I am paralyzed by choice in Star Wars: The Old Republic. But none of it is in-game choice. Those remain fairly straightforward, if you’ve played any BioWare games in the past decade. No, the choice comes from the servers, my friends, the two factions, and the character classes. These are all choices which are critical to my future enjoyment of the game, and as of right now, they’re essentially permanent. I can’t imagine I’m the only one having these issues, although the specific form my anxiety on the subject takes may be stronger than most. So let’s go through then one-by-one, bearing in mind that they all interact with each other:
The server load is one of the biggest potential issues, as I mentioned in the last diary. A pile of new servers brought up around launch time seems to have helped alleviate the worst of it, although a handful of servers still have massive queue times. The worst of the lot is “The Swiftsure”, which apparently has become the default Australian server, and typically has queue times of over an hour. A few others have around 20-40 minutes of waiting before you can play, but most of them have very short or no queue times anymore, which is helpful. Yet it still feels like it may turn into a problem at any point, presumably Christmas sales and vacations are disruptive in unpredictable fashion.
This is exacerbated by the “lock-in” of having picked a server, played on it, and become attached to your character, friends, or both. One of the servers I’d played on had been having 20-minute queues on a regular basis, and had I been more attached to it, I’d have been pissed off. Likewise, it’s hard to recommend friends joining you on a server that was light when you joined, but is now constantly full. BioWare’s slow, week-long rollout may have been brilliant from a technical and in-game social perspective, avoiding having thousands of people show up at the starting areas of every server at once, but from an external social perspective, it’s a nightmare. Without specific coordination it ends up with people getting the game at different times, trying to connect with one another to discover that their server is full, and just plain feeling like they might be doing it wrong.
Of course, this problem would be easily fixed if BioWare offered free server transfers at launch. It’s impossible to make an informed decision when a launch takes over a week. You go to sleep one day, and half your friends are on a different server they chose without telling you. Another day passes and both that server and your old one have a half-hour queue. It encourages a fractured approach, constantly rolling and rerolling characters, then disposing of them to chase people you want, run away from those you don’t, or just get sick of the characters altogether.
Maybe that’s the point, or at least an unintended positive (for BioWare) consequence. Maybe The Old Republic really does need you to create multiple different characters. I know it’s worked for me. The character creation system and I have become good friends, and I’ve even researched who the voice actors are for each class for future creation reference (Jennifer Hale, Commander Shepard herself, voices the female Republic Troopers, fyi, while Nolan North, voice of every damn thing including Nathan Drake, is the male Jedi Consular). And I’m learning which classes I enjoy. My Sith Warrior is uninspiring, which is odd, as I loved the equivalent Warrior class in World Of Warcraft, while I’m thoroughly enjoying the Smuggler/Imperial Agent class.
As of this writing, I’ve got five characters spread across four servers, different classes, different factions, whose mugshots decorate this piece. Two have only been played for a sitting or two, but I’ve put decent time into three others. And I think I’ve finally settled on a specific server and character, but I’m sure the temptation to move or try another is going to happen…especially if those damn queues come back in force.
One of those characters has reached the point in the game where she has her own ship, and with that ship, can run some space combat missions. A few people I’ve spoken to have seemed really excited about the space combat, though they seem to be a minority. If you were a big fan of the old Rebel Assault games in the mid-1990s, it’s a great recreation of that style of on-rails space shooting, and without the embarrassing live action Star Wars fanfic videos. But whether you’re a fan, or not, of the space combat modes, it doesn’t really seem to matter. The space combat modes are an entertaining set of daily side quests that can get you experience and money, but they don’t seem to connect to anything else.
Consistent play, and utilization of various different aspects of the game than the simple quest-and-combat at the core, has revealed a more complete set of bugs, glitches, and oversights. The most frustrating set of bugs prevent full access to some resource nodes for gathering skills, like rocks archeology or plants for bioanalysis. You can see them on your map, but you can’t click them to collect. Another nasty one prevents travel from planet-to-planet by ship when your party members are on different planets from you, which has only happened once for me, but it’s more than a little ridiculous.
The auction house, or “Galactic Exchange”, is also problematic, though that seems more intentional due to a difficult interface. You can’t merely search for something by name, but you have to know what category it belongs to. It’s also difficult to search for types of armor, like helmets or belts, instead just getting a pile of things to scroll through. And perhaps worst of all, the field which is supposed to help you sort the equipment by level requirement doesn’t work at the low end, so you have to scroll past dozens of pieces meant for level 5 characters or so. Toss in the fact that without mods like World Of Warcraft’s “Auctioneer”, and it’s easy to see why most players tend to complain about the Galactic Exchange…although its difficulty in use has created room for some players to exploit it and get rich.
And in terms of oversights, perhaps the most obvious is that BioWare included romance options for many of your character’s companions, but only if they were a heterosexual match for the other. Now, I’m fine with non-player characters having fairly rigid sexualities. Not every person wants to romance every other person no matter how hard they try, for many reasons including gender preference. But for there to be exclusively straight relationships and no gay relationships seems an especially egregious oversight, especially with this happening on the other side of the company nine months ago. It is a notable point of contention at times, and one which is supposed to be fixed with a patch at some point – but that in itself seems slightly discriminatory.
After two weeks with The Old Republic, I feel like I’ve gotten a good feel for a lot of its systems and mechanisms, but it’s still developing socially. The staggered launch combined with the Christmas holiday puts a lot of things in flux. My goal is to pick a home, pick a character class, and at least try to finish the first act of the plot. I think I’m settling in, as is the game.
