It's 3.30 in the morning as I am writing this first line of my latest blog post. Something equally scary and fascinating has happened today. In fact, it still is in the process of happening and I have not experienced anything like this since the day I was foolish enough to introduce my significant other, better known as The Clairebear, to Azeroth.
She came home from work at around 4pm today, launched SWTOR and has been on there ever since. Eating in front of the PC, neglecting Facebook and everything around herself and doing unspeakable things to my poor coffee mug. She's still on, because she 'just needs another half level to put on the new gear we found on that Flashpoint earlier.' She has been needing just another half level for her new lightsaber, her sprint ability, her next skill upgrade, just had to finish this one story mission really quick... you get the idea. Just one more. And maybe that one. Yeah, I'll be done in a bit.
Unlike me, Claire sports the right mindset for this kind of game. She's not analyzing, questioning and criticizing stuff the way I have done ever since it has become my job to do so. She quite obviously doesn't give a fuck. She simply enjoys the ride. I think I'm actually learning an important lesson here - I need to stop peeling at every game, taking it apart bit by bit, rating every individual component and finally judging the sum of its parts. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the pvp was about 8.3% better on WoW or whether the graphics are 20% away from meeting my expectations. Once you stop caring, is it actually fun?
Don't worry, I won't give you some crap about how I have seen the light or how awesome I suddenly think SWTOR is. The game does absolutely nothing for me, which I couldn't get from countless other MMOs and in terms of comfort, customization and pvp, I still think that WoW is clearly better. But Claire is having fun - and now that WoW offers about 2-3 hours of play time a week for our maxed-out, non-raiding arena characters, I'm glad that she's having so much fun in a galaxy far, far away and I'm more than happy to tag along with her. And I'll judge my games more carefully from now on.
We have recorded a little video, showing our characters as they run the first Republican Flashpoint - that thing WoW players know as an instance. We're way beyond the level requirement here, but the purpose of this film is not to show off some super close, epic, spectacular battles (don't worry, the fighting still looks pretty cool). Instead, we're trying to demonstrate how dialogue and decisions affect the overall feel and pace of the whole thing as opposed to, say, a regular instance on WoW.
In the unlikely event that you haven't already heard about how dialogue works in groups, let me explain it real quick: Every member of your party casts a virtual die whenever the group is supposed to talk or make a decision. Just like a loot roll, but for dialogue. The member with the highest result wins and gets to see their toon act and talk in the cutscene. The game automatically throws the dice for everyone whenever a dialogue option pops up. Don't worry - another player's actions will never affect your own character's alignment, no matter how good or evil their behaviour might be.
Claire is playing Keryx, the Jedi Sage. She's rather mean, insanely greedy, but for the most part, she's not a bad person. My character in the video is Rika, the Jedi Sentinel. She's your stereotypical goodie little two-shoes. "I don't need any money from you, the reward lies in the deed itself." Yeah, yeah, stop looking at me like that.
The two guys following us are our NPC companions.
Since Claire and I have very different ideas of our characters and their behaviour, their personalities tend to clash here and there. You can see that at the end of the video, where Claire demands a handsome reward for all our hard work, only to watch me turn down the money, saying we're not doing this for personal gain. She actually looked at me (IRL) and shouted, "I WANT MY DAMN MONEY!" when I did that, but virtual reality can only do so much. You might also catch her doing the occasional dance on a boss baddie's corpse. I'm expecting her eyes to turn an unhealthy red any day now.
You'll have to excuse the low video quality - I can only record so much gameplay with dialogue and sound before it completely clutters up my HD. You might also notice how I cram the camera all the way up my character's ass on some occasions. Unfortunately, that's something SWTOR does every once in a while when you run Fraps. God knows why.
Anyhow - here's the video. Enjoy.
-Cat
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