[SWTOR] Screencap O’ the Day

Really?

So for those of you keeping track of how dark side you are, you can apparently now do it to 13 decimal places! What the what?!

Meaty Christmas!

Just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a very Merry Meaty Christmas and a very happy New Year!

[SWTOR] Pictures from a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Not a lot to write about these days. The wife has me wrapping presents like a fiend! I did want to post a few pictures of my escapades in Star Wars: The Old Republic. So here they are:

First, I have to toot my own horn and say I have achieved my legacy status by finishing Chapter 1 of the bounty hunter story. My character’s full name is Moruth Du’ul (more-ooth d00-ool). That is the name I have given to every character in a Star Wars game since I can remember.

These are just  a couple of pics of Moruth in travel. Oddly with all the technology in this setting, people on Alderaan travel by winged toad!

The First – Dromund Kaas World Boss

Grandfather – Balmorra World Boss

Here folks from the Imperial Mercenary Corps (with a couple friends) managed to take down the world bosses for Dromund Kaas and Balmorra. On to Tatooine next!

And lastly, yeah I did that. What are you gonna do about it…

-Pid

[SWTOR] Day 2 (Officially)

Ever wonder what a womp rat looks like? Wonder no longer.

Though I have been playing SW:ToR for over a week now, today begins day 2 since the official launch. It seems odd that the game has only been live to the masses for less than 48 hours and I am level 29 and should be finishing up Chapter 1 content in the next couple of days.

I am a little worried at the pace I have set. Now it was not too crazy, but pretty quick for me. (There are two people in our guild that were level capped just before launch or shortly thereafter.) I finished Tatooine in a little over a day’s worth of play and it was a pretty huge world. I didn’t bother to do any of the bonus quests, but it just seemed overly short. Maybe it is because I wanted to spend more time on the planet due to its significance in the Star Wars big picture.

Leveling has seemed to slow down quite a bit, but I am still capable of putting out a level and a half to two levels per day of play. It seems about right, but considering there are only 21 levels left to go, I hope that part takes a little longer. I really want to play some alts, but at the same time, I am really liking this character. I think they grow on you more when you have actively participated in their dialog and shaping their decisions throughout the leveling process.

Things should get better after the holiday season because I won’t have such gobs of time to play. If taken in smaller doses, I think the available content will be much more sustainable than at the pace I have set thus far. The big X-factor on this game will be what happens when you run out of the scripted content. What happens when the train hits the end of the line? How many alts can you make? Everyone is asking this question, but only time will answer it.

-Pid

[SWTOR] Screencap O’ the Day

For the last time, yes you are the beneficiary on the life insurance policy. Now why do you want me to keep backing up?

IMC is Looking for a Few Good Sentients

Calling All Sentient Mercenaries

Star Wars: The Old Republic is set to officially launch in a few hours. What could be more exciting? I just wanted to write a small note to promote an awesome guild in the Imperial Mercenary Corps (IMC).

If you are a mature individual that wants to have fun in a friendly environment, please head over to the recruitment page of the IMC and apply to our guild. If you like to play in a competitive environment that doesn’t have players that use names like Ishootu and Bubba Fatt check us out. We are not a raiding guild or a PvP guild, but there are plenty of people that enjoy doing those thing. We are predominantly focused on getting numbers up so that we can find people to group with at any given time to do flashpoints and heroic content. We play on a RP-PvE server (Sanctum of the Exalted) but very few of us are strict role players.

If this sounds like something you are interested in please click on the recruitment link and prepare to meet a great group of guys, gals, and other sentient beings that want to have fun without all the grief.

If you don’t join us, you might be facing off against these guys!

Game on!

-Pid

[SWG] In Memory

Wilhem has a great post up about the final night of Star Wars Galaxies. Apparently it passed into history without too many people realizing it. SWG was the very first MMO I every played, and had it not been for the fact that I was knee deep in graduate school, was newly married, and found out my son was on the way, I probably would have had a lot more experience with the game. As it stands, I probably played for a couple of months. I remember the  experience fondly though.

It saddens me that the MMOverse doesn’t have enough room in it for both SWG and SW:ToR. I know that Galaxies had its ups and downs and wasn’t a powerhouse like it could have been, but there were a lot of people who still enjoyed the game. As much as I am enjoying SW:ToR, I wish it didn’t have to be one or the other. My sympathy extends to all the SWG faithful who just lost their pastime.

-Pid

[SWTOR] Shipped!

The CE is on the way!

Well, as it turns out I shouldn’t need a grace period for SW:ToR. I was pretty worried at first though. When the preorder announcement dropped I was on the Carnival Cruise Lines’ Imagination in the middle of the ocean. I usually order from Amazon, but all you jerks must have bought up all the Collector’s Editions before I could get to it. 🙂 I opted to get it from Best Buy not having ever used them for such a “time-critical” order before. I remember riding the bus from the docks to the airport frantically searching the net on my phone to find an available copy. The expected delivery is Monday so I should be in good shape!

-Pid

PS By the looks of it this thing weighs almost as much as a sack of potatoes!

[SWTOR] You Asked for It…

To all the people that were complaining about the staggered start because they were too important to be left out…here is your reward:

5 Days until retail launch!

-Pid

[SWTOR] Some Things That Bug Me

What would happen if Boba Fett and Wolverine had a love child?

I ended up taking a half day yesterday from work and between last night and today I have managed to reach level 15 with Moruth the Powertech Bounty Hunter. Let me tell you, it has been a lot of fun. Ask my wife, I’m pretty sure she thought I moved out for how much she has seen me the past two days. I assured her this will pass in time, and she assured me that “It had better.”

I have to confess, since I had played the starter world a number of times during the beta weekends, I enabled subtitles on the dialogs and actually read them instead of listening to them in their entirety. It did really speed up the process at the time, but now that I am in completely virgin territory I am stopping to actually listen to them. Very cool!

So what is up with the title? Well I would love to tell you all the things that BioWare has  done right with this game, but I am soaking all that in. At present, even if there were no fixes to the game I would not let these few things I am going to talk about below keep me from having fun. That being said, here are the things that are currently sticking in my craw.

The first can best be summed up with this picture.

Hulk Moruth Smash

The game has some minor bugs that really don’t ruin the game, but if they were to go unfixed, they would be very annoying. Mind you, all the bugs I have encountered thus far are VERY MINOR. Please do not think for a second that this game is unpolished. It is polished like grandma’s silver on Christmas. The bug depicted above happens from time to time when your companion heals you with their neon green healing ray. It just doesn’t come out in the wash apparently. A quick logout/login will reset the textures back to their normal color.

There are a couple others I have noticed. Some of the harvesting nodes don’t work. They show up on the ground and on your map, but you can’t target or use them. The guild window for some reason is very buggy. I find that it randomly doesn’t show everyone that is in the guild. It is easily fixed by pressing CTL+U twice, but it is very weird.

It is nice to see that a number of the bugs that I reported to BioWare during the beta weekends were fixed. Additionally I submitted a couple of the ones mentioned above and got replies about them very quickly saying they were known and were going to be addressed in a future patch. I’m sure the team is more worried about getting everyone in and avoiding a server crash apocalypse than fixing a couple of broken resource nodes.

There are a few more things that are bugging me about the game that aren’t “bugs” per se. One is the gobs of trash loot that you get in the game. We were discussing this in guild chat and some people chided me by saying if we didn’t have trash loot, the good loot wouldn’t look so good. At least you can send your companion out, a la Torchlight pets, to sell the junk to vendors. My opinion is that if all we are going to do is turn around and sell it anyway, why not just give us credits instead. Save me the pain of having to be the equivalent of the scrap metal guy that swipes the old bed frame from your font lawn on trash day.

The last thing I’ll mention is something that will be remedied soon. Due to the fact that they staggered access, there were next to no people at the location of the game’s first flashpoint last night when I got there. Everyone from my guild had gone off to bed and the couple of other people in the zone (seriously there was a population of 3 at the time) didn’t want to do the flashpoint. I decided to trudge on to the second planet and now I am probably a little too high of a level to have the flashpoint be worth anything but a few social points.

I know everyone who isn’t in yet are thinking that I am a jerk for complaining. Sorry about that. I think of it not so much as complaining as commenting negatively. 😛

Even though this is probably TL/DR, there are really only a few minor things about this game that bother me enough to complain about. I think people are really going to enjoy playing SW:ToR. Is there enough to keep people here? Only time can tell.

-Pid