Now that I’m close to 50 and have seen most of the story, I thought I could share with you some juicy moments in Republic evilness with all you. Spoilers ahead after the break.

• I’ve condemned orphans to certain death on two separate occasions for being in the way.
• Shot a husband so I would not have to carry him back to base. Told the truth to the wife just to freak her out.
• Gave weapons of mass destruction to an alien specie that wasn’t even in the Republic. They also want it for genocide I think.
• Lied to said alien specie so they would initiate a full-scale genocide against some of the planet population.
• Condemned valuable hostages to death just because I wanted some petty officer dead.
• Directly responsible for the death of at least 5 Republic senators. One was used as bait and another one I shot in public in front of the whole senate.
• and the list goes on…

Doing good evil deeds does comes with recognition as no less than three Sith Lords have offered to take me on as a valuable ally.

• Blizzard is hiring someone for in-game advertising (from Rock paper shotgun) for the next-gen MMO.

Not much to add besides an incredible feeling of disappointment to see a company I loved die little by little. I don’t hate Blizzard for wanting to make money mind you… but… damn… I can’t help to think of what happened to the Modern Warfare series once Activision took fully over.

The pros

• Greatest mmo storylines ever! : Seriously, Swtor blows out of the water anything I’ve ever come across in a mmo by a long shot. There’s at bare minimum 8 interesting class storylines to go through and you  could even redo them all at least once just to see how they play from both light side and dark side perspective.
• Great replay value: Tying into the above, doing those 16 playthroughs at about 5 days playtime each (average for players so far) totals up to 80 days of playtime. That is crazy good value and we’re only talking about the storylines. Then add in all the various classic mmo features like instances, raids, pvp, etc… and you get a lot of content to go through.
• Good immersion: The game makes you feel like you’re really part of the universe like few other games does. The only one I can compare it to would be Lotro.
• Bioware is working hard on the game: The results may not perfect, but at least they’re working on their game. I’ve seen more fixes and new content in a month than I’ve seen in a year from other MMOs.

The cons

• Lots of small bugs: Okay, there’s nothing game breaking but the amount of small bugs is truly impressive. The last patch (1.1) did fix a lot of small stuff but a lot more remains. They’ll need to keep working hard on this game to remove all the small annoyances.
• The Ilum disaster: Yes it only lasted a day but Bioware broke their endgame open world pvp zone in a truly impressive manner before doing an emergency patch. The community was pissed that Bioware not only realeased buggy content but did so without seemingly taking into account what was being said on the test realm forums which had identified the issues.
• Pvp issues: Ilum was a shinning example of the mess that swtor pvp is right now. There’s ton of huge balance issues that can be game breaking for all those loving pvp. If I was a player mainly interested in Pvp, I’d be real worried about Swtor direction and would probably consider not subscribing.
• Messy customer relations: Right now Bioware relation with its customers is a mess. They hold out on some information for mysterious reasons, they seem to ignore a lot of what their customers are saying (on purpose or not) and there’s a lot of reports of awful GMs on the servers. Some Bioware employees have recently started to apologize for the troubles and have promised faulty people have been replaced so there might be hope but right now… not impressed.

So right now, I think Bioware has one solid foundation with Swtor and the potential for one of the greatest mmos ever if not the greatest. However, it’s obvious a lot of the day-to-day running of a mmo is new to them and they’re struggling to keep up with everything going on. It’s to be expected and I remember WoW having some of the same issues at launch.

Right now I’m more than willing to give time to Bioware and be patient with them, they’ve only shown good effort so far. I just hope for them and myself they can get a handle on things fast enough.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a whole debate on the issue but I’ll say this. If SOPA passes in its current form I will shut down this blog. I am not willing to risk doing something that could be considered illegal (linking a protected image for example). I love to travel and my job could require me to travel to the US at some point so it’s not something I can afford to risk.

So I dearly hope SOPA not to pass but if it does RL will take prority over blogging.

I know I said in my post about Hoth I don’t mind taking my time in order to gain some immersion but there’s also a time when waste of time needs to be called a waste of time. One planet with a space station is a fun quirk, two I can manage but every single planet past level 25 is not fun!

Also, I want a bind point on my ship, make it happen Bioware!

Signed the Grumpy, no coffee, monkey