Before I begin with this week’s round of chosen adventures in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I want to point out that, no, I wasn’t allowed to play the game because of any bans (as far as I’m aware). The game just decided to full-on not work despite being completely functional for the past few days prior to my writing this column.
And that really is a shame that I appear to have run face-first into a technical wall because I was continuing to have a good time as my Sniper Smuggler in the game. Things were really beginning to come together until the game decided to fall apart.
As instructed by the fine poll-completing folk, I was first headed to Tatooine, which isn’t a new destination to me in SWTOR, obviously, but was new to me on the Smuggler side of things. As I mentioned before, I was entering new narrative territory for this class’ story, and I don’t know that there’s any better place for a Smuggler to do his thing than on a semi-lawless desert world.
It would appear that the majority vote was correct not just in terms of vibes but also in terms of story pacing. Most of the time in SWTOR, you’re going from point A to point B, then told to go to point C and then back to B subsection ii. It’s basically the “pray return to the Waking Sands” problem. Not so with Tatooine, as I moved from area to area in an admittedly straight but also sensible line.
Also, this story didn’t overstay its welcome. Or it got done quicker than I expected, anyway. I will admit that the Sith antagonist of this portion of the narrative was… something. I can’t say I’ve ever met a Sith who was willing to offer up sex as a reward for getting what she wants, but then I’m all but positive that kind of story is out there in fanfiction circles at least. No shade no shame, by the way; you do you.
From there it was obviously over to Alderaan, where that earlier Waking Sands problem was back in spades, making it feel much longer by comparison. I will admit, though, that I kind of liked this story’s beats just a bit more. Mainly for the fact that I got to mess with my favorite foil Skavak once again and also got to blast a pompous windbag of an Alderaanian “duelist” several times over. Color me pleased.
Through both stories, I was actually starting to feel a little bit of heat in terms of general difficulty. I’m not going to suggest that SWTOR suddenly became a more challenging game, but I will point out that I was seeing Bowdaar dying a bunch of times, followed by my own untimely demise a few times after that. Most of this was owing to my forgetfulness that I should probably rest myself and my fluff monster in-between combat encounters. I keep forgetting that taking a knee is a hard requirement.
I also found that my abilities didn’t really expand much, but they did start to make a lot more sense mechanically and rotationally speaking. For a good while, I was opening engagements against larger single targets with a DoT skill, followed up by a boosted powerful sniper shot, but at a certain point I was getting procs related to that shot, which led me to presume that I should probably wait until that proc goes off to fire a boosted blast. It seemed to work pretty well.
Also, I managed to get a little bit of ambient multiplayer action going on this time around, as an event on Tatooine ended with a fight against a walker that ended up being a lot sterner than I had anticipated. I was ready to just eat dirt and shrug my shoulders about it, particularly after Bowdaar fell over again, but then a Jedi who just happened to be in the area tanked the boss, letting me slowly chip away at its health pool. That’s about the point when I started to put my ability rotation together more tightly, incidentally.
I was ready to continue on with the delivery that I was charged with completing in Nar Shadaa when the game decided it was done playing with me. Now, I’ve run into a couple of crashes with SWTOR through this run of the column, but those were associated with a pretty easy fix of a setting file – stupid and annoying, but not enough to stop me. This time, however, despite all of my efforts, following a number of instructions, and even fully uninstalling and reinstalling the game, I continued to keep seeing immediate crashes to desktop without any error message whatsoever.
I’m going to try to keep tackling this problem (and I would not be against folks providing their own tips if they have them), but I worry that will put next week’s column in jeopardy from happening. And that would really suck not just because I miss an assignment because the digital dog ate it, but because I’ve started to get really into the Smuggler story and was eager to see what act three was going to bring. I’m not giving up necessarily, but I am warning that things might not work out.
But let’s just assume that I will figure out what the hell is going wrong with SWTOR, assuming it’s my fault and not Broadsword’s. As I mentioned earlier, there’s been only one or two times that I’ve enjoyed multiplayer anything in this game, and that was when I was joined by others for events. I’m sort of wondering if maybe I should play this MMORPG as an MMORPG for a little bit despite the popular wisdom being that it’s a pile of single-player RPGs. And hey, maybe being a Sniper in a group setting is more fun. So what say you all?
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The polls will once again close at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, September 26th. In the meantime, I’ve apparently got a bantha to wrestle of my game deciding to be a fussy little baby and not work whatsoever. I really, really hope this isn’t how this run ends.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
