Mellow Yellow: SW:TOR

Looking back at my flurry of First Impressions posts, I'm conscious I haven't given a clear account of my moment by moment play in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I have said, several times, that I'm enjoying the experience, that I'm having fun, and that I've been following the Class Story while leveling up, but beyond that it's all been a bit vague.

The simple truth is that I've been doing pretty much what I'd do in any new MMORPG. I've been wandering about, looking at stuff, taking lots of photos and doing odd jobs for anyone who'll pay me. Most of those jobs involve murdering someone, stealing something or blowing something up. The basic sociopath's holiday in other words, something we've all come to know, love and not really think about too much, for very good reasons.

This, supposedly, is not what I ought to be doing. Although I've been trying to stay away from Guides and How-Tos and Walkthroughs, it's been impossible to avoid picking up on the general assumption that what every new player wants to be doing is their Class Story. That, it seems, is what the game is best at and that is where it shines. Everybody says so. The other MMORPG stuff, so far as it still exists at all, is just so much legacy baggage, best avoided.

It's not that I've been avoiding my Class Story. I've been following it, on and off.  The Scoundrel, one of the Smuggler's two sub-classes, has one of the better ones, or so I'm led to believe. And it is quite good in its pulp-noir-lite way. It may, of course, get much better. I would guess I'm about halfway through, since the intended level of the Nar Shaddaa stage, which is where I am now, is mid-to-late 20s.

Then there are the Planetary Story Arcs. Even after googling, I am somewhat unclear on whether every planet has these. I don't think starter planet Ord Mantell had one but the second planet, Taris does and I've completed it.

I liked Taris. I thought it was much, much more visually appealing than ugly Ord Mantell. Also way more atmospheric. The backstory tells of a planetary civilization that was bombed into the stone age three hundred years ago. Over the passing centuries nature has reclaimed the ruins. I arrived just as recovery operations had finally begun.

I love ruins. I spend a good proportion of my vacation time wandering around the crumbling remains of long-vanished civilizations. If I can get inside a contemporary structure that's in the process of falling back into its component parts, overrun with vines and turning green, so much better. Taris pushed my buttons.

Okay, it is a tad yellow. And the TOR devs are really frugal with their assets. I'm not sure I've played another AAA MMORPG that reused quite so many structural building blocks, quite so often, with quite so few individual, hand-made touches to personalize the scene. Still, it gets the job done.

As an explorer archetype I wanted to see everything, even if a lot of it did look much the same. I also wanted to talk to everyone who'd talk to me and do whatever they wanted me to do because I'm nosy like that. Thanks to Tyler's tip in the comments I have the map widget switched on to show me every possible Mission-giver. Turns out there are a lot of them.

I'm not sure exactly how long I was on Taris but it seemd like a long time. Many hours. I'm not normally one for zone completion for reasons of achievement alone but I do hate to see unexplored areas on the map. On Taris it seemed like every time I thought I'd been everywhere, some new block of hexes would appear and I'd have to go there and open them up.

There were Missions in all sorts of obscure camps and corners. I lost track of which ones belonged to what sequence very early on, which turned out to be my undoing. As I learned, too late, Taris has a "Bonus" series of Planetary Arc missions, which you are supposed to do after you've completed the original sequence. The idea is that you come back to the planet sometime later and find out how the people you helped are getting on with taming the wilderness.

Unfortunately, whoever designed the missions neglected to script them in such a way that you can't take them out of order. They also flagged the Bonus series with the word "Bonus", which might have helped if the game didn't already use "Bonus" as a flag for an entirely different sort of mission, the ones you get all the time, whenever you kill anything, which ask you to kill more of the same.

After a frustrating few tries to get a particularly recalcitrant NPC to talk to me I googled and found that I was bugged. As countless others have been. Since 2012. There's no fix coming. I just have to suck it up and forget about it.

TOR is a disturbingly buggy game for its age and provenance. In my first few days I've been bugged in various ways at least four or five times, a couple, like this one, quite seriously. It does add to the underlying sense that you're pretty much on your own if you want to hang around in areas that have outlived their usefulness. Especially if you also insist on freeloading. Well, what can you expect?

It's a shame because down in steerage class TOR makes for a pretty good MMORPG experience. Forget the Fourth Pillar and the Big Story. There's a ton of fun to be had, playing just like it was any other MMORPG.

Take the Non-Story Missions; they're solid. If you like regular MMORPG questing as popularized by World of Warcraft, you're in safe, if familiar hands. So far I haven't run across an escort quest but all the other old favorites are there, waiting for you to sign up.

Execution is endearingly old school, too. Sometimes you get a widget to click on the Mission Tracker, other times you have to open your Inventory and find the item in your Mission Tab. Often you have to click a glowy blue thing in the world or kill mobs for drops. Once in a while you just have to get to the right marker on the map.

I've never been sure whether MMORPGs are like this because a bunch of different designers work on the same zone and all use their favorite methods or if it's a single designer trying to keep things fresh. Either way, I prefer questing with this minor note of chaos. Keeps me engaged.

As well as traditional questing, TOR offers a number of other mainstream genre staples. Bosses/Rare Spawns/Nameds - call them what you will - they pop up here and there. Naming conventions and nameplates give strong confirmation but I found I could usually spot them visually (they tend to look bigger or meaner or just slightly out of place), something I always take as a principle of good design. Show, don't tell.

And they have drops, as they should. I think. I couldn't be sure how much was random luck and how much was Boss Loot Table without killing the same ones a few times, which I never managed to do. I never missed killing one when I saw it, though. I love a good rare spawn, even if it's not actually all that rare.

There are also plenty of Chests to open, sometimes right behind the Named that's guarding it. And there's a chance to get good loot from any random mob. I've had two or three orange drops from non-entity rakghouls or pirates.

All of this is sweet music to my traditionalist ears. These are all classic MMORPG systems of which I strongly approve and which feature all too infrequently in more modern games. *cough* Guild Wars 2 *cough*.

I spent much of yesterday criss-crossing Taris, cleaning up the neighborhood for truth, justice and credits. Mostly credits, if I'm honest. Money hunger notwithstanding, my Scoundrel now leans so far into the light you can see her teeth glow through the back of her head. I'm going with it. I'm told (by Tyler again) that it doesn't matter much anyway.

When I finally had no more regular Missions in my journal I turned to Heroics. The wiki describes Heroic Missions as "missions with a slightly greater difficulty than the standard missions on a select world".  If they're flagged "2+", as all mine were, they're intended for two players but at TOR's current degraded levels of difficulty my Scoundrel and her Companion had no trouble.

Except once. The very first Heroic Mission on Taris, I somehow contrived to get my character and Corso killed. It's the first and only combat death I've had in 36 levels and it was entirely down to overconfidence, the game having trained me to treat every mob as a joke.

What happened was entirely avoidable. I was waling away on an Elite Nekghoul, when I noticed Corso wasn't healing much any more. For the first time ever I looked at his health bar and saw he was under fifty percent. He seemed to have his hands full keeping himself alive, so I backed up to do something to help him and promptly aggroed another Elite and his pals, who were lurking just out of sight around a corner.

Corso went down first, leaving me, with only my own limited heals, to take down two Elites and about six or so grunts. I got through the first Elite and a few of his friends but it was clear I wasn't going to make it. If I'd had a clue where the exit was I might have made a run for it but I didn't. I chose to stand and fall where I was.


It was the annoying run back (Taris is very hard to navigate with all the fallen buildings blocking obvious routes) more than the death itself that convinced me to pay more attention. I completed the rest of the Heroics without incident.

There were a lot of them. At least half a dozen. Some were in instances, some outdoors. All the Heroic Missions come with a "Warp to Entrance" so you can do them like shelling peas, provided you don't die and have to run back. They all reward two pieces of Blue quality armor. I got a lot of upgrades.

I thought the Heroics were fun. More fun than most similar systems I've used in other MMORPGs, because they don't use re-cycled dungeons that take too long to finish. I was in and out of most of these Heroics in ten or fifteen minutes, which felt about right. They also showed me some places on the map I hadn't discovered on my own. I tend to avoid this kind of content in most MMORPGs. Here I can imagine seeking it out.

With the last Heroic over I headed back to the Spaceport and my ship. Next stop Nar Shadaa. The name rang a bell although I couldn't have said why. Turns out it's Space Vegas.

After the supermarket car park ambience of Ord Mantell and the "any color you like so long as it's yellow" tone poem that is Taris, Nar Shadaa's neon onslaught came as an eye-opener in more ways than one. I do love a lightshow but until I opened the bay door and stepped outside I hadn't realized how much I'd missed real color.

It's evident that TOR uses its planets in the way fantasy MMORPGS use their zones. Logic suggests a planet might have more than a single biome but game logic disagrees. It's early days on Nar Shadaa but I'll be astonished if it isn't bright lights and dancing girls all the way.

So far I've rigged some bikes to crash, haggled with a Hutt and killed an inordinate amount of gang members. It's fortunate I'm not hung up on authenticity. Or ethics. I do find the sheer prevelance - and acceptance - of wholesale mass murder as the first and only solution to even the most trivial problem rather harder to handwave away in a high-tech, sceince fiction setting than a backwater, quasi-medieval fantasy world.

It occurs to me that The Purge franchise might make a particularly good I.P. for an MMO. Possibly not so much an MMORPG, where we do at least like to cling to some kind of fig-leaf of morality to cover our self-indulgent excesses, providing we're not flat-out roleplaying mustachio-twirling EVIL, of course. On which thought, and getting back to TOR, it occurs to me how curious it is that no amount of random, unprovoked killing can dent your credentials as a flag-waver for The Light. Just don't ask for money up front and your halo will never tarnish.

Leveling speed has slowed considerably. I was expecting to hit 50 before the weekend but now I'm not sure I'll make it. May be if I burned through the Class Story and kept to the rails I'd get there sooner but contrary to most of the advice I've seen I don't think that's a good plan.

BioWare made SW:TOR at the very height of the post-WoW boom. They wanted to bring their own, trademark stamp to the genre with the emphasis on story, but they also tried to catch the same magic everyone else was trying to bottle around then.

Based on what remains, I don't think they gave it a bad shot. The current leveling gameplay of TOR may be strongly watered down from what was, according many accounts, a fiddly, slow-paced, old-fashioned trudge back at launch but there's a very solid MMORPG in there somewhere, even now.

It would be a shame to miss it and I'm not going to.