritate your healer who will have to choose between throwing heals at the tank or you. In that case you will lose and you just made the rest of the group’s job harder. Now you can’t always avoid damage. There are plenty of reasons you might take damage. Grenades have splash damage, things fall form cave roofs, and you might have to off-tank something for a second until the tank can pick it off you. Put the important thing is to try and keep it to a minimum.
The second fundamental is mastering your crowd control abilities. The tank may think they are indestructible, but I guarantee you that if enough enemies are hitting him, they will die. Crowd control makes this easier. Before a pull the tank might mark up mobs and tell you to crowd control (force lift, cryo grenade or something else) a particular mob. That essentially reduces your number of enemies everyone is fighting for some period of time. The tank is happy because they have one less thing to worry about, the healer is happy because that is one less source of damage. Keep your target crowd controlled as best you can until the tank turns the groups attention to it. Which leads us to…
Focus fire on the right target. The thing about mobs is they do the same damage output usually whether they are at 100% health or 1% health. The most efficient way to get rid of them is crowd control up some of them and then focus fire one mob at a time until it is dead. Sometimes with many weak mobs it might make more sense to just use area of effect abilities, but when dealing with strong, elite, or champion level mobs, focus firing is the best way to go. Make sure you stay on the right target, and don’t break someone else’s crowd control.
If you do those three things you will get a reputation as being a good DPS player and people won’t think of you as easily replaceable.
Final Note on Kill Order
It seems like Bioware likes to mix the difficult of mobs in flashpoints and heroic quest zones. A strong mob might be surrounded by a few regular mobs. An elite or champion may have a few strong mobs surrounding it. It has been my experience that the best approach towards killing them is to work from weakest to strongest. Crowd control elite mobs and strong mobs if you can and focus on the regulars first wiping them out quickly. As soon as you cannot crowd control the strongest mobs in the pull, have the tank focus on that. A DPS can easily offtank regular mobs since it is just a few seconds of incoming damage before they drop. Stong and elite mobs however generally need a proper tank to absorb the damage.
I hope this helps lay a foundation for group play for players who are new to mmorpgs and want to make an impact in group play in SWTOR.
A sight-seeing stroll through SWTOR
AT-AT's Great-Great-Great........Great Grandma?
Twas the last day of SW:TOR’s beta, and I found myself not wanting to move the story forward anymore (despite the fact that I’m playing Republic at launch. So I finished up the arc I was on and went on walk about. There’s a lot of fun details and environmental touches that the game holds if you take a few moments to look around. The gem above struck me because from far away I thought it was an AT-AT.
Amused by the show of imperial force I headed into local Imperial city to snap some other shots. The cities, space ports and cantinas are some of the finest places to find some interesting characters. These folks apparently had caught some rebel scum and the female Captain seemed determined to lecture them until their ears bled.
Imperial Guilt Trip
Making my way into the local cantina I found some poor guy who had been assigned to clean up the floors outside what might have been the bathrooms. Rebel or not – that’s a horrible job. Cleaning a cantina has got to be a terrifying, humbling, and disgusting job. I decided to stand over him and share the lecture I had seent he Capt give him outside to help with morale. He didn’t seem interested.
I'm going to tell you how to do your job while Vette watches.
But that wasn’t the only interesting sight the cantina held, oh no. Per the usual Star Wars experience there were slutty
No cantina is complete without them...
twi’leks. Everywhere. Now I get it – that’s what that race is known for, but I played one of them in SWG so they have a special place in my heart. Seeing them objectified just doesn’t sit well with me. So I took pictures and threw credits at them. You know. For taxi fare.
But it’s not enough to have half nekkid Twi’leks. No, that wont do! This is the future, or the past or this has all happened before and will all happen again – whatever.
The point is – holowhores.
The future has crappy resolution
For some reason the Twi’leks needed to be objectified further in a holographic for where they can properly be ogled? Again I did the only human thing and threw some credits at them and told them I could /flourish better then them.
But it wasn’t enough to ogle the women-folk, I had to see what the band members had going on. There was a Twi’lek and a Rodian going at it on the kloo horn and key-tar with the usual number of dancers. But
Mr. Beefcake
there… back int he corner dancing alone next to the jukebox was some corn-fed wide-shouldered creepy guy. He bopped and shook in the shadows, possibly watching the guys on stage, possibly eyeing the reveler in black? Who knows. But Mr. Beefcake is that guy in the club. You know the one. Sometimes I scam him for drinks.
Tired of half nekkid women, I headed to the starport to see what was going on over there. I bumped into a threesome of imperials who seemed to be reprimanding their own peers. This was not the first time I had run past this group. Last time the gentleman on the right was outright cussing her out, waving his hands and accusing her of something. I didn’t stop to ask. This time around I was more stuck by the early Leia hair and the fact that now the two guys seemed to be considering how to punish her. Since server reset was coming I threw her a gun, some credits, and some advice.
“Alvis shot first”
Hmmm... how shall we punish her this time? Look at those sweet buns... On her head..
Boarding my ship for places unknown, I stopped to take a photo of this neat looking droid. Nothing nifty about him – just
Droid
thought he looked cool. It’s clear that a lot of work went into creating a lot of the characters around the game. Even the dewbacks looked good!
It was then that I discovered that I could do space combat. Now I’ve never really enjoyed space combat in other games (SWG:JTL most notably) but I did play a lot of flight/fighter sims as a kid so I usually try them at least once. (I suck at BF:1942 despite my best efforts) I was shocked to find that i really really loved the space combat in SWTOR. It’s not really like flying at all, it’s more like a mini game you’d find in a browser or in an RPG for a console, but clicking away like a madwoman – I found myself repeating quests in space out of sheer entertainment.
The ship flies on rail and you have to shoot targets, take out fighters and place your missiles wisely. Maybe I enjoyed it because I felt good at it. Maybe it was really easy – either way I’m going to have a LOT of ship upgrades come launch.
Ice clusters>My ship
It was a really great last day of Beta. I was grateful to get to see more of the game (I got to 20, woo!) and even got my “love interest” companion. Who I promptly flirted with until he was awkward. I’m getting this game, and I miss it’s warm embrace already. But I know the wait will be well worth it. And when that time comes – I already logged the time off request.
See you in SWTOR!
Follow Your Heart or Follow Orders
2 months ago
In the time I’ve been messing around in beta I’ve realized that what you are ordered to do does not always correspond with what side of the force you are trying to build. This presents players with some interesting choices in character development. If you are a by the book Republic Trooper who follows orders from your command like they are the word of God, you will at times come across issues that put you on different sides of the morality divide.
Sometimes you will do good.
For example let’s say that your commanding officer tells you to blow up this building, and there is solid evidence that a weapons cache is there that cannot be removed because of time limitations. You head out to blow up the cache only to find out there are a few human shields. The obvious light side choice is save the human shields. The standing orders is to destroy the weapon cache in a timely manner. Your character will have to decide which approach best suits their motivation. Do they care about doing good or bad, or care about the power of the Republic or Empire. Smugglers and Bounty Hunters have an additional wrinkle to this with their loose affiliation with the governing bodies. Your interests, your employer’s interests and your morality can create interesting priority hierarchies for you to sort out to figure out what you need to do.
Another wrinkle to this decision tree is balancing out what to do versus what your companion might think. If you know as a Bounty Hunter Mako doesn’t like you acting a certain way the decision landscape gets even more complicated. Do you keep acting bad and just plan to buy her affection after the fact? That is done at the expense of other things you could spend time or credits on.
And sometimes you will not.
I want to applaud Bioware’s writing team for creating these problems in a way where you can agonize over what to do for more than a few seconds, and give the decisions you make have impact on things that happen down the road. It really creates an immersive world, and makes players feel more attached to their character’s development than any MMO I can think of to date.
Star Wars: The Old Republic – A look at Beta
I was fortunate enough to be chosen to BETA test SW:TOR by BioWare/EA this weekend, and I wanted to give some feedback about my first 12 levels in the game. This is not intended to be a full game review, just some comments on things that stood out to me or struck me as amusing. These observations are based on my personal experiences during the Thanksgiving weekend Beta tests.
Some technical things to note – my computer does not have a new graphics card (It’s an NVIDEA 9800) and I’m running Vista 64 with 4 GB of RAM and a Dual Core processor that’s not terribly impressive these days. I prefer to run in windowed mode.
My Sith and her companion (The blue Twi'lek) in The Sith Stronghold
Before I even really get into this review let me say a few important things -
- I’m sort of a giant Star Wars dork
- I played Star Wars Galaxies (Pre-CU) and loved it
- I’ve played a decent number of MMOs
- I intend to roll a Republic Character at Launch and only rolled Sith to try out the other side of the fence first. I’m really glad I made this choice.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this game since it was announced and was overjoyed to find this week that I had a beta invite in my email. I had intended to wait until the launch (likening it to knowing your xmas gift before you open it), but my curiosity got the better of me. I rolled a Sith Warrior on the Cosmic Turbine server with my guild, the Church of Alvis and set out for blood, guts, and glory (and drinking).
Some TL;DR thoughts if you don’t have time to read the whole post -
- Being on Ventrillo (VOIP team chat) while playing the game makes it have a very MST3K feel
- You seem to get a lot of pants as rewards early on
- Sith really DO have more fun, but are also kind of dicks (duh)
- You develop a legitimate investment to the story
- The world actually feels pretty big
- Every class story really is different
- The story is actually something to look forward to instead of just clicking through
- The world is filled with fun touches (like the customs droid that scans you on arrival at ports)
- The game was fun, immerse, hilarious, and I was shocked with how engaged I was with the story
- I really dig the companion system
- I recommend giving the game a try come Dec 20th!
Make the right choice... or your companion will judge you
Now I don’t normally play Melee DPS characters, but the allure of a light-saber combined with cinematic graceful combat couldn’t keep me away. I went with a human female toon, and was shocked how interested I was in the story. Something we’ve read a lot of (those of you who have also been fans of the game before it was even out) is that storytelling plays a huge part of the game. The questing system is engaging and makes you feel not only a part of the world, but pretty epic in the middle of it.
They really aren’t kidding when they say storytelling is centric to the game. Maybe it was the fact that it was star wars, maybe it’s the fact that it’s a modern looking world, but for whatever reason I actually cared about my characters choices and actions. Now I’m generally an RPG fan aready (Final Fantasy, etc) but in most MMOs I can’t be bothered to even read the NPC’s name. However I loved seeing what my character was gong to say. The Sith were snarky and spunky, and I loved it.
Every single conversation offers entertaining and clever comments that are clearly intended for a wide variety of audiences with a PG-13 slant. The characters you interact with are three dimensional and illicit emotional responses. Perhaps I was moved because of the good voice acting, or perhaps I just wanted to see what my toon was going to say based on my choice. Whatever the case, I dig the quest system which is a first for me.
However it’s not just questing that makes a game. Environment, UI, Combat, and “playability” factor in as well, making a whole experience. I took some shots of the various environments I encountered (around level 10) to try and show some of the flavor in the various environments.
More Light-sabers more often
A moment of peace watching the space traffic before I head back to evil--doing
This was while I was strolling along slaughtering rebel scum
Darth Baras loves twinkies
The game moves back and forth between on world assignments and on ship or more “base” oriented assignments offering a variety of colors, lighting, creatures, and situations that keep things moving. I was happy to see that I didn’t feel like I wasn’t stuck in a noobie shelter zone for too long. There was a sense of advancement that was fairly constant and despite what I’d consider slow XP progression, I still felt like I was making progress. In fact, I rarely looked at my XP bar. (Shocking!)
One of the other things I really appreciated about this game was the variety in costuming, body types and voices. (The Sith are from the UK and the folks on Hutta appear to be from New York). The variety really shines in group instances.
In particular, I was struck by Darth Baras (pictured right) and one of the other earlier NPCs (the old woman). So often in MMOs we see perfect specimens of humanity (and other made up races). It’s nice to see some characters who do not fit into the modern model of fitness and sex appeal. Darth Baras over there, clearly likes his Melons and Sugar Dumplings and Cu-pa stew. He also seems to have a whiskey flask on his belt, but that’s probably just my interpretation. You’ll also notice that he has a sort of steampunk mask on. His voice actor reflects that as well. I just really liked the attention to these sorts of details in the game – not everything is cookie cutter. The character himself is overconfident but still engaging.
I haven’t completed my time as his apprentice, but I’m looking forward to see what other horrible things he will ask my Sith to do.
Either way – I applaud the fact that Bioware was willing to use more realistic body types, even if it means tubby villains. At least I know I can have a toon model that’s got “a little junk in the trunk”. (Can’t take credit for that quote, my guildie noted that first).
One of the other things that struck me is how damn useful my companion is. You get your first companion around level 10 or so (give or take, each class is different). She’s pictured above (the blue Twi’lek). Companions serve a variety of functions -
- Comic Relief
- Making me feel less alone at night
- Crafting
- Gathering things
- Doing my bidding
- Having someone else to be my Barbie doll.
- Apparently doing more damage then me in combat..
The holo-trees were a nice touch
When you get your first companion through the story you may be struck with how mouthy they are (which makes me smile) but I loved how useful they are as well. They will sell your useless (gray) gear as well as do your crafting for you. This really speaks to my micro-management needs in an MMO. You can have up to 5 companions all filling various functions in combat – but you can only bring one of them with you at a time. The others remain on your ship (which I haven’t gotten yet) to fulfill “crew” duties (Like making me rum and cokes). They can be geared individually, and you can have relationships with them beyond just making them suffer occasionally. Though that really is it’s own reward.
You can train up your crafting skills just like any other MMO, but you don’t have to slave in front of a console for hours, instead you have crew to do that for you! They wander off when sent on missions and come back to you after an allotted amount of time. Just don’t send them off before you get into combat…
Some of the other features I’ve enjoyed are the instanced dungeons. I got to do what they call a “Flashpoint” today, and was pleased to find that depending on what your group chooses to do will determine the course of the event. This makes instances interesting and replayable. We did ours twice, and there was some different loot for both choices. The flashpoint was actually a lot of fun and the story was interesting both times.
Add a friend (as long as they didn't wipe your party)
One of the other neat features was the ability to add group members as friends at the end of the instance. I thought this was a really smart touch. Sometimes you meet good people in PUGs (Pick up groups) that you may want to group with later. This feature is just plain handy.
I love thoughtful implementations like this. It’s smart in a world where PUGs are a reality for most group events.
One of the other features I found handy included the map that became see through as soon as you moved, and the fact that the map would tell you if your quest hand-in was upstairs or on that level. In a modern world, stairs are a huge part of the layout… so this was a thoughtful touch. (This is not pictured in this post.)
I also liked the binding system. Instead of binding in one place you are bound at all of the locations that you have clicked in that zone. Quick Transportation is available (on a cool down) to any of them in that zone. There are also Taxis that will move you from one point to another which was similar to most of the other transpo systems common in MMOs.
OMG, where am I going?
One of the other things I enjoyed was the helpful mini map which not only told me my local time, but it also let me know how bad the lag was, and where my quest objectives were. This just made things a little less painful for me. Plus it was again – just convenient and smart. Now don’t get me wrong the UI is not perfect – I want to be able to customize my bars and move things around till my hearts content, but for a beta I was pretty satisfied with the additions they had put in. I’m really hoping that there are opportunities for add ons (via curse) because I have really had a hard time determining what my DPS is.
There’s also a lot of room for macros and things like that (for instance when I send off my companion on an errand). The game is still clearly in BETA but it seems like the amount of feedback bioware has gathered through the course of the betas will be valuable. Overall though, it’s probably the most polished pre=launch games I’ve played.
Joun and Clam helping with the the Flashpoint
While I tried to take some videos of combat, I wasn’t really happy with how my computer rendered it – but what I can say is that it feels epic, and that the moves (for the Sith at least) are fluid and graceful, and everything feels exciting. It was however, pretty hard to keep track of the 4 characters in the Flashpoint, but that may have more to do with my graphics card then anything else. It’s clear I need to learn more about my class and how to effectively dish out the damage.
Yes, there's a guy in carbonite back there
For those looking at playing the game come launch – there are things in the game that some seasoned MMO fans will question at first, but my advice isto give it 5-10 levels at least, the game has a lot to offer both old and new players to the genre. Bioware has clearly made some strides that I think will make a difference for MMOs to come. All in all I’m really excited to play the actual game, as well as get to see the stories for the light side. Plus it helps that I have an awesome guild to look forward to playing with!
I’m really glad I got my two days of PTO off for launch (Which is December 20th). Special thanks to – The Church of Alvis, Jounville, Gandalfini, HappyClam, Furiel, and the rest of the Cosmic Turbine server!
This post is thanks to the lifted NDA from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The Bad Boys and Babes of Beta
2 months ago
NDA lifted, and with it we have a lot of Alvians who have gotten into not just the weekend beta, but the normal beta program. Needless to say we are very grateful to Bioware for this opportunity to play around, help test, and get a feel for game systems before we actually launch.
It was decided that we would roll a beta Sith guild so as not to spoil the Republic stories for ourselves before we ran them with our live game mains and alts. Since we are rolling Sith, the general consensus is to sow our royally evil oats. For my part I decided to roll Jounvillain the Rattataki Bounty Hunter. He has very very few charitable bones in his body. The priority list goes credits, thrill of killing, other stuff I imagine.
I'm the bad thing that happens to good people.
I’m not the only one breaking bad. On thursday Happyclam, Furiel, Yaj, and myself ran the Black Talon Flashpoint and the general game we seemed to be playing was, “Who can be the biggest jerk?”. It was a lot of fun. I’m really curious to see if the ability to reform into fine upstanding beings on the light side of the force will happen after our vacation in depravity.
The most surprising check to my evil inclinations though, wasn’t what my fellow guildies were doing, but rather how my first, and as of yet only, companion responded to me choosing evil acts. Mako was not happy with my desire to kill a Republic Scientist for a bounty, and that led me to earn my first light side points. Oh the horror.
What ways have you been going against your launch intentions?
Early Details on the Legacy System
3 months ago
by Blackferne in Gaming
Throughout the history of SWTOR there has been a rumor of the existence of a Legacy System. No one was sure whether it really existed, was something else taken out of context from a Dev misspeak, or the flights of fancy of fanbois. It was by all intents and purposes the Area 51 of the SWTOR development cycle. Yesterday that changed with a post from James Ohlen which required a bit of clarification from Damion Schubert and Allison Berryman.
James Ohlen started it with this:
Hey Everyone,
This build has our first iteration of the Legacy System! At its core the Legacy system is about allowing players to create a family tree of characters. Family is pretty important to the Star Wars universe, with the Skywalker family having one of the most interesting dynamics in movie history. This version is just the foundational components that we will use to build upon in the future. Here are the features of this iteration:
- Once your character has completed their Chapter 1 storyline, they will be able to choose aLegacy Last Name. This Legacy Last Name must be unique and is shared across all characters on that server – so choose carefully!
- Once you have unlocked your Legacy, any and all characters on that server will now contribute to that player’s Legacy Experience Points. Much like normal experience points, when you reach certain Legacy thresholds, you will increase your Legacy Level.
We already have plans for how we will expand the functionality of the Legacy System in one of our major post-ship patches.
This will include being able to shape your Legacy’s family tree, and give you a reward for all those Legacy Levels.
We look forward to reading your feedback on the Legacy System!
–James Ohlen
Damion Shubert clarified it with
You can choose to do one of the following:
- Display your legacy name as your last name (“Raiel Firewalker”)
- Display your legacy name below your nameRaiel
The Firewalker Legacy- or choose to hide it altogether. This choice can differ per character.
These explanations of the Legacy System are obviously not the Legacy System in total, but it has provoked a large backlash over the implementation. The complaints typically fall into a few main themes.
Not All My Characters Have the Same Last Name
The Legacy System seems to promote people forming families within their alts. This works for some people like myself who have their toons being within the same family. But there are plenty of people who want different unrelated characters who would have different surnames. This is especially rue for people playing characters on different factions of different species. Why a Human, a Sith Pureblood, and a Chiss would all share one name ignores cultural naming conventions. Even for people playing the same species and same faction may want to have familial separation from each other.
What if Someone Takes my Surname?
With the requirement that you need a character that is through the first Act (approx level 28-32ish), many people worry about having their desired surname taken by someone who is power leveling through the story instead of allowing the story to progress organically. It is reasonable to expect common Sci-Fi sounding names to grabbed early. Things like Strife, Windrunner, or Starfire sound very Star War-sy and will probably be in the first wave on all servers to be taken.
This has a couple ramifications. First it gives people an incentive to come up with a unique name which is probably a good things. Second is that it will push some people to play the game other than they would have otherwise done with the intention of getting their desired surname first.
I Want to Have the Same Surname as My Wife or Brother
There is a sizable group of players expressing a desire to have their real life families, or friends to form an in game family. This seems pretty reasonable. If for Role Play reasons you and your significant other want to have the same family name, the Legacy System as it currently is set up would impede the ability for people to do that. Either they would have to find similar spellings like Starfire and Starfirre or use accent marks to replicate the name.
Solutions
Community solutions seem to revolve mostly around the idea of decoupling surnames with Legacy names and they often cite the following example.
Jacen Solo
The Skywalker Legacy
It allows players to choose whatever last name they want, and even have the same last name as other players, but allows the Legacy to be independent. Personally I’m a bigger fan of this than the proposed implementation. I would like to have a non-unique last name starting at level one instead of wondering until level 30 if someone took my last name. And it makes the Legacy feel more like a clan with varied stories in it.
I am curious though what other features the Legacy system has in store for us. People need to remember that this is just one feature of a much larger system.
Ghosts From MMOs Past
4 months ago
Games always get compared to other games. Checkers and chess get compared since both are played on board with 64 squares of alternating colors. Hearts, Bridge, and Spades get compared to each other as they are four player card games involving tricks. So it is natural that Star Wars the Old Republic is going to be compared to other MMOS. For SWTOR there are two that will linger around for comparison for a long while after launch. First is Star Wars Galaxies and the second it World of Warcraft. The interesting thing to speculate on is what lessons Bioware has taken from these two games.
Lessons from Star Wars Galaxies
The comparisons are easy to draw. Both are part of the same universe. Both are MMORPGs. Both have huge expectations at launch about their ability to change the genre. But Galaxies has plenty of lessons I hope Bioware has taken to heart and employed in their game. First is that having a finished product matters. Talk to anyone who played SWG at launch and they can no doubt tell you stories about having to find work-arounds for various issues of gameplay that weren’t fully tested and fixed before launched. For crafting a common one was having to be very careful with how much money you put in your harvesters because if you screwed up you could lose a lot of credits or your harvester. It was a very careful game of balance. In combat things that targeted the mind bar were generally viewed as the best so there was a whole slew of flavor of the month templates all focusing on getting the biggest bang for your buck on attacking the mind pool stat of mobs and other players.
But after the bugs and the slow pace by which SOE fixed them, there is a lesson about content. SWG was a great game for sandbox type players, and as far as a player driven economy there are few that are in the same league as SWG. But there were a lot of Star Wars fans who came in expecting a story, and were disappointed in the lack of things to provide the Star Wars experience. MMOs tend to plot somewhere on the spectrum of pure sandbox to pure theme park. Sandbox is about world building and interaction while theme park is go see the sights everyone else has seen, get your digital “I slayed the rancor at Jabba’s Palace and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” badge. I think SWG was too sandbox for many Star Wars fans who were used to games providing a story for them. The question that pops up for me is whether an MMO with an established lore from another source (movie or book) can really be a sandbox MMO? I’d venture to guess they have to err on the side of themepark, or you get the fan base, that came to you because they love the source, disappointed at the lack of things to do.
Finally the last major lesson from SWG is the importance of community. SWG veterans wear that fact like a badge of pride. They look at less buggy games and think, “They don’t know the horrors I’ve seen.” Despite the lack of content, or maybe because of it, the players of SWG bonded and formed a real and honest to goodness online community. The fact that Alvis is still together after 8 years is a testament to that. And we are just one of many SWG guilds reforming for SWTOR. But with the development of a solid community, you also have to communicate and work with that community. Many SWG vets left at the launch of the NGE in 2005 because they saw the NGE as a betrayal of the trust the community had put into the developers. I sometimes wonder if the NGE had been the game that was there at launch if people would have liked it better. Ultimately we don’t know, but we do know that players who had invested time and effort into their characters over two and a half years felt like they suddenly didn’t have the same game anymore. And the developers lack of communication leading up to it was a major scandal.
So to sum up Star Wars Galaxies shows Bioware that you have to have a mostly bug free game at launch, you have to have things for people to do to get their immersion, and you have to work with your community.
Lessons from World of Warcraft
For as much as people think that Star Wars should be compared to Galaxies, it is going to be compared more to World of Warcraft. Since its rocky launch in 2004 WoW has grown into the 8 ton gorilla in the MMO market. In fact WoW’s success has had some industry commentators muse that they crowd out other games to the detriment of the genre as a whole. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I can say that they definitely raised the bar of what players expect from an MMO.
Customer Service is important. The rocky launch had some people not able to play for days or even weeks at a time. Blizzard responded to their screw ups with, you missed playtime we’ll give you playtime. That was something that wasn’t exactly common back in 2004. But since then the Blizzard customer service has been rather good, even accommodating to players. When accounts were hacked by gold farmers, Blizzard generally was pretty quick to get the player “whole” again. My wife’s account got hacked, and she missed a raid, but overall it was a decent experience. People who were hacked multiple times, refusing to get an authenticator, were still made whole time and time again despite the stern lecture on account security from customer service.
Polish goes a long way. Personally I started playing WoW one year into its life span. So I don’t know first hand about the rocky experiences, but I do know that in November 2005 when I started playing I was blown away by the fact you never had to find a workaround for doing what should be routine activities for your class or profession. Since then the polish has gotten better with each expansion to the point where looking back at Vanilla WoW I’m amazed that we put up with some of the dumb quests we had to put up with. QA clearly matters and if you don’t have serious or widespread problems with a patch or an expansion people tend to be more patient about waiting for the next bit.
You will have casual and hardcore players and you can’t ignore either. Blizzard for all of their polish has not been without fault in their run. The original raids were a nightmare to organize with forty people and the number of people who saw Naxrxamas in Vanilla was a tiny portion of the population. Their initial solution to that was to make raids smaller and so the Burning Crusade was more accessible for the first tier, but the higher level dungeons weren’t seen by many people either so their expansions chief bad guy most people hadn’t seen at all. Wrath of the Lich King seemed to find the solution by making the villain pop up all over the place and it was widely regarded as a pretty great expansion. It took time, but Blizzard seems to have found a way to give casuals a way to see almost all the content made, but still giving the hardcore the ability to get shiny toys for their accomplishments.
Will Bioware Learn These Lessons?
It is impossible for me to know for sure if Bioware has learned the right lessons from their MMO ancestors, but we have a lot of reason to suspect that they have.
Bioware enjoys a reputation among game developers that is top notch. When you ask most gamers what Bioware, Blizzard, and Valve have in common, the response is usually something to the effect of “They will not release a product until it is ready”. It is amazing what kind of leeway gamers will give developers with that kind of reputation. Most of Alvis is very very eager to get their hands onto this game. We read about it, we obsess over the latest tidbit said at a con or a Friday update. But almost everyone I’ve talked to has said something to the effect of “I’d rather wait for a finished game, than pay to beta test a broken game.” Bioware has been very clear that they want to make sure that launch goes smoothly, that the game is complete, that it runs well, and that the bugs are gone before 12/20/2011. Their reputation is on the line and they know it.
The second main lesson revolves around content. Since they announced the game they have gone on and on about how they are really giving “story” the center stage in this mmorpg. If they needed a tag line it would be something to the effect of “SWTOR: Putting the RPG back in MMORPG”. Podcasters have joked “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently this game has story.” If they pull this off it will be a new bar for the genre in a significant way. I’ve been playing WoW for almost 6 years and despite killing the Lich King, and seeing most end game content for years now, I never really knew why we were doing any of the things we were doing. I mean I guess that guy in that castle/cave/palace is a bad person, and he needs to be stopped, but I was in it for the game play not the story. If Bioware has succeeded it will add a whole depth to my game playing experience in that, not only will I do things because I like the game play, but I genuinely care about solving story problems. That has the potential to up the genre bar the same way WoW did.
The final lesson is about community and communication with the segments of your player base, and this is the part we can’t know for sure for a while. Ideally Bioware has gotten the resources lined up and the ability to help customers feel like the company values their subscription. And hopefully Bioware has fun activities for the whole spectrum of players. PvPers, raiders, crafters, socialites, and altaholics. If they do, then the player base can settle as a solid community. There are many promising indications this is already happening. Devs are very interactive already with players. They work with fansites, blogs ,and podcasts on a regular basis. They seem to get that people are excited, and that working with the community goes a long way towards having a lasting community.
Bioware has had lots of tests thrown its way. It has to prove it can be a viable game and succeed where a whole list of other MMOs have failed. They have the potential, they seem to be learning from other people’s mistakes. If they live up to their own expectations they could emerge out of SWG and WoW’s shadows and become a giant of their own.
Loot Containers: The End of Loot Drama?
6 months ago
by Blackferne in Gaming
‘Loot containers’ (name is still a work in progress!) do indeed exist and are designed to alleviate the frustration some feel around high-level loot drops.
As it’s currently implemented, at the end of a key encounter within an Operation, upon looting a high-level opponent, everyone in the Operations group will get an individual container which has a chance to give you a random piece of loot that’s specific to your class. It could be part of an armor set, a weapon, and so on. If you don’t get loot, you’ll get commendations which can be used to purchase gear.
Please note, this feature is currently in Game Testing and may well be modified before launch. -Stephen Reid
A long standing problem in MMOs is “who gets the loot?” I’ve seen loads of drama and read about worse drama in six years of playing World of Warcraft all on answering that exact question. There are a ton of different ways to answer the question but every one has their advantages and disadvantages. In a flashpoint (or small group instance) it is generally pretty easy to tell who a specific piece of gear is intended for and who in the group benefits most from it. But in Operations (8 or 16 man ‘raid groups’) that question becomes more difficult as you will likely have multiple people who could use a specific piece of gear.
Bioware has taken what I think is an interesting step in answering the loot question. They have essentially said “every plays, everybody wins”. This is good in many cases, but could be bad in other. I’d like to quickly outline what I see as the benefits and the potential harms.
Benefits
There is not a question of who gets what. Operation Leaders cannot play favorites because everyone essentially has a grab bag and the random number generator is deciding who gets what, not a loot system.
Since your loot container is tied to your class, any loot that drops will be class appropriate. It may not be your spec, or might be a duplicate of what you have, but it won’t be like an operation of Jedi Knights, Consulars, and Troopers finds themselves with Smuggler drops they can’t use.
Even if you get no gear, you still get something. The commendations that drop are an in game currency that can be exchanged for gear. So for every loot container you get where there aren’t pants, you still get something that when saved up will go towards new pants, or armor or a weapon.
Don’t need an external system for tracking and allocating loot. There are a lot of possible loot systems people use in World of Warcraft, and most require some addon or offline list/spreadsheet to figure out who can get loot. A loot container gets rid of the need for that since everyone is on their own loot path.
Drawbacks
The drawbacks I see are relatively few and mostly can be mitigated if gear can be traded. Let’s assume that what is provided in a loot container is bound to the owner of that loot container. There are operations I’ve been on that are farm nights. And what farm nights are really good at is helping to quickly gear some one up so they are ready for even more difficult operations in the future. For example if a Trooper who was slow to level, or had to take a few month break from the game comes to a farm night, then no matter what trooper gear dropped from a boss, they could be designated to get it. This would likely happen since all other troopers would likely already have that gear and not want it.
Another drawback is while loot containers are class specific, it isn’t necessarily spec or advanced class specific. If all I care about is tanking, DPS boots do me no good. But Furiel will want DPS boots and if the loot is linked to me and I can’t trade it, we are at a net loss.
Both of these drawbacks I think are relatively minor, and easily negated if Bioware allows for Operation members to trade loot containers within a certain time limit from opening.
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