Star Wars: The Old Republic – Beta Impressions

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…

The NDA has been lifted and I’m finally having week with more free time available, so it’s a good chance to write about SW:TOR.

BioWare has been doing a great job with Star Wars: The Old Republic’s development. The game’s current state is a lot more polished than other MMOs I tried, even after they’d gone live.There are of course glitches and bugs, but nothing terrible. BioWare is known for their great RPGs and for being careful about what they publish, but this is their first MMO.

The storytelling system is incredibly well made, and the complete voice-over of the dialogues actually makes a difference. When I rolled a Trooper I noticed that her voice was the voice of Mass Effect’s female Sheppard, which was a great surprise. I hope the plot quality is kept in higher levels. I remember the disappointment with Age of Conan after leaving the initial area too well.

Anyway, the classes seemed well balanced, and after having tried most of them I’ve given up completely on having a Jedi or Sith as a main character. I preferred the Bounty Hunter/Trooper.

I liked the character customization, even though they didn’t include some races I thought were obvious choices. I guess they’re saving them for future expansions. I didn’t see many people with the same look, which means there are enough options available.

The graphics are not state of the art, but their cartoon-ish look will age better than more detailed models and textures would. I re-visited Galaxies when SOE gave everyone free playtime and what looked nice years ago, looks and feels weird nowadays. The simpler graphics also mean that they’re easier to be supported by PCs with lower specs. Not everyone’s going to upgrade their computer to play a new MMO. BioWare was probably considering that more PCs with requirements already reached equals more potential customers for the game.

I did an instance, Black Talon, a couple of times with guildies I hadn’t played with in months. The instance was very easy with 1 Jedi tank, 2 Bounty Hunter DPS and 1 companion healing us, and it also easy when we didn’t have a healer with us, the second time around – 1 Jedi tank, 2 BH DPS, and 1 Imperial Agent DPS.

It was nice to see that you could run the same instance twice and, because of the player’s dialogue choices, get a different story and even different bosses. The group dialogue system is pretty cool, with each character choosing a line, and then the highest roll winning the chance to say it and make the story go a certain way.

I was left wondering if they’ll keep the instances this easy further ahead. I’m guessing the answer for that is ‘no’, otherwise they’d get boring very fast.

The only issue in the instance was that our group had a weird, long latency/graphics lag spike a couple of times.

Aside from that, the only other problem I had was a graphical glitch which lasted for a few seconds every time I changed my graphics preferences, and the screenshots bug, which caused me to ‘lose’ a lot of screenshots; unless you changed the graphics preferences, your screenshots would be saved as a completely black image. I’m sure they’ll fix that one easily before the game goes live.

Now, for an inevitable comparison: Eight years ago, I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, and a couple of weeks before it went live on the US, it still had a ton of serious bugs. Characters were lost and the game would crash to desktop, the char would become out of sync with the rest of the server, only to be returned to normal when the servers were restarted, there were some weird graphical issues  and so on.

With SW:TOR it’s obvious that they waited until the game had what could be a launch quality before sending out beta invites to a ton of people. Considering how Galaxies failed despite the hype that a Star Wars MMO got, and considering all the supposed ‘WoW-killers’ that have failed at keeping even 1 million subscriptions, it’s a smart move by BioWare.

I don’t think it’s going to be a WoW-killer. But I’m almost certain that it will make a big dent on WoW’s subscription numbers. Most of the people I’ve played WoW with, and who – like me – had played since the week the EU servers opened, haven’t subscribed in months and are only re-subscribing when the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria is launched to try it out. Also, everyone I’ve talked to has had a very positive opinion on SW:TOR after the beta test.

It’s the smoothest MMO beta test I’ve participated in. I’m looking forward to exploring that galaxy far far away when the game launches.

Dragon Age 2 – (Very Late) Impressions

A few games that I’m more or less fancying are nearing their release dates, so it seemed like a perfect time to finish Dragon Age 2. I’d abandoned it very close to the end some time in June and I only realized I hadn’t picked it up for that long when I saw the save game date.

So, almost eight months after its release, here are some impressions.

Spoilers for DA and DA2 ahead.

The story is not nearly as epic as the first Dragon Age, and the final battle was disappointing to say the least. On DA, we killed the Archdemon on a freaking awesome battle against an über Dragon.

This time? Lots of mobs, a weird mini-boss battle against a Mage that does something out of character. Ah, screw it, we kill him.

Next? The final battle: Meredith the crazy anti-Mage obsessive Templar decides to go Super Saiyan on us. I admit, her use of the statues was kind of cool, but the battle itself was a disappointment and way too easy.

Something else I thought was not as good in this sequel: not being able to equip armor on your party members. Sure, there’s an upgrade system, but it doesn’t work as well as just actually getting the armor you find for our companions.

What did Dragon Age 2 have that I really liked? The graphics and animations improvements. I liked the whole ‘leaping toward your enemy’ thing. Oh, and the animation for one of the Warrior moves (can’t remember the name) was like Saint Seiya’s Pegasus punch. Can’t go wrong with that.

Funniest character? Isabella. She had the best lines, hands down. Anders was hilarious on DA: Awakening, but has gone emo on DA2. Meh. Exception: the expression ‘suck on a fireball’ he keeps using in fights.

I still have to play through a couple of DLCs (including the one with the awesome Felicia Day) so I can really declare the game finished. At least until an expansion comes out.

Then maybe I’ll play the PC version of Arkham City. I hear good things about the game. Plus, it has Catwoman as a playable character. Who can resist that?

Our (Geek) Wedding – Anniversary Edition

I left the blog on auto-pilot, meaning I’ve written this in advance and am currently far, far away with João.

I hadn’t made a proper post on our wedding details, despite having told some peeps I’d make one shortly after the event, and an anniversary is as good time as any to do that.

Anyway, João and I both like role-playing games, SciFi and Fantasy, among other things. We don’t approach certain subjects in real life with people who don’t care about them, but we don’t hide what we like.

It was something that we were going to share with close friends and family. We purposefully decided to keep it relatively small – I’m not one for huge crowds, and João, despite his huge family, liked a smaller wedding we had attended the previous year.

We thought our wedding was something that should reflect who we were. I mean, it was our party, right?

So we decided to break some conventions, decoration-wise.

(No, we didn’t have everyone dressed as Jedi. We preferred the theme to be present, but subtle enough.)

So, what did our wedding look like?

Asian-themed place (it's a dojo most of the time).

All tables named after RPGs we had enjoyed

Dice and Mana/Health potions incorporated in the decor

Dice sets for every guest (my mom made the bags - skillz!)

Cake figures: Han & Leia (of course)

So, that’s a bit of what went on. I didn’t show you the flower arrangements, the candles, and all of that stuff everyone else does, just part of  the more uncommon stuff. Maybe next year I’ll talk about the soundtrack we picked, or something.

Maybe that wedding post won’t take me years to make.