I love the Star Wars universe, the vastness of its galactic landscape, the deeply personal familial stories, the struggles between light and dark, good and evil, democracy and fascism, self determination and servitude, sand and everywhere. I was born only a few months after Episode 4’s theatrical release, so I’m the oldest generation of human who never lived on Earth before Star Wars. The galaxy far, far away is every bit the mythos of my life that the Iliad and the Odyssey were to ancient greeks, or that Harry Potter is to my kids’ generation. And if there’s anything Star Wars has taught me since the 1990s, it’s how to tolerate imperfection in the myths I love.
I was in every public beta test for SWTOR in 2011, and I’ve maintained my subscription without interruption since then. Such an elegant segue implies that I place SWTOR in the category of tolerated imperfection, and … well, yes … BUT … it’s a spectrum, with Episode 1 Jar Jar on one end and SWTOR at the extreme other end. I love SWTOR, and I shall continue to love it long after its corporeal form evaporates into blue glowing ghostiness.
It’s hard to find places where people wear their love for SWTOR both openly and also unironically. The internet needs more voices extolling SWTOR’s underappreciated virtues. I shall be one. I play every aspect of the game but one, and that’s GSF*.
I love SWTOR’s PvP. The game’s class balance in PvP is vastly underappreciated. It is not perfectly balanced, but it has been the most class-balanced PvP of any MMO I’ve ever played. In this I include Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and the Elder Scrolls Online. The only MMO whose PvP I liked better was the ill-fated Warhammer Online (and, to be fair, only at low levels). Where PvP is imbalanced in SWTOR is in populations (soon to be remedied by cross-faction queuing) and in the disparity of power between a fresh 70 and a RWZ blinged 70 (which ought to be there). I love the maps, even Huttball. I have played all classes and most all specs and I never feel like I should stick with the “OP” one, because there isn’t one (except maybe for a time when Vanguards/Pyrotechs were overtuned). And that’s the theme of SWTOR, “only slightly imperfect.” I often feel that people who view SWTOR’s PvP class balance as a detractor are people who have never PvP’d significantly in other MMOs or, if they have, then they still have over-fond memories of their first MMO, like all of us do.
I love SWTOR’s raid content. LOVE IT. My only complaint is the pace of release. I wish we could get more and faster … but only because I LOVE IT so much. The content in Gods of the Machine is so so so good. Even the trash pulls are a good time. My raid team had more laughs and fun on the trash between Nahut and Scyva than we’ve had in a long time. Every new raid SWTOR gives us surpasses what came before, despite whatever constraints on manpower and funding the development team wrestles with. It’s always getting better, and the same can’t be said for other MMOs. If there’s anything I respect, it’s a person or organization on a path of continuous improvement. (I consider the ToS Commanders fight to be a notable exception to this commentary.)
And on the topic of continuous improvement: the SWTOR Art Team, from top to bottom, getting better and better! From the in-game cinematics’ camera work and blocking and lightning, to character design, to the cartel market items. If the developers could redo all the 1.0 class cinematics like they did the 8 class intro scenes, I would be ecstatic. But even if that’s not in the cards, I’m looking forward to SWTOR 6.0, because I know that no matter what happens with the story, the game is gonna look and feel Star Warsy in all the ways that matter to me. (I want Ravage/Master Strike animation returned to us, though.) Level design, visual design … well, I’m not an artist so I don’t know what all the XYZ-design groups are called, but the Traitor flashpoints are aesthetically perfect, and each is an improvement over the previous.
And story … the original eight class stories are, as a collective, a masterpiece of video game story telling. None of them are as good individually as Dragon Age: Origins, 99.5% of the Mass Effect trilogy, KOTOR, the Witcher 3, Skyrim. But SWTOR is a single game with 8 distinct and high quality Star Wars stories. What SWTOR accomplished with the game’s original release is such a monument of video game storytelling, that I simply don’t understand how the gaming universe doesn’t recognize it as such. Were people expecting 8 KOTORs to be released simultaneously, with planet storylines and flashpoint storylines and raid storylines? You know, it’s almost as if Star Wars fans have a habit of expecting too much out of Star Wars products, and then being overly critical of the final releases to protect themselves from admitting their hopes were unrealistic. What I find so beautiful about the 8 class stories is that none of them is universally considered “the worst.” It’s cheap and easy to say the consular storyline is bad, but there are a lot of people who like it best of all 8. Maybe it’s for a niche audience, an audience that loves Star Trek as much as Star Wars perhaps, but for that niche, it’s exactly what they wanted. And that’s true for every story. Eight of them. There are entire single-player games that don’t even have one good storyline (I’m looking at you, Andromeda).
Oh, um, sorry, not you. But you’re lovely, really.
Yeah, you!
Storywise, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne are like the Prequels, meaning I see what they were trying to do, and I like the overall vision a lot, but the execution was suboptimal. I’m excited about what 6.0 holds next. The storylines we’ve gotten with the Traitor arc are light, but tight and concise, fun, enjoyable. The promise of a return to Imp v Pub, with this whole teasing of how we might be able to pick which faction to join long-term with existing characters … yeah, I feel like the story is going to get back on track now.
Overall, I love this game, I love where it’s been, I love where it is, and I love where it’s headed. It’s not perfect, but as MMOs go, it’s got enough of what all the other MMOs have gamewise, and everything none of them have storywise. I’ll be playing this game till they force it to shutdown a week before the next Star Wars MMO.
Also, I didn’t love Star Wars Galaxies. I didn’t play it longer than a year, and coming from someone whose first MMO was Ultima Online, I was every bit the target demo for a Star Wars sandbox MMO. But it just wasn’t a very good game. I may have rose-tinted glasses for Star Wars, but I know a good game when I’m playing one. SWTOR is a great game. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
* I am permanently biased against GSF because it isn’t XvT or XWA, and that’s what I want! Nothing felt more like being Luke Skywalker than flying an Xwing in combat and using the Force to predict where my enemies would be in the future. You’re not only leading the targets by the duration of your blaster bolts’ flight time. No. You’re leading them by an extra lagtime of between a quarter of a second to an entire second. Ooooo I was good at that. I can’t wrap my mind around starfighter combat sans joystick or dialup latency.
