Tolerating SWTOR

I hate MMORPGs. I quit WoW once and for all the moment the community shifted from spamming cringeworthy Chuck Norris jokes to simply posting 'anal' followed by the name of an item or a skill. Anal [Raging Blow]. Fucking hilarious. And followed by dozens of people trying to be even more inventive and disgusting than the last. It's a pretty stupid thing to get annoyed at, but between that, a naked weirdo named Pwnerizer dancing naked on a mailbox and a bunch of level-capped guys in full raid gear camping around your corpse to gank you over and over again, I have found that other players tend to harm my immersion more than help it.

Then there's this whole forced 'endgame' nonsense. Repeat the same content dozens of times in order to obtain gear, which will become useless as soon as the next content update goes live. Mostly in order to impress a bunch of people you hate, who will inspect you, judge you and know every tiny detail about your character, whether you like it or not. The item treadmill, the carrot on the stick, the big motivator to keep a bunch of idiots attached to a game for as long as possible. And yes, I believe you have to be a bit of an idiot if you manage to spend all of your spare time in a single game for several years, always doing the same thing without getting bored of it, never trying anything new.

Azeroth. Where the community's greatest morons are celebrated as legends.

The reason why I hated Star Wars: The old Republic in particular is my job. I had to play this game 12+ hours a day, reach the level cap within a few days, then write up 30something pages about how and why you should play a Sith Warrior. Back then the game was basically WoW with lightsabers and a lot more talking. People who wanted a good BioWare RPG hated it for its MMO aspects, people who wanted a good MMO hated it for all the forced solo stuff and the inflated stories around every boring fetch quest. It was the perfect compromise - combine the worst of both worlds and annoy the shit out of the entire playerbase.

We were about a dozen people back then, one for each of the eight classes, as well as a bunch of extra guys tagging along, because heyho. The deadline was brutal, the server queues took several hours every day before we could even log on and after a while we all hated each other. My boss threw several massive bitchfits at me until we ended up on opposite teams in pvp and I murdered the fuck out of him again and again. My team lost by a mile, because killing people wasn't the main objective and of course he called me out on it, but it felt good at the time. We've always been cool around each other, but ridiculous amounts of pressure can make people go psycho.

"What dark side corruption? It's a skin condition and I'd appreciate if you could stop bringing it up!"

By the time my first character was done and the guides were written, I couldn't even look at the game anymore. Which was weird, because being able to 'just play' was my motivation. Just finish the damn guide, get this over with, then I can finally enjoy the game, take my time and just do what I want. But I simply couldn't stand another 10 minute conversation before every simple kill or fetch quest. Not another corridor full of awkwardly-placed baddies, which always attacked in groups of three at a time. I was done.

That was half a decade ago. Then I had to get my first smartphone ever, because of work. Yes, in 2017! And that damn thing plays Knights of the Old Republic! My last mobile phone played fucking Snake! So I dicked around on KotOR for a bit, enjoyed the nostalgia, whilst hating how poorly that game and its sequel have aged. Containers play a five second animation before they open, forcing open a lock forces me to watch my character attack a door for 30 seconds and missing most of the time, main protagonist is the only character without a voice, yada, yada, yada. Meanwhile, SWTOR had reminded me that it's still a thing with some badass trailers. I mean, just look at this shit:

In German, SWTOR KOTET literally means 'SWTOR is pooping'.

So I downloaded the game again and the first thing I had to do was rename every single one of my characters. I think it's okay to take away the names of inactive users, but you try and find a unique new name in a five year old MMO, which had undergone a ton of server consolidations. 

To be fair, the Star Wars universe probably doesn't even know what a wolf is.

Each of my characters also had about 16 messages in their mailbox. Anniversary presents, free pets, fireworks and other tat. I also received a bunch of generic companion clothing. The attached letter said there had been a problem with that. And what do you know, I found most of my companions without pants on, so now I could spend an hour playing dress-up with the lot of them. I also had a ton of free outfits and other stuff for Galactic Starfighter, a new pvp mode, which had been added and left to rot in my absence. I genuinely queued up for it and waited a half hour or so, but nothing ever happened.

In fact, the entire game felt a bit dead. I bumped into three other players in the Republic's main hub, two of which were lowbie characters, the third guy was labelled a 'legendary player' who was just posing with his lightsaber out like he was in Ironforge and there were any players around to actually see him. Inspecting people reveals their achievements, so you can still laugh at them for not completing any raids, but you can't see their gear, which I like. 

You don't have to be epic. Just hot.

So after a frustrating hour or two of sifting through tons of shit in my inventory, obligatory respecs and figuring out how stuff works, I decided to finally go and complete my Jedi Knight's story. As a subscriber you can now just play one story mission after another and receive enough experience to keep on leveling up without having to play all of the boring MMO filler crap in between the good bits. How weird is that? You skip 90% of each planet, hours upon hours of dialogue, monsters and mini dungeons somebody had to create for this game to have content and you can ignore all of it. Somebody at BioWare actually must have said, "Our shit is so boring, people don't want to touch it. So let's allow them to skip it."

I went from level 37 to 50 and a completed class storyline in a day. And that was okay, because the story was actually really, seriously good. Sure, all of the fighting was still incredibly repetitive, boring, outdated MMO-combat, especially since SWTOR suffers from ability cancer. I just don't like it when a game slowly but surely fills an entire three or more hotbars with shit. Here, have two interrupt attacks with a long cooldown instead of a single quick one. Have two different AoEs, one strong and with a long cooldown and a weak one with a short cooldown. Have a quick resource builder that generates a low amount of power and a slow one, which generates more power. Why do game designers still put multiple different attacks with the exact same effect in their MMOs? Combat doesn't get any more strategic or complex that way. You just get more buttons and shit gets tedious.

Not fun.

Despite being a goodie-goodie Jedi Knight, my character could force-choke bad guys to death, thanks to the game's legacy system and my completed Sith Warrior storyline. Completing the story of any class will grant a heroic ability to all your other characters on the same server. That's pretty cool and really motivates me to complete the stories of some of the other classes, allowing me to unlock more and more heroic abilities. And now that I can just enjoy the story missions and skip all of the filler crap, I don't even have to force myself to do it.

As for the new content - no idea, haven't even tried it. From what I've heard, the current new story expansion is in every way as epic and exciting as any BioWare RPG, but story mode difficulty is laughably easy, yet Veteran difficulty is downright impossible to most players. And that's a step up from the previous story expansion, where total joke difficulty was the only option. I'm still gonna play it eventually to experience the story, but right now I just want to catch up on the class stories I had missed out on since launch.

I'm having fun. I never run into other players outside of the main hubs, which are also ghost towns most of the time. I can't tell whether it's just my server or whether the game is simply deserted. General chat is dead, save for the incessant gold spam you get in every poorly-moderated MMO. I turned it off. Companions are now ridiculously OP and most Flashpoints (read: dungeons) have a solo mode now, so fuck all the other players, if they really exist.

Ironically, my favourite thing about SWTOR is its low subscription fee of 9 Quid (or 13 USD or whatever). I used to hate shit like that, but when I see how Warframe releases new premium packages every month, ranging from 20 to 130 Quid, as well as all the overpriced skins, costumes and premium tokens you get in all those other 'free' games out there, 9 Quid for everything seems pretty damn reasonable all of a sudden. Yes, apparently there are paid lockboxes, which randomly contain ultra rare shit like crossbar lightsabers. You can't obtain those any other way and that's a bit awful. But it's only fluff, while you can get all of the character story content for free if you're willing to live with a few restrictions.