Level 50! Let the dailies begin!

First things first, I want to begin by publicly apologizing to Selly, who takes the time to write wonderful comments here and that my spam filter seems to hate. I am sorry and hope you forgive me. On to the main topic.

Edit: BUT WAIT!!!! Bronte remind me I never apologized to him either. I am so sorry! Please forgive me.

I am now level 50 in swtor since last thursday, thus making Swtor the second MMO in which I hit a current level cap. And to answer the big question… YES! There is an actual endgame in Swtor despite what some people might want you to believe. In fact it’s eerily similar to WoW endgame… or rather it’s similar to a cross over between BC endgame and Wotlk endgame. There’s dailies, there’s heroics (hard mode) and there’s gear to be gathered and bosses to be toppled.  If you feel a bit loss, Annexxia has a great guide to level 50.

So… is it better? Is it worst than that other game?? Well, like many things in Swtor it’s similar but different. Similar because the general structure of dailies, heroics, crafting is still there. Different because you can get gear pieces using a mix of those methods. For example, dailies will give you epic ear pieces, mods and implants. These slots can also be filled by crafting or drops from heroics so you have more than one way to acquire your gear.

There’s still a lot to try out at endgame so I’ll reserve judgement for later. In fact, my main issue with WoW endgame was that every patch had you start farming anew so I’ll have to wait to see if this is the case here. Hopefully it won’t but in the meantime, I’m enjoying myself.

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Evil on the road to 50

Some people have been complaining that playing a darksider on the republic side offer little in the way of options to do evil. While it’s true that the volume of choice is less than what you get on the Empire side, I feel that the choices you do have make for bigger impact.

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.

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Blizzard to do in game advertising…

I’ll keep this short because I don’t want to do more Blizzard bashing but it’s hard to stay quiet.

• 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.

 

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A look back on a month of Swtor

Today I will become a paying Swtor customer. My free month is over and now comes the time where I have to put my money down on the table. To be perfectly honest it wasn’t really a hard decision and I can see myself staying subscribed for a long time. That said, I’m not everyone else and I know some people will ask themselves if Swtor is really worth paying for. So in the spirit of things I did a quick list of the pros and cons after a first month.

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.

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SOPA and the Screaming Monkey

I have remained quiet on the whole SOPA issue even though it’s something I follow closely due to my job and my being a blogger. Since today is blackout day, I’ll talk about the issue and how it affects me. Even though I’m not american, my blog is available in the US and is hosted on WordPress, a US based site. Canada/US treaties means that I’m not above US laws and I could be prosecuted for breaking american laws.

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.

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