An MMO Far, Far Away, The Final Chapter (Maybe)

I'm not playing Star Wars: The Old Republic anymore.

This statement isn't met with nearly the same poignancy as my similar one about World of Warcraft. I don't really harbor any deep-seated nostalgia for a month and a half ago. I already pointed out some issues I had with the game, but at the time it was good-spirited ribbing toward something I otherwise enjoyed. I was having fun.

Just not $15 a month worth of fun.

It's not like I can't afford it. On the contrary, I recently got a promotion at work that has left me, for once in my life, able to cultivate a savings account. I just don't feel it's worth it. I even had one last critical post half-drafted, about how BioWare-style storytelling doesn't really have a place in an MMO, and maybe I'll get to it, but I might just as well not. My apathy has the final say.

And apathy, ultimately, is the problem. In trying to meld World of Warcraft with their story-heavy Old Republic games, BioWare has ended up with the best and worst of both. It has the social charms of an MMO without any of the actual charm that inspires me to wax nostalgic for WoW. It has the compelling story of a BioWare game, but with the annoyances and frustrations of dealing with other people. Those two statements may seem contrary, but fellow introverts will understand that a social component can be both good and bad. Still, if we declare that they cancel each other out, we still have mildly interesting characters in a lifeless setting. I mean, really, who's all excited to get their character to a high enough level to go to Tatooine?

That's not to say I'm in the market for a new MMO. I'm pretty happy poking my head into Glitch once or twice a day. The Long-Suffering Roommate is pretty worked up about Guild Wars 2, and it does look pretty promising, so I'm sure I'll give that a try when it comes out. As a free-to-play MMO, I won't feel as pinned to an all-or-nothing situation where I either have to pay $15 a month for something I only play a couple hours a week or not play it at all. I'm not sure $15 subscription fees are still a viable model, but perhaps that's a meaty enough statement for another post. For now, I'll just have to see if SWTOR eventually goes free-to-play.

You Can Never Go Home Again

Sometimes I find myself waxing nostalgic for World of Warcraft.

It tends to start like flashbacks:
A mental image of a night elf, probably the last alt I played for a night, in an appropriately elf-colored forest;
That Forsaken in Felwood who ended up corrupting everyone at the Horde outpost that back in my day didn't HAVE a nice convenient trail;
The cove on the southern coast of Dragonblight that's filled with the ghosts of a doomed expedition;
The perfect Naxxramas playlist;
The view from Scryer's Tier looking out over Shattrath, tinged with the creative rush of massive RP drama;
Listening to the second-hand accounts of higher-levels friends telling me about Un'goro;
Fragments of years of my life spent Somewhere Else.

The saddest thing is that it's really no one's fault but my own. Yes, Blizzard has made a lot of controversial changes with Cataclysm, and I've posted before about how much I dislike them. But if I was still as desperate for what World of Warcraft was selling me, I could cope with it. I could find people to RP with - possibly on a new server, but I could find them nonetheless. I could find a new class or hit a new groove with one of my old classes. I could form new memories.

I just don't really want to. After 6 years, I'm Forsakened out. I'm maged out, I'm warriored out, I'm even Death Knighted out. I'm huntered out, after rolling a dozen and only getting two past level 20. I may be Big Open Community RPed out.

I've toyed now and then with the idea of resubscribing, but I'm not sure what I'd do if I did. I barely play SWTOR at this point. The idea of doing much of anything in Azeroth now leaves me with an odd sense of nostalgia tinged with a certain dread that I will not find whatever it is I'm looking for there. That day is over. I can never go home again.

An MMO Far, Far Away, Part 2

Level 15 going on 16. Maybe once I'm off Dromund Kaas I won't be sick of hitting things with lightsabers anymore and I can work through my Sith Warrior's rest bar.

My bounty hunter is a rattataki, which is a good jumping-off point to bring up an issue I have with Star Wars: The Old Republic that is, at least to some large degree, Bioware's fault: The race choices. What is a rattataki? Where would someone who doesn't read the excessive amounts of Expanded Universe fiction know them from? Well, let's see, there's Asajj Ventress, who was never in any of the movies but who has played a significant role in the ongoing Clone Wars show (and is one of my favorite characters). Except, wait... She's not actually rattataki. That got retconned. She was just raised by them or something. So that would leave...absolutely no one. I'm still playing one because I love the look of them, but they're hardly an iconic Star Wars alien.

You know what? Let's do a good old-fashioned list:

1. Humans. Blah blah blah humans boring boring. Why are there so damn many humans? I can kind of understand the Imperial side of things because they're a bunch of bloody racists, but still. Humans are boring.
2. Cyborgs. Like humans, but with shiny bits. I don't really think of cyborgs being an iconic Star Wars thing because, even though some of the major players all the way back to the original trilogy were technically cyborgs, they didn't have shiny bits. Still, in any sci-fi setting it's good to have that option.
3. Twi'leks. This was a necessary alien race, because they are all the fuck over the place. Which leaves me wondering why they seem to have so little political power. I vote for an all-Twi'lek Empire.
4. Zabrak. Here's where things start falling off a ledge. To start, Zabrak aren't even a thing. That name applies to a subset of Iridonians. There was an Iridonian in something your average non-alpha geek has seen, though. His name was Darth Maul. He was in the most maligned movie in the whole series, possibly one of the most maligned works of fiction in the whole canon. I'll give them a pass, though, because at least they're in the movies.
5.  Mirialan. AKA Those Two Green Jedi Chicks In Episodes 2 and 3. They do look pretty awesome, but I'm not sure why a race characterized as highly spiritual gets to be Smugglers.
6. Rattataki. Again, they did have a well-known member until she was retconned. You can play a character who looks like Ventress, at least.
7. Sith Pureblood. So you mean "Sith" isn't just a name for bad Jedi? It's a race? Who look like skinny Eredar from WoW? Well, okay, if you say so...
8. Chiss. Mostly notable for looking like red-eyed Nightcrawlers, the Chiss were introduced to the Expanded Universe in an early-90s series of novels. See also that thing I said in my last post about EU writers feeling a need to insert new things into the universe to mark their territory. They've continued to be in novels and comics but not actually any movies or anything.
9. Miraluka. They're eyeless humans who see through the Force. Exciting, I know. Notable Miraluka include no one you've ever heard of.

 I understand there are always going to be a million different reasons for choices like this. One of the biggest ones in Bioware's case may have been their desire to reuse as much as possible from race to race. Every race has the same body types, the same hairstyles, the same basic features. They're only set apart by skin color choices and, sometimes, features like Twi'lek lekku and Zabrak horns. Voices vary only by class, not by race. Your human male Sith Warrior will have a different voice from your human male Sith Inquisitor, but not from your Sith Pureblood Sith Warrior. (Sith Sith Sith.) For someone who can spend hours messing with character creation, it's kind of a letdown for me. I know it's expensive to get all that Bioware voice acting in place, but I'd still like to have more varied races.

The odd thing is that there are even NPCs of other races. There are Rodians here and there, and a few Nautolans (another personal favorite), and a Togruta companion for one of the classes. The Smuggler class gets a Wookiee friend. (I realize cutscenes in Shyriiwook would be ridiculous.) It's possible they have plans to update that all as they go, and the Long-Suffering Roommate likes to keep reminding me that the game's only about a month old. But when you're only changing the heads anyway, why not put more variety in there?

Also I would like a seduce-able female companion for my female bounty hunter plzthx.

An MMO Far, Far Away

Yes, it's been a while since I posted. Between work and school I've been bludgeoned about the head and shoulders with more other work that I care to think about, and on top of it...well, I'll be honest, I haven't had much to say. (Astonishing, I know.) I'd like to start making semi-regular (biweekly?) comic book review posts, but in the meantime, I've been dealing with a timesink even more nefarious than work or school: a new MMO.

This post is going to sound grumpy, moreso than I really feel about the game. Like the rest of the internet, I'm more inclined to talk about the things I don't like than the things I do. Human nature blah blah blah. I'm not actually the sort to keep paying for something I hate, though, certainly not $15 a month, so I'm not saying not to play the game, or that you're <insert insult related to intelligence here> for doing so. These are just some things that bug me in between giggling over cutting down a whole group of enemies with a single Death From Above.

The problem with writing about The Old Republic is that I end up writing about a lot of things that don't necessarily have anything to do with this specific game. Most of my complaints relate to the franchise as a whole, the world as seen by someone who's been doing a bit of worldbuilding herself lately, and some opinions about RP communities that will probably make some of my old WoW friends hate me. There ARE a few things that can be laid almost entirely at the feet of Bioware, but as I plunge through the gooey muck that is my thoughts most of what I find is completely out of their hands. Perhaps I'll make the things that ARE their fault a second post.

To start out with, there's something that I first came to understand when I was involved with a Star Wars tabletop RP group: The Star Wars universe has a mind-bogglingly unrealistic amount of cultural stagnation. I could understand that in a setting where FTL travel isn't possible, something where it took years and decades and centuries for ideas and technologies to get from one world to another. Star Wars is not that setting. Star Wars is a setting where people can just pop from planet to planet in, at the most, a couple days. And despite that, it's a setting where over 3,500 years of cultural and technological development has led to...slight changes in droid aesthetics? There were apparently more changes in the galaxy in 40 years following A New Hope than there were in 4,000 before it. This was likely due to the number of Expanded Universe writers looking to pee on some new territory in the post-Return of the Jedi setting by introducing massively game-changing things like the Yuuzhan Vong, but the point remains. I know that Star Wars never claimed to be hard sci-fi, that it's the poster child for science fantasy as a genre, but it still bugs me a bit.

The other thing that bugs me, the one that's going to make me a pariah, is that WoW has made me sick to death of large RP communities. I'm on an RP server in SWTOR, just as I was in WoW. In theory I love RP. Give me 5 people at a D&D table, I'm cool with that, I love it. Give me a couple dozen who all think they're super-important because they were Internet Famous in some other game, who tell other people that they're trolling if they state an opinion about RP they don't agree with, who get all bent out of shape if someone says something that shows an ignorance of some lore minutiae, and I will spend an evening playing by myself while I seethe over how much I hate them all. I love RP, but RP communities drive me up a wall. I'm just as bad, in some ways, and I'll admit that. I bristle at people RPing character types that I find out of place, overdone, or just plain annoying. I facepalm at bad grammar. And this, in my opinion, makes me just as unqualified to contribute to their community as they are unqualified to have a place in my everyday life. I used to love RP, but RPers killed it for me.

Now I'm going back to leveling my bounty hunter while I think about what I want to complain about in my next SWTOR post.

World of Warcraft has Jumped the Undead Shark

Just a little emo.

World of Warcraft has been hemmoraging players since the last expansion, and I was one of them. This week, though, I decided to take them up on a free week of "Please please please come back!" game time, and in doing so I've discovered why I really left.

I am a roleplayer. I know this puts me in a minority of players, so I don't consider my reasons for leaving to be universal. I, personally, can't keep playing a character in WoW unless that character has a compelling story. I like to compare it to romance novels: As a woman, I like a little backstory with my sex gaming.

I'm also a Forsaken roleplayer. I've dabbled in other races, but all the way back to vanilla WoW my mains have been Forsaken. Their history as a race is fraught with terror and psychological trauma. They are dark and maybe a wee bit evil, yes, but it's because of what's been done to them. Their lore is a gold mine of the kind of angst and drama I adore in my own characters. They're an excellent medium for exploring themes of loss and morality and humanity. What's more post-human than sentient undead? The Forsaken are driven by a need for revenge against their former prince and the army he commands, the army that destroyed their home kingdom and enslaved them all as undead monsters. In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion they pushed that drive into the frozen continent of Northrend.  They constructed their own architecture for the first time instead of just squatting in the ruins of their old kingdom. Their leader Sylvanas Windrunner was at the forefront of an all-out assault on their undead prince-king's citadel. There was even betrayal and intrigue as the leader of their Royal Apothecary Society unleashed a horrible toxin called the Blight not only against the Lich King but against both Horde and Alliance forces fighting him as well, turning the Forsaken in pariahs among their allies. It was a good time to be a Forsaken roleplayer.

And then they succeeded.

And the new Lich King is too busy to bother the Forsaken.

There comes a time in the life of a roleplay character where their story arc has reached its end. They may not be dead, but they have reached the personal goal for which they've struggled and are now, to some degree, at peace. The Forsaken as a race reached that point at the end of Wrath when Arthas was defeated. There's a battle raging over Gilneas in Silverpine, but unless you plan to spend your whole endgame in the Gilneas PVP battleground that only motivates your character through level 20 or so. There are still Scourge holdouts in the Plaguelands, but that only gets you to about level 45.

On top of that, most new Forsaken were never Scourge at all. They're humans who were killed in Silverpine or Gilneas or Hillsbrad and trucked north to Deathknell to be raised by Sylvanas' new val'kyr allies. Rather than being freed from the army that killed and raised them, they're now part of it. Apparently they're supposed to be okay with this. Barring those who were a touch evil to begin with, beyond those who just hated their lot in life and their families and their neighbors, why are they okay with this? Perhaps a Gilnean who was killed by worgen before being loaded up on the corpsewagon might be willing to join the Forsaken in assaulting the worgen in Gilneas, but Hillsbrad farmers? I'm not seeing it. If you want to get creative your Forsaken character could be a defeated Scourge minion who was brought to Deathknell, but I never got the impression they were bringing them in from other parts of Lordaeron. They could also be a Forsaken who was once a civilian but has now decided to take up some kind of military training, but really, if you were going to do that, why now? Why not before Arthas was defeated? Forsaken don't exactly come of age. It's not like your character was too young before.

There are still threads dangling out there. What will become of the Scourge under Bolvar Fordragon's control? Will he be able to muster them as a force for good, and if he does, will the Forsaken be willing to work with them? What will become of poor Koltira Deathweaver, tied in Sylvanas' basement? What will be the repercussions of Silvanas' use of necromancy and the Blight in direct opposition of Garrosh's commands? I want to see something come of all this, but until that happens, my account is likely going to stay lapsed. What good is being able to raid in RP armor if I don't care enough to raid?