A Brief Response to Bioware's pre-E3 Announcement.

I said to my partner as I was getting into bed last night that it felt like Christmas Eve. Swtor Clause was coming in the morning and great and wondrous new toys awaited just one sleep away!

And so, in this morning's pre-dawn gloom, I was parked in front of my laptop, double-strength coffee in my hand, fairly shaking with anticipation (either that or the mild chill that passes for winter here in Queensland) as I tuned in to watch the announcement.

Although I was disappointed in the lack of specific details, there was still enough information during (and immediately after) the presentation to start thinking some wildly speculative thoughts.

SWTOR II...kinda

While this isn't the revamped game some were thinking/hoping we were going to get, it is a re-launch of sorts.

It's an on-boarding point for new players and a fresh starting point for existing players (there's a word for this type of franchise reboot aimed at offering a convenient place for new fans to start from, but I forget what that word is right now).

Basically, what I see happening is that the game as we know at today; everything from the starter planets to Ziost, is kind of a SWTOR I. It's a game about the 'Great Galactic War' that your character (and very little else, by the sound of it) survived. It's the classic SWTOR. You level, you do Flashpoints, you enjoy a class-specific story, you get melted in the first two tiers of PvP.

But everything new, everything in 'Fallen Empire' (which I presume will be 4.0) and beyond is kind of SWTOR II (or SWTOR: the Next Generation if you will). You pick up your character (or start a new one) facing a new universe. Your faction is gone. Your companions are gone (from your side but presumably not from existence, although that could happen to some of them!). You embark on a new story, you assemble a new crew you learn new skills and [hopefully] triumph over a new enemy.

So, while the SWTOR that's been around since 2011 isn't going away, I like to think of this expansion as the dawn of a 'new' game. At least in a pseudo-spiritual way.

One can, quite literally, open the game for the first time and play only the latest iteration. The existing content has been decoupled to the point were, in my opinion, the only thing stopping this from being an actual SWTOR II is a separate launcher.

Can't we all just get along?

Since the Empire and Republic have fallen, faction lines have become irrelevant. The war we've been fighting between the 'blue' and 'red' (or 'yellow' and 'purple' if you're a PvPer) is no longer being waged.

I'm cognisant that this conflict was (is) the major attraction of the franchise, but as far as I'm concerned, it's not the only attraction.

In my opinion this change offers a huge change to the zeitgeist of the game. There's no reason any more that 'Empire' players need to group only with other 'Empire' characters. Our characters, Outlanders now (individually, if not collectively) will presumably be able to band together to take on the Emperor of the Eternal Throne (as the new big bad is known).

It may not be that big of a change to the game. But I find it exciting. After years of only being able to group with other classes of my faction (whichever side I was on at the time) it will be a novelty to be able to take my Sith Warrior into battle beside a Jedi Knight, or Trooper. Or to use my Gunslinger to offer coverfire for a Sith Sorcerer healing my group.

Author's Note: After I'd published this, it was announced that cross-faction play would not be coming with the KotFE expansion. I am Jack's utter disappointment.

Join me on the Dark Side

I know that being enthusiastic about Bioware/SWTOR expansions/enhancements/announcements is considered kind of uncool in this community; the herd mentality (even from daily players) is definitely geared toward tearing down, rather than edifying, the game and the company (and the forums, and the Twitter account, and anything else bearing the Bioware/SWTOR logo).

But goddammitall, I'm excited about this expac. It's giving a huge breath of fresh air to a game that I didn't even feel was that stale to begin with!

You can disagree with me if you wish; my response will simply be to tell you to go find a game you like and leave me to this one that I love.

If you want to check out Star Wars: The Old Republic, you can play for free by downloading the game from  http://www.swtor.com and earn some free swag if you decided to subscribe!

Getting high on Wine.

I finally took the leap and nuked the Windows installation on my gaming laptop. Rather than being the gaming version of suicide; this turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made in some time.

I've never been a big fan of Windows, even during its 'good' iterations. And despite the positive (and possibly hyperbolic) review I gave Windows 10 on my other blog, I'm a Linux guy at heart.

I've kept a Windows installation active for gaming, but there's been a number of times since I started playing SWTOR that I've looked longingly at its page on WineHQ, wondering if I had the skills to tackle the installation.

For those who don't know; Wine is a tool for running a Windows program on a Linux system. It provides a Windows-like environment that allows the program to run. And the larger, more complex the program is, the more difficult it is to get it running properly though Wine.

SWTOR promised to be diabolical in this respect.

And then I discovered PlayOnLinux. POL is an installable service that allows people who've successfully run Windows-only software using Wine to write an installation script that other instances of the service can use to install and run the same software.

And someone had been so kind as to create an entry for SWTOR. Installing SWTOR is now as easy as installing POL, finding SWTOR in its program list and hitting the [Install] button.

So, with hope in my heart, I reached for my trusty Ubuntu installation CD.

The process took under two hours, from the moment I discovered SWTOR was available on POL to when I logged in for the first time in my fresh Ubuntu 14.04 system (this includes installing Ubuntu itself and some minor configuration).

Obviously it would have been longer if I'd had to download all of SWTOR from scratch, but I'm in the habit of keeping an up-to-date backup of my installation to avoid that very thing (if you're using an Australian ISP, you can appreciate the necessity of this).

And it worked like a charm! I actually wound up investing significantly more time into finding a way to map the extra buttons on my mouse (since there's no proprietary support available) than it took to install and start SWTOR.

And the game works surprisingly well. Aside from a few client-crashing niggles that are easily avoided, it runs as well as it ever did in a native Windows environment. In fact, although it may just be my imagination, I feel like it actually runs a little better (Linux is much less resource hungry than Windows, allowing more computing power to go into running the game).

SWTOR blogger (and fellow Aussie) XamXam, hosts a great set of instructions written by her partner on how to install SWTOR on a Linux system. I didn't actually use this guide (as I only found it after I'd performed the installation myself) but the process described in the Play on Linux part is exactly what I did (except for the upgrading the Wine version part, which I've since done).

And I couldn't be happier with how it turned out:

The SWTOR login screen, with the PlayOnLinux interface (and a process spawned by it) in the background.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may notice a TeamSpeak icon in that screenshot. TS3 is available for Linux. The stylised 'M' above it is for Mangler, a Ventrilo-compatible Linux VOIP client. So I'm all set to game away to my heart's content.

Oh yeah!

I don't actually play with the sidebar visible like this; I use an external monitor.
I just wanted to capture it so show SWTOR in action on Ubuntu.

If you want to check out Star Wars: The Old Republic, you can play for free by downloading the game from  http://www.swtor.com and earn some free swag if you decided to subscribe!

"The Shadow of the Order of the Elite of the Dark Jedi"™

This blog only tangentially applies to SW:TOR, but it fits here more than it does on my other, non-gaming blog.

Browsing the Amazon Store on my Kindle earlier today, trying to decide if a subscription to Kindle Unlimited was worth my tenner a month (it isn't), I came across the 'book' you can see in the image below.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why I took a closer look at it...

Now, I can see at least three things wrong with this publication:

1. It's five pages long.
2. It's described as a 'saga' (...that word. I do not think it means what you think it means).
3. It's $7. That's $1.40 per page (to put that in perspective, the Tarkin novel is slightly over 4¢ per page).

Eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed that the good Doctor's name appears on the left-most book in the 'also bought' pane (See it? The one sporting the cover image ripped off from the Assassin's Creed franchise?)

Yes, Dark Jedi Elite has a sequel (or prequel, it's hard to tell) called Shadow Order of the Dark Jedi.

This second masterpiece, too, is $7 for five pages of what must surely be the most rivetting Star Wars prose ever penned.

Ahh, the Kindle marketplace; "If you write it, they will buy".

Working as intended; SW:TOR's Outfit Designer.

I'm relatively new to gaming. I didn't beta pong like some of my contemporaries might have done. I didn't finish the first Zelda on the N64 console. I don't even know if the first Zelda came out on the N64.

So when it comes to features in games, I'm not really able to say things like "GameX had FeatureY at launch" or "GameA's implementation of this feature is so much better". I just don't know which game offers which feature and who does it best.

What follows will be my honest opinion of Star Wars: The Old Republic's new outfit designer. A feature I've been interested in trying since it was first announced.

It will be a review of the good and bad points of the feature itself, without comparison to similar features in other games. If you want to know if the outfit designer in SW:TOR is as good as the one in LoTRO, you're reading the wrong blog. Sorry.

I was very interested in trying the outfit designer because all of my characters in SW:TOR have at least two outfits they swap between regularly; their combat gear (which is in Legacy shells) and their 'around-the-Stronghold' gear which is empty cosmetic shells they wear when not out questing. About half of my toons also have Legacy PvP armour, too, adding another set to the gear juggle.

And so, as soon as I heard that the outfit designer was available for testing, I spent the better part of a week trying to install the Public Test Server in my client (I wound up having to do a complete reinstall of the entire game before it would install the PTS).

Overall, I'm happy with what I found when I finally got to play with this new feature. Having said that though, there are a few niggles in it.

Before I discuss those, though, a word about expectations. The outfit designer as it exists now is exactly what I was expecting based on tidbits shared by Bioware in the lead up to its being opened for testing.

I wasn't expecting to be able to customise, let alone design, individual gear items. Anyone who has played this game for any amount of time and who thought that might be the case is obviously an incurable optimist when it comes to the limitations of the Hero engine that SW:TOR is built on.

So I wasn't disappointed when I first opened my character window and started to click on all the new tabs. It was, to my mind, all according to spec.

You can create, and lock in, up to 16 different outfits for your toon, mixing and matching from any gear you have available and you can swap between these outfits with two clicks.

The list below is the things I found most interesting about the tool. Some are good, some are bad. Bear in mind that any of these could change before the official launch.

• 'Stamping' an item into an outfit binds it to you. You can't buy an item, use it in an outfit and then pass it around to other toons or sell it. Totally fair enough in my mind.
• At the moment, you can only 'stamp' items into an outfit if you could also equip them the normal way. Meaning a light armour class can't stamp heavy armour pieces into an outfit. Tait, however, has mentioned that they are looking into removing this restriction ¹.
  I'd like to see this go, if only so that heavy armour wearers don't have a distinct advantage when it comes to options in creating a costume.
• You can't leave slots in a costume empty and have them appear as empty on your character unless that slot is also empty in the corresponding base slot. This is suboptimal. In my opinion, not having a piece of gear on/showing as part of a costume is every bit as valid as having one (as exhibited by the 'Hide Head Slot' perk). If you leave a slot in a costume tab empty, whatever is in that slot in the base tab will 'show through', appearing as if your character is wearing it.
• Further to the last point; items that 'show through' from base slots can't be color matched to the chest piece of the costume they are bleeding into. I hope this is a bug and, if Bioware doesn't allow us to have empty slots as part of an outfit, that we can at least colour match the things that show up there anyway. This is, to my mind the biggest problem with the designer at the moment.

On the left is the base gear; all clothing slots are filled and colour-matched. On the right is the first outfit tab; the gloves, belt and bracers are empty with the base items showing through (they appear more shadowed than the other items). The actual character model shows the active outfit, plus the base items in unfilled slots. Since it's not possible to colour-match empty slots, it's equally impossible to colour match base items that show through into empty costume slots.

• It's a credit sink. Because this is the PTS and nothing really matters, I blew through about half a million credits setting up six full outfits on another toon (unlocking the tabs and stamping an item in all slots). Six is about a third of what's available and likely more than I'll ever use.
  It costs 14K to stamp an item into a slot. Across 16 tabs with seven slots each this comes to over 1.5M credits. That's over and above the cost of unlocking the tabs in the first place. And the unlock prices have gone up since I did it!
• As with everything that costs credits, pay attention to what you're doing! After you unlock a new outfit tab, the window doesn't automatically switch to it. So if you're not careful you can wind up creating a new outfit over the top of one you've already committed, destroying it and wasting the money you spent to create it in the first place. There's no warning that you're about to undo an existing outfit. I did this precisely once before I learned my lesson. QoL issue there, Bioware!
• And finally, while not a problem with the outfit designer itself, years of practice has taught me to interact with the character window horizontally, not vertically, causing me to click on the 'Companion' or 'Ship' tab pretty much every time I wanted to tinker with outfits. Muscle memory will adapt in time, but for now, be prepared to misclick a lot.

And that's about all I have to say on the matter (as if over a thousand words isn't enough!). Feel free to leave any comments below or hit me up on Twitter (@Scotthomas) or on Google Plus with the details on the right of this page.

If you want to check out Star Wars: The Old Republic, you can play for free by downloading the game from  http://www.swtor.com and earn some free swag if you decided to subscribe!

_{1: Updated: The armour weight restriction is being lifted in the Outfit designer; 
http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=8111526
(Original post suggesting that this might have been happening: http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=8102494&postcount=35)}

SW:TOR PvP: I don't like the term 'broken', but...

I have a complex relationship with PvP in SW:TOR. I was, when I first started playing this game, only interested in PvE.

I eventually forced myself to overcome my fear and try my trembling hands at PvP as I wanted to learn how to better play my main class. And nothing would forge that skill better than the battle-chaos that is PvP.

After a while I came to enjoy playing PvP and, from my humble beginnings with one PvP-focussed character (of the same class and discipline as my PvE main), I've since rolled up four more PvP-only characters (of different classes and roles). I've even started PvPing on a couple of my endgame PvE characters.

So yeah, I enjoy it. But it's not all it could be. Any SW:TOR PvPer will tell you that.

For the uninitiated, there's five different options for PvP in SW:TOR:

1. Open-world PvP, which happens when characters attack each other out in the questing world.
2. Low-level Warzones, which are objective-based PvP scenarios for the 10 to 29 level bracket
3. Mid-level Warzones, which are exactly the same scenarios but for the 30 to 59 level bracket.
4. Endgame Warzones, which is the same again but only for max-level (60) characters.
5. Ranked Arenas. which are a different game mode from Warzones. They're team death-matches rather objective-based scenarios, only for max-level characters, and they're far more competitive than 'regular' warzones.

Of these five opportunities for PvP, I engage in precisely one. Number 4; Unranked endgame Warzones, or Regs.

Here's why:

1. OW-PvP: I play on a PvE server, so Open-world PvP is actually kinda hard to come by. Of the few times I've engaged in OW-PvP, I've been soundly annihilated. I put this down to either not having, or not wearing, PvP-specific gear at the time, but it's still not fun.
2. Lowbies: Since I don't have any characters who are under level 30, I can't do the low-level bracket (unless I start a new character, which I'm not planning on doing any time soon).
3. Midbies: The Mid-level bracket is one of my main gripes with PvP as it stands at the moment.
   Bioware/EA recently raised the game's level cap (from 55 to 60) in their Shadow of Revan expansion. Which in turn raised the level needed to get PvP-specific gear (as that gear is only ever purchasable at the top level).
   Most people were eager to get the expansion and get to the new level cap. Even if this meant needing to get a new set of PvP gear when they hit the new max. But there are some players who, for whatever reason, haven't bought the expansion. Which means they can't level to 60.
   Which, in turn means, they're stuck in the mid-level bracket.
   This leaves us with the untenable situation of having level 55 characters entering the mid-level warzones wearing powerful PvP gear attained before the expansion; PvP gear that increases damage output and decreases damage taken by up to 30%^*; PvP gear that is unavailable to the other people in the tier.
   So these guys who, prior to the expansion, were battling it out in warzones with equally geared players of the same level, are now sitting pretty eating relatively undergeared players (who in some cases are also up to 25 levels lower) for brunch.
   Which makes the mid-level tier of PvP into a killing-field. One I'm staying out of it for the foreseeable future.
4. Ranked: I refuse to do the Ranked Arenas aspect of PvP because, despite how awesome the rewards have been lately, nothing is worth enduring the vitriolic and toxic community of competitive PvPers.
   I'm just not that competitive by nature. I play this game, including PvP, for fun. And while I enjoy winning, I refuse to slave away doing everything I can to get an edge. That just doesn't seem like fun to me.
   Also, the ranked Daily and Weekly missions are counted by wins. Since I only ever queue for warzones solo (not part of a pre-arranged group of friends), my chances of winning are dictated by the people I'm grouped with when I zone in. So it's random.
   Imagine a PvE mission that you could only randomly complete and that you had to grind over and over again until the RNG finally went your way. How many people would actually do that? Most would think it was a bug!

I enjoy PvP in this game. I have about nine different characters that I PvP on. As with PvE, I play and enjoy all roles (even PvP healing!). But I only feel able (or appropriately incentivised) to participate in one fifth of the PvP options available to me. I'm kind of conflicted about this; while I'm glad there's still an option open to me, I still feel like I'm missing out on a lot.

I'll give them one thing though, they sure know how to make a great video:

^* I haven't crunched the numbers on this myself. Others have though, and this is the prevailing wisdom.