Back To The Future

After the flurry of recent name-drops, on the blog and in comments elsewhere, I'm sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I am, once again, playing Star Wars: the Old Republic. Although, as yet, I have to use the term "playing" advisedly. I haven't actually done anything that felt like play so far.

It didn't take a huge push to get me interested again. Since I stopped, several years ago now, I've thought surprisingly often about giving the game another go. There always seemed to be other things to do, though, and besides it seemed like too much trouble to get it all set up. (Ironic foreshadowing ftw!)

The trigger for me to actually do something about it at last was pulled by Yeebo's post on the game but also by Shintar's reply to my comment, in which she reminded me that I did actually seem to quite enjoy myself when I was last there, something I was aware of in a general fashion even though I'd struggle to bring any specifics in mind. I was almost there and then the final shove came from a post at AI MMORPG News that I read this morning.

AI MMORPG News was one of the two highly controversial AI-generated blogs that participated in Blaugust this year. I can't actually remember what the other one was. I know I never even saw it, much less read anything that got posted there. The AI news blog, though, I read every day. I'm sure it will annoy some readers to hear that I found the posts generally quite a good read and also reasonably informative, which is why I added it to my blog roll when Blaugust came to an end. 

Can anyone smell sulfur?

One of my main complaints about most pro/semi-pro MMORPG coverage of recent times has been how snarky and cynical it often is. I know that's rich coming from someone who sometimes satirises company press releases and official statements for the purpose of so-called humor but I hold personal blogs to a very different standard than supposedly professional news sites and I like my gaming news as straight and un-quirky as it comes.

AI-generated text has a tendency to be far too gosh-wow and gee willikers for any rational human being to feel entirely comfortable reading it but after years of trying to extract a few facts from what too-often appears to be someone's attempt to hone their routine for Friday's open mic night, I'd take sickeningly sweet over solipsistically sneery any day. If nothing else, I find saccharine praise far easier to filter out and ignore.

The AI blog posts every day with no particular agenda that I can ascertain and I always read it with interest. Today it came up with one of those listicles much favored by sites seeking to harvest clicks: The Top MMORPGs on Steam. 

For some reason it decided to stop at seven, which I very much doubt any human intern given the thankless task would have done. Star Wars: the Old Republic was not one of the picks, which I found strange. World of Warcraft was, though, which I found even stranger. Had I missed a major development or was it just one of those infamous AI hallucinations?

Neither, as it turns out. Blizzard have not yet become so desperate as to share some of their enormous yet possibly dwindling revenue stream with Valve but of course you can link your Battle.Net account with Steam and set WoW as an external game to be played through the platform. It bends the definition of "on Steam" a little but I don't think it breaks it.

Who said the graphics were old-fashioned? This looks just like The 5th Element!

Final Fantasy XIV, however, which is also on the AI's list, is fully playable on Steam, something I either never knew or had forgotten. So is Elder Scolls Online, ditto and ditto. I found that out when I fact-checked the whole list and it made me think. In some cases, like Guild Wars 2, playing through Steam means starting afresh; in others, like ESO, you can link the accounts and (I'm guessing...) carry on playing your existing characters.

Given that I was only yesterday musing about the possibility of starting over in games I used to play, either option sounded valid. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how convenient it would be to have most, if not all, my MMORPGs on one platform. The me of even five years ago would be outraged but I'm not that guy any more. 

As I said, I was somewhat surprised not to see SW:tOR on the AI's list. I'd had it in my head that the game had long been available through Steam and it would certainly seem to be one of the better-known games in the genre. I checked and yes, it very definitely is available on the platform, where it enjoys a Very Positive rating. 

I couldn't remember whether I'd played the game through Steam myself or whether I'd used a standalone client so checked that too. It seemed I hadn't played on Steam because there was no sign of the game in my library. 

Then again, there was no sign of it anywhere else, either. I couldn't find a client on any of my hard drives or an icon on my desktop so I have to assume I uninstalled it in one of my Marie Kondo moments.

Do I know you? Nope, don't believe I do.

All the more reason, then to re-install it through Steam. Or install it, I guess. Whatever. 

But first I had to check whether that would mean starting over from scratch or whether I could link my EA account and pick up from where I left off. I did remember that EA handed the game on to Broadsword a while back  - I even wrote a post about it, in which I speculated about coming back to try the game under its new management - but I figured the account I had would still be with EA. 

It was not. As it happens, my EA account is already linked with Steam for some reason but there's no sign there that I ever played SW:tOR at all. Fortunately, Broadsword have all my details safely in hand. I don't remember doing anything to pass the details across so presumably the transfer went through on the nod.

I did a bit of research on what I needed to do to link the accounts. The advice I found was less than clear but the gist seemed to be that just adding the game to my library and installing it through Steam ought to take me to a Broadsword login the first time I pressed Play. From there, I'd be able to sign in using my old account details to complete the handshake.

It kind of worked. Eventually. After a lot more messing around, googling, reading Reddit threads, cutting and pasting some code into the Steam folder... the usual sort of thing that anyone wanting to go back to play an aging game they stopped playing years ago is going to be perfectly happy to do. It took me about forty-five minutes altogether. It really didn't help that one of the authorisation screens uses borderless black tick boxes on a black background - just sorting that out took at least half the time.

Oh, so that's who I am!

Finally, I was able to log in. And there were my characters. Two of them. Neither of whom I remembered at all. 

It is very unusual indeed for me to come back to an MMORPG I played for months and not even being able to remember the name of my character when I see it. It may even be unique to SW:tOR. Apparently I did fifty-nine levels on someone called Fentara Michington, which doesn't even sound like a name I would make up, and thirty-nine on someone by the name of Coyenne, which sounds only slightly more plausible. 

I said in reply to Shintar yesterday that "I can remember precisely nothing about any of the story in SW:tOR from when I played" but even when I wrote it I was thinking "but I imagine it might come back to me if I started playing again.". Well, it hasn't. Nothing much about how to play the game has come back to me either. 

Steam tells me I've played for 68 minutes and as I said earlier about 45 of those were spent trying to link the accounts and log in. The rest were taken up with staring at the UI then going through all the menus and pressing buttons to see what they did. Without a great deal of success.

I wonder what this button does?

I began by trying to find some way off whatever space station I'd found Fentara on. I had three tracked quests on screen so I thought I'd go do one of those but I couldn't work out how to get off the damn orbital. I tried the map but it just made things even more confusing. 

That was about the one thing I did remember from before - I never could work out how to get from one place to another without it taking forever. I'm so used to being able to just open a map and click on something to be ported there instantly or at the very least to be ported to somewhere I can get a ride to where I want to go that having to pass through the places inbetween on the way seems positively archaic.

By dint of pressing everything in every drop-down menu I did manage to find my way back to my apartment, which seemed barely furnished and not at all like anywhere someone might be living. Great views though. I also managed to get myself thrown out of the game altogether onto some selection screen that threatened to take me into one of the expansions instead. I chose to log out and back in again rather than end up somewehere I couldn't get back from.

After much trial and error I finally worked out where the elevators were on the map and by a process of elimination found my way to the spaceport on whatever planet the station was orbiting. Or at least I think that's where I went.

What I actually did was click on the door of the only ship that had one that did anything, then tried both options until I got to some place that looked like it might be somewhere I could get to somewhere else from. 

Left hand down a bit...

I looked at the map and spotted some docking areas labelled with Class names, Smuggler being one of them. I had the vaguest idea that might have been the class I originally chose, although when I checked against Fentara's name it said Scoundrel. Rude!

I had a dim inkling Scoundrel might have been a sub-class choice at some point so I made my way to the Smuggler bay, which is not a thing you'd imagine would be advertised as clearly as that, if at all, and when I got there I repeated my previous tactic of finding the only ship with an interactable door and hammering on it.

It was my ship. I got lost in there, too. I met a Wookie who wanted to talk to me. I couldn't remember where I'd met him or why he was on my ship but I talked to him anyway. Apparently, I said something he disapproved of but my standing with him went up anyway. Must be a Wookie thing.

There was a robot hanging around, too - a droid in the jargon, I guess - just standing in a corridor. He didn't have anything to say so I just left him there. Didn't rememeber him either.

After a few minutes aimlessly wandering the halls I somehow managed to find what I took to be the Bridge or the Cockpit or the Flight Deck or whatever it's called. There were no obvious controls but there were three chairs so I tried sitting in all of them and, like Goldilocks, I didn't find the one that was just right until the end.

From the command chair I managed to find the planet I had a mission for on the map  The mission step I was on actually said "Fly your ship to..." whatever the planet was called. I've already forgotten. It began with O, I know that much. 

Ah, it's called Oricon. I just read the description. Looks like we're in for some "fun" there.

So I did that and got out of the ship. Or, rather, I watched a cut scene where my character told the ship's onboard computer to set her down and pick her up later. By that point I would have been fine with everything being handled in a cut scene. I didn't feel I was in much control of the situation anyway.

Outside, the planet I'd arrived on appeared to be on fire. Maybe it was Hell. It felt like it could be. It was also time for me to go and start making lunch so I decided to quit while I was, if not exactly ahead, at least slightly ahead of where I had been when I started.

As a returning player, I have had a lot better welcomes back than that. Unless I missed something, the game made absolutely no reference to the fact that it had been several years since my last login. In a way it fitted in nicely with what I have to say is now the extremely old-school feel of the game. 

These days, almost every other MMORPG I can think of, even the old ones, takes its cues from the F2P imports, gach agames and mobile titles that do everything but kill an actual fatted calf whenever you come back after more than a day or two away. SW:tOR clearly does not care one whit whether you play the game or not. In a weird way it's quite refreshing to be taken so utterly for granted but I'm not sure how wise a choice it is, commercially.

I will persist, despite the lack of bunting and presents. Having made it to the right planet I feel I ought at least to try to carry out the mission I went there to do. Whatever it is. I have no idea. Probably going to involve murdering someone, I imagine. Usually does.

I just hope I can remember which way round to hold the gun.

Insert Pop Culture Quote Here: SW:TOR

Star Wars: The Old Republic. Flavor of the month. Launch of the Year (last year but let's not quibble). Generator of hype and hatred in not at all equal measures. I'm not playing it and I don't really have any plans to. I don't rule it out, of course. When there's a free trial I might take a look, although since I never bothered with the beta I couldn't honestly claim cost was the barrier to entry in my case. If I see a cheap copy I'll probably pick it up, but whether it will ever get installed is another matter. My 99p copy of Age of Conan is still sitting on the bookcase with its pristine shrinkwrap intact.

Not Actual Copy

Despite my general lack of interest in all things Star Wars and TOR (I'm going to go with TOR. For months I've been typing "SW:tOR" and there's really no reason for it. No-one else does and it's not even the correct capitalization. I don't know now why I ever thought it was). That sentence got away from me. Let me start again. In fact, let's have a new paragraph and pretend this one never happened.

Despite my my general lack of interest in all things Star Wars and TOR in particular, I've read an awful lot about it. Hard not to when you have MMOs as a hobby. Just about every blogger I read has had something to say on the subject, even the ones who aren't playing it. Wilhelm and Potshot tried the beta and didn't like it enough to buy the game. Wilhelm actually cancelled his pre-order on the basis of what he saw when he lifted the velvet rope. SynCaine's been agin it from the start, naturally. Keen, Spinks and Syp are still playing with a mix of enthusiasm and enervation. Gordon's still playing but he thinks he won't be in a couple of months.

This week I noticed the first two drop-outs in my Reader. Melmoth at Killed In A Smiling Accident decided he'd already had his money's worth before the free 30 days were up and Kaozz at ECTmmo cancelled her account mostly because of technical issues getting the game to recognize that she had an account in the first place.

Back when the fire still burned

Not being a TOR player I hadn't been keeping count but I guess this is the week the first credit card payments go out. That's always a decision point. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I got Rift last year we went for the six-month subscription. First time I've ever done that in a new MMO. The deal on the 6 month sub was so good it seemed worth the risk and it was. We played nothing else until the end of the summer.

I'm not sure I can foresee that happening again. I'm not at all against the idea of recurring subscriptions but they do seem mighty inflexible now we've seen so many other options and the MMOs most likely to take collateral damage from the launch of new subscription MMOs would seem to be existing subscription MMOs. WoW took a visible hit from Rift, although it probably amounted more to a scratch in the paintwork than structural damage. Rift itself looks to have been holed beneath the waterline by TOR.

EQ2's move to an optional subscription model right at the time TOR launched is beginning to look more and more like a rare example of SoE getting a marketing decision right. The population boom on Freeport continues unabated. The door is wide open for anyone who left to pop right back in any time they like. As I noted the other day Trion appear to be gearing up for some kind of repopulation drive, putting the best face on things by  freeing up "trial servers" rather than calling it a server merge (which it is).

I hope it goes well for them. They had a very good run for a while there but as Keen points out, patience is in short supply among MMO players nowadays. I wonder how long TOR's moment in the sun will last?