May 2017 – Page 6

Empires Fall

May 10, 2017 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those “Bel is very late to the party” sort of posts but bear with me. Additional upfront warnings… I am entering a territory with this post that might have some minor spoilers. For a long while I have avoided Knights of the Fallen Empire because I knew it made some significant changes that you simply could not step back. As a result in my best Mass Effect fashion… I attempted to wring as much joy from the “old world” as I could and made sure that I saw all of the story content before moving forward. Last night however I finally reached that point where I was at least reasonably comfortable taking the plunge and moving forward into the modern era of SWTOR. Having said that… there are a bunch of things I am extremely glad that I completed before doing so. Firstly I am happy that I managed to see the main story arc for each of the classes. Secondly I am happy that I took the time to progress every single companion and see all of their personal story before moving forward. Additionally as far as I am concerned it is extremely important to do both Shadows of Revan and Rise of the Emperor (Ziost) before starting the Fallen Empire content. I mean in theory you can just jump ahead to the modern era at any point you like, but if you want to have completed all of your story elements… you need to do class story to completion, Revan and Ziost.

Functionally Shadows of Revan and Rise of the Emperor are the unlabeled opening acts of the Fallen Empire campaign, and as a result I am extremely glad that I completed both of them. Now the other big piece of warning that I had been given was that anything you want to do with your companions… you need to do before entering “chapters” mode. This is because in truth you may or may not ever see them again. I personally don’t have a list of which companions are findable in the game, and which are just gone indefinitely… but I have heard that some fan favorites are absolutely missing in action. Once you enter Chapters the game is functionally changed, and you are sort of along for the ride. It was that point that really concerned me and kept me from taking the leap for a very long time. I had built up this comfortable stable of characters that I liked using, and enjoyed my jetting around the galaxy life style. Once I started Chapter 1… literally all of that changed and I began playing a very different game. That said… I think it might be a better game.

If Star Wars the Old Republic was functionally World of Warcraft in space… then Fallen Empire is Knights of the Old Republic 3. The game feels like it shifts from being a traditional check all of the boxes MMORPG… to being a much more story focused RPG that just happens to have other people playing it at the same time. At this point I am still wrapping things up in Chapter VI and hope to keep moving forward tonight, but I’ve found myself in a situation that feels very familiar to anyone who has played KOTOR 1 or 2. In that fashion I think its best to think of Fallen Empire and I assumed Eternal Throne as a sequel to Star Wars the Old Republic. You are playing the same character, and you have all of the items you have built up along your first journey, but you are functionally playing a completely different game. Maybe it is more of a new game plus mode than anything, as you shift your focus from the traditional tropes of an MMO, to starting over again. It feels much the same as Mass Effect 2 did after the original, where you are set down in a world that is familiar, but the cast of characters has changed slightly… and you have to rebuild your legacy.

I will likely continue to report in as I travel through the new content, but so far I have to say I am hooked. There are a lot of events that happen in rapid succession, but functionally when you regain full control of your character five years have passed and the future is uncertain. You are presented with a new cast of characters… some of which are familiar and others brand new. That said the cast of characters are interesting and I immediately felt right at home… in spite of no longer having my original team of companions. I can see the potential for setting forth in a matter that cuts across the various class stories and potentially introduces me to characters from them all. The other weird thing about this setting is that I am finding myself turning from pure Jedi… to more of a balanced user. I am giving myself permission to take more dark side choices when I feel like it suits my purpose better. I am going to save the people that need saving… and I am absolutely going to take a lightsaber to the folks who deserve killing. I am no longer the Jedi Battlemaster and am now instead known as the Outlander, and with that comes a change in focus. Belghast is going to be a lot darker than before… and that is going to be okay. I feel like this character is the vanguard of all of the characters I have played, and as a result sort of adopting my favorite traits from each of the class storylines. In wild space, Sith and Jedi don’t matter anymore… but instead what matters is freeing the galaxy of this new threat.

Mixed Feelings

May 9, 2017 by Belghast

This morning like so many mornings I have been feeling largely uninspired in my attempt to find something to write about. In Star Wars the Old Republic I am in an odd space of doing some miscellaneous clean up before moving on to the Knights of the Fallen Empire content. This is enjoyable but not exactly the sort of thing that makes a good blog post because it doesn’t necessarily reveal anything worth mentioning. As a result I have spent way too much time looking at twitter, and almost like a miracle a tweet came across my timeline. It seems that Secret World Legends is releasing on June 26th, which is admittedly way sooner than I was expecting. It seems like it literally just went into beta about a month ago, which means one of two things. One either the beta has gone so amazingly well that they are moving up their time tables… or two that they were always going to launch on the 26th regardless of what happened in testing. Admittedly I have a lot of mixed feelings about this game relaunching.

I have a lot of love for The Secret World… but much in the same way as you might love that one movie you saw back in your childhood that you through was really damned cool and remember fondly as a sequence of memories. It will probably always be one of the best story driven MMO experiences I have had. They also did some interesting things with the deck building style ability system that let you mix and match actives and passives until you crafted a character that fit your specific play style. For example I fell in love with Blades/Shotgun which was this amazingly fun build with a mix of ranged and melee abilities that let me adapt to pretty much any open world situation. The problem being that these extremely custom builds all fell completely apart when you entered the end game. The game saw every single one of my circle of friends, having to abandon whatever path they were on to choose something new and group friendly to be able to even start to make a dent in the nightmare content. This is the point where most of us checked out, because we loved being whatever character fantasy we had built for ourselves… and having to abandon that just ruined the game experience.

All of that said… my twitter time line is full of moments when I broadcast the game out to my friends in an effort to get everyone to experience it. Each time it went on sale I talked about how good of a deal it was. I love the setting and I love the challenge of some of the quests that force you to figure out how to do silly things like decode things from base 64 encoding. In the trailer above they talk about switching the game from an MMO to a shared world action RPG… which largely sounds like marketing nonsense. They are switching the game to be reticle targeting, which can be a positive if all of the movement and interaction keys work nicely with it. In many ways this could be an attempt to make it a more console friendly design, because that sort of a control scheme seems to simply work better with a controller than it does with mouse and keyboard. All of the individual weapons seem to have a mini game aspect. About a month ago Elemental was shown off on the dev stream to have a “heat” mechanic that you are trying to keep in check. This makes me wonder however how well custom builds like my beloved Blades and Shotgun will work in this scenario. Will we have to choose a single weapon and stick to that?

Mostly I think I am going to have to fall into the “wait and see” camp at least until I get my hands on the game. I want it to work well, because I would really love to see a game like The Secret World succeeding. It did a lot of interesting things that no one else is still doing, and presented a game setting that is unique and interesting. The big problem however is all of that interesting bits came in a package that never quite worked as well as I thought it should. The user interface was always a bit of a disaster that you learned out to work around, rather than something that really reinforced the enjoyment of the game. Similarly the combat was scattered with a bunch of really great ideas that never quite coalesced into something that felt really good to play. There were elements of sheer brilliance, but those were what helped you get past all of the things that you found yourself barely tolerating. My ultimately hope is that with Secret World Legends they can go back and fix all the bits that never quite worked right, and then arrange the copious amounts of story they already have into a cohesive narrative. If they can do that and give me fun moment to moment play… then without a doubt I will be playing a lot more Secret World in the near future. They are however launching during a super tight window following ESO Morrowind on the 6th and FFXIV Stormblood on the 20th. That fact means without a doubt that while I might be playing this game… it is not going to even come close to being a primary game for me.

Legion’s Profession Problems

May 8, 2017 by Grace

After my WoW alt update post last week I decided to level my druid next. I just couldn’t resist the joy of flight form, cheering many quests and sniping all the herbs. For some reason I enjoyed the process way more than when I leveled my Alliance druid. I’m not sure if it was having flying, or not being an elf or what, but I had a lot more fun. I’ve been tempted to get the new flight form glyph because it looks really nice, but I just can’t bring myself to give up my awesome bat form.

Speaking of herbalizing from the skies, I also decided to give professions another go, mostly because I knew Darkmoon Faire was coming up and I figured at least I could get 5 free skill-ups that way. Unfortunately professions in Legion are still completely awful. I wanted to focus on my priest, who has tailoring and alchemy, since she’s my most nostalgia-heavy character and those professions made me a ton of gold over the years. Sadly the biggest moneymaker she has is still probably the 30 slot bags from WoD. Meanwhile leveling tailoring requires doing the Suramar questline, which I was avoiding like the plague on my alts. I loved Suramar, but it was long and had a rep grind and I don’t have any desire to repeat it if I can help it. On the alchemy side I’ve run up against the RNG of learning upgrades. Having to make a billion potions that are too low to give skillups to try to learn new ranks that might give skillups does not appeal. On top of all of that, you also have to run multiple dungeons for each profession. At least now that I’m 110 I can be carried through heroics by people with way more gear in a matter of minutes, as long as I don’t make myself depressed by looking at the damage meters.

The huge disconnect between how easy it is to level up an alt and how annoying it is to level their professions is really messing with my normal path to expansion/patch lull enjoyment. This is the time in prior expansions where I’d be raking in gold. Sure, we all got spoiled by how easy that was in WoD, but even in prior expansions I could level an alt and be useful making flasks, bags, gems, or transmutes pretty quickly. This time around even my main only got her professions maxed by staking out the Darkmoon Faire, and my alts are getting to around rank 760 (out of 800) at best before I hit a wall of dungeons or RNG or both. It has been fun to see a bunch of the class hall stories, but feels really strange that these alts aren’t being useful like they should. All that investment into leveling alts feels very hollow if I stop logging into them as soon as I’m done with their story. Oh well, at least I can keep selling plenty of Draenor-era bags. Maybe I should park my alts back in my garrison again…

Legacy Complete

May 8, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was yet another almost entirely devoted to playing Star Wars the Old Republic. I tend to exist in one of two modes, either I am playing a bunch of different games casually or in “maintenance mode” or I imprint super hard on a single game and I clamp down on it until I run out of stuff that I want to be doing. SWTOR seems to be in one of those clamp down modes, because I am playing it with an almost single minded focus. I set out with a goal of finishing off the eight original storylines, and this weekend I managed to push the agent across the finish line. As you can see I now have all eight icons lit up on the left side of the character select screen. What is interesting is just how much overlap there are between the different classes. You might hear a name mentioned in one class briefly that ends up being a central focus character in another. With the Agent especially it felt like we were getting the secret story of the world being played out through our actions, and it was all the more real when I slid from that story into Shadows of Revan. This is a minor spoiler but functionally the events foretold in the Agent sequence are coming to fruition by the Revanites… which makes me feel like the Star Cabal was just one of so many other puppets in the setting.

Makeb was largely interesting content, but it also felt like content added in a minor story patch in other games. It was this side mission that didn’t really move the overall story forward by much. Sure it was another chance to dust off your team mates and go on one more adventure… but it largely felt like one completely disconnected to everything else in the game. While enjoyable I stalled out in part because I had the other goal to worry about and lots of class storylines to play before that twelve times bonus went away. I wish however two years ago I had stuck around long enough to play through the Shadow of Revan campaign because I think the game as a whole would have had a good deal more traction for me. Shadow of Revan and now Ziost feels more like what I had been wanting. While it is taking part in a corner of the Galaxy and involves a brand new cast of characters… there is continuity happening and all of my actions seem to actually matter once again. Again you can absolutely see that it was design in a way so that it is stand alone DLC, but it feels like it integrates into the theme considerably better.

I am wondering if I might be attached to Star Wars the Old Republic until the release of Stormblood at this point. I have all of Ziost, which I am assuming is a fairly small addendum to the Revanite story. Then I have the entire Fallen Empire campaign and finally the Eternal Throne campaign to keep me tied up for awhile. I am figuring one of two things is going to happen when I start Fallen Empire, and in part that is why I have been avoiding actually starting it. Either I am going to love it and tear through it hungrily until I catch up completely. The other option is that I am going to bounce hard in Galaxy 2.0. Either case I can only delay the inevitably so long, but I will be doing like I did in Mass Effect Andromeda… and trying to finish everything up completely before flipping the switch. Side note… while staring at the above image I never noticed that my starship looks like it has a bubble level on the front. Mostly I want to experience the world as it exists… before changing it completely.

Some other side notes from the weekend. The experience boost is absolutely insane because I was roughly 1/3rd of the way through Shadows of Revan when I hit the modern level cap of 70. That means I have been getting functionally end game gear as I level through the content. With Knights of the Eternal Throne they added in a new Galactic Command system… that in truth I don’t fully understand. However it appears to be an alternate leveling system, and each time you kill something or complete a quest… you earn command points. Every so often you go up a level, and this process includes earning a command chest. These so far have been an excellent source of orange mod gear, and also occasionally a blue or purple item that blows away anything I have been capable of getting thusfar. Another thing that I am digging heavily is that it seems like I can enter every flashpoint in “story mode” which allows me to complete the flashpoint solo with the help of an extremely overpowered robot buddy. These flashpoints however also seem to drop current gear instead of the level of the encounter which surprised me just a little bit. Whatever the case it feels like I am getting to chase down all these story bits, and at the same time be rewarded with lots and lots of gear. Thusfar I am pretty happy with the way the systems all seem to be working.