I Am Completely Serious

Sometimes with unexciting monsters/dudes with dull color palettes inside them. Sad, cynical people are hanging around nearby saying, "kill the monsters, NOT THAT IT WILL HEAL MY CRUSHED SPIRIT."

I guess this is how SF in general works now, and it's natural to expect it to extend to the MMOs. But shouldn't there be, like, at least one that's actually fun? It seems really screwed up to me that even the Star Wars MMO is just an endless march of woe. For Christ's sake, it's the series about a doofy farm boy having laser swordfights on spaceships and hanging out with cute puppets.

In the popular consciousness, has space just become a font of endless disappointment? There's no sense of exploration and nothing's beautiful, it's all just brainwashing, environmental devastation, and war. It's not even didactic, just resigned.

It may surprise you to learn that this game is frequently better written and acted than are the actual films. Or it may not? Bioware's usually pretty decent, I understand, but this is the first game of theirs I've played.

Though other players are often present around you, this feels more like a single-player game than an MMO. It's very plot-driven - there's an overarching narrative to each place you visit, and your character has her own personal story that's driving her from one planet to another. She has a personality, too; there are dialog and story choices that determine whether she's going over to the Dark Side or not, and also how her sidekick (you get a sidekick) feels about her.

I'm playing as a smuggler, and I really love the voice actress; very cool and sardonic. She sounds forced and unconvinced of herself when she does conspicuously Light Side-ish things. Which I unfortunately have been making her do a lot; presently my character is awfully nice for a smuggler. Her sidekick is pretty happy with her, but not specifically because of the Light Side choices. I've determined from his reactions that he values personal loyalty - he doesn't like it when my smuggler chooses to betray someone, even if she's learned that they're messing with her - and sarcasm. He likes it when I choose the options that involve snappy retorts.

(Sometimes after he kills someone, he says excitedly, "Now you're ugly, stupid, and dead!" Oh, you have your fun, sidekick.)

The Dark Side/Light Side choices are often pretty simplistic. Shooting when you've got a chance to talk something out turns out to be Dark Side. Who knew? But you do run into some less obvious ones. At one point you're helping a politician fight some gangsters, and learn that she once accepted money from them. She now gives every evidence of being on the side of good, and she has enemies who are not, and revealing what you know will end her career. I personally feel that the better thing to do is still to out her, and the game agrees - that's the Light Side choice - but it strikes me as an edge thing.

In World of Warcraft, even if you're playing on a PVE server, there's a sense of competition with the other players, simply because you're usually after the same resources as someone else - you have to kill eight of a sort of bad guy of which there are only twenty-four at any given time, or whatever. In ST:TOR, though, the resources required seem to be pretty much infinite, so even if there are other players around, you can usually just ignore them and get on with whatever your task is. There's lots of empty space, too - clusters of enemies are far apart and areas are very large, so you're less likely to be near another player when s/he's fighting, and thus find it convenient to help him/her. There isn't a strong sense of the presence of other people.